Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

“About three months after it happened. But you see, if not for me, Miriam would be alive now.” Guy watched Owen lower his lips to the glass again. He could taste the sickening mess of CocaCola and Scotch sliding into Owen’s wide mouth. What was Owen going to do? Leap up suddenly and fling the glass down, throttle him as Bruno had throttled Miriam? He couldn’t imagine that Owen would continue to sit there, but the seconds went by and Owen did not move. “You see, I had to tell you,” Guy persisted. “I considered you the one person I might have hurt, the one person who suffered. Her child had been yours. You were going to marry her. You loved her. It was you—”

“Hell, I didn’t love her.” Owen looked at Guy with no change whatever in his face.

Guy stared back at him. Didn’t love her, didn’t love her, Guy thought. His mind staggered back, trying to realign all the past equations that no longer balanced. “Didn’t love her?” he said.

“No. Well, not the way you seem to think. I certainly didn’t want her to die—and understand, I’d have done anything to prevent it, but I was glad enough not to have to marry her. Getting married was her idea. That’s why she had the child. That’s not a man’s fault, I wouldn’t say. Would you?” Owen was looking at him with a tipsy earnestness, waiting, his wide mouth the same firm, irregular line it had been on the witness stand, waiting for Guy to say something, to pass judgment on his conduct with Miriam.

Guy turned away with a vaguely impatient gesture. He couldn’t make the equations balance. He couldn’t make any sense to it, except an ironic sense. There was no reason for his being here now, except for an ironic reason. There was no reason for his sweating, painful self-torture in a hotel room for the benefit of a stranger who didn’t care, except for an ironic reason.

“Do you think so?” Owen kept on, reaching for the bottle on the table beside him.

Guy couldn’t have made himself say a word. A hot, inarticulate anger was rising inside him. He slid his tie down and opened his shirt collar, and glanced at the open windows for an airconditioning apparatus.

Owen shrugged. He looked quite comfortable in his open-collared shirt and unzipped leather jacket. Guy had an absolutely unreasonable desire to ram something down Owen’s throat, to beat him and crush him, above all to blast him out of his complacent comfort in the chair.

“Listen,” Guy began quietly, “I am a—”

But Owen had begun to speak at the same instant, and he went on, droningly, not looking at Guy who stood in the middle of the floor with his mouth still open.”… the second time. Got married two months after my divorce, and there was trouble right away. Whether Miriam would of been any different, I don’t know, but I’d say she’d of been worse. Louisa up and left two months ago after damn near setting the house on fire, a big apartment house.” He droned on, and poured more Scotch into his glass from the bottle at his elbow, and Guy felt a disrespect, a definite affront, directed against himself, in the way Owen helped himself. Guy remembered his own behavior at the inquest, undistinguished behavior, to say the least, for the husband of the victim. Why should Owen have respect for him? “The awful thing is, the man gets the worst of it, because the women do more talking. Take Louisa, she can go back to that apartment house and they’ll give her a welcome, but let me so much—”

“Listen!” Guy said, unable to stand it any longer. “I—I killed someone, too! I’m a murderer, too!”

Owen’s feet came down to the floor again, he sat up again, he even looked from Guy to the window and back again, as if he contemplated having to escape or having to defend himself, but the befuddled surprise and alarm on his face was so feeble, so halfhearted, that it seemed a mockery itself, seemed to mock Guy’s seriousness. Owen started to set his glass on the table and then didn’t. “How’s that?” he asked.

“Listen!” Guy shouted again. “Listen, I’m a dead man. I’m as good as dead right now, because I’m going to give myself up. Immediately! Because I killed a man, do you understand? Don’t look so unconcerned, and don’t lean back in that chair again!”

“Why shouldn’t I lean back in this chair?” Owen had both hands on his glass now, which he had just refilled with CocaCola and Scotch.

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you that I am a murderer, and took a man’s life, something no human being has a right to do?”

Owen might have nodded, or he might not have. At any rate, he drank again, slowly.

Guy stared at him. The words, unutterable tangles of thousands and thousands of words, seemed to congest even his blood, to cause waves of heat to sweep up his arms from his clenched hands. The words were curses against Owen, sentences and paragraphs of the confession he had written that morning, that were growing jumbled now because the drunken idiot in the armchair didn’t want to hear them. The drunken idiot was determined to look indifferent. He didn’t look like a murderer, he supposed, in his clean white shirtsleeves and his silk tie and his dark blue trousers, and maybe even his strained face didn’t look like a murderer’s to anybody else. “That’s the mistake,” Guy said aloud, “that nobody knows what a murderer looks like. A murderer looks like anybody!” He laid the back of his fist against his forehead and took it down again, because he had known the last words were coming, and had been unable to stop them. It was exactly like Bruno.

Abruptly Guy went and got himself a drink, a straight threefinger shot, and drank it off.

“Glad to see I’ve got a drinking companion,” Owen mumbled. Guy sat down on the neat, green-covered bed opposite Owen. Quite suddenly, he had felt tired. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he began again, “it doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?”

“You’re not the first man I seen that killed another man. Or woman.” He chuckled. “Seems to me there’s more women that go free.”

“I’m not going free. I’m not free. I did this in cold blood. I had no reason. Don’t you see that might be worse? I did it for—” He wanted to say he did it because there had been that measure of perversity within him sufficient to do it, that he had done it because of the worm in the wood, but he knew it would make no sense to Owen, because Owen was a practical man. Owen was so practical, he would not bother to hit him, or flee from him, or call the police, because it was more comfortable to sit in the chair.

Owen waggled his head as if he really did consider Guy’s point. His lids were half dropped over his eyes. He twisted and reached for something in his hip pocket, a bag of tobacco. He got cigarette papers from the breast pocket of his shirts.

Guy watched his operations for what seemed like hours. “Here,” Guy said, offering him his own cigarettes.

Owen looked at them dubiously. “What kind are they?”

“Canadian. They’re quite good. Try one.”

“Thanks, I—” Owen drew the bag closed with his teeth—“prefer my own brand.” He spent at least three minutes rolling the cigarette.

“This was just as if I pulled a gun on someone in a public park and shot him,” Guy went on, determined to go on, though it was as if he talked to an inanimate thing like a dictaphone in the chair, with the difference that his words didn’t seem to be penetrating in any way. Mightn’t it dawn on Owen that he could pull a gun on him now in this hotel room? Guy said, “I was driven to it. That’s what I’ll tell the police, but that won’t make any difference, because the point is, I did it. You see, I have to tell you Bruno’s idea.” At least Owen was looking at him now, but his face, far from being rapt, seemed actually to wear an expression of pleasant, polite, drunken attention. Guy refused to let it stop him. “Bruno’s idea was that we should kill for each other, that he should kill Miriam and I should kill his father. Then he came to Texas and killed Miriam, behind my back. Without my knowledge or consent, do you see?” His choice of words was abominable, but at least Owen was listening. At least the words were coming out. “I didn’t know about it, and I didn’t even suspect—not really. Until months later. And then he began to haunt me. He began to tell me he would pin the blame for Miriam’s death on me, unless I went through with the rest of his damned plan, do you see? Which was to kill his father. The whole idea rested on the fact that there was no reason for the murders. No personal motives. So we couldn’t be traced, individually. Provided we didn’t see each other. But that’s another point. The point is, I did kill him. I was broken down. Bruno broke me down with letters and blackmail and sleeplessness. He drove me insane, too. And listen, I believe any man can be broke down. I could break you down. Given the same circumstances, I could break you down and make you kill someone. It might take different methods from the ones Bruno used on me, but it could be done. What else do you think keeps the totalitarian states going? Or do you ever stop to wonder about things like that, Owen? Anyway, that’s what I’ll tell the police, but it won’t matter, because they’ll say I shouldn’t have broken down.