The Glass Cell

by Patricia Highsmith

  “I’ll take that, Timmy.”

  “No, I’m okay.” Timmy had to prove he could do it.

  The suitcase was not heavy. It contained only his toilet articles, his photograph album, his French compositions, and a mirror whose frame he had made in the carpentry shop. His books he had had sent days ago. He asked Hazel if they had arrived. They hadn’t. Timmy would not let Carter take the suitcase even up the last flight of stairs. It was a handsome, once-private house, the banister and stairway were polished, the carpet on it new and clean. Hazel unlocked a door, pushed it open and said:

  “Voilà. This is ours, darling.”

  The lights were on. Carter went in first, as she wished him to do. Theirs. Gladioli in two large vases caught his eyes first. There was also a large rubber plant. A whole wall of books. Some of the furniture he recognized from Fremont, but most of it was new to him. Then he saw some ancient dark blue house slippers of his in front of an easy chair, and he laughed.

  “Those old antiques!”

  Hazel laughed also.

  Only Timmy was silent.

  Hazel took him over the rest of the apartment, Timmy’s room, their room, the bedroom, kitchen, bath. He could not say anything except, “It’s great.” He caught a glimpse of his foolishly smiling face in a mirror and looked away. He looked wrinkled and old and vaguely dirty. “Can I have a bath before dinner?”

  “You can have anything you want,” Hazel said, and gave him a long kiss.

  The kiss made Carter a bit dizzy. He was afraid even to contemplate her. Or rather, he couldn’t begin to. He was unbuttoning his prison suit jacket. He suddenly could not wait to get out of his clothes.

  “Want me to hang something up for you?” Hazel asked.

  Carter smiled and handed her his jacket. “I want you to take these damned clothes and burn them.”

  Five minutes later, when Carter was in the tub, she knocked on the door and brought him a scotch and soda with ice.

  He dressed in the bedroom in the new white shirt she had laid out on the bed. The trousers on the bed were an old favorite pair of Daks. His shoes were old but unworn, and they still fitted, unlike the trousers. On the chest of drawers stood a photograph in a silver frame of himself and Hazel at a costume party given by the Langauers years ago. How many years? Seven or eight at least, Carter thought. In the photograph he was barefoot and dressed as an Hawaiian in a grass skirt, a lei, and a straw hat, and was swinging Hazel out in a dance. Carter looked about twenty to himself and Hazel sixteen in her sari and with flowing hair much longer.

  Hazel was in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on the dinner. There was nothing he could do, Hazel said in answer to his question. Timmy could do anything she needed. She was basting a duck. He could smell the orange sauce for it. He thought suddenly of Max’s remark, “. . . the pièce de résistance for tonight . . . canardeau à l’orange, probably . . .” He started to tell Hazel that, then thought better of it.

  Timmy kept staring at him. His eyes were like his own, but his nose was like Hazel’s, narrow, straight, and not too long.

  “Timmy, how about showing me some of your constructions?” Carter said.

  Timmy squirmed, but he smiled with pleasure. “All right.”

  “Now?” Carter had noticed some mysterious forms under plastic covers in Timmy’s room.

  “After dinner,” Hazel said. “We’re almost ready. Want to open the wine, darling? Or—can you?” she asked, suddenly anxious.

  “Oh, sure. This kind of thing,” Carter said, smiling. The cork came out straight. Carter took the bottle into the living room. The table had been set near the fireplace while he was having his bath, and the fire had also been lit. Two red candles stood in wrought-iron sticks that were new to him.

  He ate more of Hazel’s mashed potatoes than of the duck, but she did not press him to eat.

  “Terribly rich, I know, but I had to have something nice for tonight,” she said.

  “Did you play baseball in that place?” Timmy asked.

  “Well—yes. Some,” Carter said, though he hadn’t. Timmy was looking at his hands.

  Hazel talked of what they would do in the next days. Her office had made her a present of a week off, without pay, even though they were swamped with work as usual. She wanted to go to the Museum of Modern Art with him and Timmy, maybe tomorrow or Sunday. Then next week they must go shopping and buy Carter “millions of things.” She liked going with him to buy his clothes, and Carter had always been pleased with her choices, and in fact he didn’t like to buy as much as a tie without her. Then there were theaters, and a ballet company she had been waiting to see with him. Carter must meet Jeremy Sutter and his wife, who wanted to have them to dinner. And the people in Locust Valley, the Elliotts, had invited them for any weekend they chose in December.

  “I’ve got to look for a job at some point,” Carter said.

  “Don’t even think of a job till after Christmas, darling. Nobody looks for a job at this time of year. Anyway, we’re rich.” She took a bite of salad and smiled at him.

  She was right, they were well off, Carter realized. In prison, being well off, quite well off, hadn’t meant a thing. Now it suddenly did: the stereo set in the living room, the furniture and books in the house, the freedom to take a trip to Europe if they chose, to send Timmy to a good prep school when he was thirteen or fourteen. Carter looked at his pretty wife and felt in a glow of happiness.

  Hazel had bought a pair of pajamas for him, though she said she had kept the best pairs of his old ones. He put on the new blue ones. Timmy had gone to bed around 10 with a solemn “Good night, Daddy,” and no speeches about being glad to have him back, which was fine with Carter. Timmy was behaving the way he ought to, Carter thought, the way he felt, which was bound to be a little funny and shy and even suspicious and resentful: Carter knew he had caused Timmy a lot of shame. He had had no time to look at Timmy’s constructions, because they had played music after dinner, Prokofiev and Mozart, whose string chords had been as rich in their way as the duck à l’orange, and after one side of each record, he simply had not been able to take any more.

  There were two thick red books on the chest of drawers, and Carter crossed the bedroom to see their titles. They were law books. Sullivan’s, of course. What were they doing in the bedroom? What were they doing in the house? Carter was vaguely ashamed of his rise of jealousy. If it were warranted, if there were anything between them, wouldn’t Hazel have hidden the books? Then Carter found himself staring at the bed. If Sullivan had had an affair with her, he thought, he could kill Sullivan with pleasure. His thumbs began to hurt. He was clenching his fists. Carter went to the box of pills on the table by the bed. The pills were called Pananod, and Carter took about six a day. Dr. Cassini had given him a prescription for some more on a blank piece of paper signed by him, and said if he was refused the pills, any doctor would give him a prescription for them. Dr. Cassini had no personal prescription paper with his name and address on it, of course.

  “Why aren’t you in bed?” Hazel said when she came in. She was in a pale yellow nightgown, barefoot, her hair loose.

  “I was wandering around looking at everything,” he said.

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  He got into bed with her. She put the light out. To embrace her was almost painful. And tears rolled out of his eyes like thawing ice. He was back home again.

  13

  The first two companies to which Carter applied for a job in January turned him down, the second admittedly because of the prison record, and Carter thought the first turned him down because of it, too, though they did not give this as a reason. Carter had been prepared for it, of course. There might be ten more such rejections, even twenty. Hazel wanted him to get a reference from the company he had worked for when he had last been in New York, but Carter was against it: their logica
l question would be, why didn’t he use his last employer’s reference, and where had he spent the last six years?

  Timmy was back in school after the Christmas holidays. Hazel left the house every morning at 8:20 in order to be at her office by 9, and Carter sat around the house writing answers to the long advertisements for engineers that he found in the Sunday Times and Herald-Tribune and sometimes in the dailies of those papers. He went to a doctor twice a week, Dr. Alexander MacKenzie, who had been Hazel’s doctor since her teens. He had also known Carter since he had been married to Hazel. Carter got liver extract and vitamin C shots from him. He found himself much more tired since leaving prison, and he had had a cold since mid-December. The doctor said he was run-down from a bad diet, and that after a month or so he should be feeling much better and putting on weight. The doctor also renewed his prescription for the Pananods, which he had been unable to obtain with Dr. Cassini’s piece of paper. The doctor asked him about the pain in his thumbs, and Carter said it had lessened in the last four years, but it was still there, enough to be annoying, practically enough to keep him awake at night unless he took something for it.

  “Does your wife know it’s this bad? She didn’t say it hurt that much,” said Dr. MacKenzie.

  “I suppose I didn’t tell her it was this bad,” Carter said. “She knows I still need pills.”

  “You’ve been taking these Pananods for some time?”

  “About a year. Before that I was on morphine. For four years or so in prison.”

  Dr. MacKenzie frowned and shoved out his underlip. “I saw the signs of it—when you had the paper on your hands. Also in your eyes.”

  Then why hadn’t he mentioned it, Carter thought, on the first visit, when he had balanced the two sheets of paper on the backs of his hands? Or when he had looked into his eyes with his light?

  “Well, I don’t take it now.”

  “How much did you used to take per day?”

  “Maybe eight grains. Sometimes less.” And sometimes more, he thought. He had taken what he needed. Twelve grains a day was considered the requirement of the average addict, Carter knew.

  “You’re bound to have had addiction symptoms, if it went on that long.”

  “Yes, but not serious ones. I tried stopping it now and then. Two months at a time here and there, I didn’t take any morphine. No shots at all for the last eleven months I was in prison.” He looked the doctor in the eye.

  “But these have opium in them, the Pananods. It’s the same thing,” said the doctor.

  “They don’t feel like morphine.”

  Dr. MacKenzie smiled without amusement. “Don’t take more than four a day if you can help it.”

  Many evenings, Hazel helped him by typing up his three-page résumé, which he included with each letter applying for a job. Her typing was much faster than his. Carter had the letter he had requested from Drexel. It said that Carter’s work for the company had been of the “finest caliber” and that his detention had been “for reasons never satisfactorily proven.” It was a careful letter, meant to be shown to future employers, but Carter could not make himself send it. Hazel said he should have at least fifty photo-stats made of it to include with his résumé.

  “The letter’s too vague,” Carter said. “To put it mildly. It sounds like somebody trying to apologize for me and not sticking his neck out much doing it.”

  “But you’re not getting anywhere like this.” Hazel turned around from the typewriter.

  It was after midnight, and they were both tired. Carter had not been mentioning prison in his last several applications. He had in his first few, saying that he had served six years on a charge of embezzlement of which he was not guilty. If anyone were interested in hiring him, he thought, they could make some inquiries and find out the story for themselves—not that it would necessarily influence them in Carter’s favor. Or, if they believed in the efficacy of the prison system, they could assume that six years had washed away his sins and criminal impulses, and that he would be as good or better than the next man now. Hazel had disapproved of his mentioning prison at all.

  “Every employer wants to know what a man’s last job was. All right, Triumph. What a name!” he said, smiling. “That was six years ago. What’ve you been doing for the last six years? Well, sitting in prison. If I don’t say it in a letter, I’ll have to say it when they interview me. I bet the whole field is on to me now. One company tells the other. Watch out for Philip Carter.”

  “All right, I’m not suggesting you hide anything. I just say include Drexel’s letter. He was your last boss, after all.”

  “Drexel can drop dead.”

  Drexel did just that at the end of January, thus precluding any more favorable letter he might ever have written about Carter. He had been retired for two years, and he died of a stroke in his home near Nashville, Tennessee.

  By mid-February, Carter was sending photostat copies of Drexel’s letter with his job applications.

  Hazel was going to keep her job, because she liked it, not because they needed the extra money. She told Carter not to be anxious. “Six weeks are nothing to spend looking for a good job.”

  Carter made an effort to play with Timmy in his room in the afternoons, if Timmy hadn’t too much homework. Carter made an oil-pump model with one of Timmy’s construction sets, which he thought Timmy rather treasured, as he did not dismantle it after a week as he usually did other constructions. Timmy still seemed a little formal with him, and remote. A few times, Carter noticed Timmy looking at his thumbs instead of the pieces that Carter was handling or talking about. Carter knew that Hazel had told Timmy something about his thumbs, because she had written him that she had, but it had been so many years ago, Carter had forgotten what she said. Carter asked her.

  “I said you’d had an accident in prison.”

  “It won’t be very long till he guesses,” Carter said. “He’s growing up. You may as well tell him.”

  “Why, darling? Let it go. I don’t want you to tell him, either.”

  “He’s not a numbskull. He’ll guess it.”

  Hazel sighed and said nervously, “Darling, let it go. Please.” She was brushing her hair at the dressing table.

  They were both about to go to bed. Carter realized he had spoken in a bitter tone and regretted it. They would be lying in bed in five minutes, and she would not be quite the same tonight. Every night, when Hazel lay in his arms, she gave him the feeling that he was the most important person in the world, that she adored him. This kept him alive as much as the beating of his own heart. It would not be quite like that tonight, because she had not liked the bitterness in his tone.

  He stooped beside her and put his arm around her hips. “You’re right. I’m sorry, darling. I’ll let it go.”

  14

  It was about a week later that Carter saw Gregory Gawill. Gawill had been waiting for him, obviously, though he said, on the sidewalk a few doors from Carter’s house, “Well, Phil! What a surprise!” and he pretended that he had just been walking along the street. “You live here?”

  “Yes.” Gawill could have found that out simply by looking in the telephone book, Carter thought, and he no doubt had.

  “Long time no see. How long have you been out?”

  “Oh—three or four months.” The years had changed Gawill a little, too, and for the worse, Carter saw. He was heavier and coarser. But his clothes still had their flashily prosperous look.

  “Well, how about a drink? Or a coffee, if it’s too early for a drink?” He slapped Carter’s arm.

  “I’m on my way to the post office.” Carter gestured with some letters he had in his hand.

  “I’ll walk with you. You’re not working now?”

  “Not just yet,” Carter said.

  “I might be able to put you on to a couple of things.”

 
; Carter gave a noncommittal grunt.

  “Seriously, Phil, one of the firms we’re supplying is looking for an engineer. In Queens. I could find out what kind of salary they’re—”

  “I wouldn’t want to work in Queens.”

  “Oh.”

  Carter had no need to go to the post office, his letters had stamps on them, but because he had said he had to go, he bought two dollars’ worth of five-cent stamps and a few airmail stamps at a window. Gawill was still hanging around.

  “Well, Greg, I’ve got to be off.”

  “Oh, come on. You haven’t got five minutes for a coffee? I had something I wanted to tell you. Something I think would interest you.”

  Carter disliked the idea of sitting anywhere with him, and at the same time he was curious. It might be worthwhile, he thought, to find out what Gawill was thinking these days. “All right.”

  They went into a bar on a corner of 23rd and Third Avenue. Carter ordered a beer, Gawill a scotch and water.

  “I suppose you’re seeing a lot of David Sullivan?” Gawill asked, rubbing his big nose with a finger.

  “Not a lot.”

  “That crud. He sticks his neck out so far, one of these days he’s going to get it. So far he’s been getting away with murder. It won’t last forever.” Gawill’s resentment was strong and real. He might have been mumbling to himself. “Nosing into my business.” Gawill chuckled and looked at Carter. “Well, you see how far it got him. Nowhere. He couldn’t pin anything on me, no matter how hard he tried, and he sure tried.”

  Carter sipped his beer.

  “I’ll never get over his pretending to be trying to help you, when he was fooling around with your wife. I don’t see how you can get over it, either. I don’t see how you can even bear to see the guy—socially.” He lifted his angry eyes to Carter.

  “Let it go, will you, Greg?”

  “But you are still seeing him, aren’t you?— My God, a man who follows your wife all the way up to New York— Well!” Gawill shifted. “I’m not blaming your wife. A woman gets lonely, okay. So does a man. It’s the false friend bit.”