The Glass Cell

by Patricia Highsmith

  Carter could have hit him. “Would you stop talking about my wife?”

  “All right. But he had an affair with her for four solid years. I don’t think you know that, and you ought to know that.”

  “That is not true.”

  Gawill leaned across the table and poked with his forefinger. “It is true. Wake up, Phil. Maybe your wife won’t— She doesn’t want to tell you, naturally. Sullivan wouldn’t tell you, either, he’d go on pretending to be the best friend you’ve got in the world. What a friend, ha!”

  Carter’s heart was beating faster. “Is that the interesting thing you had to tell me?”

  “Frankly yes. I hate to see a man be a goon. Sullivan’s making a goon out of you. He sets himself up as a friend of yours, when for Christ’s sake you’ve got every reason to beat him up or even kill him.”

  It was the bitterness that gave Gawill away. So much bitterness couldn’t come because Sullivan had had an affair with Hazel, or because Sullivan might be a false friend, but because Sullivan had done Gawill some damage. “I can understand you’re not very fond of Sullivan, because he knocked you out of a couple of jobs, didn’t he?”

  “Ah-h. Tried to. He just made a mess, nothing else. Just an unpleasant stink here and there. The stink came from Sullivan, not Gregory Gawill.”

  Carter smiled a little, and saw that Gawill didn’t like the smile. “Well, Greg, I’ll be going on. Thanks for the beer.”

  Gawill looked surprised. “When’ll I see you again?— Listen, Phil.” He frowned. He stood up and caught Carter’s right arm. “You think I’m telling you a lot of crap about Sullivan and your wife, don’t you? You think I’m exaggerating, maybe. All the time she was going to school in Long Island, and heading straight for Sullivan’s apartment when she got out in the afternoon? I had a couple of guys keeping watch on Sullivan, just like he had on me. I know what went on, with your wife using his keys to get in, and then leaving his place just before six to go home and fix the kid’s dinner, maybe.” Gawill shook his head in disgust, then gripped Carter’s sleeve harder. “And I can tell you something else, too.”

  “Come on, Greg, let go.” Carter pulled his arm away and went off.

  “It’s still going on,” Gawill yelled after him.

  Carter walked quickly, and when he finally looked around to see where he was, he found he was way over on the East Side at First Avenue. He turned around and walked toward home. It’s all a lot of lies and exaggerations, Carter said to himself. A child could see through Gawill.

  15

  February 14 was Hazel’s birthday. Sullivan had asked them to cocktails at his house, and then they were to go with eight or ten other people to a Japanese restaurant. Carter left the house that day shortly after Hazel and Timmy, eager to pick up his present for Hazel, a silver-backed brush and comb and mirror, at a shop on Fifth Avenue. They were antiques. He had found them only last week, after much searching of the city for what he wanted, and the initialing, he was told, could be finished only by the fourteenth. He was at the shop by 9:30 a.m., expecting to be told that the set would not be ready until afternoon, but it was there and done: H. O. C. in graceful letters. The letters struck him as a trifle large, but they were not large enough to inspire him to have them changed and make the present late. The brush and comb and hand mirror went into a white box, bedded in tissue. Around this went a red ribbon, and then the box was slipped into a white paper bag with gold printing on it and handed to him. Carter went out and strolled down Fifth Avenue. He bought two dozen red roses, and took them back to the apartment.

  By now the post had come, and Carter had two more rejections, one from Trippe Industrials in the Chrysler Building, which Carter had held out some hope for. The letter said that the position had been filled since his application. Carter bit the inside of his cheek in shame. He remembered that he had included Drexel’s letter in the Trippe application.

  Late that afternoon, Hazel called. The train she was supposed to meet at 4:20 p.m. was going to be an hour late, and she wouldn’t have time to come home and dress before Sullivan’s party. Could Carter bring her black dress—the one with the zipper in back, not the side—and she would dress at Sullivan’s?

  “I’ll just take it in another room and put it on. I can’t go like this. I’m in a skirt and blouse.”

  “Sure, Hazel. I’ll bring it.”

  “And my gold scarf. It’s a long one like a stole, I don’t know if you know it. Bright yellow. It’s in the third drawer of the chest, third from the bottom.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks, darling.” Her voice had become soft and low, in a way Carter knew well. “How are you?”

  “Well—I wish you were coming home. I’m okay.”

  She explained that the two children who were arriving were on her caseload, and she couldn’t ask anyone else in the office to meet them.

  He hung the dress she wanted on its hanger on the door of the front hall closet, so that he could not possibly forget it, then went for the scarf. The drawer was full of folded delicate-looking slips, stacks of scarves, stockings. As he reached for the yellow scarf, his hand struck something firm behind them. They were his letters from prison, all on identical paper, a single thick sheet folded in half, then in thirds to fit the prison’s windowed envelopes. Hazel had put them in bundles of thirty or so with a rubber band around them, and then had stacked these and tied them all together. He put his hand out and laid his palm flat on the two-foot-long row of them. In doing this, his fingers touched another row behind them, half concealed by some of her clothes. Another row as long as the first.

  “Good God,” he said.

  It was enough to fill six books, he supposed. Gibbon could have written The Decline and Fall in that amount of prose, or Cervantes Don Quixote, and all he had done was write a lot of griping or lovesick letters. But it was the idea of all the time they meant that overwhelmed him. Was it any wonder the world did not forget it, either? Carter looked at the photograph of Hazel and him in the silly party costume. He stared hard at it, then closed his eyes and turned away with the scarf.

  He was not in a good mood when he set out for Sullivan’s apartment. He had shaved and dressed carefully to please Hazel: his new dark blue suit, the dark blue and dark red tie she liked best, a white shirt, black shoes. Everything he had on, nearly everything he owned now, was new. He carried her dress and scarf in the white bag her silver set had come in. Timmy had also been disappointed when he came in at 4:30, because his mother was not coming home, and Carter made a rather unsuccessful attempt to say something cheerful. He had said to Timmy that they would wake him up when they came home and they would have a little party. Timmy had bought a white slip with brown embroidery for Hazel, quite an expensive item, Carter thought, for a boy with a three-dollar allowance and a taste for sodas, but Timmy had refused Carter’s offer of ten dollars a few days ago. The present had been bought when Carter offered. That afternoon, Timmy solemnly went to his room and got his present for Hazel, already wrapped, and put it beside Carter’s presents and the roses on the hi-fi. Timmy was going to his friend Ralph Underwood’s house for dinner.

  Sullivan welcomed Carter at the apartment door. There was a din of conversation from the living room behind him. “Well, well, the fashion plate again,” Sullivan said. “Come in. Where’s Hazel?”

  Carter explained why she would be late, and Sullivan took the bag from Carter and carried it into his bedroom while Carter hung his coat. Then he went into the living room, greeted the four or five people he knew—the Elliotts were here; Jeremy Sutter and his wife, Susan; a pleasant middle-aged man named John Dwight, who was a friend of Sullivan’s. Some of these introduced him to the others, not a single one of whose names stuck with Carter. He was too aware of all of them staring at him, because he was so recently out of prison. Although Hazel and David had once said, “The new people you meet don’t have
to know a thing about it,” that wasn’t the way things worked. The word got around, somehow.

  This was only the third time that year that he had seen Sullivan. He knew that Hazel was deliberately not inviting him, or not accepting Sullivan’s invitations that possibly Sullivan extended over the telephone to Hazel in her office, because she knew he did not want to see much of him. This decrease in their social exchanges had made no change in Sullivan, Carter thought, on the few occasions when they had seen him. Tonight he was confident and smiling, circulating smoothly among his guests, seeing that their drinks were all right, that everybody had a cheese canapé while they were still hot. Sullivan had a taste for Greek and Roman marble pieces, and here and there in a bookcase was a marble head, a marble foot, a vase, a fragment of a Greek inscription. He had bought these on a trip to Greece, he said. His rugs were Orientals.

  “How’s the job situation?” Sullivan asked.

  “Nothing yet. Still trying,” Carter said as casually as he could.

  “That fellow Butterworth isn’t back yet. I called up yesterday about him.”

  Butterworth worked for a firm of engineers that Carter had heard of—Jenkins and Field. Butterworth was in California on business. Sullivan had said several times that he thought Butterworth could get Carter into the firm, but Butterworth just wasn’t around to do it, and had begun to seem to Carter like someone who didn’t exist.

  Carter was relieved when Hazel arrived. She greeted everyone, met the new people in her easy, graceful way, without insisting on changing her clothes first, as many women would have done, Carter thought. He watched with pleasure the faces of the men who had not met her before, watched the way they all jumped up from their chairs, no matter how deeply sunk in them they had been, because Hazel was a pretty woman. When Hazel came to Carter he was smiling a little, but it was a real smile, his first that day.

  “Happy birthday, darling. How are you?”

  “Bushed, but I’ll feel better out of these clothes. Timmy okay?”

  Carter nodded, as dazed as the men who had just met her, and then she disappeared.

  Sullivan followed her.

  Carter sipped his second drink.

  When Sullivan came back, after about two minutes, he beckoned to Carter and said in a low tone, “I heard some news today via a very long grapevine. Gawill is back up north. Working or connected with some pipe company in Queens. His boss is a man called Grasso who owns some crummy apartment houses in Queens, a slum landlord, it sounds like. Slum landlords always have a couple of sidelines.”

  Carter felt only a quick warmth in his blood at Gawill’s name, then indifference. “Well?” Carter shrugged and took a gulp of his drink.

  “He knows you’re out.”

  “Oh?— He’s working for a pipe company? Not for smoking, I presume.”

  “Ha! No, the pipes they put underground. Gas and sewage and such.” Sullivan dragged the words out drily. “I was interested that he’s taken the trouble to know you’re out. Or find out. It wouldn’t surprise me if he tried to get in touch with you.” Sullivan looked at Carter.

  “Why?”

  “I dunno. But I thought I’d warn you. I don’t imagine you want to see him.”

  “No, I don’t.” Hazel was just coming in then, and they both turned to her.

  Carter would have liked to stay by Hazel’s side for the duration of the cocktail party, but he forced himself to mix with the others. Sullivan stayed near Hazel, however, or she near him, it was hard to tell which. They looked absolutely at ease together, Carter thought, as if they always had something to talk about, which was probably only natural since they had spent so much time together while he was in prison. Nearly as much, he realized with a sudden shock, as he and Hazel had spent together before he went to prison. Just seven years for him versus six for Sullivan. Sullivan was leaning on the back of the easy chair in which Hazel was sitting, listening to her and nodding seriously, and now and again Hazel glanced up at him with a look quick and brief, but it seemed to Carter of such intimacy and familiarity that it was obvious that they had slept together and many times. He’d ask her tonight, Carter decided, simply ask her if she’d ever slept with him. Then he realized that he was feeling his drink, and that he must not ask her that question on her birthday, or maybe any other day. He had no doubt that Hazel loved him. But he also had no doubt that Sullivan was in love with her.

  At the Japanese restaurant, they drank warmed saki. They sat on cushions around a long low table, and once more Carter was separated from Hazel, who was once more beside Sullivan.

  “Et pour vous, monsieur?” said the man on Carter’s left, holding the napkin-wrapped bottle of saki.

  “Oui, avec plaisir,” Carter said, and held his little cup.

  “Vous parlez français?”

  “Oui.”

  And from then on they spoke French, and Carter talked to no one else. His name was Lafferty—Carter asked him his name, with apologies for not having remembered it when he was introduced—and he had worked for two years in Paris for his firm, which sold bottling machinery. They talked about the French character, the joys of life in France, the ravages of unhappy love affairs.

  “Each separation,” he said, “each parting, strikes a blow and takes something away, as the sea does when it hits a cliff. A man can stand just so many, like a cliff. One day he is small and thin, and then he is nothing, finished.”

  Mr. Lafferty was not talking about hopeless love affairs, just separations. This semipoetry from a businessman was a pleasant surprise to Carter. Or perhaps what he was saying sounded better and more profound in French. Or perhaps it was that talking with Mr. Lafferty reminded him of happy moments with Max. Then a pause in the conversation, as Mr. Lafferty spoke in English to a woman on his left, Carter looked over and saw Sullivan laughing heartily—yet the laugh was still restrained in volume, suitable and proper to the environment, just like Sullivan—and Sullivan touched Hazel’s shoulder, pressed it, before he let it go. Carter wondered if Sullivan had ever made a mistake in his life, ever done anything on impulse that he regretted? And suddenly, Carter remembered his uncle and aunt lecturing him when he was about fourteen for letting things slip through his fingers. A tennis racquet once, that he had lent to a school friend. A trenchcoat. A dinner suit when he was in college. No, he wasn’t very efficient or practical or well organized, like Sullivan. Finally, his supreme act of carelessness, signing the receipts for Wallace Palmer, which had netted him six years in prison. To be so trusting was stupid. Sullivan would never have been like that. He had the lawyer’s mind: don’t make a move unless your interests are covered. Then Carter realized, and it was as if a bullet hit him, that he had also trusted Hazel with Sullivan. Suppose he had been a sublime idiot there, topping even his Wallace Palmer folly?

  Hazel suddenly looked at him. “Phil! Are you okay?”

  His face must be pink, he knew from its heat. He pushed his palm against his forehead nervously. “I’m all right,” he said. He hated Sullivan for looking at him, too. He reached for a glass of water and found there wasn’t any. But by that time, Hazel wasn’t watching him. Carter drank his saki.

  “What did David give you?” Carter asked when they got home that evening. Hazel had the white bag with her other clothes in it, and the bag was heavier. Carter had carried it from the car up the stairs.

  “A book that I wanted. It’s Aubrey Menen’s book on Rome. I haven’t opened it yet.”

  Carter had supposed Sullivan’s present would be something more personal than a book.

  Timmy woke up and came in in his pajamas. He threw his arms around Hazel and said, “Happy birthday, Mommy!”

  “Thank you, darling. My goodness, it looks like Christmas,” she said, looking at the presents on the hi-fi. “And what wonderful roses! Which of you do I thank for that?”

  “Both.” Carter smile
d at his son.

  Hazel loved the brush and comb and mirror, and she did not think the initials were too big. Carter had also given her candy and soap and handkerchiefs. They had a nightcap while she opened the presents, and Timmy had a glass of chocolate milk.

  He could not sleep that night. The liquor he had drunk might as well have been benzedrine. And his thumbs ached. He longed for a needle full of morphine. Around 3 a.m., he got up gently and went into the bathroom to take one of the Pananods. Then he came back in the dark.

  “Darling—you can’t sleep?” Hazel said.

  It was suddenly unreal to Carter, Hazel’s voice in the darkness, the room in which they both were, presumably, the whole evening, Sullivan, Max. Yet Max seemed more alive and real than any of the rest of them, even himself. “No,” Carter said tentatively, as if he replied to a question in a dream, just to keep the dream going.

  “Put on the light.”

  He put on the light and blinked. It did nothing to dispel the unreality.

  “Sit down, darling. What’s troubling you?”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Sullivan.”

  “Oh, darling.” She closed her eyes and frowned, turned her head away for a moment. “Phil, if it’ll make things any easier—we don’t have to see him anymore.”

  Her tone sounded as if that would be a nearly superhuman sacrifice, but she would make it. “No, I wouldn’t want you to do that,” he said, but not in the light tone he tried for, and he saw her expression change to wariness.

  “Then—I think it’s time you stopped making scenes, don’t you? Like tonight?”

  “I didn’t know I made a scene.”

  “I thought you were going to explode—in the restaurant—just because David touched my shoulder once. Everybody noticed it. You looked as if you hated him.”