Strangers on a Train

by Patricia Highsmith

  Now that the building was gone, he began to see it in terms of what it would not mean. He would not have the extra money he had counted on by summer. Nor the prestige, the prestige with the Faulkner family. It did not once occur to him—as much at the root of his anguish as any of the other reasons—that he had suffered frustration in seeing a creation come to nothing.

  It would be only a matter of time until Bruno informed the next client, and the next. This was his threat to ruin his career. And his life with Anne? Guy thought of her with a flash of pain. It seemed to him that he was forgetting for long intervals that he loved her. Something was happening between them, he could not say what. He felt Bruno was destroying his courage to love. Every slightest thing deepened his anxiety, from the fact he had lost his best pair of shoes by forgetting what repair shop he had taken them to, to the house at Alton, which already seemed more than they should have taken on, which he doubted they could fill.

  In the office, Myers worked on his routine, drafting agency jobs, and Guy’s telephone never rang. Once Guy thought, even Bruno doesn’t call because he wants it to build up and build up, so his voice will be welcome when it comes. And disgusted with himself, Guy went down in the middle of the day and drank martinis in a Madison Avenue bar. He was to have had lunch with Anne, but she had called and broken the appointment, he could not remember why. She had not sounded precisely cool, but he thought she had not given any real reason for not lunching with him. She certainly hadn’t said she was going shopping for something for the house, or he would have remembered it. Or would he have? Or was she retaliating for his breaking his promise to come out to dinner with her family last Sunday? He had been too tired and too depressed to see anyone last Sunday. A quiet, unacknowledged quarrel seemed to be going on between himself and Anne. Lately, he felt too miserable to inflict himself on her, and she pretended to be too busy to see him when he asked to see her. She was busy planning for the house, and busy quarreling with him. It did not make sense. Nothing in the world made sense except to escape from Bruno. There was no way of doing that that made sense. What would happen in a court would not make sense.

  He lighted a cigarette, then noticed he already had one. Hunched over the shiny black table, he smoked them both. His arms and hands with the cigarettes seemed mirrored. What was he doing here at 1:15 in the afternoon, growing swimmy on his third martini, making himself incapable of work, assuming he had any? Guy Haines who loved Anne, who had built the Palmyra? He hadn’t even the courage to throw his martini glass into the corner. Quicksand. Suppose he sank completely. Suppose he did kill for Bruno. It would be so simple, as Bruno said, when the house was empty except for his father and the butler, and Guy knew the house more exactly than his home in Metcalf. He could leave clues against Bruno, too, leave the Luger in the room. This thought became a single point of concreteness. His fists closed reflexively against Bruno, then the impotence of his clenched hands before him on the table shamed him. He must not let his mind go there again. That was exactly what Bruno wanted his mind to do.

  He wet his handkerchief in the glass of water and daubed his face. A shaving cut began to sting. He looked at it in the mirror beside him. It had started to bleed, a tiny red mark just to one side of the faint cleft in his chin. He wanted to throw his fist at the chin in the mirror. He jerked himself up and went to pay his bill.

  But having been there once, it was easy for his mind to go there again. In the nights when he could not sleep, he enacted the murder, and it soothed him like a drug. It was not murder but an act he performed to rid himself of Bruno, the slice of a knife that cut away a malignant growth. In the night, Bruno’s father was not a person but an object, as he himself was not a person but a force. To enact it, leaving the Luger in the room, to follow Bruno’s progress to conviction and death, was a catharsis.

  Bruno sent him an alligator billfold with gold corners and his initials G.D.H. inside. “I thought this looked like you, Guy,” said the note inside. “Please don’t make things tough. I am very fond of you. As ever, Bruno.” Guy’s arm moved to fling it into a trash-basket on the street, then he slipped it into his pocket. He hated to throw away a beautiful thing. He would think of something else to do with it.

  That same morning, Guy declined an invitation to speak on a radio panel. He was in no condition to work and he knew it. Why did he even keep coming to the office? He would have been delighted to stay drunk all day, and especially all night. He watched his hand turning and turning the folded compass on his desk top. Someone had once told him that he had hands like a Capuchin monk. Tim O’Flaherty in Chicago. Once when they had sat eating spaghetti in Tim’s basement apartment, talking of Le Corbusier and the verbal eloquence that seemed innate in architects, a natural concomitant of the profession, and how fortunate it was, because generally you had to talk your way. But it had all been possible then, even with Miriam draining him, merely a clean invigorating fight ahead, and somehow right with all its difficulties. He turned the compass over and over, sliding his fingers down it and turning it, until he thought the noise might be bothering Myers and stopped.

  “Pull out of it, Guy,” Myers said amiably.

  “It isn’t anything one snaps out of. One either cracks up or doesn’t,” Guy retorted with a dead calm in his voice, and then, unable to stop himself, “I don’t want advice, Myers. Thanks.”

  “Listen, Guy—” Myers stood up, smiling, lanky, tranquil. But he did not come beyond the corner of his desk.

  Guy got his coat from the tree by the door. “I’m sorry. Let’s forget it.”

  “I know what’s the matter. Pre-wedding nerves. I had them, too. What do you say we go down and have a drink?”

  Myers’ familiarity piqued a certain sense of dignity that Guy was never aware of until it was affronted. He could not bear to look at Myers’ untroubled, empty face, his smug banality. “Thanks,” he said, “I really don’t feel like it.” He closed the door softly behind him.

  twenty-three

  Guy glanced again at the row of brownstones across the street, sure he had seen Bruno. His eyes smarted and swam, fighting the dusk. He had seen him, there by the black iron gate, where he was not. Guy turned and ran up his steps. He had tickets to a Verdi opera tonight. Anne was going to meet him at the theatre at 8:30. He didn’t feel like seeing Anne tonight, didn’t want Anne’s kind of cheering, didn’t want to exhaust himself pretending he felt better than he did. She was worried about his not sleeping. Not that she said much, but that little annoyed him. Above all, he didn’t want to hear Verdi. Whatever had possessed him to buy tickets to Verdi? He had wanted to do something to please Anne, but at best she wouldn’t like it very much, and wasn’t there something insane about buying tickets for something neither of them liked?

  Mrs. McCausland gave him a number he was supposed to call. He thought it looked like the number of one of Anne’s aunts. He hoped Anne might be busy tonight.

  “Guy, I don’t see how I can make it,” Anne said. “These two people Aunt Julie wanted me to meet aren’t coming until after dinner.”

  “All right.”

  “And I can’t duck out on it.”

  “It’s perfectly all right.”

  “I am sorry though. Do you know I haven’t seen you since Saturday?”

  Guy bit the end of his tongue. An actual repulsion against her clinging, her concern, even her clear, gentle voice that had before been like an embrace itself—all this seemed a revelation he no longer loved her.

  “Why don’t you take Mrs. McCausland tonight? I think it’d be nice if you did.”

  “Anne, I don’t care at all.”

  “There haven’t been any more letters, Guy?”

  “No.” The third time she had asked him!

  “I do love you. You won’t forget, will you?”

  “No, Anne.”

  He fled upstairs to his room, hung up his coat and washed, combed his hair, and immediately there was nothing to do, and he wanted Anne. He wanted her terribly. Why had he be
en so mad as to think he didn’t want to see her? He searched his pockets for Mrs. McCausland’s note with the telephone number, then ran downstairs and looked for it on the hall floor. It had vanished—as if someone had deliberately snatched it away to thwart him. He peered through the etched glass of the front door. Bruno, he thought, Bruno had taken it.

  The Faulkners would know her aunt’s number. He would see her, spend the evening with her, even if it meant spending the evening with her Aunt Julie. The telephone in Long Island rang and rang and nobody answered. He tried again to think of her aunt’s last name, and couldn’t.

  His room seemed filled with palpable, suspenseful silence. He glanced at the low bookshelves he had built around the walls, at the ivy Mrs. McCausland had given him in the wall brackets, at the empty red plush chair by the reading lamp, at his sketch in black and white over his bed entitled “Imaginary Zoo,” at the monk’s cloth curtains that concealed his kitchenette. Almost boredly he went and moved the curtains aside and looked behind them. He had a definite feeling someone was waiting for him in the room, though he was not in the least frightened. He picked up the newspaper and started to read.

  A few moments later, he was in a bar drinking a second martini. He had to sleep, he reasoned, even if it meant drinking alone, which he despised. He walked down to Times Square, got a haircut, and on the way home bought a quart of milk and a couple of tabloids. After he wrote a letter to his mother, he thought, he would drink some milk, read the papers, and go to bed. Or there might even be Anne’s telephone number on the floor when he came in. But there wasn’t.

  At about 2 in the morning, he got up from bed and wandered about the room, hungry and unwilling to eat. Yet one night last week, he remembered, he had opened a can of sardines and devoured them on the blade of a knife. The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself. He plucked a notebook from the bookshelf and turned through it hastily. It was his first New York notebook, when he was about twenty-two. He had sketched indiscriminately—the Chrysler Building, the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, barges on the East River, workmen leaning on electric drills that bit horizontally into rock. There was a series on the Radio City buildings, with notes on space, on the opposite page the same building with the amendations he would make, or perhaps an entirely new building of his own conception. He closed the book quickly because it was good, and he doubted if he could do as well now. The Palmyra seemed the last spurt of that generous, happy energy of his youth. The sob he had been suppressing contracted his chest with a sickening, familiar pain—familiar from the years after Miriam. He lay down on his bed in order to stop the next.

  Guy awakened to Bruno’s presence in the dark, though he heard nothing. After the first small start at the suddenness, he felt no surprise at all. As he had imagined, in nights before this, he was quite happy that Bruno had come. Really Bruno? Yes. Guy saw the end of his cigarette now, over by the bureau.

  “Bruno?”

  “Hi,” Bruno said softly. “I got in on a pass key. You’re ready now, aren’t you?” Bruno sounded calm and tired.

  Guy raised himself to one elbow. Of course Bruno was there. The orangey end of his cigarette was there. “Yes,” Guy said, and felt the yes absorbed by the darkness, not like the other nights when the yes had been silent, not even going out from him. It undid the knot in his head so suddenly that it hurt him. It was what he had been waiting to say, what the silence in the room had been waiting to hear. And the beasts beyond the walls.

  Bruno sat down on the side of the bed and gripped both his arms above the elbows. “Guy, I’ll never see you again.”

  “No.” Bruno smelled abominably of cigarettes and sweet brilliantine, of the sourness of drink, but Guy did not draw back from him. His head was still at its delicious business of untying.

  “I tried to be nice to him these last couple days,” Bruno said. “Not nice, just decent. He said something tonight to my mother, just before we went out—”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” Guy said. Time and again he had stopped Bruno because he didn’t want to know what his father had said, what he looked like, anything about him.

  They were both silent for several seconds, Guy because he would not explain, and Bruno because he had been silenced.

  Bruno snuffled with a disgusting rattle. “We’re going to Maine tomorrow, starting by noon positively. My mother and me and the chauffeur. Tomorrow night is a good night but any night except Thursday night is just the same. Any time after 11 . . .”

  He kept talking, repeating what Guy knew already, and Guy did not stop him, because he knew he was going to enter the house and it would all come true.

  “I broke the lock on the back door two days ago, slamming it when I was tight. They won’t get it fixed, they’re too busy. But if they do—” He pressed a key into Guy’s hand. “And I brought you these.”

  “What is it?”

  “Gloves. Ladies’ gloves, but they’ll stretch.” Bruno laughed.

  Guy felt the thin cotton gloves.

  “You got the gun, huh? Where is it?”

  “In the bottom drawer.”

  Guy heard him stumble against the bureau and heard the drawer pull out. The lampshade crackled, the light came on, and Bruno stood there huge and tall in a new polo coat so pale it was nearly white, in black trousers with a thin white stripe in them. A white silk muffler hung long around his neck. Guy examined him from his small brown shoes to his stringy oiled hair, as if from his physical appearance he could discover what had caused his change of feeling, or even what the feeling was. It was familiarity and something more, something brotherly. Bruno clicked the gun shut and turned to him. His face was heavier than the last time Guy had seen it, flushed and more alive than he remembered ever having seen it. His gray eyes looked bigger with his tears and rather golden. He looked at Guy as if he tried to find words, or as if he pled with Guy to find them. Then he moistened the thin parted lips, shook his head, and reached an arm out toward the lamp. The light went out.

  When he was gone, it hardly seemed he was gone. There were just the two of them in the room still, and sleep.

  A GRAY GLARING LIGHT FILLED THE ROOM when Guy awakened. The clock said 3:25. He imagined more than remembered that he had gotten up to go to the telephone that morning, that Myers had called to ask why he had not come in, and that he had said he didn’t feel well. The devil with Myers. He lay there blinking his dullness away, letting it seep into the thinking part of his brain that tonight he was going to do it, and after tonight it would all be over. Then he got up and slowly went about his routine of shaving, showering, and dressing, aware that nothing he did mattered at all until the hour between 11 and midnight, the hour there was neither hurry nor delay about, that was coming just as it should. He felt he moved on certain definite tracks now, and that he could not have stopped himself or gotten off them if he had wanted to.

  In the middle of his late breakfast in a coffee shop down the street, an eerie sensation came over him that the last time he had seen Anne he had told her everything that he was going to do, and that she had listened placidly, knowing she must for his sake, because he absolutely had to do what he was going to do. It seemed so natural and inevitable, he felt everyone in the world must know it, the man sitting beside him unconcernedly eating, Mrs. McCausland, sweeping her hall as he went out, who had given him an especially maternal smile and asked if he was feeling well. March 12 FRIDAY, said the day-by-day calendar on the coffee-shop wall. Guy stared at it a moment, then finished his meal.

  He wanted to keep moving. He decided by the time he walked up Madison Avenue, then Fifth to the end of Central Park, down Central Park West to Pennsylvania Station, it would be time to catch the train to Great Neck. He began to think of his course of action for tonight, but it bored him like something in school he had already studied too much, and he stopped. The brass barometers in a Madison Avenue window had a special appeal now, as if he were soon to have a holiday and possess them and play with the
m. Anne’s sailboat, he thought, didn’t have a barometer as handsome as any of these, or he would have noticed it. He must get one before they sailed south on their honeymoon. He thought of his love, like a rich possession. He had reached the north end of Central Park, when it occurred to him he didn’t have the gun with him. Or the gloves. And it was a quarter to 8. A fine, stupid beginning! He hailed a cab and hurried the driver back to his house.

  There was plenty of time after all, so much that he wandered about his room absently for a while. Should he bother to wear crepe-soled shoes? Should he wear a hat? He got the Luger out of the bottom drawer and laid it on the bureau. There was a single plan of Bruno’s under the gun and he opened it, but immediately every word was so familiar, he threw it into the wastebasket. Momentum smoothed his movements again. He got the purple cotton gloves from the table by his bed. A small yellow card fluttered from them. It was a ticket to Great Neck.

  He stared at the black Luger which more than before struck him as outrageously large. Idiotic of someone to have made a gun so big! He got his own little revolver from the top drawer. Its pearl handle gleamed with a discreet beauty. Its short slender barrel looked inquisitive, willing, strong with a reserved and gallant strength. Still, he mustn’t forget he’d been going to leave the Luger in the bedroom, because it was Bruno’s gun. But it didn’t seem worth it now, to carry the heavy gun just for that. He really felt no enmity toward Bruno now, and that was the odd thing.

  For a moment, he was utterly confused. Of course take the Luger, the Luger was in the plan! He put the Luger in his overcoat pocket. His hand moved for the gloves on the bureau top. The gloves were purple and the flannel bag of his revolver was lavender. Suddenly it seemed fitting he should take the small revolver, because of the similar colors, so he put the Luger back in the bottom drawer and dropped the little revolver into his pocket. He did not check to see if anything else should be done, because he could simply feel, having gone over Bruno’s plans so often, that he had done everything. At last he got a glass of water and poured it into the ivy in the wall brackets. A cup of coffee might make him more alert, he thought. He would get one at the Great Neck station.