Strangers on a Train

by Patricia Highsmith

  “You do mind,” Anne said, with a smile.

  “I think he’s sort of a bounder, that’s all.”

  “It’s bad luck to turn anyone away from a housewarming. Don’t you know that?”

  Bruno was pink-eyed when he arrived. Everyone else had made some comment about the new house, but Bruno stepped down into the brick-red and forest-green living room as if he had been here a hundred times before. Or as if he lived here, Guy thought as he introduced Bruno around the room. Bruno focused a grinning, excited attention on Guy and Anne, hardly acknowledging the greetings of the others—two or three looked as if they knew him, Guy thought—except for that of a Mrs. Chester Boltinoff of Muncey Park, Long Island, whose hand Bruno shook in both his as if he had found an ally. And Guy watched with horror as Mrs. Boltinoff looked up at Bruno with a wide, friendly smile.

  “How’s every little thing?” Bruno asked Guy after he had gotten himself a drink.

  “Fine. Very fine.” Guy was determined to be calm, even if he had to anaesthetize himself. He had already had two or three straight shots in the kitchen. But he found himself walking away, retreating, toward the perpendicular spiral stairway in the corner of the living room. Just for a moment, he thought, just to get his bearings. He ran upstairs and into the bedroom, laid his cold hand against his forehead, and brought it slowly down his face.

  “Pardon me, I’m still exploring,” said a voice from the other side of the room. “It’s such a terrific house, Guy, I had to retreat to the nineteenth century for a while.”

  Helen Heyburn, Anne’s friend from her Bermuda schooldays, was standing by the bureau. Where the little revolver was, Guy thought.

  “Make yourself at home. I just came up for a handkerchief. How’s your drink holding up?” Guy slid out the right top drawer where lay both the gun he didn’t want and the handkerchief he didn’t need.

  “Well—better than I am.”

  Helen was in another “manic” period, Guy supposed. She was a commercial artist, a good one, Anne thought, but she worked only when her quarterly allowance gave out and she slipped into a depressive period. And she didn’t like him, he felt, since the Sunday evening when he hadn’t gone with Anne to her party. She was suspicious of him. What was she doing now in their bedroom, pretending to feel her drinks more than she did?

  “Are you always so serious, Guy? You know what I said to Anne when she told me she was going to marry you?”

  “You told her she was insane.”

  “I said, ‘But he’s so serious. Very attractive and maybe a genius, but he’s so serious, how can you stand it?’” She lifted her squarish, pretty blond face. “You don’t even defend yourself. I’ll bet you’re too serious to kiss me, aren’t you?”

  He forced himself toward her, and kissed her.

  “That’s no kiss.”

  “But I deliberately wasn’t being serious.”

  He went out. She would tell Anne, he thought, she would tell her that she had found him in the bedroom looking pained at 10 o’clock. She might look into the drawer and find the gun, too. But he didn’t believe any of it. Helen was silly, and he hadn’t the slightest idea why Anne liked her, but she wasn’t a troublemaker. And she wasn’t a snooper any more than Anne was. My God, hadn’t he left the revolver there in the drawer next to Anne’s all the time they had been living here? He was no more afraid Anne would investigate his half of the bureau than he was that she would open his mail.

  Bruno and Anne were on the right-angled sofa by the fireplace when he came down. The glass Bruno wobbled casually on the sofa back had made dark green splotches on the cloth.

  “He’s telling me all about the new Capri, Guy.” Anne looked up at him. “I’ve always wanted us to go there.”

  “The thing to do is to take a whole house,” Bruno went on, ignoring Guy, “take a castle, the bigger the better. My mother and I lived in a castle so big we never walked to the other end of it until one night I couldn’t find the right door. There was a whole Italian family having dinner at the other end of the veranda, and the same night they all come over, about twelve of them, and ask if they can work for us for nothing, just if we let them stay there. So of course we did.”

  “And you never learned any Italian?”

  “No need to!” Bruno shrugged, his voice hoarse again, exactly as Guy always heard it in his mind.

  Guy busied himself with a cigarette, feeling Bruno’s avid, shyly flirtatious gaze at Anne boring into his back, deeper than the numbing tingle of the alcohol. No doubt Bruno had already complimented the dress she was wearing, his favorite dress of gray taffeta with the tiny blue pattern like peacocks’ eyes. Bruno always noticed women’s clothes.

  “Guy and I,” Bruno’s voice said distinctly behind him as if he had turned his head, “Guy and I once talked about traveling.”

  Guy jabbed his cigarette into an ashtray, put out every spark, then went toward the sofa. “How about seeing our game room upstairs?” he said to Bruno.

  “Sure.” Bruno got up. “What kind of games you play?”

  Guy pushed him into a small room lined with red, and closed the door behind them. “How far are you going?”

  “Guy! You’re tight!”

  “What’s the idea of telling everyone we’re old friends?”

  “Didn’t tell everyone. I told Anne.”

  “What’s the idea of telling her or anyone? What’s the idea of coming here?”

  “Quiet, Guy! Sh—sh—sh-h-h!” Bruno swung his drink casually in one hand.

  “The police are still watching your friends, aren’t they?”

  “Not enough to worry me.”

  “Get out. Get out now.” His voice shook with his effort to control it. And why should he control himself? The revolver with the one bullet was just across the hall.

  Bruno looked at him boredly and sighed. The breath against his upper lip was like the breathing Guy heard in his room at night.

  Guy staggered slightly, and the stagger enraged him.

  “I think Anne’s beautiful,” Bruno remarked pleasantly.

  “If I see you talking with her again, I’ll kill you.”

  Bruno’s smile went slack, then came back even broader. “Is that a threat, Guy?”

  “That’s a promise.”

  Half an hour later, Bruno passed out back of the sofa where he and Anne had been sitting. He looked extremely long on the floor, and his head tiny on the big hearthstone. Three men picked him up, then didn’t know what to do with him.

  “Take him—I suppose to the guest room,” Anne said.

  “That’s a good omen, Anne,” Helen laughed. “Somebody’s supposed to stay overnight at every housewarming, you know. First guest!”

  Christopher Nelson came over to Guy. “Where’d you dig him up? He used to pass out so often at the Great Neck Club, he can’t get in anymore.”

  Guy had checked with Teddy after the wedding. Teddy hadn’t invited Bruno, didn’t know anything about him, except that he didn’t like him.

  Guy climbed the steps to the studio, and closed the door. On his work table lay the unfinished sketch of the cockeyed department store that conscience had made him take home to complete this weekend. The familiar lines, blurred now with drinking, almost made him sick. He took a blank sheet of paper and began to draw the building they wanted. He knew exactly what they wanted. He hoped he could finish before he became sick, and after he finished be as sick as a dog. But he wasn’t sick when he finished. He only sat back in his chair, and finally went and opened a window.

  thirty-three

  The department store was accepted and highly praised, first by the Hortons and then by the client, Mr. Howard Wyndham of New Rochelle, who came into the office early Monday afternoon to see the drawing. Guy rewarded himself by spending the rest of the day smoking in his office and thumbing through a morocco-bound copy of Religio Medici he had just bought at Brentano’s to give Anne on her birthday. What assignment would they give him next, he wondered. He skipped through th
e book, remembering the passages he and Peter had used to like . . . the man without a navel yet lives in me . . . What atrocity would he be asked to do next? He had already fulfilled an assignment. Hadn’t he done enough? Another thing like the department store would be unbearable. It wasn’t self-pity, only life. He was still alive, if he wanted to blame himself for that. He got up from the drawing table, went to his typewriter, and began his letter of resignation.

  Anne insisted they go out and celebrate that evening. She was so glad, so overflowing with gladness, Guy felt his own spirits lifting a little, uncertainly, as a kite tries to lift itself from the ground on a still day. He watched her quick, slender fingers draw her hair tight back at the sides and close the bar pin over it in back.

  “And, Guy, can’t we make the cruise now?” she asked as they came down into the living room.

  Anne still had her heart set on the cruise down the coast in the India, the honeymoon trip they had put off. Guy had intended to give all his time to the drafting rooms that were doing his hospital drawings, but he couldn’t refuse Anne now.

  “How soon do you think we can leave? Five days? A week?”

  “Maybe five days.”

  “Oh, I just remember,” she sighed. “I’ve got to stay till the twenty-third. There’s a man coming in from California who’s interested in all our cotton stuff.”

  “And isn’t there a fashion show the end of this month?”

  “Oh, Lillian can take care of that.” She smiled. “How wonderful of you to remember!”

  He waited while she pulled the hood of her leopard coat up about her head, amused at the thought of her driving a hard bargain with the man from California next week. She wouldn’t leave that to Lillian. Anne was the business half of the shop. He saw the long-stemmed orange flowers on the coffee table for the first time. “Where’d these come from?” he asked.

  “Charley Bruno. With a note apologizing for passing out Friday night.” She laughed. “I think it’s rather sweet.”

  Guy stared at them. “What kind are they?”

  “African daisies.” She held the front door open for him, and they went on out to the car.

  She was flattered by the flowers, Guy thought. But her opinion of Bruno, he also knew, had gone down since the night of the party. Guy thought again of how bound up they were now, he and Bruno, by the score of people at the party. The police might investigate him any day. They would investigate him, he warned himself. And why wasn’t he more concerned? What state of mind was he in that he could no longer say even what state it was? Resignation? Suicide? Or simply a torpor of stupidity?

  During the next idle days he was compelled to spend at Horton, Horton and Keese to launch the drawings of the department store interior, he even asked himself whether he could be mentally deranged, if some subtle madness had not taken possession of him. He remembered the week or so after the Friday night, when his safety, his existence, had seemed to hang in a delicate balance that a failure of nerve might upset in a second. Now he felt none of that. Yet he still dreamt of Bruno invading his room. If he woke at dawn, he could still see himself standing in the room with the gun. He still felt that he must, and very soon, find some atonement for what he had done, some atonement for which no service or sacrifice he could yet envisage sufficed. He felt rather like two people, one of whom could create and feel in harmony with God when he created, and the other who could murder. “Any kind of person can murder,” Bruno had said on the train. The man who had explained the cantilever principle to Bobbie Cartwright two years ago in Metcalf? No, nor the man who had designed the hospital, or even the department store, or debated half an hour with himself over the color he would paint a metal chair on the back lawn last week, but the man who had glanced into the mirror just last night and had seen for one instant the murderer, like a secret brother.

  And how could he sit at his desk thinking of murder, when in less than ten days he would be with Anne on a white ship? Why had he been given Anne, or the power to love her? And had he agreed so readily to the cruise only because he wanted to be free of Bruno for three weeks? Bruno, if he wanted to, could take Anne from him. He had always admitted that to himself, always tried to face it. But he realized that since he had seen them together, since the day of the wedding, the possibility had become a specific terror.

  He got up and put on his hat to go out to lunch. He heard the switchboard buzz as he crossed the lobby. Then the girl called to him.

  “Take it from here if you like, Mr. Haines.”

  Guy picked up the telephone, knowing it was Bruno, knowing he would agree to Bruno’s seeing him sometime today. Bruno asked him to have lunch, and Guy promised to meet him at Mario’s Villa d’Este in ten minutes.

  There were pink and white patterned drapes in the restaurant’s window. Guy had a feeling that Bruno had laid a trap, that detectives would be behind the pink and white curtain, but not Bruno. And he didn’t care, he felt, didn’t care at all.

  Bruno spotted him from the bar and slid off his stool with a grin. Guy walking around with his head in the air again, he thought, walking right by him. Bruno laid his hand on Guy’s shoulder.

  “Hi, Guy. I’ve got a table the end of this row.”

  Bruno was wearing his old rust-brown suit. Guy thought of the first time he had followed the long legs, down the swaying train to the compartment, but the memory brought no remorse now. He felt, in fact, well-disposed toward Bruno, as he sometimes did by night, but never until now by day. He did not even resent Bruno’s evident gratification that he had come to lunch with him.

  Bruno ordered the cocktails and the lunch. He ordered broiled liver for himself, because of his new diet, he said, and eggs Benedict for Guy, because he knew Guy liked them. Guy was inspecting the table nearest them. He felt a puzzled suspicion of the four smartly dressed, fortyish women, all of whom were smiling with their eyes almost closed, all of whom lifted cocktail glasses. Beyond them, a well-fed, European-looking man hurled a smile across the table at his invisible companion. Waiters scurried zealously. Could it all be a show created and enacted by madmen, he and Bruno the main characters, and the maddest of all? For every movement he saw, every word he heard, seemed wrapped in the heroic gloom of predestination.

  “Like ’em?” Bruno was saying. “I got ’em at Clyde’s this morning. Best selection in town. For summer anyway.”

  Guy looked down at the four tie boxes Bruno had opened in their laps. There were knitted, silk and linen ties, and a pale lavender bowtie of heavy linen. There was a shantung silk tie of aqua, like a dress of Anne’s.

  Bruno was disappointed. Guy didn’t seem to like them. “Too loud? They’re summer ties.”

  “They’re nice,” Guy said.

  “This is my favorite. I never saw anything like this.” Bruno held up the white knitted tie with the thin red stripe down the center. “Started to get one for myself, but I wanted you to have it. Just you, I mean. They’re for you, Guy.”

  “Thanks.” Guy felt an unpleasant twitch in his upper lip. He might have been Bruno’s lover, he thought suddenly, to whom Bruno had brought a present, a peace offering.

  “Here’s to the trip,” Bruno said, lifting his glass.

  Bruno had spoken to Anne this morning on the telephone, and Anne had mentioned the cruise, he said. Bruno kept telling him, wistfully, how wonderful he thought Anne was.

  “She’s so pure-looking. You certainly don’t see a—a kind-looking girl like that very often. You must be awfully happy, Guy.” He hoped Guy might say something, a phrase or a word, that would somehow explain just why he was happy. But Guy didn’t say anything, and Bruno felt rebuffed, felt the choking lump traveling from his chest up to his throat. What could Guy take offense at about that? Bruno wanted very much to put his hand over Guy’s fist, that rested lightly on the edge of the table, just for a moment as a brother might, but he restrained himself. “Did she like you right away or did you have to know her a long time? Guy?”

  Guy heard him repeat the ques
tion. It seemed ages old. “How can you ask me about time? It’s a fact.” He glanced at Bruno’s narrow, plumpening face, at the cowlick that still gave his forehead a tentative expression, but Bruno’s eyes were vastly more confident than when he had seen them first, and less sensitive. Because he had his money now, Guy thought.

  “Yeah. I know what you mean.” But Bruno didn’t, quite. Guy was happy with Anne even though the murder still haunted him. Guy would be happy with her even if he were broke. Bruno winced now for even having thought once that he might offer Guy money. He could hear the way Guy would say, “No,” with that look of drawing back in his eyes, of being miles away from him in a second. Bruno knew he would never have the things Guy had no matter how much money he had or what he did with it. Having his mother to himself was no guarantee of happiness, he had found out. Bruno made himself smile. “You think Anne likes me all right?”

  “All right.”

  “What does she like to do outside of designing? Does she like to cook? Things like that?” Bruno watched Guy pick up his martini and drain it in three swallows. “You know. I just like to know the kind of things you do together. Like take walks or work crossword puzzles.”

  “We do things like that.”

  “What do you do in the evenings?”

  “Anne sometimes works in the evenings.” His mind slid easily, as it never had before with Bruno, to the upstairs studio where he and Anne often worked in the evenings, Anne talking to him from time to time, or holding something up for him to comment on, as if her work were effortless. When she dabbled her paintbrush fast in a glass of water, the sound was like laughter.

  “I saw her picture in Harper’s Bazaar a couple months ago with some other designers. She’s pretty good, isn’t she?”

  “Very good.”

  “I—” Bruno laid his forearms one above the other on the table. “I sure am glad you’re happy with her.”