Strangers on a Train

by Patricia Highsmith

  Guy put his hands over his own face, and felt its contortion against his palms. “If this Matt gets blamed,” he whispered, “I’ll tell them the whole story.”

  “Oh, he won’t. They won’t have enough. It’s a joke, son!” Bruno grinned. “Matt’s the right character with the wrong evidence. You’re the wrong character with the right evidence. You’re an important guy, f’ Christ’s sake!” He pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to Guy. “I found this last week. Very nice, Guy.”

  Guy looked at the photograph of “The Pittsburgh Store,” funereally backgrounded by black. It was a booklet from the Modern Museum. He read: “Guy Daniel Haines, hardly thirty, follows the Wright tradition. He has achieved a distinctive, uncompromising style noted for a rigorous simplicity without starkness, for the grace he calls ‘singingness’ . . . ” Guy closed it nervously, disgusted by the last word that was an invention of the Museum’s.

  Bruno repocketed the booklet. “You’re one of the tops. If you kept your nerve up, they could turn you inside out and never suspect.”

  Guy looked down at him. “That’s still no reason for you to see me. Why do you do it?” But he knew. Because his life with Anne fascinated Bruno. Because he himself derived something from seeing Bruno, some torture that perversely eased.

  Bruno watched him as if he knew everything that passed through his mind. “I like you, Guy, but remember—they’ve got a lot more against you than against me. I could wiggle out if you turned me in, but you couldn’t. There’s the fact Herbert might remember you. And Anne might remember you were acting funny around that time. And the scratches and the scar. And all the little clues they’d shove in front of you, like the revolver, and glove pieces—” Bruno recited them slowly and fondly, like old memories. “With me against you, you’d crack up, I bet.”

  thirty-seven

  Guy knew as soon as Anne called to him that she had seen the dent. He had meant to get it fixed, and had forgotten. He said first that he didn’t know how it got there, then that he did. He had taken the boat out last week, he said, and it had bumped a buoy.

  “Don’t be terribly sorry,” she mocked him, “it isn’t worth it.” She took his hand as she stood up. “Egon said you had the boat out one afternoon. Is that why you didn’t say anything about it?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Did you take it out by yourself?” Anne smiled a little, because he wasn’t a good-enough sailor to take the boat out by himself.

  Bruno had called up and insisted they go out for a sail. Gerard had come to a new deadend with Matt Levine, deadends everywhere, and Bruno had insisted that they celebrate. “I took it out with Charles Bruno one afternoon,” he said. And he had brought the revolver with him that day, too.

  “It’s all right, Guy. Only why’d you see him again? I thought you disliked him so.”

  “A whim,” he murmured. “It was the two days I was doing that work at home.” It wasn’t all right, Guy knew. Anne kept the India’s brass and white-painted wood gleaming and spotless, like something of chryselephantine. And Bruno! She mistrusted Bruno now.

  “Guy, he’s not the man we saw that night in front of your apartment, is he? The one who spoke to us in the snow?”

  “Yes. He’s the same one.” Guy’s fingers, supporting the weight of the revolver in his pocket, tightened helplessly.

  “What’s his interest in you?” Anne followed him casually down the deck. “He isn’t interested in architecture particularly. I talked with him the night of the party.”

  “He’s got no interest in me. Just doesn’t know what to do with himself.” When he got rid of the revolver, he thought, he could talk.

  “You met him at school?”

  “Yes. He was wandering around a corridor.” How easy it was to lie when one had to lie! But it was wrapping tendrils around his feet, his body, his brain. He would say the wrong thing one day. He was doomed to lose Anne. Perhaps he had already lost her, at this moment when he lighted a cigarette and she stood leaning against the mainmast, watching him. The revolver seemed to weight him to the spot, and determinedly he turned and walked toward the prow. Behind him, he heard Anne’s step onto the deck, and her soft tread in her tennis shoes, going back toward the cockpit.

  It was a sullen day, promising rain. The India rocked slowly on the choppy surface, and seemed no farther from the gray shore than it had been an hour ago. Guy leaned on the bowsprit and looked down at his white-clad legs, the blue gilt-buttoned jacket he had taken from the India’s locker, that perhaps had belonged to Anne’s father. He might have been a sailor instead of an architect, he thought. He had been wild to go to sea at fourteen. What had stopped him? How different his life might have been without—what? Without Miriam, of course. He straightened impatiently and pulled the revolver from the pocket of the jacket.

  He held the gun in both hands over the water, his elbow on the bowsprit. How intelligent a jewel, he thought, and how innocent it looked now. Himself— He let it drop. The gun turned once head-over, in perfect balance, with its familiar look of willingness, and disappeared.

  “What was that?”

  Guy turned and saw her standing on the deck near the cabin. He measured the ten or twelve feet between them. He could think of nothing, absolutely nothing to say to her.

  thirty-eight

  Bruno hesitated about the drink. The bathroom walls had that look of breaking up in little pieces, as if the walls might not really have been there, or he might not really have been here.

  “Ma!” But the frightened bleat shamed him, and he drank his drink.

  He tiptoed into his mother’s room and awakened her with a press of the button by her bed, which signaled to Herbert in the kitchen that she was ready for her breakfast.

  “Oh-h,” she yawned, then smiled. “And how are you?” She patted his arm, slid up from the covers, and went into the bathroom to wash.

  Bruno sat quietly on her bed until she came out and got back under the cover again.

  “We’re supposed to see that trip man this afternoon. What’s his name, Saunders? You’d better feel like going in with me.”

  Bruno nodded. It was about their trip to Europe, that they might make into a round-the-world trip. It didn’t have any charm this morning. He might like to go around the world with Guy. Bruno stood up, wondering whether to go get another drink.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  His mother always asked him at the wrong times. “Okay,” he said, sitting down again.

  There was a knock on the door, and Herbert came in. “Good morning, madam. Good morning, sir,” Herbert said without looking at either of them.

  With his chin in his hand, Bruno frowned down at Herbert’s silent, polished, turned-out shoes. Herbert’s insolence lately was intolerable! Gerard had made him think he was the key to the whole case, if they just produced the right man. Everyone said how brave he was to have chased the murderer. And his father had left him twenty thousand in his will. Herbert might take a vacation!

  “Does madam know if there’ll be six or seven for dinner?”

  As Herbert spoke, Bruno looked up at his pink, pointed chin and thought, Guy whammed him there and knocked him right out.

  “Oh, dear, I haven’t called yet, Herbert, but I think seven.”

  “Very good, madam.”

  Rutledge Overbeck II, Bruno thought. He had known his mother would end up having him, though she pretended to be doubtful because he would make an odd number. Rutledge Overbeck was madly in love with his mother, or pretending to be. Bruno wanted to tell his mother Herbert hadn’t sent his clothes to be pressed in six weeks, but he felt too sickish to begin.

  “You know, I’m dying to see Australia,” she said through a bite of toast. She had propped a map up against her coffee pot.

  A tingling, naked sensation spread over his buttocks. He stood up. “Ma, I don’t feel so hot.”

  She frowned at him concernedly, which frightened him more, because he realized there was nothing in the worl
d she could do to help him. “What’s the matter, darling? What do you want?”

  He hurried from the room, feeling he might have to be sick. The bathroom went black. He staggered out, and let the still corked Scotch bottle topple onto his bed.

  “What, Charley? What is it?”

  “I wanna lie down.” He flopped down, but that wasn’t it. He motioned his mother away so he could get up, but when he sat up he wanted to lie down again, so he stood up. “Feel like I’m dying!”

  “Lie down, darling. How about some—some hot tea?”

  Bruno tore off his smoking jacket, then his pajama top. He was suffocating. He had to pant to breathe. He did feel like he was dying!

  She hurried to him with a wet towel. “What is it, your stomach?”

  “Everything.” He kicked off his slippers. He went to the window to open it, but it was already open. He turned, sweating. “Ma, maybe I’m dying. You think I’m dying?”

  “I’ll get you a drink!”

  “No, get the doctor!” he shrieked. “Get me a drink, too!” Feebly he pulled his pajama string and let the pants drop. What was it? Not just the shakes. He was too weak to shake. Even his hands were weak and tingly. He held up his hands. The fingers were curved inward. He couldn’t open them. “Ma, somp’n’s the matter with my hands! Look, Ma, what is it, what is it?”

  “Drink this!”

  He heard the bottle chatter on the rim of the glass. He couldn’t wait for it. He trotted into the hall, stooped with terror, staring at his limp, curling hands. It was the two middle fingers on each hand. They were curving in, almost touching the palm.

  “Darling, put your robe on!” she whispered.

  “Get the doctor!” A robe! She talked about a robe! What did it matter if he was stark naked? “Ma, but don’t let ’em take me away!” He plucked at her as she stood at the telephone. “Lock all the doors! You know what they do?” He spoke fast and confidentially, because the numbness was working up and he knew what was the matter now. He was a case! He was going to be like this all his life! “Know what they do, Ma, they put you in a straitjacket without a drop and it’ll kill me!”

  “Dr. Packer? This is Mrs. Bruno. Could you recommend a doctor in the neighborhood?”

  Bruno screamed. How would a doctor get out here in the Connecticut sticks? “Massom—” He gasped. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t move his tongue. It had gone into his vocal cords! “Aaaaagh!” He wriggled from under the smoking jacket his mother was trying to throw over him. Let Herbert stand there gaping at him if he wanted to!

  “Charles!”

  He gestured toward his mouth with his crazy hands. He trotted to the closet mirror. His face was white, flat around the mouth as if someone had hit him with a board, his lips drawn horribly back from his teeth. And his hands! He wouldn’t be able to hold a glass anymore, or light a cigarette. He wouldn’t be able to drive a car. He wouldn’t even be able to go to the john by himself!

  “Drink this!”

  Yes, liquor, liquor. He tried to catch it all in his stiff lips. It burnt his face and ran down his chest. He motioned for more. He tried to remind her to lock the doors. Oh, Christ, if it went away, he would be grateful all his life! He let Herbert and his mother push him onto the bed.

  “Tehmeh!” he choked. He twisted his mother’s dressing gown and nearly pulled her down on top of him. But at least he could hold to something now. “Dome tehmeh way!” he said with his breath, and she assured him she wouldn’t. She told him she would lock all the doors.

  Gerard, he thought. Gerard was still working against him, and he would keep on and on and on. Not only Gerard but a whole army of people, checking and snooping and visiting people, hammering typewriters, running out and running back with more pieces, pieces from Santa Fe now, and one day Gerard might put them together right. One day Gerard might come in and find him like this morning, and ask him and he would tell everything. He had killed someone. They killed you for killing someone. Maybe he couldn’t cope. He stared up at the light fixture in the center of the ceiling. It reminded him of the round chromium drainstop in the basin at his grandmother’s house in Los Angeles. Why did he think of that?

  The cruel jab of the hypodermic needle shocked him to sharper consciousness.

  The young, jumpy-looking doctor was talking to his mother in a corner of the darkened room. But he felt better. They wouldn’t take him away now. It was okay now. He had just been panicky. Cautiously, just under the top of the sheet, he watched his fingers flex. “Guy,” he whispered. His tongue was still thick, but he could talk. Then he saw the doctor go out.

  “Ma, I don’t want to go to Europe!” he said in a monotone as his mother came over.

  “All right, darling, we won’t go.” She sat down gently on the side of the bed, and he felt immediately better.

  “The doctor didn’t say I couldn’t go, did he?” As if he wouldn’t go if he wanted to! What was he afraid of? Not even of another attack like this! He touched the puffed shoulder of his mother’s dressing gown, but he thought of Rutledge Overbeck at dinner tonight, and let his hand drop. He was sure his mother was having an affair with him. She went to see him too much at his studio in Silver Springs, and she stayed too long. He didn’t want to admit it, but why shouldn’t he when it was under his nose? It was the first affair, and his father was dead so why shouldn’t she, but why did she have to pick such a jerk? Her eyes looked darker now, in the shaded room. She hadn’t improved since the days after his father’s death. She was going to be like this, Bruno realized now, stay like this, never be young again the way he liked her. “Don’t look so sad, Mom.”

  “Darling, will you promise me you’ll cut down? The doctor said this is the beginning of the end. This morning was a warning, don’t you see? Nature’s warning.” She moistened her lips, and the sudden softness of the rouged, lined underlip so close to him was more than Bruno could bear.

  He closed his eyes tight shut. If he promised, he would be lying. “Hell, I didn’t get the D.T.’s, did I? I never had ’em.”

  “But this is worse. I talked with the doctor. It’s destroying your nerve tissue, he said, and it can kill you. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “Promise me?” She watched his eyelids flutter shut again, and heard him sigh. The tragedy was not this morning, she thought, but years ago when he had taken his first drink by himself. The tragedy was not even the first drink, because the first drink was not the first resort but the last. There’d had to be first the failure of everything else—of her and Sam, of his friends, of his hope, of his interests, really. And hard as she tried, she could never discover why or where it might have begun, because Charley had always been given everything, and both she and Sam had done their best to encourage him in everything and anything he had ever shown interest in. If she could only discover the place in the past where it might have begun— She got up, needing a drink herself.

  Bruno opened his eyes tentatively. He felt deliciously heavy with sleep. He saw himself halfway across the room, as if he watched himself on a screen. He was in his red-brown suit. It was the island in Metcalf. He saw his younger, slimmer body arc toward Miriam and fling her to the earth, those few short moments separate from time before and time after. He felt he had made special movements, thought special brilliant thoughts in those moments, and that such an interval would never come again. Like Guy had talked about himself, the other day on the boat, when he built the Palmyra. Bruno was glad those special moments for both of them had come so near the same time. Sometimes he thought he could die without regrets, because what else could he ever do that would measure up to the night in Metcalf? What else wouldn’t be an anticlimax? Sometimes, like now, he felt his energy might be winding down, and something, maybe his curiosity, dying down. But he didn’t mind, because he felt so wise now somehow, and really so content. Only yesterday he had wanted to go around the world. And why? To say he had been? To say to whom? Last month he had written to William Beebe, volu
nteering to go down in the new super-bathysphere that they were testing first without a man inside. Why? Everything was silly compared to the night in Metcalf. Every person he knew was silly compared to Guy. Silliest of all to think he’d wanted to see a lot of European women! Maybe the Captain’s whores had soured him, so what? Lots of people thought sex was overrated. No love lasts forever, the psychologists said. But he really shouldn’t say that about Guy and Anne. He had a feeling theirs might last, but just why he didn’t know. It wasn’t only that Guy was so wrapped up in her he was blind to all the rest. It wasn’t just that Guy had enough money now. It was something invisible that he hadn’t even thought of yet. Sometimes he felt he was right on the brink of thinking of it. No, he didn’t want the answer for himself. Purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry.

  He turned on his side, smiling, clicking and unclicking the top of his gold Dunhill lighter. That trip man wouldn’t see them today or any other day. Home was a hell of a lot more comfortable than Europe. And Guy was here.

  thirty-nine

  Gerard was chasing him through a forest, waving all the clues at him—the glove scraps, the shred of overcoat, even the revolver, because Gerard already had Guy. Guy was tied up back in the forest, and his right hand was bleeding fast. If he couldn’t circle around and get to him, Guy would bleed to death. Gerard giggled as he ran, as if it were a good joke, a good trick they’d played, but he’d guessed it after all. In a minute, Gerard would touch him with those ugly hands!

  “Guy!” But his voice sounded feeble. And Gerard was almost touching him. That was the game, when Gerard touched him!

  With all his power, Bruno struggled to sit up. The nightmare slid from his brain like heavy slabs of rock.

  Gerard! There he was!

  “What’s the matter? Bad dream?”

  The pink-purply hands touched him, and Bruno whirled himself off the bed onto the floor.