The Price of Salt

by Highsmith, Patricia

  And they were silent again. Carol drove faster, changing her lane to pass cars, as if they had a destination. Therese set herself to say something, anything at all, by the time they reached the George Washington Bridge.

  Suddenly it occurred to her that if Carol and her husband were divorcing, Carol had been downtown to see a lawyer today. The district there was full of law offices. And something had gone wrong. Why were they divorcing? Because Harge was having an affair with the woman called Cynthia? Therese was cold. Carol had lowered the window beside her, and every time the car sped, the wind burst through and wrapped its cold arms around her.

  "That's where Abby lives," Carol said, nodding across the river.

  Therese did not even see any special lights. "Who's Abby?"

  "Abby? My best friend." Then Carol looked at her. "Aren't you cold with this window open?"

  "No."

  "You must be." They stopped for a red light, and Carol rolled the window up. Carol looked at her, as if really seeing her for the first time that evening, and under her eyes that went from her face to her hands in her lap, Therese felt like a puppy Carol had bought at a roadside kennel, that Carol had just remembered was riding beside her.

  "What happened, Carol? Are you getting a divorce now?"

  Carol sighed. "Yes, a divorce," she said quite calmly, and started the car.

  "And he has the child?"

  "Just tonight."

  Therese was about to ask another question, when Carol said, "Let's talk about something else."

  A car went by with the radio playing Christmas carols and everyone singing.

  And she and Carol were silent. They drove past Yonkers, and it seemed to Therese she had left every chance of talking further to Carol somewhere behind on the road. Carol insisted suddenly that she should eat something, because it was getting on to eight, so they stopped at a little restaurant by the roadside, a place that sold fried-clam sandwiches. They sat at the counter and ordered sandwiches and coffee, but Carol did not eat. Carol asked her questions about Richard, not in the concerned way she had Sunday afternoon, but rather as if she talked to keep Therese from asking more questions about her. They were personal questions, yet Therese answered them mechanically and impersonally.

  Carol's quiet voice went on and on, much quieter than the voice of the counter boy talking with someone three yards away.

  "Do you sleep with him?" Carol asked her.

  "I did. Two or three times." Therese told her about those times, the first time and the three times afterward. She was not embarrassed, talking about it. It had never seemed so dull and unimportant before. She felt Carol could imagine every minute of those evenings. She felt Carol's objective, appraising glance over her, and she knew Carol was about to say she did not look particularly cold, or perhaps, emotionally starved.

  But Carol was silent, and Therese stared uncomfortably at the list of songs on the little music box in front of her. She remembered someone telling her once she had a passionate mouth, she couldn't remember who.

  "Sometimes it takes time," Carol said. "Don't you believe in giving people another chance?"

  "But why? It isn't pleasant. And I'm not in love with him."

  "Don't you think you might be, if you got this worked out?"

  "Is that the way people fall in love?"

  Carol looked up at the deer's head on the wall behind the counter. "No," she said, smiling. "What do you like about Richard?"

  "Well, he has—" But she wasn't sure if it really was sincerity. He wasn't sincere, she felt, about his ambition to be a painter. "I like his attitude—more than most men's. He does treat me like a person instead of just a girl he can go so far with or not. And I like his family—the fact that he has a family."

  "Lots of people have families."

  Therese tried again. "He's flexible. He changes. He's not like most men that you can label doctor or—or insurance salesman."

  "I think you know him better than I knew Harge after months of marriage.

  At least you're not going to make the same mistake I did, to marry because it was the thing to do when you were about twenty, among the people I knew."

  "You mean you weren't in love?"

  "Yes, I was, very much. And so was Harge. And he was the kind of man who could wrap your life up in a week and put it in his pocket. Were you ever in love, Therese?"

  She waited, until the word from nowhere, false, guilty, moved her lips, "No."

  "But you'd like to be." Carol was smiling.

  "Is Harge still in love with you?"

  Carol looked down at her lap, impatiently, and perhaps she was shocked at her bluntness, Therese thought, but when Carol spoke, her voice was the same as before, "Even I don't know. In a way, he's the same emotionally as he's always been. It's just that now I can see how he really is. He said I was the first woman he'd ever been in love with. I think it's true, but I don't think he was in love with me—in the usual sense of the word—for more than a few months. He's never been interested in anyone else, it's true. Maybe he'd be more human if he were. That I could understand and forgive."

  "Does he like Rindy?"

  "Dotes on her." Carol glanced at her smiling. "If he's in love with anyone, it's Rindy."

  "What kind of a name is that?"

  "Nerinda. Harge named her. He wanted a son, but I think he's even more pleased with a daughter. I wanted a girl. I wanted two or three children."

  "And—Harge didn't?"

  "I didn't." She looked at Therese again. "Is this the right conversation for Christmas Eve?" Carol reached for a cigarette, and, accepted the one Therese offered her, a Philip Morris.

  "I like to know all about you," Therese said.

  "I didn't want any more children, because I was afraid our marriage was going on the rocks anyway, even with Rindy. So you want to fall in love?

  You probably will soon, and if you do, enjoy it, it's harder later on."

  "To love someone?"

  "To fall in love. Or even to have the desire to make love. I think sex flows more sluggishly in all of us than we care to believe, especially men care to believe. The first adventures are usually nothing but a satisfying of curiosity, and after that one keeps repeating the same actions, trying to find—what?"

  "What?" Therese asked.

  "Is there a word? A friend, a companion, or maybe just a sharer. What good are words? I mean, I think people often try to find through sex, things that are much easier to find in other ways."

  What Carol said about curiosity, she knew was true. "What other ways?" she asked.

  Carol gave her a glance. "I think that's for each person to find out. I wonder if I can get a drink here."

  But the restaurant served only beer and wine, so they left.

  Carol did not stop anywhere for her drink as they drove back toward New York. Carol asked her if she wanted to go home or come out to her house for a while, and Therese said to Carol's house. She remembered the Kellys had asked her to drop in on the wine and fruitcake party they were having tonight, and she had promised to, but they wouldn't miss her, she thought.

  "What a rotten time I give you," Carol said suddenly. "Sunday and now this. I'm not the best company this evening. What would you like to do?

  Would you like to go to a restaurant in Newark where they have lights and Christmas music tonight? It's not a night club. We could have a decent dinner there, too."

  "I really don't care about going anywhere—for myself."

  "You've been in that rotten store all day, and we haven't done a thing to celebrate your liberation."

  "I just like to be here with you," Therese said, and hearing the explanatory tone in her voice, she smiled.

  Carol shook her head, not looking at her. "Child, child, where do you wander—all by yourself?"

  Then a moment later on the New Jersey highway, Carol said, "I know what."

  And she turned the car into a graveled section off the road and stopped.

  "Come out with me."

&n
bsp; They were in front of a lighted stand piled high with Christmas trees.

  Carol told her to pick a tree, one not too big and not too small. They put the tree in the back of the car, and Therese sat in front beside Carol with her arms full of holly and fir branches. Therese pressed her face into them and inhaled the dark-green sharpness of their smell, their clean spice that was like a wild forest and like all the artifices of Christmas—tree baubles, gifts, snow, Christmas music, holidays. It was being through with the store and being beside Carol now. It was the purr of the car's engine, and the needles of the fir branches that she could touch with her fingers. I am happy, I am happy, Therese thought.

  "Let's do the tree now," Carol said as soon as they entered the house.

  Carol turned the radio on in the living room, and fixed a drink for both of them. There were Christmas songs on the radio, bells breaking resonantly, as if they were inside a great church. Carol brought a blanket of white cotton for the snow around the tree, and Therese sprinkled it with sugar so it would glisten. Then she cut an elongated angel out of some gold ribbon and fixed it to the top of the tree, and folded tissue paper and cut a string of angels to thread along the branches.

  "You're very good at that," Carol said, surveying the tree from the hearth. "It's superb. Everything but presents."

  Carol's present was on the sofa beside Therese's coat. The card she had made for it was at home, however, and she didn't want to give it without the card. Therese looked at the tree. "What else do we need?"

  "Nothing. Do you know what time it is?"

  The radio had signed off. Therese saw the mantel clock. It was after one.

  "It's Christmas," she said.

  "You'd better stay the night."

  "All right."

  "What do you have to do tomorrow?"

  "Nothing."

  Carol got her drink from the radio top. "Don't you have to see Richard?"

  She did have to see Richard, at twelve noon. She was to spend the day at his house. But she could make some kind of excuse. "No. I said I might see him. It's not important."

  "I can drive you in early."

  "Are you busy tomorrow?"

  Carol finished the last inch of her drink. "Yes," she said.

  Therese began to clean up the mess she had made, the scraps of tissue and snippets of ribbon. She hated cleaning up after making something.

  "Your friend Richard sounds like the kind of man who needs a woman around him to work for. Whether he marries her or not," Carol said. "Isn't he like that?"

  Why talk of Richard now, Therese thought irritably. She felt that Carol liked Richard—which could only be her own fault—and a distant jealousy prickled her, sharp as a pin.

  "Actually, I admire that more than the men who live alone or think they live alone, and end by making the stupidest blunders with women."

  Therese stared at Carol's pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. She had absolutely nothing to say on the subject. She could find Carol's perfume like a fine thread in the stronger smell of evergreen, and she wanted to follow it, to put her arms around Carol.

  "It has nothing to do with whether people marry, has it?"

  "What?" Therese looked at her and saw her smiling a little.

  "Harge is the kind of man who doesn't let a woman enter his life. And on the other hand, your friend Richard might never marry. But the pleasure Richard will get out of thinking he wants to marry." Carol looked at Therese from head to foot. "The wrong girls," she added. "Do you dance, Therese? Do you like to dance?"

  Carol seemed suddenly cool and bitter, and Therese could have wept. "No," she said. She should never have told her anything about Richard, Therese thought, but now it was done.

  "You're tired. Come on to bed."

  Carol took her to the room that Harge had gone into Sunday, and turned down the covers of one of the twin beds. It might have been Harge's room, Therese thought. There was certainly nothing about it that suggested a child's room. She thought of Rindy's possessions that Harge had taken from this room, and imagined Harge moving first from the bedroom he shared with Carol, then letting Rindy bring her things into this room, keeping them here, closing himself and Rindy away from Carol.

  Carol laid some pajamas on the foot of the bed. "Good night, then," she said at the door. "Merry Christmas. What do you want for Christmas?"

  Therese smiled suddenly. "Nothing."

  That night she dreamed of birds, long, bright red birds like flamingos, zipping through a black forest and making scallopy patterns, arcs of red that curved like their cries. Then her eyes opened and she heard it really, a soft whistle curving, rising and coming down again with an extra note at the end, and behind it the real, feebler twitter of birds.

  The window was a bright gray. The whistling began again, just below the window, and Therese got out of bed. There was a long open-topped car, in the driveway, and a woman standing in it, whistling. It was like a dream she looked out on, a scene without color, misty at the edges.

  Then she heard Carol's whisper, as clearly as if all three of them were in the same room together, "Are you going to bed or getting up?"

  The woman in the car with her foot on the seat said just as softly, "Both," and Therese heard the tremor of repressed laughter in the word and liked her instantly. "Go for a ride?" the woman asked. She was looking up at Carol's window with a big smile that Therese had just begun to see.

  "You nitwit," Carol whispered.

  "You alone?"

  "No."

  "Oh-oh."

  "It's all right. Do you want to come in?"

  The woman got out of the car.

  Therese went to the door of her room and opened it. Carol was just coming into the hall, tying the belt of her robe.

  "Sorry I wakened you," Carol said. "Go back to bed."

  "I don't mind. Can I come down?"

  "Well, of course!" Carol smiled suddenly. "Get a robe out of the closet."

  Therese got a robe, probably a robe of Harge's, she thought, and went downstairs.

  "Who made the Christmas tree?" the woman was asking.

  They were in the living room.

  "She did." Carol turned to Therese. "This is Abby. Abby Gerhard, Therese Belivet."

  "Hello," Abby said.

  "How do you do." Therese had hoped it was Abby. Abby looked at her now with the same bright, rather popeyed expression of amusement that Therese had seen when she stood in the car.

  "You make a fine tree," Abby told her.

  "Will everybody stop whispering?" Carol asked.

  Abby chafed her hands together and followed Carol into the kitchen. "Got any coffee, Carol?"

  Therese stood by the kitchen table, watching them, feeling at ease because Abby paid no further attention to her, only took off her coat and started helping Carol with the coffee. Her waist and hips looked perfectly cylindrical, without any front or back, under her purple knitted suit. Her hands were a little clumsy, Therese noticed, and her feet had none of the grace of Carol's. She looked older than Carol, and there were two wrinkles across her forehead that cut deep when she laughed and her strong arched eyebrows rose higher. And she and Carol kept laughing now, while they fixed coffee and squeezed orange juice, talking in short phrases about nothing, or nothing that was important enough to be followed.

  Except Abby's sudden, "Well"—fishing a seed out of the last glass of orange juice and wiping her finger carelessly on her own dress—"how's old Harge?"

  "The same," Carol said. Carol was looking for something in the refrigerator, and watching her, Therese failed to hear all of what Abby said next, or maybe it was another of the fragmentary sentences that Carol alone understood, but it made Carol straighten up and laugh, suddenly and hard, made her whole face change, and Therese thought with sudden envy, she could not make Carol laugh like that, but Abby could.

  "I'm going to tell him that," Carol said. "I can't resist."

  It was something about a Boy Scout pocket gadget for Harge.

  "And
tell him where it came from," Abby said, looking at Therese and smiling broadly, as if she should share in the joke, too. "Where're you from?" she asked Therese as they sat down in the table alcove at one side of the kitchen.

  "She's from New York," Carol answered for her, and Therese thought Abby was going to say, why how unusual, or something silly, but Abby said nothing at all, only looked at Therese with the same expectant smile, as if she awaited the next cue from her.

  For all their fussing about breakfast, there was only orange juice and coffee and some unbuttered toast that nobody wanted. Abby lighted a cigarette before she touched anything.

  "Are you old enough to smoke?" she asked Therese, offering her a red box that said Craven A's.

  Carol put her spoon down. "Abby, what is this?" she asked with an air of embarrassment that Therese had never seen before.

  "Thanks, I'd like one," Therese said, taking a cigarette.

  Abby settled her elbows on the table. "Well, what's what?" she asked Carol.

  "I suspect you're a little tight," Carol said.

  "Driving for hours in the open air? I left New Rochelle at two, got home and found your message, and here I am."

  She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably did nothing all day except what she felt like doing.

  "Well?" Abby said.

  "Well—I didn't win the first round," Carol said.

  Abby drew on her cigarette, showing no surprise at all. "For how long?"

  "For three months."

  "Starting when?"

  "Starting now. Starting last night, in fact." Carol glanced at Therese, then looked down at her coffee cup, and Therese knew Carol would not say any more with her sitting there.

  "That's not set already, is it?" Abby asked.

  "I'm afraid it is," Carol answered casually, with a shrug in her tone.

  "Just verbally, but it'll hold. What're you doing tonight? Late."

  "I'm not doing anything early. Dinner's at two today."

  "Call me sometime."

  "Sure."

  Carol kept her eyes down, looking down at the orange juice glass in her hand, and Therese saw a downward slant of sadness in her mouth now, a sadness not of wisdom but of defeat.

  "I'd take a trip," Abby said. "Take a little trip away somewhere." Then Abby looked at Therese, another of the bright, irrelevant, friendly glances, as if to include her in something it was impossible she could be included in, and anyway, Therese had gone stiff with the thought that Carol might take a trip away from her.