The Price of Salt

by Highsmith, Patricia

  "You've got a hell of a crush on her," Richard announced, explanatorily and resentfully.

  Therese took a deep breath. Should she be simple and say yes, or should she try to explain it? What could he ever understand of it, even if she explained it in a million words?

  "Does she know it? Of course she knows it." Richard frowned and drew on his cigarette. "Don't you think it's pretty silly? It's like a crush that schoolgirls get."

  "You don't understand," she said. She felt so very sure of herself. I will comb you like music caught in the heads of all the trees in the forest...

  "What's there to understand? But she understands. She shouldn't indulge you. She shouldn't play with you like this. It's not fair to you."

  "Not fair to me?"

  "What's she doing, amusing herself with you? And then one day she'll get tired of you and kick you out."

  Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an emotion? She was angry, but she did not want to argue. She said nothing.

  "You're in a daze!"

  "I'm wide awake. I never felt more awake." She picked up the table knife and rubbed her thumb back and forth on the ridge at the base of the blade. "Why don't you leave me alone?"

  He frowned. "Leave you alone?"

  "Yes."

  "You mean, about Europe, too?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Listen, Terry—" Richard wriggled in his chair and leaned forward, hesitated, then took another cigarette, lighting it distastefully, throwing the match on the floor. "You're in some kind of trance! It's worse—"

  "Just because I don't want to argue with you?"

  "It's worse than being lovesick, because it's so completely unreasonable.

  Don't you understand that?"

  No, she didn't understand a word.

  "But you're going to get over it in about a week. I hope. My God!" He squirmed again. "To say—to say for a minute you practically want to say good-by to me because of some silly crush!"

  "I didn't say that. You said it." She looked back at him, at his rigid face that was beginning to redden in the center of the flat cheeks. "But why should I want to be with you if all you do is argue about this?"

  He sat back. "Wednesday, next Saturday, you won't feel like this at all.

  You haven't known her three weeks yet."

  She looked over toward the steam tables, where people edged slowly along, choosing this and that, drifting toward the curve in the counter where they dispersed. "We may as well say good-by," she said, "because neither of us will ever be any different from what we are this minute."

  "Therese, you're like a person gone so crazy, you think you're saner than ever!"

  "Oh, let's stop it!"

  Richard's hand with its row of knuckles embedded in the white, freckled flesh was clenched on the table motionless, like a picture of a hand that had hammered some ineffectual, inaudible point. "I'll tell you one thing, I think your friend knows what she's doing. I think she's committing a crime against you. I've half a mind to report her to somebody, but the trouble is you're not a child. You're just acting like one."

  "Why do you make so much out of it?" she asked. "You're practically in a frenzy."

  "You make enough out of it to want to say good-by to me! What do you know about her?"

  "What do you know about her?"

  "Did she ever make any passes at you?"

  "God!" Therese said. She felt like saying it a dozen times. It summed up everything, her imprisonment now, here, yet. "You don't understand." But he did, and that was why he was angry. But did he understand that she would have felt the same way if Carol had never touched her? Yes, and if Carol had never even spoken to her after that brief conversation about a doll's valise in the store. If Carol, in fact, had never spoken to her at all, for it had all happened in that instant she had seen Carol standing in the middle of the floor, watching her. Then the realization that so much had happened after that meeting made her feel incredibly lucky suddenly. It was so easy for a man and woman to find each other, to find someone who would do, but for her to have found Carol—"I think I understand you better than you understand me. You don't really want to see me again, either, because you said yourself I'm not the same person.

  If we keep on seeing each other, you'll only get more and more—like this."

  "Terry, forget for a minute I ever said I wanted you to love me, or that I love you. It's you as a person, I mean. I like you. I'd like—"

  "I wonder sometimes why you think you like me, or did like me. Because you didn't even know me."

  "You don't know yourself."

  "But I do—and I know you. You'll drop painting someday and me with it.

  Just as you've dropped everything else you ever started, as far-as I can see. The dry-cleaning thing, or the used-car lot—"

  "That's not true," Richard said sullenly.

  "But why do you think you like me? Because I paint a little, too, and we can talk about that? I'm just as impractical as a girl friend for you as painting is as a business for you." She hesitated a minute, then said the rest of it, "You know enough about art anyway to know you'll never make a good painter. You're like a little boy playing truant as long as you can, knowing all the time what you ought to be doing and what you'll finally be doing, working for your father."

  Richard's blue eyes had gone suddenly cold. The line of his mouth was straight and very short now, the thin upper lip faintly curling. "All that isn't quite the point now, is it?"

  "Well—yes. It's part of your hanging on when you know it's hopeless, and when you know you'll finally let go."

  "I will not!"

  "Richard, there's no point—!"

  "You're going to change your mind, you know."

  She understood that. It was like a song he kept singing to her.

  A week later, Richard stood in her room with the same expression of sullen anger on his face, talking in the same tone. He had called up at the unusual hour of three in the afternoon, and insisted on seeing her for a moment. She was packing a bag to take to Carol's for the week end.

  If she hadn't been packing for Carol's house, Richard might have been in quite another mood, she thought, because she had seen him three times the past week, and he had never been pleasanter, never been more considerate of her.

  "You can't just give me marching orders out of your life," he said, flinging his long arms out, but there was a lonesome tone in it, as if he had already started on that road away from her. "What really makes me sore is that you act like I'm not worth anything, that I'm completely ineffectual. It isn't fair to me, Terry. I can't compete!"

  No, she thought, of course he couldn't. "I don't have any quarrel with you," she said. "It's you who choose to quarrel over Carol. She hasn't taken anything away from you, because you didn't have it in the first place. But if you can't go on seeing me—" She stopped, knowing he could and probably would go on seeing her.

  "What logic," he said, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye.

  Therese watched him, caught by the idea that had just come to her, that she knew suddenly was a fact. Why hadn't it occurred to her the night of the theater, days ago? She might have known it from a hundred gestures, words, looks, this past week. But she remembered the night of the theater especially—he had surprised her with tickets to something she particularly wanted to see—the way he had held her hand that night, and from his voice on the telephone, not just telling her to meet him here or there, but asking her very sweetly if she could. She hadn't liked it. It was not a manifestation of affection, but rather a means of ingratiating himself, of somehow paving the way for the sudden questions he had asked so casually that night, "What do you mean you're fond of her? Do you want to go to bed with her?" Therese had replied, "Do you think I would tell you if I did?" while a quick succession of emotions—humiliation, resentment, loathing of him—had made her speechless, had made it almost impossible for her to keep walking beside him. And glancing at him, she had seen him looking a
t her with that soft, inane smile that in memory now looked cruel, and unhealthy. And its unhealthiness might have escaped her, she thought, if it weren't that Richard was so frankly trying to convince her she was unhealthy.

  Therese turned and tossed into the overnight bag her toothbrush and her hairbrush, then remembered she had a toothbrush at Carol's.

  "Just what do you want from her, Therese? Where's it going to go from here?"

  "Why are you so interested?"

  He stared at her and for a moment beneath the anger she saw the fixed curiosity she had seen before, as if he were watching a spectacle through a keyhole'. But she knew he was not so detached as that. On the contrary, she sensed that he was never so bound to her as now, never so determined not to give her up. It frightened her. She could imagine the determination transformed to hatred and to violence.

  Richard sighed, and twisted the newspaper in his hands. "I'm interested in you. You can't just say to me, 'Find someone else.' I've never treated you the way I treated the others, never thought of you that way."

  She didn't answer.

  "Damn!" Richard threw the newspaper at the bookshelf, and turned his back on her.

  The newspaper flicked the Madonna, and it tipped back against the wall as if astonished, fell over, and rolled off the edge. Richard made a lunge for it and caught it in both hands. He looked at Therese and smiled involuntarily.

  "Thanks." Therese took it from him. She lifted it to set it back then brought her hands down quickly and smashed the figure to the floor.

  "Terry!"

  The Madonna lay in three or four pieces.

  "Never mind it," she said. Her heart was beating as if she were angry, or fighting.

  "But—"

  "To hell with it!" she said, pushing the pieces aside with her shoe.

  Richard left a moment later, slamming the door.

  What was it, Therese wondered, the Andronich thing or Richard? Mr.

  Andronich's secretary had called about an hour ago and told her that Mr.

  Andronich had decided to hire an assistant from Philadelphia instead of her. So that job would not be there to come back to, after the trip with Carol. Therese looked down at the broken Madonna. The wood was quite beautiful inside. It had cracked cleanly along the grain.

  Carol asked her in detail that evening about her talk with Richard. It irked Therese that Carol was so concerned as to whether Richard were hurt or not.

  "You're not used to thinking of other people's feelings," Carol said bluntly to her.

  They were in the kitchen fixing a late dinner, because Carol had given the maid the evening off.

  "What real reason have you to think he's not in love with you?" Carol asked.

  "Maybe I just don't understand how he works. But it doesn't seem like love to me."

  Then in the middle of dinner, in the middle of a conversation about the trip, Carol remarked suddenly, "You shouldn't have talked to Richard at all."

  It was the first time Therese had told Carol any of it, any of the first conversation in the cafeteria with Richard. "Why not? Should I have lied to him?"

  Carol was not eating. Now she pushed back her chair and stood up. "You're much too young to know your own mind. Or what you're talking about. Yes, in that case, lie."

  Therese laid her fork down. She watched Carol get a cigarette and light it. "I had to say good-by to him and I did. I have. I won't see him again."

  Carol opened a panel in the bottom of the bookcase and took out a bottle.

  She poured some into an empty glass and slammed the panel shut. "Why did you do if now? Why not two months ago or two months from now? And why did you mention me?"

  "I know—I think it fascinates him."

  "It probably does."

  "But if I simply don't see him again—" She couldn't finish it, about his not being apt to follow her, spy on her. She didn't want to say such things to Carol. And besides, there was the memory of Richard's eyes. "I think he'll give it up. He said he couldn't compete."

  Carol struck her forehead with her hand. "Couldn't compete," she repeated. She came back to the table and poured some of the water from her glass into the whisky. "How true. Finish your dinner. I may be making too much of it, I don't know."

  But Therese did not move. She had done the wrong thing. And at best, even doing the right thing, she could not make Carol happy as Carol made her happy, she thought as she had thought a hundred times before. Carol was happy only at moments here and there, moments that Therese caught and kept. One had been in the evening they put away the Christmas decorations, and Carol had refolded the string of angels and put them between the pages of a book. "I'm going to keep these," she had said.

  "With twenty-two angels to defend me, I can't lose." Therese looked at Carol now, and though Carol was watching her, it was through that veil of preoccupation that Therese so often saw, that kept them a world apart.

  "Lines," Carol said. "I can't compete. People talk of classics. These lines are classic. A hundred different people will say the same words.

  There are lines for the mother, lines for the daughter, for the husband and the lover. I'd rather see you dead at my feet. It's the same play repeated with different casts. What do they say makes a play a classic, Therese?"

  "A classic—" Her voice sounded tight and stifled. "A classic is something with a basic human situation."

  When Therese awakened, the sun was in her room. She lay for a moment, watching the watery looking sunspots rippling on the pale green ceiling, listening for any sound of activity in the house. She looked at her blouse, hanging over the edge of the bureau. Why was she so untidy in Carol's house? Carol didn't like it. The dog that lived somewhere beyond the garages was barking intermittently, halfheartedly. There had been one pleasant interval last evening, the telephone call from Rindy. Rindy back from a birthday party at nine thirty. Could she give a birthday party on her birthday in April. Carol said of course. Carol had been different after that. She had talked about Europe, and summers in Rapallo.

  Therese got up and went to the window, raised it higher and leaned on the sill, tensing herself against the cold. There were no mornings anywhere like the mornings from this window. The round bed of grass beyond the driveway had darts of sunlight in it, like scattered gold needles. There were sparks of sun in the moist hedge leaves, and the sky was a fresh solid blue. She looked at the place in the driveway where Abby had been that morning, and at the bit of white fence beyond the hedges that marked the end of the lawn. The ground looked breathing and young, even though the winter had browned the grass. There had been trees and hedges around the school in Montclair, but the green had always ended in part of a red brick wall, or a gray stone building that was part of the school—an infirmary, a woodshed, a toolhouse—and the green each spring had seemed old already, used and handed down by one generation of children to the next, as much a part of school paraphernalia as textbooks and uniforms.

  She dressed in the plaid slacks she had brought from home, and one of the shirts she had left from another time, that had been laundered. It was twenty past eight. Carol liked to get up about eight thirty, liked to be awakened by someone with a cup of coffee, though Therese had noticed she never had Florence do it.

  Florence was in the kitchen when she went down, but she had only just started the coffee.

  "Good morning," Therese said. "Do you mind if I fix the breakfast?"

  Florence hadn't minded the two other times she had come in and found Therese fixing them.

  "Go ahead, miss," Florence said. "I'll just make my own fried eggs. You like doing things for Mrs. Aird yourself, don't you?" she said like a statement.

  Therese was getting two eggs out of the refrigerator. "Yes," she said, smiling. She dropped one of the eggs into the water that was just beginning to heat. Her answer sounded rather flat, but what other answer was there? When she turned around after setting the breakfast tray, she saw Florence had put the second egg in the water. Therese took it out with her finger
s. "She wants only one egg," Therese said. "That's for my omelette."

  "Does she? She always used to eat two."

  "Well—she doesn't now," Therese said.

  "Shouldn't you measure that egg anyway, miss?" Florence gave her the pleasant professional smile. "Here's the egg timer, top of the stove."

  Therese shook her head. "It comes out better when I guess." She had never gone wrong yet on Carol's egg. Carol liked it a little better done than the egg timer made it. Therese looked at Florence, who was concentrating now on the two eggs she was frying in the skillet. The coffee was almost all filtered. In silence, Therese prepared the cup to take up to Carol.

  Later in the morning, Therese helped Carol take in the white iron chairs and the glider from the lawn in back of the house. It would be simpler with Florence there, Carol said, but Carol had sent her away marketing, then had a sudden whim to get the furniture in. It was Harge's idea to leave them out all winter, she said, but she thought they looked bleak.

  Finally only one chair remained by the round fountain, a prim little chair of white metal with a bulging bottom and four lacy feet. Therese looked at it and wondered who had sat there.

  "I wish there were more plays that happened out of doors," Therese said.

  "What do you think of first when you start to make a set?" Carol asked.

  "What do you start from?"

  "The mood of the play, I suppose. What do you mean?"

  "Do you think of the kind of play it is, or of something you want to see?"

  One of Mr. Donohue's remarks brushed Therese's mind with a vague unpleasantness. Carol was in an argumentative mood this morning. "I think you're determined to consider me an amateur," Therese said.

  "I think you're rather subjective. That's amateurish, isn't it?"

  "Not always." But she knew what Carol meant.

  "You have to know a lot to be absolutely subjective, don't you? In those things you showed me, I think you're too subjective—without knowing enough."