The Price of Salt

by Highsmith, Patricia

  "We'll be a half hour drinking these."

  "Your powers of persuasion are irresistible." Carol took the suit into the bathroom and turned the water on in the tub.

  It was the suit she had worn the day they had had the first lunch together.

  "Do you realize this is the only drink I've had since we left New York?"

  Carol said. "Of course you don't. Do you know why? I'm happy."

  "You're beautiful," Therese said.

  And Carol gave her the derogatory smile that Therese loved, and walked to the dressing table. She flung a yellow-silk scarf around her neck and tied it loosely and began to comb her hair. The lamp's light framed her figure like a picture, and Therese had a feeling all this had happened before. She remembered suddenly: the woman in the window brushing up her long hair, remembered the very bricks in the wall, the texture of the misty rain that morning.

  "How about some perfume?" Carol asked, moving toward her with the bottle.

  She touched Therese's forehead with her fingers, at the hairline where she had kissed her that day.

  "You remind me of the woman I once saw," Therese said, "somewhere off Lexington. Not you but the light. She was combing her hair up." Therese stopped, but Carol waited for her to go on. Carol always waited, and she could never say exactly what she wanted to say. "Early one morning when I was on the way to work, and I remember it was starting to rain," she floundered on. "I saw her in a window." She really could not go on, about standing there for perhaps three or four minutes, wishing with an intensity that drained her strength that she knew the woman, that she might be welcome if she went to the house and knocked on the door, wishing she could do that instead of going on to her job at the Pelican Press.

  "My little orphan," Carol said.

  Therese smiled. There was nothing dismal, no sting in the word when Carol said it.

  "What does your mother look like?"

  "She had black hair," Therese said quickly. "She didn't look anything like me." Therese always found herself talking about her mother in the past tense, though she was alive this minute, somewhere in Connecticut.

  "You really don't think she'll ever want to see you again?" Carol was standing at the mirror.

  "I don't think so."

  "What about your father's family. Didn't you say he had a brother?"

  "I never met him. He was a kind of geologist, working for an oil company.

  I don't know where he is." It was easier talking about the uncle she had never met.

  "What's your mother's name now?"

  "Esther—Mrs. Nicolas Strully." The name meant as little to her as one she might see in a telephone book. She looked at Carol, suddenly sorry she had said the name. Carol might some day—A shock of loss, of helplessness came over her. She knew so little about Carol after all.

  Carol glanced at her. "I'll never mention it," she said, "never mention it again. If that second drink's going to make you blue, don't drink it.

  I don't want you to be blue tonight."

  The restaurant where they dined overlooked the lake, too. They had a banquet of a dinner with champagne and brandy afterward. It was the first time in her life that Therese had been a little drunk, in fact much drunker than she wanted Carol to see. Her impression of Lakeshore Drive was always to be of a broad avenue studded with mansions all resembling the White House in Washington. In the memory there would be Carol's voice, telling her about a house here and there where she had been before, and the disquieting awareness that for a while this had been Carol's world, as Rapallo, Paris, and other places Therese did not know had for a while been the frame of everything Carol did.

  That night, Carol sat on the edge of her bed, smoking a cigarette before they turned the light out. Therese lay in her own bed, sleepily watching her, trying to read the meaning of the restless, puzzled look in Carol's eyes that would stare at something in the room for a moment and then move on. Was it of her she thought, or of Harge, or of Rindy? Carol had asked to be called at seven tomorrow, in order to telephone Rindy before she went to school. Therese remembered their telephone conversation in Defiance. Rindy had had a fight with some other little girl, and Carol had spent fifteen minutes going over it, and trying to persuade Rindy she should take the first step and apologize. Therese still felt the effects of what she had drunk, the tingling of the champagne that drew her painfully close to Carol. If she simply asked, she thought, Carol would let her sleep tonight in the same bed with her. She wanted more than that, to kiss her, to feel their bodies next to each other's. Therese thought of the two girls she had seen in the Palermo bar. They did that, she knew, and more. And would Carol suddenly thrust her away in disgust, if she merely wanted to hold her in her arms? And would whatever affection Carol now had for her vanish in that instant? A vision of Carol's cold rebuff swept her courage clean away. It crept back humbly in the question, couldn't she ask simply to sleep in the same bed with her?

  "Carol, would you mind—"

  "Tomorrow we'll go to the stockyards," Carol said at the same time, and Therese burst out laughing. "What's so damned funny about that?" Carol asked, putting out her cigarette, but she was smiling, too.

  "It just is. It's terribly funny," Therese said, still laughing, laughing away all the longing and the intention of the night.

  "You're giggly on champagne," Carol said as she put the light out.

  Late the next afternoon they left Chicago and drove in the direction of Rockford. Carol said she might have a letter from Abby there, but probably not, because Abby was a bad correspondent. Therese went to a shoe repair shop to get a moccasin stitched, and when she came back, Carol was reading the letter in the car.

  "What road do we take out?" Carol's face looked happier.

  "Twenty, going west."

  Carol turned on the radio and worked the dial until she found some music.

  "What's a good town for tonight on the way to Minneapolis?"

  "Dubuque," Therese said, looking at the map. "Or Waterloo looks fairly big, but it's about two hundred miles away."

  "We might make it."

  They took Highway 20 toward Freeport and Galena, which was starred on the map as the home of Ulysses S. Grant.

  "What did Abby say?"

  "Nothing much. Just a very nice letter."

  Carol said little to her in the car, or even in the cafe where they stopped later for coffee. Carol went over and stood in front of a juke box, dropping nickels slowly.

  "You wish Abby'd come along, don't you?" Therese said.

  "No," Carol said.

  "You're so different since you got the letter from her."

  Carol looked at her across the table. "Darling, it's just a silly letter.

  You can even read it if you want to." Carol reached for her handbag, but she did not get the letter out.

  Sometime that evening, Therese fell asleep in the car and woke up with the lights of a city on her face. Carol was resting both arms tiredly on the top of the wheel. They had stopped for a red light.

  "Here's where we stay the night," Carol said.

  Therese's sleep still clung to her as she walked across the hotel lobby.

  She rode up in an elevator and she was acutely conscious of Carol beside her, as if she dreamed a dream in which Carol was the subject and the only figure. In the room, she lifted her suitcase from the floor to a chair, unlatched it and left it, and stood by the writing table, watching Carol. As if her emotions had been in abeyance all the past hours, or days, they flooded her now as she watched Carol opening her suitcase, taking out, as she always did first, the leather kit that contained her toilet articles, dropping it onto the bed. She looked at Carol's hands, at the lock of hair that fell over the scarf tied around her head, at the scratch she had gotten days ago across the toe of her moccasin.

  "What're you standing there for?" Carol asked. "Get to bed, sleepyhead."

  "Carol, I love you."

  Carol straightened up. Therese stared at her with intense, sleepy eyes.

&nbs
p; Then Carol finished taking her pajamas from the suitcase and pulled the lid down. She came to Therese and put her hands on her shoulders. She squeezed her shoulders hard, as if she were exacting a promise from her, or perhaps searching her to see if what she had said were real. Then she kissed Therese on the lips, as if they had kissed a thousand times before.

  "Don't you know I love you?" Carol said.

  Carol took her pajamas into the bedroom, and stood for a moment, looking down at the basin.

  "I'm going out," Carol said. "But I'll be back right away."

  Therese waited by the table while Carol was gone, while time passed indefinitely or maybe not at all, until the door opened and Carol came in again. She set a paper bag on the table, and Therese knew she had only gone to get a container of milk, as Carol or she herself did very often at night.

  "Can I sleep with you?" Therese asked.

  "Did you see the bed?"

  It was a double bed. They sat up in their pajamas, drinking milk and sharing an orange that Carol was too sleepy to finish. Then Therese set the container of milk on the floor and looked at Carol who was sleeping already, on her stomach, with one arm flung up as she always went to sleep. Therese pulled out the light. Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched, fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale-white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.

  "Go to sleep," Carol said.

  Therese hoped she would not. But when she felt Carol's hand move on her shoulder, she knew she had been asleep. It was dawn now. Carol's fingers tightened in her hair, Carol kissed her on the lips, and pleasure leaped in Therese again as if it were only a continuation of the moment when Carol had slipped her arm under her neck last night. I love you, Therese wanted to say again, and then the words were erased by the tingling and terrifying pleasure that spread in waves from Carol's lips over her neck, her shoulders, that rushed suddenly, the length of her body. Her arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing else, of Carol's hand that slid along her ribs, Carol's hair that brushed her bare breasts, and then her body too seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought could follow. While a thousand memories and moments, words, the first darling, the second time Carol had met her at the store, a thousand memories of Carol's face, her voice, moments of anger and laughter flashed like the tail of a comet across her brain. And now it was pale-blue distance and space, an expanding space in which she took flight suddenly like a long arrow. The arrow seemed to cross an impossibly wide abyss with ease, seemed to arc on and on in space, and not quite to stop. Then she realized that she still clung to Carol, that she trembled violently, and the arrow was herself. She saw Carol's pale hair across her eyes, and now Carol's head was close against hers. And she did not have to ask if this were right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect. She held Carol tighter against her, and felt Carol's mouth on her own smiling mouth. Therese lay still, looking at her at Carol's face only inches away from her, the gray eyes calm as she had never seen them, as if they retained some of the space she had just emerged from. And it seemed strange that it was still Carol's face, with the freckles, the bending blond eyebrow that she knew, the mouth now as calm as her eyes, as Therese had seen it many times before.

  "My angel," Carol said. "Flung out of space."

  Therese looked up at the corners of the room that were much brighter now, at the bureau with the bulging front and the shield-shaped drawer pulls, at the frameless mirror with the beveled edge, at the green patterned curtains that hung straight at the windows, and the two gray tips of buildings that showed just above the sill. She would remember every detail of this room forever.

  "What town is this?" she asked.

  Carol laughed. "This? This is Waterloo." She reached for a cigarette.

  "Isn't that awful."

  Smiling, Therese raised up on her elbow. Carol put a cigarette between her lips. "There's a couple of Waterloos in every state," Therese said.

  CHAPTER 16

  THERESE WENT OUT to get some newspapers while Carol was dressing. She stepped into the elevator and turned around in the exact center of it.

  She felt a little odd, as if everything had shifted and distances were not quite the same. She walked across the lobby to the newspaper stand in the corner.

  "The Courier and the Tribune," she said to the man, taking them, and even to utter words was as strange as the names of the newspapers she bought.

  "Eight cents," the man said, and Therese looked down at the change he had given her and saw there was still the same difference between eight cents and a quarter.

  She wandered across the lobby, looked through the glass into the barber shop where a couple of men were getting shaves. A Negro boy was shining shoes. A tall man with a cigar and a broad-brimmed hat, with Western shoes, walked by her. She would remember this lobby, too, forever, the people, the old-fashioned looking woodwork at the base of the registration desk, and the man in the dark overcoat who looked at her over the top of his newspaper, and slumped in his chair and went on reading beside the black and cream-colored marble column.

  When Therese opened the room door, the sight of Carol went through her like a spear. She stood a moment with her hand on the knob.

  Carol looked at her from the bathroom, holding the comb suspended over her head. Carol looked at her from head to foot. "Don't do that in public," Carol said.

  Therese threw the newspapers on the bed and came to her. Carol seized her suddenly in her arms. They stood holding each other as if they would never separate. Therese shuddered, and there were tears in her eyes. It was hard to find words, locked in Carol's arms, closer than kissing.

  "Why did you wait so long?" Therese asked.

  "Because—I thought there wouldn't be a second time, that I wouldn't want it. But that's not true."

  Therese thought of Abby, and it was like a slim shaft of bitterness dropping between them. Carol released her.

  "And there was something else—to have you around reminding me, knowing you and knowing it would be so easy. I'm sorry. It wasn't fair to you."

  Therese set her teeth hard. She watched Carol walk slowly away across the room, watched the space widen, and remembered the first time she had seen her walk so slowly away in the department store, Therese had thought forever. Carol had loved Abby, too, and she reproached herself for it. As Carol would one day for loving her, Therese wondered? Therese understood now why the December and January weeks had been made up of anger and indecision, reprimands alternating with indulgences. But she understood now that whatever Carol said in words, there were no barriers and no indecisions now. There was no Abby, either, after this morning, whatever had happened between Carol and Abby before.

  "Was it?" Carol asked.

  "You've made me so happy ever since I've known you," Therese said.

  "I don't think you can judge."

  "I can judge this morning."

  Carol did not answer. Only the rasp of the door lock answered her. Carol had locked the door and they were alone. Therese came toward her, straight into her arms.

  "I love you," Therese said, just to hear the words. "I love you, I love you."

  But Carol seemed deliberately to pay almost no attention to her that day.

  There was more arrogance in the tilt of her cigarette, in the way she backed the car away from a curb, cursing, not quite joking. "Damned if I'll put a dime in a parking meter with a prairie right in sight," Carol said. But when Therese did catch her looking at her, Carol's eyes were laughing. Carol teased her, leaning on her shoulder as they stood in front of a cigarette machine, touching her foot under tables. It made Therese limp and tense at the same time. She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shou
ldn't she and Carol? Yet when she simply took Carol's arm as they stood choosing a box of candy in a shop, Carol murmured, "Don't."

  Therese sent a box of candy to Mrs. Robichek from the candy shop in Minneapolis, and a box also to the Kellys. She sent an extravagantly big box to Richard's mother, a double-deck box with wooden compartments that she knew Mrs. Semco would use later for sewing articles.

  "Did you ever do that with Abby?" Therese asked abruptly that evening in the car.

  Carol's eyes understood suddenly and she blinked. "What questions you ask," she said. "Of course."

  Of course. She had known it. "And now—?"

  "Therese—"

  She asked stiffly, "Was it very much the same as with me?"

  Carol smiled. "No, darling."

  "Don't you think it's more pleasant than sleeping with men?"

  Her smile was amused. "Not necessarily. That depends. Who have you ever known except Richard?"

  "No one."

  "Well, don't you think you'd better try some others?"

  Therese was speechless for a moment, but she tried to be casual, drumming her fingers on the book in her lap.

  "I mean sometime, darling. You've got a lot of years ahead."

  Therese said nothing. She could not imagine ever leaving Carol either.

  That was another terrible question that had sprung into her mind at the start, that hammered at her brain now with a painful insistence to be answered. Would Carol ever want to leave her?

  "I mean, whom you sleep with depends so much on habit," Carol went on.

  "And you're too young to make enormous decisions. Or habits."

  "Are you just a habit?" she asked, smiling, but she heard the resentment in her voice. "You mean it's nothing but that?"

  "Therese—of all times to get so melancholic."

  "I'm not melancholic," she protested, but the thin ice was under her feet again, the uncertainties. Or was it that she always wanted a little more than she had, no matter how much she had? She said impulsively, "Abby loves you, too, doesn't she?"

  Carol started a little, and put her foot down. "Abby has loved me practically all her life—even as you."