The Price of Salt

by Highsmith, Patricia

  In the mornings, they generally drove out somewhere in the mountains and left the car so they could climb up a hill. They drove aimlessly over the zigzagging roads that were like white chalk lines connecting mountain point to mountain point. From a distance, one could see clouds lying about the projecting peaks, so it seemed they flew along in space, a little closer to heaven than to earth. Therese's favorite spot was on the highway above Cripple Creek, where the road clung suddenly to the rim of a gigantic depression. Hundreds of feet below, lay the tiny disorder of the abandoned mining town. There the eye and the brain played tricks with each other, for it was impossible to keep a steady concept of the proportion below, impossible to compare it on any human scale. Her own hand held up in front of her could look Lilliputian or curiously huge.

  And the town occupied only a fraction of the great scoop in the earth, like a single experience, a single commonplace event, set in a certain immeasurable territory of the mind. The eye, swimming in space, returned to rest on the spot that looked like a box of matches run over by a car, the man-made confusion of the little town.

  Always Therese looked for the man with the creases on either side of his mouth, but Carol never did. Carol had not even mentioned him since their second day at Colorado Springs, and now ten days had passed. Because the restaurant of the hotel was famous, new people came every evening to the big dining room, and Therese always glanced about, not actually expecting to see him, but as a kind of precaution that had become a habit. But Carol paid no attention to anyone except Walter, their waiter, who always came up to ask what kind of cocktail they wanted that evening. Many people looked at Carol, however, because she was generally the most attractive woman in the room. And Therese was so delighted to be with her, so proud of her, she looked at no one else but Carol. Then as she read the menu, Carol would slowly press Therese's foot under the table to make her smile.

  "What do you think about Iceland in the summer?" Carol might ask, because they made a point of talking about travel, if there was a silence when they first sat down.

  "Must you pick such cold places? When'll I ever work?"

  "Don't be dismal. Shall we invite Mrs. French? Think she'd mind our holding hands?"

  One morning, there were three letters—from Rindy, Abby, and Dannie. It was Carol's second letter from Abby, who had had no further news before, and Therese noticed Carol opened Rindy's letter first. Dannie wrote that he was still waiting to hear the outcome of two interviews about jobs and reported that Phil said Harkevy was going to do the sets for the English play called The Faint Heart in March.

  "Listen to this," Carol said. "'Have you seen any armadillos in Colorado?

  Can you send me one, because the chameleon got lost. Daddy and I looked everywhere in the house for him. But if you send me the armadillo it will be big enough not to get lost.' New paragraph. 'I got 90 in spelling but only 70 in arithmetic. I hate it. I hate the teacher. Well I must be closing. Love to you and to Abby. Rindy. XX. p. s. Thank you very much for the leather shirt. Daddy bought me a two-wheel bike regular size that he said I was too small for Christmas. I am not too small. It is a beautiful bike.' Period. What's the use? Harge can always top me." Carol put the letter down and picked up Abby's.

  "Why did Rindy say 'Love to you and to Abby'?" Therese asked. "Does she think you're with Abby?"

  "No." Carol's wooden letter opener had stopped halfway through Abby's envelope. "I suppose she thinks I write to her," she said, and finished slitting the envelope.

  "I mean, Harge wouldn't have told her that, would he?"

  "No, darling," Carol said preoccupiedly, reading Abby's letter.

  Therese got up and crossed the room, and stood by the window looking out at the mountains. She should write to Harkevy this afternoon, she thought, and ask him if there was a chance of an assistant's job with his group in March. She began composing the letter in her head. The mountains looked back at her like majestic red lions, staring down their noses.

  Twice she heard Carol laugh, but she did not read any of the letter aloud to her.

  "No news?" Therese asked when she was finished.

  "No news."

  Carol taught her to drive on the roads around the foot of the mountains, where a car almost never passed. Therese learned faster than she had ever learned anything before, and after a couple of days, Carol let her drive in Colorado Springs. In Denver, she took a test and got a license. Carol said she could do half the driving back to New York, if she wanted to.

  He was sitting one evening at the dinner hour at a table by himself to the left of Carol and behind her. Therese choked on nothing, and put her fork down. Her heart began to beat as if it would hammer its way out of her chest. How had she gotten halfway through the meal without seeing him? She lifted her eyes to Carol's face and saw Carol watching her, reading her with the gray eyes that were not quite so calm as a moment ago. Carol had stopped in the middle of saying something.

  "Have a cigarette," Carol said, offering her one, lighting it for her.

  "He doesn't know that you can recognize him, does he?"

  "No."

  "Well, don't let him find out." Carol smiled at her, lighted her own cigarette, and looked away in the opposite direction from the detective.

  "Just take it easy," Carol added in the same tone.

  It was easy to say, easy to have thought she could look at him when she saw him next, but what was the use of trying when it was like being struck in the face with a cannon ball?

  "No baked Alaska tonight?" Carol said, looking at the menu. "That breaks my heart. You know what we're going to have?" She called to the waiter.

  "Walter!"

  Walter came smiling, ardent to serve them, just as he did every evening.

  "Yes, madame."

  "Two Remy Martins, please, Walter," Carol told him.

  The brandy helped very little, if at all. The detective did not once look at them. He was reading a book that he had propped up on the metal napkin holder, and even now Therese felt a doubt as strong as in the cafe outside Salt Lake City, an uncertainty that was somehow more horrible than the positive knowledge would be that he was the detective.

  "Do we have to go past him, Carol?" Therese asked. There was a door in back of her, into the bar.

  "Yes. That's the way we go out." Carol's eyebrows lifted with her smile, exactly as on any other night. "He can't do anything to us. Do you expect him to pull a gun?"

  Therese followed her, passed within twelve inches of the man whose head was lowered toward his book. Ahead of her she saw Carol's figure bend gracefully as she greeted Mrs. French, who was sitting alone at a table.

  "Why didn't you come and join us?" Carol said, and Therese remembered that the two women Mrs. French usually sat with had left today.

  Carol even stood there a few moments talking with Mrs. French, and Therese marveled at her but she couldn't stand there herself, and went on, to wait for Carol by the elevators.

  Upstairs, Carol found the little instrument fastened up in a corner under the bed table. Carol got the scissors and using both hands cut through the wire that disappeared under the carpet.

  "Did the hotel people let him in here, do you think?" Therese asked, horrified.

  "He probably had a key to fit.". Carol yanked the thing loose from the table and dropped it on the carpet, a little black box with a trail of wire. "Look at it, like a rat," she said. "A portrait of Harge." Her face had flushed suddenly.

  "Where does it go to?"

  "To some room where it's recorded. Probably across the hall. Bless these fancy wall to wall carpets!"

  Carol kicked the dictaphone toward the center of the room.

  Therese looked at the little rectangular box, and thought of it drinking up their words last night. "I wonder how long it's been there?"

  "How long do you think he could have been here without your seeing him?"

  "Yesterday at the worst." But even as she said it, she knew she could be wrong. She couldn't have seen every face i
n the hotel.

  And Carol was shaking her head. "Would it take him nearly two weeks to trace us from Salt Lake City to here? No, he just decided to have dinner with us tonight." Carol turned from the bookshelf with a glass of brandy in her hand. The flush had left her face. Now she even smiled a little at Therese. "Clumsy fellow, isn't he?" She sat down on the bed, swung a pillow behind her and leaned back. "Well, we've been here just about long enough, haven't we?"

  "When do you want to go?"

  "Maybe tomorrow. We'll get ourselves packed in the morning and take off after lunch. What do you think?"

  Later, they went down to the car and took a drive, westward into the darkness. We shall not go farther west, Therese thought. She could not stamp out the panic that danced in the very core of her, that she felt due to something gone before, something that had happened long ago, not now, not this. She was uneasy, but Carol was not. Carol was not merely pretending coolness, she really was not afraid. Carol said, what could he do, after all, but she simply didn't want to be spied upon.

  "One other thing," Carol said. "Try and find out what kind of car he's in."

  That night, talking over the road map about their route tomorrow, talking as matter-of-factly as a couple of strangers, Therese thought surely tonight would not be like last night. But when they kissed good night in bed, Therese felt their sudden release, that leap of response in both of them, as if their bodies were of some materials, which put together inevitably created desire.

  CHAPTER 19

  THERESE COULD NOT find out what kind of car he had, because the cars were locked in separate garages, and though she had a view of the garages from the sunroom, she did not see him come out that morning. Neither did they see him at lunchtime.

  Mrs. French insisted that they come into her room for a cordial, when she heard they were leaving. "You must have a stirrup cup," Mrs. French said to Carol. "Why I haven't even got your address yet!"

  Therese remembered that they had promised to exchange flower bulbs. She remembered a long conversation in the car one day about bulbs that had cemented their friendship. Carol was incredibly patient to the last. One would never have guessed, seeing Carol sitting on Mrs. French's sofa with the little glass Mrs. French kept filling, that she was in a hurry to get away. Mrs. French kissed them both on the cheek when they said good-by.

  From Denver, they took a highway northward toward Wyoming. They stopped for coffee at the kind of place they always liked, an ordinary restaurant with a counter and a juke box. They put nickels into the juke box, but it was not the same as before. Therese knew it would not be the same for the rest of the trip, though Carol talked of going to Washington even yet, and perhaps up into Canada. Therese could feel that Carol's goal was New York.

  They spent the first night in a tourist camp that was built like a circle of tepees. While they were undressing, Carol looked up at the ceiling where the tepee poles came to a point, and said boredly, "The trouble some idiots go to," and for some reason it struck Therese as hysterically funny. She laughed until Carol got tired of it and threatened to make her drink a tumbler of brandy, if she didn't stop. And Therese was still smiling, standing by the window with a brandy in her hand, waiting for Carol to come out of the shower, when she saw a car drive up beside the large office tepee and stop. After a moment, the man who had gone into the office came out and looked around in the dark area within the circle of tepees, and it was his prowling step that arrested her attention. She was suddenly sure without seeing his face or even his figure very clearly that he was the detective.

  "Carol!" she called.

  Carol pushed the shower curtain aside and glanced at her and stopped drying herself. "Is it—"

  "I don't know, but I think so," she said, and saw the anger spread slowly over Carol's face and stiffen it, and it shocked Therese to sobriety, as if she had just realized an insult, to herself or to Carol.

  "Chr-rist!" Carol said, and flung the towel at the floor. She drew on her robe and tied the belt of it. "Well—what's he doing?"

  "I think he's stopping here." Therese stood back at the edge of the window. "His car's still in front of the office, anyway. If we turn out the light, I'll be able to see a lot better."

  Carol groaned. "Oh, don't. I couldn't. It bores me," she said with the utmost boredom and disgust.

  And Therese smiled, twistedly, and checked another insane impulse to laugh, because Carol would have been furious if she had laughed. Then she saw the car roll under the garage door of a tepee across the circle.

  "Yes, he's stopping here. It's a black two-door sedan."

  Carol sat down on the bed with a sigh. She smiled at Therese, a quick smile of fatigue and boredom, of resignation and helplessness and anger.

  "Take your shower. And then get dressed again."

  "But I don't know if it's him at all."

  "That's just the hell of it, darling."

  Therese took a shower and lay down in her clothes beside Carol. Carol had turned out the light. She was smoking cigarettes in the dark, and said nothing to her until finally she touched her arm and said, "Let's go." It was three thirty when they drove out of the tourist camp. They had paid their bill in advance. There was no light anywhere, and unless the detective was watching them with his light out, no one had observed them.

  "What do you want to do, sleep again somewhere?" Carol asked her.

  "No. Do you?"

  "No. Let's see how much distance we can make." She pressed the pedal to the floor. The road was clear and smooth as far as the headlights swept.

  As dawn was breaking, a highway patrolman stopped them for speeding, and Carol had to pay a twenty-two dollar fine in a town called Central City, Nebraska. They lost thirty miles by having to follow the patrolman back to the little town, but Carol went through with it without a word, unlike herself, unlike the time she had argued and cajoled the patrolman out of an arrest for speeding, and a New Jersey speed cop at that.

  "Irritating," Carol said when they got back into the car, and that was all she said, for hours.

  Therese offered to drive, but Carol said she wanted to. And the flat Nebraska prairie spread out before them, yellow with wheat stubble, brown-splotched with bare earth and stone, deceptively warm looking in the white winter sun. Because they went a little slower now, Therese had a panicky sensation of not moving at all, as if the earth drifted under them and they stood still. She watched the road behind them for another patrol car, for the detective's car, and for the nameless, shapeless thing she felt pursuing them from Colorado Springs. She watched the land and the sky for the meaningless events that her mind insisted on attaching significance to, the buzzard that banked slowly in the sky, the direction of a tangle of weeds that bounced over a rutted field before the wind, and whether a chimney had smoke or not. Around eight o'clock, an irresistible sleepiness weighted her eyelids and clouded her head, so she felt scarcely any surprise when she saw a car behind them like the car she watched for, a two-door sedan of dark color.

  "There's a car like that behind us," she said. "It's got a yellow license plate."

  Carol said nothing for a minute, but she glanced in the mirror and blew her breath out through pursed lips. "I doubt it. If it is, he's a better man than I thought." She was slowing down. "If I let him pass, do you think you can recognize him?"

  "Yes." Couldn't she recognize the blurriest glimpse of him by now?

  Carol slowed almost to a stop and took the road map and laid it across the wheel and looked at it. The other car approached, and it was him inside, and went by.

  "Yes," Therese said. The man hadn't glanced at her.

  Carol pressed the gas pedal down. "You're sure, are you?"

  "Positive." Therese watched the speedometer go up to sixty-five and over.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Speak to him."

  Carol slacked her speed as they closed the distance. They drew alongside of the detective's car, and he turned to look at them, the wide straight mouth unchanging, t
he eyes like round gray dots, expressionless as the mouth. Carol waved her hand downward. The man's car slowed.

  "Roll your window down," Carol said to Therese.

  The detective's car pulled over into the sandy shoulder of the road and stopped.

  Carol stopped her car with its rear wheels on the highway, and spoke across Therese. "Do you like our company or what?" she asked.

  The man got out of his car and closed his door. Some three yards of ground separated the cars, and the detective crossed half of it and stood. His dead little eyes had darkish rims around their gray irises, like a doll's blank and steady eyes. He was not young. His face looked worn by the weathers he had driven it through, and the shadow of his beard deepened the bent creases on either side of his mouth.

  "I'm doing my job, Mrs. Aird," he said.

  "That's pretty obvious. It's nasty work, isn't it?"

  The detective tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail and lighted it in the gusty wind with a slowness that suggested a stage performance. "At least it's nearly over."

  "Then why don't you leave us alone," Carol said, her voice as tense as the arm that supported her on the steering wheel...

  "Because I have orders to follow you on this trip. But if you're going back to New York, I won't have to any more. I advise you to go back, Mrs. Aird. Are you going back now?"

  "No, I'm not."

  "Because I've got some information—information that I'd say was in your interest to go back and take care of."

  "Thanks," Carol said cynically. "Thanks so much for telling me. It's not in my plans to go back just yet. But I can give you my itinerary, so you can leave us alone and catch up on your sleep."

  The detective looked at her with a false and meaningless smile, not like a person at all, but like a machine wound up and set on a course. "I think you'll go back to New York. I'm giving you sound advice. Your child is at stake. I suppose you know that, don't you?"

  "My child is my property!"

  A crease twitched in his cheek. "A human being is not property, Mrs. Aird."