Nothing That Meets the Eye

by Patricia Highsmith

  Back in his cell he was still thinking of that, Lee’s popularity. She had been twenty going to art school in Chicago, when Robert met her. He had visited the Reinecker Art Institute in quest of a part-time job, two or three mornings a week, teaching sculpture. He had his own credentials from the Art Students League in New York and from a Brooklyn academy, less well known, but he had a prize from that school, attested to by a certificate and a photograph of his work which had taken first prize. The Reinecker, however, had wanted a teacher for five mornings a week, and Robert had hesitated, said he would think it over. Nine to noon, five days a week. They would have taken Robert on, yes, and they hadn’t thought it unusual that Robert wished to consider it for a few days. Robert had walked out of the superintendent’s office and into the hall, down a short flight of stairs, and met Lee coming up the stairs.

  He had not met her in the usual sense, and she had been with two young men, one on either side of her, all three talking, as Robert remembered it, but his eyes had met Lee’s eyes for an instant. Robert could still see it as clearly as if it had been a color photograph that he carried with him. Lee was blond, not very tall, and had blue eyes. She had been wearing beige trousers, like chino pants, a pale blue shirt or blouse.

  Robert had turned and followed her. She had a smooth, oval face, a high forehead, round and rather bulging. The important thing was her eyes—intelligent, appraising, cool. Who wouldn’t have followed those eyes? Robert wondered. As he had walked behind the trio in the corridor, Lee had looked back once at him, aware that he was following her. The two boys with her had eyes only for Lee, Robert remembered. Robert was to see plenty of this later. But Lee had stopped and turned, looking at him.

  Robert had said, “Hello,” like one stunned. Hadn’t the other two fallen back a step, stunned also in the presence of love at first sight? Robert was not sure. He had managed to get out something, because he wanted her as a model, quite apart from the fact that he had fallen suddenly in love with her. “You’re a student here?” Maybe he had said something like that. Anyway, Lee had said that she was not studying painting any longer and was intending to go to a photography school, somewhere else. Robert had whipped his little sketchbook from a back pocket, a pencil, had got Lee’s name and address, and had given her his own. She had a telephone number. She lived with her mother in Evanston.

  She had liked him, that was the important thing, enough to give him her name and address. And suddenly, too, she had been walking with him, back down the long cream-colored corridor with its closed doors on either side, bulletins and posters everywhere on the walls—and the other two young men had vanished, or were maybe standing in the corridor behind them, puzzled.

  And then things had gone badly.

  Robert was now sitting on his bed, thinking: things had gone badly. But he was thinking of two periods of time—just after he had met Lee and the past weeks. Between times about three years had passed.

  In the first bad or uncertain period, just after he met Lee, it had seemed to Robert that she was afraid of him. She refused to make dates with him, she wrote him an ambiguous note: did she want to see him again, or not? Robert lived just thirty miles or so from Evanston. One of the young men in whose company Robert had first seen Lee was still present and in full force. This Robert had discovered when he had his first date with Lee. She had had to ease the young man politely from her mother’s house, and he had gone off with a smirk at Robert, as if to say, “You’re wasting your time, fellow.”

  Robert and Lee had gone back to her mother’s house after dinner (her mother was divorced), and Lee had shown him her drawings, some paintings that were not as good as her drawings, and her new photographic efforts. Robert was impressed. Many were portraits of people she knew, young and old. She had imagination and energy. The energy showed in Lee herself—a strong body neither slender nor sturdy but something in between, with a grace of movement. Above all, her energy showed in her enthusiasm for her work.

  Robert had blurted out around midnight, “I love you—you know?” Then Lee had been silent, as if surprised (how could she be, when half a dozen men must be in love with her? Robert had thought), and then she had gone on putting away her photographs in their labeled folders and portfolios. He had not tried to take her hand or to kiss her.

  And then silence—for two weeks, for a month. She was too busy to make dates, she said when he telephoned. And Robert recalled his friends’ advice, with mingled gratefulness and annoyance: “Play it cool, Bob, and she’ll come around to you.” He was not the type to play it cool, but he had done his best, and Lee had come around, made dates with him, even said yes when he asked her to marry him. By then they had been to bed together several times in his studio. Robert was head over heels. He felt he had met a goddess. He did not care for the word goddess, but he ­didn’t know what else to liken her to, because there was no other girl in the world like her.

  The advice. Robert lit one of his remaining five cigarettes. Advice reminded him of his parents in New York. They had telephoned him yesterday, and he had been allowed to speak with both of them.

  “Is it true, Bobby?” his mother had asked in a voice that pained Robert to remember.

  “We just can’t believe it,” his father had said in a heavy, hopeless tone. “We thought it was a mistake—of names, identity—”

  It wasn’t a mistake, Robert had told him. Yes, he had done it. How could he explain on the telephone? Did it really matter if he explained it, much as he liked and loved his parents? Could they ever understand even if he wrote it out for them? “My life is finished,” Robert had said at the end. The guard had beckoned to him then (even though his parents had been paying for the call), and Robert had told his father that he had to hang up.

  If he were writing it—Robert was walking around his cell, whose confinement and barred door did not bother him in the least now—he would say that Lee had become a different person. That was it, and Robert had realized that long ago, nearly two years ago. If he ever wrote anything about Lee and himself, he would have to say this from the start and emphatically. That was the essence, and that was what he had been unable to take, or accept, whatever you wanted to call it. His fault. Sure. Lee had the right to change, or maybe just to become herself.

  When the baby was less than a year old, Robert had asked her if she wanted to divorce him.

  “But why?” Lee had asked back. “What’s wrong, Bob? Are you so unhappy?”

  They hadn’t made love for a month or more. Robert couldn’t, and maybe Lee hadn’t even noticed, absorbed as she was in Melinda. It wasn’t the act or the pleasure of making love that was so important, meaning not even the absence of it was so important, but the fact that Lee had become another person with motherhood—formidable word—and with all the fussing around the house, which had begun early in their marriage. Gradually she had dropped her photography. The equipment in her darkroom had begun to gather dust before Melinda’s birth, Robert remembered. They had got a mortgage on a pretty house, not too big or too small, outside the town where Robert had had his rented studio. There had been a period of shopping for furniture, curtains, buying a fridge and a stove, but Lee hadn’t stopped. Then it had been slipcovers for the sofa and living room armchairs, and Lee was good at the sewing machine. Then she had become pregnant. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and Robert had been as happy as she. Sunday afternoon dinners at her mother’s, a bit boring but bearable, sometimes even cozy and reassuring.

  Robert paused in front of the not very big mirror fastened to the wall above his basin. He saw that he was frowning. He rubbed his chin brusquely, barely met his own eyes. He was not interested in looking at himself. Rotten shave he had given himself that morning. What had he been thinking of then?

  The magic just fell away, Robert thought. Would he write a sentence like that, if he were writing about himself and Lee?

  Robert felt suddenly puzzled. Ho
w could anyone write something about anything, until it was clear in his own head? How could anyone put into words or phrases how much he had loved Lee? The clumsiness, the bluntness of certain pop-song lyrics came now to Robert . . . the catch in my throat when we meet . . . when I look in your eyes, I want to die . . . the places we yee-eewst to go together . . . Lee had liked pop music as background sometimes when she sewed, changed the baby, or gave her a bath. If only Lee had stopped doing little things, let him change the baby (he could), just dropped everything and got back to her own work!

  Robert was working himself into a torment again. Absurd. Lee was dead and forever dead. What good did tension, even analysis, do now, really?

  In the next seconds he was back to the present. His parents were coming to see him tomorrow. Lee’s mother evidently did not wish to see him, and she had gone with Melinda to a sister’s house somewhere in Illinois. Rather, she was going, after the funeral. The funeral was today. Robert realized that with only a mild shock; he had an impulse to look at his wristwatch, and didn’t. He knew it was still before noon, because the guard had not brought his lunch tray. Funerals were always in the morning, weren’t they?

  Then for another few seconds Robert felt that he couldn’t realize what he had done. That was almost comforting, like a pill he might have taken. He did realize that his life and his work, whatever he had wanted to do in life, was over, finished. He might as well be dead now, like Lee. But they weren’t going to kill him, just sentence him and imprison him. That was worse. Think about that later. He was pushing his tongue against his left eyetooth, which was nicked from a football game, way back, when Robert had been fourteen or fifteen. A vision of little white houses, blue sea behind them, came into his eyes. Greece. Robert had been to Greece when he was twenty, pack on his back, sleeping on beaches and in pine woods, getting to know the land and the people. He had hoped to have enough money one day to buy a house on a Greek island, and to live there with Lee at least half of the year, the other half in America. He had never forgotten Greece or his dream of a house there. He and Lee had used to talk about it, now and then. Greek music.

  Lee’s music. Lee hadn’t always played pop, either on the radio or on the record player. She had liked Mahler, oddly. Depressing sometimes to Robert, fear-making, unfathomable sometimes to him. Yet now the memory of the Mahler Sixth steadied him. He had come to a big decision about Lee while Mahler’s Sixth Symphony played one afternoon. He had been working on a clay model of what he called A Dreaming Woman, the woman not reclining but on her knees with arms raised as if half ambulant in her dream. He had gone to speak with Lee about his idea.

  And what had she been doing? Putting adhesive paper down on some kitchen shelves, standing on a low formica stool. Robert proposed that she divorce him and marry Tony, the bachelor architect-carpenter who lived about eight miles away, the same fellow who had hung the shelf Lee was now busy with.

  “Tony?”

  Robert could still hear her voice and the astonishment in it. “He’s in love with you,” Robert had said. “Just too polite to do anything about it. You must know it yourself.”

  “Are you out of your mind, Bob?”

  Robert remembered her eyes then, the same straight clear gaze at him, but what a different mind or brain behind those eyes!

  The difference in her was affecting his work, at least affecting his sketches of Lee. He could not see her the same way as before, because she wasn’t the same. His nearly life-size nudes of her, a couple of years old by then, thumbtacked to the walls of his workroom, had seemed to mock him: you can’t do it again, they seemed to say. The drawings had spirit, enthusiasm, even genius. Whose genius, his or Lee’s? Robert wasn’t vain, it could be his or hers, and he preferred to think it both his and hers.

  So Robert had turned himself to other themes, other women’s figures, if he needed them, abstracts, nature forms. Lee had become “any woman,” ordinary, pretty, but uninspired and uninspiring. Robert had managed a teaching job for three mornings a week in Chicago. They could have afforded a baby-sitter, a woman to do the housecleaning once or twice a week, but Lee seemed to enjoy these chores, and she said she didn’t want anyone else in the house.

  If Lee began to be the cliché, the woman-next-door, Tony Wagener was the archetype of the man-next-door (formerly the nice-boy-next-door) whom the average girl would be lucky to marry. He was healthy, attractive, good-natured, age twenty-five, and he couldn’t take his eyes off Lee. Was it any wonder that a happy idea had crossed Robert’s mind? Robert had thought it might work. He still loved Lee, even in a physical way, in fact, but the letdown—of his dream? No, because Lee had been the way he remembered her when he met her and when they had married, for a while. Witness his drawings! Witness his three statues of her, two small and one life-size! They were good, really good!

  Therefore, Tony.

  “Don’t you like Tony?” Robert had asked on another occasion.

  “Like him? I never think about him. Why should I? He brings us wood for the fireplace—because he doesn’t need it.” She had shrugged.

  “It might be better. You might be happier. Tony would.” Robert remembered he had laughed here.

  Lee had still been puzzled. “I don’t want Tony!” And what else had she said? Had she asked him if he was miserable with her, if he didn’t love her any longer?

  What would he have answered in that case?

  It had crossed Robert’s mind to run away, simply abandon Lee and the baby. He loved the baby, was rather in awe of it as his and Lee’s creation, but he had still been able to envisage disappearing rather than—something worse. The something worse hadn’t been definite in Robert’s mind then, he had merely feared it.

  If he disappeared, Robert remembered thinking, mightn’t things be better? Lee would land on her feet, if she fell at all. Tony would dance attendance and step in as soon as Lee let him, and why shouldn’t she? Tony was serious about his architecture, had a degree from somewhere, and was going to climb in his profession. Robert could not imagine a more ardent suitor than Tony, if Tony were only given a chance. Tony had had a girlfriend when Lee and Robert had moved into their house, but after three months or so (Tony had been doing some carpentry work for them, and had brought the girl once or twice), Tony had dropped her. Tony had fallen in love with Lee, that had been plain. Robert remembered mentioning it, early on, to Lee, and Lee had shrugged, uninterested.

  Robert had been doing portraits, heads as he called them, for two people or clients in Bloomington, and for one in Chicago. They brought in money. Only middle-aged and well-to-do people could afford the luxury of having themselves or their wives cast in bronze at three thousand dollars each. Robert had had to work in rather conventional style to get a likeness that pleased the client. He tried to be as free as he could in his style, but still it bored him.

  Lee had begun to bore him. Incredible realization! One day he had driven back from a sitting in Chicago, nervous, unhappy, and he had said to Lee, “What if I just disappeared?”

  She had turned from the stove where she was cooking something. “What do you mean?” Her smile was almost her former smile, amused, cool, showing rather pointed white teeth between her rouged lips. She wore white sneakers, a pair of girls’ maroon corduroy jeans. She couldn’t wear boys’ trousers, because she had a waistline and hips, though she was not plump.

  What had he replied? Robert tried to remember now, because it was important, because he had really been trying to make the right suggestion. “I don’t see that you need me anymore.” Robert was sure he had said that. What else could he have said? “If I went away, I’d send you money to live on, you can be sure of that.” Then he had blurted out the truth: “You’re not the same girl as before. It’s not your fault, I think. It’s my fault. I should never have asked you to marry me. Somehow I’m destroying you. And this situation or whatever it is is bothering my work. It depresses me.�
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  “But I am the same person. Sure I have to spend a lot of time now with Melinda, but I don’t mind that. It’s normal.” And at that moment hadn’t she run across the kitchen to stop Melinda from poking a finger into an electric outlet? Melinda crawled around a lot, because Lee was against confining her too much in her crib. “When she’s really tired, she’ll sleep better,” Lee often said. What else had she said? Maybe, “I thought you were working rather well. Aren’t you?”

  And her dressing table, its top covered with little boxes of pins, lipsticks, perfume bottles, lotions, cologne. Robert had used to look at all that with a smile—mystifying objects, but Lee knew what to do with them. She made herself prettier, different. She amused herself, she amused other people. Boys and men looked at her when they went to restaurants. But Lee didn’t invite attention, never had, didn’t need to. Maybe men took as flirting one glance from her, but Lee could hardly go around with her eyes shut all the time. No, she hadn’t flirted, and once she had decided she liked him, Robert had been the only man for her, he knew that.

  One Friday morning, one of the mornings when he had to get up at seven at the latest for the Chicago art school, Robert had quit the house. He had left Lee a note saying that he was going to telephone Tony. Try it, Robert had written. See if you can’t love Tony as much as he loves you. You know where to reach me, at the art school. Try it for maybe a month, please? You might find yourself happier. Robert had taken a furnished room not far from the school. If Tony didn’t work out, Robert had thought of acquiring a ­second-hand car for himself and giving Lee the car he had taken, their car. She was able to drive. Robert envisaged a divorce, of course. He felt a divorce would be better for both of them. Some other Tony would come along. Meanwhile he missed his workroom at home, his clay, a couple of works in progress.