Strangers on a Train

by Strangers on a Train (2021) (retail) (epub)

  The conductor’s voice shouted a warning, but Guy paced till the last moment, then swung himself aboard the car behind the diner.

  The waiter had just taken his order when the blond young man appeared in the doorway of the car, swaying, looking a little truculent with a short cigarette in his mouth. Guy had put him quite out of mind and now his tall rust-brown figure was like a vaguely unpleasant memory. Guy saw him smile as he sighted him.

  “Thought you might have missed the train,” Bruno said cheerfully, pulling out a chair.

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Bruno, I’d like some privacy for a while. I have some things to think over.”

  Bruno stabbed out the cigarette that was burning his fingers and looked at him blankly. He was drunker than before. His face seemed smeared and fuzzy at the edges. “We could have privacy in my place. We could have dinner there. How about it?”

  “Thanks, I’d rather stay here.”

  “Oh, but I insist. Waiter!” Bruno clapped his hands. “Would you have this gentleman’s order sent to Drawing Room Three and bring me a steak medium rare with French fries and apple pie? And two Scotch and sodas fast as you can, huh?” He looked at Guy and smiled, the soft wistful smile. “Okay?”

  Guy debated, then got up and came with him. What did it matter after all? And wasn’t he utterly sick of himself?

  There was no need of the Scotches except to provide glasses and ice. The four yellow-labeled bottles of Scotch lined up on an alligator suitcase were the one neat unit of the little room. Suitcases and wardrobe trunks blocked passage everywhere except for a small labyrinthine area in the center of the floor, and on top of them were strewn sports clothes and equipment, tennis rackets, a bag of golf clubs, a couple of cameras, a wicker basket of fruit and wine bedded in fuchsia paper. A splay of current magazines, comic books and novels covered the seat by the window. There was also a box of candy with a red ribbon across the lid.

  “Looks kind of athletic, I guess,” Bruno said, suddenly apologetic.

  “It’s fine.” Guy smiled slowly. The room amused him and gave him a welcome sense of seclusion. With the smile his dark brows relaxed, transforming his whole expression. His eyes looked outward now. He stepped lithely in the alleys between suitcases, examining things like a curious cat.

  “Brand-new. Never felt a ball,” Bruno informed him, holding out a tennis racket for him to feel. “My mother makes me take all this stuff, hoping it’ll keep me out of bars. Good to hock if I run out, anyway. I like to drink when I travel. It enhances things, don’t you think?” The highballs arrived, and Bruno strengthened them from one of his bottles. “Sit down. Take off your coat.”

  But neither of them sat down or removed his coat. There was an awkward several minutes when they had nothing to say to each other. Guy took a swallow of the highball that seemed to be all Scotch, and looked down at the littered floor. Bruno had odd feet, Guy noticed, or maybe it was the shoes. Small, light tan shoes with a long plain toecap shaped like Bruno’s lantern chin. Somehow old-fashioned-looking feet. And Bruno was not so slender as he had thought. His long legs were heavy and his body rounded.

  “I hope you weren’t annoyed,” Bruno said cautiously, “when I came in the diner.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I felt lonely. You know.”

  Guy said something about its being lonely traveling in a drawing room alone, then nearly tripped on something: the strap of a Rolleiflex camera. There was a new white scratch deep down the side of its leather case. He was conscious of Bruno’s shy stare. He was going to be bored, of course. Why had he come? A pang of conscience made him want to return to the diner. Then the waiter arrived with a pewter-covered tray, and snapped up a table. The smell of charcoal-broiled meat cheered him. Bruno insisted so desperately on paying the check that Guy gave it up. Bruno had a big mushroom-covered steak. Guy had hamburger.

  “What’re you building in Metcalf?”

  “Nothing,” Guy said. “My mother lives there.”

  “Oh,” Bruno said interestedly. “Visiting her? Is that where you’re from?”

  “Yes. Born there.”

  “You don’t look much like a Texan.” Bruno shot ketchup all over his steak and French fries, then delicately picked up the parsley and held it poised. “How long since you been home?”

  “About two years.”

  “Your father there, too?”

  “My father’s dead.”

  “Oh. Get along with your mother okay?”

  Guy said he did. The taste of Scotch, though Guy didn’t much care for it, was pleasant because it reminded him of Anne. She drank Scotch, when she drank. It was like her, golden, full of light, made with careful art. “Where do you live in Long Island?”

  “Great Neck.”

  Anne lived much farther out on Long Island.

  “In a house I call the Doghouse,” Bruno went on. “There’s dogwood all around it and everybody in it’s in some kind of doghouse, down to the chauffeur.” He laughed suddenly with real pleasure, and bent again over his food.

  Looking at him now, Guy saw only the top of his narrow thin-haired head and the protruding pimple. He had not been conscious of the pimple since he had seen him asleep, but now that he noticed it again, it seemed a monstrous, shocking thing and he saw it alone. “Why?” Guy asked.

  “Account of my father. Bastard. I get on okay with my mother, too. My mother’s coming out to Santa Fe in a couple days.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “It is,” Bruno said as if contradicting him. “We have a lot of fun together—sitting around, playing golf. We even go to parties together.” He laughed, half ashamed, half proud, and suddenly uncertain and young. “You think that’s funny?”

  “No,” said Guy.

  “I just wish I had my own dough. See, my income was supposed to start this year, only my father won’t let me have it. He’s deflecting it into his own exchequer. You might not think so, but I haven’t got any more money now than I had when I was in school with everything paid for. I have to ask for a hundred dollars now and then from my mother.” He smiled, pluckily.

  “I wish you had let me pay the check.”

  “A-aw, no!” Bruno protested. “I just mean it’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it, when your own father robs you. It isn’t even his money, it’s my mother’s family’s money.” He waited for Guy to comment.

  “Hasn’t your mother any say about it?”

  “My father got his name put on it when I was a kid!” Bruno shouted hoarsely.

  “Oh.” Guy wondered how many people Bruno had met, bought dinners for, and told the same story about his father. “Why did he do that?”

  Bruno brought his hands up in a hopeless shrug, then hid them fast in his pockets. “I said he was a bastard, didn’t I? He robs everyone he can. Now he says he won’t give it to me because I won’t work, but that’s a lie. He thinks my mother and I have too good a time as it is. He’s always scheming up ways to cut in.”

  Guy could see him and his mother, a youngish Long Island society woman who used too much mascara and occasionally, like her son, enjoyed tough company. “Where’d you go to college?”

  “Harvard. Busted out sophomore year. Drinking and gambling.” He shrugged with a writhing movement of his narrow shoulders. “Not like you, huh? Okay, I’m a bum, so what?” He poured more Scotch for both of them.

  “Who said you were?”

  “My father says so. He should’ve had a nice quiet son like you, then everybody would’ve been happy.”

  “What makes you think I’m nice and quiet?”

  “I mean you’re serious and you choose a profession. Like architecture. Me, I don’t feel like working. I don’t have to work, see? I’m not a writer or a painter or a musician. Is there any reason a person should work if they don’t have to? I’ll get my ulcers the easy way. My father has ulcers. Hah! He still has hopes I’ll enter his hardware business. I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized
fornication. Am I right?”

  Guy looked at him wryly and sprinkled salt on the French fried potato on his fork. He was eating slowly, enjoying his meal, even vaguely enjoying Bruno, as he might have enjoyed an entertainment on a distant stage. Actually, he was thinking of Anne. Sometimes the faint continuous dream he had of her seemed more real than the outside world that penetrated only in sharp fragments, occasional images, like the scratch on the Rolleiflex case, the long cigarette Bruno had plunged into his pat of butter, the shattered glass of the photograph of the father Bruno had thrown out in the hall in the story he was telling now. It had just occurred to Guy he might have time to see Anne in Mexico, between seeing Miriam and going to Florida. If he got through with Miriam quickly, he could fly to Mexico and fly to Palm Beach. It hadn’t occurred to him before because he couldn’t afford it. But if the Palm Beach contract came through, he could.

  “Can you imagine anything more insulting? Locking the garage where my own car is?” Bruno’s voice had cracked and was stuck at a shrieking pitch.

  “Why?” Guy asked.

  “Just because he knew I needed it bad that night! My friends picked me up finally, so what does he get out of it?”

  Guy didn’t know what to say. “He keeps the keys?”

  “He took my keys! Took them out of my room! That’s why he was scared of me. He left the house that night, he was so scared.” Bruno was turned in his chair, breathing hard, chewing a fingernail. Some wisps of hair, darkened brown with sweat, bobbed like antennae over his forehead. “My mother wasn’t home, or it never could have happened, of course.”

  “Of course,” Guy echoed involuntarily. Their whole conversation had been leading to this story, he supposed, that he had heard only half of. Back of the bloodshot eyes that had opened on him in the Pullman car, back of the wistful smile, another story of hatred and injustice. “So you threw his picture out in the hall?” Guy asked meaninglessly.

  “I threw it out of my mother’s room,” Bruno said, emphasizing the last three words. “My father put it in my mother’s room. She doesn’t like the Captain any better than I do. The Captain!—I don’t call him anything, brother!”

  “But what’s he got against you?”

  “Against me and my mother, too! He’s different from us or any other human! He doesn’t like anybody. He doesn’t like anything but money. He cut enough throats to make a lot of money, that’s all. Sure he’s smart! Okay! But his conscience is sure eating him now! That’s why he wants me to go into his business, so I’ll cut throats and feel as lousy as he does!” Bruno’s stiff hand closed, then his mouth, then his eyes.

  Guy thought he was about to cry, when the puffy lids lifted and the smile staggered back.

  “Boring, huh? I was just explaining why I left town so soon, ahead of my mother. You don’t know what a cheerful guy I am really! Honest!”

  “Can’t you leave home if you want to?”

  Bruno didn’t seem to understand his question at first, then he answered calmly, “Sure, only I like to be with my mother.”

  And his mother stayed because of the money, Guy supposed. “Cigarette?”

  Bruno took one, smiling. “You know, the night he left the house was the first time in maybe ten years he’d gone out. I wonder where the hell he even went. I was sore enough that night to kill him and he knew it. Ever feel like murdering somebody?”

  “No.”

  “I do. I’m sure sometimes I could kill my father.” He looked down at his plate with a bemused smile. “You know what my father does for a hobby? Guess.”

  Guy didn’t want to guess. He felt suddenly bored and wanted to be alone.

  “He collects cookie cutters!” Bruno exploded with a snickering laugh. “Cookie cutters, honest! He’s got all kinds—Pennsylvania Dutch, Bavarian, English, French, a lot of Hungarian, all around the room. Animal-cracker cookie cutters framed over his desk—you know, the things kids eat in boxes? He wrote the president of the company and they sent him a whole set. The machine age!” Bruno laughed and ducked his head.

  Guy stared at him. Bruno himself was funnier than what he said. “Does he ever use them?”

  “Huh?”

  “Does he ever make cookies?”

  Bruno whooped. With a wriggle, he removed his jacket and flung it at a suitcase. For a moment he seemed too excited to say anything, then remarked with sudden quiet, “My mother’s always telling him to go back to his cookie cutters.” A film of sweat covered his smooth face like thin oil. He thrust his smile solicitously half across the table. “Enjoy your dinner?”

  “Very much,” Guy said heartily.

  “Ever hear of the Bruno Transforming Company of Long Island? Makes AC-DC gadgets?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, why should you? Makes plenty of dough though. You interested in making money?”

  “Not awfully.”

  “Mind if I ask how old you are?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Yeah? I would’ve said older. How old you think I look?”

  Guy studied him politely. “Maybe twenty-four or five,” he answered, intending to flatter him, for he looked younger.

  “Yeah, I am. Twenty-five. You mean I do look twenty-five with this—this thing right in the center of my head?” Bruno caught his underlip between his teeth. A glint of wariness came in his eyes, and suddenly he cupped his hand over his forehead in intense and bitter shame. He sprang up and went to the mirror. “I meant to put something over it.”

  Guy said something reassuring, but Bruno kept looking at himself this way and that in the mirror, in an agony of self-torture. “It couldn’t be a pimple,” he said nasally. “It’s a boil. It’s everything I hate boiling up in me. It’s a plague of Job!”

  “Oh, now!” Guy laughed.

  “It started coming Monday night after that fight. It’s getting worse. I bet it leaves a scar.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “Yes, it will. A fine thing to get to Santa Fe with!” He was sitting in his chair now with his fists clenched and one heavy leg trailing, in a pose of brooding tragedy.

  Guy went over and opened one of the books on the seat by the window. It was a detective novel. They were all detective novels. When he tried to read a few lines, the print swam and he closed the book. He must have drunk a lot, he thought. He didn’t really care, tonight.

  “In Santa Fe,” Bruno said, “I want everything there is. Wine, women, and song. Hah!”

  “What do you want?”

  “Something.” Bruno’s mouth turned down in an ugly grimace of unconcern. “Everything. I got a theory a person ought to do everything it’s possible to do before he dies, and maybe die trying to do something that’s really impossible.”

  Something in Guy responded with a leap, then cautiously drew back. He asked softly, “Like what?”

  “Like a trip to the moon in a rocket. Setting a speed record in a car—blindfolded. I did that once. Didn’t set a record, but I went up to a hundred sixty.”

  “Blindfolded?”

  “And I did a robbery.” Bruno stared at Guy rigidly. “Good one. Out of an apartment.”

  An incredulous smile started on Guy’s lips, though actually he believed Bruno. Bruno could be violent. He could be insane, too. Despair, Guy thought, not insanity. The desperate boredom of the wealthy, that he often spoke of to Anne. It tended to destroy rather than create. And it could lead to crime as easily as privation.

  “Not to get anything,” Bruno went on. “I didn’t want what I took. I especially took what I didn’t want.”

  “What did you take?”

  Bruno shrugged. “Cigarette lighter. Table model. And a statue off the mantel. Colored glass. And something else.” Another shrug. “You’re the only one knows about it. I don’t talk much. Guess you think I do.” He smiled.

  Guy drew on his cigarette. “How’d you go about it?”

  “Watched an apartment house in Astoria till I got the time right, then just walked in the window. D
own the fire escape. Sort of easy. One of the things I cross off my list, thinking thank God.”

  “Why ‘thank God’?”

  Bruno grinned shyly. “I don’t know why I said that.” He refilled his glass, then Guy’s.

  Guy looked at the stiff, shaky hands that had stolen, at the nails bitten below the quick. The hands played clumsily with a match cover and dropped it, like a baby’s hands, onto the ash-sprinkled steak. How boring it was really, Guy thought, crime. How motiveless often. A certain type turned to crime. And who would know from Bruno’s hands, or his room, or his ugly wistful face that he had stolen? Guy dropped into his chair again.

  “Tell me about you,” Bruno invited pleasantly.

  “Nothing to tell.” Guy took a pipe from his jacket pocket, banged it on his heel, looked down at the ashes on the carpet, and then forgot them. The tingling of the alcohol sank deeper into his flesh. He thought, if the Palm Beach contract came through, the two weeks before work began would pass quickly. A divorce needn’t take long. The pattern of the low white buildings on the green lawn in his finished drawing swam familiarly in his mind, in detail, without his trying to evoke them. He felt subtly flattered, immensely secure suddenly, and blessed.

  “What kind of houses you build?” Bruno asked.

  “Oh—what’s known as modern. I’ve done a couple of stores and a small office building.” Guy smiled, feeling none of the reticence, the faint vexation he generally did when people asked him about his work.

  “You married?”

  “No. Well, I am, yes. Separated.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “Incompatible,” Guy replied.

  “How long you been separated?”

  “Three years.”

  “You don’t want a divorce?”