Strangers on a Train

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

  He awakened with a jerk and rolled from under Gerard’s hand on his shoulder.

  “By-by,” Gerard said, his smile showing his tobacco-stained lower teeth. “Just leaving and thought I’d say good-by.”

  “Is it worth waking somebody up for?” Bruno said.

  Gerard chuckled and waddled from the room before Bruno could think of some mitigating phrase he really wanted to say. He plunged back on the pillow and tried to resume his nap, but when he closed his eyes, he saw Gerard’s stocky figure in the light-brown suit going down the halls, slipping wraithlike through closed doors, bending to look into drawers, to read letters, to make notes, turning to point a finger at him, tormenting his mother so it was impossible not to fight back.

  twenty-seven

  “What else can you make of it? He’s accusing me!” Bruno shouted across the table.

  “Darling, he’s not. He’s attending to his business.”

  Bruno pushed his hair back. “Want to dance, Mom?”

  “You’re in no condition to dance.”

  He wasn’t and he knew it. “Then I want another drink.”

  “Darling, the food’s coming right away.”

  Her patience with it all, the purple circles under her eyes, pained him so he could not look in front of him. Bruno glanced around for a waiter. The place was so crowded tonight, it was hard to tell a waiter from any other guy. His eyes stopped on a man at a table across the dance floor who looked like Gerard. He couldn’t see the man he was with, but he certainly looked like Gerard, the bald head and light brown hair, except this man wore a black jacket. Bruno closed one eye to stop the rhythmic splitting of the image.

  “Charley, do sit down. The waiter’s coming.”

  It was Gerard, and he was laughing now, as if the other fellow had told him he was watching them. For one suspended, furious second, Bruno wondered whether to tell his mother.

  Then he sat down and said with vehemence: “Gerard’s over there!”

  “Is he? Where?”

  “Over left of the orchestra. Under the blue lamp.”

  “I don’t see him.” His mother stretched up. “Darling, you’re imagining.”

  “I am not imagining!” Bruno shouted and threw his napkin in his roast beef au jus.

  “I see the one you mean, and it’s not Gerard,” she said patiently.

  “You can’t see him as good as I can! It’s him and I don’t feel like eating in the same room with him!”

  “Charles,” she sighed. “Do you want another drink? Have another drink. Here’s a waiter.”

  “I don’t even feel like drinkin’ with him! Want me to prove it’s him?”

  “What does it matter? He’s not going to bother us. He’s guarding us probably.”

  “You admit it’s him! He’s spying on us and he’s in a dark suit so he can follow us anywhere else we go!”

  “It’s not Arthur anyway,” she said quietly, squeezing lemon over her broiled fish. “You’re having hallucinations.”

  Bruno stared at her with his mouth open. “What do you mean saying things like that to me, Mom?” His voice cracked.

  “Sweetie, everybody’s looking at us.”

  “I don’t care!”

  “Darling, let me tell you something. You’re making too much out of this.” She interrupted him, “You are, because you want to. You want excitement. I’ve seen it before.”

  Bruno was absolutely speechless. His mother was turning against him. He had seen her look at the Captain the way she looked at him now.

  “You’ve probably said something to Gerard,” she went on, “in anger, and he thinks you’re behaving most peculiarly. Well, you are.”

  “Is that any reason for him to tail me day and night?”

  “Darling, I don’t think that’s Gerard,” she said firmly.

  Bruno pushed himself up and staggered away toward the table where Gerard sat. He’d prove to her it was Gerard, and prove to Gerard he wasn’t afraid of him. A couple of tables blocked him at the edge of the dance floor, but he could see it was Gerard now.

  Gerard looked up at him and waved a hand familiarly, and his little stooge stared at him. And he, he and his mother were paying for it! Bruno opened his mouth, not knowing exactly what he wanted to say, then teetered around. He knew what he wanted to do, call up Guy. Right here and now. Right in the same room with Gerard. He struggled across the dance floor toward the telephone booth by the bar. The slow, crazily revolving figures pressed him back like a sea wave, baffling him. The wave floated toward him again, buoyant but insuperable, sweeping him yet farther back, and a similar moment at a party in his house when he was a little boy, when he tried to get through the dancing couples to his mother across the living room, came back to him.

  Bruno woke up early in the morning, in bed, and lay perfectly still, retracing the last moments he could remember. He knew he had passed out. Had he called Guy before he passed out? If he had, could Gerard trace it? He surely hadn’t talked to Guy or he’d remember it, but maybe he’d called his house. He got up to go ask his mother if he had passed out in the telephone booth. Then the shakes came on and he went into the bathroom. The Scotch and water splashed up in his face when he lifted the glass. He braced himself against the bathroom door. It was getting him at both ends now, the shakes, early and late, waking him earlier and earlier, and he had to take more and more at night to get to sleep.

  And in between was Gerard.

  twenty-eight

  Momentarily, and faintly, as one re-experiences a remembered sensation, Guy felt secure and self-sufficient as he sat down at his work table where he had his hospital books and notes carefully arranged.

  In the last month, he had washed and repainted all his bookshelves, had his carpet and curtains cleaned, and had scrubbed his kitchenette until its porcelain and aluminum gleamed. All guilt, he had thought as he poured the pans of dirty water down the sink, but since he could sleep no more than two or three hours a night, and then only after physical exercise, he reasoned that cleaning one’s house was a more profitable manner of tiring oneself than walking the streets of the city.

  He looked at the unopened newspaper on his bed, then got up and glanced through all its pages. But the papers had stopped mentioning the murder six weeks ago. He had taken care of every clue—the purple gloves cut up and flushed down the toilet, the overcoat (a good overcoat, and he had thought of giving it to a beggar, but who would be so base as to give even a beggar a murderer’s overcoat?) and the trousers torn in pieces and disposed of gradually in the garbage. And the Luger dropped off the Manhattan Bridge. And his shoes off another. The only thing he had not disposed of was the little revolver.

  He went to his bureau to look at it. Its hardness under his fingertips soothed him. The one clue he had not disposed of, and all the clue they needed if they found him. He knew exactly why he kept the revolver: it was his, a part of himself, the third hand that had done the murder. It was himself at fifteen when he had bought it, himself when he had loved Miriam and had kept it in their room in Chicago, looking at it now and then in his most contented, most inward moments. The best of himself, with its mechanical, absolute logic. Like him, he thought now, in its power to kill.

  If Bruno dared to contact him again, he would kill him, too. Guy was sure that he could. Bruno would know it, too. Bruno had always been able to read him. The silence from Bruno now brought more relief than the silence from the police. In fact, he was not anxious at all lest the police find him, had never been. The anxiety had always been within himself, a battle of himself against himself, so torturous he might have welcomed the law’s intervention. Society’s law was lax compared to the law of conscience. He might go to the law and confess, but confession seemed a minor point, a mere gesture, even an easy way out, an avoidance of truth. If the law executed him, it would be a mere gesture.

  “I have no great respect for the law,” he remembered he had said to Peter Wriggs in Metcalf two years ago. Why should he have respect for a statute
that called him and Miriam man and wife? “I have no great respect for the church,” he had said sophomorishly to Peter at fifteen. Then, of course, he had meant the Metcalf Baptists. At seventeen, he had discovered God by himself. He had discovered God through his own awakening talents, and through a sense of unity of all the arts, and then of nature, finally of science—of all the creating and ordering forces in the world. He believed he could not have done his work without a belief in God. And where had his belief been when he murdered? He had forsaken God, not God him. It seemed to him that no human being had ever borne, or had needed to bear, so much guilt as he, and that he could not have borne it and lived unless his spirit was dead already, and what existed of himself now only a husk.

  Awkwardly, he turned and faced his work table. A gasp hissed between his teeth, and nervously, impatiently, he passed his hand hard across his mouth. And yet, he felt, there was something still to come, still to be grasped, some severer punishment, some bitterer realization.

  “I don’t suffer enough!” burst from him suddenly in a whisper. But why had he whispered? Was he ashamed? “I don’t suffer enough,” he said in a normal voice, glancing about him as if he expected some ear to hear him. And he would have shouted it, if he had not felt some element of pleading in it, and considered himself unworthy of pleading for anything, from anyone.

  His new books, for instance, the beautiful new books he had bought today—he could still think about them, love them. Yet he felt he had left them there long ago on his work table, like his own youth. He must go immediately and work, he thought. He had been commissioned to plan a hospital. He frowned at the little stack of notes he had already taken, spotlighted under his gooseneck lamp. Somehow it did not seem real that he had been commissioned. He would awaken soon and find that all these weeks had been a fantasy, a wishful dream. A hospital. Wasn’t a hospital more fitting than even a prison? He frowned puzzledly, knowing his mind had strayed wildly, that two weeks ago when he had begun the hospital interior he had not thought once of death, that the positive requisites of health and healing alone had occupied him. He hadn’t told Anne about the hospital, he remembered suddenly, that was why it seemed unreal. She was his glass of reality, not his work. But on the other hand, why hadn’t he told her?

  He must go immediately and work, but he could feel in his legs now that frenzied energy that came every evening, that sent him out in the streets finally in a vain effort to spend it. The energy frightened him because he could find no task that would absorb it, and because he felt at times that the task might be his suicide. Yet very deep inside him, and very much against his own will, his roots still clung to life, and he sensed that suicide was a coward’s escape, a ruthless act against those who loved him.

  He thought of his mother, and felt he could never let her embrace him again. He remembered her telling him that all men were equally good, because all men had souls and the soul was entirely good. Evil, she said, always came from externals. And so he had believed even months after Miriam, when he had wanted to murder her lover Steve. So he had believed even on the train, reading his Plato. In himself, the second horse of the charioteer had always been obedient as the first. But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative. The splitting of the atom was the only true destruction, the breaking of the universal law of oneness. Nothing could be without its opposite that was bound up with it. Could space exist in a building without objects that stopped it? Could energy exist without matter, or matter without energy? Matter and energy, the inert and the active, once considered opposites, were now known to be one.

  And Bruno, he and Bruno. Each was what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved.

  For a moment, he felt as if he might be mad. He thought, madness and genius often overlapped, too. But what mediocre lives most people lived! In middle waters, like most fish!

  No, there was that duality permeating nature down to the tiny proton and electron within the tiniest atom. Science was now at work trying to split the electron, and perhaps it couldn’t because perhaps only an idea was behind it: the one and only truth, that the opposite is always present. Who knew whether an electron was matter or energy? Perhaps God and the Devil danced hand in hand around every single electron!

  He threw his cigarette at the wastebasket and missed.

  When he put out the stub in the basket, he saw a crumpled page on which he had written last night one of his guilt-crazed confessions. It dragged him up sickeningly to a present that assaulted him from all sides—Bruno, Anne, this room, this night, the conference with the Department of Hospitals tomorrow.

  Toward midnight, when he felt drowsy, he left his work table and lay down carefully on his bed, not daring to undress lest he awaken himself again.

  He dreamed that he woke up in the night to the sound of the slow, watchful breathing that he heard every night in his room as he tried to fall asleep. It came from outside his window now. Someone was climbing the house. A tall figure in a great cape like a bat’s wings sprang suddenly into the room.

  “I’m here,” said the figure matter-of-factly.

  Guy jumped from his bed to fight him. “Who are you?” He saw it was Bruno.

  Bruno resisted him rather than fought back. If Guy used his utmost strength, he could just pin Bruno’s shoulders to the floor, and always in the recurrent dream, Guy had to use his utmost strength. Guy held Bruno to the floor with his knees and strangled him, but Bruno kept grinning up at him as if he felt nothing.

  “You,” Bruno answered finally.

  Guy awakened heavy-headed and perspiring. He sat up higher, vigilantly guarding his empty room. There were slimily wet sounds in the room now, as of a snake crawling through the cement court below, slapping its moist coils against the walls. Then suddenly he recognized the sound as that of rain, a gentle, silvery summer rain, and sank back again on his pillow. He began to cry softly. He thought of the rain, rushing at a slant to the earth. It seemed to say: Where are the spring plants to water? Where is the new life that depends on me? Where is the green vine, Anne, as we saw love in our youth? he had written last night on the crumpled paper. The rain would find the new life awaiting it, depending on it. What fell in his court was only its excess. Where is the green vine, Anne . . .

  He lay with his eyes open until the dawn eased its fingertips onto the sill, like the stranger who had sprung in. Like Bruno. Then he got up and turned on his lights, drew the shades, and went back to his work.

  twenty-nine

  Guy slammed his foot on the brake pedal, but the car leapt, screaming, toward the child. There was a tinny clatter of the bicycle falling. Guy got out and ran around the car, banged his knee excruciatingly on the front bumper, and dragged the child up by his shoulders.

  “I’m okay,” the little boy said.

  “Is he all right, Guy?” Anne ran up, white as the child.

  “I think so.” Guy gripped the bicycle’s front wheel with his knees and straightened the handlebars, feeling the child’s curious eyes on his own violently trembling hands.

  “Thanks,” said the boy.

  Guy watched him mount the bicycle and pedal off as if he watched a miracle. He looked at Anne and said quietly, with a shuddering sigh, “I can’t drive anymore today.”

  “All right,” she replied, as quietly as he, but there was a suspicion in her eyes, Guy knew, as she turned to go around to the driver’s seat.

  Guy apologized to the Faulkners as he got back into the car, and they murmured something about such things happening to every driver now and then. But Guy felt their real silence behind him, a silence of shock and horror.
He had seen the boy coming down the side road. The boy had stopped for him, but Guy had swerved the car toward him as if he had intended to hit him. Had he? Tremulously, he lighted a cigarette. Nothing but bad coordination, he told himself, he had seen it a hundred times in the past two weeks—collisions with revolving doors, his inability even to hold a pen against a ruler, and so often the feeling he wasn’t here, doing what he was doing. Grimly he re-established what he was doing now, driving in Anne’s car up to Alton to see the new house. The house was done. Anne and her mother had put the drapes up last week. It was Sunday, nearly noon. Anne had told him she had gotten a nice letter from his mother yesterday, and that his mother had sent her three crocheted aprons and a lot of homemade preserves to start their kitchen shelves. Could he remember all that? All he seemed to remember was the sketch of the Bronx hospital in his pocket, that he hadn’t told Anne about yet. He wished he could go away somewhere and do nothing but work, see no one, not even Anne. He stole a glance at her, at her coolly lifted face with the faint arch in the bridge of the nose. Her thin strong hands swung the wheel expertly into a curve and out. Suddenly he was sure she loved her car more than she loved him.

  “If anybody’s hungry, speak up now,” Anne said. “This little store’s the last place for miles.”

  But no one was hungry.

  “I expect to be asked for dinner at least once a year, Anne,” her father said. “Maybe a brace of ducks or some quail. I hear there’s some good hunting around here. Any good with a gun, Guy?”

  Anne turned the car into the road that led to the house.

  “Fair, sir,” Guy said finally, stammering twice. His heart was flogging him to run, he could still it only by running, he was sure.

  “Guy!” Anne smiled at him. Stopping the car, she whispered to him, “Have a nip when you get in the house. There’s a bottle of brandy in the kitchen.” She touched his wrist, and Guy jerked his hand back, involuntarily.