Strangers on a Train

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

  “Get out,” Guy said. “The door’s behind you.” But he mustn’t say any more, he thought. He would lose control.

  “Call a truce, Guy. I want to meet the bride.”

  Guy let himself be drawn away by two middle-aged women, one on either arm. Though he did not see him, he knew that Bruno had retreated, with a hurt, impatient smile, to the buffet table.

  “Bearing up, Guy?” Mr. Faulkner took his half-empty glass from his hand. “Let’s get something better at the bar.”

  Guy had half a glassful of Scotch. He talked without knowing what he was saying. He was sure he had said, Stop it all, tell everyone to go. But he hadn’t, or Mr. Faulkner wouldn’t be roaring with laughter. Or would he?

  Bruno watched from down the table as they cut the cake, watched Anne mostly, Guy noticed. Bruno’s mouth was a thin, insanely smiling line, his eyes glinted like the diamond pin on his dark blue tie, and in his face Guy saw that same combination of wistfulness, awe, determination, and humor that he had seen the first moment he met him.

  Bruno came up to Anne. “I think I met you somewhere before. Are you any relation to Teddy Faulkner?”

  Guy watched their hands meet. He had thought he wouldn’t be able to bear it, but he was bearing it, without making a move.

  “He’s my cousin,” Anne said with her easy smile, the same smile she had given someone a moment before.

  Bruno nodded. “I played golf with him a couple of times.”

  Guy felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Got a minute, Guy? I’d—” It was Peter Wriggs.

  “I haven’t.” Guy started after Bruno and Anne. He closed his fingers around Anne’s left hand.

  Bruno sauntered on the other side of her, very erect, very much at ease, bearing his untouched piece of wedding cake on a plate in front of him. “I’m an old friend of Guy’s. An old acquaintance.” Bruno winked at him behind Anne’s head.

  “Really? Where’d you two know each other?”

  “In school. Old school friends.” Bruno grinned. “You know, you’re the most beautiful bride I’ve seen in years, Mrs. Haines. I’m certainly glad to have met you,” he said, not with finality but an emphatic conviction that made Anne smile again.

  “Very glad to have met you,” she replied.

  “I hope I’ll be seeing you both. Where’re you going to live?”

  “In Connecticut,” Anne said.

  “Nice state, Connecticut,” Bruno said with another wink at Guy, and left them with a graceful bow.

  “He’s a friend of Teddy’s?” Guy asked Anne. “Did Teddy invite him?”

  “Don’t look so worried, darling!” Anne laughed at him. “We’ll leave soon.”

  “Where is Teddy?” But what was the use finding Teddy, what was the sense in making an issue of it, he asked himself at the same time.

  “I saw him two minutes ago up at the head of the table,” Anne told him. “There’s Chris. I’ve got to say hello to him.”

  Guy turned, looking for Bruno, and saw him helping himself to shirred eggs, talking gaily to two young men who smiled at him as if under the spell of a devil.

  The ironic thing, Guy thought bitterly in the car a few moments later, the ironic thing was that Anne had never had time to know him. When they first met, he had been melancholic. Now his efforts, because he so rarely made efforts, had come to seem real. There had been, perhaps, those few days in Mexico City when he had been himself.

  “Did the man in the blue suit go to Deems?” Anne asked.

  They were driving out to Montauk Point. One of Anne’s relatives had lent them her cottage for their three-day honeymoon. The honeymoon was only three days, because he had pledged to start work at Horton, Horton and Keese, Architects, in less than a month, and he would have to work on the double to get the detailed drawings for the hospital under way before he began. “No, the Institute. For a while.” But why did he fall in with Bruno’s lie?

  “Interesting face he has,” Anne said, straightening her dress about her ankles before she put her feet on the jump seat.

  “Interesting?” Guy asked.

  “I don’t mean attractive. Just intense.”

  Guy set his teeth. Intense? Couldn’t she see he was insane? Morbidly insane? Couldn’t everyone see it?

  thirty-two

  The receptionist at Horton, Horton and Keese, Architects, handed him a message that Charles Bruno had called and left his number. It was the Great Neck number.

  “Thank you,” Guy said, and went on across the lobby.

  Suppose the firm kept records of telephone messages. They didn’t, but suppose they did. Suppose Bruno dropped in one day. But Horton, Horton and Keese were so rotten themselves, Bruno wouldn’t make much of a contrast. And wasn’t that exactly why he was here, steeping himself in it, under some illusion that revulsion was atonement and that he would begin to feel better here?

  Guy went into the big skylighted, leather-upholstered lounge, and lighted a cigarette. Mainwaring and Williams, two of the firm’s first-string architects, sat in big leather armchairs, reading company reports. Guy felt their eyes on him as he stared out the window. They were always watching him, because he was supposed to be something special, a genius, the junior Horton had assured everybody, so what was he doing here? He might be broker than everybody thought, of course, and he had just gotten married, but quite apart from that and from the Bronx hospital, he was obviously nervous, had lost his grip. The best lost their grip sometimes, they would say to themselves, so why should they scruple about taking a comfortable job? Guy gazed down onto the dirty jumble of Manhattan roofs and streets that looked like a floor model of how a city should not be built. When he turned around, Mainwaring dropped his eyes like a schoolboy.

  He spent the morning dawdling over a job that he had been on for several days. Take your time, they told him. All he had to do was give the client what he wanted and sign his name to it. Now, this job was a department store for an opulent little community in Westchester, and the client wanted something like an old mansion, in keeping with the town, only sort of modern, too, see? And he had asked especially for Guy Daniel Haines. By adjusting his brain to the level of the trick, the cartoon, Guy could have tossed it off, but the fact it was really going to be a department store kept intruding certain functional demands. He erased and sharpened pencils all morning, and figured it would take him four or five more days, well into next week, until he got anything down as even a rough idea to show the client.

  “Charley Bruno’s coming tonight, too,” Anne called that evening from the kitchen.

  “What?” Guy came around the partition.

  “Isn’t that his name? The young man we saw at the wedding.”

  Anne was cutting chives on a wooden board.

  “You invited him?”

  “He seems to have heard about it, so he called up and sort of invited himself,” Anne replied so casually that a wild suspicion she might be testing him sent a faint chill up his spine. “Hazel—not milk, angel, there’s plenty of cream in the refrigerator.”

  Guy watched Hazel set the cream container down by the bowl of crumbled gorgonzola cheese.

  “Do you mind his coming, Guy?” Anne asked him.

  “Not at all, but he’s no friend of mine, you know.” He moved awkwardly toward the cabinets and got out the shoe-polish box. How could he stop him? There had to be a way, yet even as he racked his brain, he knew that the way would elude him.

  “You do mind,” Anne said, with a smile.

  “I think he’s sort of a bounder, that’s all.”

  “It’s bad luck to turn anyone away from a housewarming. Don’t you know that?”

  Bruno was pink-eyed when he arrived. Everyone else had made some comment about the new house, but Bruno stepped down into the brick-red and forest-green living room as if he had been here a hundred times before. Or as if he lived here, Guy thought as he introduced Bruno around the room. Bruno focused a grinning, excited attention on Guy and Anne, hardly acknowledging
the greetings of the others—two or three looked as if they knew him, Guy thought—except for that of a Mrs. Chester Boltinoff of Muncey Park, Long Island, whose hand Bruno shook in both his as if he had found an ally. And Guy watched with horror as Mrs. Boltinoff looked up at Bruno with a wide, friendly smile.

  “How’s every little thing?” Bruno asked Guy after he had gotten himself a drink.

  “Fine. Very fine.” Guy was determined to be calm, even if he had to anaesthetize himself. He had already had two or three straight shots in the kitchen. But he found himself walking away, retreating, toward the perpendicular spiral stairway in the corner of the living room. Just for a moment, he thought, just to get his bearings. He ran upstairs and into the bedroom, laid his cold hand against his forehead, and brought it slowly down his face.

  “Pardon me, I’m still exploring,” said a voice from the other side of the room. “It’s such a terrific house, Guy, I had to retreat to the nineteenth century for a while.”

  Helen Heyburn, Anne’s friend from her Bermuda schooldays, was standing by the bureau. Where the little revolver was, Guy thought.

  “Make yourself at home. I just came up for a handkerchief. How’s your drink holding up?” Guy slid out the right top drawer where lay both the gun he didn’t want and the handkerchief he didn’t need.

  “Well—better than I am.”

  Helen was in another “manic” period, Guy supposed. She was a commercial artist, a good one, Anne thought, but she worked only when her quarterly allowance gave out and she slipped into a depressive period. And she didn’t like him, he felt, since the Sunday evening when he hadn’t gone with Anne to her party. She was suspicious of him. What was she doing now in their bedroom, pretending to feel her drinks more than she did?

  “Are you always so serious, Guy? You know what I said to Anne when she told me she was going to marry you?”

  “You told her she was insane.”

  “I said, ‘But he’s so serious. Very attractive and maybe a genius, but he’s so serious, how can you stand it?’” She lifted her squarish, pretty blond face. “You don’t even defend yourself. I’ll bet you’re too serious to kiss me, aren’t you?”

  He forced himself toward her, and kissed her.

  “That’s no kiss.”

  “But I deliberately wasn’t being serious.”

  He went out. She would tell Anne, he thought, she would tell her that she had found him in the bedroom looking pained at 10 o’clock. She might look into the drawer and find the gun, too. But he didn’t believe any of it. Helen was silly, and he hadn’t the slightest idea why Anne liked her, but she wasn’t a troublemaker. And she wasn’t a snooper any more than Anne was. My God, hadn’t he left the revolver there in the drawer next to Anne’s all the time they had been living here? He was no more afraid Anne would investigate his half of the bureau than he was that she would open his mail.

  Bruno and Anne were on the right-angled sofa by the fireplace when he came down. The glass Bruno wobbled casually on the sofa back had made dark green splotches on the cloth.

  “He’s telling me all about the new Capri, Guy.” Anne looked up at him. “I’ve always wanted us to go there.”

  “The thing to do is to take a whole house,” Bruno went on, ignoring Guy, “take a castle, the bigger the better. My mother and I lived in a castle so big we never walked to the other end of it until one night I couldn’t find the right door. There was a whole Italian family having dinner at the other end of the veranda, and the same night they all come over, about twelve of them, and ask if they can work for us for nothing, just if we let them stay there. So of course we did.”

  “And you never learned any Italian?”

  “No need to!” Bruno shrugged, his voice hoarse again, exactly as Guy always heard it in his mind.

  Guy busied himself with a cigarette, feeling Bruno’s avid, shyly flirtatious gaze at Anne boring into his back, deeper than the numbing tingle of the alcohol. No doubt Bruno had already complimented the dress she was wearing, his favorite dress of gray taffeta with the tiny blue pattern like peacocks’ eyes. Bruno always noticed women’s clothes.

  “Guy and I,” Bruno’s voice said distinctly behind him as if he had turned his head, “Guy and I once talked about traveling.”

  Guy jabbed his cigarette into an ashtray, put out every spark, then went toward the sofa. “How about seeing our game room upstairs?” he said to Bruno.

  “Sure.” Bruno got up. “What kind of games you play?”

  Guy pushed him into a small room lined with red, and closed the door behind them. “How far are you going?”

  “Guy! You’re tight!”

  “What’s the idea of telling everyone we’re old friends?”

  “Didn’t tell everyone. I told Anne.”

  “What’s the idea of telling her or anyone? What’s the idea of coming here?”

  “Quiet, Guy! Sh—sh—sh-h-h!” Bruno swung his drink casually in one hand.

  “The police are still watching your friends, aren’t they?”

  “Not enough to worry me.”

  “Get out. Get out now.” His voice shook with his effort to control it. And why should he control himself? The revolver with the one bullet was just across the hall.

  Bruno looked at him boredly and sighed. The breath against his upper lip was like the breathing Guy heard in his room at night.

  Guy staggered slightly, and the stagger enraged him.

  “I think Anne’s beautiful,” Bruno remarked pleasantly.

  “If I see you talking with her again, I’ll kill you.”

  Bruno’s smile went slack, then came back even broader. “Is that a threat, Guy?”

  “That’s a promise.”

  Half an hour later, Bruno passed out back of the sofa where he and Anne had been sitting. He looked extremely long on the floor, and his head tiny on the big hearthstone. Three men picked him up, then didn’t know what to do with him.

  “Take him—I suppose to the guest room,” Anne said.

  “That’s a good omen, Anne,” Helen laughed. “Somebody’s supposed to stay overnight at every housewarming, you know. First guest!”

  Christopher Nelson came over to Guy. “Where’d you dig him up? He used to pass out so often at the Great Neck Club, he can’t get in anymore.”

  Guy had checked with Teddy after the wedding. Teddy hadn’t invited Bruno, didn’t know anything about him, except that he didn’t like him.

  Guy climbed the steps to the studio, and closed the door. On his work table lay the unfinished sketch of the cockeyed department store that conscience had made him take home to complete this weekend. The familiar lines, blurred now with drinking, almost made him sick. He took a blank sheet of paper and began to draw the building they wanted. He knew exactly what they wanted. He hoped he could finish before he became sick, and after he finished be as sick as a dog. But he wasn’t sick when he finished. He only sat back in his chair, and finally went and opened a window.

  thirty-three

  The department store was accepted and highly praised, first by the Hortons and then by the client, Mr. Howard Wyndham of New Rochelle, who came into the office early Monday afternoon to see the drawing. Guy rewarded himself by spending the rest of the day smoking in his office and thumbing through a morocco-bound copy of Religio Medici he had just bought at Brentano’s to give Anne on her birthday. What assignment would they give him next, he wondered. He skipped through the book, remembering the passages he and Peter had used to like . . . the man without a navel yet lives in me . . . What atrocity would he be asked to do next? He had already fulfilled an assignment. Hadn’t he done enough? Another thing like the department store would be unbearable. It wasn’t self-pity, only life. He was still alive, if he wanted to blame himself for that. He got up from the drawing table, went to his typewriter, and began his letter of resignation.

  Anne insisted they go out and celebrate that evening. She was so glad, so overflowing with gladness, Guy felt his own spirits lifting a l
ittle, uncertainly, as a kite tries to lift itself from the ground on a still day. He watched her quick, slender fingers draw her hair tight back at the sides and close the bar pin over it in back.

  “And, Guy, can’t we make the cruise now?” she asked as they came down into the living room.

  Anne still had her heart set on the cruise down the coast in the India, the honeymoon trip they had put off. Guy had intended to give all his time to the drafting rooms that were doing his hospital drawings, but he couldn’t refuse Anne now.

  “How soon do you think we can leave? Five days? A week?”

  “Maybe five days.”

  “Oh, I just remember,” she sighed. “I’ve got to stay till the twenty-third. There’s a man coming in from California who’s interested in all our cotton stuff.”

  “And isn’t there a fashion show the end of this month?”

  “Oh, Lillian can take care of that.” She smiled. “How wonderful of you to remember!”

  He waited while she pulled the hood of her leopard coat up about her head, amused at the thought of her driving a hard bargain with the man from California next week. She wouldn’t leave that to Lillian. Anne was the business half of the shop. He saw the long-stemmed orange flowers on the coffee table for the first time. “Where’d these come from?” he asked.

  “Charley Bruno. With a note apologizing for passing out Friday night.” She laughed. “I think it’s rather sweet.”

  Guy stared at them. “What kind are they?”

  “African daisies.” She held the front door open for him, and they went on out to the car.

  She was flattered by the flowers, Guy thought. But her opinion of Bruno, he also knew, had gone down since the night of the party. Guy thought again of how bound up they were now, he and Bruno, by the score of people at the party. The police might investigate him any day. They would investigate him, he warned himself. And why wasn’t he more concerned? What state of mind was he in that he could no longer say even what state it was? Resignation? Suicide? Or simply a torpor of stupidity?

  During the next idle days he was compelled to spend at Horton, Horton and Keese to launch the drawings of the department store interior, he even asked himself whether he could be mentally deranged, if some subtle madness had not taken possession of him. He remembered the week or so after the Friday night, when his safety, his existence, had seemed to hang in a delicate balance that a failure of nerve might upset in a second. Now he felt none of that. Yet he still dreamt of Bruno invading his room. If he woke at dawn, he could still see himself standing in the room with the gun. He still felt that he must, and very soon, find some atonement for what he had done, some atonement for which no service or sacrifice he could yet envisage sufficed. He felt rather like two people, one of whom could create and feel in harmony with God when he created, and the other who could murder. “Any kind of person can murder,” Bruno had said on the train. The man who had explained the cantilever principle to Bobbie Cartwright two years ago in Metcalf? No, nor the man who had designed the hospital, or even the department store, or debated half an hour with himself over the color he would paint a metal chair on the back lawn last week, but the man who had glanced into the mirror just last night and had seen for one instant the murderer, like a secret brother.