The Price of Salt, or Carol

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Miss Belivet!” Mrs. Hendrickson’s voice called, and Therese jumped to attention. But Mrs. Hendrickson only waved her hand for the benefit of the Western Union messenger who laid a telegram in front of Therese.

  Therese signed for it in a scribble, and tore it open. It said: “MEET YOU DOWNSTAIRS AT 5 P.M. CAROL.”

  Therese crushed it in her hand. She pressed it hard with her thumb into her palm, and watched the messenger boy who was really an old man walk back toward the elevators. He walked ploddingly, with a stoop that thrust his knees far ahead of him, and his puttees were loose and wobbly.

  “You look happy,” Mrs. Zabriskie said dismally to her as she went by.

  Therese smiled. “I am.” Mrs. Zabriskie had a two-months’-old baby, she had told Therese, and her husband was out of work now. Therese wondered if Mrs. Zabriskie and her husband were in love with each other, and really happy. Perhaps they were, but there was nothing in Mrs. Zabriskie’s blank face and her trudging gait that would suggest it. Perhaps once Mrs. Zabriskie had been as happy as she. Perhaps it had gone away. She remembered reading—even Richard once saying—that love usually dies after two years of marriage. That was a cruel thing, a trick. She tried to imagine Carol’s face, the smell of her perfume, becoming meaningless. But in the first place could she say she was in love with Carol? She had come to a question she could not answer.

  At a quarter to five, Therese went to Mrs. Hendrickson and asked permission to leave a half hour early. Mrs. Hendrickson might have thought the telegram had something to do with it, but she let Therese go without even a complaining look, and that was another thing that made the day a strange one.

  Carol was waiting for her in the foyer where they had met before.

  “Hello!” Therese said. “I’m through.”

  “Through what?”

  “Through with working. Here.” But Carol seemed depressed, and it dampened Therese instantly. She said anyway, “I was awfully happy to get the telegram.”

  “I didn’t know if you’d be free. Are you free tonight?”

  “Of course.”

  And they walked on, slowly, amid the jostling crowd, Carol in her delicate-looking suede pumps that made her a couple of inches taller than Therese. It had begun to snow about an hour before, but it was stopping already. The snow was no more than a film underfoot, like thin white wool drawn across the street and sidewalk.

  “We might have seen Abby tonight, but she’s busy,” Carol said. “Anyway, we can take a drive, if you’d like. It’s good to see you. You’re an angel to be free tonight. Do you know that?”

  “No,” Therese said, still happy in spite of herself, though Carol’s mood was disquieting. Therese felt something had happened.

  “Do you suppose there’s a place to get a cup of coffee around here?”

  “Yes. A little further east.”

  Therese was thinking of one of the sandwich shops between Fifth and Madison, but Carol chose a small bar with an awning in front. The waiter was reluctant at first, and said it was the cocktail hour, but when Carol started to leave, he went away and got the coffee. Therese was anxious about picking up the handbag. She didn’t want to do it when Carol was with her, even though the package would be wrapped.

  “Did something happen?” Therese asked.

  “Something too long to explain.” Carol smiled at her but the smile was tired, and a silence followed, an empty silence as if they traveled through space away from each other.

  Probably Carol had had to break an engagement she had looked forward to, Therese thought. Carol would of course be busy on Christmas Eve.

  “I’m not keeping you from doing anything now?” Carol asked.

  Therese felt herself growing tense, helplessly. “I’m supposed to pick up a package on Madison Avenue. It’s not far. I can do it now, if you’ll wait for me.”

  “All right.”

  Therese stood up. “I can do it in three minutes with a taxi. But I don’t think you will wait for me, will you?”

  Carol smiled and reached for her hand. Indifferently, Carol squeezed her hand and dropped it. “Yes, I’ll wait.”

  The bored tone of Carol’s voice was in her ears as she sat on the edge of the taxi seat. On the way back, the traffic was so slow, she got out and ran the last block.

  Carol was still there, her coffee only half finished.

  “I don’t want my coffee.” Therese said, because Carol seemed ready to go.

  “My car’s downtown. Let’s get a taxi down.”

  They went down into the business section not far from the Battery. Carol’s car was brought up from an underground garage. Carol drove west to the West Side Highway.

  “This is better.” Carol shed her coat as she drove. “Throw it in back, will you?”

  And they were silent again. Carol drove faster, changing her lane to pass cars, as if they had a destination. Therese set herself to say something, anything at all, by the time they reached the George Washington Bridge. Suddenly it occurred to her that if Carol and her husband were divorcing, Carol had been downtown to see a lawyer today. The district there was full of law offices. And something had gone wrong. Why were they divorcing? Because Harge was having an affair with the woman called Cynthia? Therese was cold. Carol had lowered the window beside her, and every time the car sped, the wind burst through and wrapped its cold arms around her.

  “That’s where Abby lives,” Carol said, nodding across the river.

  Therese did not even see any special lights. “Who’s Abby?”

  “Abby? My best friend.” Then Carol looked at her. “Aren’t you cold with this window open?”

  “No.”

  “You must be.” They stopped for a red light, and Carol rolled the window up. Carol looked at her, as if really seeing her for the first time that evening, and under her eyes that went from her face to her hands in her lap, Therese felt like a puppy Carol had bought at a roadside kennel, that Carol had just remembered was riding beside her.

  “What happened, Carol? Are you getting a divorce now?”

  Carol sighed. “Yes, a divorce,” she said quite calmly, and started the car.

  “And he has the child?”

  “Just tonight.”

  Therese was about to ask another question, when Carol said, “Let’s talk about something else.”

  A car went by with the radio playing Christmas carols and everyone singing.

  And she and Carol were silent. They drove past Yonkers, and it seemed to Therese she had left every chance of talking further to Carol somewhere behind on the road. Carol insisted suddenly that she should eat something, because it was getting on to eight, so they stopped at a little restaurant by the roadside, a place that sold fried clam sandwiches. They sat at the counter and ordered sandwiches and coffee, but Carol did not eat. Carol asked her questions about Richard, not in the concerned way she had Sunday afternoon, but rather as if she talked to keep Therese from asking more questions about her. They were personal questions, yet Therese answered them mechanically and impersonally. Carol’s quiet voice went on and on, much quieter than the voice of the counter boy talking with someone three yards away.

  “Do you sleep with him?” Carol asked.

  “I did. Two or three times.” Therese told her about those times, the first time and the three times afterward. She was not embarrassed, talking about it. It had never seemed so dull and unimportant before. She felt Carol could imagine every minute of those evenings. She felt Carol’s objective, appraising glance over her, and she knew Carol was about to say she did not look particularly cold, or, perhaps, emotionally starved. But Carol was silent, and Therese stared uncomfortably at the list of songs on the little music box in front of her. She remembered someone telling her once she had a passionate mouth, she couldn’t remember who.

  “Sometimes it
takes time,” Carol said. “Don’t you believe in giving people another chance?”

  “But—why? It isn’t pleasant. And I’m not in love with him.”

  “Don’t you think you might be, if you got this worked out?”

  “Is that the way people fall in love?”

  Carol looked up at the deer’s head on the wall behind the counter. “No,” she said, smiling. “What do you like about Richard?”

  “Well, he has—” But she wasn’t sure if it really was sincerity. He wasn’t sincere, she felt, about his ambition to be a painter. “I like his attitude—more than most men’s. He does treat me like a person instead of just a girl he can go so far with or not. And I like his family—the fact that he has a family.”

  “Lots of people have families.”

  Therese tried again. “He’s flexible. He changes. He’s not like most men that you can label doctor or—or insurance salesman.”

  “I think you know him better than I knew Harge after months of marriage. At least you’re not going to make the same mistake I did, to marry because it was the thing to do when you were about twenty, among the people I knew.”

  “You mean you weren’t in love?”

  “Yes, I was, very much. And so was Harge. And he was the kind of man who could wrap your life up in a week and put it in his pocket. Were you ever in love, Therese?”

  She waited, until the word from nowhere, false, guilty, moved her lips. “No.”

  “But you’d like to be.” Carol was smiling.

  “Is Harge still in love with you?”

  Carol looked down at her lap, impatiently, and perhaps she was shocked at her bluntness, Therese thought, but when Carol spoke her voice was the same as before. “Even I don’t know. In a way, he’s the same emotionally as he’s always been. It’s just that now I can see how he really is. He said I was the first woman he’d ever been in love with. I think it’s true, but I don’t think he was in love with me—in the usual sense of the word—for more than a few months. He’s never been interested in anyone else, it’s true. Maybe he’d be more human if he were. That I could understand and forgive.”

  “Does he like Rindy?”

  “Dotes on her.” Carol glanced at her, smiling. “If he’s in love with anyone, it’s Rindy.”

  “What kind of a name is that?’

  “Nerinda. Harge named her. He wanted a son, but I think he’s even more pleased with a daughter. I wanted a girl. I wanted two or three children.”

  “And—Harge didn’t?”

  “I didn’t.” She looked at Therese again. “Is this the right conversation for Christmas Eve?” Carol reached for a cigarette, and accepted the one Therese offered her, a Philip Morris.

  “I like to know all about you,” Therese said.

  “I didn’t want any more children, because I was afraid our marriage was going on the rocks anyway, even with Rindy. So you want to fall in love? You probably will soon, and if you do, enjoy it, it’s harder later on.”

  “To love someone?”

  “To fall in love. Or even to have the desire to make love. I think sex flows more sluggishly in all of us than we care to believe, especially men care to believe. The first adventures are usually nothing but a satisfying of curiosity, and after that one keeps repeating the same actions, trying to find—what?”

  “What?” Therese asked.

  “Is there a word? A friend, a companion, or maybe just a sharer. What good are words? I mean, I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.”

  What Carol said about curiosity, she knew was true. “What other ways?” she asked.

  Carol gave her a glance. “I think that’s for each person to find out. I wonder if I can get a drink here.”

  But the restaurant served only beer and wine, so they left. Carol did not stop anywhere for her drink as they drove back toward New York. Carol asked her if she wanted to go home or come out to her house for a while, and Therese said to Carol’s house. She remembered the Kellys had asked her to drop in on the wine and fruitcake party they were having tonight, and she had promised to, but they wouldn’t miss her, she thought.

  “What a rotten time I give you,” Carol said suddenly. “Sunday and now this. I’m not the best company this evening. What would you like to do? Would you like to go to a restaurant in Newark where they have lights and Christmas music tonight? It’s not a nightclub. We could have a decent dinner there, too.”

  “I really don’t care about going anywhere—for myself.”

  “You’ve been in that rotten store all day, and we haven’t done a thing to celebrate your liberation.”

  “I just like to be here with you,” Therese said, and hearing the explanatory tone in her voice, she smiled.

  Carol shook her head, not looking at her. “Child, child, where do you wander—all by yourself?”

  Then, a moment later, on the New Jersey highway, Carol said, “I know what.” And she turned the car into a graveled section off the road and stopped. “Come out with me.”

  They were in front of a lighted stand piled high with Christmas trees. Carol told her to pick a tree, one not too big and not too small. They put the tree in the back of the car, and Therese sat in front beside Carol with her arms full of holly and fir branches. Therese pressed her face into them and inhaled the dark green sharpness of their smell, their clean spice that was like a wild forest and like all the artifices of Christmas—tree baubles, gifts, snow, Christmas music, holidays. It was being through with the store and being beside Carol now. It was the purr of the car’s engine, and the needles of the fir branches that she could touch with her fingers. I am happy, I am happy, Therese thought.

  “Let’s do the tree now,” Carol said as soon as they entered the house.

  Carol turned the radio on in the living room, and fixed a drink for both of them. There were Christmas songs on the radio, bells breaking resonantly, as if they were inside a great church. Carol brought a blanket of white cotton for the snow around the tree, and Therese sprinkled it with sugar so it would glisten. Then she cut an elongated angel out of some gold ribbon and fixed it to the top of the tree, and folded tissue paper and cut a string of angels to thread along the branches.

  “You’re very good at that,” Carol said, surveying the tree from the hearth. “It’s superb. Everything but presents.”

  Carol’s present was on the sofa beside Therese’s coat. The card she had made for it was at home, however, and she didn’t want to give it without the card. Therese looked at the tree. “What else do we need?”

  “Nothing. Do you know what time it is?”

  The radio had signed off. Therese saw the mantel clock. It was after one. “It’s Christmas,” she said.

  “You’d better stay the night.”

  “All right.”

  “What do you have to do tomorrow?”

  “Nothing.”

  Carol got her drink from the radio top. “Don’t you have to see Richard?”

  She did have to see Richard, at twelve noon. She was to spend the day at his house. But she could make some kind of excuse. “No. I said I might see him. It’s not important.”

  “I can drive you in early.”

  “Are you busy tomorrow?”

  Carol finished the last inch of her drink. “Yes,” she said.

  Therese began to clean up the mess she had made, the scraps of tissue and snippets of ribbon. She hated cleaning up after making something.

  “Your friend Richard sounds like the kind of man who needs a woman around him to work for. Whether he marries her or not,” Carol said. “Isn’t he like that?”

  Why talk of Richard now, Therese thought irritably. She felt that Carol liked Richard—which could only be her own fault—and a distant jealousy pricked her, sharp as
a pin.

  “Actually, I admire that more than the men who live alone or think they live alone, and end by making the stupidest blunders with women.”

  Therese stared at Carol’s pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. She had absolutely nothing to say on the subject. She could find Carol’s perfume like a fine thread in the stronger smell of evergreen, and she wanted to follow it, to put her arms around Carol.

  “It has nothing to do with whether people marry, has it?”

  “What?” Therese looked at her and saw her smiling a little.

  “Harge is the kind of man who doesn’t let a woman enter his life. And on the other hand, your friend Richard might never marry. But the pleasure Richard will get out of thinking he wants to marry.” Carol looked at Therese from head to foot. “The wrong girls,” she added. “Do you dance, Therese? Do you like to dance?”

  Carol seemed suddenly cool and bitter, and Therese could have wept. “No,” she said. She should never have told her anything about Richard, Therese thought, but now it was done.

  “You’re tired. Come on to bed.”

  Carol took her to the room that Harge had gone into on Sunday, and turned down the covers of one of the twin beds. It might have been Harge’s room, Therese thought. There was certainly nothing about it that suggested a child’s room. She thought of Rindy’s possessions that Harge had taken from this room, and imagined Harge moving first from the bedroom he shared with Carol, then letting Rindy bring her things into this room, keeping them here, closing himself and Rindy away from Carol.

  Carol laid some pajamas on the foot of the bed. “Good night, then,” she said at the door. “Merry Christmas. What do you want for Christmas?”

  Therese smiled suddenly. “Nothing.”

  That night she dreamed of birds, long, bright red birds like flamingos, zipping through a black forest and making scallopy patterns, arcs of red that curved like their cries. Then her eyes opened and she heard it really, a soft whistle curving, rising and coming down again with an extra note at the end, and behind it the real, feebler twitter of birds. The window was a bright gray. The whistling began again, just below the window, and Therese got out of bed. There was a long open-topped car in the driveway, and a woman standing in it, whistling. It was like a dream she looked out on, a scene without color, misty at the edges.