The Price of Salt, or Carol

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Not all the time,” Abby corrected, with the laughter under the surface of her voice, as it had been in the first word Therese had heard her say.

  The wine in her head promised music or poetry or truth, but she was stranded on the brink. Therese could not think of a single question that would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.

  “How’d you meet Carol?” Abby asked.

  “Didn’t Carol tell you?”

  “She just said she met you at Frankenberg’s when you had a job there.”

  “Well, that’s how,” Therese said, feeling a resentment in her against Abby building up, uncontrollably.

  “You just started talking?” Abby asked with a smile, lighting a cigarette.

  “I waited on her,” Therese said, and stopped.

  And Abby waited, for a precise description of that meeting, Therese knew, but she wouldn’t give it to Abby or to anyone else. It belonged to her. Surely Carol hadn’t told Abby, she thought, told her the silly story of the Christmas card. It wouldn’t be important enough to Carol for Carol to have told her.

  “Do you mind telling me who started talking first?”

  Therese laughed suddenly. She reached for a cigarette and lighted it, still smiling. No, Carol hadn’t told her about the Christmas card, and Abby’s question struck her as terribly funny. “I did,” Therese said.

  “You like her a lot, don’t you?” Abby asked.

  Therese explored it for hostility. It was not hostile, but jealous. “Yes.”

  “Why do you?”

  “Why do I? Why do you?”

  Abby’s eyes still laughed. “I’ve known Carol since she was four years old.”

  Therese said nothing.

  “You’re awfully young, aren’t you? Are you twenty-one?”

  “No. Not quite.”

  “You know Carol’s got a lot of worries right now, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s lonely now,” Abby added, her eyes watching.

  “Do you mean that’s why she sees me?” Therese asked calmly. “Do you want to tell me I shouldn’t see her?”

  Abby’s unblinking eyes blinked twice after all. “No, not a bit. But I don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t want you to hurt Carol either.”

  “I’d never hurt Carol,” Therese said. “Do you think I would?”

  Abby was still watching her alertly, had never taken her eyes from her. “No, I don’t think you would,” Abby replied as if she had just decided it. And she smiled now as if she were especially pleased about something.

  But Therese did not like the smile, and realizing her face showed her feelings, she looked down at the table. There was a glass of hot zabaglione standing on a plate in front of her.

  “Would you like to come to a cocktail party this afternoon, Therese? It’s uptown at about six o’clock. I don’t know if there’ll be any stage designers there, but one of the girls who’s giving it is an actress.”

  Therese put her cigarette out. “Is Carol going to be there?”

  “No. She won’t be. But they’re all easy to get along with. It’s a small party.”

  “Thanks. I don’t think I should go. I may have to work late today, too.”

  “Oh. I was going to give you the address anyway, but if you won’t come—”

  “No,” Therese said.

  Abby wanted to walk around the block after they came out of the restaurant. Therese agreed, though she was tired of Abby now. Abby with her cocksureness, her blunt, careless questions, made Therese feel she had gotten an advantage over her. And Abby had not let her pay the bill.

  Abby said, “Carol thinks a lot of you, you know. She says you have a lot of talent.”

  “Does she?” Therese said, only half believing it. “She never told me.” She wanted to walk faster, but Abby held their pace back.

  “You must know she thinks a lot of you, if she wants you to take a trip with her.”

  Therese glanced and saw Abby smiling at her, guilelessly. “She didn’t say anything to me about that either,” Therese said quietly, though her heart had begun pumping.

  “I’m sure she will. You’ll go with her, won’t you?”

  Why should Abby know about it before she did, Therese wondered. She felt a flush of anger in her face. What was it all about? Did Abby hate her? If she did, why wasn’t she consistent about it? Then in the next instant, the rise of anger fell and left her weak, left her vulnerable and defenseless. She thought, if Abby pressed her against the wall at that moment and said: Out with it. What do you want from Carol? How much of her do you want to take from me? she would have babbled it all. She would have said: I want to be with her. I love to be with her, and what has it got to do with you?

  “Isn’t that for Carol to talk about? Why do you ask me these things?” Therese made an effort to sound indifferent. It was hopeless.

  Abby stopped walking. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to her. “I think I understand better now.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Just—that you win.”

  “Win what?”

  “What,” Abby echoed with her head up, looking up at the corner of a building, at the sky, and Therese suddenly felt furiously impatient.

  She wanted Abby to go so she could telephone Carol. Nothing mattered but the sound of Carol’s voice. Nothing mattered but Carol, and why did she let herself forget for a moment?

  “No wonder Carol thinks such a lot of you,” Abby said, but if it was a kind remark, Therese did not accept it as such. “So long, Therese. I’ll see you again no doubt.” Abby held out her hand.

  Therese took it. “So long,” she said. She watched Abby walking toward Washington Square, her step quicker now, her curly head high.

  Therese went into the drugstore at the next corner and called Carol. She got the maid and then Carol.

  “What’s the matter?” Carol asked. “You sound low.”

  “Nothing. It’s dull at work.”

  “Are you doing anything tonight? Would you like to come out?”

  Therese came out of the drugstore smiling. Carol was going to pick her up at five-thirty. Carol insisted on picking her up, because it was such a rotten trip by train.

  Across the street, walking away from her, she saw Danny McElroy, striding along without a coat, carrying a naked bottle of milk in his hand.

  “Danny!” she called.

  Danny turned and walked toward her. “Come by for a few minutes?” he yelled.

  Therese started to say no, then, as he came up to her, she took his arm. “Just for a minute. I’ve had a long lunch hour already.”

  Danny smiled down at her. “What time is it? I’ve been studying till I’m blind.”

  “After two.” She felt Danny’s arm tensed hard against the cold. There were goosepimples under the dark hair on his forearm. “You’re mad to go out without a coat,” she said.

  “It clears my head.” He held the iron gate for her that led to his door. “Phil’s out somewhere.”

  The room smelled of pipe smoke, rather like hot chocolate cooking. The apartment was a semibasement, generally darkish, and the lamp made a warm pool of light on the desk that was always cluttered. Therese looked down at the opened books on his desk, the pages and pages covered with symbols that she could not understand, but that she liked to look at. Everything the symbols stood for was true and proven. The symbols were stronger and more definite than words. She felt Danny’s mind swung on them, from one fact to another, as if he bore himself on strong chains, hand over hand through space. She watched him assembling a sandwich, standing at the kitchen table. His shoulders looked very broad and rounded with muscle under his white shirt, shifting a little with the motions of laying the salami and cheese slices onto the bi
g piece of rye bread.

  “I wish you’d come by more often, Therese. Wednesday’s the only day I’m not home at noon. We wouldn’t bother Phil, having lunch, even if he’s sleeping.”

  “I will,” Therese said. She sat down in his desk chair that was half turned around. She had come once for lunch, and once after work. She liked visiting Danny. One did not have to make small talk with him.

  In the corner of the room, Phil’s sofa bed was unmade, a tangle of blankets and sheets. The two times she had come in before, the bed had been unmade, or Phil had still been in it. The long bookcase pulled out at right angles to the sofa made a unit of Phil’s corner of the room, and it was always in disorder, in a frustrated and nervous disorder not at all like the working disorder of Danny’s desk.

  Danny’s beer can hissed as he opened it. He leaned against the wall with the beer and the sandwich, smiling, delighted to have her here. “Remember what you said about physics not applying to people?”

  “Umm. Vaguely.”

  “Well, I’m not sure you’re right,” he said as he took a bite. “Take friendships, for instance. I can think of a lot of cases where the two people have nothing in common. I think there’s a definite reason for every friendship just as there’s a reason why certain atoms unite and others don’t—certain missing factors in one, or certain present factors in the other—what do you think? I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.”

  “Maybe. I can think of a few cases, too.” Richard and herself, for one. Richard got on with people, elbowed his way through the world in a way she couldn’t. She had always been attracted to people with Richard’s kind of self-assurance. “And what’s weak about you, Danny?”

  “Me?” he said, smiling. “Do you want to be my friend?”

  “Yes. But you’re about the strongest person I know.”

  “Really? Shall I enumerate my shortcomings?”

  She smiled, looking at him. A young man of twenty-five who had known where he was going since he was fourteen. He had driven all his energy into one channel—just the opposite of what Richard had done.

  “I have a secret and very buried need for a cook,” Danny said, “and a dancing teacher, and someone to remind me to do little things like take my laundry and get haircuts.”

  “I can’t remember to take my laundry either.”

  “Oh,” he said sadly. “Then it’s out. And I’d had some hope. I’d had a little feeling of destiny. Because, you see, what I mean about affinities is true from friendships down to even the accidental glance at someone on the street—there’s always a definite reason somewhere. I think even the poets would agree with me.”

  She smiled. “Even the poets?” She thought of Carol, and then of Abby, of their conversation at lunch that had been so much more than a glance and so much less, and the sequence of emotions it had evoked in her. It depressed her. “But you have to make allowances for people’s perversities, things that don’t make much sense.”

  “Perversities? That’s only a subterfuge. A word used by the poets.”

  “I thought it was used by the psychologists,” Therese said.

  “I mean, to make allowances—that’s a meaningless term. Life is an exact science on its own terms, it’s just a matter of finding them and defining them. What doesn’t make any sense to you?”

  “Nothing. I was thinking of something that doesn’t matter anyway.” She was suddenly angry again, as she had been on the sidewalk after the lunch.

  “What?” he persisted, frowning.

  “Like the lunch I just had,” she said.

  “With whom?”

  “It doesn’t matter. If it did, I’d go into it. It’s just a waste, like losing something, I thought. But maybe something that didn’t exist anyway.” She had wanted to like Abby because Carol did.

  “Except in your mind? That can still be a loss.”

  “Yes—but there are some people or some things people do that you can’t salvage anything from finally, because nothing connects with you.” It was of something else she wanted to talk about, though, not this at all. Not Abby or Carol, but before. Something that made perfect connection and perfect sense. She loved Carol. She leaned her forehead against her hand.

  Danny looked at her for a moment, then pushed himself off from the wall. He turned to the stove, and got a match from his shirt pocket, and Therese sensed that the conversation dangled, would always dangle and never be finished, whatever they went on to say. But she felt if she told Danny every word that she and Abby had exchanged, he could clear away its subterfuges with a phrase, as if he sprinkled a chemical in the air that would dry up the mist instantly. Or was there always something that logic couldn’t touch? Something illogical, behind the jealousy, the suspicion, and the hostility in Abby’s conversation, that was Abby all by herself?

  “Everything’s not as simple as a lot of combinations,” Therese added.

  “Some things don’t react. But everything’s alive.” He turned around with a broad smile, as if quite another train of thought had entered his head. He was holding up the match, which was still smoking. “Like this match. And I’m not talking physics, about the indestructibility of smoke. In fact, I feel rather poetic today.”

  “About the match?”

  “I feel as if it were growing, like a plant, not disappearing. I feel everything in the world must have the texture of a plant sometimes to a poet. Even this table, like my own flesh.” He touched the table edge with his palm. “It’s like a feeling I had once riding up a hill on a horse. It was in Pennsylvania. I didn’t know how to ride very well then, and I remember the horse turning his head and seeing the hill, and deciding by himself to run up it, his hind legs sank before we took off, and suddenly we were going like blazes and I wasn’t afraid at all. I felt completely in harmony with the horse and the land, as if we were a whole tree simply being stirred by the wind in its branches. I remember being sure that nothing would happen to me then, but some other time, yes, eventually. And it made me very happy. I thought of all the people who are afraid and hoard things, and themselves, and I thought, when everybody in the world comes to realize what I felt going up the hill, then there’ll be a kind of right economy of living and of using and using up. Do you know what I mean?” Danny had clenched his fist, but his eyes were bright as if he still laughed at himself. “Did you ever wear out a sweater you particularly liked, and throw it away finally?”

  She thought of the green woolen gloves of Sister Alicia, which she had neither worn nor thrown away. “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, that’s all I mean. And the lambs who didn’t realize how much wool they were losing when somebody sheared them to make the sweater, because they could grow more wool. It’s very simple.” He turned to the coffeepot he had reheated, which was already boiling.

  “Yes.” She knew. And like Richard and the kite, because he could make another kite. She thought of Abby with a sense of vacuity suddenly, as if the luncheon had been eradicated. For an instant, she felt as if her mind had overflowed a brim and was swimming emptily into space. She stood up.

  Danny came toward her, put his hands on her shoulders, and though she felt it was only a gesture, a gesture instead of a word, the spell was broken. She was uneasy at his touch, and the uneasiness was a point of concreteness. “I should go back,” she said. “I’m way late.”

  His hands came down, pinning her elbows hard against her sides, and he kissed her suddenly, held his lips hard against hers for a moment, and she felt his warm breath on her upper lip before he released her.

  “You are,” he said, looking at her.

  “Why did you—” She stopped, because the kiss had so mingled tenderness and roughness, she didn’t know how to take it.

  “Why, Terry?” he said, turning away from her, smiling.
“Did you mind?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Would Richard mind?”

  “I suppose.” She buttoned her coat. “I must go,” she said, moving toward the door.

  Danny swung the door open for her, smiling his easy smile, as if nothing had happened. “Come back tomorrow? Come for lunch.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m busy this week.”

  “All right, come—next Monday, maybe?”

  “All right.” She smiled, too, and put her hand out automatically and Danny shook it once, politely.

  She ran the two blocks to the Black Cat. A little like the horse, she thought. But not enough, not enough to be perfect, and what Danny meant was perfect.

  11

  “The pastimes of idle people,” Carol said, stretching her legs out before her on the swing seat. “It’s time Abby got herself a job again.”

  Therese said nothing. She hadn’t told Carol all the conversation at lunch, but she didn’t want to talk about Abby anymore.

  “Don’t you want to sit in a more comfortable chair?”

  “No,” Therese said. She was sitting on a leather stool near the swing seat. They had finished dinner a few moments ago, and then come up to this room that Therese had not seen before, a glass-enclosed porch off the plain green room.

  “What else did Abby say that bothers you?” Carol asked, still looking straight before her, down her long legs in the navy blue slacks.

  Carol seemed tired. She was worried about other things, Therese thought, more important things than this. “Nothing. Does it bother you, Carol?”

  “Bother me?”

  “You’re different with me tonight.”

  Carol glanced at her. “You imagine,” she said, and the pleasant vibration of her voice faded into silence again.

  The page she had written last night, Therese thought, had nothing to do with this Carol, was not addressed to her. I feel I am in love with you, she had written, and it should be spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.