Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
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 re
“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. Down 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?”
Guy hesitated, frowning.
“Is she in Texas, too?”
“Yes.”
“Going to see her?”
“I’ll see her. We’re going to arrange the divorce now.” His teeth set. Why had he said it?
Bruno sneered. “What kind of girls you find to marry down there?”
“Very pretty,” Guy replied. “Some of them.”
“Mostly dumb though, huh?”
“They can be.” He smiled to himself. Miriam was the kind of Southern girl Bruno probably meant.
“What kind of girl’s your wife?”
“Rather pretty,” Guy said cautiously. “Red hair. A little plump.”
“What’s her name?”
“Miriam. Miriam Joyce.”
“Hm-m. Smart or dumb?”
“She’s not an intellectual. I didn’t want to marry an intellectual.”
“And you loved her like hell, huh?”
Why? Did he show it? Bruno’s eyes were fixed on him, missing nothing, unblinking, as if their exhaustion had passed the point where sleep is imperative. Guy had a feeling those gray eyes had been searching him for hours and hours. “Why do you say that?”
“You’re a nice guy. You take everything serious. You take women the hard way, too, don’t you?”
“What’s the hard way?” he retorted. But he felt a rush of affection for Bruno because Bruno had said what he thought about him. Most people, Guy knew, didn’t say what they thought about him.
Bruno made little scallops in the air with his hands, and sighed.
“What’s the hard way?” Guy repeated.
“All out, with a lot of high hopes. Then you get kicked in the teeth, right?”
“Not entirely.” A throb of self-pity piqued him, however, and he got up, taking his drink with him. There was no place to move in the room. The swaying of the train made it difficult even to stand upright.
And Bruno kept staring at him, one old-fashioned foot dangling at the end of the crossed leg, flicking his finger again and again on the cigarette he held over his plate. The unfinished pink and black steak was slowly being covered by the rain of ashes. Bruno looked less friendly, Guy suspected, since he had told him he was married. And more curious.
“What happened with your wife? She start sleeping around?”
That irritated him, too, Bruno’s accuracy. “No. That’s all past anyway.”
“But you’re still married to her. Couldn’t you get a divorce before now?”
Guy felt instantaneous shame. “I haven’t been much concerned about a divorce.”
“What’s happened now?”
“She just decided she wanted one. I think she’s going to have a child.”
“Oh. Fine time to decide, huh? She’s been sleeping around for three years and finally landed somebody?”
Just what had happened, of course, and probably it had taken the baby to do it. How did Bruno know? Guy felt that Bruno was superimposing upon Miriam the knowledge and hatred of someone else he knew. Guy turned to the window. The window gave him nothing but his own image. He could feel his heartbeats shaking his body, deeper than the train’s vibrations. Perhaps, he thought, his heart was beating because he had never told anyone so much about Miriam. He had never told Anne as much as Bruno knew already. Except that Miriam had once been different—sweet, loyal, lonely, terribly in need of him and of freedom from her family. He would see Miriam tomorrow, be able to touch her by putting out his hand. He could not bear the thought of touching her oversoft flesh that once he had loved. Failure overwhelmed him suddenly.
“What happened with your marriage?” Bruno’s voice asked gently, right behind him. “I’m really very interested, as a friend. How old was she?”
“Eighteen.”
“She start sleeping around right away?”
Guy turned reflexively, as if to shoulder Miriam’s guilt. “That’s not the only thing women do, you know.”
“But she did, didn’t she?”
Guy looked away, annoyed and fascinated at the same time. “Yes.” How ugly the little word sounded, hissing in his ears!
“I know that Southern redhead type,” Bruno said, poking at his apple pie.
Guy was conscious again of an acute and absolutely useless shame. Useless, because nothing Miriam had done or said would embarrass or surprise Bruno. Bruno seemed incapable of surprise, only of a whetting of interest.
Bruno looked down at his plate with coy amusement. His eyes widened, bright as they could be with the bloodshot and the blue circles. “Marriage,” he sighed.
The word “marriage” lingered in Guy’s ears, too. It was a solemn word to him. It had the primordial solemnity of holy, love, sin. It was Miriam’s round terra cotta-colored mouth saying, “Why should I put myself out for you?” and it was Anne’s eyes as she pushed her hair back and looked up at him on the lawn of her house where she planted crocuses. It was Miriam turning from the tall thin window in the room in Chicago, lifting her freckled, shield-shaped face directly up to his as she always did before she told a lie, and Steve’s long dark head, insolently smiling. Memories began to crowd in, and he wanted to put his hands up and push them back. The room
“I mean it,” Bruno’s voice said distantly. “What happened? You don’t mind telling me, do you? I’m interested.”
Steve happened. Guy picked up his drink. He saw the afternoon in Chicago, framed by the doorway of the room, the image gray and black now like a photograph. The afternoon he had found them in the apartment, like no other afternoon, with its own color, taste, and sound, its own world, like a horrible little work of art. Like a date in history fixed in time. Or wasn’t it just the opposite, that it traveled with him always? For here it was now, as clear as it had ever been. And, worst of all, he was aware of an impulse to tell Bruno everything, the stranger on the train who would listen, commiserate, and forget. The idea of telling Bruno began to comfort him. Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on the train by any means. He was cruel and corrupt enough himself to appreciate a story like that of his first love. And Steve was only the surprise ending that made the rest fall into place. Steve wasn’t the first betrayal. It was only his twenty-six-year-old pride that had exploded in his face that afternoon. He had told the story to himself a thousand times, a classic story, dramatic for all his stupidity. His stupidity only lent it humor.
“I expected too much of her,” Guy said casually, “without any right to. She happened to like attention. She’ll probably flirt all her life, no matter whom she’s with.”
“I know, the eternal high school type.” Bruno waved his hand. “Can’t even pretend to belong to one guy, ever.”
Guy looked at him. Miriam had, of course, once.
Abruptly he abandoned his idea of telling Bruno, ashamed that he had nearly begun. Bruno seemed unconcerned now, in fact, whether he told it or not. Slumped, Bruno was drawing with a match in the gravy of his plate. The downturned half of his mouth, in profile, was sunken between nose and chin like the mouth of an old man. The mouth seemed to say, whatever the story, it was really beneath his contempt to listen.