Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith Page 17

  Now she was out of the town. The wind came strong and clean through the open window, and the tar highway hissed under the tires. Her eyes, one wide, the other a slit in a mound of purple and yellow, watched the road at the farthest reach of the headlights. It was a two-lane road that wound around mountainside after mountainside in a general westward direction toward Mexico City. After Mexico City, she would go north on the road to Juarez. She pressed the pedal to the floor and the car leapt like a fish, took a long hill at a smoothly increasing speed, turned abruptly and began another climb.

  Then, at a curve to the left, the car leaned in the opposite direction, going too fast for the turn it had to make. The rubber shrieked at Florence’s sharp turning, the wheels on the right side struck gravel, dropped, and then the car shot over the edge and began to fall. It turned over and over, bumping down the mountainside with Florence inside it, and burst into flame before it quite came to a stop in the valley.

  THE STILL POINT OF THE

  TURNING WORLD

  There is a small park, hardly more than a square, far over on the West Side in the lower Twenties, that is almost always deserted. A low iron fence runs around it, setting it off from a used car lot, a big redstone public dispensary of some sort, and the plain gray backs of shabby apartment buildings that share the same block with it. Three or four benches stand in pleasant places along the two curving cement paths that one may enter by, and that meet in the center at a cement drinking fountain forever bubbling an inch or so of cool water.

  From quite a distance up or down the avenue the little park shines like an emerald isle, a bright and inviting surprise in a sea of drab grayness. Mrs. Robertson noticed it one day from a corner of the Castle Terrace Apartments three blocks away, where she lived. She took her small son Philip to play there that afternoon. It was a splendid place for him, because the low iron fence kept him within bounds even when her back was turned, and it was quiet and sunny, unlittered and untrodden. For a city park it was unusually pretty, too, as if the gardeners had been inspired by a special and personal pride when they made it. The fine close-cropped grass extended into the very corners of the four vaguely triangular lawns. If the grass was not to be walked on, there was no one about to tell her so. Of course, the neighborhood was an abruptly sordid contrast with nearby Castle Terrace, but so was the neighborhood in every direction around Castle Terrace. Its square block of apartments stood like a feudal castle in the center of vassal land in which even the dingiest shops and restaurants bore sycophantic names like the King George, the Crown Tavern, the Belvedere Bar and Grill, as if to curry patronage from the manor. The only people Mrs. Robertson saw near the park, however, were the busy truck drivers who came and went around a diner a block away, and an occasional old man in a pinned-together overcoat who shuffled by too drunk or too tired even to glance at the park. Mrs. Robertson read her book until she grew tired of it, then picked up some knitting she had brought, and after a while just sat and daydreamed in the tranquillity. She debated the item she always left until last in her dinner, the vegetable she would buy in a frozen package on the way home.

  She had just decided on mixed carrots and peas when a young woman with a child about the age of Philip came into the park and sat down on one of the benches. The little boy was dark-haired and had a blue and white beach ball which interested Philip.

  The dark-haired little boy climbed over the scalloped wire fence into the lawn where Philip played. “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” said Philip.

  In a minute they were playing together, Philip with the beach ball and the dark-haired little boy with Philip’s tricycle. Mrs. Robertson did not like Philip’s playing with just any child, but this had happened so quickly there was nothing to be done about it. She intended to leave in about fifteen minutes anyway. Idly, she studied the other woman, surmising immediately that she was rather poor and that she lived in one of the shabby apartment buildings close by. She had very light blond hair that did not quite look bleached, though, and she was rather pretty. She sat with her hands in the pockets of her black polo coat, her knees close together, almost as if she were cold, and she paid little attention to her child, Mrs. Robertson thought, if it was hers. She stared straight before her with a faint smile on her lips, as if she were miles away in thought.

  Soon Mrs. Robertson got up and went to get Philip. He and the dark-haired child had become such good friends, Philip cried a little when she loosened his hands from the beach ball and drew him and his tricycle toward the path. Mrs. Robertson and the blond woman exchanged a smile of understanding, but they did not speak to each other. Mrs. Robertson was not given to speaking to strangers, and the other woman seemed still lost in her trance.

  The next afternoon, the blond young woman was in the park when Mrs. Robertson arrived, on the same bench, in the same attitude in the black polo coat.

  “Dickie!” Philip shrieked when he saw the little boy, and his baby voice cracked with joy.

  It gave Mrs. Robertson a tweak of surprise, somehow of unease, that Philip knew the other little boy’s name. She watched Philip run totteringly along the path to meet Dickie, who stood with a wide smile, holding his beach ball toward Philip in two outstretched arms. Philip’s rush of greeting knocked the other little boy down, and they both scrambled after the rolling ball. Mrs. Robertson knew suddenly in that instant they were together, bound up as one being in play, what had made her uneasy: she was not sure the other little boy was clean. He might even have things in his hair. Mrs. Robertson had lived until recently in a suburb of Philadelphia, but she had heard about the unsanitary conditions of New York’s tenement apartments. The dark-haired little boy looked washed enough in his pink-and-white striped play overalls, but one never knew what kind of disease a child who lived in a tenement might carry, and Philip would not have the resistance of a child brought up in such an environment. She would have to watch to see he did not put things in his mouth.

  Mrs. Robertson gave the blond woman a nod and a smile as she sat down on the bench where she had been the day before. The other woman responded with a nod that Mrs. Robertson could just detect, and her eyes resumed their vacant gaze, quite above the figures of the two little boys playing on the grass. Her expression was so completely oblivious, it aroused Mrs. Robertson’s curiosity. Her smile suggested that she saw into some pleasant and fascinating spectacle in a definite place in space. She was quite young, she decided, probably about twenty-one or -two. What was she thinking of? she wondered. And what would her little boy have to do to make her pay him any notice?

  On the bench across the path, nearer the fountain than Mrs. Robertson, the blond young woman was awaiting her lover. She was thinking what a beautiful sunny, quiet day it was, and wishing, almost, that these meetings in the little park in April afternoons were all that he and she would know, could know, or would want to know. She was thinking that a mood came upon her every afternoon as she and Dickie left the house, as she descended the brownstone steps, feeling the warmth of the spring sunlight and its calm clarity upon her before she could take her eyes from Dickie’s feet to look around her. The street where she lived was especially free of traffic, and at two or three in the afternoons almost as tranquil as the park itself. It presented two smooth parallel walls of brownstone, and even the gray-blue band of street between them was sharp and clear. Here and there a window was dotted by a white bottle of milk on the sill, or a pair of arms at rest on a flattened pillow. Above the arms, resigned and mildly curious eyes gazed down, athirst for any movement on the street, and there was so little: a woman in a housedress airing a nondescript white dog along the curb, a solitary child bouncing a ball beside a stoop post, maybe a boy with a rattly laundry cart, a passing cat. Everyone except the aged and a few women were off at work. Like her husband, Charles, who drove a bus on Broadway, who was gone by eight in the morning and generally did not return until after five. To her, the street seemed empty even of people
, because she did not think the woman with her white dog or the arms on the two or three windowsills were alive in the way she knew she was alive. She did not believe they were aware in the same way of the serenity of the street, an odd kind of serenity that clamored to be noticed, or even of its dazzling cleanliness at that hour of the afternoon in the month of April. The woman with the dog did not feel the same as she, coming down her own steps onto the sidewalk, did not sense that the afternoon there belonged to women, to the wives who were alone now with the chores they were complete mistresses of, whose schedule they could rearrange with the flexibility of a woman’s day, to an hour earlier if they chose, an hour later, or perhaps not until tomorrow—a woman’s world, the street and its two or three reedy trees in iron cages, their thin heads green once more, the street and its unutterable peace. She did not, however, consider herself an ordinary housewife. And there was not the stillness of the street or of the park inside her on the afternoons when he was to come to meet her, though her perception of its stillness and the park’s were dependent upon him. On the afternoons she was to see him, she saw beyond the street and the park. She would look eastward where the street disappeared in a huddled jagged mass of buildings, and imagine noise and seething people. She would look west and something in her would leap at the sight of the pier on the river, at a ship’s high short mast rising in a cross like a strong and mystic promise above the sooty front of the dock building, above the squared top where the pier’s number was written. From this very pier, so close to where she slept every night, she might leave for any corner of the earth, she supposed. And she would wonder if she and Lance would ever really make voyages to foreign places. If she asked him, of course, he would answer such a firm “Certainly we will. Why not?” she would believe and not wonder any longer. Did the woman with the dog ever lift her eyes to look at the pier? Or the woman who had come to the park again today, with the washed and combed little blond boy, who must live in Castle Terrace, did she ever get chills at the sight and smell and sound of the river? But she had probably been all over the world already, been to Europe so many times she knew how each thing would look, what was going to happen next. She would not care to look at the pier.

  The blond young woman looked at her now, sitting reading her book, glancing once in a while to see if her little boy was safe. What could happen to anyone in this park? The sweater she wore over her dress was beautiful in the sunlight, the color of a stick of grape ice held to light. Cashmere. She was young, too, she thought, but her manner was so formal she seemed older. She had not talked with her, she supposed, because she considered her an inferior, but she did not care at all. She was not in a mood for talking. She was not in a mood for reading, either. She could have sat all day happily, dreaming on the bench and gazing into space with the green of the park beneath her eyes and reflecting up into them. She was waiting for Lance. And in this park, wasn’t she able to sit like this even on the days when he could not come? After the hours here, she could smile, very quietly, as if it amused her, when Charles came in very drunk and cheerful late at night, having drunk up all his pay. Strangely, she did not even blame him, if she had spent the afternoon in the park. His job had ruined his nerves—the pushing crowds, the making change, stopping and starting, the schedules to be met, the dodging of darting pedestrians that made him start up in his sleep at night—so he drank to deaden his nerves. He drank to find the stillness that she found in the park. Once, months ago, before she had met Lance, she had brought Charles to the park and he had not liked it, because he could not sit still anymore anywhere. Now the park belonged to her and Lance. After the hours in the park, she could not blame Charles or herself for what had happened. They simply had stopped loving each other, first Charles, then herself. It might have been the lack of quiet that had exhausted them, from the very first when they lived in the ground-floor apartment on the East Side, that had left Charles not enough energy to love her any longer. If he could be bathed in stillness, drink it and hear it, see it and breathe it, sleep for hours in it, she could imagine his forehead smooth again, his eyes opening to look at her again as if he loved her. But she did not even want this now, it was too late. She had found Lance and she loved him. And Lance would love her no matter where he or she were, together or apart, in silence or noise, movement or stillness. Lance had something within him that Charles had not and never had. She knew now. She was not eighteen any longer, as she had been when she married Charles.

  “Philip!”

  Philip stood up and looked guiltily at his mother, who was waiting for him to say, “Yes, Mama,” which he did, with the accent on the last­­ ­syllable.

  “Don’t get mud on your playsuit, darling! Be careful, now.”

  “Yes, Mama.” And he turned back and squatted down by his friend and finished pouring the Dixie cup of water from the fountain into the little pit they had dug in the smooth grass. Dickie had found the discarded cup at the end of the path, and Philip had automatically kept it out of sight when he spoke to his mother. They did not know what they were going to do with the little pit that kept drinking the water, but they were happy and they found something to say to each other every second, so that both talked at once almost all the time. Neither of them in his life had ever found anyone he liked so much as the other.

  Mrs. Robertson looked up immediately when the man came into the park, so few people ever came into the park. He was bareheaded, in a dark suit, and he stopped and stood for a moment on the cement walk, looking at the woman on the bench. Mrs. Robertson’s first reaction was the least sensation of alarm: there was something sinister in his intensity, in his half-smiling observation of the blond woman, in his hands rammed into the pockets of his jacket almost as if he were cold—and as she recognized this single similarity between them, she recognized also that they knew each other, though neither made a sign of greeting. Now he walked with a kind of rigid caution in his shortened step toward the woman and sat down easily beside her, not taking his hands from his pockets or his eyes from her face. And the woman’s expression of bemused content that Mrs. Robertson had remarked both yesterday and today did not alter even in the least. The man’s lips moved, the woman looked at him and smiled, and Mrs. Robertson again felt subtly disturbed by what she beheld. It was vaguely disturbing that a man had come in and sat down on a bench at all. That he was a stranger making advances had flitted into her mind and out, because of the aura of intimacy that wrapped them both. Both looked before them now, leaned very slightly toward each other, though between them was one of the iron arms that divided the bench into four or five seats, and then the man reached over and took the young woman’s hand gently from her pocket, drawing it by the wrist beneath the iron bar until he held it in his own hand, resting it on his crossed leg. And suddenly Mrs. Robertson knew: they were lovers. Of course! Why had it taken her so long to guess? Now she began to watch fascinatedly, covertly. For a few moments she was captured by the obvious and attractive happiness in both of them, by the pride in the lift of their heads as they gazed, he, too, now in the sightless, half-smiling way she had seen first in the woman, straight ahead of them as if at something far beyond the park’s iron fence. They were certainly unlike husband and wife, she thought, with a strange rise of excitement, yet neither did they behave quite as intensely as she thought lovers should behave, though she reminded herself she had probably never seen a pair of clandestine lovers, only read about them. And these were certainly clandestine lovers. She saw it all: a husband (with dark hair) who worked during the day and came home at six o’clock, all unsuspecting that his wife had spent the afternoon with another man. Mrs. Robertson felt a pang of compassion for the deceived husband. Yes, the blond woman was clearly rather cheap—her high-heeled pumps, her hair lightened with peroxide probably. Would she take the lover home with her? Mrs. Robertson hoped she would not have to witness that. And in the next moment, she admitted to herself she would like to see just that, see them go away together. She turned a p
age she hadn’t read, conscious of the sound of her thin gold bracelet touching her watch. She looked over her reading glasses again. The man was talking, but so low she could hear not even a murmur. His head was back, resting on the back of the bench, and the woman watched his face, more alert now than Mrs. Robertson had yet seen her, though still with her soft unconscious-looking smile. The man spread his fingers and took firmer grip on her hand, and Mrs. Robertson felt a small wave of pleasure break over her. What did he talk to her about? she wondered. Or could she possibly be wrong about the whole thing? Was the woman not the child’s mother, only a paid sitter, or a nursemaid? But both the woman and the child did not look well enough dressed for such a relationship to be likely. And as if to asseverate her opinion, the child suddenly came running across the path, she watched the woman gather him in her arms, take a handkerchief from her bag, and wipe his nose with a twist, and she caught a quality, in both of them, beyond a shadow of doubt now, that was like a statement that they were mother and child. The man had brought his other hand from his pocket with a handkerchief, too, and having put the handkerchief back, he held now, as if he had just discovered it, a small blue automobile on his palm. The woman said something, and the little boy threw his arms about the man’s neck, kissed his cheek, and darted away, so quickly Mrs. Robertson could hardly believe she had seen it. Yet she had seen it, of course, and there had been in that, too, an unmistakable look of its having been done before. She stared at the two unabashedly as they leaned forward together, smilingly watching the children.

  Philip! He was playing with the automobile, too. The little boy was sharing it with him. Mrs. Robertson stood up involuntarily, then sat down again. She did not like his playing with the toy, felt somehow that the automobile was not quite right, not quite clean, either, like the little boy. Again she looked at the two on the bench—she could look at them openly for all they appeared aware of her—and again they were leaning back comfortably, more comfortably than seemed possible on the hard bench, and their arms were interlocked, their hands clasped more closely under the iron bar between them. The man talked, and the woman now and again said something in response. It was unusual that he should be so fond of the child. Or was he only pretending? What were they talking about? How they must hate the bench arm between them! And she felt a taut, righteous satisfaction that the iron bar was between them. What would the park be like without the iron arms? Men sleeping along the benches. Couples . . .