Strangers on a Train Read online

I keep thinking about that idea we had for a couple of murders. It could be done, I am sure. I cannot express to you my supremest confidence in the idea! Though I know subject does not interest you.

  What’s what with your wife as that was very interesting? Please write me soon. Outside of losing wallit in El Paso (stolen right off a bar in front of me) nothing has happened of note. Didn’t like El Paso, with apologies to you.

  Hoping to hear from you soon,

  Your friend,

  Charles A. Bruno

  P.S. Very sorry for sleeping late and missing you that A.M.

  C.A.B.

  The letter pleased him somehow. It was pleasant to think of Bruno’s freedom.

  “Grits!” he said happily to his mother. “Never get grits with my fried eggs up North!”

  He put on a favorite old robe that was too hot for the weather, and sat back in bed with the Metcalf Star and the teetery-legged bed tray that held his breakfast.

  Afterward, he showered and dressed as if there were something he had to do that day, but there wasn’t. He had visited the Cartwrights yesterday. He might have seen Peter Wriggs, his boyhood friend, but Peter had a job in New Orleans now. What was Miriam doing, he wondered. Perhaps manicuring her nails on her back porch, or playing checkers with some little girl neighbor who adored her, who wanted to be just like her. Miriam was never one to brood when a plan went askew. Guy lighted a cigarette.

  A soft, intermittent chink came from downstairs, where his mother or Ursline the cook was cleaning the silver and dropping it piece by piece onto a heap.

  Why hadn’t he left for Mexico today? The next idle twenty-four hours were going to be miserable, he knew. Tonight, his uncle again, and probably some friends of his mother’s dropping over. They all wanted to see him. Since his last visit, the Metcalf Star had printed a column about him and his work, mentioning his scholarships, the Prix de Rome that he hadn’t been able to use because of the war, the store he had designed in Pittsburgh, and the little annex infirmary of the hospital in Chicago. It read so impressively in a newspaper. It had almost made him feel important, he remembered, the lonely day in New York when the clipping had arrived in his mother’s letter.

  A sudden impulse to write Bruno made him sit down at his work table, but, with his pen in his hand, he realized he had nothing to say. He could see Bruno in his rust-brown suit, camera strap over his shoulder, plodding up some dry hill in Santa Fe, grinning with his bad teeth at something, lifting his camera unsteadily and clicking. Bruno with a thousand easy dollars in his pocket, sitting in a bar, waiting for his mother. What did he have to say to Bruno? He recapped his fountain pen and tossed it back on the table.

  “Mama?” he called. He ran downstairs. “How about a movie this afternoon?”

  His mother said she had already been to movies twice that week. “You know you don’t like movies,” she chided him.

  “Mama, I really want to go!” he smiled, and insisted.

  eight

  The telephone rang that night at about eleven. His mother answered it, then came in and called him from the living room where he sat with his uncle and his uncle’s wife and his two cousins, Ritchie and Ty.

  “It’s long-distance,” his mother said.

  Guy nodded. It would be Brillhart, of course, asking for further explanations. Guy had answered his letter that day.

  “Hello, Guy,” the voice said. “Charley.”

  “Charley who?”

  “Charley Bruno.”

  “Oh!—How are you? Thanks for the book.”

  “I dint send it yet but I will,” Bruno said with the drunken cheer Guy remembered from the train. “Coming out to Santa Fe?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “What about Palm Beach? Can I visit you there in a couple weeks? I’d like to see how it looks.”

  “Sorry, that’s all off.”

  “Off? Why?”

  “Complications. I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Account of your wife?”

  “N-no.” Guy felt vaguely irritated.

  “She wants you to stay with her?”

  “Yes. Sort of.”

  “Miriam wants to come out to Palm Beach?”

  Guy was surprised he remembered her name.

  “You haven’t got your divorce, huh?”

  “Getting it,” Guy said tersely.

  “Yes, I’m paying for this call!” Bruno shouted to someone. “Cheeses!” disgustedly. “Listen, Guy, you gave up that job account of her?”

  “Not exactly. It doesn’t matter. It’s finished.”

  “You have to wait till the child’s born for a divorce?”

  Guy said nothing.

  “The other guy’s not going to marry her, huh?”

  “Oh, yes, he is—”

  “Yeah?” Bruno interrupted cynically.

  “I can’t talk any longer. We’ve got guests here tonight. I wish you a pleasant trip, Charley.”

  “When can we talk? Tomorrow?”

  “I won’t be here tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” Bruno sounded lost now, and Guy hoped he was. Then the voice again, with sullen intimacy, “Listen, Guy, if you want anything done, you know, all you have to do is give a sign.”

  Guy frowned. A question took form in his mind, and immediately he knew the answer. He remembered Bruno’s idea for a murder.

  “What do you want, Guy?”

  “Nothing. I’m very content. Understand?” But it was drunken bravado on Bruno’s part, he thought. Why should he react seriously?

  “Guy, I mean it,” the voice slurred, drunker than before.

  “Good-by, Charley,” Guy said. He waited for Bruno to hang up.

  “Doesn’t sound like everything’s fine,” Bruno challenged.

  “I don’t see that it’s any of your business.”

  “Guy!” in a tearful whine.

  Guy started to speak, but the line clicked and went dead. He had an impulse to ask the operator to trace the call. Then he thought, drunken bravado. And boredom. It annoyed him that Bruno had his address. Guy ran his hand hard across his hair, and went back into the living room.

  nine

  All of what he had just told her of Miriam, Guy thought, did not matter so much as the fact he and Anne were together on the gravel path. He took her hand as they walked, and gazed around him at the scene in which every object was foreign—a broad level avenue bordered with giant trees like the Champs-Elysées, military statues on pedestals, and beyond, buildings he did not know. The Paseo de la Reforma. Anne walked beside him with her head still lowered, nearly matching his slow paces. Their shoulders brushed, and he glanced at her to see if she were about to speak, to say he was right in what he had decided, but her lips were still thoughtful. Her pale yellow hair, held by a silver bar at the back of her neck, made lazy movements in the wind behind her. It was the second summer he had seen her when the sun had only begun to tan her face, so her skin about equaled in pigment the color of her hair. Soon her face would be darker than her hair, but Guy liked her best the way she was now, like something made of white gold.

  She turned to him with the faintest smile of self-consciousness on her lips because he had been staring at her. “You couldn’t have borne it, Guy?”

  “No. Don’t ask me why. I couldn’t.” He saw that her smile stayed, tinged with perplexity, perhaps annoyance.

  “It’s such a big thing to give up.”

  It vexed him now. He felt done with it. “I simply loathe her,” he said quietly.

  “But you shouldn’t loathe anything.”

  He made a nervous gesture. “I loathe her because I’ve told you all this while we’re walking here!”

  “Guy, really!”

  “She’s everything that should be loathed,” he went on, staring in front of him. “Sometimes I think I hate everything in the world. No decency, no conscience. She’s what people mean when they say America never grows up, America rewards the corrupt. She’s the type who goes to the bad movies, acts
in them, reads the love-story magazines, lives in a bungalow, and whips her husband into earning more money this year so they can buy on the installment plan next year, breaks up her neighbor’s marriage—”

  “Stop it, Guy! You talk so like a child!” She drew away from him.

  “And the fact I once loved her,” Guy added, “loved all of it, makes me ill.”

  They stopped, looking at each other. He had had to say it, here and now, the ugliest thing he could say. He wanted to suffer also from Anne’s disapproval, perhaps from her turning away and leaving him to finish the walk by himself. She had left him on one or two other occasions, when he had been unreasonable.

  Anne said, in that distant, expressionless tone that terrified him, because he felt she might abandon him and never come back, “Sometimes I can believe you’re still in love with her.”

  He smiled, and she softened. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Oh, Guy!” She put out her hand again, like a gesture of beseeching, and he took it. “If you’d only grow up!”

  “I read somewhere people don’t grow emotionally.”

  “I don’t care what you read. They do. I’ll prove it to you if it’s the last thing I do.”

  He felt secure suddenly. “What else can I think about now?” he asked perversely, lowering his voice.

  “That you were never closer to being free of her than now, Guy. What do you suppose you should think about?”

  He lifted his head higher. There was a big pink sign on the top of a building: TOME XX, and all at once he was curious to know what it meant and wanted to ask Anne. He wanted to ask her why everything was so much easier and simpler when he was with her, but pride kept him from asking now, and the question would have been rhetorical anyway, unanswerable by Anne in words, because the answer was simply Anne. It had been so since the day he met her, in the dingy basement of the Art Institute in New York, the rainy day he had slogged in and addressed the only living thing he saw, the Chinese red raincoat and hood. The red raincoat and hood had turned and said: “You get to 9A from the first floor. You didn’t have to come all the way down here.” And then her quick, amused laugh that mysteriously, immediately, lifted his rage. He had learned to smile by quarter inches, frightened of her, a little contemptuous of her new dark green convertible. “A car just makes more sense,” Anne said, “when you live in Long Island.” The days when he was contemptuous of everything and courses taken here and there were no more than tests to make sure he knew all the instructor had to say, or to see how fast he could learn it and leave. “How do you suppose anybody gets in if not through pull? They can still throw you out if they don’t like you.” He had seen it her way finally, the right way, and gone to the exclusive Deems Architectural Academy in Brooklyn for a year, through her father’s knowing a man on the board of directors.

  “I know you have it in you, Guy,” Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, “the capacity to be terribly happy.”

  Guy nodded quickly, though Anne was not looking at him. He felt somehow ashamed. Anne had the capacity to be happy. She was happy now, she had been happy before she met him, and it was only he, his problems, that ever seemed to daunt her happiness for an instant. He would be happy, too, when he lived with Anne. He had told her so, but he could not bear to tell her again now.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  A big round house of glass had come into view under the trees of Chapultepec Park.

  “The botanical gardens,” Anne said.

  There was no one inside the building, not even a caretaker. The air smelled of warm, fresh earth. They walked around, reading unpronounceable names of plants that might have come from another planet. Anne had a favorite plant. She had watched it grow for three years, she said, visiting it on successive summers with her father.

  “Only I can’t ever remember these names,” she said.

  “Why should you remember?”

  They had lunch at Sanborn’s with Anne’s mother, then walked around in the store until it was time for Mrs. Faulkner’s afternoon nap. Mrs. Faulkner was a thin, nervously energetic woman, tall as Anne, and for her age as attractive. Guy had come to be devoted to her, because she was devoted to him. At first, in his mind, he had built up the greatest handicaps for himself from Anne’s wealthy parents, but not one of them had come true, and gradually he had shed them. That evening, the four of them went to a concert at the Bellas Artes, then had a late supper at the Lady Baltimore Restaurant across the street from the Ritz.

  The Faulkners were sorry he wouldn’t be able to stay the summer with them in Acapulco. Anne’s father, an importer, intended to build a warehouse on the docks there.

  “We can’t expect to interest him in a warehouse if he’s building a whole country club,” Mrs. Faulkner said.

  Guy said nothing. He couldn’t look at Anne. He had asked her not to tell her parents about Palm Beach until after he left. Where would he go next week? He might go to Chicago and study for a couple of months. He had stored away his possessions in New York, and his landlady awaited his word as to whether to rent his apartment or not. If he went to Chicago, he might see the great Saarinen in Evanston and Tim O’Flaherty, a young architect who had had no recognition yet, but whom Guy believed in. There might be a job or two in Chicago. But New York was too dismal a prospect without Anne.

  Mrs. Faulkner laid her hand on his forearm and laughed. “He wouldn’t smile if he got all New York to build over, would you, Guy?”

  He hadn’t been listening. He wanted Anne to take a walk with him later, but she insisted on his coming up to their suite at the Ritz to see the silk dressing gown she had bought for her cousin Teddy, before she sent it off. And then, of course, it was too late for a walk.

  He was staying at the Hotel Montecarlo, about ten blocks from the Hotel Ritz, a great shabby building that looked like the former residence of a military general. One entered it through a wide carriage drive, paved in black and white tile like a bathroom floor. This gave into a huge dark lobby, also tile floored. There was a grotto-like barroom and a restaurant that was always empty. Stained marble stairs wound around the patio, and going up them behind the bellhop yesterday, Guy had seen, through open doorways and windows, a Japanese couple playing cards, a woman kneeling at prayer, people writing letters at tables or merely standing with a strange air of captivity. A masculine gloom and an untraceable promise of the supernatural oppressed the whole place, and Guy had liked it instantly, though the Faulkners, including Anne, chaffed him about his choice.

  His cheap little room in a back corner was crammed with pink and brown painted furniture, had a bed like a fallen cake, and a bath down the hall. Somewhere down in the patio, water dripped continuously, and the sporadic flush of toilets sounded torrential.

  When he got back from the Ritz, Guy deposited his wristwatch, a present from Anne, on the pink bed table, and his billfold and keys on the scratched brown bureau, as he might have done at home. He felt very content as he got into bed with his Mexican newspapers and a book on English architecture that he had found at the Alameda bookstore that afternoon. After a second plunge at the Spanish, he leaned his head back against the pillow and gazed at the offensive room, listened to the little ratlike sounds of human activity from all parts of the building. What was it that he liked, he wondered. To immerse himself in ugly, uncomfortable, undignified living so that he gained new power to fight it in his work? Or was it a sense of hiding from Miriam? He would be harder to find here than at the Ritz.

  Anne telephoned him the next morning to say that a telegram had come for him. “I just happened to hear them paging you,” she said. “They were about to give it up.”

  “Would you read it to me, Anne?”

  Anne read: “‘Miriam suffered miscarriage yesterday. Upset and asking to see you. Can you come home? Mama.’—Oh, Guy!”

  He felt sick of it, all of it. “She did it herself,” he murmured.

  “You don’t know, Guy.”

  “I know.”

/>   “Don’t you think you’d better see her?”

  His fingers tightened on the telephone. “I’ll get the Palmyra back anyway,” he said. “When was the telegram sent?”

  “The ninth. Tuesday, at 4 P.M.”

  He sent a telegram off to Mr. Brillhart, asking if he might be reconsidered for the job. Of course he would be, he thought, but how asinine it made him. Because of Miriam. He wrote to Miriam:

  This changes both our plans, of course. Regardless of yours, I mean to get the divorce now. I shall be in Texas in a few days. I hope you will be well by then, but if not, I can manage whatever is necessary alone.

  Again my wishes for your quick recovery.

  Guy

  Shall be at this address until Sunday.

  He sent it airmail special delivery.

  Then he called up Anne. He wanted to take her to the best restaurant in the city that night. He wanted the most exotic cocktails in the Ritz Bar to start with, all of them.

  “You really feel happy?” Anne asked, laughing, as if she couldn’t quite believe him.

  “Happy and—strange. Muy extranjero.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t think it was fated. I didn’t think it was part of my destiny. The Palmyra, I mean.”

  “I did.”

  “Oh, you did!”

  “Why do you think I was so mad at you yesterday?”

  He really did not expect an answer from Miriam, but Friday morning when he and Anne were in Xochimilco, he felt prompted to call his hotel to see if a message had come. There was a telegram waiting. And after saying he would pick it up in a few minutes, he couldn’t wait, once he was back in Mexico City, and telephoned the hotel again from a drugstore in the Socalo. The Montecarlo clerk read it to him: “‘Have to talk with you first. Please come soon. Love, Miriam.’”

  “She’ll make a bit of a fuss,” Guy said after he repeated it to Anne. “I’m sure the other man doesn’t want to marry her. He’s got a wife now.”

  “Oh.”

  He glanced at her as they walked, wanting to say something to her about her patience with him, with Miriam, with all of it. “Let’s forget it,” he smiled, and began to walk faster.