Highsmith, Patricia (13 page)

Carol turned around, smiling. “Just plants,” she repeated.

“What about tonight?”

“All right. But I won’t stay. It’s only three. I’ll give you a ring around six.” Carol dropped her lighter in her handbag. It was not the handbag Therese had given her. “I feel like looking at furniture this afternoon.”

“Furniture? In stores?”

“In stores or at the Parke-Bernet. Furniture does me good.” Carol reached for her coat on the armchair, and again Therese noticed the long line from her shoulder to the wide leather belt, continued in her leg. It was beautiful, like a chord of music or a whole ballet. She was beautiful, and why should her days be so empty now, Therese wondered, when she was made to live with people who loved her, to walk in beautiful houses in beautiful cities, along blue seacoasts with a long horizon and a blue sky to background her.

“Bye-bye,” Carol said, and in the same movement with which she put on her coat, she put her arm around Therese’s waist. It was only an instant, too disconcerting with Carol’s arm suddenly about her, to be relief or end or beginning, before the doorbell rang in their ears like the tearing of a brass wall. Carol smiled. “Who is it?” she asked.

Therese felt the sting of Carol’s thumbnail in her wrist as she released her. “Richard probably.” It could only be Richard, because she knew his long ring.

“Good. I’d like to meet him.”

Therese pressed the bell, then heard Richard’s firm, hopping steps on the stairs. She opened the door.

“Hello,” Richard said. “I decided—”

“Richard, this is Mrs. Aird,” Therese said. “Richard Semco.”

“How do you do?” Carol said.

Richard nodded, with almost a bow. “How do you do,” he said, his blue eyes stretched wide.

They stared at each other, Richard with a square box in his hands as if he were about to present it to her, and Carol standing with a new cigarette in her hand, neither staying nor leaving. Richard put the box on an end table.

“I was so near, I thought I’d come up,” he said, and under its note of explanation, Therese heard the unconscious assertion of a right, just as she had seen behind his inquisitive stare a spontaneous mistrust of Carol. “I had to take a present to a friend of Mamma’s. This is lebkuchen.” He nodded at the box and smiled, disarmingly. “Anybody want some now?”

Carol and Therese declined. Carol was watching Richard as he opened the box with his pocketknife. She liked his smile, Therese thought. She likes him, the gangling young man with unruly blond hair, the broad lean shoulders, and the big funny feet in moccasins.

“Please sit down,” Therese said to Carol.

“No, I’m going,” she answered.

“I’ll give you half, Terry, then I’ll be going too,” he said.

Therese looked at Carol, and Carol smiled at her nervousness and sat down on a corner of the couch.

“Anyway, don’t let me rush you off,” Richard said, lifting the paper with the cake in it to a kitchen shelf.

“You’re not. You’re a painter, aren’t you, Richard?”

“Yes.” He popped some loose icing into his mouth, and looked at Carol, poised because he was incapable of being un-poised, Therese thought, his eyes frank because he had nothing to hide. “Are you a painter, too?”

“No,” Carol said with another smile. “I’m nothing.”

“The hardest thing to be.”

“Is it? Are you a good painter?”

“I will be. I can be,” said Richard, unperturbed. “Have you got any beer, Terry? I’ve got an awful thirst.”

Therese went to the refrigerator and got out the two bottles that were there. Richard asked Carol if she would like some, but Carol refused.

Then Richard strolled past the couch, looking at the suitcase and the wrappings, and Therese thought he was going to say something about it, but he didn’t.

“I thought we might go to a movie tonight, Terry. I’d like to see that thing at the Victoria. Do you want to?”

“I can’t tonight. I’ve got a date with Mrs. Aird.”

“Oh.” Richard looked at Carol.

Carol put out her cigarette and stood up. “I must be going.” She smiled at Therese. “Call you back around six. If you change your mind, it’s not important. Good-by, Richard.”

“Good-by,” Richard said.

Carol gave her a wink as she went down the stairs. “Be a good girl,”

Carol said.

“Where’d the suitcase come from?” Richard asked when she came back in the room.

“It’s a present.”

“What’s the matter, Terry?”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“Did I interrupt anything important? Who is she?”

Therese picked up Carol’s empty glass. There was a little lipstick at the rim. “She’s a woman I met at the store.”

“Did she give you that suitcase?”

“Yes.”

“It’s quite a present. Is she that rich?”

Therese glanced at him. Richard’s aversion to the wealthy, to the bourgeois, was automatic. “Rich? You mean the mink coat? I don’t know. I did her a favor. I found something she lost in the store.”

“Oh?” he said. “What? You didn’t say anything about it.”

She washed and dried Carol’s glass and set it back on the shelf. “She left her billfold oh the counter and I took it to her, that’s all.”

“Oh. Damned nice reward.” He frowned. “Terry, what is it? You’re not still sore about that silly kite, are you?”

“No, of course not,” she said impatiently. She wished he would go. She put her hands in her robe pockets and walked across the room, stood where Carol had stood, looking at the box of plants. “Phil brought the play over this morning. I started reading it.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?”

“What makes you think I’m worried?” She turned around.

“You’re in another of those miles-away moods again.”

“I’m not worried and I’m not miles away.” She took a deep breath. “It’s funny—you’re so conscious of some moods and so unconscious of others.”

Richard looked at her. “All right, Terry,” he said with a shrug, as if he conceded it. He sat down in the straight chair and poured the rest of the beer into his glass. “What’s this date you have with that woman tonight?”

Therese’s lips widened in a smile as she ran the end of her lipstick over them. For a moment, she stared at the eyebrow tweezers that lay on the little shelf fixed to the inside of the closet door. Then she put the lipstick down on the shelf. “It’s sort of a cocktail party, I think. Sort of a Christmas benefit thing. In some restaurant, she said.”

“Hmm. Do you want to go?”

“I said I would.”

Richard drank his beer, frowning a little over his glass. “What about afterward? Maybe I could hang around here and read the play while you’re gone, and then we could grab a bite and go to the movie.”

“Afterward, I thought I’d better finish the play. I’m supposed to start on Saturday, and I ought to have some ideas in my head.”

Richard stood up. “Yep,” he said casually, with a sigh.

Therese watched him idle over to the couch and stand there, looking down at the manuscript. Then he bent over, studying the title page, and the cast pages. He looked at his wrist watch, and then at her.

“‘Why don’t I read it now?” he asked.

“Go ahead,” she answered with a brusqueness that Richard either didn’t hear or ignored, because he simply lay back on the couch with the manuscript in his hands and began to read. She picked up a book of matches from the shelf. No, he only recognized the “miles away” moods, she thought, when he felt himself deprived of her by distance. And she thought suddenly of the times she had gone to bed with him, of her distance then compared to the closeness that was supposed to be, that everyone talked about. It hadn’t mattered to Richard then, she supposed, because of the physical fact they were in bed together. And it crossed her mind now, seeing Richard’s complete absorption in his reading, seeing the plump, stiff fingers catch a front lock of his hair between them and pull it straight down toward his nose, as she had seen him do a thousand times before, it occurred to her Richard’s attitude was that his place in her life was unassailable, her tie with him permanent and beyond question, because he was the first man she had ever slept with. Therese threw the match cover at the shelf, and a bottle of something fell over.

Richard sat up, smiling a little, surprisedly. “‘S matter, Terry?”

“Richard, I feel like being alone—the rest of the afternoon. Would you mind?”

He got up. The surprise did not leave his face. “No. Of course not.” He dropped the manuscript on the couch again. “All right, Terry. It’s probably better. Maybe you ought to read this now—read it alone,” he said argumentatively, as if he persuaded himself. He looked at his watch again. “Maybe I’ll go down and try to see Sam and Joan for a while.”

She stood there not moving, not even thinking of anything except of the few seconds of time to pass until he would be gone, while he brushed his hand once, a little clingy with its moisture, over her hair, and bent to kiss her. Then quite suddenly she remembered the Degas book she had bought days ago, the book of reproductions that Richard wanted and hadn’t been able to find anywhere. She got it from the bottom drawer of the bureau. “I found this. The Degas book.”

“Oh, swell. Thanks.” He took it in both hands. It was still wrapped.

“Where’d you find it?”

“Frankenberg’s. Of all places.”

“Frankenberg’s.” Richard smiled. “It’s six bucks, isn’t it?”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

Richard had his wallet out. “But I asked you to get it for me.”

“Never mind, really.”

Richard protested, but she didn’t take the money. And a minute later, he was gone, with a promise to call her tomorrow at five. They might do something tomorrow night, he said.

Carol called at ten past six. Did she feel like going to Chinatown, Carol asked. Therese said, of course.

“I’m having cocktails with someone in the St. Regis,” Carol said. “Why don’t you pick me up here? It’s the little room, not the big one. And listen, we’re going on to some theater thing you’ve asked me to. Get it?”

“Some sort of Christmas benefit cocktail party?”

Carol laughed. “Hurry up.”

Therese flew.

Carol’s friend was a man called Stanley McVeigh, a tall and very attractive man of about forty with a mustache and a boxer dog on a leash.

Carol was ready to go when she arrived. Stanley walked out with them, put them into a taxi and gave the driver some money through the window.

“Who’s he?” Therese asked.

“An old friend. Seeing more of me now that Harge and I are separating.”

Therese looked at her. Carol had a wonderful little smile in her eyes tonight. “Do you like him?”

“So so,” Carol said. “Driver, will you make that Chinatown instead of the other?”

It began to rain while they were having dinner. Carol said it always rained in Chinatown, every time she had been here. But it didn’t matter much, because they ducked from one shop to another, looking at things and buying things. Therese saw some sandals with platform heels that she thought were beautiful, rather more Persian looking than Chinese, and she wanted to buy them for Carol, but Carol said Rindy wouldn’t approve.

Rindy was a conservative, and didn’t like her even to go without stockings in summer, and Carol conformed to her. The same store had Chinese suits of a black shiny material, with plain trousers and a high-collared jacket, and Carol bought one for Rindy. Therese bought the sandals for Carol anyway, while Carol was arranging for Rindy’s suit to be sent. She knew the right size just by looking at the sandals, arid it pleased Carol after all that she bought them. Then they spent a weird hour in a Chinese theater where people in the audience were sleeping through all the clangor. And finally they went uptown for a late supper in a restaurant where a harp played. It was a glorious evening, a really magnificent evening.

ON TUESDAY, the fifth day of work, Therese sat in a little bare room with no ceiling at the back of the Black Cat Theatre, waiting for Mr. Donohue, the new director, to come and look at her cardboard model. Yesterday morning, Donohue had replaced Cortes as director, had thrown out her first model, and also thrown out Phil McElroy as the second brother in the play. Phil had walked out yesterday in a huff. It was lucky she hadn’t been thrown out along with her model, Therese thought, so she had followed Mr. Donohue’s instructions to the letter. The new model hadn’t the movable section she had put into the first, which would have permitted the living-room scene to be converted into the terrace scene for the last act. Mr. Donohue seemed to be adamant against anything unusual or even simple. By setting the whole play in the living room, a lot of the dialogue had to be changed in the last act, and some of the cleverest lines had been lost. Her new model indicated a fireplace, broad French windows giving onto a terrace, two doors, a sofa, and a couple of armchairs and a bookcase. It would look, when finished, like a room in a model house at Sloan’s, lifelike down to the last ash tray.

Therese stood up, stretched herself, and reached for the corduroy jacket that was hanging on a nail in the door. The place was cold as a barn. Mr.

Donohue probably wouldn’t come in until afternoon, or not even today if she didn’t remind him again. There was no hurry about the scenery. It might have been the least important matter in the whole production, but she had sat up until late last night, enthusiastically working on the model.

She went out to stand in the wings again. The cast was all on stage with scripts in hand. Mr. Donohue kept running the cast through the whole play, to get the flow of it, he said, but today it seemed to be only putting them to sleep. All the cast looked lazy except Tom Harding, a tall blond young man who had the male lead, and he was a little too energetic. Georgia Halloran was suffering from sinus headaches, and had to stop every hour to put drops in her nose and lie down for a few minutes. Geoffrey Andrews, a middle-aged man who played the heroine’s father, grumbled constantly between his lines because he didn’t like Donohue.

“No, no, no, no,” said Mr. Donohue for the tenth time that morning, stopping everything and causing everybody to lower his script and turn to him with a puzzled, irritated docility. “Let’s start again from page twenty-eight.”