Highsmith, Patricia (34 page)

When had she ever refused Carol when Carol wanted to see her? “Would you like me to drive the car out tomorrow?”

“No, I can come in for it. I’m not an invalid. Did the car behave itself?”

“It’s in good shape,” Therese said. “No scratches anywhere.”

“And you?” Carol asked, but Therese didn’t answer anything. “Shall I see you tomorrow? Do you have any time in the afternoon?”

They arranged to meet in the bar of the Ritz Tower on Fifty-seventh Street, at four thirty, and then they hung up.

Carol was a quarter of an hour late. Therese sat waiting for her at a table where she could see the glass doors that led into the bar, and finally she saw Carol push open one of the doors, and the tension broke in her with a small dull ache. Carol wore the same fur coat, the same black suede pumps she had worn the day Therese first saw her, but now a red scarf set off the blond lifted head. She saw Carol’s face, thinner now, alter with surprise, with a little smile, as Carol caught sight of her.

“Hello,” Therese said.

“I didn’t even know you at first.” And Carol stood by the table a moment, looking at her, before she sat down. “It’s nice of you to see me.”

“Don’t say that.”

The waiter came, and Carol ordered tea. So did Therese, mechanically.

“Do you hate me, Therese?” Carol asked her.

“No.” Therese could smell Carol’s perfume faintly, that familiar sweetness that was strangely unfamiliar now, because it did not evoke what it had once evoked. She put down the match cover she had been crushing in her hand. “How can I hate you, Carol?”

“I suppose you could. You did for a while, didn’t you?” Carol said, as if she told her a fact.

“Hate you? No.” Not quite, she might have said. But she knew that Carol’s eyes were reading it in her face.

“And now—you’re all grown up—with grown-up hair and grown-up clothes.”

Therese looked into her gray eyes that were more serious now, somehow wistful, too, despite the assurance of the proud head, and she looked down again, unable to fathom them. She was still beautiful, Therese thought with a sudden pang of loss. “I’ve learned a few things,” Therese said.

“What?”

“That I—” Therese stopped, her thoughts obstructed suddenly by the memory of the portrait in Sioux Falls.

“You know, you look very fine,” Carol said. “You’ve come out all of a sudden. Is that what comes of getting away from me?”

“No,” Therese said quickly. She frowned down at the tea she didn’t want.

Carol’s phrase “come out” had made her think of being born, and it embarrassed her. Yes, she had been born since she left Carol. She had been born the instant she saw the picture in the library, and her stifled cry then was like the first yell of an infant, being dragged into the world against its will. She looked at Carol. “There was a picture in the library at Sioux Falls,” she said. Then she told Carol about it, simply and without emotion, like a story that had happened to somebody else.

And Carol listened, never taking her eyes from her. Carol watched her as she might have watched from a distance someone she could not help.

“Strange,” Carol said quietly. “And horrifying.”

“It was.” Therese knew Carol understood. She saw the sympathy in Carol’s eyes, too, and she smiled, but Carol did not smile back. Carol was still staring at her. “What are you thinking?” Therese asked.

Carol took a cigarette. “What do you think? Of that day in the store.”

Therese smiled again. “It was so wonderful when you came over to me. Why did you come to me?”

Carol waited. “For such a dull reason. Because you were the only girl not busy as hell. You didn’t have a smock either, I remember.”

Therese burst out laughing. Carol only smiled, but she looked suddenly like herself, as she had been in Colorado Springs, before anything had happened. All at once, Therese remembered the candlestick in her handbag.

“I brought you this,” she said, handing it to her. “I found it in Sioux Falls.”

Therese had only twisted some white tissue around it. Carol opened it on the table.

“I think it’s charming,” Carol said. “It looks just like you.”

“Thank you. I thought it looked like you.” Therese looked at Carol’s hand, the thumb and the tip of the middle finger resting on the thin rim of the candlestick, as she had seen Carol’s fingers on the saucers of coffee cups in Colorado, in Chicago, and places forgotten. Therese closed her eyes.

“I love you,” Carol said.

Therese opened her eyes, but she did not look up.

“I know you don’t feel the same about me. Do you?”

Therese had an impulse to deny it, but could she? She didn’t feel the same. “I don’t know, Carol.”

“That’s the same thing.” Carol’s voice was soft, expectant, expecting affirmation or denial.

Therese stared at the triangles of toast on the plate between them. She thought of Rindy. She had put off asking about her. “Have you seen Rindy?”

Carol sighed. Therese saw her hand draw back from the candlestick. “Yes, last Sunday for an hour or so. I suppose she can come and visit me a couple of afternoons a year. Once in a blue moon. I’ve lost completely.”

“I thought you said a few weeks of the year.”

“Well, a little more happened—privately between Harge and me. I refused to make a lot of promises he asked me to make. And the family came into it, too. I refused to live by a list of silly promises they’d made up like a list of misdemeanors—even if it did mean that they’d lock Rindy away from me as if I were an ogre. And it did mean that. Harge told the lawyers everything—whatever they didn’t know already.”

“God,” Therese whispered. She could imagine what it meant, Rindy visiting one afternoon, accompanied by a staring governess who had been forewarned against Carol, told not to let the child out of her sight, probably, and Rindy would soon understand all that. What would be the pleasure in a visit at all? Harge—Therese did not want to say his name. “Even the court was kinder,” she said.

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t promise very much in court. I refused there, too.”

Therese smiled a little in spite of herself, because she was glad Carol had refused, that Carol had still been that proud.

“But it wasn’t a court, you know, just a round-table discussion. Do you know how they made that recording in Waterloo? They drove a spike into the wall, probably just about as soon as we got there.”

“A spike?”

“I remember hearing somebody hammering something. I think it was when we’d just finished in the shower. Do you remember?”

“No.”

Carol smiled. “A spike that picks up sound like a dictaphone. He had the room next to us.”

Therese didn’t remember the hammering, but the violence of all of it came back, shattering, destroying— “It’s all over,” Carol said. “You know, I’d almost prefer not to see Rindy at all any more. I’m never going to demand to see her if she stops wanting to see me. I’ll just leave that up to her.”

“I can’t imagine her ever not wanting to see you.”

Carol’s eyebrows lifted. “Is there any way of predicting what Harge can do to her?”

Therese was silent. She looked away from Carol, and saw a clock. It was five thirty-five. She should be at the cocktail party before six, she thought, if she went at all. She had dressed for it, in the new black dress with a white scarf, in her new shoes, with her new black gloves.

And how unimportant the clothes seemed now. She thought suddenly of the green woolen gloves that Sister Alicia had given her. Were they still in the ancient tissue at the bottom of her trunk? She wanted to throw them away.

“One gets over things,” Carol said.

“Yes.”

“Harge and I are selling the house, and I’ve taken an apartment up on Madison Avenue. And a job, believe it or not. I’m going to work for a furniture house on Fourth Avenue as a buyer. Some of my ancestors must have been carpenters.” She looked at Therese. “Anyway, it’s a living and I’ll like it. The apartment’s a nice big one—big enough for two. I was hoping you might like to come and live with me, but I guess you won’t.”

Therese’s heart took a jump, exactly as it had when Carol had telephoned her that day in the store. Something responded in her against her will, made her feel happy all at once, and proud. She was proud that Carol had the courage to do such things, to say such things, that Carol always would have the courage. She remembered Carol’s courage, facing the detective on the country road. Therese swallowed, trying to swallow the beating of her heart. Carol had not even looked at her. Carol was rubbing her cigarette end back and forth in the ash tray. To live with Carol?

Once that had been impossible, and had been what she wanted most in the world. To live with her and share everything with her, summer and winter, to walk and read together, to travel together. And she remembered the days of resenting Carol, when she had imagined Carol asking her this, and herself answering no.

“Would you?” Carol looked at her.

Therese felt she balanced on a thin edge. The resentment was gone now.

Nothing but the decision remained now, a thin line suspended in the air, with nothing on either side to push her or pull her. But on the one side, Carol, and on the other an empty question mark. On the one side, Carol, and it would be different now, because they were both different. It would be a world as unknown as the world just past had been when she first entered it. Only now, there were no obstacles. Therese thought of Carol’s perfume that today meant nothing. A blank to be filled in, Carol would say.

“Well,” Carol said smiling, impatient.

“No,” Therese said. “No, I don’t think so.” Because you would betray me again. That was what she had thought in Sioux Falls, what she had intended to write or say. But Carol had not betrayed her. Carol loved her more than she loved her child. That was part of the reason why she had not promised. She was gambling now as she had gambled on getting everything from the detective that day on the road, and she lost then, too. And now she saw Carol’s face changing, saw the little signs of astonishment and shock so subtle that perhaps only she in the world could have noticed them, and Therese could not think for a moment.

“That’s your decision,” Carol said.

“Yes.”

Carol stared at her cigarette lighter on the table. “That’s that.”

Therese looked at her, wanting still to put out her hands, to touch Carol’s hair and to hold it tight in all her fingers. Hadn’t Carol heard the indecision in her voice? Therese wanted suddenly to run away, to rush quickly out the door and down the sidewalk. It was a quarter to six.

“I’ve got to go to a cocktail party this afternoon. It’s important because of a possible job. Harkevy’s going to be there.” Harkevy would give her some kind of a job, she was sure. She had called him at noon today about the models she had left at his studio. Harkevy had liked them all. “I got a television assignment yesterday, too.”

Carol lifted her head, smiling. “My little big shot. Now you look like you might do something good. Do you know, even your voice is different?”

“Is it?” Therese hesitated, finding it harder and harder to sit there.

“Carol, you could come to the party if you want to. It’s a big party in a couple of rooms at a hotel—welcoming the woman who’s going to do the lead in Harkevy’s play. I know they wouldn’t mind if I brought someone.” And she didn’t know quite why she was asking her, why Carol would possibly want to go to a cocktail party now any more than she did.

Carol shook her head. “No, thanks, darling. You’d better run along by yourself. I’ve got a date at the Elysee in a minute as a matter of fact.”

Therese gathered her gloves and her handbag in her lap. She looked at Carol’s hands, the pale freckles sprinkled on their backs—the wedding ring was gone now—and at Carol’s eyes. She felt she would never see Carol again. In two minutes, less, they would part on the sidewalk. “The car’s outside. Out in front to the left. And here’s the keys.”

“I know, I saw it.”

“Are you going to stay on?” Therese asked her. “I’ll take care of the check.”

“I’ll take care of the check,” Carol said. “Go on, if you have to.”

Therese stood up. She couldn’t leave Carol sitting here at he table where their two teacups were, with the ashes of their cigarettes in front of her. “Don’t stay. Come out with me.” Carol glanced up with a kind of questioning surprise in her face. “All right,” she said. “There are a couple of things of yours out at the house. Shall I—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Therese interrupted her. “And your flowers. Your plants.” Carol was paying the check the waiter had brought over. “What happened to the flowers I gave you?”

“The flowers you gave me—they died.” Carol’s eyes met hers for a second, and Therese looked away. They parted on the sidewalk, at the corner of Park Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. Therese ran across the avenue, just making it ahead of the green lights that released a pack of cars behind her, that blurred her view of Carol when she turned on the other sidewalk. Carol was walking slowly away, past the Ritz Tower doorway, and on. And that was the way it should be, Therese thought, not with a lingering handclasp, not with backward glances. Then as she saw Carol touch the handle of the car door, she remembered the beer can still under the front seat, remembered its clink as she had driven up the ramp from the Lincoln Tunnel coming into New York. She had thought then, she must get it out before she gave the car back to Carol, but she had forgotten.

Therese hurried on to the hotel.

People were already spilling out of the two doorways into the hall, and a waiter was having difficulty pushing his rolling table of ice buckets into the room. The rooms were noisy, and Therese did not see Bernstein or Harkevy anywhere. She didn’t know anyone, not a soul. Except one face, a man she had talked to months ago, somewhere, about a job that didn’t materialize. Therese turned around. A man poked a tall glass into her hand.

“Mademoiselle,” he said with a flourish. “Are you looking for one of these?”

“Thank you.” She didn’t stay with him. She thought she saw Mr. Bernstein over in the corner. There were several women with big hats in the way.

“Are you an actress?” the same man asked her, thrusting with her through the crowd.