"You don't believe him about dictaphone records in New York, do you?" "Don't talk about it!--I'm sick of it!" Therese squeezed the wheel, then deliberately relaxed. She sensed a tremendous sorrow hanging over them, ahead of them, that was just beginning to reveal the edge of itself, that they were driving into. She remembered the detective's face and the barely legible expression that she realized now was malice. It was malice she had seen in his smile, even as he said he was on no side, and she could feel in him a desire that was actually personal to separate them, because he knew they were together. She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist. "I'm thinking of that check," Carol said. It fell like another stone inside her. "Do you think they're going over the house?" Therese asked. "Possibly. Just possibly." "I don't think they'd find it. It's way under the runner." But there was the letter in the book. A curious pride lifted her spirit for an instant, and vanished. It was a beautiful letter, and she would rather they found it than the check, though as to incrimination they would probably have the same weight, and they would make the one as dirty as the other. The letter she had never given, and the check she had never cashed. It was more likely they would find the letter, certainly. Therese could not bring herself to tell Carol of the letter, whether from plain cowardice or a desire to spare Carol any more now, she didn't know. She saw a bridge ahead. "There's a river," she said. "How about here?" "Good enough." Carol handed her the little boxes. She had put the half- burned tape back in its box. Therese got out and flung them over the metal rail, and did not watch. She looked at the young man in overalls walking onto the bridge from the other side, hating the senseless antagonism in herself against him. Carol telephoned from a hotel in Omaha. Abby was not at home, and Carol left a message that she would call at six o'clock that evening, when Abby was expected. Carol said it was of no use to call her lawyer now, because he would be out to lunch until after two by their time. Carol wanted to wash up, and then have a drink. They had Old Fashioneds in the bar of the hotel, in complete silence. Therese asked for a second when Carol did, but Carol said she should eat something instead. The waiter told Carol that food was not served in the bar. "She wants something to eat," Carol said firmly.


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"The dining room is across the lobby, madame, and there's a coffee shop--" "Carol, I can wait," Therese said. "Will you please bring me the menu? She prefers to eat here," Carol said with a glance at the waiter. The waiter hesitated, then said, "Yes, madame," and went to get the menu. While Therese ate scrambled eggs and sausage, Carol had her third drink. Finally, Carol said in a tone of hopelessness, "Darling, can I ask you to forgive me?" The tone hurt Therese more than the question. "I love you, Carol." "But do you see what it means?" "Yes." But that moment of defeat in the car, she thought, that had been only a moment, as this time now was only a situation. "I don't see why it should mean this forever. I don't see how this can destroy anything," she said earnestly. Carol took her hand down from her face and sat back, and now in spite of the tiredness she looked as Therese always thought of her--the eyes that could be tender and hard at once as they tested her, the intelligent red lips strong and soft, though the upper lip trembled the least bit now. "Do you?" Therese asked, and she realized suddenly it was a question as big as the one Carol had asked her without words in the room in Waterloo. In fact, the same question. "No. I think you're right," Carol said. "You make me realize it." Carol went to telephone. It was three o'clock. Therese got the check, then sat there waiting, wondering when it was going to be over, whether the reassuring word would come from Carol's lawyer or from Abby, or whether it was going to get worse before it got better. Carol was gone about half an hour. "My lawyer hasn't heard anything," she said. "And I didn't tell him anything. I can't. I'll have to write it." "I thought you would." "Oh, you did," Carol said with her first smile that day. "What do you say we get a room here? I don't feel like traveling any more." Carol had her lunch sent up to their room. They both lay down to take a nap, but when Therese awakened at a quarter to five, Carol was gone. Therese glanced around the room, noticing Carol's black gloves on the dressing table, and her moccasins side by side near the armchair. Therese sighed, tremulously, unrefreshed by her sleep. She opened the window and looked down. It was the seventh or eighth floor, she couldn't remember which. A streetcar crawled past the front of the hotel, and people on the sidewalk moved in every direction, with legs on either side of them, and it crossed her mind to jump. She looked off at the drab little skyline of gray buildings and closed her eyes on it. Then she turned around and Carol was in the room, standing by the door, watching her. "Where have you been?" Therese asked.


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"Writing that damned letter." Carol crossed the room and caught Therese in her arms. Therese felt Carol's nails through the back of her jacket. When Carol went to the telephone, Therese left the room and wandered down the hall toward the elevators. She went down to the lobby and sat there reading an article on weevils in the Corngrower's Gazette, and wondered if Abby knew all that about corn weevils. She watched the clock, and after twenty-five minutes went upstairs again. Carol was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette. Therese waited for her to speak. "Darling, I've got to go to New York," Carol said. Therese had been sure of that. She came to the foot of the bed. "What else did Abby say?" "She saw the fellow named Bob Haversham again." Carol raised herself on her elbow. "But he certainly doesn't know as much as I do at this point. Nobody seems to know anything, except that trouble's brewing. Nothing much can happen until I get there. But I've got to be there." "Of course." Bob Haversham was the friend of Abby's who worked in Harge's firm in Newark, not a close friend either of Abby's or Harge's, just a link, a slim link between the two of them, the one person who might know, something of what Harge was doing", if he could recognize a detective, or overhear part of a telephone call, in Harge's office. It was worth almost nothing, Therese felt. "Abby's going to get the check," Carol said, sitting up on the bed, reaching for her moccasins. "Has she got a key?" "I wish she had. She's got to get it from Florence. But that'll be all right. I told her to tell Florence I wanted a couple of things sent to me." "Can you tell her to get a letter, too? I left a letter to you in a book in my room. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before. I didn't know you were going to have Abby go there." Carol gave her a frowning glance. "Anything else?" "No. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before." Carol sighed, and stood up. "Oh, let's not worry any more. I doubt if they'll bother about the house, but I'll tell Abby about the letter anyway. Where is it?" "In the Oxford Book of English Verse. I think I left it on top of the bureau." She watched Carol glance around the room, looking anywhere but at her. "I don't want to stay here tonight after all," Carol said. Half an hour later, they were in the car going eastward. Carol wanted to reach Des Moines that night. After a silence of more than an hour, Carol suddenly stopped the car at the edge of the road, bent her head, and said, "Damn!" She could see the darkish sinks under Carol's eyes in the glare of passing cars. Carol hadn't slept at all last night. "Let's go back to that last town," Therese said.


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"It's still about seventy-five miles to Des Moines." "Do you want to go to Arizona?" Carol asked her, as if all they had to do was turn around. "Oh, Carol--why talk about it?" A feeling of despair came over her suddenly. Her hands were shaking as she lighted a cigarette. She gave the cigarette to Carol, and lighted one for herself. "Because I want to talk about it. Can you take another three weeks off?" "Of course." Of course, of course. What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow? There was the Harkevy show in March, Harkevy might recommend her for a job somewhere else, but the jobs were uncertain and Carol was not. "I shouldn't have to stay in New York more than a week at most, because the divorce is all set, Fred, my lawyer, said so today. So why don't we have a few more weeks in Arizona? Or New Mexico? I don't want to hang around New York the rest of the winter." Carol drove slowly. Her eyes were different now. They had come alive, like her voice. "Of course I'd like to. Anywhere." "All right. Come on. Let's get to Des Moines. How about you driving a while?" They changed places. It was a little before midnight when they got to Des Moines and found a hotel room. "Why should you go back to New York at all?" Carol asked her. "You could keep the car and wait for me somewhere like Tucson or Santa Fe, and I could fly back." "And leave you?" Therese turned from the mirror where she was brushing her hair. Carol smiled. "What do you mean, leave me?" It had taken Therese by surprise, and now she saw an expression on Carol's face, even though Carol looked at her intently, that made her feel shut off, as if Carol had thrust her away in a back corner of her mind to make room for something more important. "Just leave you now, I meant," Therese said, turning back to the mirror. "No, it might be a good idea. It's quicker for you." "I thought you might prefer staying somewhere in the West. Unless you want to do something in New York those few days," Carol's voice was casual. "I don't." She dreaded the cold days in Manhattan, when Carol would be too busy to see her. And she thought of the detective. If Carol flew, she wouldn't be haunted by his trailing her. She tried to imagine it already, Carol arriving in the East alone, to face something she didn't yet know, something impossible to prepare for. She imagined herself in Santa Fe, waiting for a telephone call, waiting for a letter from Carol. But to be two thousand miles away from Carol, she could not imagine that so easily. "Only a week, Carol?" she asked, drawing the comb along her part again, flicking the long, fine hair to one side.


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She had gained weight, but her face was thinner, she noticed suddenly, and it pleased her. She looked older. In the mirror, she saw Carol come up behind her, and there was no answer but the pleasure of Carol's arms sliding around her, that made it impossible to think, and Therese twisted away more suddenly than she meant to, and stood by the corner of the dressing table looking at Carol, bewildered for a moment by the elusiveness of what they talked about, time and space, and the four feet that separated them now and the two thousand miles. She gave her hair another stroke. "Only about a week?" "That's what I said." Carol replied with a smile in her eyes, but Therese heard the same hardness in it as in her own question, as if they exchanged challenges. "If you mind keeping the car, I can have it driven East." "I don't mind keeping it.". "And don't worry about the detective. I'll wire Harge that I'm on my way." "I won't worry about that." How could Carol be so cold about it, Therese wondered, thinking of everything else but their leaving each other? She put the hairbrush down on the dressing table. "Therese, do you think I'm going to enjoy it?" And Therese thought of the detectives, the divorce, the hostility, all Carol had to face. Carol touched her cheek, pressed both palms hard against her cheeks so her mouth opened like a fish's, and Therese had to smile. Therese stood by the dressing table and watched her, watching every move of her hands, of her feet as she peeled off her stockings and stepped into her moccasins again. There were no words, she thought, after this point. What else did they need to explain, or ask, or promise in words? They did not even need to see each other's eyes. Therese watched her pick up the telephone, and then she lay face down on the bed, while Carol made her plane reservation for tomorrow, one ticket, one way, tomorrow at eleven a. m. "Where do you think you'll go?" Carol asked her. "I don't know." I might go back to Sioux Falls." "South Dakota?" Carol smiled at her. "You wouldn't prefer Santa Fe? It's warmer." "I'll wait and see it with you." "Not Colorado Springs?" "No!" Therese laughed, and got up. She took her toothbrush into the bathroom. "I might even take a job somewhere for a week." "What kind of a job?" "Any kind. Just to keep me from thinking of you, you now." "I want you to think of me. Not a job in a department store." "No." Therese stood by the bathroom door, watching Carol take off her slip and put her robe on. "You're not worrying about money again, are you?" Therese slid her hands into her robe pockets and crossed her feet. "If I'm broke, I don't care. I'll start worrying when it's used up."


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"I'm going to give you a couple of hundred tomorrow for the car." Carol pulled Therese's nose, as she passed by. "And you're not to use that car to pick up any strangers." Carol went into the bathroom arid turned on the shower. Therese came in after her. "I thought I was using this John." "I'm using it, but I'll let you come in." "Oh, thanks." Therese took off her robe as Carol did. "Well?" Carol said. "Well?" Therese stepped under the shower. "Of all the nerve." Carol got under it, too, and twisted Therese's arm behind her, but Therese only giggled. Therese wanted to embrace her, kiss her, but her free arm reached out convulsively and dragged Carol's head against her, under the stream of water, and there was the horrible sound of a foot slipping. "Stop it, we'll fall!" Carol shouted. "For Christ's sake, can't two people take a shower in peace?"


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Patricia Highsmith CHAPTER 20 IN SIOUX FALLS, Therese stopped the car in front of the hotel they had stayed in before, the Warrior Hotel. It was nine-thirty in the evening. Carol had got home about an hour ago, Therese thought. She was to call Carol at midnight. She took a room, had her bags carried up, then went out for a walk through the main street. There was a movie house, and it occurred to her she had never seen a movie with Carol. She went in. But she was in no mood to follow the picture, even though there was a woman in it whose voice was a little like Carol's, not at all like the flat nasal voices she heard all around her. She thought of Carol, over a thousand miles away now, thought of sleeping alone tonight, and she got up and wandered out on the street again. There was the drugstore where Carol had bought cleansing tissues and toothpaste one morning. And the corner where Carol had looked up and read the street names--Fifth and Nebraska streets. She bought a pack of cigarettes at the same drugstore, walked back to the hotel and sat in the lobby, smoking, savoring the first cigarette since she had left Carol, savoring the forgotten state of being alone. It was only a physical state. She really did not feel at all alone. She read some newspapers for a while, then took the letters from Dannie and Phil, that had come in the last days at Colorado Springs, out of her handbag and glanced over them. I saw Richard two nights ago in the Palermo all by himself [Phil's letter said]. I asked about you and he said he wasn't writing to you. I gather there has been a small rupture, but I didn't press for information. He was in no mood for talking. And we are not too chummy lately, as you know.... Have been talking you up to an angel named Francis Puckett who will put up fifty thousand if a certain play from France comes over in April. Shall keep you posted, as there is not even a producer yet.... Dannie sends his love, I am sure. He is leaving soon for somewhere probably, he has that look, and I'll have to scout for new winter quarters or find a roommate.... Did you get the clippings I sent you on Small Rain? Best, Phil Dannie's short letter was: Dear Therese, There is a possibility I may go out to the Coast at the end of the month to take a job in California. I must decide between this (a lab job) and an offer in a commercial chemical place in Maryland. But if I could see you in Colorado or anywhere else for a while, I would leave a little early. Shall probably take the California job, as I think it has better prospects. So would you let me know where you'll be? It doesn't matter.


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There are a lot of ways of getting to California. If your friend wouldn't mind, it would be nice to spend a few days with you somewhere. I'll be in New York until the 28 of February anyway. Love, Dannie She had not yet answered him. She would send him an address tomorrow, as soon as she found a room somewhere in the town. But as to the next destination, she would have to talk to Carol about that. And when would Carol be able to say? She wondered what Carol might already have found tonight in New Jersey, and Therese's courage sank dismally. She reached for a newspaper and looked at the date. February fifteenth. Twenty-nine days since she had left New York with Carol. Could it be so few days? Upstairs in her room, she put the call through to Carol, and bathed and got into pajamas. Then the telephone rang. "Hel-lo," Carol said, as if she had been waiting a long while. "What's the name of that hotel?" "The Warrior. But I'm not going to stay here." "You didn't pick up any strangers on the road, did you?" Therese laughed. Carol's slow voice went through her as if she touched her. "What's the news?" Therese asked. "Tonight? Nothing. The house is freezing and Florence can't get here till day after tomorrow. Abby's here. Do you want to say hello to her?" "Not right there with you." "No-o. Upstairs in the green room with the door shut." "I don't really want to talk to her now." Carol wanted to know everything she had done, how the roads were, and whether she had on the yellow pajamas or the blue ones. "I'll have a hard time getting to sleep tonight without you." "Yes." Immediately, out of nowhere, Therese felt tears pressing behind her eyes. "Can't you say anything but yes?" "I love you." Carol whistled. Then silence. "Abby got the check, darling, but no letter. She missed my wire, but there isn't any letter anyway." "Did you find the book?" "We found the book, but there's nothing in it." Therese wondered if the letter could be in her own apartment after all. But she had a picture of the letter in the book, marking a place. "Do you think anybody's been through the house?" "No. I can tell by various things. Don't worry about that. Will you?" A moment later, Therese slid down into bed and pulled her light out. Carol had asked her to call tomorrow night, too. For a while the sound of Carol's voice was in her ears. Then a melancholy began to seep into her. She lay on her back with her arms straight at her sides, with a sense of empty space all around her, as if she were laid out ready for the grave, and then she fell asleep.


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The next morning, Therese found a room she liked in a house on one of the streets that ran uphill, a large front room with a bay window full of plants and white curtains. There was a four-poster bed and an oval hooked rug on the floor. The woman said it was seven dollars a week, but Therese said she was not sure if she would be here a week, so she had better take it by the day. "That'll be the same thing," the woman said. "Where're you from?" "New York." "Are you going to live here?" "No. I'm just waiting for a friend to join me." "Man or a woman?" Therese smiled. "A woman," she said. "Is there any space in those garages in back? I've got a car with me." The woman said there were two garages empty, and that she didn't charge for the garages, if people lived here. She was not old, but she stooped a little and her figure was frail. Her name was Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper. She had been keeping roomers for fifteen years, she said, and two of the three she had started with were still here. The same day, she made the acquaintance of Dutch Huber and his wife who ran the diner near the public library. He was a skinny man of about fifty with small curious blue eyes. His wife Edna was fat and did the cooking, and talked a great deal less than he. Dutch had worked in New York for a while years ago. He asked her questions about sections of the city she happened not to know at all, while she mentioned places Dutch had never heard of or had forgotten, and somehow the slow, dragging conversation made them both laugh. Dutch asked her if she would like to go with him and his wife to the motorcycle races that were to be held a few miles out of town on Saturday, and Therese said yes. She bought cardboard and glue and worked on the first of the models she meant to show Harkevy when she got back to New York. She had it nearly done when she went out at eleven thirty to call Carol from the Warrior. Carol was not in and no one answered. Therese tried until one o'clock, then went back to Mrs. Cooper's house. Therese reached her the next morning around ten thirty. Carol said she had talked over everything with her lawyer the day before, but there was nothing she or her lawyer could do until they knew Harge's next move. Carol was a little short with her, because she had a luncheon appointment in New York and a letter to write first. She seemed anxious for the first time about what Harge was doing. She had tried to call him twice without being able to reach him. But it was her brusqueness that disturbed Therese most of all. "You haven't changed your mind about anything?" Therese said.


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"Of course not, darling. I'm giving a party tomorrow night. I'll miss you." Therese tripped on the hotel threshold as she went out, and she felt the first hollow wave of loneliness break over her. What would she be doing tomorrow night? Reading in the library until it closed at nine? Working on another set? She went over the names of the people Carol had said were coming to the party--Max and Clara Tibbett, the couple who had a greenhouse on some highway near Carol's house and whom Therese had met once, Carol's friend Tessie she had never met, and Stanley McVeigh, the man Carol had been with the evening they went to Chinatown. Carol hadn't mentioned Abby. And Carol hadn't said to call tomorrow. She walked on, and the last moment she had seen Carol came back as if it were happening in front of her eyes again. Carol waving from the door of the plane at the Des Moines airport, Carol already small and far away, because Therese had had to stand back of the wire fence across the field. The ramp had been moved away, but Therese had thought, there were still a few seconds of time before they closed the door, and then Carol had appeared again, just long enough to stand still in the doorway for a second, to find her again, and make the gesture of blowing her a kiss. But it meant an absurd lot that she had come back. Therese drove out to the motorcycle races on Saturday, and took Dutch and Edna with her, because Carol's car was bigger. Afterward, they invited her to supper at their house, but she did not accept. There hadn't been a letter from Carol that day, and she had expected a note at least. Sunday depressed her, and even the drive she took up the Big Sioux River to Dell Rapids in the afternoon did not change the scene inside her mind. Monday morning, she sat in the library reading plays. Then around two, when the noonday rush was slacking off in Dutch's diner, she went in and had some tea, and talked with Dutch while she played the songs on the juke box that she and Carol had used to play. She had told Dutch that the car belonged to the friend for whom she was waiting. And gradually, Dutch's intermittent questions led her to tell him that Carol lived in New Jersey, that she would probably fly out, that Carol wanted to go to New Mexico. "Carol does?" Dutch said, turning to her as he polished a lass. Then a strange resentment rose in Therese because he had said her name, and she made a resolution not to speak of Carol again at all, not to anyone in the city.


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Tuesday the letter came from Carol, nothing but a short note, but it said Fred was more optimistic about everything, and it looked as if there would be nothing but the divorce to worry about and she could probably leave the twenty-fourth of February. Therese began to smile as she read it. She wanted to go out and celebrate with someone, but there was no one, so there was nothing to do but take a walk, have a lonely drink at the bar of the Warrior, and think of Carol five days away. There was no one she would have wanted to be with, except perhaps Dannie. Or Stella Overton. Stella was jolly, and though she couldn't have told Stella anything about Carol--whom could she tell?--it would have been good to see her now. She had meant to write Stella a card days ago, but she hadn't yet. She wrote to Carol late that night. The news is wonderful. I celebrated with a single daiquiri at the Warrior. Not that I am conservative, but did you know that one drink has the kick of three when you are alone?... I love this town because it all reminds me of you. I know you don't like it any more than any other town, but that isn't the point. I mean you are here as much as I can bear you to be, not being here... Carol wrote: I never liked Florence. I say this as a prelude. It seems Florence found the note you wrote to me and sold it to Harge--at a price. She is also responsible for Harge's knowing where we (or at least I) were going, I've no doubt. I don't know what I left around the house or what she might have overheard, I thought I was pretty silent, but if Harge took the trouble to bribe her and I'm sure he did, there's no telling. They picked us up in Chicago, anyway. Darling, I had no idea how far this thing had gone. To give you the atmosphere--nobody tells me anything, things are just suddenly discovered. If anyone is in possession of the facts, it is Harge. I spoke with him on the phone, and he refuses to tell me anything, which of course is calculated to terrorize me into giving all my ground before the fight has even begun. They don't know me, any of them, if they think I will. The fight of course is over Rindy, and yes, darling, I'm afraid there will be one, and I can't leave the 24th. That much Harge did tell me when he sprang the letter this morning on the phone. I think the letter may be his strongest weapon (the dictaphone business only went on in Colorado S. so far as I can possibly imagine) hence his letting me know about it.


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But I can imagine the kind of letter it is, written even before we took off, and there'll be a limit to what even Harge can read into it. Harge is merely threatening--in the peculiar form of silence--hoping I will back out completely as far as Rindy is concerned. I won't, so there will come some kind of a showdown, I hope not in court. Fred is prepared for anything however. He is wonderful, the only person who talks straight to me, but unfortunately he knows least of all too. You ask if I miss you. I think of your voice, your hands, and your eyes when you look straight into mine. I remember your courage that I hadn't suspected, and it gives me courage. Will you call me, darling? I don't want to call you if your phone is in the hall. Call me collect around 7 P.M. preferably, which is 6 your time. And Therese was about to call her that day when a telegram came: DON'T TELEPHONE FOR A WHILE, EXPLAIN LATER, ALL MY LOVE, DARLING CAROL. Mrs. Cooper watched her reading it in the hall. "That from your friend?" she asked. "Yes." "Hope nothing's the matter." Mrs. Cooper had a way of peering at people, and Therese lifted her head deliberately. "No, she's coming," Therese said. "She's been delayed."


Patricia Highsmith CHAPTER 21 ALBERT KENNEDY, BERT to people he liked, lived in a room at the back of the house, and was one of Mrs. Cooper's original lodgers. He was forty-five, a native of San Francisco, and more like a New Yorker than anyone Therese had met in the town, and this fact alone inclined her to avoid him. Often he asked Therese to go to the movies with him, but she had gone only once. She was restless and she preferred to wander about by herself, mostly just looking and thinking, because the days were too cold and windy for any outdoor sketching. And the scenes she had liked at first had grown too stale to sketch, from too much looking, too much waiting. Therese went to the library almost every evening, sat at one of the long tables looking over half a dozen books, and then took a meandering course homeward. She came back to the house only to wander out again after a while, stiffening herself against the erratic wind, or letting it turn her down streets she would not otherwise have followed. In the lighted windows she would see a girl seated at a piano, in another a man laughing, in another a woman sewing. Then he remembered she could not even call Carol, admitted to herself she did not even know what Carol was doing at this moment, and she felt emptier than the wind. Carol did not tell her everything in her letters, she felt, did not tell her the worst. In the library, she looked at books with photographs of Europe in them, marble fountains in Sicily, ruins of Greece in sunlight, and she wondered if she and Carol would really ever go there. There was still so much they had not done. There was the first voyage across the Atlantic. There were simply the mornings, mornings anywhere, when she could lift her head from a pillow and see Carol's face, and know that the day was theirs and that nothing would separate them. And there was the beautiful thing, transfixing the heart and the eyes at once, in the dark window of an antique shop in a street where she had never been. Therese stared at it, feeling it quench some forgotten and nameless thirst inside her. Most of its porcelain surface was painted with small bright lozenges of colored enamel, royal blue and deep red and green, outlined with coin gold as shiny as silk embroidery, even under its film of dust. There was a gold ring at the rim for the finger. It was a tiny candlestick holder. Who had made it, she wondered, and for whom? She came back the next morning and bought it to give to Carol. A letter from Richard had come that morning, forwarded from Colorado Springs. Therese sat down on one of the stone benches in the street where the library was, and opened it.


It was on business stationery: The Semco Bottled Gas Company. Cooks--Heats--Makes Ice. Richard's name was at the top as General Manager of the Port Jefferson Branch. Dear Therese, I have Dannie to thank for telling me where you are. You may think this letter unnecessary and perhaps it is to you. Perhaps you are still in that fog you were, when we talked that evening in the cafeteria. But I feel it is necessary to make one thing clear, and that is that I no longer feel the way I did even two weeks ago, and the letter I wrote you last was nothing but a last spasmodic effort, and I knew it was hopeless when I wrote it, and I knew you wouldn't answer and I didn't want you to. I know I had stopped loving you then, and now the uppermost emotion I feel toward you is one that was present from the first--disgust. It is your hanging onto this woman to the exclusion of everyone else, this relationship which I am sure has become sordid and pathological by now, that disgusts me. I know that it will not last, as I said from the first. It is only regrettable that you will be disgusted later yourself, in proportion to how much of your life you waste now with it. It is rootless and infantile, like living on lotus blossoms or some sickening candy instead of the bread and meat of life. I have often thought of those questions you asked me the day we were flying the kite. I wish I had acted then before it was too late, because I loved you enough then to try to rescue you. Now I don't. People still ask me about you. What do you expect me to tell them? I intend to tell them the truth. Only that way can I get it out of myself--and I can no longer bear to carry it around with me. I have sent a few things you had at the house back to your apartment. The slightest memory or contact with you depresses me, makes me not want to touch you or anything concerned with you. But I am talking sense and very likely you are not understanding a word of it. Except maybe this: I want nothing to do with you. Richard She saw Richard's thin soft lips tensed in a straight line as they must have looked when he wrote the letter, a line that still did not keep the tiny, taut curl in the upper lip from showing-she saw his face clearly for a moment, and then it vanished with a little jolt that seemed as muffled and remote from her as the clamor of Richard's letter. She stood up, put the letter back in the envelope, and walked on. She hoped he succeeded in purging himself of her.


But she could only imagine him telling other people about her with that curious attitude of passionate participation she had seen in New York before she left. She imagined Richard telling Phil as they stood some evening at the Palermo bar, imagined him telling the Kellys. She wouldn't care at all, whatever he said. She wondered what Carol was doing now, at ten o'clock, at eleven in New Jersey. Listening to some stranger's accusations? Thinking of her, or was there time for that? It was a fine day, cold and almost windless, bright with sun. She could take, the car and drive somewhere. She had not used the car for three days. Suddenly she realized she did not want to use it. The day she had taken it out and driven it up to ninety on the straight road to Dell Rapids, exultant after a letter from Carol, seemed very long ago. Mr. Bowen, another of the roomers, was on the front porch when she came back to Mrs. Cooper's house. He was sitting in the sun with his legs wrapped in a blanket and his cap pulled down over his eyes as if he were asleep, but he called out, "Hi, there! How's my girl?" She stopped and chatted with him for a while, asked him about his arthritis, trying to be as courteous as Carol had always been with Mrs. French. They found something to laugh at, and she was still smiling when she went to her room. Then the sight of the geranium ended it. She watered the geranium and set it at the end of the window sill, where it would get the sun for the longest time. There was even brown at the tips of the smallest leaves at the top. Carol had bought it for her in Des Moines just before she took the plane. The pot of ivy had died already--the man in the shop had warned them it was delicate, but Carol had wanted it anyway--and Therese doubted that the geranium would live. But Mrs. Cooper's motley collection of plants flourished in the bay window. "I walk and walk around the town," she wrote to Carol, "but I wish I could keep walking in one direction--east--and finally come to you. When can you come, Carol? Or shall I come to you? I really cannot stand being away from you so long...." She had her answer the next morning. A check fluttered out of Carol's letter onto Mrs. Cooper's hall floor. The check was for two hundred and fifty dollars. Carol's letter--the long loops looser and lighter, the t-bars stretching the length of the word--said that it was impossible for her to come out within the next two weeks, if then. The check was for her to fly back to New York and have the car driven East. "I'd feel better if you took the plane. Come now and don't wait," was the last paragraph.


Carol had written the letter in haste, had probably snatched a moment to write it, but there was a coldness in it, too, that shocked Therese. She went out and walked dazedly to the corner and dropped the letter she had written the night before into the mailbox anyway, a heavy letter with three airmail stamps on it. She might see Carol within twelve hours. The thought did not bring any reassurance. Should she leave this morning? This afternoon? What had they done to Carol? She wondered if Carol would be furious if she telephoned her, if it would precipitate some crisis into a total defeat if she did? She was sitting at a table somewhere with coffee and orange juice in front of her, before she looked at the other letter in her hand. In the upper left corner she could just make out the scrawly handwriting. It was from Mrs. R. Robichek. Dear Therese, Thank you very much for the delicious sausage that came last month. You are a nice sweet girl and I am glad to have the opportunity to thank you many times. It was nice of you to think of me making such a long trip. I enjoy the pretty post cards, specially the big one from Sioux Falls. How is in South Dakota? Are mountains and cowboys? I have never had chance to travel except Pennsylvania. You are a lucky girl, so young and pretty and kind. Myself I still work. The store is just the same. Everything is the same but it is colder. Please visit me when you come back. I cook a nice dinner for you not from delicatessen. Thank you for the sausage again. I lived from it for many days, really something special and nice. With best regards and yours truly. Ruby Robichek Therese slid off the stool, left some money on the counter and ran out. She ran all the way to the Warrior Hotel, put the call in and waited with the receiver against her ear until she heard the telephone ringing in Carol's house. No one answered. It rang twenty times and no one answered. She thought of calling Carol's lawyer, Fred Haymes. She decided she shouldn't. Neither did she want to call Abby. That day it rained, and Therese lay on her bed in her room, staring up at the ceiling, waiting for three o'clock, when she intended to telephone again. Mrs. Cooper brought her a tray of lunch around midday. Mrs. Cooper thought she was sick. Therese could not eat the food, however, and she did not know what to do with it. She was still trying to reach Carol at five o'clock. Finally the ringing stopped and there was confusion on the wire, a couple of operators questioning each other about the call, and the first words Therese heard from Carol were "Yes, damn it!" Therese smiled and the ache went out of her arms. "Hello?" Carol said brusquely. "Hello?"


The connection was bad. "I got the letter--the one with the check. What happened, Carol?... What?" Carol's harassed sounding voice repeated through the crackling interference,"This wire I think is tapped, Therese.... Are you all right? Are you coming home? I can't talk very long now." Therese frowned, wordless. "Yes, I suppose I can leave today." Then she blurted, "What is it, Carol? I really can't stand this, not knowing anything!" "Therese!" Carol drew the word all across Therese's words, like a deletion. "Will you come home so I can talk to you?" Therese thought she heard Carol sigh impatiently. "But I've got to know now. Can you see me at all when I come back?" "Hang onto yourself, Therese." Was this the way they talked together? Were these the words they used? "But can you?" "I don't know," Carol said. A chill ran up her arm, into the fingers that held the telephone. She felt Carol hated her. Because it was her fault, her stupid blunder about the letter Florence had found. Something had happened and perhaps Carol couldn't and wouldn't even want to see her again. "Has the court thing started yet?" "It's finished. I wrote you about that. I can't talk any longer. Good-by, Therese." Carol waited for her to reply. "I've got to say good-by." Therese put the receiver slowly back on the hook. She stood in the hotel lobby, staring at the blurred figures around the front desk. She pulled Carol's letter out of her pocket and read it again, but Carol's voice was closer, saying impatiently, "Will you come home so I can talk to you?" She pulled the check out and looked at it again, upside down, and slowly tore it up. She dropped the pieces into a brass spittoon. But the tears did not come until she got back to the house and saw her room again, the double bed that sagged in the middle, the stack of letters from Carol on the desk. She couldn't stay here another night. She would go to a hotel for the night, and if the letter Carol had mentioned wasn't here tomorrow morning, she would leave anyway. Therese dragged her suitcase down from the closet and opened it on the bed. The folded corner of a white handkerchief stuck out of one of the pockets. Therese took it out and lifted it to her nose, remembering the morning in Des Moines when Carol had put it there, with the dash of perfume on it, and the derisive remark Carol had made about putting it there, that she had laughed at. Therese stood with her hand on the back of a chair and the other hand clenched in a fist that rose and fell aimlessly, and what she felt was as blurred as the desk and the letters that she frowned at in front of her. Then her hand reached out suddenly for the letter propped against the books at the back of the desk.


She hadn't seen the letter before, though it was in plain view. Therese tore it open. This was the letter Carol had meant. It was a long letter, and the ink was pale blue on some pages and dark on others, and there were words crossed out. She read the first page, then went back and read it again. Monday My darling, I am not even going into court. This morning I was given a private showing of what Harge intended to bring against me. Yes, they have a few conversations recorded--namely Waterloo, and it would be useless to try to face a court with this. I should be ashamed, not for myself oddly enough, but for my own child, to say nothing of not wanting you to have to appear. Everything was very simple this morning--I simply surrendered. The important thing now is what I intend to do in the future, the lawyers said. On this depends whether I would ever see my child again, because Harge has with ease now complete custody of her. The question was would I stop seeing you (and others like you, they said!). It was not so clearly put. There were a dozen faces that opened their mouths and spoke like the judges of doomsday--reminding me of my duties, my position, and my future. (What future have they fixed up for me? Are they going to look in on it in six months?) --I said I would stop seeing you. I wonder if you will understand, Therese, since you are so young and never even knew a mother who cared desperately for you. For this promise, they present me with their wonderful reward, the privilege of seeing my child a few weeks of the year. Hours later-- Abby is here. We talk of you--she sends you her love as I send mine. Abby reminds me of the things I know already--that you are very young and you adore me. Abby does not think I should send this to you, but tell you when you come. We have just had quite an argument about it. I tell her she does not know you as well as I, and I think now she does not know me as well as you in some ways, and those ways are the emotions. I am not very happy today, my sweet. I am drinking my ryes and you would tell me they depress me, I know. But I wasn't prepared for these days after those weeks with you. They were happy weeks--you knew it more than I did. Though all we have known is only a beginning. I meant to try to tell you in this letter that you don't even know the rest and perhaps you never will and are not supposed to-- meaning destined to. We never fought, never came back knowing there was nothing else we wanted in heaven or hell but to be together.


The Price of Salt -- Highsmith, Patricia -- d3477ce58404d2d159337a1eb92fe0db -- Anna’s Archive.7

Did you ever care for me that much, I don't know. But that is all part of it and all we have known is only a beginning. And it has been such a short time. For that reason it will have shorter roots in you. You say you love me however I am and when I curse. I say I love you always, the person you are and the person you will become. I would say it in a court if it would mean anything to those people or possibly change anything, because those are not the words I am afraid of. I mean, darling, I shall send you this letter and I think you will understand why I do, why I told the lawyers yesterday I would not see you again and why I had to tell them that, and I would be underestimating you to think you could not and to think you would prefer delay. She stopped reading and stood up, and walked slowly to her writing table. Yes, she understood why Carol had sent the letter. Because Carol loved her child more than her. And because of that, the lawyers had been able to break her, to force her to do exactly what they wanted her to do. Therese could not imagine Carol forced. Yet here it was in Carol's writing. It was a surrender. Therese knew no situation in which she was the stake could have wrested her from Carol. For an instant there came the fantastic realization that Carol had devoted only a fraction of herself to her, Therese, and suddenly the whole world of the last month, like a tremendous lie, cracked and almost toppled. In the next instant, Therese did not believe that. Yet the fact remained, she had chosen her child. She stared at Richard's envelope on her table, and felt all the words she wanted to say to him, that she had never said to him, rising in a torrent inside her. What right had he to talk about whom she loved or how? What did he know about her? What had he ever known? ... exaggerated and at the same time minimized [she read on another page of Carol's letter]. But between the pleasure of a kiss and of what a man and woman do in bed seems to me only a gradation. A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a question of pleasure after all, and what's the use of debating the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football game--or a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I'll leave that to the philosophers.


The Price of Salt -- Highsmith, Patricia -- d3477ce58404d2d159337a1eb92fe0db -- Anna’s Archive.8

But their attitude was that I must be somehow demented or blind (plus a kind of regret, I thought, at the fact a fairly attractive woman is presumably unavailable to men). Someone brought "aesthetics" into the argument, I mean against me of course. I said did they really want to debate that--it brought the only laugh in the whole show. But the most important point I did not mention and was not thought of by anyone--that the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing that happens between men and women. It was said or at least implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a good deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial thing--that is degeneration. Or to live against one's grain, that is degeneration by definition. Darling, I pour all this out to you [the next lines were crossed out]. You will undoubtedly handle your future better than I. Let me be a bad example to you. If you are hurt now beyond what you think you can bear and if it makes you-- either now or one day--hate me, and this is what I told Abby, then I shan't be sorry. I may have been that one person you were fated to meet, as you say, and the only one, and you can put it all behind you. Yet if you don't, for all this failure and the dismalness now, I know what you said that afternoon is right--it needn't be like this. I do want to talk with you once when you come back, if you're willing, unless you think you can't. Your plants are still thriving on the back porch. I water them every day.... Therese could not read any more. Beyond her door she heard footsteps slowly descending the stairs, walking more confidently across the hall. When the footsteps were gone, she opened her door and stood there a moment, struggling against an impulse to walk straight out of the house and leave everything behind her. Then she went down the hall to Mrs. Cooper's door in the rear. Mrs. Cooper answered her knock, and Therese said the words she had prepared, about leaving that night. She watched Mrs. Cooper's face that didn't listen to her but only reacted to the sight of her own face, and Mrs. Cooper seemed suddenly her own reflection, that she could not turn away from. "Well, I'm sorry, Miss Belivet. I'm sorry if your plans have gone wrong," she said, while her face registered only shock and curiosity.


Then Therese went back to her room and began to pack, laying in the bottom of her suitcase the cardboard models she had folded flat, and then her books. After a moment, she heard Mrs. Cooper approaching her door slowly, as if she carried something, and Therese thought, if she was bringing her another tray, she would scream. Mrs. Cooper knocked. "Where shall I forward your mail to, honey, in case there's any more letters?" Mrs. Cooper asked. "I don't know yet. I'll have to write and let you know." Therese felt lightheaded and sickish when she straightened up. "You're not starting back for New York this late at night, are you?" Mrs. Cooper called anything after six "night." "No," Therese said. "I'll just go a little ways." She was impatient to be alone. She looked at Mrs. Cooper's hand bulging the gray checked apron under the waistband, at the cracked soft house shoes worn paper thin on these floors, that had walked these floors years before she came here and would go on in the same foot tracks years after she was gone. "Well, you be sure and let me hear how you make out," Mrs. Cooper said. "Yes." She drove to a hotel, a different hotel from the one where she had always called Carol. Then she went out for a walk, restlessly, avoiding all the streets she had been in with Carol. She might have driven to another town, she thought, and stopped, half decided to go back to the car. Then she walked on, not caring, actually, where she was. She walked until she was cold, and the library was the closest place to go and get warm. She passed the diner and glanced in. Dutch saw her, and with the familiar dip of his head, as if he had to look under something to see her through the window, he smiled and waved to her. Automatically, her hand waved back, good-by, and suddenly she thought of her room in New York, with the dress still on the studio couch, and the corner of the carpet turned back. If she could only reach out now and pull the carpet flat, she thought. She stood staring down the narrowish, solid looking avenue with its round street lights. A single figure walked along the sidewalk toward her. Therese went up the library steps. Miss Graham, the librarian, greeted her as usual, but Therese did not go into the main reading room. There were two or three people there tonight, the baldheaded man with the black-rimmed glasses who was often at the middle table, and how often had she sat in that room with a letter from Carol in her pocket? With Carol beside her. She climbed the stairs, passed the history and art room on the second floor, up to the third floor where she had never been before.


There was a single large dusty looking room with glass-front bookcases around the walls, a few oil paintings and marble busts on pedestals. Therese sat down at one of the tables, and her body relaxed with an ache. She put her head down on her arms on the table, suddenly limp and sleepy, but in the next second, she slid the chair back and stood up. She felt prickles of terror in the roots of her hair. She had been somehow pretending until this moment that Carol was not gone, that when she went back to New York, she would see Carol and everything would be, would have to be as it had been before. She glanced nervously around the room, as if looking for some contradiction, some redress. For a moment, she felt her body might shatter apart of itself, or might hurl itself through the glass of the long windows across the room. She stared at a pallid bust of Homer, the inquisitively lifted eyebrows delineated faintly by dust. She turned to the door, and for the first time noticed the picture over the lintel. It was only similar, she thought, not quite the same, not the same, but the recognition had shaken her at the core, was growing as she looked at it, and she knew the picture was exactly the same, only much larger, and she had seen it many times in the hall that led to the music room before they had taken it down when she was still small--the smiling woman in the ornate dress of some court, the hand poised just below the throat, the arrogant head half turned, as if the painter had somehow caught her in motion so that even the pearls that hung from each ear seemed to move. She knew the short, firmly modeled cheeks, the full coral lips that smiled at one corner, the mockingly narrowed lids, the strong, not very high forehead that even in the picture seemed to project a little over the living eyes that knew everything beforehand, and sympathized and laughed at once. It was Carol. Now in the long moment while she could not look away from it, the mouth smiled and the eyes regarded her with nothing but mockery, the last veil lifted and revealing nothing but mockery and gloating, the splendid satisfaction of the betrayal accomplished. With a shuddering gasp, Therese ran under the picture and down the stairs. In the downstairs hall, Miss Graham said something to her, an anxious question, and Therese heard her own reply like an idiot's babble, because she was still gasping, fighting for breath, and she passed Miss Graham and rushed out of the building.


Patricia Highsmith CHAPTER 22 IN THE MIDDLE of the block, she opened the door of a coffee shop, but they were playing one of the songs she had heard with Carol everywhere, and she let the door close and walked on. The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back? She walked to the hotel. In her room, she wet a face towel with cold water to put over her eyes. The room was chilly, so she took off her dress and shoes and got into bed. From outside, a shrill voice, muted in empty space, cried: "Hey, Chicago Sun-Times!" Then silence, and she debated trying to fall asleep, while fatigue already began to rock her unpleasantly, like drunkenness. Now there were voices in the hall, talking of a misplaced piece of luggage, and a sense of futility overwhelmed her as she lay there with the wet, medicinally smelling face towel over her swollen eyes. The voices wrangled, and she felt her courage running out, and then her will, and in panic she tried to think of the world outside, of Dannie and Mrs. Robichek, of Frances Cotter at the Pelican Press, of Mrs. Osborne, and of her own apartment still in New York, but her mind refused to survey or to renounce, and her mind was the same as her heart now and refused to renounce Carol. The faces swam together like the voices outside. There was also the face of Sister Alicia, and of her mother. There was the last room she had slept in at school. There was the morning she had sneaked out of the dormitory very early and run across the lawn like a young animal crazy with spring, and had seen Sister Alicia running crazily through a field herself, white shoes flashing like ducks through the high grass, and it had been minutes before she realized that Sister Alicia was chasing an escaped chicken. There was the moment, in the house of some friend of her mother's, when she had reached for a piece of cake and had upset the plate on the floor, and her mother had slapped her in the face. She saw the picture in the hall at school, it breathed and moved now like Carol, mocking and cruel and finished with her, as if some evil and long-destined purpose had been accomplished. Therese's body tensed in terror, and the conversation went on and on in the hall obliviously, falling on her ear with the sharp, alarming sound of ice cracking somewhere out on a pond. "What do you mean you did?" "No..." "If you did, the suitcase would be downstairs in the checkroom..." "Oh, I told you..." "But you want me to lose a suitcase so you won't lose your job!"


Her mind attached meaning to the phrases one by one, like some slow translator that lagged behind, and at last got lost. She sat up in bed with the end of a bad dream in her head. The room was nearly dark, its shadows deep and solid in the corners. She reached for the lamp switch and half closed her eyes against the light. She dropped a quarter into the radio on the wall, and turned the volume quite loud at the first sound she got. It was a man's voice, and then music began, a lilting, Oriental- sounding piece that had been among the selections in music appreciation class at school. "In a Persian Market," she remembered automatically, and now its undulant rhythm that had always made her think of a camel walking took her back to the rather small room at the Home, with the illustrations from Verdi operas around the walls above the high wainscoting. She had heard the piece occasionally in New York, but she had never heard it with Carol, had not heard it or thought of it since she had known Carol, and now the music was like a bridge soaring across time without touching anything. She picked up Carol's letter opener from the bed table, the wooden knife that had somehow gotten into her suitcase when they packed, and she squeezed the handle and rubbed her thumb along its edge, but its reality seemed to deny Carol instead of affirm her, did not evoke her so much as the music they had never heard together. She thought of Carol with a twist of resentment, Carol like a distant spot of silence and stillness. Therese went to the basin to wash her face in cold water. She should get a job, tomorrow if she could. That had been her idea in stopping here, to work for two weeks or so, not to weep in hotel rooms. She should send Mrs. Cooper the hotel name as an address, simply for courtesy's sake. It was another of the things she must do, although she did not want to. And was it worth while to write to Harkevy again, she wondered, after his polite but explicit note in Sioux Falls. "... I should be glad to see you again when you come to New York, but it is impossible for me to promise anything this spring. It would be a good idea for you to see Mr. Ned Bernstein, the co-producer, when you get back. He can tell you more of what is happening in designing studios than I can...." No, she wouldn't write again about that. Downstairs, she bought a picture post card of Lake Michigan, and deliberately wrote a cheerful message on it to Mrs. Robichek.


It seemed false as she wrote it, but walking away from the box where she had dropped it, she was conscious suddenly of the energy in her body, the spring in her toes, the youth in her blood that warmed her cheeks as she walked faster, and she knew she was free and blessed compared to Mrs. Robichek, and what she had written was not false, because she could so well afford it. She was not crumpled or half blind, not in pain. She stood by a store window and quickly put on some more lipstick. A gust of wind made her step to catch her balance. But she could feel in the wind's coldness its core of spring, like a heart warm and young inside it. Tomorrow morning, she would start to look for a job. She should be able to live on the money she had left, and save whatever she earned to get back to New York on. She could wire her bank for the rest of her money, of course, but that was not what she wanted. She wanted two weeks of working among people she didn't know, doing the kind of work a million other people did. She wanted to step into someone else's shoes. She answered an advertisement for a receptionist-filing clerk that said little typing required and call in person. They seemed to think she would do, and she spent all morning learning the files. Then one of the bosses came in after lunch and said he wanted a girl who knew some shorthand. Therese didn't. The school had taught her typing, but not shorthand, so she was out. She looked through the help-wanted columns again that afternoon. Then she remembered the sign on the fence of the lumberyard not far from the hotel. "Girl wanted for general office work and stock. $40 weekly." If they didn't demand shorthand, she might qualify. It was around three when she turned into the windy street where the lumberyard lay. She lifted her head and let the wind blow her hair back from her face. And she remembered Carol saying, I like to see you walking. When I see you from a distance, I feel you're walking on the palm of my hand and you're about five inches high. She could hear Carol's soft voice under the babble of the wind, and she grew tense, with bitterness and fear. She walked faster, ran a few steps, as if she could run out of that morass of love and hate and resentment in which her mind suddenly floundered. There was a wooden shack of an office at the side of the lumberyard. She went in and spoke with a Mr. Zambrowski, a slow moving baldheaded man with a gold watch chain that barely stretched across his front. Before Therese asked him about shorthand, he volunteered that he didn't need it. He said he would try her out the rest of the afternoon and tomorrow.


Two other girls came in for the job the next morning, and Mr. Zambrowski took their names, but before noon, he said the job was hers. "If you don't mind getting here at eight in the morning," Mr. Zambrowski said. "I don't mind." She had come in at nine that morning. But she would have gotten there at four in the morning if he had asked her to. Her hours were from eight to four thirty, and her duties consisted simply in checking the mill shipments to the yard against the orders received, and in writing letters of confirmation. She did not see much lumber from her desk in the office, but the smell of it was in the air, fresh as if the saws had just exposed the surface of the white pine boards, and she could hear it bouncing and rattling as the trucks pulled into the center of the yard. She liked the work, liked Mr. Zambrowski, and liked the lumberjacks and truck drivers who came into the office to warm their hands at the fire. One of the lumberjacks named Steve, an attractive young man with a golden stubble of beard, invited her a couple of times to have lunch with him in the cafeteria down the street. He asked her for a date on Saturday night, but Therese did not want to spend a whole evening with him or with anyone yet. One night, Abby telephoned her. "Do you know I had to call South Dakota twice to find you?" Abby said irritably. "What're you doing out there? When're you coming back?" Abby's voice brought Carol as close as if it were Carol she heard. It brought the hollow tightness in her throat again, and for a moment she couldn't answer anything. "Therese?" "Is Carol there with you?" "She's in Vermont. She's been sick," Abby's hoarse voice said, and there was no smile in it now. "She's taking a rest." "She's too sick to call me? Why don't you tell me, Abby? Is she getting better or worse?" "Better. Why didn't you try to call to find out?" Therese squeezed the telephone. Yes, why hadn't she? Because she had been thinking of a picture instead of Carol. "What's the matter with her? Is she--" "That's a fine question. Carol wrote you what happened, didn't she?" "Yes." "Well, do you expect her to bounce up like a rubber ball? Or chase you all over America? What do you think this is, a game of hide and seek?" All the conversation of that lunch with Abby crashed down on Therese. As Abby saw it, the whole thing was her fault. The letter Florence had found was only the final blunder. "When're you coming back?" Abby asked. "In about ten days. Unless Carol wants the car sooner." "She doesn't. She won't be home in ten days." Therese forced herself to say, "About that letter--the one I wrote--do you know if they found it before or after?"


"Before or after what?" "After the detectives started following us." "They found it afterward," Abby said, sighing. Therese set her teeth. But it didn't matter what Abby thought of her, only what Carol thought. "Where is she in Vermont?" "I wouldn't call her if I were you." "But you're not me and I want to call her." "Don't. That much I can tell you. I can give her any message--that's important." And there was a cold silence. "Carol wants to know if you need any money and what about the car." "I don't need any money. The car's all right." She had to ask one more question. "What does Rindy know about this?" "She knows what the word divorce means. And she wanted to stay with Carol. That doesn't make it easier for Carol, either." Very well, very well, Therese wanted to say. She wouldn't trouble Carol by telephoning, by writing, by any messages, unless it was a message about the car. She was shaking when she put the telephone down. And she immediately picked it up again. "This is room six eleven," she said. "I don't want to take any more long distance calls--none at all." She looked at Carol's letter opener on the bed table, and now it meant Carol, the person of flesh and blood, the Carol with freckles and the corner nicked off one tooth. Did she owe Carol anything, Carol the person? Hadn't Carol been playing with her, as Richard had said? She remembered Carol's words, "When you have a husband and child it's a little different." She frowned at the letter opener, not understanding why it had become only a letter opener suddenly, why it was a matter of indifference to her whether she kept it or threw it away. Two days later, a letter arrived from Abby enclosing a personal check for a hundred and fifty dollars that Abby told her to "forget about." Abby said she had spoken with Carol, and that Carol would like to hear from her, and she gave Carol's address. It was a rather cold letter, but the gesture of the check was not cold. It hadn't been prompted by Carol, Therese knew. "Thank you for the check," Therese wrote back to her. "It's terribly nice of you, but I won't use it and I don't need it. You ask me to write to Carol. I don't think I can or that I should." Dannie was sitting in the hotel lobby one afternoon when she came home from work. She could not quite believe it was he, the dark-eyed young man who got up from the chair smiling and came slowly toward her. Then the sight of his loose black hair, mussed a little more by the upturned coat collar, the symmetrical broad smile, was as familiar as if she had seen him only the day before. "Hello, Therese," he said. "Surprised?" "Well, terrifically. I'd given you up. No word from you in--two weeks."


She remembered the twenty-eighth was the day he said he would leave New York, and it was the day she had come to Chicago. "I'd just about given you up," Dannie said, laughing. "I got delayed in New York. I guess it's lucky I did, because I tried to telephone you and your landlady gave me your address." Dannie's fingers kept a firm grip on her elbow. They were walking slowly toward the elevators. "You look wonderful, Therese." "Do I? I'm awfully glad to see you." There was an open elevator in front of them. "Do you want to come up?" "Let's go have something to eat. Or is it too early? I didn't have any lunch today." "It's certainly not too early, then." They went to a place Therese knew about, that specialized in steaks. Dannie even ordered cocktails, though he usually never drank. "You're here by yourself?" he said. "Your landlady in Sioux Falls told me you left by yourself." "Carol couldn't come out finally." "Oh. And you decided to stay out longer?" "Yes." "Until when?" "Until just about now. I'm going back next week." Dannie listened with his warm dark eyes fixed on her face, without any surprise. "Why don't you just go west instead of east and spend a little time in California. I've got a job in Oakland. I have to be there day after tomorrow." "What kind of a job?" "Researching--just what I asked for. I came out better than I thought I would on my exams." "Were you first in the class?" "I don't know. I doubt it. They weren't graded like that. You didn't answer my question." "I want to get back to New York, Dannie." "Oh." He smiled, looking at her hair, her lips, and it occurred to her Dannie had never seen her with this much makeup on. "You look grown up all of a sudden," he said. "You changed your hair, didn't you?" "A little." "You don't look frightened any more. Or even so serious." "That pleases me." She felt shy with him, yet somehow close, a closeness charged with something she had never felt with Richard. Something suspenseful, that she enjoyed. A little salt, she thought. She looked at Dannie's hand on the table, at the strong muscle that bulged below the thumb. She remembered his hands on her shoulders that day in his room. The memory was a pleasant one. "You did miss me a little, didn't you, Terry?" "Of course." "Did you ever think you might care something about me? As much as you did for Richard, for instance?" he asked with a note of surprise in his own voice, as if it were a fantastic question. "I don't know," she said quickly. "But you're not still thinking about Richard, are you?" "You must know I'm not." "'Who is it then? Carol?" She felt suddenly naked, sitting there opposite him. "Yes. It was." "But not now?"


Therese was amazed that he could say the words without any surprise, any attitude at all. "No. It's--I can't talk to anyone about it, Dannie," she finished, and her voice sounded deep and quiet in her ears, like the voice of another person. "Don't you want to forget it, if it's past?" "I don't know. I don't know just how you mean that." "I mean, are you sorry?" "No. Would I do the same thing again? Yes." "Do you mean with somebody else, or with her?" "With her," Therese said. The corner of her mouth went up in a smile. "But the end was a fiasco." "Yes. I mean I'd go through the end, too." "And you're still going through it." Therese didn't say anything. "Are you going to see her again? Do you mind if I ask you all these questions?" "I don't mind," she said. "No, I'm not going to see her again. I don't want to." "But somebody else?" "Another woman?" Therese shook her head. "No." Dannie looked at her and smiled, slowly. "That's what matters. Or rather, that's what makes it not matter." "What do you mean?" "I mean, you're so young, Therese. You'll change. You'll forget." She did not feel young. "Did Richard talk to you?" she asked. "No. I think he wanted to one night, but I cut it off before he got started." She felt the bitter smile on her mouth, and she took a last pull on her short cigarette and put it out. "I hope he finds somebody to listen to him. He needs an audience." "He feels jilted. His ego's suffering. Don't ever think I'm like Richard. I think people's lives are their own." Something Carol had said once came suddenly to her mind: every adult has secrets. Said as casually as Carol said everything, stamped as indelibly in her brain as the address she had written on the sales slip in Frankenberg's. She had an impulse to tell Dannie the rest, about the picture in the library, the picture in the school. And about the Carol who was not a picture, but a woman with a child and a husband, with freckles on her hands and a habit of cursing, of growing melancholy at unexpected moments, with a bad habit of indulging her will. A woman who had endured much more in New York than she had in South Dakota. She looked at Dannie's eyes, at his chin with the faint cleft. She knew that up to now she had been under a spell that prevented her from seeing anyone in the world but Carol. "Now what are you thinking?" he asked. "Of what you said once in New York, about using things and throwing them away." "Did she do that to you?" Therese smiled. "I shall do it." "Then find someone you'll never want to throw away." "Who won't wear out," Therese said. "Will you write to me?" "Of course." "Write me in three months." "Three months?"


But suddenly she knew what he meant. "And not before?" "No." He was looking at her steadily. "That's a fair time, isn't it?" "Yes. All right. It's a promise." "Promise me something else--take tomorrow off so you can be with me. I've got till nine tomorrow night." "I can't, Dannie. There's work to do--and I've got to tell him anyway that I'm leaving in another week." Those weren't quite the reasons, she knew. And perhaps Dannie knew, looking at her. She didn't want to spend tomorrow with him, it would be too intense, he would remind her too much of herself, and she still was not ready. Dannie came round to the lumberyard the next day at noon. They had intended to have lunch together, but they walked and talked on Lake Shore Drive for the whole hour instead. That evening at nine, Dannie took a plane westward. Eight days later, she started for New York. She meant to move away from Mrs. Osborne's as soon as possible. She wanted to look up some of the people she had run away from last fall. And there would be other people, new people. She would go to night school this spring. And she wanted to change her wardrobe completely. Everything she had now, the clothes she remembered in her closet in New York, seemed juvenile, like clothes that had belonged to her years ago. In Chicago she had looked around in the stores and hungered for the clothes she couldn't buy yet. All she could afford now was a new haircut.


Patricia Highsmith CHAPTER 23 THERESE WENT INTO HER old room, and the first thing she noticed was that the carpet corner lay flat. And how small and tragic the room looked. And yet hers, the tiny radio on the bookshelf, and the pillows on the studio couch, as personal as a signature she had written long ago and forgotten. Like the two or three set models hanging on the walls that she deliberately avoided looking at. She went to the bank and took out a hundred of her last two hundred dollars, and bought a black dress and a pair of shoes. Tomorrow, she thought, she would call Abby and arrange something about Carol's car, but not today. That same afternoon, she made an appointment with Ned Bernstein, the co-producer of the English show for which Harkevy was to do the sets. She took three of the models she had made in the West and also the Small Rain photographs to show him. An apprentice job with Harkevy, if she got it, wouldn't pay enough to live on, but there were other sources, other than department stores, anyway. There was television, for instance. Mr. Bernstein looked at her work indifferently. Therese said she hadn't spoken to Mr. Harkevy yet, and asked Mr. Bernstein if he knew anything about his taking on helpers. Mr. Bernstein said that was up to Harkevy, but as far as he knew, he didn't need any more assistants. Neither did Mr. Bernstein know of any other set studio that needed anyone at the moment. And Therese thought of the sixty-dollar dress. And of the hundred dollars left in the bank. And she had told Mrs. Osborne she might show the apartment any time she wished, because she was moving. Therese hadn't yet any idea where. She got up to leave, and thanked Mr. Bernstein anyway for looking at her work. She did it with a smile. "How about television?" Mr. Bernstein asked. "Have you tried to start that way? It's easier to break into." "I'm going over to see someone at Dumont later this afternoon." Mr. Donohue had given her a couple of names last January. Mr. Bernstein gave her some more names. Then she telephoned Harkevy's studio. Harkevy said he was just going out, but she could drop her models by his studio today and he could look at them tomorrow morning. "By the way, there'll be a cocktail party at the St. Regis for Genevieve Cranell tomorrow at about five o'clock. If you care to drop in," Harkevy said, with his staccato accent that made his soft voice as precise as mathematics, "at least we'll be sure to see each other tomorrow. Can you come?" "Yes. I'd love to come. Where in the St. Regis?" He read from the invitation. Suite D. Five to seven o'clock. "I shall be there by six." She left the telephone booth feeling as happy as if Harkevy had just taken her into partnership.


She walked the twelve blocks to his studio, and left the models with a young man there, a different young man from the one she had seen in January. Harkevy changed his assistants often. She looked around his workroom reverently before she closed the door. Perhaps he would let her come soon. Perhaps she would know tomorrow. She went into a drugstore on Broadway and called Abby in New Jersey. Abby's voice was entirely different from the way it had sounded in Chicago. Carol must be much better, Therese thought. But she did not ask about Carol. She was calling to arrange about the car. "I can come and get it if you want me to," Abby said. "But why don't you call Carol about it? I know she'd like to hear from you." Abby was actually bending over backward. "Well--" Therese didn't want to call her. But what was she afraid of? Carol's voice? Carol herself? "All right. I'll take the car to her, unless she doesn't want me to. In that case, I'll call you back." "When? This afternoon?" "Yes. In a few minutes." Therese went to the door of the drugstore and stood there for a few moments, looking out at the Camel advertisement with the giant face puffing smoke rings like gigantic doughnuts, at the low-slung, sullen-looking taxis maneuvering like sharks in the after-matinee rush, at the familiar hodgepodge of restaurant and bar signs, awnings, front steps and windows, that reddish- brown confusion of the side street that was like hundreds of streets in New York. She remembered walking in a certain street in the West Eighties once, the brownstone fronts, overlaid and overlaid with humanity, human lives, some beginning and some ending there, and she remembered the sense of oppression it had given her, and how she had hurried through it to get to the avenue. Only two or three months ago. Now the same kind of street filled her with a tense excitement, made her want to plunge headlong into it, down the sidewalk with all the signs and theater marquees and rushing, bumping people. She turned and walked back to the telephone booths. A moment later, she heard Carol's voice. "When did you get in, Therese?" There was a brief, fluttering shock at the first sound of her voice, and then nothing. "Yesterday." "How are you? Do you still look the same?" Carol sounded repressed, as if someone might be with her, but Therese was sure there was no one else. "Not exactly. Do you?" Carol waited. "You sound different." "I am." "Am I going to see you? Or don't you want to. Once." It was Carol's voice, but the words were not hers. The words were cautious and uncertain. "What about this afternoon? Have you got the car?" "I've got to see a couple of people this afternoon. There won't be time." 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. "No. A stage designer." It was Mr. Bernstein, and Therese sidled between a couple of groups of people and reached him. Mr. Bernstein held out a plump, cordial hand to her, and got up from his radiator seat. "Miss Belivet!" he shouted. "Mrs. Crawford, the make-up consultant--" "Let's not talk business!" Mrs. Crawford shrieked. "Mr. Stevens, Mr. Fenelon," Mr. Bernstein went on, and on and on, until she was nodding to a dozen people and saying "How do you do?" to about half of them. "And Ivor--Ivor!" Mr. Bernstein called. There was Harkevy, a slim figure with a slim face and a small mustache, smiling at her, reaching a hand over for her to shake. "Hello," he said, "I'm glad to see you again. Yes, I liked your work. I see your anxiety." He laughed a little. "Enough to let me squeeze in?" she asked. "You want to know," he said, smiling. "Yes, you can squeeze in. Come up to my studio tomorrow at about eleven. Can you make that?" "Yes." "Come and join me later. I must say good-by to these people who are leaving." And he went away. Therese set her drink down on the edge of a table, and reached for a cigarette in her handbag. It was done. She glanced at the door. A woman with upswept blond hair, with bright, intense blue eyes had just come into the room and was causing a small furor of excitement around her. She had quick, positive movements as she turned to greet people, to shake hands, and suddenly Therese realized she was Genevieve Cranell, the English actress who was to play the lead. She looked different from the few stills Therese had seen of her. She had the kind of face that must be seen in action to be attractive. "Hello, hello!"


she called to everyone finally as she glanced around the room, and Therese saw the glance linger on her for an instant, while in Therese there took place a shock a little like that she had known when she had seen Carol for the first time, and there was the same flash of interest in the woman's blue eyes that had been in her own, she knew, when she saw Carol. And now it was Therese who-continued to look, and the other woman who glanced away, and turned around. Therese looked down at the glass in her hand, and felt a sudden heat in her face and her finger tips, the rush inside her that was neither quite her blood nor her thoughts alone. She knew before they were introduced that this woman was like Carol. And she was beautiful. And she did not look like the picture in the library. Therese smiled as she sipped her drink. She took a long pull at the drink to steady herself. "A flower, madame?" A waiter was extending a tray full of white orchids. "Thank you very much." Therese took one. She had trouble with the pin, and someone--Mr. Fenelon or Mr. Stevens it was--came up and helped. "Thanks," she said. Genevieve Cranell was coming toward her, with Mr. Bernstein behind her. The actress greeted the man with Therese as if she knew him very well. "Did you meet Miss Cranell?" Mr. Bernstein asked Therese. Therese looked at the woman. "My name is Therese Belivet." She took the hand the woman extended. "How do you do? So you're the set department?" "No. Only part of it." She could still feel the handclasp when the woman released her hand. She felt excited, wildly and stupidly excited. "Isn't anybody going to bring me a drink?" Miss Cranell asked anybody. Mr. Bernstein obliged. Mr. Bernstein finished introducing Miss Cranell to the people around him who hadn't met her. Therese heard her tell someone that she had just gotten off a plane and that her luggage was piled in the lobby, and while she spoke, Therese saw her glance at her a couple of times past the men's shoulders. Therese felt an exciting attraction in the neat back of her head, in the funny, careless lift of her nose at the end, the only careless feature of her narrow, classic face. Her lips were rather thin. She looked extremely alert, and imperturbably poised. Yet Therese sensed that Genevieve Cranell might not talk to her again at the party for the simple reason that she probably wanted to. Therese made her way to a wall mirror, and glanced to see if her hair and her lipstick were still all right. "Therese," said a voice near her. "Do you like champagne?" Therese turned and saw Genevieve Cranell. "Of course." "Of course. Well, toddle up to six-nineteen in a few minutes. That's my suite. We're having an inner circle party later." "I feel very honored," Therese said.