Highsmith, Patricia (24 page)

“You didn’t by any chance bring a bottle.”

Bob jumped up. “I certainly did. It’s weighing me down and I completely forgot it.” He set the bottle on the table and waited for Guy to take it. Bob was about forty-five, a man of modest but sanguine temperament, with an indelible stamp of contented bachelorhood and of complete absorption and authority in his profession. “After you,” he prompted Guy. “I want to drink a private toast to Anne. She’s very beautiful, Guy.” He added softly, with a smile, “As beautiful as a white bridge.”

Guy stood looking at the opened pint bottle. The hubbub out the window seemed to poke fun at him now, at him and Anne. The bottle on the table was part of it, the jaded, half-humorous concomitant of the traditional wedding. He had drunk whisky at his wedding with Miriam. Guy hurled the bottle into the corner. Its solid crack and spatter ended the hooting horns, the voices, the silly tremolo of the organ only for a second, and they began to seep back again.

“Sorry, Bob. I’m very sorry.”

Bob had not taken his eyes from him. “I don’t blame you a bit,” he smiled.

“But I blame myself!”

“Listen, old man—”

Guy could see that Bob did not know whether to laugh or be serious.

“Wait,” Treacher said. “I’ll get us some more.”

The door opened just as Bob reached for it, and Peter Wriggs’ thin figure slipped in. Guy introduced him to Treacher. Peter had come all the way up from New Orleans to be at his wedding. He wouldn’t have come to his wedding with Miriam, Guy thought. Peter had hated Miriam. There was gray at Peter’s temples now, though his lean face still grinned like a sixteen-year-old’s. Guy returned his quick embrace, feeling that he moved automatically now, on rails as he had the Friday night.

“It’s time, Guy,” Bob said, opening the door.

Guy walked beside him. It was twelve steps to the altar. The accusing faces, Guy thought. They were silent with horror, as the Faulkners had been in the back of the car. When were they going to interfere and stop it all? How much longer was everyone going to wait?

“Guy!” somebody whispered.

Six, Guy counted, seven.

“Guy!” faint and direct, from among the faces, and Guy glanced left, followed the gaze of two women who looked over their shoulders, and saw Bruno’s face and no other.

Guy looked straight again. Was it Bruno or a vision? The face had been smiling eagerly, the gray eyes sharp as pins. Ten, eleven, he counted. Twelve steps up, skip seven… . You can remember it, it’s got a syncopated rhythm. His scalp tingled. Wasn’t that a proof it was a vision and not Bruno? He prayed, Lord, don’t let me faint. Better you fainted than married, the inner voice shouted back.

He was standing beside Anne, and Bruno was here with them, not an event, not a moment, but a condition, something that had always been and always would be. Bruno, himself, Anne. And the moving on the tracks. And the lifetime of moving on the tracks until death do us part, for that was the punishment. What more punishment was he looking for?

Faces bobbed and smiled all around him, and Guy felt himself aping them like an idiot. It was the Sail and Racquet Club. There was a buffet breakfast, and everyone had a champagne glass, even himself. And Bruno was not here. There was really no one here but wrinkled, harmless, perfumed old women in hats. Then Mrs. Faulkner put an arm around his neck and kissed his cheek, and over her shoulder he saw Bruno thrusting himself through the door with the same smile, the same pinlike eyes that had already found him. Bruno came straight toward him and stopped, rocking on his feet.

“My best—best wishes, Guy. You didn’t mind if I looked in, did you? It’s a happy occasion!”

“Get out. Get out of here fast.”

Bruno’s smile faded hesitantly.” I just got back from Capri,” he said in the same hoarse voice. He wore a new dark royal-blue gabardine suit with lapels broad as an evening suit’s lapels. “How’ve you been, Guy?”

An aunt of Anne’s babbled a perfumed message into Guy’s ear, and he murmured something back. Turning, Guy started to move off.

“I just wanted to wish you well,” Bruno declared.“There it is.”

“Get out,” Guy said. “The door’s behind you.” But he mustn’t say any more, he thought. He would lose control.

“Call a truce, Guy. I want to meet the bride.”

Guy let himself be drawn away by two middle-aged women, one on either arm. Though he did not see him, he knew that Bruno had retreated, with a hurt, impatient smile, to the buffet table.

“Bearing up, Guy?” Mr. Faulkner took his half-empty glass from his hand. “Let’s get something better at the bar.”

Guy had half a glassful of Scotch. He talked without knowing what he was saying. He was sure he had said, Stop it all, tell everyone to go. But he hadn’t, or Mr. Faulkner wouldn’t be roaring with laughter. Or would he?

Bruno watched from down the table as they cut the cake, watched Anne mostly, Guy noticed. Bruno’s mouth was a thin, insanely smiling line, his eyes glinted like the diamond pin on his dark blue tie, and in his face Guy saw that same combination of wistfulness, awe, determination, and humor that he had seen the first moment he met him.

Bruno came up to Anne. “I think I met you somewhere before. Are you any relation to Teddy Faulkner?”

Guy watched their hands meet. He had thought he wouldn’t be able to bear it, but he was bearing it, without making a move.

“He’s my cousin,” Anne said with her easy smile, the same smile she had given someone a moment before.

Bruno nodded. “I played golf with him a couple of times.”

Guy felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Got a minute, Guy? I’d—” It was Peter Wriggs.

“I haven’t.” Guy started after Bruno and Anne. He closed his fingers around Anne’s left hand.

Bruno sauntered on the other side of her, very erect, very much at ease, bearing his untouched piece of wedding cake on a plate in front of him. “I’m an old friend of Guy’s. An old acquaintance.” Bruno winked at him behind Anne’s head.

“Really? Where’d you two know each other?”

“In school. Old school friends.” Bruno grinned. “You know, you’re the most beautiful bride I’ve seen in years, Mrs. Haines. I’m certainly glad to have met you,” he. said, not with finality but an emphatic conviction that made Anne smile again.

“Very glad to have met you,” she replied.

“I hope I’ll be seeing you both. Where’re you going to live?”

“In Connecticut,” Anne said.

“Nice state, Connecticut,” Bruno said with another wink at Guy, and left them with a graceful bow.

“He’s a friend of Teddy’s?” Guy asked Anne. “Did Teddy invite him?”

“Don’t look so worried, darling!” Anne laughed at him.“We’ll leave soon.”

“Where is Teddy?” But what was the use finding Teddy, what was the sense in making an issue of it, he asked himself at the same time.

“I saw him two minutes ago up at the head of the table,” Anne told him. “There’s Chris. I’ve got to say hello to him.”

Guy turned, looking for Bruno, and saw him helping himself to shirred eggs, talking gaily to two young men who smiled at him as if under the spell of a devil.

The ironic thing, Guy thought bitterly in the car a few moments later, the ironic thing was that Anne had never had time to know him. When they first met, he had been melancholic. Now his efforts, because he so rarely made efforts, had come to seem real. There had been, perhaps, those few days in Mexico City when he had been himself.

“Did the man in the blue suit go to Deems?” Anne asked.

They were driving out to Montauk Point. One of Anne’s relatives had lent them her cottage for their three-day honeymoon. The honeymoon was only three days, because he had pledged to start work at Horton, Horton and Keese, Architects, in less than a month, and he would have to work on the double to get the detailed drawings for the hospital under way before he began. “No, the Institute. For a while.” But why did he fall in with Bruno’s lie?

“Interesting face he has,” Anne said, straightening her dress about her ankles before she put her feet on the jump seat.

“Interesting?” Guy asked.

“I don’t mean attractive. Just intense.”

Guy set his teeth. Intense? Couldn’t she see he was insane? Morbidly insane? Couldn’t everyone see it?

Thirty-two

The receptionist at Horton, Horton and Keese, Architects, handed him a message that Charles Bruno had called and left his number. It was the Great Neck number.

“Thank you,” Guy said, and went on across the lobby.

Suppose the firm kept records of telephone messages. They didn’t, but suppose they did. Suppose Bruno dropped in one day. But Horton, Horton and Keese were so rotten themselves, Bruno wouldn’t make much of a contrast. And wasn’t that exactly why he was here, steeping himself in it, under some illusion that revulsion was atonement and that he would begin to feel better here?

Guy went into the big skylighted, leather-upholstered lounge, and lighted a cigarette. Mainwaring and Williams, two of the firm’s first-string architects, sat in big leather armchairs, reading company reports. Guy felt their eyes on him as he stared out the window. They were always watching him, because he was supposed to be something special, a genius, the junior Horton had assured everybody, so what was he doing here? He might be broker than everybody thought, of course, and he had just gotten married, but quite apart from that and from the Bronx hospital, he was obviously nervous, had lost his grip. The best lost their grip sometimes, they would say to themselves, so why should they scruple about taking a comfortable job? Guy gazed down onto the dirty jumble of Manhattan roofs and streets that looked like a floor model of how a city should not be built. When he turned around, Mainwaring dropped his eyes like a schoolboy.

He spent the morning dawdling over a job that he had been on for several days. Take your time, they told him. All he had to do was give the client what he wanted and sign his name to it. Now, this job was a department store for an opulent little community in Westchester, and the client wanted something like an old mansion, in keeping with the town, only sort of modern, too, see? And he had asked especially for Guy Daniel Haines. By adjusting his brain to the level of the trick, the cartoon, Guy could have tossed it off, but the fact it was really going to be a department store kept intruding certain functional demands. He erased and sharpened pencils all morning, and figured it would take him four or five more days, well into next week, until he got anything down as even a rough idea to show the client.

“Charley Bruno’s coming tonight, too,” Anne called that evening from the kitchen.

“What?” Guy came around the partition.

“Isn’t that his name? The young man we saw at the wedding.”

Anne was cutting chives on a wooden board.

“You invited him?”

“He seems to have heard about it, so he called up and sort of invited himself,” Anne replied so casually that a wild suspicion she might be testing him sent a faint chill up his spine. “Hazel—not milk, angel, there’s plenty of cream in the refrigerator.”

Guy watched Hazel set the cream container down by the bowl of crumbled gorgonzola cheese.

“Do you mind his coming, Guy?” Anne asked him.

“Not at all, but he’s no friend of mine, you know.” He moved awkwardly toward the cabinets and got out the shoe-polish box. How could he stop him? There had to be a way, yet even as he racked his brain, he knew that the way would elude him.

“You do mind,” Anne said, with a smile.

“I think he’s sort of a bounder, that’s all.”

“It’s bad luck to turn anyone away from a housewarming. Don’t you know that?”

Bruno was pink-eyed when he arrived. Everyone else had made some comment about the new house, but Bruno stepped down into the brick-red and forest-green living room as if he had been here a hundred times before. Or as if he lived here, Guy thought as he introduced Bruno around the room. Bruno focused a grinning, excited attention on Guy and Anne, hardly acknowledging the greetings of the others—two or three looked as if they knew him, Guy thought—except for that of a Mrs. Chester Boltinoff of Muncey Park, Long Island, whose hand Bruno shook in both his as if he had found an ally. And Guy watched with horror as Mrs. Boltinoff looked up at Bruno with a wide, friendly smile.

“How’s every little thing?” Bruno asked Guy after he had gotten himself a drink.

“Fine. Very fine.” Guy was determined to be calm, even if he had to anaesthetize himself. He had already had two or three straight shots in the kitchen. But he found himself walking away, retreating, toward the perpendicular spiral stairway in the corner of the living room. Just for a moment, he thought, just to get his bearings. He ran upstairs and into the bedroom, laid his cold hand against his forehead, and brought it slowly down his face.

“Pardon me, I’m still exploring,” said a voice from the other side of the room. “It’s such a terrific house, Guy, I had to retreat to the nineteenth century for a while.”

Helen Heyburn, Anne’s friend from her Bermuda schooldays, was standing by the bureau. Where the little revolver was, Guy thought.

“Make yourself at home. I just came up for a handkerchief. How’s your drink holding up?” Guy slid out the right top drawer where lay both the gun he didn’t want and the handkerchief he didn’t need.

“Well—better than I am.”

Helen was in another “manic” period, Guy supposed. She was a commercial artist, a good one, Anne thought, but she worked only when her quarterly allowance gave out and she slipped into a depressive period. And she didn’t like him, he felt, since the Sunday evening when he hadn’t gone with Anne to her party. She was suspicious of him. What was she doing now in their bedroom, pretending to feel her drinks more than she did?

“Are you always so serious, Guy? You know what I said to Anne when she told me she was going to marry you?”

“You told her she was insane.”

“I said,‘But he’s so serious. Very attractive and maybe a genius, but he’s so serious, how can you stand it?’” She lifted her squarish, pretty blond face. “You don’t even defend yourself. I’ll bet you’re too serious to kiss me, aren’t you?”