Strangers on a Train

  “But why at all?”

  “I feel like it!”

  “Why do you feel like it? Why do you want to be a martyr, Guy?”

  He said nothing.

  The setting sun dropped free of the trees and poured onto them suddenly. Guy frowned deeper, shading his eye with the brow that bore the white scar from the woods—the scar that would always show, he thought. He kicked at a stone in the ground, without being able to dislodge it. Let her think the job was still part of his depression after the Palmyra. Let her think anything.

  “Guy, I’m sorry,” she said.

  Guy looked at her. “Sorry?”

  She came closer to him. “Sorry. I think I know what it is.”

  He still kept his hands in his pockets. “What do you mean?”

  She waited a long while. “I thought all this, all your uneasiness after the Palmyra—even without your knowing it, I mean—goes back to Miriam.”

  He twisted away abruptly. “No. No, that’s not it at all!” He said it so honestly, yet it sounded so like a lie! He thrust his fingers in his hair and shoved it back.

  “Listen, Guy,” Anne said softly and clearly, “maybe you don’t want the wedding as much as you think you do. If you think that’s part of it, say it, because I can take that a lot easier than this job idea. If you want to wait—still—or if you want to break it off entirely, I can bear it.”

  Her mind was made up, and had been for a long while. He could feel it at the very center of her calmness. He could give her up at this moment. The pain of that would cancel out the pain of guilt.

  “Hey, there, Anne!” her father called from the back door. “Coming in soon? I need that mint!”

  “Minute, Dad!” she shouted back. “What do you say, Guy?”

  His tongue pressed the top of his mouth. He thought, she is the sun in my dark forest. But he couldn’t say it. He could only say, “I can’t say—”

  “Well—I want you now more than ever, because you need me now more than ever.” She pressed the mint and watercress into his hand. “Do you want to take this to Dad? And have a drink with him. I have to change my clothes.” She turned and went off toward the house, not fast, but much too fast for Guy to try to follow her.

  Guy drank several of the mint juleps. Anne’s father made them the old-fashioned way, letting the sugar and bourbon and mint stand in a dozen glasses all day, getting colder and more frosted, and he liked to ask Guy if he had ever tasted better ones anywhere. Guy could feel the precise degree to which his tension lessened, but it was impossible for him to become drunk. He had tried a few times and made himself sick, without becoming drunk.

  There was a moment after dusk, on the terrace with Anne, when he imagined he might not have known her any better than he had the first evening he visited her, when he suddenly felt a tremendous, joyous longing to make her love him. Then he remembered the house in Alton awaiting them after the wedding Sunday, and all the happiness he had known already with Anne rushed back to him. He wanted to protect her, to achieve some impossible goal, which would please her. It seemed the most positive, the happiest ambition he had ever known. There was a way out, then, if he could feel like this. It was only a part of himself he had to cope with, not his whole self, not Bruno, or his work. He had merely to crush the other part of himself, and live in the self he was now.

  thirty-one

  But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him. The wedding so elaborately prepared for, so festive, so pure with white lace and linen, so happily awaited by everyone, seemed the worst act of treachery he could commit, and the closer it drew, the more frantically and vainly he debated canceling it. Up to the last hour, he wanted simply to flee.

  Robert Treacher, the friend of his Chicago days, telephoned his good wishes and asked if he might come to the wedding. Guy put him off with some feeble excuse. It was the Faulkners’ affair, he felt, their friends, their family church, and the presence of a friend would put a hole in his armor. He had invited only Myers, who didn’t matter—since the hospital commission, he no longer shared an office with him—Tim O’Flaherty, who couldn’t come, and two or three architects from the Deems Academy, who knew his work better than they knew him. But half an hour after Treacher’s call from Montreal, Guy telephoned back and asked Bob if he would be his best man.

  Guy realized he had not even thought of Treacher in nearly a year, had not answered his last letter. He had not thought of Peter Wriggs, or Vic De Poyster and Gunther Hall. He had used to call on Vic and his wife in their Bleecker Street apartment, had once taken Anne there. Vic was a painter, and had sent him an invitation to his exhibit last winter, Guy remembered. He hadn’t even answered. Vaguely now, he remembered that Tim had been in New York and had called him to have lunch during the period when Bruno had been haunting him by telephone, and that he had refused. The Theologica Germanica, Guy recalled, said that the ancient Germans had judged an accused man innocent or guilty by the number of friends who came forth to vouch for his character. How many would vouch for him now? He had never given a great deal of time to his friends, because they were not the kind of people who expected it, but now he felt his friends were shunning him in turn, as if they sensed without seeing him that he had become unworthy of friendship.

  The Sunday morning of the wedding, walking in slow circles around Bob Treacher in the vestry of the church, Guy clung to his memory of the hospital drawings as to a single last shred of hope, the single proof that he still existed. He had done an excellent job. Bob Treacher, his friend, had praised him. He had proven to himself that he could still create.

  Bob had given up trying to make conversation with him. He sat with his arms folded, with a pleasant but rather absent expression on his chubby face. Bob thought he was simply nervous. Bob didn’t know how he felt, Guy knew, because however much he thought it showed, it didn’t. And that was the hell, that one’s life could so easily be total hypocrisy. This was the essence, his wedding and his friend, Bob Treacher, who no longer knew him. And the little stone vestry with the high grilled window, like a prison cell. And the murmur of voices outside, like the self-righteous murmurings of a mob impatient to storm the prison and wreak justice.

  “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. P
eter 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.