The Price of Salt, or Carol

by Patricia Highsmith

  “I don’t think Abby likes me,” Therese remarked. “I don’t think she wants me to see you.”

  “That’s not true. You’re imagining again.”

  “I don’t mean she said it.” Therese tried to sound as calm as Carol. “She was very nice. She invited me to a cocktail party.”

  “Whose party?”

  “I don’t know. She said uptown. She said you wouldn’t be there, so I didn’t particularly want to go.”

  “Where uptown?”

  “She didn’t say. Just that one of the girls giving it was an actress.”

  Carol set her lighter down with a click on the glass table, and Therese sensed her displeasure. “She did,” Carol murmured, half to herself. “Sit over here, Therese.”

  Therese got up, and sat down at the very foot of the swing seat.

  “You mustn’t think Abby feels that way about you. I know her well enough to know she wouldn’t.”

  “All right,” Therese said.

  “But Abby’s incredibly clumsy sometimes in the way she talks.”

  Therese wanted to forget the whole thing. Carol was still so distant even when she spoke, even when she looked at her. A bar of light from the green room lay across the top of Carol’s head, but she could not see Carol’s face now.

  Carol poked her with the back of her toe. “Hop up.”

  But Therese was slow to move, and Carol swung her feet over Therese’s head and sat up. Then Therese heard the maid’s step in the next room, and the plump, Irish-looking maid in the gray and white uniform came in bearing a coffee tray, shaking the porch floor with her quick, eager little steps that sounded so eager to please.

  “The cream’s in here, ma’am,” she said, pointing to a pitcher that didn’t match the demitasse set. Florence glanced at Therese with a friendly smile and round blank eyes. She was about fifty, with a bun at the back of her neck under the starched white band of her cap. Therese could not establish her somehow, could not determine her allegiance. Therese had heard her refer to Mr. Aird twice as if she were very devoted to him, and whether it was professional or genuine, Therese did not know.

  “Will there be anything else, ma’am?” Florence asked. “Shall I put out the lights?”

  “No, I like the lights. We won’t need anything else, thanks. Did Mrs. Riordan call?”

  “Not yet, ma’am.”

  “Will you tell her I’m out when she does?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Florence hesitated. “I was wondering if you were finished with that new book, ma’am. The one about the Alps.”

  “Go in my room and get it, if you’d like it, Florence. I don’t think I want to finish it.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. Good night, ma’am. Good night, miss.”

  “Good night,” Carol said.

  While Carol was pouring the coffee, Therese asked, “Have you decided how soon you’re going away?”

  “Maybe in about a week.” Carol handed her the demitasse with cream in it. “Why?”

  “Just that I’ll miss you. Of course.”

  Carol was motionless for a moment, and then she reached for a cigarette, a last one, and crumpled the pack up. “I was thinking, in fact, you might like to go with me. What do you think, for three weeks or so?”

  There it was, Therese thought, as casual as if she suggested their taking a walk together. “You mentioned it to Abby, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Carol said. “Why?”

  Why? Therese could not put into words why it hurt her that Carol had. “It just seems strange you’d tell her before you said anything to me.”

  “I didn’t tell her. I only said I might ask you.” Carol came over to her and put her hands on Therese’s shoulders. “Look, there’s no reason for you to feel like this about Abby—unless Abby said a lot else to you at lunch that you didn’t tell me.”

  “No,” Therese said. No, but it was the undercurrents, it was worse. She felt Carol’s hands leave her shoulders.

  “Abby’s a very old friend of mine,” Carol said. “I talk over everything with her.”

  “Yes,” Therese said.

  “Well, do you think you’d like to go?”

  Carol had turned away from her, and suddenly it meant nothing, because of the way Carol asked her, as if she didn’t really care one way or the other if she went. “Thanks—I don’t think I can afford it just now.”

  “You wouldn’t need much money. We’d go in the car. But if you have a job offered you right away, that’s different.”

  As if she wouldn’t turn down a job on a ballet set to go away with Carol—to go with her through country she had never seen before, over rivers and mountains, not knowing where they would be when night came. Carol knew that, and knew she would have to refuse if Carol asked her in this way. Therese felt suddenly sure that Carol taunted her, and she resented it with the bitter resentment of a betrayal. And the resentment resolved itself into a decision never to see Carol again. She glanced at Carol, who was waiting for her answer, with that defiance only half masked by an air of indifference, an expression that Therese knew would not change at all if she should give a negative answer. Therese got up and went to the box on the end table for a cigarette. There was nothing in the box but some phonograph needles and a photograph.

  “What is it?” Carol asked, watching her.

  Therese felt Carol had been reading all her thoughts. “It’s a picture of Rindy,” Therese said.

  “Of Rindy? Let’s see it.”

  Therese watched Carol’s face as she looked at the picture of the little girl with the white-blonde hair and the serious face, with the taped white bandage on her knee. In the picture, Harge was standing in a rowing boat, and Rindy was stepping from a dock into his arms.

  “It’s not a very good picture,” Carol said, but her face had changed, grown softer. “That’s about three years old. Would you like a cigarette? There’s some over here. Rindy’s going to stay with Harge for the next three months.”

  Therese had supposed that from the conversation in the kitchen that morning with Abby. “Is that in New Jersey, too?”

  “Yes. Harge’s family lives in New Jersey. They’ve a big house.” Carol waited. “The divorce will come through in a month, I think, and after March, I’ll have Rindy the rest of the year.”

  “Oh. But you’ll see her again before March, won’t you?”

  “A few times. Probably not much.”

  Therese looked at Carol’s hand holding the photograph, beside her on the swing seat, carelessly. “Won’t she miss you?”

  “Yes, but she’s very fond of her father, too.”

  “Fonder than she is of you?”

  “No. Not really. But he’s bought her a goat to play with now. He takes her to school on his way to work, and he picks her up at four. Neglects his business for her—and what more can you ask of a man?”

  “You didn’t see her Christmas, did you?” Therese said.

  “No. Because of something that happened in the lawyer’s office. That was the afternoon Harge’s lawyer wanted to see us both, and Harge had brought Rindy, too. Rindy said she wanted to go to Harge’s house for Christmas. Rindy didn’t know I wasn’t going to be there this year. They have a big tree that grows on the lawn and they always decorate it, so Rindy was set on it. Anyway, it made quite an impression on the lawyer, you know, the child asking to go home for Christmas with her father. And naturally I didn’t want to tell Rindy then I wasn’t going, or she’d have been disappointed. I couldn’t have said it anyway, in front of the lawyer. Harge’s machinations are enough.”

  Therese stood there, crushing the unlighted cigarette in her fingers. Carol’s voice was calm, as it might have been if she talked to Abby, Therese thought. Carol had never said so much to her before. “But the lawyer understood?

  Ca
rol shrugged. “It’s Harge’s lawyer, not mine. So I agreed to the three-month arrangement now, because I don’t want her to be tossed back and forth. If I’m to have her nine months and Harge three—it might as well start now.”

  “You won’t even visit her?”

  Carol waited so long to answer, Therese thought she was not going to. “Not very often. The family isn’t too cordial. I talk to Rindy every day on the telephone. Sometimes she calls me.”

  “Why isn’t the family cordial?”

  “They never cared for me. They’ve been complaining ever since Harge met me at some deb party. They’re very good at criticizing. I sometimes wonder just who would pass with them.”

  “What do they criticize you for?”

  “For having a furniture shop, for instance. But that didn’t last a year. Then for not playing bridge, or not liking to. They pick out the funny things, the most superficial things.”

  “They sound horrid.”

  “They’re not horrid. One’s just supposed to conform. I know what they’d like, they’d like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly. Shall we play some music? Don’t you ever like the radio?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Carol leaned against the windowsill. “And now Rindy’s got television every day. Hopalong Cassidy. How she’d love to go out west. That’s the last doll I’ll ever buy for her, Therese. I only got it because she said she wanted one, but she’s outgrown them.”

  Behind Carol, an airport searchlight made a pale sweep in the night, and disappeared. Carol’s voice seemed to linger in the darkness. In its richer, happier tone, Therese could hear the depths within her where she loved Rindy, deeper than she would probably ever love anyone else. “Harge doesn’t make it easy for you to see her, does he?”

  “You know that,” Carol said.

  “I don’t see how he could be so much in love with you.”

  “It’s not love. It’s a compulsion. I think he wants to control me. I suppose if I were a lot wilder but never had an opinion on anything except his opinion—Can you follow all this?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never done anything to embarrass him socially, and that’s all he cares about really. There’s a certain woman at the club I wish he’d married. Her life is entirely filled with giving exquisite little dinner parties and being carried out of the best bars feet first—She’s made her husband’s advertising business a great success, so he smiles on her little faults. Harge wouldn’t smile, but he’d have some definite reason for complaint. I think he picked me out like a rug for his living room, and he made a bad mistake. I doubt if he’s capable of loving anyone, really. What he has is a kind of acquisitiveness, which isn’t much separate from his ambition. It’s getting to be a disease, isn’t it, not being able to love?” She looked at Therese. “Maybe it’s the times. If one wanted to, one could make out a case for racial suicide. Man trying to catch up with his own destructive machines.”

  Therese said nothing. It reminded her of a thousand conversations with Richard, Richard mingling war and big business and congressional witch hunts and finally certain people he knew into one grand enemy, whose only collective label was hate. Now Carol, too. It shook Therese in the profoundest part of her where no words were, no easy words like death or dying or killing. Those words were somehow future, and this was present. An inarticulate anxiety, a desire to know, know anything, for certain, had jammed itself in her throat so for a moment she felt she could hardly breathe. Do you think, do you think, it began. Do you think both of us will die violently someday, be suddenly shut off? But even that question wasn’t definite enough. Perhaps it was a statement after all: I don’t want to die yet without knowing you. Do you feel the same way, Carol? She could have uttered the last question, but she could not have said all that went before it.

  “You’re the young generation,” Carol said. “And what have you got to say?” She sat down on the swing seat.

  “I suppose the first thing is not to be afraid.” Therese turned and saw Carol’s smile. “You’re smiling because you think I am afraid, I suppose.”

  “You’re about as weak as this match.” Carol held it burning for a moment after she lighted her cigarette. “But given the right conditions, you could burn a house down, couldn’t you?”

  “Or a city.”

  “But you’re even afraid to take a little trip with me. You’re afraid because you think you haven’t got enough money.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “You’ve got some very strange values, Therese. I asked you to go with me, because it would give me pleasure to have you. I should think it’d be good for you, too, and good for your work. But you’ve got to spoil it by a silly pride about money. Like that handbag you gave me. Out of all proportion. Why don’t you take it back, if you need the money? I don’t need the handbag. It gave you pleasure to give it to me, I suppose. It’s the same thing, you see. Only I make sense and you don’t.” Carol walked by her and turned to her again, poised with one foot forward and her head up, the short blonde hair as unobtrusive as a statue’s hair. “Well, do you think it’s funny?”

  Therese was smiling. “I don’t care about the money,” she said quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that,” Therese said. “I’ve got the money to go. I’ll go.”

  Carol stared at her. Therese saw the sullenness leave her face, and then Carol began to smile, too, with surprise, a little incredulously.

  “Well, all right,” Carol said. “I’m delighted.”

  “I’m delighted.”

  “What brought this happy change about?”

  Doesn’t she really know, Therese thought. “You do seem to care whether I go or not,” Therese said simply.

  “Of course I care. I asked you, didn’t I?” Carol said, still smiling, but with a twist of her toe she turned her back on Therese and walked toward the green room.

  Therese watched her go, her hands in her pockets and her moccasins making light slow clicks on the floor. Therese looked at the empty doorway. Carol would have walked out exactly the same way, she thought, if she had said no, she wouldn’t go. She picked up her half-finished demitasse, then set it down again.

  She went out and across the hall, to the door of Carol’s room. “What are you doing?”

  Carol was bending over her dressing table, writing. “What am I doing?” She stood up and slipped a piece of paper into her pocket. She was smiling now, really smiling in her eyes, like the moment in the kitchen with Abby. “Something,” Carol said. “Let’s have some music.”

  “Fine.” A smile spread over her face.

  “Why don’t you get ready for bed first? It’s late, do you know that?”

  “It always gets late with you.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “I don’t feel like going to bed tonight.”

  Carol crossed the hall to the green room. “You get ready. You’ve got circles under your eyes.”

  Therese undressed quickly in the room with the twin beds. The phonograph in the other room played “Embraceable You.” Then the telephone rang. Therese opened the top drawer of the bureau. It was empty except for a couple of men’s handkerchiefs, an old clothes brush and a key. And a few papers in the corner. Therese picked up a card covered in isinglass. It was an old driver’s license belonging to Harge. Hargess Foster Aird. Age: 37. Height: 5’ 81⁄2”. Weight: 168. Hair: blond. Eyes: blue. She knew all that. A 1950 Oldsmobile. Color: dark blue. Therese put it back and closed the drawer. She went to the door and listened.

  “I am sorry, Tessie, but I did get stuck after all,” Carol was saying regretfully, but her voice was happy. “Is it a good party? . . . Well, I’m not dressed and I’m tired.”

  Therese went to the bed table and got a cigarette from the box
there. A Philip Morris. Carol had put them there, not the maid, Therese knew, because Carol remembered that she liked them. Naked now, Therese stood listening to the music. It was a song she didn’t know.

  Was Carol on the telephone again?

  “Well, I don’t like it,” she heard Carol say, half angry, half joking, “one damn bit.”

  . . . It’s easy to live . . . when you’re in love . . .

  “How do I know what kind of people they are? . . . Oh-ho! Is that so?”

  Abby, Therese knew. She blew her smoke out and snuffled at the slightly sweet-smelling wisps of it, remembering the first cigarette she had ever smoked, a Philip Morris, on the roof of a dormitory at the home, four of them passing it around.

  “Yes, we’re going,” Carol said emphatically. “Well, I am. Don’t I sound it?”

  . . . For you . . . maybe I’m a fool but it’s fun . . . People say you rule me with one . . . wave of your hand . . . Darling, it’s grand . . . they just don’t understand . . .

  It was a good song. Therese closed her eyes and leaned on the half-open door, listening. Behind the voice was a slow piano that rippled all over the keyboard. And a lazy trumpet.

  Carol said, “That’s nobody’s business but mine, is it? . . . Nonsense!” and Therese smiled at her vehemence.

  Therese closed the door. The phonograph had dropped another record.

  “Why don’t you come say hello to Abby?” Carol said.

  Therese had ducked behind the bathroom door because she was naked. “Why?”

  “Come along,” Carol said, and Therese put on a robe and went.

  “Hello,” Abby said. “I hear you’re going.”

  “Is that news to you?”

  Abby sounded silly, as if she wanted to talk all night. She wished Therese a pleasant trip, and told her about the roads in the corn belt, how bad they could be in winter.

  “Will you forgive me if I was rude today?” Abby said for the second time. “I like you OK, Therese.”