The Two Faces of January

by Patricia Highsmith

  Chester’s and Colette’s room was so stark it was amusing. A double bed, a table, a chair, and that was it. No waste-paper-basket and only one ashtray the size of a pin tray. It was also cold. The bellboy went over and turned the wheel on a radiator with a triumphant air, said something to them, then waited for his tip. Chester paid him.

  “I think this is very exciting,” Colette said. “It’s like camping or something.”

  “Um-m. Want to wash up first?”

  Colette did.

  Chester felt the radiator, which as yet showed no sign of losing its coldness. He had a vision of its being cold tonight also, and Colette staying up all night dancing somewhere with Rydal, instead of trying to sleep. Colette’s energy was astounding to Chester—ice-skating all afternoon in Radio City or riding in Central Park, then dancing till dawn at a party, for instance. The energy of youth, of course. He simply couldn’t keep up with it. His legs wouldn’t hold out. Well, it hadn’t come to that yet, and if the room didn’t get warm in a couple of hours, he’d change the room or change the hotel.

  “I’ll be in Rydal’s room,” Colette said as she came out of the bathroom, rubbing lotion on her hands.

  They were all going out to have a late lunch in a few minutes. Chester only nodded to her. He washed up, had a Scotch, hung up a suit from his suitcase, then went down the hall to number 18, which Rydal said he had been given. The door was slightly ajar, but he meticulously knocked, holding the knob so the door wouldn’t swing open. He heard Colette’s and Rydal’s voice, and heard Colette laugh.

  “Come in,” Rydal called. “We’re comparing notes on our rooms. How do you like that tub?” He nodded towards the bathroom.

  Chester went to take a look. The hot-water tank projected over the front half of the tub, leaving hardly any room to sit in it. Chester came back smiling. “And how’s your heat?”

  “Coming along, I think,” Rydal said. He put on his jacket.

  Chester wandered over and put a hand down on Rydal’s radiator. Definitely on the way to being warm. Rydal’s suitcase was open on a chair. Its lining was worn and coming unglued at an upper corner. Chester saw a sweater, a shirt, a rolled pair of pajamas with a pair of shoes inside them.

  “I’m starving,” Colette said.

  “Well,” Rydal said, “let’s go out on the town.”

  They lunched in a tile-floored restaurant on the square. Bunches of bananas hung down from the ceiling on black chains, with big black hooks stuck through their stems. The portions of their lamb and rice orders were small but adequate, the red wine was drinkable, and Chester felt much better after the meal.

  “What’s there to do in this town?” Colette asked.

  “I really don’t know,” Rydal said. “But it is a port. We might take a look at the water.”

  “I’ve got to buy stockings,” Colette said. “I left two pairs drying on the back of the john door in Iraklion, damn it. I’d like to get some before the shops close this afternoon.”

  “Oh, that should be easy,” Rydal said. “I imagine these shops stay open till seven.”

  They strolled in the direction of the sea, which was visible down the street from the main square. The town seemed to offer nothing in the way of beauty. The shops were tiny and poor-looking, there was nothing like a museum or a government building in view. The port was a long curve with a wide wharf going out into the water. The only boats in the harbor were two old tankers.

  “Must be a slack season here,” Chester remarked. Colette was holding his arm. He put his hand over hers.

  After ten minutes or so, they turned back in the direction of the main part of town to look for a shop that sold stockings. There were shoe shops, women’s lingerie shops of a simple sort with cotton stockings, but no nylons. Rydal pointed out to Colette a cellar tavern with a billboard in front of it showing a buxom woman in a peasant blouse, her mouth open, singing.

  “I suppose this is the town hotspot,” Rydal said. “Dancing nightly, it says.”

  Colette bent to look down the narrow stairs which ended at a red door. “How exciting. Why don’t we give it a whirl tonight?” She looked at Chester.

  Chester saw, or imagined he saw, a taunting in the look: come or not, I’m going. But Colette looked away, and he wasn’t sure. The place looked miserable to Chester, and semi-peasant dancing wasn’t the kind of folklore he was interested in. The gaudy, baubled woman in the photograph looked Turkish or Romany or worse. But he’d go, of course. He foresaw it.

  It was Rydal who spotted a stocking shop across a street, Rydal who negotiated for Colette and got the right size.

  “What’s the word for stockings?” Chester asked him, and Rydal told him. But a minute later the word had gone out of Chester’s head.

  Then back to the hotel for a rest before the evening began. Rydal was to give them a ring around seven, by which time he said he would have bought what evening papers he could find. Chester lay down beside Colette, who was reading on the bed in her dressing-gown. She was reading one of the pocketbook novels they had bought in Athens. Chester put his arm across her waist, but she soon extricated herself and got up.

  “I’m sorry you don’t like beards, honey,” Chester said, “but just now I don’t know what I can do about it. It won’t be for long.”

  “It’s not the beard,” Colette said with her back to him. “I was just about to do my nails.” She turned around with her box of nail polish in her hands.

  She came back and sat on the bed, propped up against a pillow, and Chester fell asleep while she was putting on the polish. When he woke up, it was ten minutes to seven by Colette’s clock on the bed table, and he thought at once of Rydal’s promised call. If Rydal had found anything important in the paper, Chester thought—such as that Chester MacFarland was believed to have left Iraklion this morning—he would have called by now. Then a thought, or rather a disturbing question, occurred to Chester: what kind of a young man would aid and abet a man he knew to be wanted by the police, a man he knew had killed someone, even if it was by accident? The answer was a crook, of course, a young man who expected to play the blackmail game slowly and carefully and for a long time. Chester had thought of it before, but somehow now, after the nap, it hit him with a new freshness. The worst was yet to come. Chester shivered. He was cold. The room was cold.

  “Chilly, darling?” Colette was reading beside him.

  “Yes. It’s cold, isn’t it?”

  “The radiator’s doing better. I just felt it.”

  Chester got up and poured himself a Scotch. He saw Colette glance at him for drinking it, but she didn’t say anything. Well, he was stuck with Rydal Keener for the next few days. He thought he would ask Rydal a little more about himself, his schooling, his ambitions, if any, and he could tell a lot about what he was in for by what Rydal told him.

  The telephone rang.

  Rydal reported no news in the local Chania paper. “I thought you and your wife might like to have dinner by yourselves tonight,” Rydal said.

  But Chester’s mind was on questioning Rydal a bit. “Not particularly, unless you’d like to be alone,” Chester said.

  “He’s not coming with us?” Colette asked, reaching a hand up for the telephone. “Let me speak to him.”

  Grimly, without a word to Rydal, Chester passed the telephone to her.

  “Hello, Rydal. What’s this about being alone? . . . Of course not, don’t be silly. . . . Nonsense, knock on the door around eight and come in for a Scotch. . . . Oh, that sounds interesting. Fine, I’ll tell Chester. . . . Okay, see you.” She hung up and said, “Rydal found out that nightclub we saw serves dinner, so why don’t we eat there?”

  As Chester had foreseen, Rydal and Colette were dancing at midnight, he himself was beginning to feel tired, and he had found out very little more about Rydal Keener. He had gone to Yale and taken
a law degree, he said, and then he had done his army service. The two years he had spent in Europe were a present from his grandmother, who had left him ten thousand dollars when she died. Chester believed him about the grandmother, but he was not sure about the law degree, or Yale. Chester had only a superficial knowledge of the Yale campus in New Haven, from one visit. He had gone to Harvard for two years. Chester had no questions he could ask Rydal that would prove he had gone to Yale or not. At any rate, Rydal Keener had never worked, and that was a bad sign. Chester looked every few minutes at Rydal and at Colette in her bright-blue dress, dancing on the small floor. The place was dimly lit. Rydal and Colette stood out, because everybody else was dancing faster than they. Chester ordered his fourth Scotch. When Colette and Rydal returned to the table, Chester said:

  “What do you say we take off? We’ve had a long day.”

  “Oh, darling! At twelve thirty they’re having another floor show. A different one. Can’t you wait that long?” She sat down.

  Chester sat down, knowing he would wait that long.

  Rydal continued a conversation he had evidently been having with her on the dance floor, about Greek tavern music and dances, and why men sometimes danced with men. Chester had heard about that. Some shyness between the sexes, perhaps. There were two men couples dancing here, not touching each other, dancing very lively steps. It was not very interesting. But Colette was listening to Rydal as if fascinated.

  “That’s mentioned in our Guide Bleu,” Chester put in.

  But it made no stir in their conversation, because Rydal was talking about something else now. Lace blouses, something like that. He was so full of information, Chester wondered if it were not all made up.

  “Have a drink?” Chester asked Rydal when his Scotch arrived.

  Rydal looked at Colette. “A drink?”

  “No. Oh, maybe I’ll have a beer,” she said.

  Both she and Rydal ordered beer.

  The floor show at last arrived. It consisted mostly of patter and jokes, judging from the laughter, and Chester understood not a word of it. He was terribly tired of sitting, sitting on the bus all day, and now this. At last the floor show was over, and though he had meant to ask Colette to dance—they had danced only once all evening—he was just tired and stubborn enough not to ask her to dance now, and to show by his sullenness his displeasure with Rydal and his boredom with the whole evening.

  “How about it? Shall we take off?” Chester said to his wife.

  “One more, darling, and I promise you,” Colette said, standing up.

  She was asking Rydal to dance, Chester saw. Rydal hadn’t said a word to her or made a sign. He watched them go off with a deliberately indignant expression on his face, which, however, neither of them looked back to see. Chester brooded over his drink. He thought of the letters waiting for him in Athens. There were bound to be letters. He was expecting reports from his man in Dallas, who was also an accountant, on Unimex’s current situation. Was it being investigated? Then there was Jesse in New York, Jesse who knew his real name, Chester MacFarland. Jesse might have seen it in the papers by now, if it was in the papers. Jesse might panic, if he didn’t get a reply to some letter he’d sent to Athens. What were the papers in New York saying about him? That was what mattered. In Iraklion, even a Paris Herald Tribune was unobtainable.

  The music was now soft and slow, nothing but a violin and an accordion, playing as if they played for Colette and Rydal alone, and Chester saw to his annoyance that they really were the only couple on the floor now. Chester set his teeth and reconciled himself to the possibility that the music might go on for another fifteen minutes. The musicians were looking dreamily at Colette and Rydal, or so Chester thought. Chester went to the men’s room.

  When he came back, Colette and Rydal were sitting at the table talking, and the music had stopped.

  “Shall we go, darling?” Colette asked him.

  “If you’re ready,” Chester said with a taut smile.

  He and Rydal divided the bill and the tip, which Rydal said should be about a hundred, and Chester casually added another fifty to his share. They walked back to the Hotel Nikë, disturbed a snoozing bellboy to take them up in the elevator, and said good night to Rydal in the hall.

  “Good night. Pleasant dreams,” said Rydal, waving a hand as he walked away.

  Chester thought his smile cocky.

  In their room, Chester removed his jacket, and drew a glass of cold water from the tap. He would have preferred a nightcap of his own Scotch, but he thought with a glass of water he would make a soberer impression on Colette when he spoke to her.

  “You didn’t have much fun, did you, darling?” she asked, hanging up the blue dress she had just pulled over her head.

  “I don’t think it’s very wise of you to get chummy with a blackmailer,” Chester said quietly.

  “A blackmailer?” She turned her innocent, lavender eyes on him.

  “A potential blackmailer.” He moved closer to her, and spoke as softly as if Rydal were trying to listen at the door, and it occurred to Chester that he might be. “Last night in Iraklion, I offered him five thousand dollars to stay with us three days.” Chester sipped his water, looking hard at Colette. “He accepted it, you can be sure.”

  “Well—he didn’t ask you for it, it seems.” She hung up her dress and walked towards the bathroom. “You offered it.”

  Chester was momentarily distracted by her black panties and her bare back with the black strap of her bra crossing it. “I can’t talk to you if you go into the john,” he said with annoyance, but still softly.

  “I’m only getting my dressing-gown. Goodness, what’s all the ­excitement about?” She came back, tying the belt of her dressing-gown.

  “Just this. I don’t know what you’re saying to him, but . . . he already knows enough. After Sunday night, he’s leaving. After Sunday night . . . I’ll feel a little more secure. I’ll feel quite secure when I see the last of him.” He nodded in the direction of Rydal’s room.

  Colette said nothing, only lifted her eyebrows. She sat down on the edge of the bed, picked up a nail file from the night table and began filing away at a nail, waiting for more from him.

  “He’s plainly getting chummy with you. I don’t like it, and I want you to watch what you say to him. You understand, Colette, don’t you?”

  “Um-hm,” she said coolly. “I don’t understand why you’re so upset, though.” She went on filing, staring at her nail.

  “It’s quite simple,” Chester said, moving closer to her. “I’m not sure I can get rid of him Sunday night. If he chooses to stay on, ask for more money, what in hell could I—”

  “He hasn’t asked you for any yet.”

  “Why’re you defending him? He’s already taking advantage of the situation by smooching with you every night!”

  “Chester, don’t be silly! Smooching!”

  Chester snorted, went to his Scotch bottle and poured a little into his glass that had some water in it. “What I’d like to know, so I’ll know my own position, is what you’ve told him already.”

  “About what?”

  “About my affairs. About us. About anything.”

  “Darling, you’re getting red in the face, and I think you’ve had enough Scotch. I haven’t told him anything,” she said positively. “I bet not as much as you’ve told him after a few drinks. Matter of fact, tonight he did most of the talking. He was telling me about a girl he’d been in love with at fifteen.”

  “At fifteen?” Chester frowned.

  “Yes. She was fifteen, too. His cousin. Agnes. She was visiting in his family’s house over Easter holidays, and they had an affair together for about ten days, and his mother and father found out about it and had Rydal thrown out.”

  “Hm-m,” said Chester, only mildly interested. “Thrown out
? Disowned? And that’s how he got through Yale?”

  “No, he wasn’t thrown out right away. He was severely reproached by his father. He was accused of seducing the girl, though Rydal said it was a mutual thing. The point was, the girl came to his mother, after the family found out, and said Rydal had seduced her and she was trying to get away from him and all that, and she asked Rydal’s parents to keep him away from her. Isn’t that awful? And Rydal had thought they were both in love and they’d been planning to get married as soon as they got of age. I mean, it’s an awful betrayal for a boy of fifteen, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know.” Chester lit a cigarette.

  “Well, I think so. It nearly wrecked Rydal. He robbed a grocery store just after that, and then his father really cracked down on him and managed to put him into reform school.”

  “He must’ve learned a lot of useful things there.”

  “Why’re you so cynical? No, he hated it. He was there two years. Can you imagine, the son of a Harvard professor?”

  “Is that what he says he is?”

  “Yes,” Colette said firmly. “Then, after the two years, his grandmother helped him to get through college, because she still believed in him, you see, and his father—well, he said his father contributed a little bit, but they never were really reconciled again. Agnes, he said, got married at seventeen. A shotgun wedding in her home town. Great Barrington.”

  Chester sank into an armchair. “Well. You seem to’ve heard a real saga tonight. All this on that noisy dance floor?”

  “Well, just in snatches. Rydal told it to me in less words than I’m using, probably. But it’s the meaning of it you don’t seem to grasp. How a young man—a boy can have all that happen to him and still come out decent, I think that’s something. Still finish law school at Yale, for instance, that’s something, isn’t it?”

  Chester could see that Rydal had totally won her over. It was even worse than he’d thought, though rather amusing, he supposed. “And how do you know every damned thing he says isn’t a lie?”

  Colette put the nail file back on the night table, and looked directly at Chester. “Because of the way he says it. Said it.”