The Price of Salt, or Carol by Patricia Highsmith

Author:Patricia Highsmith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

13

Richard began it.

“Why do you like her so much?”

It was an evening on which she had broken a date with Richard on the slim chance Carol would come by. Carol hadn’t, and Richard had come by instead. Now at five past eleven in the huge pink-walled cafeteria on Lexington Avenue, she had been about to begin, but Richard was ahead of her.

“I like being with her, I like talking with her. I’m fond of anybody I can talk to.” The phrases of some letter she had written to Carol and never mailed drifted across her mind as if to answer Richard. I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.

“You’ve got a hell of a crush on her,” Richard announced, explanatorily and resentfully.

Therese took a deep breath. Should she be simple and say yes, or should she try to explain it? What could he ever understand of it, even if she explained it in a million words?

“Does she know it? Of course she knows it.” Richard frowned and drew on his cigarette. “Don’t you think it’s pretty silly? It’s like a crush that schoolgirls get.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. She felt so very sure of herself. I will comb you like music caught in the heads of all the trees in the forest . . .

“What’s there to understand? But she understands. She shouldn’t indulge you. She shouldn’t play with you like this. It’s not fair to you.”

“Not fair to me?”

“What’s she doing, amusing herself with you? And then one day she’ll get tired of you and kick you out.”

Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an emotion? She was angry, but she did not want to argue. She said nothing.

“You’re in a daze!”

“I’m wide awake. I never felt more awake.” She picked up the table knife and rubbed her thumb back and forth on the ridge at the base of the blade. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

He frowned. “Leave you alone?”

“Yes.”

“You mean, about Europe, too?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Listen, Terry—” Richard wriggled in his chair and leaned forward, hesitated, then took another cigarette, lighting it distastefully, throwing the match on the floor. “You’re in some kind of trance! It’s worse—”

“Just because I don’t want to argue with you?”

“It’s worse than being lovesick, because it’s so completely unreasonable. Don’t you understand that?”

No, she didn’t understand a word.

“But you’re going to get over it in about a week. I hope. My God!” He squirmed again. “To say—to say for a minute you practically want to say good-bye to me because of some silly crush!”

“I didn’t say that. You said it.” She looked back at him, at his rigid face that was beginning to redden in the center of the flat cheeks. “But why should I want to be with you if all you do is argue about this?”

He sat back. “Wednesday, next Saturday, you won’t feel like this at all. You haven’t known her three weeks yet.

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