The Price of Salt

by Patricia Highsmith

And when one tried to touch a live string, looked at one with faces as masked as ever, making a remark so perfect in its banality that one could not even believe it might be subterfuge.

And suddenly the woman’s ugliness disappeared, because her reddish brown eyes behind the glasses were gentle, and interested in her. Therese could feel her heart beating, as if it had come to life.

Gay

“Hello,” said Mrs. Robichek, so indifferently that Therese was crushed. Therese did not dare look at Mrs. Robichek again. And yet their shoulders were actually pressed together!

Her mind was at a distant point, at a distant vortex that opened on the scene in the dimly lighted, terrifying room where the two of them seemed to stand in desperate combat. And at the point of the vortex where her mind was, she knew it was the hopelessness that terrified her and nothing else.

It was easy, after all, simply to open the door and escape. It was easy, she thought, because she was not really escaping at all.

She still wasn’t in love with him, not after ten months, and maybe she never could be, though the fact remained that she liked him better than any one person she had ever known, certainly any man. Sometimes she thought she was in love with him, waking up in the morning and looking blankly at the ceiling, remembering suddenly that she knew him, remembering suddenly his face shining with affection for her because of some gesture of affection on her part, before her sleepy emptiness had time to fill up with the realization of what time it was, what day, what she had to do, the soldier substance that made up one’s life. But the feeling bore no resemblance to what she had read about love. Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.

Their eyes met at the same instant, Therese glancing up from a box she was opening, and the woman just turning her head so she looked directly at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with a hand on her waist. Her eyes were gray, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire, and caught by them, Therese could not look away.

“That’s the one I like, but I don’t suppose I can have it, can I?” she said, nodding toward the brown valise in the show window behind Therese. Her eyebrows were blond, curving around the bend of her forehead. Her mouth was as wise as her eyes, Therese thought, and her voice was like her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full of secrets. “Yes,” Therese said.

Pathetic lesbian YESSS

She was conscious of the moments passing like irrevocable time, irrevocable happiness, for in these last seconds, she might turn and see the face she would never see again.

She laughed, putting her head back. It was a sound more beautiful than music. It made a little wrinkle at the corner of her eyes, and it made her purse her red lips as she drew on her cigarette. She gazed past Therese for a moment, her elbows on the table and her chin propped up on the hand that held her cigarette.

Once the backs of their hands brushed on the table, and Therese’s skin there felt separately alive now, and rather burning. Therese could not understand it, but it was so.

She wished the tunnel might cave in and kill them both, that their bodies might be dragged out together.

Im obsessed with her

The milk seemed to taste of bone and blood, of warm flesh, or hair, saltless as chalk yet alive as a growing embryo.

“Do you like her?” “Of course!” What a question! Like asking her if she believed in God.

Nothing mattered but the sound of Carol’s voice. Nothing mattered but Carol, and why did she let herself forget for a moment?

think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.”

I feel I am in love with you, she had written, and it should be spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.

JANUARY. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory:

She did not feel guilty about tonight. It was something else. She envied him. She envied him his faith there would always be a place, a home, a job, someone else for him. She envied him that attitude. She almost resented his having it.

“We may as well say good-by,” she said, “because neither of us will ever be any different from what we are this minute.”

Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder’s foot.

“I wonder if you’ll really enjoy this trip,” Carol said. “You so prefer things reflected in a glass, don’t you? You have your private conception of everything. Like that windmill. It’s practically as good as being in Holland to you. I wonder if you’ll even like seeing real mountains and real people.”

“How do you ever expect to create anything if you get all your experiences second hand?”

Minneapolis?”

Minnesota feature

Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched, fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale-white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.

“I love you,” Therese said, just to hear the words. “I love you, I love you.” But Carol seemed deliberately to pay almost no attention to her that day.

“I haven’t heard from you, and it’s beginning to dawn on me what an incredible conglomeration of contradictions you are. You are sensitive and yet so insensitive, imaginative and yet so unimaginative.

But at moments she felt like an actor, remembered only now and then her identity with a sense of surprise,

How was it possible to be afraid and in love, Therese thought. The two things did not go together. How was it possible to be afraid, when the two of them grew stronger together every day? And every night. Every night was different, and every morning. Together they possessed a miracle.

Once they came upon a little town they liked and spent the night there, without pajamas or toothbrushes, without past or future, and the night became another of those islands in time, suspended somewhere in the heart or in the memory, intact and absolute.

She sensed a tremendous sorrow hanging over them, ahead of them, that was just beginning to reveal the edge of itself, that they were driving into.

She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.

Carol touched her cheek, pressed both palms hard against her cheeks so her mouth opened like a fish’s, and Therese had to smile.

There were no words, she thought, after this point. What else did they need to explain, or ask, or promise in words? They did not even need to see each other’s eyes.

savoring the forgotten state of being alone. It was only a physical state. She really did not feel at all alone.

“Carol does?” Dutch said, turning to her as he polished a glass. Then a strange resentment rose in Therese because he had said her name, and she made a resolution not to speak of Carol again at all, not to anyone in the city.

Though all we have known is only a beginning. I meant to try to tell you in this letter that you don’t even know the rest and perhaps you never will and are not supposed to—meaning destined to. We never fought, never came back knowing there was nothing else we wanted in heaven or hell but to be together. Did you ever care for me that much, I don’t know. But that is all part of it and all we have known is only a beginning.

For an instant there came the fantastic realization that Carol had devoted only a fraction of herself to her, Therese, and suddenly the whole world of the last month, like a tremendous lie, cracked and almost toppled.

that the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing that happens between men and women.

Now in the long moment while she could not look away from it, the mouth smiled and the eyes regarded her with nothing but mockery, the last veil lifted and revealing nothing but mockery and gloating, the splendid satisfaction of the betrayal accomplished.

The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?

It seemed false as she wrote it, but walking away from the box where she had dropped it, she was conscious suddenly of the energy in her body, the spring in her toes, the youth in her blood that warmed her cheeks as she walked faster, and she knew she was free and blessed compared to Mrs. Robichek, and what she had written was not false, because she could so well afford it.

She walked faster, ran a few steps, as if she could run out of that morass of love and hate and resentment in which her mind suddenly floundered.

A little salt, she thought.

She knew that up to now she had been under a spell that prevented her from seeing anyone in the world but Carol.

Yes, she had been born since she left Carol. She had been born the instant she saw the picture in the library, and her stifled cry then was like the first yell of an infant, being dragged into the world against its will.

“Is there any way of predicting what Harge can do to her?”

“The flowers you gave me—they died.”

but her consciousness had stopped in a tangle where a dozen threads crossed and knotted. One was Dannie. One was Carol. One was Genevieve Cranell.

speaking now that she would not go further with Dannie. And loneliness swept over her again like a rushing wind, mysterious as the thin tears that covered her eyes suddenly, too thin to be noticed, she knew, as she lifted her head and glanced at the doorway again.