Read Highsmith, Patricia for Free Online

had left it in Bruno’s room. His Plato. He didn’t like the idea of its spending the night in Bruno’s room, or of Bruno’s touching it and opening it.
     

Three
     
    He had called Miriam immediately, and she had arranged to meet him at the high school that lay between their houses.
    Now he stood in a corner of the asphalt gamefield, waiting. She would be late, of course. Why had she chosen the high school, he wondered. Because it was her own ground? He had loved her when he had used to wait for her here.
    Overhead, the sky was a clear strong blue. The sun poured down moltenly, not yellow but colorless, like something grown white with its own heat. Beyond the trees, he saw the top of a slim reddish building he did not know, that had gone up since he had been in Metcalf two years ago. He turned away. There was no human being in sight, as if the heat had caused everyone to abandon the school building and even the homes of the neighborhood. He looked at the broad gray steps that spilled from the dark arch of the school doors. He could still remember the inky, faintly sweaty smell on the fuzzy edges of Miriam’s algebra book. He could still see the MIRIAM penciled on the edge of its pages, and the drawing of the girl with the Spencerian marcel wave on the flyleaf, when he opened the book to do her problems for her. Why had he thought Miriam any different from all the others?
    He walked through the wide gate between the crisscross wire fence and looked up College Avenue again. Then he saw her, under the yellow-green trees that bordered the sidewalk. His heart began to beat harder, but he blinked his eyes with deliberate casualness. She walked at her usual rather stolid pace, taking her time. Now her head came into view, haloed by a broad, light-colored hat. Shadow and sun speckled her figure chaotically. She gave him a relaxed wave, and Guy pulled a hand out of his pocket, returned it, and went back into the gamefield, suddenly tense and shy as a boy. She knows about the Palm Beach job, he thought, that strange girl under the trees. His mother had told him, half an hour ago, that she had mentioned it to Miriam when Miriam last telephoned.
    “Hello, Guy.” Miriam smiled and quickly closed her broad orangey-pink lips. Because of the space between her front teeth, Guy remembered.
    “How are you, Miriam?” Involuntarily he glanced at her figure, plump but not pregnant looking, and it flashed through his mind she might have lied. She wore a brightly flowered skirt and a white short-sleeved blouse. Her big white pocketbook was of woven patent leather.
    She sat down primly on the one stone bench that was in the shade, and asked him dull questions about his trip. Her face had grown fuller where it had always been full, on the lower cheeks, so that her chin looked more pointed. There were little wrinkles under her eyes now, Guy noticed. She had lived a long time, for twenty-two.
    “In January,” she answered him in a flat voice. “In January the child’s due.”
    It was two months advanced then. “I suppose you want to marry him.”
    She turned her head slightly and looked down. On her short cheek, the sunlight picked out the largest freckles, and Guy saw a certain pattern he remembered and had not thought of since a time when he had been married to her. How sure he had once been that he possessed her, possessed her every frailest thought! Suddenly it seemed that all love was only a tantalizing, a horrible next-best to knowing. He knew not the smallest part of the new world in Miriam’s mind now. Was it possible that the same thing could happen with Anne?
    “Don’t you, Miriam?” he prompted.
    “Not right now. See, there’re complications.”
    “Like what?”
    “Well, we might not be able to marry as soon as we’d like to.”
    “Oh.” We. He knew what he would look like, tall and dark, with a long face, like Steve. The type Miriam had always been attracted to. The only type she would have a child by. And she did