Free Highsmith, Patricia by The Price of Salt Page A

way?”
    “No,” Therese said.
    “Not many? Just three or four?”
    “Like you?” Therese met her eyes steadily.
    And Carol looked fixedly at her, as if she demanded another word, another phrase from Therese. But then she set the glass down on the stove top and turned away. “Do you play the piano?”
    “Some.”
    “Come and play something.” And when Therese started to refuse, she said imperatively, “Oh, I don’t care how you play. Just play something.”
    Therese played some Scarlatti she had learned at the Home. In a chair on the other side of the room. Carol sat listening relaxed and motionless, not even sipping the new glass of whisky and water. Therese played the C major Sonata, which was slowish and rather simple, full of broken octaves, but it struck her as dull, then pretentious in the trill parts, and she stopped. It was suddenly too much, her hands on the keyboard that she knew Carol played, Carol watching her with her eyes half closed, Carol’s, whole house around her, and the music that made her abandon herself, made her-defenseless. With a gasp, she dropped her hands in her lap.
    “Are you tired?” Carol asked calmly.
    The question seemed not of now but of always. “Yes.”
    Carol came up behind her and set her hands on Therese’s shoulders.
    Therese could see her hands in her memory—flexible and strong, the delicate tendons showing as they pressed her shoulders. It seemed an age as her hands moved toward her neck and under her chin, an age of tumult so intense it blotted out the pleasure of Carol’s tipping her head back and kissing her lightly at the edge of her hair. Therese did not feel the kiss at all.
    “Come with me,” Carol said.
    She went with Carol upstairs again. Therese pulled herself up by the banister and was reminded suddenly of Mrs. Robichek.
    “I think a nap wouldn’t hurt you,” Carol said, turning down the flowered cotton bedspread and the top blanket.
    “Thanks, I’m not really—”
    “Slip your shoes off,” Carol said softly, but in a tone that commanded obedience.
    Therese looked at the bed. She had hardly slept the night before. “I don’t think I shall sleep, but if I do—”
    “I’ll wake you in half an hour.” Carol pulled the blanket over her when she lay down. Carol sat down on the edge of the bed. “How old are you, Therese?”
    Therese looked up at her, unable to bear her eyes now but bearing them nevertheless, not caring if she died that instant, if Carol strangled her, prostrate and vulnerable in her bed, the intruder. “Nineteen.” How old it sounded. Older than ninety-one.
    Carol’s eyebrows frowned, though she smiled a little.
    Therese felt that she thought of something so intensely, one might have touched the thought in the air between them. Then Carol slipped her hands under her shoulders, and bent her head down to Therese’s throat, and Therese felt the tension go out of Carol’s body with the sigh that made her neck warm, that carried the perfume that was in Carol’s hair.
    “You’re a child,” Carol said, like a reproach. She lifted her head. “What would you like?”
    Therese remembered what she had thought of in the restaurant, and she set her teeth in shame.
    “What would you like?” Carol repeated.
    “Nothing, thanks.”
    Carol got up and went to her dressing table and lighted a cigarette.
    Therese watched her through half-closed lids, worried by Carol’s restlessness, though she loved the cigarette, loved to see her smoke.
    “What would you like, a drink?”
    Therese knew she meant water. She knew from the tenderness and the concern in her voice, as if she were a child sick with fever. Then Therese said it: “I think I’d like some hot milk.”
    The corner of Carol’s mouth lifted in a smile. “Some hot milk,” she mocked. Then she left the room.
    And Therese lay in a limbo of anxiety and sleepiness all the long while until Carol reappeared with the milk in a straight-sided white cup with a saucer under it,