Free Those Who Walk Away by Patricia Highsmith

allowed to stay, especially if he gave her some money. Or he could pick up some Americans, tell them he was hiding from a girl, an Italian girl who was inquiring at every hotel in Venice for him. But he realized the difficulty of finding Americans who (a) had a flat or a house in Venice and (b) would be Bohemian enough to take in a stranger. Ray thought again, and tried to be more logical. For the third time, the peach-faced girl in the bar-caffé north of the piazza came to his mind. A nice girl, that was evident. He would have to tell her a decent story. The nearest to the truth was best, or so he had always heard. He could ask her a perfectly honourable question: did she know of any place, any family, any person who would take him in for a few days, if he paid them rent? Private houses would not ask for his passport, because they did not report their income from lodgers.
    Ray left the bar, and went in search of a barbershop. In the barbershop—where a ten-year-old boy lay sprawled on a bench with a transistor, enraptured by some quite good old-style American jazz—Ray asked the barber to leave the beard along his jawbone and his upper lip. He was not trying to change his appearance, and the beard wouldn’t do so to any extent; he simply wanted a change. He had grown such a beard in Mallorca for a few months. Peggy had liked it at first, then she had not liked it, and he had shaved it off. The barber’s mirror was long and clear, covering half the wall. Ray looked directly at himself over the double row of bottles of hair tonic and lotions, his eyes burning now in a fine frenzy of fever, he supposed, but they seemed very steady.
    He had heavy dark brown eyebrows, a wide straight mouth, the lips more full than thin. His nose was strong and straight, a heavier version of his mother’s, but in his mother it had been a final asset that made her ‘a beauty.’ His red-brown hair was not in his parents, but had been the hair colour of his mother’s brother Rayburn, for whom he was named. When Ray received letters addressed to Raymond Garrett, he knew whoever had written did not know him well. From his father, an oilwell worker in his youth, a self-made man, now a millionaire with an oil company of his own, Ray had inherited wide cheekbones. It was an American face, slightly on the handsome side, hopelessly marred by vagueness, discretion, the second thought, if not downright indecision, Ray thought. He disliked his appearance, and always saw himself leaning slightly forward as if to hear someone who was speaking softly, or as if incipiently bowing, kowtowing, about to retreat backwards. And he felt that because of his parents’ money, he had had life too easy. It was still un-American to take money from one’s parents. Among his friends, lots of them painters without much money, Ray was inclined to pick up any tab, but this also was forbidden: it was showing off. He was afflicted by a constant feeling that he was not in the mainstream of life, because he did not have to hold a job. With friends, he divided bills rather too pointedly, perhaps, and each paid his share, except when he had had a couple of drinks and was able to do what he felt like, which was to say, “This is on me.”
    Sitting in the barber’s chair, Ray recalled a childhood incident which stood out absurdly, and returned to him at least twice a year. When he was nine or ten, he had stayed in the house of one of his school friends, an apartment house. He had realized that his school friend’s parents didn’t own the apartment, only rented it, and that other people had lived there before them and would live after them. He had spoken to his father about it that evening, saying, ‘Our house always was ours, wasn’t it?’ ‘Of course, I built it,’ said his father. (Ray had thought then, his father might have built it with his own hands before Ray was born, because his father could do anything.) Ray had felt different then, rather special, but in a way