The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith Read Free Book Online

child’s tricycle in the shadows on the porch. At the corner to the left, there was a drugstore-luncheonette that smelled of chocolate syrup, where Robert had bought toothpaste and razor blades a couple of times. Down at the other corner, out of sight from him, was a rather gloomy Y.M.C.A. Two or three blocks away, straight ahead, was the railroad station, where he’d picked up the box Nickie had sent him of items he had forgotten. Not that he’d forgotten most of them, since most of them had been things he’d bought for the house—an expensive clothes brush, a vase, a big glass ashtray, a ten-inch-high Mayan statue he had found in a shop in the Village. But sending them to him was another way of Nickie’s saying, “We’re finished, and take every damned thing you brought here!” Yes, she had finished with him abruptly, as abruptly as she finished with a name she had chosen to paint under. She was on her fourth or fifth name now—Amat. Or perhaps Ralph had inspired her to choose another. And when would Ralph start getting the treatment, Robert wondered. The on-again-off-again treatment, the manufactured quarrels, the rages followed by apologies. When would Ralph startto get fed up with the drunks asleep in the bathtub, on the living-room sofa, maybe in his own bed?
    Robert went into his kitchenette and fixed himself a Scotch and water. It had taken him nearly six months, the whole last six months, to learn that Nickie was playing a game, playing it so well she could produce real, wet tears out of her eyes when she apologized, when she told him she loved him and that she still believed they could make a go of it together. And hope had sprung up in Robert every time, and he had said, “Of course we can. For God’s sake, we love each other!” And at Nickie’s request, he would move out of the hotel that at her request he had moved into, and then the game would repeat itself, with a manufactured quarrel:
“Go back to your filthy hole of a hotel! I don’t want you in the house tonight! Go back and pick up some whore, I don’t care!”
And slowly but surely Ralph Jurgen had come on the scene, and as Nickie became more sure of Ralph, her interest in the game with Robert had diminished.
    He and Nickie had started out so differently, very much in love with each other, and Nickie had said many times, “I’ll love you the rest of my life. You’re the only man in the world for me,” and he had every reason to think that she meant it. Their friends told him she had said the same thing to them about him. It was Nickie’s second marriage, but those who had known her first husband—very few people, actually, only two or three, because Nickie had evidently dropped all the people she had known with Orrin Desch—said that she had never cared as much for Orrin. Robert and Nickie had planned a trip around the world in two years—now one, Robert realized. He remembered her going all the way to Brooklyn once to find a certain drawing pen that he had wanted. And maybe for a while,maybe for about a year, Nickie had loved him. Then the incidents had begun to come, minuscule incidents that Nickie could blow up into a storm. What were the letters from Marion doing at the back of the drawer in his desk at home? Marion was a girl he had been in love with four years before. Robert had forgotten he had the letters. Nickie had found them and read them all. She suspected Robert of seeing Marion—who had since married—now and then in New York, maybe for lunch, maybe when he said he was working overtime at the office. Robert had finally taken the letters into the hall of the building and thrown them down the incinerator—and later regretted it. What right had Nickie to look in his desk, anyway? Robert thought her unsureness of herself—it seemed to be that—might come from her dissatisfaction with herself as a painter. Robert had met her at the time she was beginning to realize she could not get into the uptown galleries merely by