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

late, perhaps to call him and say that she couldn’t make it at all, but she did not call, and she came into the Jasserine Chains punctually at seven. Robert was waiting in the lobby, which had a mahogany staircase, carpets and mirrors and paintings, like the hall of a privatehouse. She was wearing stadium boots, her high-heeled pumps in her hand, and she effected the change, holding on to his arm, in front of the wardrobe check booth.
    “These things are so aw-wful,” she said apologetically.
    They were shown to a table a pleasant distance from the fireplace. When he proposed a cocktail, she said she would have a Manhattan. She wore a blue-and-black patterned dress that looked to Robert a bit old and sedate for her. Her earrings were half spheres of silver. Their conversation, for the first fifteen minutes, was platitudinous. (“Oh, if any car can move in the slush, it’s a Volkswagen,” Jenny said.) Robert was uncomfortably conscious of the aroma of his hair: he had just had a haircut, and the barber had doused him with tonic before Robert could stop him. The girl’s eyes dwelt on him, stared at him, but what she was thinking about him Robert could not tell, and her conversation gave no clue. She talked casually of her family in Scranton, of her old-fashioned father, who hadn’t wanted her to go to college and who had insisted that she take some business courses as well as sociology. She asked him about his schools. He had gone to the University of Colorado. He hadn’t finished until he was twenty-four, because of money problems, he told her, though actually he hadn’t finished sooner because of a depression that had hit him at nineteen, a year after his mother remarried. Robert considered it the low point in his life, a period he was vaguely ashamed of. He had fallen apart because it had seemed to him that his family had fallen apart, though he had really approved of his mother’s marrying again and he liked the man she had married. Robert’s father had drunk too much, had never known how to manage his money, and nothing but his mother’s patience had held the family together—only threeof them, as he had no brothers or sisters—until his father killed himself in a car accident when Robert was seventeen. But Robert did not tell any of this to Jenny.
    “How long are you going to be in Langley?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. Why?”
    “Because you look like someone who’s not going to stay long. Someone who prefers a bigger city.”
    Robert poured a half inch more wine for her, so that her glass was just half full. He realized he was wearing the gold cuff links Nickie had given him on their first wedding anniversary, and he pulled his jacket cuffs farther down over them. “Where’re you and Greg going to live when you’re married?”
    “Oh, Greg likes Trenton. For business reasons. It’s ugly compared to Princeton, but Princeton’s expensive. He’s got a house picked out in Trenton, and we’re supposed to take it June first.”
    “Do you like the house?”
    She took a long time to answer, then said seriously, “I think what it amounts to is I’m not so sure I ought to marry Greg.”
    “Oh? Why?”
    “I’m not so sure I love him enough.”
    Robert had no comment that seemed appropriate. She had finished her dinner.
    “I’m not going to marry him,” she said.
    “When did you decide that?”
    “Just after Christmas.” She rolled the lighted end of her cigarette in the ashtray.
    The waiter came to remove their plates, to take their orders for dessert. Robert didn’t want dessert, but the homemade apple pie washighly touted on the menu, and Jenny agreed to it when he suggested it, so he ordered two with coffee.
    “My advice to you,” he said, “is to postpone the wedding a few months. Maybe you’re worried because Greg’s rushing you.”
    Her slender eyebrows frowned slightly. “That wouldn’t do any good, postponing. I’m talking about something I already know.”
    “You’ve