The Talented Miss Highsmith (46 page)

The Price of Salt
allowed Pat to release herself from what was to become her most reliable artistic forgery: the male “voice” of narration and an apparently heterosexual orientation. She never again published another work like it. “How grateful I am at last,” she wrote while working on the manuscript in December of 1949, “not…to spoil my best thematic material by transposing it to false male-female relationship.”
³²

On 30 June 1950, the day after she finished her first version of
The Price of Salt,
Pat, saturated with images from her manuscript and moved by some demiurge of completion, took a train from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan to Ridgewood, New Jersey, on her way to the address she'd memorized a year and a half before: Kathleen Senn's address, 315 Murray Avenue.
³³
It was the beginning of an ineptly comic episode: a “stalking” of the heroine of her own novel.

Early in June, an accidental meeting with a man from Ridgewood, Carl Hazelwood, had revived Pat's interest in the actual Mrs. Senn. Hazelwood was to drive Pat out to Ridgewood on her second “stalking” trip there six months later (when Pat found the house deserted and “something of a fairy tale[,] something of a castle”),
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and he joined the long list of young men whom Pat—for a moment—thought she might marry. But as Pat wrote in her diary about Mrs. Senn: “Alas, should I see her, my book would be spoilt! I should be inhibited!”
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Pat's instinctively canny separation of her art from her life was followed by a “completely irresponsible desire to drift about picking up strangers, especially girls. Born of confidence & money, of course.”
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Pat had been spending uninspiring nights with casual lovers Billie (a woman) and Sylvia as well as with her serious, off-and-on-again “fiancé,” Marc Brandel. It was only when she'd finished the first version of
Salt
that she felt secure enough to make the first trip to New Jersey.

Pat carefully preserved her ticket back from that ride, Ridgewood to New York on the Erie Railroad, on her diary page of 30 June 1950. Just as carefully, she recorded her guilty and self-dramatizing impressions from that day.

“Today feeling quite odd—like a murderer in a novel, I boarded the train for Ridgewood, New Jersey. It shook me physically and left me limp.”
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Pat had to fortify herself with “two ryes” before taking the 92 bus in Ridgewood to Murray Avenue. She asked the driver where to go and then, “to my dismay and horror, I heard the entire bus shouting Murray Ave?—and giving me directions!” Feeling exposed and unbalanced by the attention, she took the wrong bus, and then, still embarrassed by the remarks of the passengers, she got off at the wrong stop. “I overshot my mark.” She found herself in a residential area with no sidewalks where “I was a conspicuous figure. I dared not go any further, up the avenue…where she [Mrs. Senn] just might have been on the lawn or porch and I might have betrayed myself with halting too abruptly.”

Pat wanted only to look, to gaze at the woman whose essence she had been, in the most profound way, living with and re-creating for the past eighteen months while writing
The Price of Salt
. Like any voyeur, she didn't want to be “a conspicuous figure” or even to make contact with the object of her obsession. But her timidity was so pronounced that it overcame her mild intention of creeping a little closer. So she hovered on a nearby street and watched recessively as a “pale aqua automobile [came] out of Murray Avenue, driven by a woman with dark glasses and short blond hair, alone, and I think in a pale blue or aqua dress with short sleeves.” But Pat wasn't at all certain the driver was Mrs. Senn—the hair was different—and her identification of the figure was ambiguous. “My heart leapt but not very high.”

Later, she wrote “a tragic little poem” about the sighting—“if it was one”—and announced that she was determined to conceal “these stirrings” from “Mr. M[arc] B[randel],” whom she was still trying to persuade herself to marry.
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The whole afternoon was a comedy of errors—more like a failed, farcical rehearsal of transgressive desires than a noirish episode of sexual stalking. Pat was, anyway, a great rehearser and assembler of feelings for her writing, and she carefully described and filed away the humiliation she suffered on this stalking trip to New Jersey. Twelve years later she was able to make use of it in a dazzling novel of misfortune,
The Cry of the Owl,
whose mild-mannered peeping Tom, Robert Forester, suffers the horrible consequences of having a girl he spies upon fall deeply in love with him.

Three weeks before she took the trip to Ridgewood, Pat had gone to visit Mother Mary in Hastings-on-Hudson for another rehearsal: she called it steeping “myself in that which I hate, in that rejection, which is what I am about to describe in my book. My mother grows increasingly neurotic—my god!…Yet she insists I do not need an analyst.”
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In her private writing, as she did in this passage, Pat often confused herself with her mother. But in her public writing, she tried to do what she never could do in life: make the best use of her worst feelings.

The day after she returned from Ridgewood, 1 July, Pat went back to Hastings-on-Hudson to visit Mary again, and she found that trip to be just as unsatisfactory as her ride to New Jersey had been the day before. “Though mother always asks when I am coming out…she wants me really to leave very soon.”
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Mary was collapsing under the intolerable financial pressure of keeping up a good front. Her fancy house and live-in Filipino “houseboy” in Hastings-on-Hudson were far beyond her means, and all her work opportunities were disappearing. Pat knew—Stanley had told her—that Mary was “ashamed she cannot offer a house with leisure, food, servants, etc. and afraid of what the Southern family will think of her. This reaches serious proportions—so great I am worried that mother may lose her mind, even commit suicide.”
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Pat felt “conscience stricken” and thought about lending her parents a thousand dollars; she was flush from the sale of some stories. But she decided, typically, against becoming her mother's banker because Mary “resents my success, my ability to organize my life.”
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On 12 October, Pat finished her second version of
The Price of Salt,
got deeply drunk, and found that she had her period for the first time “since May or June”—something she ascribed to completing her book. Off the leash at last, she extended her “drunk” into a long, bad binge.

“I am ashamed of my self-indulgent and destructive behavior—which I cannot seem to control. I can blame fatigue but not entirely. Such a deplorable waste of time and money—and I feel I sink as low morally as any of the [Greenwich] Village wastrels of whom I have heard, have known, all my life, without suspecting I could ever be like them.”
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Pat had spent the spring and summer of 1950, with only a week or two out in August, almost completely absorbed in her revisions of
The Price of Salt
, the novel she was still calling
Tantalus
. In May and early June, she was boarding in a fairy-tale setting: an old turreted and towered building in Tarrytown, New York, called the Tarrytown Castle, half an hour up the Henry Hudson Parkway from Manhattan. And she was falling “madly in love with my Carol…. I want to spend all my time, all my evenings with her.”
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She was having dreams full of “homosexual symbols” and other dreams “filled with self-confidence. A strange new atmosphere as if even the mind dreaming it were not mine.”
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Back in Manhattan, along with her work came heavy bouts of drinking, waves of shame and fear at the thought of publishing a “lesbian” novel that would wreck her career (“I shall try to persuade Margot [her literary agent] that the book should not be published now”),
⁴⁶
and behavior as feverish as that of any of her love-struck protagonists. She experienced a “[t]emporary relief from shame” when her agent suggested she publish the novel under a pseudonym—but she was resolved not to tell “the family” about it.
⁴⁷

Pat continued to work on the manuscript in Provincetown, in New York, and on Fire Island, where she was a resentful and messy guest at the house of Rosalind Constable and Rosalind's lover, Claude. Rosalind, drinking heavily herself, stumbled across Pat in bed with yet another woman named Anne in what Rosalind called a “house reeking of liquor, fornication, and unmade beds.” It was really, Pat thought, the “cataclysmic end” of her ten-year friendship with Rosalind Constable. But there were compensations: before she left the island, Pat began a secret flirtation with her agent Margot Johnson's girlfriend, Kay.

While Pat was in Provincetown, Alfred Hitchcock sent her a telegram asking for a meeting. He was “already shooting [the tennis scenes of
Strangers on a Train
] in Forest Hills.” “He seems to be going…mad over my book,” she wrote in her diary.
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But Pat didn't rush away from Provincetown to meet the famous director, and she gave no explanation for her behavior.
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Perhaps it was shyness; perhaps she was simply focused on her new book and up to her eyes in her always complicated love life. Films, anyway, weren't a form Pat took very seriously in the 1940s. “Movies in America,” she wrote, “destroy that fine, seldom even perceived sense of the importance and dignity of one's own life.”
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Pat wouldn't have known that Farley Granger, the handsome young actor playing Guy Haines in the tennis scenes Hitchcock was now shooting in Forest Hills, Queens, had the same ambiguous sexuality with which she'd haloed the character of Guy Haines in her novel. Nor would Farley Granger have known what Pat Highsmith's sexual tastes were. And that was the underworld of homosexuality in mid-twentieth-century America: so darkly lit, no one could see anyone else's face.

Returning to New York, Pat managed to find yet another woman named Virginia to sleep with and considered, in her practical way, Ann Smith's invitation to come and live with her in Provincetown: “[P]erhaps her youth…would tend to make me stronger…rather than if I lived with an older person, which is my inclination.” All this happened in July.

Pat began August by relaxing: “Idle-idle-idle-idle—and I love it. All my clothes are clean.” From New York she went to New Hampshire with Mother Mary to stay as a paying guest with the family of farmers Pat and Mary usually stayed with on their New Hampshire trips, the Minots, and she sketched and read while Mary played interminable games of canasta. Back in New York, Pat spent the night with one of her casual lovers, Jeanne T., once again wishing for her favorite Virginia, Ginnie Catherwood—“wife, harlot, sweetheart—all in one! Irresistible!” Margot Johnson's magazine sale of Pat's chauffeur story, “Where to, Madame?” for $1,150 made her think of reworking
Tantalus
(
The Price of Salt
) and she thought of two more titles for her revision:
The Sun Gazer
and
The Echo.

And then, Pat had a wisdom tooth extracted. It was “a ghastly experience…. I am conscious at the moment of extraction. And gas dreams are the most cataclysmic episodes of my existence.”

Pat's taste for dental gas was one of her stranger introductions into the feelings she usually associated with love. She suffered from bad teeth all her life, and it affected the way she thought of herself. As an early adolescent, Pat had stifled her attraction for a girl classmate because she assumed, mistakenly, that the girl was jibing at her decaying teeth. It was Pat's recurrent attempts to repair that decay that led her into “gas dreams.” At thirty-two, agonizing once more over her bad teeth in Trieste, she summed up her problem.

“About twice a week I have bad dreams about my bad teeth, always connected with general inferiority, social and otherwise. With better teeth, I should be quite a different personality.”
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At forty-nine, Pat already had false teeth she could “sleep in and eat corn on the cob” with. At fifty-three, she reported sarcastically to Kingsley: “Just had the remainder of my upper teeth out—isn't that cheerful news?”
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From late adolescence, Pat had been writing (sometimes in German) about the pain of her frequent tooth extractions, and about the transcendent ecstasy dental gas afforded her. She said the experience of anesthesia—rather like her contemplations of love and murder—allowed her to have “cosmic” feelings.

In December of 1949, shortly after she'd returned to New York from her first trip to Europe (and then went on to New Jersey, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida; she was twitchy as a Mexican jumping bean from her European experiences of art and love), Pat made this enthusiastic entry—one of many on the subject—in her nineteenth cahier.

Aside from the occasional porcelain filling, some deeply painful tooth extractions in London, and a crown or two that had to be replaced in Europe, most of the serious repair work on Pat's mouth was done in New York. All of the dentists she saw there were Jews, and she continued to seek out her old New York dentists long after she'd moved permanently to Europe, making appointments with them on her short stays in Manhattan and spending more time with her dentists than she did with any other medical practitioners. Her favorite dentist was Dr. Arnold Gottlieb on Fifth Avenue, and he went on treating her teeth and replacing the last of them, finally, with false teeth well into the 1980s.
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Pat wrote rhapsodically to Kingsley about the “deep curettage” Gottlieb had performed on her and about the upper bridge he'd installed in 1970: “In his way, I think he's an artist.”
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And she continued to take a relishing pleasure in the gas and in her near-technical familiarity with its administration—for whose details she continued to pump the good doctor. Dr. Gottlieb, Pat said to Kingsley, “doesn't mind telling you what he is doing.”
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