A Game for the Living by Patricia Highsmith

you.”
    â€œOh, yes. The lawyer. He stood around and listened until they were through with me.”
    â€œYou weren’t there very long, anyway, Ramón.”
    Ramón looked at him through his pink lids, a bitter smile on his lips.
    Theodore wondered what he might say that would erase the hostility from Ramón’s face. Ramón was afraid, Theodore thought. That was why he went around protesting to everybody that he hadn’t killed Lelia. He was afraid, because many times, in his anger at Lelia, he must have imagined doing just what the murderer had done—or perhaps Ramón himself had done. Theodore wanted to ask Ramón quietly, now while he could look at him, whether he had done it, but he was afraid to ask him. Theodore glanced at the stairs. Inocenza had waited up for a while to see Ramón, but finally she had gone up to her room, and perhaps now she was asleep.
    â€œI am so glad to see that nothing bothers you, Don Teodoro. You never wanted to marry her, did you?”
    â€œI never wanted to marry anybody. That doesn’t mean I loved Lelia any less,” Theodore replied.
    â€œLelia was just a charming girl you met on your travels. A beautiful Latin girl with a talent for painting.”
    â€œLelia was more to me than that. You don’t know what you’re saying now.”
    Ramón’s trembling had subsided, though he had not touched his drink. “Maybe you can imagine her even closer to you now that she’s gone. Everything’s in one’s own mind, you always say. You’re not like the rest of us, are you, Teo.”
    Theodore did not want to get into a discussion of the Catholic versus the Protestant conscience or, what was worse, the Catholic conscience versus Ramón’s idea of ‘Existentialist’s conscience’, which was no conscience at all to Ramón. Just because he did not torture himself, as Ramón did, for having an affair out of wedlock!
    â€œAlways taking trips away from her,” Ramón continued, as if to himself.
    â€œOften with you both. I was in love with her, too, Ramón.”
    â€œI believe you, Teo. It was just a funny kind of love. You used to urge me to marry her and her to marry me. Remember?”
    â€œBut that was when I’d just met you both, Ramón. Before I realized Lelia didn’t want to marry. I considered myself something of an intruder then. I didn’t realize. And I’m sorry I intruded on your privacy by suggesting that you marry each other. It wasn’t any of my business.”
    â€œNo, it was not. But you wanted us to get married, didn’t you?” Ramón asked, pointing a finger at him.
    â€œI thought you were enough suited and that you were in love with each other.” Theodore looked at his little glass of whisky, which he was holding in his hand as if he were frozen. He felt that he was blushing. It was as if Ramón had looked in on a private fantasy, a foolish, romantic one. By feeling well disposed towards their marrying, Theodore had used to imagine that he would ‘win’ in the situation, and that by absenting himself from Lelia he could keep her memories of him without the blemishes that married life would put on them. He had used to imagine that if Lelia chose Ramón, she would end by not liking Ramón as much as she would have liked him, as a husband. And there had been the Christian “to give is more blessed than to receive” working its effect, too, no doubt. In all these senses, Theodore had used to imagine ‘winning’. He would have been desolate if Ramón had married Lelia, yet in a perverse way would probably have enjoyed his desolation.
    Theodore’s French clock on the mantel struck twelve in little ‘tings’.
    â€œWhy didn’t you ever ask her to marry you, Teo? She might have accepted.”
    â€œI had two reasons. The first is, it would have hurt you. The second is that I doubt my