Highsmith, Patricia by The Price of Salt Page A

later on the New Jersey highway, Carol said, “I know what.”
    And she turned the car into a graveled section off the road and stopped.
    “Come out with me.”
    They were in front of a lighted stand piled high with Christmas trees.
    Carol told her to pick a tree, one not too big and not too small. They put the tree in the back of the car, and Therese sat in front beside Carol with her arms full of holly and fir branches. Therese pressed her face into them and inhaled the dark-green sharpness of their smell, their clean spice that was like a wild forest and like all the artifices of Christmas—tree baubles, gifts, snow, Christmas music, holidays. It was being through with the store and being beside Carol now. It was the purr of the car’s engine, and the needles of the fir branches that she could touch with her fingers. I am happy, I am happy, Therese thought.
    “Let’s do the tree now,” Carol said as soon as they entered the house.
    Carol turned the radio on in the living room, and fixed a drink for both of them. There were Christmas songs on the radio, bells breaking resonantly, as if they were inside a great church. Carol brought a blanket of white cotton for the snow around the tree, and Therese sprinkled it with sugar so it would glisten. Then she cut an elongated angel out of some gold ribbon and fixed it to the top of the tree, and folded tissue paper and cut a string of angels to thread along the branches.
    “You’re very good at that,” Carol said, surveying the tree from the hearth. “It’s superb. Everything but presents.”
    Carol’s present was on the sofa beside Therese’s coat. The card she had made for it was at home, however, and she didn’t want to give it without the card. Therese looked at the tree. “What else do we need?”
    “Nothing. Do you know what time it is?”
    The radio had signed off. Therese saw the mantel clock. It was after one.
    “It’s Christmas,” she said.
    “You’d better stay the night.”
    “All right.”
    “What do you have to do tomorrow?”
    “Nothing.”
    Carol got her drink from the radio top. “Don’t you have to see Richard?”
    She did have to see Richard, at twelve noon. She was to spend the day at his house. But she could make some kind of excuse. “No. I said I might see him. It’s not important.”
    “I can drive you in early.”
    “Are you busy tomorrow?”
    Carol finished the last inch of her drink. “Yes,” she said.
    Therese began to clean up the mess she had made, the scraps of tissue and snippets of ribbon. She hated cleaning up after making something.
    “Your friend Richard sounds like the kind of man who needs a woman around him to work for. Whether he marries her or not,” Carol said. “Isn’t he like that?”
    Why talk of Richard now, Therese thought irritably. She felt that Carol liked Richard—which could only be her own fault—and a distant jealousy prickled her, sharp as a pin.
    “Actually, I admire that more than the men who live alone or think they live alone, and end by making the stupidest blunders with women.”
    Therese stared at Carol’s pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. She had absolutely nothing to say on the subject. She could find Carol’s perfume like a fine thread in the stronger smell of evergreen, and she wanted to follow it, to put her arms around Carol.
    “It has nothing to do with whether people marry, has it?”
    “What?” Therese looked at her and saw her smiling a little.
    “Harge is the kind of man who doesn’t let a woman enter his life. And on the other hand, your friend Richard might never marry. But the pleasure Richard will get out of thinking he wants to marry.” Carol looked at Therese from head to foot. “The wrong girls,” she added. “Do you dance, Therese? Do you like to dance?”
    Carol seemed suddenly cool and bitter, and Therese could have wept. “No,” she said. She should never have told her anything about Richard, Therese thought, but now it was done.
    “You’re