Mermaids on the Golf Course by Patricia Highsmith

dream. Chris had made him able to achieve it. Chris had introduced him to the people who had helped him. So what was he, really? Now pushing fifty, and a twenty-nine-year-old had taken over his part with great success in New York. Who needed Simon Hatton any longer? I’d better die before Chris. The words came as soon as the thought.
    Simon was suddenly frightened, yet resolved. Did any of the other fellows feel the same? Well, certainly not Richard with a wife and a couple of children. Not even Detweiler, probably, who was a realist. Jonathan? Somehow he looked the softest of the lot with his puzzled eyes. But why make a pact with Jonathan? Simon didn’t need a pact with anyone.
    He drifted towards the window, but looked away from the pine forest beyond the lawn to the writing table in the corner, cinquecento, scarred and much polished, and he stared at a brass letter-opener curved like a little scimitar with a single red stone in its haft. Kill himself with that? Absurd. Yet the letter-opener fascinated him, because it was beautiful. Then Simon realized that he had bought the letter-opener in Gibraltar, decades ago, and given it to Chris. Simon had been about twenty-two then, lithe and agile, running through the narrow cobbled streets of Gibraltar, up earlier than Chris as usual, bringing back the letter-opener in a brown paper bag from an unpretentious little shop, sneaking back into the hotel room where Chris still lay asleep. Chris’s June birthday had been near.
    Simon made an effort, picked up the letter-opener, ran his thumb along the edge as if it were a knife, then laid it down exactly where it had been.
    Before noon, Simon had taken a walk around Chris’s property, looking for a place, a gorge deep enough to throw himself down, fatally. But wouldn’t it be a mess, his corpse on the estate, discovered perhaps by police dogs? Better to jump into the Limmat in Zurich. Better yet to take sleeping pills in an hotel, leaving money for disposal or shipping corpse back to America, or whatever they did.
    Lunch was in Chris’s big room, which really was big enough to hold them all. August had pulled back the curtains of its two big windows, sunlight poured in (Chris said he had cut down forty pines to obtain this low-slanting winter sunshine), and August had laid out meats and salads on a long wooden commode.
    “This is bliss,” announced Chris, beatifically smiling on all his twelve, and in danger of tipping the champagne glass which he held in his right hand. In his left was a long cigarette in a black and gold holder.
    Simon’s eyes were drawn to Chris, and then he had to look away. He held a glass of red wine, otherwise it would have been remarked that he had nothing to drink, but Simon had hardly sipped it. He went to Jonathan and asked softly, “Do you want to die too?”
    Jonathan put a forkful of smoked salmon into his mouth. “No,” he said, apparently amused.
    Detweiler looked more awake, like a different person from earlier this morning. Carl Parker was standing beside him.
    “Where’s your plate, Simon?” said Detweiler. “Have you tried the potato salad? Divine.”
    “How’s the bump on your head?” asked Carl, looking at Simon’s head where the hair stood out. “You had a shock last night. Are you really feeling okay?”
    “Yes, thanks. Do I look funny?—Did Freddy tell you my understudy in New York had a big success last night? The theater phoned me this morning.”
    “No. Well, that’s a relief to you, I’m sure,” said Carl with his mid-Atlantic accent. “Did you tell Chris?”
    “N-not as yet.” Jonathan and Richard were on either side of Chris’s bed just then, Richard cutting something on Chris’s plate, which lay on a big tray spanning his body. Chris would not be interested, Simon thought. It was rather a negative piece of information, nothing particularly to Simon’s good.
    “Simon, you must come and visit us, since you’re working in New York,” said Carl, fishing in