“Mrs. McCartney,” Effie called out. “I’ve been told that if you put a little peanut butter in burned potatoes, you can’t taste the burn.”
Mr. Harris chuckled appreciatively.
“Oh. Why, thank you, Effie. I’ll tell the cook,” said Mrs. McCartney, her exit spoiled.
“Just keep some peanut butter on the stove at all times,” Mr. Harris said, and laughed loudly again.
David pushed his chair back, ready to get up.
“Can I talk with you for a minute?” Effie asked.
“Why, yes.”
“It’s about your friend Mr. Carmichael—Wes. He’s a married man, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” David said.
“Well, it’s a little awkward. I mean, I don’t like to make dates with married men. I don’t think I should go to their room, if they’re in a hotel or something, and have a drink with them. I don’t want to be rude to him, but I just don’t do that,” she said solemnly, shaking her head slowly for emphasis. “Not that I want to make an issue of it,” she added with a little laugh. “I thought maybe you could kind of let him know. Only don’t tell him I said anything to you. Will you?”
“No,” David said, in a different tone from any he had used to the girl before. He suddenly felt friendly toward her and almost liked her.
“See, I had the idea you didn’t intend to come tonight,” she said nervously.
“Come where?”
“To his room. He asked us both, you know.” She smiled her wide, hectic smile. “Didn’t you hear him? He said he was going to get champagne and ice. That’s what he’s doing now.”
David shook his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear anything about the champagne.”
Some of her amused smile lingered. “But you’re going, aren’t you?” she asked hopefully.
David knew there was no getting out of it, even though Wes would have preferred to see the girl alone, Wes would take it amiss if he declined tonight. “I’ll go tonight, but not the other nights,” David said.
“What other nights?” Effie stiffened in her chair. She blinked her eyes. “Listen, I hope you’re not trying to insult me, Mr. Kelsey. I don’t have to go at all.”
David bit the inside of his cheek. He had not meant to be insulting, only honest.
“After all, I think he’s your friend, not mine.” She got up, and left the dining room.
David was in his room, reading, when Wes knocked on his door a little before eight.
“Effie wants to know if you’re coming,” Wes said. “Come on, old man, you’ve got every night in the year to read.”
David tossed his book on his bed with a smile. He gave his hair a couple of strokes with a comb, standing before the mirror inside the door of his wardrobe.
On the way out, Wes stopped at Effie’s door and knocked. “Are you ready? I’ve got David.”
“I’m ready. Just a sec,” she said, and Wes smiled confidently at David. She opened the door a moment later. She carried a tiny pocketbook, and David smelled more strongly the pleasant, not too sweet perfume.
Wes had filled his basin with ice cubes and half immersed two bottles of champagne in it. He told his guests to be seated, then turned the bottles a few times, pulled one out to feel it, and put it back. Effie sat down primly in one armchair, David on Wes’s bed. Wes served the champagne deftly—he had borrowed some sturdy stemmed dessert glasses from the kitchen—and they toasted Wes’s room and his sojourn under the roof of Mrs. McCartney. Wes poured a second round.
Effie’s cheeks began to pinken, delicately as the rose. They talked nonsense, and at last David neither joined in nor listened. Wes had opened the second bottle, and mentioned getting a third. The store would deliver it, he said. He opened the window to let the smoke out. Wes sat down on the floor by the girl’s chair, and now and then patted her hand or her arm as he talked. Then Effie would take her arm away and look with her pleasant smile at David. “I wish you’d tell me about your work.”
“Let him tell you,” David said.
“No work. No talk of work tonight,” said Wes.
The girl’s eyes grew a little swimmy. “I won’t be here then,” she was saying to Wes. “I’ve found an apartment, and I’m moving December first. Ten more days.”
Wes gave a groan. “But you’ll be around. I’ll be able to see you now and then, won’t I?”
“I certainly hope I’ll be able to see you both,” Effie said.
Leaning back against the wall, David watched her casually. He realized for the first time that her hair was almost the same shade of brown as Annabelle’s. Her expression had lost its self-consciousness, but her eyes moved from David’s face to his brown loafer shoe propped up on his knee, to Wes, to the ceiling, and began the circuit again. Wes’s arm was now on her chair arm, and the girl’s hand played with the cigarette package in her lap. David was bored, and wished he were upstairs reading. The girl had even commented on his loafers, how good-looking they were, and asked him if he always wore chino pants. Who cared? He had said yes. He nearly always wore chino pants, non-white shirts and odd jackets and loafers to the lab, because it had irked him to be told by Mr. Lewissohn that he would prefer him to wear business suits, in view of the fact he would often have to talk to “clients,” a sacred word to Lewissohn. Because of all the acid sprays around the place, he wore a long white coat most of the time, and consequently nobody could see much if anything of what he had on underneath. His better clothes he kept at the house in Ballard. People in the boardinghouse, he supposed, thought he had even to economize on his clothing, in order to support his mother.
David was aware that Wes exacted a promise from Effie to take a drive in the country one day soon.
“I’ll get the car, all right,” Wes said to David over his shoulder, with determination.
It was all so sordid, David thought. If he wanted a girl, why didn’t he go out and buy one? What else did he like about Effie except her body, what else was there of her he could use? She didn’t play the piano like Annabelle, had none of the sweetness of Annabelle—only the pseudo-decorousness of the basically coarse young female who reads the women’s magazines and the etiquette columns in cheap newspapers that tell a girl how to behave when she is out with men. They focused a girl’s mind on sex by harping on “how far” a nice girl should go. They assumed every man was a lecher. But on the other hand, was there much more to most girls than their biological urges? The only objective of most of them was to get married before twenty-five and begin a cycle of childbearing. Annabelle, at twenty-two, had a brilliant idea for a book on Schubert and Mozart, two composers with the greatest lyric gifts in the history of music, she said. David often wondered what had become of that idea and of the notes she had shown him of it? Had her inspiration gone down the drain with a lot of dirty dishwater? Or was she still thinking about it, still intending to write it, and was it mellowing with time?
They interrupted him, gibing at him for his daydreaming. Effie was standing up, ready to leave, and protesting against Wes’s telephoning for another bottle of champagne. Wes begged David to stay on a while, but David with rare firmness toward Wes said he had to do some reading tonight. It was eleven o’clock. David and the girl thanked Wes for his hospitality, and closed the door on his smiling but lonely face.
“I hear if you drink water the next morning, you can feel the champagne all over again,” Effie was saying, giggling. She kept David at his door, saying in a rush of words that an interesting movie was starting Saturday at the Odeon.
“But I’m afraid I won’t be here.”
“Oh, that’s right. But it’ll still be playing Monday. Think about it.” And she turned suddenly as if embarrassed and went to her own door. “Good night, David.”
“Good night.”
In the ten days that followed David’s pessimistic predictions seemed to be borne out.
Effie went to the movie on Saturday night with Wes, Wes told him. She had let him kiss her—once. Laura called Wes at the factory several times, Wes said, but he refused to speak to her. Once Laura called and asked for David Kelsey. She wanted to know where Wes was staying, but since Wes had asked him not to tell her, David said that he didn’t know. Laura persisted, her voice as impersonal as a military officer’s. “Then I wish you would find out for me. It’s important.” David asked Wes if there could be some crisis, if he ought to get in touch with her.
“She’s got no target for her nagging right now. That’s all Laura wants, someone she can yell at.”
It depressed David, and he thought about Wes and Effie as little as he could, though Effie, at breakfast and at dinner, always tried to include him in their conversation, and twice asked him to watch television with them. Wes had gotten his portable set from home. David realized that it was not Wes’s morals he objected to, not the morals that depressed him. He was sad that his friend had lost the stature David had given him, sad that Wes had never really possessed that stature.
5
By December twelfth, David could not wait any longer. On Saturday, December thirteenth, at his house in Ballard, he wrote another letter to Annabelle, hiding his painful urgency, he hoped, behind a pretended fear that the letter asking her about Christmas might never have arrived. He was sure it had arrived, it just might have been opened and kept from her by Gerald. Or Gerald might have seen it and forbidden her to answer him. Then for an instant David imagined Gerald reading a certain letter of the other four he had sent Annabelle, one in which he had said he would never be happy without her, that he would move heaven and earth to be with her, and that he had not begun to use—David had forgotten his precise words, but the sense was that he had unlimited power at his command, which he had not yet drawn upon. He had meant, of course, psychical or emotional powers. David believed strongly in the power of letters to sway, to fortify, to convince—and by the same token to destroy, if that was their intention. It had been Annabelle herself who lent him a book of Heloïse’s and Abelard’s letters. Annabelle knew, too. But if that swine had ever read that letter, he would have done the instinctive thing to protect himself, forbidden Annabelle to answer, perhaps forbidden her to open any more of his letters, if they came. For all his eunuchoid appearance, Gerald laid the law down in the household, according to what his aunt had said, and his aunt had gotten it from Annabelle’s family in La Jolla.
David no longer liked to have Wes visit him in his room in the evenings, and noticing this, Wes began to resent it.
“I knew you were chaste,” Wes said with a mitigating laugh, “but I didn’t know you were a prig. All I’ve done with the girl is take her to two movies.”
“I hope I’m not a prig,” David said quietly. “I just find it depressing. Nothing can come of it.”
“And what about that girl you said you were in love with? You haven’t even seen her for two years. What do you think can come of that? Don’t you think she might meet some other fellow who’s a little more attentive?”
“I doubt it.” David was driving his car, on the way to the factory on the north side of town.
“Meanwhile, you want to shut out the rest of life.”
David kept silent. A year ago Wes had introduced him to two of his own ex-girlfriends, but David had never tried to see either of them again, much to Wes’s surprise and disappointment. “Why, I nearly married so-and-so myself!” Wes had said. That had been just after David had found out Annabelle was married, and it was a wonder he had been able to make himself meet the girls at all. He had declined, he remembered, to go to Wes and Laura’s new and happy home, and Wes had arranged that he and David and the girls meet in the Red Schooner Inn for dinner. The girls were friends, and one of them lived in Froudsburg. Wes had harped so on his “having a little social life” that David had finally told him there was a girl in California he was in love with and intended to marry. David said she was finishing college, and wanted to work a year before she married. This, David recalled, had brought a dubious expression to Wes’s face, and he had remarked that she must be an unusual kind of girl, or David must be unusually cold about women. “It’s not that I’m cold to women,” David had told Wes, “It’s the intensity of my feeling for this one. Can’t you understand something as simple as that?” It was more difficult for Wes to understand that than to understand a complicated chemical equation. Wes even said that the girl—David never told him her name—had made him inhuman, whereas Annabelle had done just the opposite. What was human to Wes, to get drunk and be promiscuous?
But David could not forget and did not want to forget the many hours he had spent with Wes talking of other things than women, the evenings when Wes, mellow on long, slow scotches, would talk in an entranced, monologic way. Wes was not obtuse in matters of the human heart, but alcohol had to paralyze or at least hold in abeyance his conscious thinking in order for his emotions to show. Wes had invented one night the story of an old woman in rags reverently touching the dead and mutilated body of her prodigal son, who even at the end had not come home, and whom she had had to trudge for miles to see finally in a horrible state. Rhetorically Wes had asked why. And he had rambled on: the prodigal son was childless, had never done anything in life that could be mentioned to his credit, and people had told the mother not to go look at him because it would hurt her, and yet you found her creeping, weeping, on hands and knees to touch his filthy skin with her fingertips. Wes had been talking about the futility and illogic of human relationships. He knew as well as David that they were as unfathomable as the physical universe was understandable and even predictable. That symbol of the mother and the prodigal son had come at the time when Wes had begun having his troubles with Laura, the time of the first dimming of happiness, and David wondered if in an allegorical way the story could mean that he really would always love Laura, no matter what she did.
The girl Effie had moved on December first to her new apartment, and though Wes said he had been there a couple of times, he still spent half his evenings at Mrs. McCartney’s, and on the evenings he went out, it was by himself, David knew, because Wes often asked him to go out with him. Laura now knew where Wes was staying, and Wes kept her off, he said, only by a promise to come home on the twentieth of the month. There was a mystery for you, David thought: Laura dying to have him back, according to Wes, only so she could rant and scream at him again, and Wes obeying like a little dog.
“That house is going to be so clean I won’t be able to breathe the air,” Wes said. “An angel would be afraid to walk across the rug. And she’ll say, ‘See, things can look nice with you out of the house for a while.’ That’ll be her heartwarming greeting, I’ll bet.”
And David thought of Wes’s very orderly desk in his office on the second floor of Cheswick.
David turned his car in between the wire gates of the factory’s parking ground, and swore automatically, as he had every morning since his letter to Annabelle about their meeting in New York, that if she was unable to come to New York, he would resign from his job and go to Hartford to tackle the Situation more directly. He would demand to see Annabelle, and if necessary talk to Gerald too. What if he presented himself to her jobless? He could make more money in a research laboratory than Gerald was making, sell his house and buy an equally good one somewhere else near his next place of work. And Annabelle would be in it. He’d been entirely too patient up to now, too passive by far.
“He-ey,” Wes said. “What’re you grinding your teeth for?”
David found a space in his usual corner near the east door of the building. A truckload of chemical tanks was being unloaded, and David and Wes had to walk around crates and squeeze past the projecting platform at the end of the truck to get in. Wes said he would see David at lunch, and then took some stairs. David continued on his L-shaped way to his office in the northwest corner of the building. His secretary,
a girl named Helen Phimister, had not arrived, and David looked over a small stack of letters in the outgoing box on his desk to see how many he would have to answer personally that day. His dictating period was around eleven. David shared Helen with two other men. He took a mechanics manual from his desktop and left the office.
Mr. Lewissohn, chunky in a double-breasted gray suit, pink-faced, smiling, called a hearty “Morning, Dave!” and waved as he passed. David only nodded, with a smile. He realized that he had forgotten to put on his white smock, that pseudo-scientific uniform of his position. But he went on without it, his well-polished loafers falling lightly and almost silently on the cork floor.
Because he browsed too long in the library, trying to check something for the electronics engineer, David did not realize until one-fifteen that it was time for lunch. He had a bowl of vegetable soup and a cup of coffee, and was back in his office to go over Helen’s afternoon’s work with her at one-thirty. And then he was not conscious of time until the whistle blew from the top of the building at five. He would have stayed on awhile, perhaps until six, when only Charley Engels, the watchman, would be down at the main door, but there was Wes to take home now.
And of course there might be a letter from Annabelle at Mrs. McCartney’s. This possibility, striking his heart faintly but very surely, brought a smile to his lips as he said good night to Helen Phimister.
She smiled broadly in reply. “Good night, Mr. Kelsey. You’re looking very chipper today.” She was a pretty, good-natured blond girl of twenty-two or -three.
“Thanks. So are you,” David said awkwardly as he pulled on his overcoat. A pocket of the coat bulged with a pint bottle of a white emulsion produced by Wes’s department, nameless but excellent for the skin, which he was going to give to Mrs. Beecham. It was the third such bottle he had given her since he had been at the boardinghouse.
As David and Wes rode homeward, Wes tried to persuade David to come to Effie Brennan’s apartment for dinner that evening. “If you could only have heard her begging me to bring you,” Wes said. “It’s you she wants to see, not me.”
This Sweet Sickness Page 5