This Sweet Sickness

by Patricia Highsmith

  He sat for a while on the sofa, which was already tied up with newspaper. The house was filled with a shocked silence, like the silence after the explosion of a bomb. The words he had said to Effie came back to him now, repeating themselves like maddening echoes in his head. Had he really said, “I despise you! Get out or I’ll throw you out!”? He had certainly said Neumeister was a good friend of his, and he had told Wes that he had never heard of Neumeister. What was Wes going to make of that? What was Effie going to make of it? David stood up with a thought of talking to Effie again, asking her—But he remembered her terrified face, and he knew now he had made her his enemy. She’d talk to Wes all right, probably immediately.

  To hell with it, David thought. He was again worried about the wrong things. Annabelle was the only thing worth worrying about.

  As for knowing or not knowing Neumeister, he’d tell Wes, in case Wes brought it up, that he’d told a slight lie to him in denying knowing Neumeister—who really did own the house in Ballard, and who was a friend of his—but that the police had asked him not to discuss the thing with anyone, because of Neumeister’s accidental and unfortunate connection with Delaney’s death. David smiled a little bitterly, and from a silver box, still unpacked among some other small things on the floor, he took a cigarette and lighted it. William Neumeister smoked a few cigarettes on his weekends, and this one was a last salute to him. It was dry and crackly. David inhaled it, even though it gave him no pleasure.

  The doorknocker sounded, and he walked to the door quite calmly. There stood the young officer from Beck’s Brook.

  “Afternoon, Mr. Newmester. Well! You’re moving?”

  “Yep. I’m going to be traveling for a bit. Do you want to come in?”

  “Thanks,” he said, coming in. “I saw a little activity around the place, so I thought I’d drop in and see how you are.”

  “I’m fine,” David said.

  The young officer pushed his cap to the back of his head. “You weren’t ever at the Barclay, were you?”

  “No. I had to stay somewhere else the first night and the second I was told I could get in, but—” David made a gesture as if it were too unimportant to go into.

  “We tried to reach you at the Barclay Thursday, because Mrs. Delaney was here.”

  “Here?”

  “She came to see us. She wanted to see the spot where her husband died. She wanted to talk to you, see, so we put in a call for you at the Barclay. We thought, if you were willing, you could’ve come up and talked to her, because she’d’ve waited a couple of hours, but we just took her around outside here and she went back. She was with another woman. Very pretty girl, she is.” He looked with a dreamy smile at David, as if her image were still in his eyes.

  David looked out a front window. That ground, and Annabelle’s feet. It was almost incredible, having hoped for so long to bring her here, and then that she had actually come when he was not here, and gone away again.

  “You moving out?” the young officer asked.

  “Yes. I’m going to be traveling for a while. I’m selling the place.”

  “What’re you asking?”

  “What I paid. Twenty thousand. Seven and a half acres go with it.” David frowned. “Did Mrs. Delaney stay very long?” he asked, prodded by a tremendous curiosity.

  “Oh, just about ten minutes. You shouldn’t be so surprised, people’re always like that. They want to see where it happened and they want every detail you can give ’em. Unless they’re old people. Old people don’t want to hear details, y’know, about car wrecks and things like that.”

  David nodded, wondering if Annabelle still wanted to see William Neumeister, and if she were going to persist until she did. “Do you think I should telephone her?” he asked.

  “Up to you. I guess I would. You could probably tell her what she wants to know on the phone.” He drifted toward the door. “Got her phone number at the station if you want to drop by for it. Otherwise it’s Hartford, Mrs. Gerald Delaney. Information’ll give it to you.”

  “Was she very upset?”

  “Kinda teary, but she held up okay. Nice girl, you can tell. And with a two-months-old baby. Jesus! I think her name’s Anna. Something like Anna.”

  16

  On Monday evening, David drove to Hartford. He had set out at a quarter to six, and he arrived at eight-thirty, in a nasty little rain. He had wanted to ring her bell without telephoning first, but now he felt it would be rude not to call, so he stopped at the drugstore he had called from before, dialed her number without checking on it, and Annabelle answered. He told her he was in Hartford.

  “Can I see you, darling? Are you free?”

  “Yes—I’m free. Did you want to come here?”

  He left his car where it was, dashed obliquely across the street, nearly got hit, and strode on down a dark sidewalk with his face turned up to the fine rain which had suddenly become beautiful and refreshing. Someone was coming out of the house as he arrived, and he lunged and caught the door before it had time to close, ran up the steps and knocked.

  “Dave?” Annabelle called.

  “Yes.”

  A latch turned, the door opened. Annabelle looked at him in surprise. “You got here so fast.”

  He held her close and pressed his lips against her cheek. She stirred in his arms, and it was not until her hand pushed his shoulder that he realized she wanted free and he immediately released her. His eyes devoured her as his arms had. She was pale, even her lips colorless. Only her eyes seemed the same, looking up at his face sadly, and as if they spoke to him in words she couldn’t utter. He searched them for words of love, and instantly found them, found also regret, apology, hope, and tenderness. It was as if she said to him that she had been longing for him to come, that she needed him, that she had been afraid he might not come. He put his hands on her shoulders and bent to kiss her again.

  “You hung up soon,” she said, drawing back, “I didn’t tell you that somebody’s coming over.”

  “Who?”

  “A friend. Mrs. Barber. She’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  “Oh. But at least we have a few minutes. I have so much to say, Annabelle. Isn’t there ever any time?” He passed his hand across his damp hair.

  “Take off your coat, Dave,” she said more kindly, and David’s face spread in a smile.

  She sat down tensely on the edge of the sofa, her hands in her lap.

  He sat down on the sofa also, not too close to her. “I’m sorry you’ve been unhappy,” he said, and watched her eyes fill slowly with tears.

  “It’s all such a mistake. I can’t believe it sometimes. I think—Gerald’s going to walk in the house, but no. Gerald was here—and now he’s not here.” She wiped a tear away impatiently.

  Her words, which meant little to him emotionally, seemed classically trite—as if Annabelle felt she had to put on a traditional show. David looked from her to the television set with the gray-haired nonentity on it. “I want you to come with me, Annabelle,” he said suddenly, turning back to her, seizing her hand, though it grew stiff at his touch. “I’m selling my house, but I want to buy another house, one you’ll like and help me choose. It can be anywhere, depending on where I work, and I’ll work anywhere, almost anywhere. I’d like to be with Dickson-Rand in Troy. I want to start a completely new life. Let’s both start over. Do you—”

  “No,” she interrupted more loudly. “Honestly, Dave, did you come here to talk sense to me or not?”

  He looked at her closed hand, which had just come to rest, with tired slowness, on her thigh. It had a plain gold wedding ring on it. “I didn’t mean to say it all at once. There’s always so little time—or none. I’m sorry, darling.” And he ground his teeth, because he could see from her tense expression that she was nearly out of her mind from fatigue and worry, the worries he so wanted
to relieve her from.

  “I just have nothing to answer to an outburst like that. You talk as if I have no child, no responsibility to Gerald—”

  David was suddenly aware that she wore a man’s white shirt with her patterned cotton skirt, realized with discomfort and revulsion that the shirt was probably one of Gerald’s. “I know all that takes time.”

  “Time? A long time. My life’s torn apart now and you come with your crazy plans. My first duty is to my child.”

  “We’ll take her with us,” David said quickly. “That’s understood, darling. I was talking about the future. You’ve got to think of that too, haven’t you?”

  “It’s a boy, in case you’ve forgotten,” Annabelle said, wiping her nose with a Kleenex she had taken from the shirt pocket.

  A boy, of course. David had been picturing a miniature Gerald, when he thought of the child at all. He asked her if she were going to stay on in the apartment, and she said there was the lease to think of, and that she had friends in the neighborhood who could help her take care of the baby, because sooner or later she would have to take a job.

  “That’s not necessary, darling, I’ve got plenty of money.”

  “I can’t take your money.”

  “What’s it for, if it isn’t for you?”

  She took her hand from his again, and for a moment, he thought she was going to get up from the sofa. “Where was your house, Dave?”

  “Oh—nearly an hour’s drive from Froudsburg.”

  “In Ballard?”

  “No. Practically in an opposite direction from Ballard. The girl at the boardinghouse just made up Ballard, Annabelle. She didn’t know where my house was.”

  “Why? Isn’t she a friend of yours.”

  “I didn’t want anybody to know about the house, Annabelle. I wanted to keep it just for us—and I did.”

  “Near what town was it?”

  He sighed. “The nearest town was—Ruarksville. The house was a mile or so the other side of it. A good ninety miles from Ballard!”

  “You told everybody you went to see your mother. Why did you lie, Dave?”

  “Because it was the simplest way. I wanted privacy. I didn’t want any houseguests. I didn’t even have a—” He checked himself from saying he hadn’t a telephone. “It was a pretty house. I so much wanted you to see it. I used to imagine you were there with me, and I did everything the way I thought you’d like it done. The bedroom, the living room, the pictures on the walls—even the way I fixed my meals.” He smiled. “I wish I had some pictures of it, so you could see what it looked like.” And he really did wish that, until he remembered that she would have recognized it from the outside.

  She nodded, frowning slightly, her eyes far away, not looking at him. “Do you know William Neumeister?” she asked, pronouncing it the German way.

  “No.”

  “Does anybody at your boardinghouse know him?”

  “No. Nobody as far as I know.”

  “I very much wanted to talk to him. He was away. I went to the house last Thursday. I knew he wasn’t home, but I thought somebody there might know where he was. One of the police. I wanted to ask him what really happened.”

  David shrugged, and his eyes were drawn again to the smug face in the photograph on the television set. “He told the police what happened, didn’t he?”

  “What I can’t understand is that Gerald stood there arguing with him—long enough to draw a gun. It doesn’t make sense. I know he’d had something to drink, but—”

  No, it didn’t make sense, and David had thought of it before, but it had to make sense now. “Maybe he thought I was hiding in the house. Maybe he’d had a little more to drink than you thought.”

  “But the doctor didn’t think he’d had much. He’d had four at Ed Purdy’s and I doubt if he stopped for more on the way.”

  “Well, there you are—four, and you don’t know how big they were.” David said, and felt his desperation was beginning to show through. “It was an accident, Annabelle, any way you look at it. He fell and hit a step. It could’ve happened to anyone going down the steps in the snow that day.”

  “But the other man pushed him,” she said. “I wanted to talk to Neumeister—” Her face, her voice, had twisted again with the oozing tears, the futile tears that David hated to see and could not stop.

  “You can’t blame Neumeister for resisting a man with a gun.”

  She lifted her head. “But it wasn’t an accident that he went to find you. Any man would have, if some other man was writing his wife letters like those. And I asked you to stop, Dave, it wasn’t as if I encouraged you.”

  “I know.”

  “But no, along you come with the worst of all. Threats—saying you were going to come here and take me away. Why, Dave, if anybody saw those letters, they’d say you practically belonged in an institution.”

  He sprang up. “Oh? Any one of those letters—They’re perfectly logical letters and you know it. I love you, and why shouldn’t I write you letters?”

  “Because I’m married!” she interjected.

  “I never laid a hand on you or Gerald, and you talk as if I were an idiot or a maniac. If a man can’t plead his case in a letter, what’s the world coming to?”

  “You don’t write letters like those to a married woman! I couldn’t even go into it with the police, it’s so embarrassing!”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Embarrassing,” David repeated, stunned.

  “And all you can say is ‘I have a right.’ You have a right then to kill my husband?” She stood up, white-faced with an anger David could see she thought was righteous.

  “Kill him, my foot!” he said, and turned away.

  “That’s what it amounts to.” She walked out of the room.

  David heard the release button downstairs. Then a woman’s rather slow steps ascended.

  “There’s no use in your staying any longer, Dave,” Annabelle said.

  “What do you mean?” He was walking toward her, stopped because he knew she would not let him touch her, then in desperation caught her shoulders. “With all my heart I love you and want to make you happy. I might as well be dead myself without you, Annabelle. Just give me a chance.”

  There was a rapping at the door.

  Annabelle looked at him angrily, as if too angry even to say anything to him, and David scowled, baffled.

  “I’ll wait downstairs, however long it takes,” David said.

  “Do you think I’m going to put you up for the night here?” She opened the door.

  There came into the room one of the gray-haired, plumpish, fiftyish women that epitomized to David the word “neighbor,” possibly “good neighbor,” plain and dull. “How do you do?” David said with a little bow, in response to Annabelle’s introduction, and saw the woman’s smile deflate, leaving pucker lines around her mouth.

  “It’s—the same one?” the woman asked Annabelle.

  Annabelle nodded. “Yes. We had to have a talk. But Dave’s leaving now.”

  “I was not leaving,” Dave said softly but firmly, “unless I’m in the way, of course.”

  The woman stared at him as if he were a curiosity, a phenomenon, her mouth a little ajar—like someone in a crowd photograph snapped watching a parade.

  “I don’t think we finished our talk, Annabelle,” David added.

  “Thanks, David, for all your offers. I don’t know what else we have to talk about tonight.”

  He stared stupidly at Annabelle’s brown loafers, her bare slim ankles that without the woman standing there he might have gotten down on the floor and kissed. The taste of blood was in his mouth. He had been biting the inside of his cheek. Annabelle looked at him haughtily, almost as if she were putting on an act for this clod of a neighbor. “Whe
n may I see you again?”

  “Dave, please—”

  “Annabelle, what’s the matter with you?” he shouted, in this last minute seizing her hands, and as she drew back there was a sudden crackling fury from the woman, hands fumbling with his arm that he jerked away from her. Then he stood apart from Annabelle, blinking as the woman shouted and gesticulated.

  “Haven’t you caused enough trouble, you—you filthy character! Filthy character, you are!” she said righteously, nodding.

  “I love this girl and I don’t care who knows it!” David yelled back.

  Now the woman stomped, tossed her head, and yelled something else that David scorned to listen to as he turned back to Annabelle. Annabelle stepped away, at the same time opening the door.

  “Good night, Dave, please, please,” Annabelle said tiredly.

  He only took a long last look, smiling with relief at the kindness in her voice. “I’ll think of you—constantly,” he said, and left.

  And for all the time it took for him to walk to his car, his brain was in a vise of self-reproach for having lost his temper. Even in the face of the asinine neighbor, there was no excuse for it. He should have been calm for Annabelle’s sake, a pillar of strength, sympathetic, patient, all the things he had not been.