This Sweet Sickness

by Patricia Highsmith

  He decided to tell her on the phone. He would be cheerful but careful not to be too cheerful or too anything. The main thing was not to appear to assume she would live with him there, nor to appear she wouldn’t. After he called her, he would stop at the best restaurant he could find on the road and have a good dinner, preceded by a martini or two martinis, one for Annabelle.

  It was around 5 P.M. when he stopped at a filling station, ordered gas, and went into the office to call her. There was no answer, though he had the operator ring more than twenty times.

  She was still not home by nine, when he reached Froudsburg, and he gave it up. He had decided by then that he might do better writing her a letter.

  He wrote to Annabelle, describing the house in some detail, and then in a cheerful mood typed a letter to his aunt.

  . . . I don’t know why you are all so gloomy out there. Can’t you absorb any California sunshine? I talk to Annabelle quite often and see her too. Naturally, she’s a bit low because of Gerald, but grief passes in normal people. The grandmother you mentioned must have been a psychotic if she spent a lifetime grieving . . . I am moving to a wonderful house I bought today, a bargain at any price, as they say. This because I’m at last changing my job. From now on I continue my school in a sense, though I’ll be paid for it. I am going to be working at Dickson-Rand Laboratories. This is the lab that reports California’s earthquakes before California knows it has had them. My immediate superior will be Dr. Wilbur Osbourne, of whom you may not have heard, but he is world renowned as a geophysicist and quite an eccentric, I hear. Since I am told I am too, perhaps we’ll get along. . . .

  Then he wrote a letter to the Red Arrow storage company of Poughkeepsie, asking that the articles deposited in the name of David Kelsey be delivered to the house outside of Troy, and he enclosed a little map that the real estate agent had given him. Reluctantly, he signed the letter William Neumeister, and he hoped it would be the last time he would have to write that name.

  He waited until the following Wednesday at noon, two-and-a-half creeping days, before he telephoned Annabelle. She sounded very cheerful, congratulated him on finding a house so soon, but when he tried to set a date when she might drive up with him to see it—and it could have been any one of eight glorious days starting Saturday, because Dickson-Rand was giving him a week’s leave to get settled—Annabelle hedged and postponed. She even said she was considering going to La Jolla.

  “I really was going three weeks ago, Dave, but the baby had a fever and I didn’t dare leave with him. I didn’t mention it, because I know you’re not interested in babies, but I have to be. Then I wanted to see Mr. Neumeister, if I possibly could.”

  “Have you seen him?” he asked.

  “They still can’t reach him. The man who’s handling his house said he told him he was going to be traveling, but he hasn’t left this country, because one of the police in Beck’s Brook has checked with the passport—the passport something or other. Now they’re checking the references he gave the real estate agent. That should lead to something.”

  David’s guilt created a feeling much like anger. “Have they put anything in the papers about it? Maybe they should do that.”

  “Not that I know of. I guess it isn’t that important. It’s just important to me.”

  “Well, what do you think he can tell you, Annabelle, that he didn’t tell the police?”

  She didn’t answer. “Dave, Sergeant Terry called me last week. He’s the one in Beck’s Brook.”

  “Yes? What about?”

  “Mostly you. He asked if there was anything between us. I told him no, Dave. I didn’t see it would do a bit of good to—I mean, I told them Gerald was a very jealous type, but he had no reason to be where you were concerned, because whatever there’d been between us was over a long time ago. That’s essentially the truth, and I thought it was better for Gerald and you and me. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” David murmured.

  “I told them Gerald had been drinking—which they knew. I didn’t tell them about your letters. That would only complicate things and make the situation sound more serious than it was.”

  The Situation, the Situation. David asked, “Do you think they believed you?”

  “Why shouldn’t they?”

  “That’s right. Why shouldn’t they?”

  “Dave, don’t be angry about this. It’s absurd.”

  “I’m not angry.” And yet he was.

  “They said you told them you were in New York that Sunday. Is that true, Dave?”

  “Yes. I was.”

  “And that you always went to New York on your weekends. That’s not true, is it?” she asked. “Didn’t you spend most of them at your house?”

  “Yes,” said David. Every question was like a driven nail.

  “Why did you lie? Why do you lie, Dave?”

  “That house was yours. And it’s gone now. I don’t want to discuss it. With anybody. I’ve bought a new house and I—My things’re going to arrive Saturday, so the house’ll be a mess then, but I wish you could see it, darling, even with the things not arranged. I’ve got a piano, you know. I don’t think I ever told you that, did I? It’s a Steinway baby grand.”

  “Really, Dave? Do you play now?”

  “I play Chopsticks—chords,” he said, “just so it gets a little exercise. I have it for you, Annabelle.”

  Silence.

  With a lump in his throat, he went on. “I want you to see where I’m going to work too. We could drive up there in twenty minutes from the house. You’ve got to let me bring you out this weekend, Annabelle.” He waited. “Annabelle, do you ever think of us together? Do you ever think we might—”

  “I guess sometimes—I think of it.”

  She promised to send him a postcard in regard to the weekend, and David left the telephone booth radiant. He felt optimistic for perhaps five minutes, until the Neumeister business began to prod at his brain. So they were checking Neumeister’s references. Would he never be done with Neumeister? David wanted to forget him, like a silly game, like a bad dream, like a self-indulgence that made him ashamed of himself. And now they were checking his references, all because of a whim of Annabelle’s to talk to him! They wouldn’t be able to find his references either, and what then? John Atherley, or had it been Asherley? And Richard Patterson. David began to whistle loudly. Like a scared boy in a dark cemetery, he thought.

  On Friday he said good-bye to twenty or thirty people at Cheswick, some of them a little jealous, David thought, because he was doing what they wished they could do or wished they had the courage to do. Some of them, too, had heard that David had been fostering a curious lie about an invalid mother. It was inevitable: Mr. Lewissohn’s secretary had checked his questionnaire for the police, she had told someone else about the police call, and finally a few who had asked him, as Wes Carmichael had, to their homes on weekends and been refused on the grounds that he had to see his mother—these few heard the story and remembered it. David could see behind Wes’s joking remarks and smiles that he was a little worried because the thing had come out in the open.

  “Listen, Dave,” Wes whispered to him in David’s office, “you weren’t by any chance seeing Delaney’s wife—ever. I mean in that house.”

  “What house?”

  “Newmester’s,” Wes said, pronouncing it in that manner that always made David think for an instant that people were talking about someone else.

  “I told you I didn’t know him,” David said, frowning.

  “All right, Dave, it crossed my mind, that’s all. We’re good enough friends for you to tell me, aren’t we? If it were true and I knew it—Well, I haven’t any ax to grind about it,” he added, retreating before David’s frown. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  “I never met Delaney’s wife. I never met Delaney,” David
said, his voice cracking.

  “Well, where did you go weekends, Dave?”

  “I just don’t care to answer that. I went to New York most of the time. What I do weekends ought to be my own business.”

  “Okay, Dave,” Wes said in a placating tone, but he was angry.

  David knew he had sounded angry too, but he didn’t care.

  “Let’s go back and join the boys,” Wes said.

  There was another gamut at Mrs. McCartney’s. Mrs. McCartney had a special dinner for him, turkey with accessories, shared by the entire dining room, and even preceded by port wine in thick, stemmed glasses. Everyone asked him about his new job. He explained how cores were taken from the earth and the ocean bottom and marveled to himself that there could be a room of twelve or more living, breathing people of whom only one or two had ever heard of taking sample cores. When he went out of the dining room with Mr. Muldaven, Effie Brennan was sitting in the straight chair in the hall.

  She got up and greeted him with a smile. “Finally caught you, Dave.”

  “Hello, there. Why didn’t you come in the dining room?”

  “Oh, I knew it was a special dinner for you. I don’t belong here any more. I was hoping you might come by my place for a last talk, Dave,” she said, turning her pleading eyes up to him.

  David realized he owed her a great deal, but at that moment the prospect of going with her to her apartment was the last thing he wanted to do. “I was going to see Mrs. Beecham for a while,” he said. “She’s expecting me.”

  “All right. I can wait,” Effie said with a smile. The tip of her slightly upturned nose was pink and shiny from the cold. “She’ll be going to bed soon, won’t she? You’d better hurry.”

  “Effie, I’ve still got some things to do. In the way of packing, you know.”

  “But this is important, Dave, honestly.” She came closer to him, suddenly earnest and straining. “I want to talk to you.”

  It would have been easier to get rid of a bulldog with its teeth sunk in his wrist. “All right. Let me go tell Mrs. Beecham.”

  He had no appointment with Mrs. Beecham, and he was grateful that Effie walked toward the front door, from which she could not see the top of the first flight of stairs. David went into his own room, spent a few minutes puttering around, got his coat, and went down again.

  21

  Back through the door under the sign of Dr. Needle, painless dentist. It was the second time David had been to Effie’s apartment, and it seemed smaller and more cluttered. A round, orangey-pink cake stood on the coffee table with a big D on it in black chocolate.

  “That’s for you,” Effie said, hanging up her coat in the foyer closet. “I made it—and Wes may come over tonight. In fact it’s practically certain. Maybe in half an hour.” She was so tense her voice sounded hysterically shrill.

  Her nervousness made him nervous. He opened his arms stupidly and said, “Well, that’s very nice. We’ll all have coffee and cake.”

  “I’ll bet old Wes won’t have any coffee or cake. I’ve got scotch for him. You—I’ve got a bottle of sauterne for you.”

  Good God, David thought, then reproached himself for his ingratitude. “I’m honored,” he said, smiling.

  “Sit down, Dave.”

  He waited until she had sat down in an armchair, then he sat down on the sofa.

  “Dave, before Wes comes,” she said, “I wanted to tell you Annabelle called me today.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, why not? Just to be friendly.”

  “But why did she call you?” It was Annabelle’s calling her and not him that galled him.

  “Dave, I happen to think it’s nice—even remarkable—if a woman can be friendly enough even though I happened to send her husband to the house where he was killed.”

  “All right.” David looked away from her face.

  “What I wanted to tell you is the police, the Beck’s Brook police, aren’t going to stop looking for Newmester.”

  “Oh? What’re they doing about it now?”

  “Annabelle said they’re looking up everybody by that name, but they can’t find any journalist nor anybody by that name who’s around thirty and answers that description they’ve got.”

  David had to smile. “There must be a William Neumeister somewhere who answers that description.”

  “You’re awfully casual, Dave.”

  “All right, Effie. Thank you for telling me. But I wish you’d stop trying to alarm me, because I’m not afraid of anything.” He stood up.

  “I think you are. I think you’d lose Annabelle if she knew. She wouldn’t care to see you any more. I know that.”

  Here was the blackmail again. “I’m not so sure of that.”

  “I think you are. Meanwhile you expect me to protect you. You just take it for granted I will.” Her voice had begun to shake with hysterical, incredible tears. “And I have—with the police and with Wes, too.”

  David glanced at her uneasily. “I’ve told you what happened at that house was an accident. And if I wanted to buy a house under another name, what is it to anybody?”

  “I’m even trying to persuade Annabelle to drop this business of finding Newmester,” she interrupted him. “But I can’t help it if the police are interested now. Annabelle thinks Newmester tried to kill her husband in that fight. Maybe out of self-defense, but that he tried to and did and that’s why he’s hiding out now and maybe going under another name.”

  David laughed.

  “You’re lucky, Dave,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

  “I think Neumeister’s lucky. But Neumeister’s finished now. He’s disappeared and forever.”

  “Annabelle told me they’re checking the references you gave when you bought the Ballard house. They won’t stand up, will they?”

  David shrugged. “Not if they look hard.”

  “Have you thought of getting yourself a real alibi? A real house or a person you could say you were with on those weekends?”

  “You?” David asked, smiling.

  She got up and stood by the dark window, looking out. It was so silent he could hear a clock ticking in the bedroom. He felt a nervous amusement, something quite uncontrollable, at least for the moment. He thought of a funny remark, and set his teeth together to keep from saying it. “I’m sorry, Effie,” he said.

  “Oh—let’s open the Sauterne.”

  He got up to help her with it in the kitchen. Great play of hands over the corkscrew. David chose to think it funny. There was no other way to take it.

  “You must be looking forward to your new job. I’ve never seen you in such a good mood.”

  “I think I’ll be this way from now on,” David said. He noticed some gray in Effie’s hair, just two or three gray hairs, in the bright light of the kitchen. They were somehow comforting.

  She had a glass of wine, but she insisted the whole bottle was for him. It touched him that the Sauterne was bona fide French and quite good.

  “You’ve found a house, Wes told me,” she said. “Where is it?”

  “I wouldn’t know how to say. Near Dickson-Rand, which is near Troy.”

  “But what’s your address? Where can I write to you?”

  “Dickson-Rand, Troy, New York.”

  “Oh, Dave, I’ll miss you,” she said in a sentimental tone, and started toward the cake as if to cut it, but there wasn’t a knife, and she went off to the kitchen, came back with one, awkwardly laid it on the cake plate, and sat down again.

  “This is one of those silly cake knives you get by sending off four box tops and fifty cents,” she said. “Someday I’ll really have to start collecting silver.”

  Her eyes gave him a sensation of being slowly drained, and realizing this, the situation seemed vaguely comical again. She put a r
ecord on the phonograph, assuring him she would play it very low, asking him if he minded French records. David happened to have the record himself, though he didn’t tell her so. He remembered going into a music shop to buy something else and hearing part of the French record, liking the piano in it and thinking Annabelle might like it. Effie sat down again and took another cigarette.

  “Will you be seeing Annabelle very much when you’re in Troy? That’s not so far away from Hartford as Froudsburg, is it?”

  “About the same. Yes, I certainly expect to be seeing her,” David said. “Anyway, I think she’ll be moving from Hartford soon.”

  “Oh? To where?”

  “Well, I’m not quite sure yet.”

  “You’re still—very much in love with her?”

  “Of course,” David said, and then Effie’s wistful, almost tragic smile made his own confident smile leave his face and he looked away from her out of pity. He poured his glass half full again. Effie still had most of her glass.

  “When will you know, Dave?”

  “Know what?”

  “Whether she’s going to marry you or not?”

  “I know now. She is. I don’t say next month, but—”

  “That’s why I asked you when you’ll know.”

  “I don’t see that it matters much when,” he said quickly, and at the same time the doorbell rang.

  Effie pressed the button in the kitchen, then with her old nervousness back—such an unpleasant contrast to Annabelle’s calm—she said she’d fix Wes’s drink right away and began to clatter the ice tray.

  Wes came grinning broadly, chucked Effie under the chin, and accepted the scotch and soda as soon as he had removed his overcoat.

  “I didn’t really think you’d make it tonight, Dave,” Wes said for the second time. “Good for you, Eff.”

  “Why, it was easy,” said Effie. “He came along like a lamb.”

  He hadn’t, David thought. Effie had tricked him into coming by telling him she had something of the greatest importance to tell him. That Neumeister story—she hadn’t told him anything that he had not known or could not have predicted for himself.