This Sweet Sickness

by Patricia Highsmith

  David smiled, and looked surprised. “Sergeant, I’m sorry you had such difficulties. It’s my fault, I suppose, for not contacting Mrs. Delaney as soon as that other officer mentioned it—that day I was packing. To be honest with you, I wasn’t looking forward to it, and I put it off and then it went out of my head. I thought she’d be hysterical or even blame me for it. Does she?” he asked anxiously.

  “I don’t think so,” the sergeant said. “She’s a pretty level-headed woman. She just wants a firsthand account of what happened.”

  “She’ll get it,” David said with resignation. He watched the sergeant move toward the telephone on the desk. If the man was going to ask him to talk to her now, David thought, he would claim an urgent engagement elsewhere.

  But the sergeant turned and said, “Is this why you moved out of your house so soon? This Delaney story?”

  “No,” David said. “I admit it upset me a little. Maybe it did make me move sooner than I’d intended, but I’d been planning a couple of years’ work that would keep me traveling, and that’s the reason I got rid of the house.”

  The sergeant nodded, and stared at him. “Would you like to talk to Mrs. Delaney now?”

  David gave a little shrug and was about to say he might as well talk to her in person, but the sergeant had already picked up the telephone. The folder with Annabelle’s telephone number was still open on the desk, and the sergeant read it to the operator. In the interim of waiting for the telephone to be answered, David said as casually as he could, “Or you might set a time when I could come to see her. I’m pretty free tomorrow and Tuesday.”

  The sergeant did not answer. He frowned attentively as if he were listening to something. The moments passed. Was she not at home? Or had the Hartford operator even begun to ring? Sergeant Terry was patient. David slumped, his tense shoulders aching, and turned a little, just as Sergeant Terry said, “I see. Thank you, operator.” He hung up. “She’s not in,” he said.

  “I’ll call her tomorrow,” David said with a sigh. “I’m sure I can manage to see her.”

  “Do that. And by the way, Mr. Newmester, give us one place—one specific place you can be reached or where there’s somebody who knows where you can be reached. Just in case this slips your mind again.”

  David smiled a little. “I’m really not as invisible as you think, sergeant. Tonight I expect to be at the Hotel Wellington in New York, Fifty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue. And—at the Times office in New York, there’s a Mr. Jason McLain who knows where I am ninety percent of the time. Want to write that down?”

  Sergeant Terry wrote it down. “Mr. Newmester, we have nothing against you and we don’t want to have anything against you, but we’re going to find out if you contact Mrs. Delaney, and if you don’t—Well, that’s all we want from you and all she wants from you.”

  “I understand,” David said, making an effort to hide a surge of resentment. After all, it was almost over. The sergeant was walking with him to the door. David waited for the sergeant to say good-bye first.

  “I’ll call Mrs. Delaney early tomorrow and tell her you came in,” said Sergeant Terry. “Good-bye, Mr. Newmester.”

  “Good-bye, sergeant,” David replied with a wave of his hand.

  And when he drove away, he turned in the direction of New York, even though the sergeant might not have been watching. It occurred to him now that it would be wise to trade in his car for one of a different make and color, in case Sergeant Terry had noticed it when he came in, and in case David Kelsey had any more dealings with the Beck’s Brook police. But having to trade in his car was a small nuisance compared to the achievements of the day, he thought. Sergeant Terry had seemed a little suspicious, no doubt of that, but it was nothing serious, or he would have been questioned a lot more thoroughly and perhaps held at the station. He would write to Annabelle in lieu of seeing her, and he felt sure that the letter he would write would satisfy her. Annabelle, alas, wanted to hear about Gerald, not necessarily see Neumeister in the flesh. He had imagined going home to write the letter, but that made no sense, if he would have to go to New York to mail it. He continued in the direction of New York. He could borrow a typewriter at a hotel, he thought, the Wellington Hotel, where he would register as William Neumeister, and he hoped the Beck’s Brook police would call him there to check on his whereabouts. If they didn’t, perhaps he would call them. David began to whistle. Annabelle might get his letter Monday, if her mail came in the afternoon, but most likely she would get it Tuesday. If the police got upset because he didn’t speak to her Monday, he would say he hadn’t been able to fit Hartford into his schedule on Monday, and that he had written her an explicit letter.

  He arrived in New York at midnight, put his car in a garage off Eighth Avenue, and walked to the Hotel Wellington. No luggage, he told them, he would be here just overnight. He asked if he could rent or borrow a typewriter for an hour or so. When they brought one up to his room, he sat down at once, while still as much in the mood as he would ever be, to write the letter to Annabelle, which would be only half deceitful after all, he thought. Without pausing, he wrote two full pages on the hotel’s stationery, leaving in fact little room for Neumeister’s backhanded signature. Then he took some stamps from his billfold, marked the letter airmail, and dropped it down the chute in the hall.

  Then he was suddenly tired. He blotted his perspiring forehead with a handkerchief. Lies, he thought. He had been lying steadily since four o’clock that afternoon, and he had done it with surprising ease. Standing in the middle of his room, he felt a little faint. It was as if he beheld for the first time a criminal side of himself that he had not known existed. Nonsense, he thought, and began to undress. It had all been necessary; if he hadn’t lied, Annabelle or the police would have lied in accusing him of murdering Gerald, and wasn’t his the lesser of the evils? He felt faint only because he had forgotten to eat any dinner. But now he had no desire to play any more with the Beck’s Brook police. Annabelle would probably tell them the letter had been written on Hotel Wellington stationery, and that was good enough. He fell into bed.

  The next morning, Monday, he breakfasted in the hotel, paid his bill, and checked out. He bought a few phonograph records, and in the early afternoon saw an Italian movie. He considered looking at cars in Manhattan, but the thought bored him, and he decided he could risk getting one in Troy. He started for home. Tuesday morning in Troy, he chose a light blue Dodge convertible, two years old and a year younger than his black two-door Chrysler. The car would be delivered next Monday. Annabelle, he thought, might like light blue, though he really didn’t know. The rest of Tuesday he spent on the house, and that evening, when he thought the house seventy-five percent presentable, he telephoned Annabelle.

  A man answered, and David asked to speak to her.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “David Kelsey.”

  A moment passed, and then Annabelle’s voice said, “Hello, Dave,” warmly and happily, as if she were glad he had called.

  “Hello, darling. I called to—to give you my new phone number.” The presence of the man in her apartment threw him off. “Got a pencil?”

  “Yes, in just a minute. Dave, I heard from Mr. Neumeister today.”

  “You did?” For an instant, it had actually taken him by surprise. “You saw him?” he asked more carefully.

  “I had a letter. A very nice letter. I’ll let you see it. He sounds like a very nice person and—well, I feel so much better, I can’t tell you.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He just told me what really happened. In detail. That’s all I wanted to know. Mr. Neumeister’s in New York now. He’s just back from a trip to California.”

  “Oh. Did you learn anything new?”

  “Of course. Well, maybe I didn’t, but I was glad to hear it from him. He was at the Beck’s Brook police station Sunday. He ha
dn’t even known we were trying to find him.”

  “I told you you should’ve had something put in the newspapers and you might’ve heard from him sooner.” David stopped, his easy flow of words shut off. “Can you get a pencil?” he asked. When she got one, he gave her his number and address and the address of Dickson-Rand. The man with her was murmuring something, rudely, while she was trying to write, but David could not hear what he said. “I was wondering when you might be free to visit me. I’ve got the rest of this week free and next weekend, too. I could drive over tomorrow and pick you up.”

  “You talk as if I’m a couple of blocks away.”

  “You’re not far.”

  But she couldn’t make it this week, and she wasn’t sure about the weekend. She absolutely had to get some sewing done on Saturday, and she had guests for dinner Sunday. David had a premonition of defeat about the weekend.

  “It’s my only time off, Annabelle—” He broke off, knowing it was useless. “Okay. Next week then. Shall I call you or would you call me? Reverse the charges. Any time day or night.”

  “I’ll remember that,” she said with a smile in her voice. “And I wish you much luck and success and all that in your new job.”

  He laughed at her formality, then froze at the prospect of the “good-bye” that was coming in a matter of seconds.

  “Thank you for calling, Dave. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” he said, and sat for a few minutes looking at a big, shiny avocado that crowned a basket of fruit, an avocado that would be perfect in a day or so, that he had thought of using in the luncheon with Annabelle.

  That evening he had two martinis before his dinner, and for company at the table propped open a pamphlet on nuclear radiation that had been written by a scientist of Dickson-Rand. It crossed his mind, like a subtle temptation, to use the name William Neumeister in this house too. Neumeister was so much more cheerful than David Kelsey. Neumeister had reason to be. Annabelle had said he sounded like a very nice person. David felt that it was going to be hard to imagine Annabelle in this house with him, if he were only David Kelsey. He need not have bought the house in Neumeister’s name, he thought, and he hadn’t, but merely to pretend, only to himself, that here he was William Neumeister who had never failed in anything—David checked himself. He had made a decision to abandon that silly game, and he would stick to it. It was nothing but a crutch, and it had been weak of him ever to use it. It was no better than Wes’s drinking to avoid the painful decision to do something about his wretched life with Laura.

  David went to work on Monday. His job in the rock analysis laboratory, the caliber of the people, the atmosphere, all matched his expectations. The grounds, spacious and well kept, put him in a good mood every morning as he walked the flagstone paths from his car to the geophysical laboratory. Tall blue spruces grew near the administration building. There was a sundial that was also a bird bath and frozen tight now, a tennis court, a loggia with a grapevine growing on it, and stone benches here and there where in good weather one could sit and talk with a colleague. David’s superior, Dr. Wilbur Osbourne, was a small, stooped man with humor in his eye and an easygoing manner that did not suggest an eccentric character. And then before David had worked five days, Dr. Osbourne closeted himself in his office, locked the door, and refused to be disturbed by anyone and refused to take any telephone calls. He even spent the weekend in his office, sleeping there by night on his leather couch. He was thinking out a problem. There were other odd ones. A young engineer in David’s department was enamored of rain, and would stand out in it bareheaded and with his face turned up, David was told. Another man brought his gray Persian cat to his office every day. Another, Dr. Gregory Kipp, walked the two and one half miles from and to his house morning and evening, regardless of the weather.

  Most of the men, like David, had no private office, but worked on their feet in big rectangular rooms that held vacuum tubes, rock separators, mass spectographs, and other machines for the analysis of physical matter. There were five or six students from Utica working toward degrees in physics. David’s routine job was to tend the rock-separating machines and spectographs, and to remove the dust they produced, record its weight and affix a label. He was also to work with Dr. Osbourne on two or three projects that were outgrowths of that last voyage of the Darwin, Dickson-Rand’s own ship. He could not have wished a more altruistic job: the Dickson-Rand Laboratory received hundreds of rock and soil samples per year, and gave its analyses free of charge to private citizens and to commercial firms. It was a far cry from the practices of Cheswick Fabrics, Inc.

  Effie Brennan sent David a present of a gray linen tablecloth, darker gray napkins and four bamboo place mats. “Be happy in your new home,” said her card. It was quite a fine linen set, one that met David’s standards, which were the standards he set for Annabelle.

  Annabelle was unable to make a date with him during the second week he was in his new house. David felt restless and unhappy. He had called twice, both times in the evening. The first time there had been no answer, and the second time he had gotten Annabelle just as she was going out somewhere and had no time to talk, but she had said that every night that week was impossible, and so was the following weekend.

  It was now March seventh, a Saturday. The day before, David had accepted Dr. Osbourne’s invitation to dinner at his house on Saturday evening. Dr. Osbourne had invited him the preceding Saturday, but David had declined, thinking he might be able to see Annabelle. When Dr. Osbourne repeated the invitation, David had awkwardly said he would not know if he were able to come until Thursday evening, a time he arbitrarily set to call Annabelle with a last hope for the weekend.

  “Well! I didn’t know you were so popular,” Dr. Osbourne had said cheerfully.

  David, after a moment’s hesitation, decided to wear chino pants, loafers, and a tweed jacket to the Osbournes’. Informality went unnoticed among the Dickson-Rand personnel. He followed the little map that Dr. Osbourne had drawn on a scrap of graph paper, and arrived at a massive two-story house set back on a dark lawn. A light came on in the hall, and Dr. Osbourne greeted him with a handshake. A colored maid took his overcoat. Then they went into a solid, old-fashioned-looking living room where a fire was burning in the fireplace. Mrs. Osbourne, a plump woman with fuzzy gray hair, was sitting on a sofa, cracking nuts in a silver bowl.

  “Hello-o, David,” she said, as if she had known him all her life. “Pardon me for not getting up, but once I’m ensconced here—My, you are tall, aren’t you? Wilbur said you were tall. What will you have to drink?” And a walnut cracked in the silver nutcracker.

  David liked her at once and at once felt at ease. They did not think it odd that he declined a drink and they did not press him. At their insistence, David sat on a hassock near the fire while Dr. Osbourne drank his bourbon and his wife her sherry. Mrs. Osbourne said she couldn’t understand how anyone could go around in cotton clothes in such weather.

  “This boy runs on intellectual heat,” said Dr. Osbourne.

  “Tuh!” from his wife.

  The dinner was substantial and the dishes arrived in heavy silver tureens. There was a joke, that David paid little attention to, about the tureen’s bearing the initial of Mrs. Osbourne’s maiden name. For the benefit of his wife, Dr. Osbourne went over David’s achievements at his school in California and his credits with the laboratory in Oakley, and though David usually squirmed at such times, he was flattered by Mrs. Osbourne’s knowledge of what her husband was talking about, and gratified that Dr. Osbourne rated him highly and considered the laboratory fortunate in having him.

  “I hope I am here the rest of my life,” David said.

  “Why, Wilbur was telling me you’ve already bought a house,” said Mrs. Osbourne. “Tell me where it is.”

  David told her and said it had formerly been owned by some people called Twilling.

  “Twilli
ng? The Twilling house? Wilbur, why didn’t you tell me it was the Twilling house?”

  “Because I didn’t know, my dear,” said the doctor.

  “Why, I know that house well. I’m a friend of Mrs. Twilling, you see, and I used to visit her. Wilbur doesn’t happen to like Mr. Twilling but that’s neither here nor there,” she said with a smile.

  “Twilling’s an ass,” said Dr. Osbourne, pouring more wine for David and himself. “Never associate with asses or their wives. Life’s too short.”

  “To return to the house,” said his wife, “it has a lot of charm, hasn’t it? And you can’t say there isn’t enough room there. You’re not going to be lonely, all by yourself?”

  “Why should he be lonely?” asked Dr. Osbourne. “Besides, he may be doomed to matrimony. I daresay that’s what you’re feeling around for.” Dr. Osbourne’s eyes kept moving over the things on the table as if he were looking for something that was missing. David had passed him the salt earlier in the dinner.

  “Well, I hope that’s in David’s picture—some time,” said the doctor’s wife.

  David sat up a little. “Matter of fact, it is. I don’t know when it’ll be—the date—but certainly before this year is out. Before the summer is out,” he said with more conviction.

  “Why, congratulations, David! Where is she and what’s her name?” Mrs. Osbourne asked.

  He hesitated, wondering if he had already gone too far, until both of them looked at him expectantly. “She’s in Connecticut,” David said. “Her name’s Annabelle.” And he felt immediately better, happier, more sure of everything. The Osbournes were his friends. He suddenly even wanted Mrs. Osbourne to meet Annabelle. Yes, he wanted that especially. “You’ll like her,” David added with a smile.

  “Hmph,” said Dr. Osbourne. “Just when you’re about to get married, you leave a highly paid job for a much less well-paying one.”