This Sweet Sickness

by Patricia Highsmith

  They hit his head on the door frame of his car. The car door slammed shut. David knew his eyes were shut, knew he was half reclined on the front seat, and that he was motionless, though his rage still boiled and stormed in him.

  When he stirred again, dragging himself up by the steering wheel and accidentally tooting the horn, he saw that there was no light in Annabelle’s apartment or anywhere in her building. He cupped his hand around his watch to see the radium dial. It was ten minutes to three. He started the car immediately and drove off. A front tooth throbbed. Feeling with his tongue, he found it was still there and not even chipped. And so what, he thought, so what?

  At the moment, he hated the whole lot of them behind him.

  25

  The next day was a Monday, and David did not go to the lab. He telephoned at nine o’clock and told Rosalie, one of the secretaries, that he had an intestinal virus and had orders to stay in bed one more day. Actually, his trouble was a cut face and very puffy underlip, not to mention a purple eye and various aches, and he hoped to improve his appearance by Tuesday. He was ashamed of having fought physically, and also ashamed of having lost. There was no doubt he had lost. But Annabelle, telling him she was going to marry Grant Barber, telling him to his face! Had she thought she had to resort to that to get him out of the house? And that nightmarish hog of a woman, pulling at him with those horrible hands!

  David paced his house, holding towels with ice cubes in them against his eye, his lips, his cheeks. There was a rip in the shoulder seam of his jacket, and in the afternoon he took it to a tailor in Troy to be mended. It was obvious by nightfall that he was not going to make a great improvement in his face. He debated telling a story of a prowler to the people at the lab. He didn’t want them to think he’d been drunk and gotten into a fistfight. On the other hand, why tell them anything? Didn’t he have a right to some privacy? Gerald Delaney had gone through life with a lower lip fatter than this, and probably no one had ever questioned him about it. He’d even married Annabelle. David smiled and his lip split. He went to bed very early.

  And he woke up feeling like a different person. He could think clearly again. Let her marry Grant Barber, he thought, let her make another obvious mistake. It wouldn’t last long. But then he realized the inevitable, idiotic delay that another marriage would mean. And the thought of that swine crawling into bed with her put him into a sweat. Something certainly had to be done. Another letter? He’d given up letters. He could throttle Mr. Barber with pleasure, but then he’d be jailed. Hate was a slight relief, hate and contempt for the lot of them. But he couldn’t completely hate Annabelle. She was simply duped, right and left. She condemned herself to ugliness and mediocrity, and why?

  David drove off to the lab in a quiet, almost repentant mood, conscious that his violence had gotten him and would get him nowhere, and secure with the faith that something, some idea, some solution would occur to him today or tomorrow or the next day. Any problem in nature could be solved. All it took was perseverance. Ponder it, and then relax and let the imagination work. He resolved to concentrate hard on his own work today, be alert and bright with Dr. Osbourne at their conference this afternoon, and he felt that, before six, a brilliant move would have occurred to him in regard to Annabelle.

  Kenneth Laing gave David a second look and asked him what had happened.

  “Oh, I just settled an old grudge this weekend,” David replied with a smile.

  Laing whistled. “Who won?”

  “I did.”

  No further remarks. Laing was not the familiar type. He kept a certain distance.

  That afternoon David got into an argument with Dr. Osbourne. David had briefed himself on what they were going to discuss that day, and everything went well until Dr. Osbourne said something about the radiocarbon activity of a tufa mass he had examined somewhere, at some time. Perhaps the doctor had even made a joke about it. Less than a minute later, via some exchanges about the significance of radiocarbon activity to living organisms, David found himself in a tangle of illogic, unable to get out of it and blustering in every direction. He sounded off about his attitudes and duties as a scientist. Dr. Osbourne protested that those things hadn’t any bearing on what he had been talking about. David heard Dr. Osbourne and heard his own words too, and it was as if he couldn’t correlate them and couldn’t shut up either and couldn’t change the subject. He harangued against the gabbling scientists who would stop every project that might lead to a homicidal weapon, and at the same time he was decrying—he heard himself—the further investigation of radioactivity anywhere on the globe. And why? Because the discovery that the rate of radioactivity was low and harmless at present would only lead to more tests and more radioactivity on the earth’s surface and in the atmosphere.

  “I’m confused and amused,” said Dr. Osbourne, smiling, but David hardly paused to hear him.

  “I don’t say I have it all worked out clearly,” David went on quickly, grasping for the hostility and resentment he had felt against Dr. Osbourne minutes before and which now seemed to have fled from him. “I’m not one to make up systems. But in fact I have worked out a system that could make the world a better place. The keypoint of it is the relationship between acceptance and rejection. It would permeate everywhere, from the humblest individual to the men who make foreign policies.” But David had not worked it out, they were only fleeting ideas he had had while standing under the shower or trying to fall asleep at night (and the small hours of the morning were never a good time for him to do any real thinking, despite the apparent racing of his brain), but he babbled on while Dr. Osbourne listened with his chin sunk in his hand. “You have to know what to accept and what to reject,” David said.

  “Which nobody can deny. Well, once you get that a little better formulated—”

  “But surely you can understand some of it right now,” David interrupted, his confidence rising again.

  “My dear David, are you sure that fight you were in didn’t jar your brain a little? Or have you had a couple of bracers this morning? Not that I mind in the least, just tell me, because I want to get on with this or not.”

  David stood up, feeling vaguely insulted. “I was trying to say something pertinent to what we were talking about.”

  “I’m afraid you didn’t. I can’t even call what you were talking about a tangent. Now David, I’m not angry!” Dr. Osbourne chuckled, but David could see that he was looking at him sharply.

  If Dr. Osbourne made any comments, David swore to himself, any comments on his personal life now, he would storm out of this office and never come back, never say a word to anybody in the lab, just leave.

  But Dr. Osbourne did not speak. He only nodded a little to himself, as if he had said something inside himself that he agreed with. And his smile was unattractively superior. He made a gesture toward David’s chair. “I’m sorry, David. Now would you like to sit down and we’ll go on again—or not?”

  David felt baffled. He did not know what he wanted to do.

  “Suppose we take it up again tomorrow, eh, David?” Dr. Osbourne stood up, smiling. “We all have our bad days. This wind doesn’t make things any better.” He stuck his thumbs in his vest pockets and twisted himself slightly to look out the window behind him.

  “Thank you, sir,” David said. Suddenly his underlip felt as if it weighed several ounces. “If you will excuse me—”

  “Certainly, David. There’s no hurry with the work around here, you know. I don’t want you to feel any pressure.”

  During the next hour he experienced something quite new to him. He was unable to work. He was supposed to make an average of graph recordings for one month, something a secretary might have done if she had known where to look, but he could not force himself more than halfway through the task. He tried something more difficult, but this did not go either. Embarrassed by what seemed to him a visible idleness, he went
to Laing, told him he wasn’t feeling well, and to tell Dr. Osbourne that, in case he came down to speak to him. David knew it was most unlikely that Dr. Osbourne would come down, and he saw from Laing’s face that he thought it was an odd remark.

  The unpleasant ambivalence stayed with him on the drive home. Should he turn around and go back to the lab? Should he telephone Annabelle and say something to her that she couldn’t ignore, pass off, or forget? Or should he not telephone but go to Hartford again?

  When he got home, he cleaned the house, vacuumed every room, and since the house was not really in need of cleaning, it went very quickly. It gave him a feeling of not having totally wasted the day. Then it occurred to him to look for the mail, which he usually did on his way back from work. He put on a raincoat and walked in the mud to the box at the end of his lane. The world looked mysteriously black, not so dark he could not see anything, but as if a solution of India ink had been poured into the atmosphere. He saw some birds fleeing. Then just as his hand touched the mailbox, there was a shocking crack of thunder. Was that an omen? He yanked the box open.

  There was nothing personal except a letter from his Uncle Bert, which he had no desire to open.

  Back in the house, he cleaned his shoes under the sink tap, wiped them dry with a paper towel and then polished them before he opened his uncle’s letter. There was a lot of family news of no great import, Louise had a boyfriend they thought was too old for her, and then Bert launched into his well-meant, avuncular advice with the phrase David had heard him say in his mild voice since he was fifteen, “I know you’re old enough to lead your own life now and I don’t mean to butt in but . . .” He was worried, of all things, about the field trip in July on the Darwin. He thought David’s happiness sounded a little false. Was he really happy? What was happening with Annabelle?

  . . . In your last letter, you said you two were going to be married by June. Is this really so, Dave? That’s not what Annabelle’s mother thought when I ran into her on the street the other day. Not that I brought this up, but I mentioned you. To tell you the truth, she avoided talking about you. Please tell me what’s been happening, Dave. You know my opinion well enough on this whole thing. It’s high time you developed some eyes for another girl. . . .

  Had he said he and Annabelle would be married by June? Maybe he had. David put the letter down on the kitchen table before he had quite finished it.

  An hour or so later, he was sitting on the living room sofa, a little high on his third martini. He had started the martinis as a prelude to dinner, and then had decided he had no appetite for dinner. He set the third martini down unfinished, and briskly went upstairs to take a shower and change his clothes. Under the shower, he began to feel more cheerful. He whistled defiantly and began to think of William Neumeister. Lucky old Bill! Somehow that shower reminded him of many happy showers in his other house in Ballard, much, much happier showers. Looking back on it, he felt the house in Ballard was bliss. Gerald had come to an end there, too, at the hands of William Neumeister.

  That evening he was William Neumeister again. It helped a great deal. He ate a small dinner and played some records, listening to them on a cowhide rug with an ice pack against his lip and the cold, cut-off tail of a Porterhouse steak against his dark eye.

  At the end of Verklärte Nacht he went to the telephone and called Annabelle. He had no resolution about using or not using rough language, in case one of the Barbers answered. He simply felt very confident.

  “May I speak to Annabelle, please,” he said calmly. He had gotten the old hag, all right.

  “Is this David? David Kelsey?” she asked in a terrified voice.

  “No, this is Bill.”

  “Who?”

  “I want to speak to Annabelle!”

  “Listen here, Mr Kelsey, I got news for you. Annabelle’s married.”

  “Hm-hm,” David said insolently. “I still want to speak to her.”

  “Well, she’s not here, I tell you. She’s away with Grant.”

  “Married?” David asked, with an embarrassing gasp. “You mean they’re married?”

  “That’s right, and they’ve got you to thank for it, Mr. Kelsey. Annabelle was so upset after Sunday night, the doctor told her she shouldn’t wait a minute longer. Grant married her and took her away yesterday, so there. They left town, and they’re going to have po-lice pro-tec-tion in case you even try to make any more trouble. You’d best remember that.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Not gonna tell you. Not for all the money in the world.” Bang went the phone down.

  They’d gone to Niagara Falls, David thought, if Grant had any say about it. He walked from the telephone into the kitchen and back again. Was it a lie? But that moron Mrs. Barber wouldn’t be able to lie that well. Involuntarily David shrugged and smiled a little, put his hands in his pockets, and whistled a made-up tune. Then he began to feel odd, opened a window and leaned on the sill, breathing deeply. It did not help. He lost his dinner in the bathroom, and though he listened automatically for the ringing of the telephone downstairs, even the ringing of the toilet tank was lost in the jangle of his own blood in his ears. He brushed his teeth, and avoided looking into the mirror over the basin.

  The staircase was partly dark as he walked down, and he realized he was afraid. Afraid of something coming out of the shadows, something coming in the door. The standing lamp, again focusing on the telephone, made the brown-and-beige living room look extremely silent. David had another martini, sipping it slowly as he walked about the house. On the surface, his thoughts drifted between a policy of waiting until Grant Barber showed his true grossness, if he hadn’t done this already, and of finding out where they were and paying them a visit. There was no doubt, however, that the old hag’s threat about the police was deterring him somewhat. There might be a grain of truth in it. Once the police got hold of you, no use trying to explain. Besides, it would be embarrassing.

  Keep cool, William Neumeister. Keep the home fires down. He opened windows, but he felt warm in his chest and in his hands, as if he had a high fever. Annabelle had made a mistake, that was all. Not the first. The second. The last.

  What would Mrs. Beecham advise him to do, he wondered. He remembered that Mrs. Beecham had been sympathetic when she learned that there was a girl he was in love with. Her eyes had lighted up, and they had also grown sad and warm. He had felt as if he had a friend. And she was still there at the top floor back, nearest to heaven at the back door of life. He was on his way to the telephone, when he bethought himself that the telephone was on the ground floor and that Mrs. Beecham couldn’t get there. Besides, it was nearly midnight.

  He woke up at six on the living room sofa, a sordid experience that was rendered less sordid by the fact that his face in the mirror looked much better. He whistled under the shower, shaved, dressed, and went down for a leisurely breakfast, which turned out to be a big glass of milk merely flavored with coffee, and two shots of gin neat. William Neumeister was going to pull through today, all right. He could tell already that he would do a good day’s work, quite good enough to make up for yesterday’s mess.

  26

  “Hello, Dave. Wes. We’re in Troy. Are we too early?”

  “No,” David said blankly.

  “If we are, we’ll kill a little time here. So now we take Peterborough Road out of town and I follow your map, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What’s the matter? Did I wake you up?”

  “No, I was up,” David said. “Come on out. I’ll be seeing you, Wes.”

  “Ciao.” Wes hung up.

  David looked at his watch. Eleven-five. Saturday morning. It was rather annoying. And the “we.” Probably Effie. If it was Laura, he thought, he simply wouldn’t let them in the house. No quarrels. He would pretend he had some engagement that he had to go out for. David
walked restlessly about the house, frowning, glancing here and there to see if anything needed straightening. Nothing did. Then he went to the kitchen, looked into the refrigerator and the freezing unit, where a three-inch-thick steak in waxed paper took up most of the space. It was big enough for six people, which was fortunate.

  He put some music on the phonograph, stopped the record after a minute or two and put on a French woman singer, not the one Effie had played at her apartment. He put a few more French and Italian popular records on the spindle.

  David jumped at the sound of a car door slamming. A second door slammed. He went to the front door and opened it. It was Effie with Wes. She carried a basket with a white towel over it.

  “Hi, Dave!” she called. “My, what a handsome house!”

  “Hello, there, Dave!” Wes said. “Good to see you!” He wrung David’s hand, stamping his feet on the doormat.

  “I brought a few goodies,” Effie said. “Some fried chicken and a pie. Gosh, a piano! Do you play, Dave?”

  They looked over the living room, complimenting everything, and David had to show them the upstairs too.

  Now they were in the kitchen, he and Wes, and David was getting some ice out for Wes’s drink. Effie had disappeared into the bathroom.

  “You lost some weight,” Wes said. “Are they working you hard?”

  “Not a bit. They treat us well.”

  In silence they strolled back to the living room.

  David made an effort and said, “I suppose you’re going to stay the night, aren’t you? Both of you?”

  “That was the idea, wasn’t it?” Wes said, rubbing his hands together. “I’m looking forward to that steak you told us about. You know, Dave, I was pretty worried about you after you called Thursday. I’m glad you look as well as you do.”