This Sweet Sickness

by Patricia Highsmith

  Damaged. The word held out a sweet hope. He closed his eyes and thought about it. Damaged didn’t mean destroyed or killed or finished. If something was damaged, it might be repaired. And then he remembered the sketch, and the Beck’s Brook policemen.

  He turned to Annabelle on the bed, embraced her, and began to cry. But he cried only a few seconds and jumped up again, washed his face and combed his hair.

  “William Neumeister,” he said jauntily into the mirror, “pick yourself up. You may not be a brilliant scientist, but Annabelle likes you. She likes you a lot better than she ever liked David Kelsey. She’s sharing a hotel room with you, and you’re not even married.” He spoke quietly, as if Annabelle in the next room might hear him if he spoke any louder. He went back into the bedroom and proposed a tour of the Museum of Modern Art, followed by lunch there, and Annabelle was delighted with the idea.

  “Oh, wear the tweed one,” he said. He saw her standing by the closet, one hand touching a hanger. The hand moved, and she took down a very full-cut dress of brown tweed, much like one of his old jackets.

  She fastened a broad leather belt around it. Generous folds on her generous figure. Most women, he thought as he watched her making up in the mirror, would have been too vain to wear such a dress unless they were emaciated. She was ready in no time.

  They walked to Fifth Avenue and up. It was a beautiful sunny day. They looked at barometers in a shop window, then at women’s shoes, then at a travel display with African spears and shields in the window. At the Museum’s ticket window, he said, “Two, please,” and got his tickets and change. He took the tickets to the man in the gray uniform at the entrance.

  “Two, sir?” said the ticket taker, looking past David.

  “Yes,” David said, and walked in.

  There were photographs downstairs. David, that morning, preferred them to paintings. Some photographs had been made through microscopes, showing the paths of atom particles, and these to David seemed the most beautiful, combining art and science. He explained them to Annabelle, the concentric patterns, the magnetic lines. A woman edged back from him to give him room, and David smiled. A tall, gray-haired man smiled at him too. Holding hands, David and Annabelle looked at photographs of people in the dust bowl of Oklahoma and at old masterpieces of Steichen.

  The Museum’s cafeteria seemed crowded, and after all not good enough for Annabelle on a special day like this. David walked eastward on Fifty-third Street and chose Michel’s, where he also had to wait for a table, but he waited at the bar and had a martini. He had time to order a second, which he did not really want (he pretended Annabelle had declined a cocktail), and he took it with him to his table. Annabelle was really drinking it, he felt, and he was sure not all of its alcohol would have effect on him alone. The lunch was splendid, and, having had no wine, he finished it off with a brandy.

  “It’s our honeymoon,” he murmured over Annabelle’s protestations. “We may as well pretend it is, don’t you think?” He knew it wasn’t, of course. They had been married quite a time. With the coffee and brandy, he had a moment of clarity, and saw the curved top of the chair back, empty in front of him. But what was the use of that? With the very slightest effort, he had her back again, smiling, her hair soft and a little long, in her brown tweed dress, and some perfume, more naive than the kind she used at night, just perceptible to him across the table.

  They walked down Madison to pick up his suit. He tried the jacket on in front of a mirror.

  “You’re feeling fine today,” the clerk said out of the blue.

  It rather startled David, but he smiled. “I’m on my honeymoon,” he said.

  “A-ah! Well, I hope she likes it as well as you think she will.”

  When David next looked at the clerk, he seemed to have gone sour. Probably envious, David thought.

  He bought cigarettes, and at a liquor store a bottle of champagne. As soon as he had the champagne, he realized he could have ordered a bottle in the hotel, but it would have meant an immediate fuss with an ice bucket, and having a bottle on his dresser top would make the room more like home. He also bought an evening paper. It was of slight interest to him to see how things were progressing in regard to David Kelsey, of the same interest, he thought, as a stock market quotation might be if he played, and perhaps not even as much. All relative, because if a man had little money, he valued it, and he did not at all value his life or himself. He had turned loose of himself, he felt, and in that he had found life, perhaps eternal life. He had certainly found happiness. He could certainly look any man in the eye. He had certainly lost his frowns, his sweating, his intolerance of things that were unavoidable, like slow elevators. He was William Neumeister, and even if the police were looking for him, Neumeister’s luck hadn’t run out. Not by a long shot.

  In his room, he put the suit box on the bed, opened it, and hung the jacket and trousers on hangers that he hooked over the top of the closet door. “We’ll do something nice tonight,” he said quietly. “I suppose I should have gotten tickets for a show, though.” The fact that he hadn’t depressed him momentarily, but Annabelle did not seem to mind. There were so many good movies in New York, and one didn’t need advance tickets for movies. David sat down on the bed, looked at the front page of the folded newspaper which had headlines about a proposed conference in Europe, and then reached for the telephone.

  “Information, please,” he said, and waited. “Would you be good enough to give me the telephone number of Romeo Salta on West Fifty-sixth Street?”

  He reserved a table for two at seven-thirty in the name of Neumeister. David had read something about the Romeo Salta restaurant somewhere, at some time, and he had wanted to try it on his next trip to New York. He remembered now that it was one of the restaurants he had hoped to take Annabelle to, when she met him in New York just before last Christmas. But she had not met him.

  Then slowly, leaning back against his pillows, he picked up the newspaper. Nothing on the front page. He turned to the second page and saw Effie’s sketch of him, and above it, in heavy print:

  “DOUBLE LIFE” OF KELSEY THROWS

  NEW LIGHT ON MURDER CASE

  Sergeant Everett Terry of Beck’s Brook, N.Y., today identified David Kelsey, 28-year-old scientist sought as slayer of Elfrida Brennan, as a man who for nearly two years maintained an alias as William Neumeister in Ballard, N.Y.

  On January 18th of this year, “Neumeister” brought the body of Gerald Delaney to the Beck’s Brook police station with a story of . . .

  David could not bear to read it. Farther down the page, his eye fell on Annabelle’s name:

  Mrs. Annabelle Barber, 26, of Hartford, Conn., formerly Mrs. Annabelle Delaney, stated that she has known Kelsey for the past two and one half years and that he repeatedly said he was in love with her and intended to marry her, despite her marriage in 1957 to Gerald Delaney.

  Mrs. Barber, in her Hartford apartment at 48 Talbert Street, gave the following statement today: “I now understand why my husband was killed. It was Dave he talked to that Sunday in Ballard and not Mr. Neumeister. Dave killed him deliberately. I know now that Dave is insane. I was always afraid of him. If he had not bothered us so much with his letters and his visits, my husband would never have tried to see him that day.” She was in tears as she finished.

  David dropped the paper and stood up. He walked to the window, pressing his wet palms together, and looked out at the irregular pattern of lighted windows in the building across the street. So he was insane. He laughed a little, nervously. Should he believe them or not? And what did it matter? Annabelle’s words were like a hysterical din in his brain. He could hear her voice, angry and shrill with tears, Dave killed him deliberately, and something went out of him forever. When he turned from the window, he was another person, not David Kelsey, not William Neumeister, but some other being entirely. It was as strange and inexplicable as a
religious experience, he felt, and he realized, too, that this was the nearest he had ever come in his life to having a religious experience.

  Fifteen minutes later he was showered and dressed in his new suit and his second new shirt. He had no clear idea of what he was going to do next, and yet everything seemed inevitable and he did not hesitate.

  Again there were no police in the lobby, and David could not understand that, could not understand why someone had not rapped on his room door, or picked him up when he had entered the hotel an hour ago. It seemed another piece of the Neumeister luck that he was coasting on. It might not last forever, but it would last hours and perhaps days longer than anybody else’s luck. He had left his key in the door, and he did not stop at the desk. He was not coming back.

  He began walking west. It was a fine spring evening, and perhaps his last, David thought. The eight dollars he had in his billfold was probably not enough for his cocktails and dinner tonight, and he did not know what was going to happen when they presented him with the bill, but somehow it didn’t matter.

  “Don’t be afraid, Annabelle,” he murmured to her, and pressed his right arm, which she held, closer to his side.

  But she was afraid. He could feel her shrinking a little, shrinking even from him. She hadn’t known that William Neumeister—David Kelsey—was the man who had knocked her husband down against the steps, the man who had shoved his corpse into his car.

  “You’ll feel better in the restaurant,” David said.

  He walked a long way up Fifth Avenue, past Fifty-sixth Street, and it was reassuring that nobody seemed to notice him. David felt determined to bring this evening off well, with no embarrassing snags. With the determination came a great self-confidence. Whatever happened he felt that he would do and say the right thing, and get his way with a mere word or two. He was quite free, he told himself, quite free. A particle in space. Now he held Annabelle by the hand. Her strong fingers straightened, then closed firmly on his. She didn’t mind that they had no place as yet to sleep tonight. They’d find some place. Or they’d walk all night, because the weather was fine.

  “Neumeister,” he said to the headwaiter. “I reserved a table for two.”

  “Yes, sir. Right this way, sir.”

  David followed him, beginning to feel euphoric as he walked past the rows of hanging wine bottles, through the pleasant aroma of good food.

  “Two martinis, please,” David said to the waiter, and lit a cigarette. “If you don’t want it, I’ll drink it,” he said to Annabelle. “Or would you prefer something else?”

  When the waiter returned with the drinks, David ordered a daiquiri.

  “A daiquiri, sir?”

  “Yes. A daiquiri,” David said.

  David took the martini that the waiter had set in the plate next to his and put it near his own plate. When the waiter came back, David indicated that the daiquiri should be put on the other plate. The waiter set it there with a flourish. David drank the first martini, thinking of Wes and of Effie and of David Kelsey’s sad sojourn at Dickson-Rand, thinking of all this in a detached, objective way. It seemed a remarkable chain of bad luck, starting way back, starting the day he received the news that Annabelle Stanton had married Gerald Delaney. He saw it all telescoped into five seconds, a whirling, whizzing image of Annabelle spinning in a wild dance, touching him several times and caroming off, out of his reach. He shook his head in discouragement, lifted the second martini and addressed Annabelle, really against his will or at least involuntarily, for he could see that the place beside him was empty:

  “You’re looking especially pretty tonight. Had you really rather go to a movie than go dancing somewhere?”

  She demurred. She would decide after dinner. The full red skirt of her dress, crimson as fresh blood, lay on the bench seat between them and touched the dark blue material of David’s trousers.

  David signaled for the waiter, looked over the menu and ordered clams, veal piccante, a mixed salad, and a Valpolicella.

  “Shall I remove the daiquiri, sir?” asked the waiter, reaching for it.

  “Oh, no. Leave it.” David frowned, suddenly angry. “That dinner also is for two.”

  “Two, sir?”

  “Two orders of everything, please.” He lit another cigarette. The money situation was not important. Had he ever considered money when it was something that concerned Annabelle?

  He called for another wine glass. He poured two glasses of wine when the meat dish arrived, ordered two servings of piselli, and the more the waiters looked at him, the more nonchalantly he chatted with Annabelle. He had drunk the daiquiri before the clams arrived, and, since he felt the effect, he was careful to eat some bread and butter. The people across the way, a dark, portly man with a mustache and a dark, portly woman, were looking at him and smiling, and finally the mustached man raised his own glass to David. David replied in kind, and they both drank.

  “You’ve got to come aboard the Darwin at least,” David was saying quietly to her, “and see where I’m going to sleep and all that—No, I haven’t been on it, but I’ve seen photographs of it inside and out. It’s being overhauled in Brooklyn now.”

  He ate well and finished the wine, which had been a whole bottle, not a half. Annabelle remarked that he would gain weight at this rate, and David said maybe that would stop people telling him he was too thin. He had an espresso. Annabelle, rather to his disappointment, did not want any coffee, but he made her taste some from his cup.

  There was laughter in the restaurant, the ring of glasses and silver, the aroma of lemon peel in espresso.

  “I’ll see what I can do around Christmas,” David said to her. They were discussing going to Europe. He proposed a brandy, but she refused it and told him he had probably had enough too. “I’m inclined to agree,” he replied. He had to make an effort to bring the overlapping images of the waiter together. “The bill, please,” he said, and with aplomb reached for his billfold, where he knew only eight dollars remained.

  The woman next to David smiled at him. David’s own pleasant expression did not change.

  The bill was $16.37. David laid his eight dollars on it, pocketed his cigarettes, and stood up. The waiter took up the bill and the money, glanced at it a second time, and David gestured to the front of the restaurant.

  “I have money in my coat,” he said.

  He gave the hatcheck girl thirty-five cents. The waiter was standing nearby, smiling pleasantly.

  “That’s for you,” David said, nodding to the money in his hand.

  “Eight dollars more, sir,” said the waiter, and David could tell that the waiter thought he was drunk.

  David stood a little taller.

  “What’s the trouble?” asked the headwaiter.

  “Perhaps I’d better write a check,” David said, trying to extricate his checkbook from the mass of papers in his trenchcoat pocket. “You have a pen?”

  “Is that a local bank, sir?” asked the headwaiter, producing, however, a pen.

  “No. It’s a Troy bank.”

  The headwaiter shook his head sadly.

  David was embarrassed, and at that moment felt grateful that he was as drunk as he was, because he was able to appear less flustered. He hesitated for what seemed to him five minutes (the headwaiter was asking him if he had some identification), but he could not make up his mind between David Kelsey and William Neumeister: he preferred to sign David Kelsey, because as low as Kelsey might be his check was good and he did not want to cheat the restaurant. On the other hand, he intended to inform his bank to honor Neumeister’s checks, and after all he was William Neumeister tonight.

  “Annabelle—”

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  David bent suddenly at the counter of the hatcheck girl and wrote Wm. Neumeister and above it in parentheses David Kelsey, tore the check
off and handed it to the waiter with a little bow. The check was for twenty dollars. The waiter showed it to the headwaiter, who looked at it with interest. David was extending his hand, about to ask the waiter for his eight dollars back, when the headwaiter looked at him in astonishment.

  “David Kelsey?” he asked, frowning.

  The name was a hideous thing.

  David turned and fled out the door, tripped on a step and fell on his hands on the sidewalk.

  Voices shouted behind him.

  He ran, crossing the street. There was a whistle like a police whistle. Ahead of him, a fire engine clanged up Sixth Avenue. David crossed the avenue just behind it and continued westward on Fifty-sixth Street, because it looked darker than the avenue. But he slowed to a fast walk.

  “Damn it, Annabelle, damn it,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean to put you through this.”