This Sweet Sickness (27 page)

“I'm going to call up Ed Greenhouse,” he said when he returned to Annabelle.

They headed for a restaurant's pink neon sign. And there, right beside the telephone booth, was a men's room he might have used free. Closing one eye, David was able to find Greenhouse, Edgar, 410 Riverside Drive. And where, exactly, was that? An orchestra or a juke box was playing “It was only a paper moon—hanging over a cardboard sky . . .” A girl was singing, and David closed his eyes and listened for a moment, daydreaming, imagining his encounter with Ed, the handshakes, the greetings, meeting his wife. What was so embarrassing about asking for ten dollars or even fifty or a hundred? Ed would get it back. David opened his eyes and pulled out his change: one dime, two nickels, and three pennies. He had the dime in his fingers when he realized that, if he spent it, he would be two cents short of having the fifteen-cent subway fare.

“You haven't a dime, have you, darling?”

But Annabelle had left her little money purse in the hotel room, and they could not go back there, could never enjoy the champagne that was standing on the dresser.

“We'll just go on up to Ed's,” he said calmly.

He asked the man in the subway change booth where 410 Riverside Drive would be, and the man said to get off at 110th Street. He bought a token, squeezed Annabelle through the turnstile with him, and they caught a train up.

29

I
t was a huge, gloomy apartment building with the grime of the city in the gray stone curlicues around its double doors. At right and left in the foyer there were long lists of names, and it took him some time to find
Greenhouse, E. 9K
. David pushed the bell, and stood with his hand on the brass doorknob, waiting. He had to ring again, and again he waited, ready to open the door, and still there was no reply. Then a man and woman came in, used their key, and David went in with them. He let them both precede him into the elevator, which was run by a little gray man in a shabby blue uniform. The people got out at the eighth floor, and David said, “Nine, please.”

At the ninth floor, he looked for the K apartment, bending close to read the markers on the doors, because the hall light was dim. He pushed the bell and heard a pair of chimes.

“Who is it?” a man's voice asked.

“Ed?” David said, smiling. “An old friend. Dave.”

The door opened a little, and Ed Greenhouse—plumper and shorter than David remembered him—looked at him blankly.

“It's me, Ed!” David said, pushing the door wider. He patted Ed on the shoulder. “How've you been, old man?”

“Dave Kelsey?” Ed looked completely surprised. His close-set black eyes stared at David on either side of his beak nose, and David remembered that he had used to think Ed looked like a cartoon of an owl.

“Did I change so much in six years? Five, isn't it?”

Ed glanced over his shoulder at a blond woman who was standing in the middle of the living room.

“Your wife?” David asked. “How do you do?” He bowed to her. David was in their hall now, but Ed still stood by the half-open door. “I hope you'll forgive my barging in like this without calling,” David began. “I would've called, but—” He was suddenly embarrassed, unable to speak of money. And Ed wasn't helping by being so stiff. Ed didn't used to be stuffy, far from it. Frowning, David glanced about quickly for Annabelle, aware that she—somewhere—had shrunk into the background to be less obtrusive.

“That's okay, Dave,” Ed said, moving away from the door at last. “Honey, this is—this is Dave Kelsey, an old school friend of mine.”

“How do you do?” David said again.

“How do you do?” she said breathlessly, staring at him.

“Am I interrupting something?” David asked.

“Sit down, Dave. Can I get you anything? Coffee? A beer?” Ed preceded him into the living room and turned, his plump, hairy hands that David remembered quite well poised now on his hips. Ed was starting to lose his hair. And he looked rather pale.

David smiled. “No, thank you. I won't stay long, Ed.” He sat down on the sofa.

Ed did not sit down and neither did his wife. Ed kept looking at her as if he were trying to convey something to her with his glances, and David thought he saw him nod his head a little.

“Am I interrupting something?” David asked again, ready to get up. “I really shouldn't have burst in—”

“Oh, no, no. Glad to see you, Dave. Liz, I might like a beer and I don't think we've got any, have we? Would you mind going down for some?”

David was on his feet at once. “Oh, no, I'll go.”

“No, really. Don't even think of it,” Ed said quickly.

“Oh, certainly, I'll go,” said the girl, and started for the door.

“You'll need a coat,” David said. “It's pretty cool.”

She shook her head with a glance over her shoulder at David, and then she went out, not quite closing the door after her.

“Well—” Ed said pleasantly, and put a shapely pipe in his mouth. He tried to light it, shook the match out and poked at the tobacco with the end of the match, put the match in an ashtray and lit another match. The operation must have taken him over a minute, but David waited patiently for him to speak. “You're looking fine, Dave.”

“So are you. Married life agrees with you, eh? You've put on weight.”

Ed nodded, but again David saw that cool withdrawal in his expression, as if he resented David's bursting in on him and was even on the verge of telling him so.

David moistened his lips and looked down at the pale green carpet. It was suddenly impossible for him to ask Ed about his work, as he had certainly meant to do. May as well plunge, David thought. Either that or get up and leave. “I guess you wonder why I'm here,” David said. “The fact is—this wasn't a planned trip and I'm out of cash—just out of pocket money, and my banks are out of town and it's hard to get a check cashed. I could write you a check though, Ed, for whatever amount you give me. Fifty would be fine. Less, if it's not convenient.”

“Why, sure, Dave,” Ed said in a surprisingly agreeable tone. “I don't think I've got fifty, to be perfectly honest, but I can let you have twenty.” He pulled his billfold from a hip pocket.

David stood up, already reaching for his checkbook in his trenchcoat pocket. “It's a godsend,” David said, suddenly happy and smiling. “When you're in New York with a girl, you know!”

“Oh? What girl?”

“The girl I'm going to marry. Matter of fact, we are married in every way except the paper way. And who cares about the paper way?” David got a pen from the desk across the room, and wrote the check out on the coffee table. It did not occur to him now to sign William Neumeister's name, but he did want to tell Ed about lucky Bill. “Remember that weekend we had in Los Angeles? The time we barely got back to your mother's for New Year's Eve?”

Ed nodded, smiling. “Yes, I remember.”

“This trip has been something like that. I had some wine tonight with dinner. But essentially one doesn't need to—I mean, it's the state of mind that does it—and mine's excellent.”

“Good,” Ed said. Still smiling affably, he tiptoed down a hall off the living room and David saw part of him—an arm and his head—as he very gently closed a door. Then he tiptoed back.

“Somebody in there? Maybe I've been talking too loud?”

“Oh, no, nobody in there. Are you sure you wouldn't like some coffee? We have instant.”

David declined it. He wished Ed would sit down, but it was hardly his place to ask him to. David looked around the room, noticed the dull Impressionist painting reproductions on the walls, the mixture of modern furniture with Victorian, the very messy desk, every cubbyhole jammed and its writing surface chaotic. Then he saw on the floor by the armchair two pink baby rattles. No,
one
pink baby rattle. “Curious,” David said, “the shape of baby rattles hasn't changed in hundreds of years, has it?”

“No.” Ed chuckled, but David heard a falseness in it, and he felt a little alarmed. “Where's the girl now?”

“Who?”

“The girl you're with.”

“Oh, why she's—” David gestured airily and stopped. He looked at Ed and again felt embarrassed, wondered if he should say she was waiting downstairs for him. “She's at the hotel.”

“Oh? What hotel?” Now Ed sat down on a hassock in front of the armchair.

“I seem to have forgotten the name. But I can get there.” David laughed. His legs, jutting out in front of him, did not look like his own. The thighs were thin. He brought his palm down on his knee. “Well, Ed—”

“Wouldn't be the Barclay, would it?” Ed asked.

“Yes,” David replied, smiling. “That's it, of course.”

“You're going back there tonight?”

“Yes,” David said. “But how'd you know?”

“Just a wild guess,” Ed said, puffing his pipe. “What's the girl's name?”

David had heard the elevator through the partly open door. Ed got up and went to the door and, as soon as he looked out, stepped quickly aside.

“He's in there,” Ed said.

David had jumped up.

Two policemen came in. Three.

“Stay there, Liz,” Ed said out the door.

“Mr. Kelsey?” asked the first policeman, an enormous fellow with little gray eyes under his visor.

David whirled away from him, struck a windowpane with his forearm, kicked more glass out and in the same movement climbed out on the sill, grasping a folded awning bar. A hand caught at his ankle, and David kicked it off.

“Kelsey!” the cop was saying in an admonishing tone. “Kelsey!”

David pressed his fingertips down in a crack between the big cement bricks of the house front and sidled farther from the window. There was a ledge perhaps six inches wide under his shoes. The ledge went on to the corner of the building and disappeared. But there were no more windows between him and the corner.

“Come back, Kelsey! You're going to fall!”

The policeman's hand or his nightstick brushed David's trouser cuff. The cement scraped David's nose as he moved on. Then David paused, out of the man's reach now, and looked back at him. He was a big man and his fear was equally big, David could see that. He was balanced on his hip on the sill, holding to the awning bar that David had caught. Then he pocketed his nightstick and climbed out on the sill and straightened. David edged still farther from him, but there was no need, because the man was not going to turn loose of that awning bar.

Suddenly there were murmurs and shouts of advice from inside the room, as if the people in there had been stunned speechless until that instant. Two other faces leaned out.

“Better come back, Kelsey,” said the big man on the sill, his voice shaking with the fear of death. “I can shoot you from here.”

David laughed a little. It seemed so silly and unimportant. Still smiling, he imagined the bullet entering his right side, taking his strength in an instant, and he imagined falling backward, over and over to that final kiss of cement below that he could not really imagine. David shut his eyes against the alternately warm and cool flow of his blood into his eyes. Blood made his fingertips a little slippery, too, and he supposed they were cut. But if they dried, he thought, wouldn't they glue his fingers to the cement?

“Dave—” Now it was Ed leaning out the window, and the policeman had disappeared. “Dave, you've got to come back and face this thing! Come back, Dave!”

But it was Ed who had betrayed him. David could not muster the energy or the interest to spit at him. He felt compelled to look down at the street, at the sidewalk directly below him, half believing that the policeman had fallen, silently, in the course of duty. The view—not emptiness but the presence of lines converging to an imaginary vortex directly below him—was so much what he expected that he lost his fear of it. Down below, a foreshortened figure of a woman pointed at him, and a man joined her and looked up. Two more people, walking from different directions, followed the gaze of the man and woman and were caught too. The four of them formed an ornamental, flowerlike design, their turned-up faces white and mysteriously complex in the glow of a street light.

“Better come back, Kelsey. You're going to fall.”

David's teeth were set and he did not reply. He kept his nose to the cement, and turned his feet a little, so he could stand on the ledge without his heels overhanging. His heart pounded with an anger he could do nothing about. And now he began to feel tired. If his anger had had an objective, he thought—But he was not angry at the police, or at Ed or his wife, or at anybody. He saw himself objectively, and he felt merely silly, standing on a ledge being stared at, called, asked to come back through the window, and for what? A policeman's flashlight played over his body.

“
Bastard
!” David yelled for no reason at the two gesticulating policemen who were leaning out the window.

“I've got a gun on you, Kelsey. Better come back or I'll shoot.”

“Go to hell!” David said nervously.

“You're a killer. I'm not interested in saving your life.” The big gun waggled at David.

“If you lay a hand on that girl in there—” David muttered.

“What girl? Liz?”

A gust of wind made him cling more tightly. He shut his eyes. Warm blood trickled between his eyebrows and ran cool down the left side of his nose. He wondered if he dared try to make it around the corner of the building and thence to a window? But for what use, after all? It did not matter either whether he fell or remained on the ledge for an indefinite time or forever: the thought gave him a sense of freedom and power, and he bounced a little on his toes. Behind the policeman's thick shoulder, David could see two or three people leaning out of other windows on the same floor. A window went up above him and a woman gave a small scream, but David did not care to look up. Anyway, the weight of his head might have overbalanced him, and he did not want to fall just yet.

“What's going on?” asked a man's voice from above.

“We gotta get this man,” said a policeman, as earnestly as anybody ever pursued the holy grail. Then he turned his head to say something to the people in the room with him, and his voice was an ugly, angry roar.

David closed his eyes, pressed his forehead and nose against the cool stone, and clung harder with his fingertips. Some decision had to be made. Or did it? Why couldn't he stay here the rest of his life? There was something peculiarly fitting about it for David Kelsey—to drop in on an old school friend to borrow some money he could have immediately paid back, and to be betrayed. The memories of Ed Greenhouse came back in a very personal way, a very close way, as if Ed meant something more to David than an acquaintance, which he hadn't: Ed with a terrible nosebleed one day in a classroom, dripping onto an exam paper until he couldn't write anymore and had to leave the room, even though two or three fellows, including himself, had given him their handkerchiefs. Ed with a startlingly pretty girl at some dance, surprising everybody by that girl. Had it been this girl, his wife?

He felt his being here at Ed Greenhouse's tonight had been predestined.