This Sweet Sickness (3 page)

And sometimes, after the two martinis and a half bottle of wine at dinner, he imagined that he heard Annabelle call him Bill, and that made him smile, because when that happened, he'd gotten tangled up himself. In this house, his house, he liked to imagine himself William Neumeister—a man who had everything he wanted, a man who knew how to live, to laugh, and to be happy. David had bought the house in the name of William Neumeister, and the few local tradespeople, the garbage collector, and his real estate agent knew him as William Neumeister. David had picked the name out of the blue one day, had at once realized that it meant “new master” in German and that it was therefore rather silly and obvious why it had occurred to him, but the name sounded good to him, a comfortable mouthful, and so he kept it.

At first, nearly two years ago, when he heard that Annabelle had married Gerald Delaney, David had merely wanted to escape, at any cost, the pressure and the pain of his depression. He was not the sort to throw up his job, stay drunk for weeks, or any of that. On the contrary, he had tried to work harder to shut it all out until he could recover enough to think what had to be done. He had wanted privacy and a change of scene, and because of his job the change of scene had been impossible. But he dreamed about a change of scene, and as he dreamed he enriched his fantasy. Why not, for a time, imagine it had not happened, Annabelle's horrible mistake of a marriage? Why not, just for a while, the blessed relief of imagining that Annabelle had married him? And what would he and she be doing? He would certainly have moved out of his small apartment in Froudsburg and into a pretty house somewhere. Without hesitation he had made the split as it remained to this day: the ugly boardinghouse in Froudsburg where he worked, and the house in the country into which he put ninety per cent of his earnings and as much time as he could. He had not wanted to make the house traceable to David Kelsey, so he had invented the other name, and with the new name came to some extent a new character—William Neumeister who had never failed at anything, at least nothing important, who therefore had won Annabelle. She lived with him here, he imagined as he browsed through his books, as he shaved on Saturday and Sunday mornings, as he puttered about his grounds.

He had not acquired the house overnight. It had taken him weeks to prepare William Neumeister's references: one from a “Richard Patterson,” who subscribed to a mail and telephone service in New York City, and who replied to the querying letter of Mr. Willis, the real estate agent, recommending William Neumeister in the highest terms; another word of commendation from “John Atherley,” in whose name David had maintained a room for a week or so in a Poughkeepsie hotel, where he had picked up Mr. Willis's letter. A last small precaution was joining the library in Beck's Brook, a town a little north of Ballard, an action for which no references had been asked. In addition, he had borrowed a few thousand dollars (since paid back) from his Uncle Bert, so that his down payment on the house could be substantial. Real estate agents were not apt to be suspicious of people who could pay in cash a third of the value of a house. He had told his uncle he wanted the money because he was thinking of buying a house, and a few months later said he had changed his mind and would continue living in the boardinghouse. At the First National Bank of Beck's Brook he had opened small checking and savings accounts simultaneously, again using Patterson and Atherley as references for William Neumeister, but evidently these were never investigated, as David received no letters from the bank.

His house had the tremendous virtue of never being lonely. He felt Annabelle's presence in every room. He behaved as if he were with her, even when he meditatively ate his meals. It was not like the boardinghouse, where with all that humanity around him he felt as lonely as an atom in space. In the pretty house Annabelle was with him, holding his hand as they listened to Bach and Brahms and Bartók, making fun of him if he were absentminded. He walked and breathed in a kind of glory within the house. Sunlight was like heaven, and rainy weekends had their peculiar charm.

At night, he slept with her in the double bed upstairs. Her head lay on his arm, and when he turned to her and held her close, the surge of his desire had more than once reached the summit and gone over with the imagined pressure of her body, though afterward, his hand, flat against the sheet, reported only emptiness and aloneness. On one Sunday morning, he threw away the bottle of Kashmir that he had bought because Annabelle had often worn it. He did not need such things to recall her. The perfume was even too much.

On Sunday evening, after a dinner of charcoal-broiled steak that he had cooked in the fireplace, David sat down at the beige, Japanese-style desk in the extra room upstairs, opened his fountain pen, and spent perhaps ten minutes in thought. When he had composed his letter in his mind, he took from a cubbyhole that contained nothing else the two letters he had received from Annabelle. Their envelopes were postmarked Hartford, Connecticut, a town David knew slightly and considered nearly as ugly as Froudsburg. He knew the rows of red brick houses with ten feet of space between them and that space cluttered with garbage cans and children's play wagons. He knew the flapping clotheslines and the tangles of television aerials on the roofs. He knew even Annabelle's street, though when he had gone there, he had not wanted to identify her house in the red row. It would have been like pressing his fingers against a painful wound, instead of merely looking at it.

He read her last letter thoughtfully, though he knew it by heart. Her handwriting was a little on the large side, its lines very straight.

July 3, 1958

Dearest Dave,

I was so happy to hear from you—but if Gerald happens to see the envelope, I have to go thru the old explaining and reassuring. I'm glad your job continues to go well. The folks at home often write me what a success you've become. Congratulations!

I too remember the happy days we had together. My life here isn't very exciting or interesting but—that's life, I guess. Gerald's shop is doing fairly well, but we have expenses coming up. I do think of you since you asked and would love to see you, but it would be hard to arrange without a lot of trouble blowing up. I hope you've met some friends where you are and are not spending too much time alone. I know you are superior to most people, but as Mr. Soloff (one of my music teachers) used to say, you can get a little something from everybody, even the humblest. No, I do not keep your letters, as Gerald might find them. I tell him you write me now and then to tell me how you are getting along. I know you are getting along very well. After all, Dave, you do have your work to occupy you.

This letter is so long already and I've got tons of sandwiches to make for a picnic tomorrow!

With my love and good wishes always,

Annabelle

Those tragic phrases—
I have to go thru the old explaining . . . My life here isn't very exciting or interesting
—though they had disturbed him daily since he received the letter, now fell painfully and fresh on his heart. She didn't love Gerald and never had. It was a marriage that should have been undone, and David had tried to persuade her to undo it when he had first heard about it, when it was only a month old. He shook his head and ground his teeth again at the thought that he had ruined everything, made the crashing blunder, by staying on that last month in Froudsburg, just because Cheswick had told him they wanted him to stay, and because the job was new to him, and because he had thought, for the $25,000 they were paying him, he had better know every detail of the factory's operation. He could have learned his work in two weeks, and actually he had. He forced his anger to subside, and pulled a piece of paper in front of him. No use reading her other, earlier letter, which was shorter than this, and which he knew by heart too, unfortunately, because it did not cheer him. He had not replied to her July letter. He had wanted to have something definite to ask her before he risked trouble for her by sending another letter. The idea of trouble from that mushy beast of a husband was more infuriating than any other aspect of the situation. He looked like a eunuch, and David cherished a faint hope that he really was.

He dated the page and wrote “My darling Annabelle,” and then before he went on, took an envelope and addressed it, not putting any return address on it.

Your letters [he wrote] are both my only source of happiness these days and also cause my greatest pain. You told me once that you were not in love with him, and I wonder if you have forgotten or have you—not having anyone there to help you—succumbed to what you consider fate? Darling, it is
not
life that you are experiencing in Hartford. Far from it! You're not in love with him and he hasn't even any money. Not that I'd reproach any man for not having money if he's not interested in it or it's beyond his powers to earn much. It's the drudgery and the ugliness that this implies that galls me—plus the all-important fact that there isn't any love to make it bearable. Can you not be objective for one moment and see how it must seem to me or to anyone else looking on from the outside?

Can it be you're afraid to see me? [He crossed that out. He would have to copy the letter. He usually had to.] I want to see you, darling, and I think I have a better idea than Hartford. It's very far off, which will give you plenty of time to think about it. I would like you to meet me in New York. Any day between Dec. 21 and 24 (I know you'll have to be back Christmas). Do let me know soon, so I can be thinking about the day. Tell Gerald you have to shop for something and make it specific. I'll arrange, if you can make it, to be staying at the Algonquin, so for future reference, meet me there on the day you can come in. Or if you prefer, I'll meet your train if you can tell me what it is. Don't forget, you can write me as often as you wish:

137½ Ash Lane

Froudsburg, N.Y.

If you have half an hour, fine, or three hours—wonderful. We'll have tea, lunch, dinner, whatever you like. Or we'll sit in the lobby and talk and have nothing. I'll be cheerful, funny, serious, or anything you like.

Here he had a vision of Mrs. Beecham's pink bedjacket. That was funny, but he could not tell it to Annabelle. He did not want to tell her yet about the house where he spent his weekends, about the records and books he was amassing, always with her in mind. And Christ damn it, he could not even ask her to spend a weekend with him
in
his house, because Annabelle would never do anything like that. Her loyalty had been bought by a pig! And not even bought, just reached out and seized. For a moment, he dreamed of proposing his house, telling her about it in his letter, dreamed of her accepting and spending a weekend of the kind he imagined every weekend here—Annabelle here in flesh and blood, able really to eat and drink with him. But it was unthinkable, and he gave it up. He signed the letter with his love, and added a postscript:

It is all very well for you to say I have my work. But I am incomplete without you.

3

N
early two weeks passed, and there was no letter from Annabelle. David tried to excuse this, but the fact remained that she could so easily write to him, even if it was only a postcard dropped in a box while she was out marketing. She simply did not realize what it meant to him to get no word from her at all, he thought, not even a word that she was considering his proposal to meet in New York. David imagined that she was considering it, and not writing until she knew for sure.

The dreary, busy days went by. His working hours were often hectic. As the chief engineer, he was supposed to know what was going on and to supervise the work in ten or a dozen quite different departments. The electronics engineer was incapable of making the smallest decision for himself and called for David at least four times a day. Something had gone wrong with a dancer bar. Was $375 really the right price for a tube? Would he consider this plate worn out or not? The new kid had done something to a roller and it was measuring out fifteen-pound rolls instead of the required thirteen. The factory made plastic material that was used for car seats, covering for cheap sofas and chairs, baby blankets, suitcase linings, and whatever else men like Dexter Lewissohn could think up to use it for. A score of machines resembling newspaper printing presses unrolled bolts of white plastic filler between thin pink or blue or green or any colored plastic material, and at regular intervals this was stamped with diamond designs, squares, dots, or whatever. The results were horrid. They went all over the nation and were exported too. You could spill drinks on Cheswick fabrics, babies could puke on them, just wipe them clean again with soap and water. The one aesthetic aspect of the production was perhaps the snow-white bolts of plastic filler, five feet long and three feet in diameter that weighed almost nothing. They at least looked clean. But before the stuff was white and on bolts, it had to be processed and washed and subjected to various rinses (whose formulae Lewissohn unnecessarily and rather romantically guarded from competitors), and from the carding stalls the white wool-like stuff floated out into the air, got into the nose, and stuck to the clothing and the hair. In the “experimental department” on the second floor, Wes Carmichael and a half-dozen other young chemists worked, played, and “experimented,” drawing quite handsome salaries for doing very little. They played at making plastic covering for wire, of the sort dish drying racks are made of, they came up with liquids that could remove stove grease, emollients that were good for the skin, rat poison, and silver polish. They outdid one another in creating cartoons and slogans detrimental to factory morale and effort. On the second floor the men's room was labeled “Bulls” and the women's room “Heifers.” The day David had accepted the job, Mr. Lewissohn had told him with a happy slap of his palms, “All our products are turned into dollars and cents in a matter of days.” This was not exactly true of the products of the “experimental department,” Mr. Lewissohn's one extravagance for the sake of his vanity. Or David himself might have been one other extravagance. It flattered Mr. Lewissohn to be able to say, “I've got a real chemist working for me. A young fellow who's won three scholarships.”

David disliked his job and, ironically, had taken it only because of Annabelle, and then lost her because of staying on that crucial month to learn the work. David would have preferred a research job. But he had thought that if he wanted to marry soon, he would do well to have some cash in hand and cash coming in. The research job he had had in Oakley the preceding year had not paid enough for him to have put much away in the bank. David had started out very promisingly in the capacity of chemist, and seeing his quickness, Mr. Lewissohn had conceived the idea of putting him in charge of the whole downstairs, and so dismissing two or three foremen who were not particularly efficient. This had been just at the time he had intended to go back to La Jolla to ask Annabelle to marry him. He had been writing to her daily, and now he wrote that he would be delayed a month. He hadn't said “wait for me” and hadn't told her in his letter that he wanted to marry her, because he preferred to say that in person. After all, she had said to him only two months before, “I love you too, David.” The fact she had called him David at that moment instead of Dave somehow made it all the more serious and true. He hadn't believed it when his Aunt Edie wrote him that Annabelle had married somebody else. David had never heard of Gerald Delaney. He was from Tucson, Aunt Edie wrote him. Annabelle had known him less than a month when she married him, Aunt Edie said, and maybe it was too sudden, but she blamed it on the “bad time” Annabelle had been having at home. David knew: her mother ailing and complaining, her father ill-tempered, and her two good-for-nothing brothers making her wait on them hand and foot as if she were the Cinderella of the household. But to have married somebody she'd known less than a month! “Well, it's always the stranger out of the blue who carries the day in love,” his cousin Louise had written him. Louise was sixteen and she had aspirations of becoming a writer. And there had been no use in his dashing out to La Jolla at that point, because Louise said that Annabelle and her new husband had gone off on a month's honeymoon to Canada, she didn't know just where. “But her mother said she'd be back by La Jolla to pick up her things after the honeymoon. I'll keep you posted, Dave. But don't be too sad, because to tell you the truth she's not good enough for you in my opinion. Water seeks its own level, mom says.”

David had managed to be back in La Jolla when the month was up. He had flown across the continent for one weekend, and he had seen Annabelle at her house. She had come back to pack up a few of her things, because she was going east to live, she said. Gerald was an electrical engineer—by which lofty title David gathered that he could fix a toaster or put new plates in an electric iron. That, in fact, was what Gerald was going to do in the east, set up a little repair shop somewhere. David had been absolutely appalled.

“You didn't know,” he had asked naively, “that I wanted to marry you, Annabelle?”

She had looked inwardly embarrassed, like a small girl with a conscience caught out in a very minor offense. “Well, Dave—I wasn't sure. Why should I have been?” She was taller than average and had rather large bones, though she was extremely graceful and fond of dancing. At twenty-two, an adolescent roundness still showed in her cheeks. Her lips were young, somewhat thin and soft and as honest as her gray-blue eyes. And she was very serious, seldom made a joke, not having the necessary detachment for joking. “I'm sorry, Dave.”

“But it's not too late, Annabelle! Do you—You're not in love with him, are you?”

“I don't know. He's nice to me”

“But you're not in love with him, are you?” David had asked desperately.

“I don't think I am—yet.”

And then had followed the argument that had finally raised their voices, until some brother, awakened from a nap, had shouted down a complaint from upstairs. He had caught her in his arms—and that had been the last time—and begged her to annul the marriage with Gerald. He had told her his life was not worth living if she were not with him, and he'd never spoken a truer word. Somehow he had lost his balance and they had both fallen over a trunk on the floor, and one of his tenderest memories of Annabelle was that she had laughed at that, laughed as she let him pull her up to her feet. Then she had said he must go, because Gerald was due any minute.

“I'm not afraid of him,” David had said. And at that moment he had seen a car stop in front of the house, and one of Annabelle's brothers and a shorter man got out of it. “But I don't particularly care to meet him either,” David had added quite calmly. “I love you, Annabelle. I'll love you all my life.” And on those words, which are monumental or absolutely worthless, depending on how you take them, he went out the door, without even kissing her, which he certainly could have done. He still remembered the surprised, puzzled expression on her face, and sometimes he wondered, if he had stayed a minute longer, if she would have said, “All right, Dave. I'll get a divorce from Gerald.”

On the sidewalk he did not step aside enough for Gerald, whose shoulder brushed his—or rather brushed his upper arm. David had glanced at his face, and what stood out in his memory was the large, fat underlip, suggestive not so much of sensuality as laziness, the small, dark, simian eyes, the smooth, plump jaw that appeared beardless. In later months, the fat underlip had grown to grotesque proportions in David's memory, like part of a monkey's behind. David had thought,
why
on earth? And it had shaken him so, he had not regained the fortitude that day to go back to his aunt's house until it was time to go to bed.

When he had telephoned Annabelle the next day at noon, her mother said that she and Gerald had left. David caught an afternoon plane back east. His family—which was his aunt and uncle and his cousin, David's father having died when he was ten and his mother four years later—knew by then that he was in love with Annabelle. David was sorry that they knew, because while their knowing might have pleased him if he had had Annabelle with him, it now did him not a bit of good. And his Uncle Bert, in his shy but matter-of-fact way, not looking at David as he spoke, had told him he thought this was another case of his “picking the wrong girl—like that Joan Wagoner.” David had said nothing, but it infuriated him that Bert had put Annabelle on a par with Joan Wagoner, a girl he found it hard even to remember, a girl he had known at seventeen or eighteen! Joan had married some ass too. That was the only similarity. When his uncle and aunt and his cousin had seen him off on the plane, they had looked at him with sad, wondering expressions, as if they had just learned that he had some terrible disease that they could do nothing about.

At that time he had known Annabelle for five months, but what did time matter in love? A second, a year, a month—what they measured didn't apply. When Annabelle had smiled and said “Hello” to him that spring day at the church bazaar grounds, he might as well have answered, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. My name is David. What is your name?” He had been helping his aunt build her booth that day, and he remembered straightening up, dropping the saw, and walking toward the piano music that was coming from behind a big sheet of cardboard. The cardboard leaned against a piano. She was half in sunlight, half in shade, but the sunlight was on the keys and on her wonderful hands. There were little ribbons of black velvet at the bottoms of her short sleeves. Her light brown hair was parted in the middle and fell full and soft behind her head, like a brown cloud. He stood for what was perhaps five seconds—that was something he would never know—and then she saw him, looked once and then again and stopped her playing and said, “Hello,” with a smile, as if she already knew him. He walked to her house with her that day (eighteen blissful blocks) and he proposed a soda or a Coke and she declined, but she promised to take a walk with him the following evening, after dinner. She couldn't have dinner with him, she said, because she had to cook her family's dinner. She had two brothers. Her mother knew David's aunt, Annabelle said, and David wondered why he and she had never met before, because even though he had been away at school so much of the time, he was home on vacations. “Bad luck, I guess,” Annabelle said in a drawling way through a shy smile that made her seem younger than she was. She told him the piece she had been playing was a Chopin étude. Walking home that day, David had tried to remember it and failed, but its spirit filled him to the brim.

The third time he had seen her, when they were walking under some trees not far from her house, he had taken her hand, their arms had touched as they slowly walked, touched and separated until it was no longer bearable, and they stopped and turned to each other.

His aunt had liked Annabelle well enough when David had brought her to the house, but her attitude had been, it seemed to David, one of incomprehensible indifference. He hadn't blurted out to his aunt that he was in love with Annabelle Stanton, perhaps because he hadn't thought it necessary, and also because of his desire to keep it secret for a while. But Annabelle—one didn't see a girl like her every day or every year or every lifetime. David could see, when he walked down the street with her, that a few people realized this. Everybody who knew her liked her, and pitied her because she was unappreciated at home. Her brothers had always ruled the roost. Annabelle was the cleaning girl, the cook, their shirt washer and ironer, and if she could play the piano, that was nice, they'd let her, but it shouldn't take her away from her chores. Annabelle had had two years of college, had had to stop for lack of money, and then she had won a scholarship to study the piano, and that had had to stop because her father had a stroke and her mother needed help. David had been so certain, so arrogant, so indignant at her wretched life, he had not even spoken of it much to Annabelle, except to say once or twice, with more violent words that he did not utter choking his throat, “I'll take you out of all this and soon, very soon.” He was twenty-six then. He had been working at a research laboratory in Oakley for very little pay, and he had intended to go back, but Annabelle changed his plans. He decided to look for a job with a commercial firm, and he had answered the advertisement of Cheswick Fabrics in Froudsburg, New York. He had not set a date for his return to La Jolla, but he had said he would be back at least for a weekend in two or three months, and maybe less. They had known each other six weeks when he left for the east, not long, perhaps, to know someone before marriage, but by then David knew Annabelle was going to be his wife. It was inevitable and right, and it seemed to him that she knew it too.

Perhaps he had tried to hint some of this to his uncle and aunt, he couldn't really remember, but he had sensed that both of them looked down on the Stanton family. It might be true, David thought, that the Stantons had less money than the Kelseys, but was the worth of families to be judged by money? If her brothers drank and loafed around the house, was that Annabelle's fault? David's father, Bert's brother, had left enough money for David's upbringing plus his education, and in fact nobody in the Kelsey family had ever had to worry about money, but not everybody had that advantage. Bert had a comfortable job with an insurance firm, and he had had the job for thirty years. Every now and then, Bert would refer to his brother Arthur's recklessness in business with a sad shake of his head, but David's father had not died poor, and his mother, too, had contributed money from her family. When David was ten, his father had died of pneumonia, and four years later his mother had been killed in a car accident. His uncle and aunt had raised him like a son as far as his physical comforts were concerned, had praised him and been proud of his record in schools. Bert had been shy about accepting the role of father in every sense, but David had not minded that. Bert was a good-natured, benevolent guardian uncle. His wife was less intelligent and more superficial, hanging onto her youth quite successfully at forty-two. Only her letters sounded old, full of outdated snobbism, practical advice, and inquiries as to his finances.