This Sweet Sickness (6 page)

To David's surprise and discomfort he saw that it was a portrait of himself.

“It's Davy!” Wes cried, and laughed. “I didn't know you'd sat for her, Dave.”

“I didn't.”

“I'm enormously flattered that you recognize it. I did it from memory. Memory!” she repeated nervously and rolled her eyes. “Not that I had much. I mean—well, now I can see what I missed in the eyes.” She went back to her desk.

“But the hair and the whole shape of the face is great,” Wes said.

And that was reasonably true, David thought. There was his thick, dark brown hair—the drawing was in brown charcoal—the straight eyebrows and the mouth. “I think it's incredibly good, just to be from memory, Effie,” David said, smiling.

She stopped in midmovement, there was a sudden silence in the room, framing his words in space. It was as if Effie had stopped to drink in his casual words of praise. Then she moved and stood before him with a crayon in her hand. “I don't suppose you'd really sit for me for one minute and let me get the eyes right.”

David nodded. “Of course I would.”

Effie worked with a little pointed eraser, and scratched a point on her charcoal from time to time on a sandpaper pad.

“There!” she said finally. “I've even improved the eyebrows.” She set it up on a bookshelf for all of them to admire, though at everything they said she laughed deprecatingly. “Portrait of the genius as a young man,” Effie said, interrupting them.

Shortly after that, Wes slipped out of the room, to the bathroom, David supposed, and he found himself with Effie, both of them as tongue-tied as adolescents. She told him he could have the charcoal drawing of himself, if he really wanted it, and he said of course he did.

“I don't know what you think of me. You probably think I'm silly,” Effie said, her eyelids fluttering, unable to look at him. “But I like you a lot. I wish you wouldn't be so shy with me.
I'm
bad enough.”

In an agony of embarrassment, David stood like a stick.

“I mean, I really don't see why we couldn't see a movie now and then. Or you come here for dinner now and then. I'm not going to cook
you
and eat you.” She laughed painfully.

David braced himself, thinking if he got it over with, everything would be easier. “To tell you the truth, Effie, I'm engaged and—even though the marriage is a little way off, I'd prefer not to see anybody else.” It was like revealing himself naked for an instant, then clutching his clothes about him again.

But Effie did not look at all surprised. “Do you see her on weekends? Is that where you go?” she asked almost dreamily.

“I see my mother,” he replied.

“Your mother's dead.”

David's mouth opened and closed. “And who told you that?”

“Your boss. My boss Mr. Depew knows Mr. Lewissohn. He had some business with Mr. Lewissohn. So we were chatting about you, and I said to Mr. Lewissohn, ‘It's too bad about his mother,' or something like that, and he said, ‘What's the matter?' and I said that she had to be in a nursing home, and he said no, she was dead. It was on their record and he remembered it. I didn't go into it, naturally. I certainly wasn't trying to probe. I just told Mr. Lewissohn I must have gotten mixed up.”

David knew his face must be white, because he felt about to faint. “Mr. Lewissohn's mistaken. She's very ill and she may die in a few months, but she's not dead. He's made a mistake about that record.” But David remembered the record now too, the simple “
No
” he had written in a questionnaire's blank two years ago. He hadn't thought of it since the day he filled it out. What if Wes should find out? Or maybe Effie had already told him.

Wes was back.

Effie and Wes had a nightcap of scotch, and David a cup of coffee—instant coffee, since the pot was empty. Then they got up to leave. Effie looked strange, he thought, and he attributed it to the fact she perhaps did not believe what he had said about his mother. As he was about to thank her for his portrait, which he had picked up, she said, “On second thought, I'd better spray it with fixative before you take it. Otherwise it'll smear.” Her eyes looked straight into his as she spoke, and he knew he would never see the drawing again.

6

A
letter from Annabelle arrived the next day, the eighteenth of December. Seeing it on the wicker table, David did not snatch it but picked it up quietly along with a picture postcard with a California landscape, probably from his cousin Louise. He climbed the stairs to his room.

He took off his coat and nervously hung it, yanking its front straight on the hanger, closed the wardrobe door, then sat down at his writing table, the better to bear whatever the letter might contain. It was two pages, written only on one side, and his eyes swam over the whole thing before they focused.

Dec. 16, 1958

Dear Dave,

Pardon me for taking such a long time to answer you—but I think I have a good excuse! I have just had a baby, an 8½ pound boy. There were some complications—or rather some were expected, so I was afraid to say anything before “it” was actually here, but now everything is fine. I hope you can understand, Dave, that with a baby to take care of it is impossible for me to think of going anywhere. He was born Dec. 2, at 4:10
A.M.
, which makes him two weeks old today.

Dave, I really can understand that this may come as a surprise to you, but it shouldn't. I am happy—at least right now—and though I might have been equally happy or more happy with you, that is just not the way things worked out. To think of anything else except the way things
are
is just to live in a world of the imagination—fine for some things but not for real life. Don't you agree?

I'll have to take a job as soon as I'm able to arrange about the baby, as Gerald has made a bad mistake about his shop (against everybody's advice) and consequently has had great expenses. Enough of that.

I must end this as I have a million things to do. I'm sorry I can't see you, especially just before Xmas. Are you going to California for Xmas? I do think of you, Dave.

With much love, as ever,
Annabelle

David stood up and faced his triad of windows. A baby. It was unbelievable, just unbelievable. His stunned brain played for a moment with the idea she had only made this up, perhaps to startle, to hurt him so that he would not try to write her again—her objective being to make him stop hurting himself. If she had been going to have a baby, wouldn't she have said so months ago? Wouldn't any woman?

He sat for a long while on his bed, frowning with an attentive, puzzled expression at the carpet, until finally a knock on the door roused him.

It was Sarah, saying something about dinner.

“I'm not feeling well tonight. I won't be coming down,” David said to her.

Her presence reminded him of where he was, and when he had closed the door after her, he listened until her footsteps were out of hearing, then picked up Annabelle's letter, his eyes falling on certain words though he refolded it quickly, put it back into its envelope, and set his ink bottle on it with a thump. He took his coat, left his room without locking the door, and went quietly downstairs just as Wes came into the hall from the dining room.

“There you are. You're not feeling well?” Wes asked with concern.

“I'm all right. Not hungry tonight.”

“You're
green
. What happened?”

“Nothing. I'll just get a little air. See you later,” he added weakly, and went out the front door.

For the first time in months, perhaps ever on his walks, he went to Main Street, where there were lights and people. Many of the stores were closed, but many also stayed open for Christmas shopping, and there were people enough on the sidewalk, the dull-faced peasant types that from David's first days in the town had surprised him by their preponderance and repelled him. Aware suddenly that he walked on Effie's side of the street, he crossed over so as to have less chance of running into her. The windows of cheap shoes, women's dresses, drugstore windows crammed with toys, flickered past in the corner of his left eye. Constantly he stepped aside to avoid the oncoming drifters, gawking at the windows. A huge, dangling Santa Claus, laughing drearily on a too-slow phonograph record, made him dodge sharply, but when he looked he saw that the black oilcloth boots were at least four feet over his head. A record store boomed “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” Through this chaos David carried precariously the small, concentrated chaos of the Situation like a ball held up in the air by jets of water from below it. When the sounds and the light grew dimmer, and a dark, silent vacant lot stretched out on his left, he found a thought in his head: Annabelle was not herself now, wasn't able to see anything in perspective, because of the baby. No, he didn't think she had lied about the baby; Annabelle wouldn't stoop to trickery. But it was no wonder she was immersed, drowned now in what she considered reality. Naturally, a baby was real, pain was real, dirty diapers, hospital bills, and of course the stupid husband. What Annabelle couldn't see now was that there was a way out still.

If Annabelle could not come to him he would go to her. He decided to go this Sunday, when he would most likely find Gerald Delaney at home too. He would go to his house in Ballard Friday evening as usual, and leave around nine Sunday morning for Hartford. He would not call her first, he thought, and give her the opportunity to beg him not to come. He would call her in Hartford and insist upon seeing her and Gerald too. Then he began to plan, as methodically as he could, his argument.

David credited himself with an ability to maintain a self-possessed manner, regardless of his emotions. And though the letter from Annabelle had been shattering, had prevented him sleeping the night of the evening he received it, neither Wes nor Mrs. Beecham—who measured him for socks—nor anyone at the factory commented on a change in him Thursday and Friday. He remembered the flowers for Effie and sent them to her with a thank-you note. On Friday, around 5:30
P.M.
, Wes left Mrs. McCartney's in a resigned and cynical mood to go home to Laura.

With a swiftness that made Wes drop a package he was holding, David swung around and caught Wes by the shoulders and shook him. “
Try
it again, for Christ's sake! You've had your vacation!”

“Good God, Dave!” Wes said, readjusting his jacket. “What on earth's the matter with you?”

“Nothing! But you—If you go back with a bitter attitude, where do you think you're going to get with her?”

“Maybe I don't want to get anywhere with her.”

“You said you loved each other once.” David tried to quiet his hard breathing. “I'm sorry, Wes.”

“Christ. I thought you were going to beat me up.” Wes's expression was still resentful. “To tell you the truth, I've been invited to Effie's for a bracing scotch or two before I face—home.”

“Go ahead, go ahead.” Then David sat down on his bed and put his hands over his face, waiting for Wes to be gone, for him to be quite out of the house, before he started on this most important of journeys.

It was at least a minute before he heard his floor creak under Wes's steps and the door open and close.

7

S
unday morning, it rained, starting a little after 6
A.M.
, when David got up. On the radio, he heard that the rain was expected to turn to snow. In his pajamas and robe, David had a leisurely breakfast of boiled eggs and an English muffin and bacon—though he had no appetite, the importance of eating had registered on his mind, and the breakfast went down dutifully. Then he played some Haydn on the phonograph and drifted about his house, looking at the backs of his art books, at his framed manuscript page of a Beethoven theme which had cost him a considerable sum, at the gold-leaf-framed Leonardo drawing which had cost more, and at his silver tea set on a table in a corner of the living room, which he realized with a little shame he had never used once.

It rained all the way to Hartford, and grew perceptibly colder and foggier as if he were forcing his car into Hyperborean realms. David still heard the Haydn in his ears, and he hummed with it as he casually rehearsed his lines. Not one line did he compose verbatim, however. In a situation like this, he preferred to rely mostly on inspiration. Having vowed he would enter the city properly this time, he again got shunted onto an overpass that brought him out finally in a factory district, not unlike the neighborhood of Annabelle's house, but miles away from it, he knew. He was forced to ask directions twice at filling stations.

Talbert Street. A name evoking nothing, named perhaps for some ephemeral good citizen, or maybe just slapped on for no reason at all. After sighting the street, David drove two or three blocks to a drugstore to telephone. He knew her number by heart.

A man's voice answered.

“May I speak to Annabelle, please?”

“Who's calling?”

“David Kelsey.”

“David?”

“Yes. David.”

It seemed longer than necessary before she came on.

“Hello?” she said, and at her voice he relaxed like a bow unstrung.

“Hello, darling, it's David. I'm in Hartford and—well, I want to see you.”

“Today?”

“Yes. Now. Can I come up? I'm very nearby.”

“I'm on my way to church, Dave.”

“Church?” he said with surprise.

“Yes, but I suppose I—I was just going with a friend.”

“Well, break it, Annabelle, would you? Annabelle?” But she was already off the telephone, talking perhaps to the friend.

“Hello, Dave. Can I meet you somewhere?”

“I'd rather see you at home. I'd like to speak to Gerald, too,” he said with determination.

And again she went away, and he heard unintelligible hums, the deeper hum of a man's voice, and then the telephone was hung noisily up.

David banged his own telephone back on the hook, and wrenched the booth door open. Immediately he checked his anger, so that even before he was out of the drugstore he felt cool and collected once more. Let Gerald be the only angry one in this scene, the ass. David drove to Talbert Street and parked his car almost in front of the house. He rang the Delaney bell, one of four in the two-story red brick building. He looked at the sprinkling of yellowed grass on the tiny lawn, at the foot-high hedge full of gaps where people had trodden through, despite the wire someone had strung. Thinking he had waited long enough, David rang again. A prim, freckle-faced little girl in Sunday best opened the door and walked by him, staring at him. David heard a woman's high heels on the stairs. The door opened and there she was.

“Dave, why did you?” she asked, smiling. “Sunday of all days. Ouch! That's my hand.”

“Annabelle—” Her hair was shorter, and she looked a little tired under her eyes, but the color of her eyes, that dusty gray-blue, and her wonderful mouth were still the same. He looked at the swell of her breast under the brown tweed dress, at her still slender waist.

“What're you staring at?” she asked with a shy laugh that made his own heart dissolve in tears. “How'd you get your hair so wet?”

He said something that came out simply gibberish. Then he was leaning against the doorjamb, tiredly, though he held her tightly in his arms, his lips against her skin just below the ear. He could have spent the rest of his life there.

“Listen, I came down to avoid a scene—with Gerald,” she said, pushing back from him. “You shouldn't have told him your name.”

“I want to see him. Or do you want to come out and talk to me first? My car's outside.”

She shook her head. “Gerald'll be down in a minute, if I'm not back. I don't know if I can see you at all today, Dave. Except now.”

“What are you, a prisoner?”

“When it comes to you—”

“Annabelle?” from upstairs.

She looked at him, beseechingly, and he was reminded of her yes in La Jolla, when she had come back from her honeymoon.

“Fine. Let's go up,” David said, taking her arm.

“Annabelle? You coming up?”

“Please, Dave—”

But he pulled her firmly toward the stairs. “Yes!” David shouted up.

Gerald retreated a step toward the open door as David, still holding Annabelle's arm, arrived at the second floor. He was short, round-shouldered in his shirtsleeves, and baby-faced, and David suddenly realized what was so strange about him: he looked like one of those glandular cases whose name David had forgotten, whose voices never really change, who are practically beardless, wide in the hips, high-waisted—and Gerald was all of that, except that his voice did sound a trifle more like a man's than a woman's. “Mr. Kelsey?” Gerald said.

“Yes,” David replied pleasantly. “Pardon the intrusion. I was just passing through.”

“Dave wants to come in for a few minutes,” Annabelle said to Gerald, who was standing sideways in the door now as if he would block it.

David made Annabelle precede him into the apartment. He had expected clutter and the dreary appurtenances of an existence such as theirs, but the sight, the tangibleness of it all now made it far more horrible to him. There was the picture of a hideous, gray-haired relative on the television set beside the aerial, a pair of mole-colored house slippers in front of the armchair in whose seat lay the gaudy comic section of the Sunday newspaper. Glancing at Gerald's shoes—small, unshined—he noticed that the laces were not tied and deduced that he had interrupted Gerald in his reading.

“The place is a little untidy,” Annabelle said. “Sit down, Dave.” She gestured to a green sofa that looked more worn than their year and a half here would seem to have warranted.

“Thank you.” David pulled off his damp raincoat and tossed it over one arm.

“Well, you don't have to stand there scowling at each other,” Annabelle said. “Would you like some coffee, Dave?”

“No, thanks, Annabelle.” He looked at Gerald, who was standing with folded arms, regarding David with a frank impatience for him to be gone. “To come to the point quickly, Mr. Delaney, I love Annabelle, and I intend to make her my wife.”

“What?” Gerald said with a slow smile of amusement, dropping his arms now and resting his hands on his hips that looked more capable of childbirth than Annabelle's.

“Oh, Lord, Dave,” Annabelle moaned.

“Listen, Mr. Kelsey,” Gerald said slowly, and, as if to back him up, or as if Gerald had meant to listen to it, a squeaky wail came from another room, and Annabelle made a start toward it and stopped. “As far as I'm concerned, you've been rude, vulgar—”

“Just a minute,” David interrupted.

“—all the time Annabelle and I've been married. I don't like your letters and I don't want any more of them!”

“I didn't know I'd sent any to you.”

“You've sent them to my wife and—”

“I suppose you read them. You look like the type. It's usually a woman's vice.”

“David!”

Gerald's cheeks were becoming as pink as his rubbery underlip. “In a way—in a way, I'm glad you came up here today, because I can see you're just what I thought. You're a nut, a real nut.”

David gave a little laugh. That eunuch! For him to have married Annabelle was a piece of grotesquery—like a hunchback in a fairy tale capturing a princess. “You're the picture of health, I must say.”

Then there was a burst from Gerald, answered by David, both were shouting at once, close together, and Annabelle, trying to separate them, got struck in the hip by the back of David's hand.

“Get out!” Gerald said, pointing to the door. “Get out now or I'll call the police!”

“Annabelle will put me out and nobody else,” David said, picking his raincoat up from the floor, wishing he had buried his fist up to his elbow in that inviting pudginess below Gerald's belt. It would have laid him groveling on the floor, might even have killed him. Boldly, David kept his back to Gerald while he straightened his raincoat, turned it inside out, and laid it over his left arm. Then he looked around for Annabelle, remembering from his own smarting hand that he had struck her.

She was coming into the room with a cup of coffee for him, held out like an offering, and for some reason David found it very amusing and grinned broadly at her as he took it. “It's not very strong,” she said apologetically. “Gerald doesn't like it very strong.”

“And you?” he asked. It was indeed abominable coffee, so transparent he could see the circle of the cup's base through it. He thought of his espresso machine at his house, and he looked once again at Gerald, who was spraddle-legged, his absurd fists still clenched. “Mark my word, Gerald. Annabelle and I loved each other before she ever met you, and those things don't change,” David said.

“For Chrissake!” Gerald slapped his bulbous forehead. “Ask her! Ask her!”

“You can remember, can't you, Annabelle?” When he turned to her, he felt his thirst in body and soul. All his anger subsided, and the coffee cup nearly slipped off its saucer. She was looking at him, wanting to say, “Yes.”

“I remember, but it was a long time ago, Dave.”

“Less than two years. You told me that you didn't love Gerald.”

“How could I have?”

“In La Jolla,” David said.

“He's insane. If you're not out of here in one minute, Mr. Kelsey—”

“I guess there're different kinds of love, Dave. When you're married, it's different.” Her voice shook.

“Different from what? People fall in love and they get married—” He stared at her, at a loss to express himself by only the one word “love.” He plunged on. “Doesn't it mean caring, providing, being thoughtful—sacrificing?”

“Yes. Oh, Dave, we can't stand here all day arguing.”

“But I do all that for you,” he stammered. “More than this—” Again there was no word for that lump of flesh with the unfortunate ability to reproduce itself. “I want to speak to you alone, Annabelle.” Setting his cup down, he took her hand to lead her toward the door, but her hand stiffened and drew back, and then Gerald's face was near his, and David drew his fist back.

“Dave,
please
!” Annabelle hung onto his raised arm with both hands.

David relaxed. “I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.” He would have been ashamed to hit the absurd little man, was ashamed that he had almost hit him. “I mean what I say,” he said quietly to Annabelle, looking into her warm eyes that were now full of tears. Then he kissed her suddenly and briefly on the lips, before Gerald could bustle up, and the kiss was over when David's hand flattened against Gerald's chest and shoved.

Gerald recovered his balance before the back of his legs struck the sofa. He uttered a filthy curse, which David ignored.

“Obviously Sunday isn't the day to call,” David said. “I love you, Annabelle, and I'll write to you.” He pressed her hand, then walked to the door and went out, hearing Gerald's bluster—in a tone of pretended incredulity—as he descended the stairs.

Though he kept walking toward his car, David debated turning back and demanding to talk to Annabelle alone, taking her out by force if he had to. Certainly he could handle Gerald with one hand. He felt he hadn't been definite or strong enough. But he reflected that his exit had not been bad, and that a return might spoil it. He would write to her, and persuade her—really persuade her—to meet him somewhere, even if it was only in Hartford. He thought of Gerald's physical appearance—unredeemed evidently by any brains, grace, or sensitivity—and David felt quite secure again. He had not driven half a mile, when he pulled against the curb in a quiet street, turned off his motor, and sank with fatigue over the steering wheel, his mind reverting to Annabelle as it always did before he fell asleep, not tackling now the problems, the Situation—only Annabelle's clear and innocent face, her body that he had so recently half embraced. He knew, like a quiet, still fact that she would one day be his.