This Sweet Sickness (13 page)

The police wouldn't get Neumeister tonight, and maybe not any other night. It was very difficult to get hold of somebody who didn't exist, and thinking of this, David began to laugh to himself.

Abruptly he turned and walked back to the drugstore. Effie was just coming out the door.

“I'm not going to talk to the police,” David said.

“I didn't think you would. What are you going to do, Dave?”

“I'll just take my chances.”

On Thursday morning he called Annabelle. She was not in. Nobody answered the telephone until four forty-five, and then it was not Annabelle but a strange female voice. David suspected it was the old witch who had plucked so insanely at his sleeve, and he declined to give his name, only asked if Annabelle would be in at six, at seven, at eight? The woman thought she would be in at six.

David called at six from the squalid pharmacy between Mrs. McCartney's and Main Street.

“Yes,” Annabelle's calm voice said. “I'd like very much to see you Saturday, Dave.”

“I'll be there by noon. Or would you like me to come earlier?”

“Noon is fine.”

Noon is fine. Noon is bliss! Noon is when time starts again! He ran into the inward leaning tree on the way back, though it was not even very dark, the tree he had so often dodged and barely missed on his nocturnal walks. He bruised his forehead quite painfully, but this seemed a good omen, a sign of a great change, simply because he had hit the tree after missing it for two years.

He talked to Mr. Harris and Mr. Muldaven at the dinner table that evening, and even dug up two jokes to tell them, of recent Wes Carmichael vintage.

18

T
here was an adolescent girl in the apartment on Saturday, who Annabelle said was going to baby-sit. The baby was in a large pen affair in the living room, propped up against a pillow, sucking the nipple of a bottle which he constantly dropped, and which Annabelle patiently put back into his mouth. She moved in her smooth, unhurried way, and David stood with his overcoat in his arms in the middle of the floor, following her with his eyes wherever she went.

“Dave,” she said, stopping at the door to the bedroom, “maybe you'd like a drink before we go? There's some bourbon.”

“No, thanks,” he said, smiling.

She seemed in a good mood, almost the way he remembered her in the best days of La Jolla. She even wore a dress with little ribbons at the bottoms of the short sleeves, like the dress he had first seen her in. He felt optimistic about the afternoon.

“You don't want to sit down, Dave? I've still got one or two things to do,” she said. “I'm sorry to hold us up, but you were so ear-ly.” She drawled the last word, as she had drawled certain words in La Jolla when she was happy.

She disappeared, reappeared, bent over the pen, tickled the baby's chest, and as she picked her green cloth coat up from the armchair, David sprang to hold it for her, dropping his own coat accidentally on the floor, leaving it there until Annabelle had her coat on.

“What's your favorite restaurant in the country around here?” David asked as they walked toward his car.

“You won't believe it, but I don't know any places in the country.”

David knew four. He had consulted roadmaps for suggestions and even an old Duncan Hines in Mrs. McCartney's bookshelf in the dining room, but the most promising was one he had seen advertised in a Hartford paper that he had bought that morning: King George's Inn, Old Mail Road off Route 21A, since 1889, wines and spirits, quiet atmosphere, superb cooking and a view of some river whose name he had forgotten.

“I quit my job,” David said.

“You did? When?”

“I gave notice last week. I'll be there three weeks more, though. February twentieth is my last day.”

“What're you going to do then?”

“Try to get in at Dickson-Rand in Troy. I wrote them. They should be interviewing me in a few days.” He glanced at the houses as they left the city. He wanted to see a certain kind of house, somewhere by itself, snug and preferably made of rock, and say, “What do you think of a house like that?”

“You're not worried, quitting your job before you've got another?”

“Not a bit. I couldn't have made myself stay on any longer anyway. If I get in at Dickson-Rand, I won't be making as much money, unless I can get some consulting work on the side, but that's not everything. Let's not talk about that. That's a different perfume you're wearing. You don't wear Kashmir any more?”

“Kashmir. You still remember?”

“I could have brought you some,” he said with bitter self-reproach. “I bought a bottle a year ago. Then I threw it away.” He glanced at her, awkward as a small boy confessing a misdemeanor, yet longing to elaborate in one long burst on that bottle of Kashmir.

And she seemed to be thinking of what he had said, yet she did not say anything. The silence was so painful, somehow so torturous and embarrassing, he gripped the steering wheel with all his might. Then he pulled to the side of the road and stopped the car. There was a fluttering in his chest, behind his eyes, like tears.

“Annabelle, forgive me today if I say something wrong. I want it to be a beautiful day. I want you to enjoy it. Please? Forgive me.”

But she looked at him almost in alarm. “You haven't said anything wrong. Let's go on, Dave.”

Confused between a desire to find more words and to seize her hand and kiss it, he could only stare at her, still gripping the wheel. Then he grimly faced front and pressed the accelerator.

The restaurant was not so attractive as he had hoped, but Annabelle said, “I think this is beautiful. And I didn't even know it existed!”

David gave great attention to the menu, asked the waiter whether he recommended the sole or the
boeuf bourguignon
—the answer was the sole—and then selected a Beaune of 1949 vintage, which David happened to know was excellent. He proposed the consommé, but Annabelle wanted a shrimp cocktail.

“The shrimp?” he said in blank amazement, then realized he had only made it up that she did not like shrimp. “I meant, since you're having sole—”

Annabelle laughed. “I didn't know you'd become such a gourmet.”

“Do you like eggplant too?” he asked.

“So so. Did you want eggplant?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “I just wanted to find out what you like. What don't you like?”

“Very little. Maybe just kidneys. Oh, and sweetbreads.”

“I know a dish with kidneys and beef that I think you'd like,” he said. “I've made it two or three times for myself.”

“So you can cook too! You cooked in your house?”

“Yes. Certainly I did.” The waiter poured an inch of the white wine into his glass for his approval, and David sipped it, and nodded to the waiter that it would do.

Her gray-blue eyes gazed quietly into his. Now her eyes were gentle as smoke or clouds, as David always imagined them, as they were in the larger photograph that he treasured. David derived a peculiar nourishment from them. “Do you see Effie very often?” Annabelle asked, and the spell was broken.

“Almost never.” David's eyes came to rest on her wedding ring.

“She told me she was in love with you.”

“So I heard.” He sipped from his water glass.

“I don't think you treat her very nicely.”

“Why should I? I don't treat her unnicely. I just never see her,” he said, frowning.

“She's a nice girl. It ought to be easy for you to put yourself in her place—someone in love with you and you don't even give her the time of day.”

The slang phrase annoyed him and the whole subject annoyed him. “She's a very ordinary girl. Let her find somebody of her own kind. Are you possibly thinking I could be interested in her?”

“You don't have to be angry, do you? I just said she was a nice girl.”

David stared at Annabelle in a hopeless silence as the waiter served their first course. Then he said, “Do you mind if we talk about something else? Anything else?”

“All right. Will you answer a question for me?”

“Certainly.”

“Is it really true that Effie doesn't know William Neumeister?”

“As far as I know. Yes.”

“She told Gerald to go to his house just by accident, you think?”

“I don't know any of her friends,” David said, scowling with impatience. “If she said it was an accident, I'm sure it's true.”

“I was wondering if she might be trying to protect Neumeister for some reason,” Annabelle said, spearing her first shrimp, dipping it into the red sauce.

“I don't think so. I think she's a very honest girl,” he said with difficulty, as much bothered by Annabelle's casual eating of the shrimp as by anything else.

“Are you telling me the truth, David?”

“Yes,” he said in a protesting tone. “I told you before that I didn't know Neumeister either.”

There was a silence. David tried to eat his consommé, which was quite uninteresting.

“Don't you think it's odd that they can't find Neumeister? It's as if he's hiding. I keep thinking there's some connection between Effie and him or even Gerald and him.”

“Did you ever hear Gerald mention his name?”

“No, absolutely not. I know I'd have remembered.”

“Did Gerald owe money to anybody?”

“Only a little to a bank,” she replied, and David caught the pride and resentment in her voice.

“Well—you were asking why Neumeister's avoiding the police. First of all, I haven't seen any notices in the paper that he's wanted by the police. Maybe he's traveling and can't be reached. As for his hiding—at least he had the guts to take Gerald's body to the police station. If a man pulls a gun on you, I think a man's got a right to resort to almost anything to defend himself, don't you? An unarmed man?”

“Gerald wasn't a mean man. Why're you defending Neumeister?”

“I'm not defending anybody. I just reminded you that Gerald had a gun and was out of his head besides. What do you expect a man to do?” He realized suddenly how belligerent he sounded, and he was sorry. He thought of the instant his foot had struck Gerald's chest, and the way Gerald, stiff with death and cold, had leaned to the right in the front seat of his car. David's mouth twisted a little, and he reached for a cigarette.

“Since when do you smoke?”

“I smoke occasionally. Usually just on weekends.” The tension left his face. “I'm sorry I sounded so—”

“You're always sorry afterward.”

Her defenses of Gerald, that worthless eyesore, were still up. Gerald was like a barrier between him and her, a fat, comic barrier that David might have demolished with a derogatory phrase, if Annabelle were not obsessed by her sense of loyalty. She was like the girl in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
who fell in love with the donkey.

“You have funny times for smiling,” Annabelle said.

His smile went away. “Darling, I'm sorry.”

“What good does that do? I suppose you're sorry your letters drove Gerald to try to look you up and talk to you—”

“Talk to me? With a gun?”

“The fact remains, if you hadn't written those letters, this wouldn't have happened. Nothing of it.” Her voice shook with tears. “Gerald would be here now!”

What a horrible prospect, David thought. “I'm sorry the letters did that.”

“You're not sorry. You said you weren't. So don't tell me you are now. You're quite heartless—in a way, Dave. You seem to live entirely in your own head and you don't know anything at all about other people, the people around you.”

The words had a deadly familiarity. Maybe his aunt had said them to him, maybe even Wes. They baffled David, made him angry and ashamed of his anger. “That's not entirely true,” he said quietly.

“I know it's true from what you said about your house, the way you pretended I was there and all that.” She stopped with a strange gasp that made David look at her. “I suppose that's normal? To fix up a house to show a woman who's already married to somebody else?”

“Annabelle,” he began, “if I made up things—about us, it was in order to be able to live at all. It wasn't that I believed it was real, you living in that house with me. Some people take to drink, some to—I don't know what, but I did that.”

She stared at him, and he saw in her face that she still didn't understand. Absurdly enough, she looked a little frightened. Sitting tensely on the edge of his chair, he caught himself, out of habit, trying to memorize every subtle curve in the long line of her face from temple to chin to take away with him.

“I'm not trying to reproach you, Dave,” she said in her slow, serious way. “I'm thinking of you. I want you to be happy and lead a normal life.”

He gave a groan. “I love you and that makes me happy.”

“How can it? You imagine it does. And now—you have a perfectly nice girl like Effie Brennan who loves you very much, and you can't even see her. Why don't you try?”

“But I don't want her.”

“Please try it. For me, Dave. I'm asking you to.”

“It's as if you don't understand anything at all about me!” He passed his hand across his forehead, looked at her puzzled, almost angry eyes, and knew in his own eyes now was the same expression. “Annabelle, this can't go on,” he said, meaning everything. “I can't bear it. When I'm with you it's like having every pore open, and when you don't understand and you ask me to do the impossible, you don't know what a torture it is to me.” He talked on, unable to stop even when she tried to say something, believing that what he said and the way he said it could not be too awful, too bizarre, because he was keeping his voice low. The waiter might stare at him, but to hell with the waiter. And his sentences might not even be grammatical, but the words were all there, all the words in the English language that could tell her what she meant to him. Then at a repeated phrase from her, he stopped. “My work? What about my work?”

“I don't know. I just said
maybe
,” she replied, her eyes worried and frowning. “Maybe you're overstrained—”

“I'm understrained. I'd like a little strain. Why don't you try the wine?”

She took her glass.

Smiling, he lifted his to her. “I've done this a thousand times with you before.”

She drank, but she did not smile.

He tried to recall what she had said to him, something about adding to his troubles. “I don't have any troubles,” he said. “Nothing could trouble me seriously except for you to say you don't care to see me again or something like that. I think it'd kill me.”

“I wouldn't tell you that, Dave,” she said very softly, looking down at the table.

That made him smile again. His left hand felt the square box in his jacket pocket, the diamond clip that Annabelle had sent back to him. At the right moment, he was going to present it to her again. And there would be no Gerald to make her refuse it.

She said she absolutely had to be back by three-fifteen, and it was three-twelve when David turned the car into her street.

“Annabelle,” he said happily, “will you marry me?”

She laughed, as if surprised.

“You can't exactly say it's sudden.”

“Oh, Dave, I don't know what I'm going to do with my life.”

“Let's work it out together. When can I see you again? I can drive up in time for dinner any night, you know.” He pressed the little box through his overcoat pocket, on the brink of pulling it out.