This Sweet Sickness (18 page)

“You talk as if I'm a couple of blocks away.”

“You're not far.”

But she couldn't make it this week, and she wasn't sure about the weekend. She absolutely had to get some sewing done on Saturday, and she had guests for dinner Sunday. David had a premonition of defeat about the weekend.

“It's my only time off, Annabelle—” He broke off, knowing it was useless. “Okay. Next week then. Shall I call you or would you call me? Reverse the charges. Any time day or night.”

“I'll remember that,” she said with a smile in her voice. “And I wish you much luck and success and all that in your new job.”

He laughed at her formality, then froze at the prospect of the “good-bye” that was coming in a matter of seconds.

“Thank you for calling, Dave. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” he said, and sat for a few minutes looking at a big, shiny avocado that crowned a basket of fruit, an avocado that would be perfect in a day or so, that he had thought of using in the luncheon with Annabelle.

That evening he had two martinis before his dinner, and for company at the table propped open a pamphlet on nuclear radiation that had been written by a scientist of Dickson-Rand. It crossed his mind, like a subtle temptation, to use the name William Neumeister in this house too. Neumeister was so much more cheerful than David Kelsey. Neumeister had reason to be. Annabelle had said he sounded like a very nice person. David felt that it was going to be hard to imagine Annabelle in this house with him, if he were only David Kelsey. He need not have bought the house in Neumeister's name, he thought, and he hadn't, but merely to pretend, only to himself, that here he was William Neumeister who had never failed in anything—David checked himself. He had made a decision to abandon that silly game, and he would stick to it. It was nothing but a crutch, and it had been weak of him ever to use it. It was no better than Wes's drinking to avoid the painful decision to do something about his wretched life with Laura.

David went to work on Monday. His job in the rock analysis laboratory, the caliber of the people, the atmosphere, all matched his expectations. The grounds, spacious and well kept, put him in a good mood every morning as he walked the flagstone paths from his car to the geophysical laboratory. Tall blue spruces grew near the administration building. There was a sundial that was also a bird bath and frozen tight now, a tennis court, a loggia with a grapevine growing on it, and stone benches here and there where in good weather one could sit and talk with a colleague. David's superior, Dr. Wilbur Osbourne, was a small, stooped man with humor in his eye and an easygoing manner that did not suggest an eccentric character. And then before David had worked five days, Dr. Osbourne closeted himself in his office, locked the door, and refused to be disturbed by anyone and refused to take any telephone calls. He even spent the weekend in his office, sleeping there by night on his leather couch. He was thinking out a problem. There were other odd ones. A young engineer in David's department was enamored of rain, and would stand out in it bareheaded and with his face turned up, David was told. Another man brought his gray Persian cat to his office every day. Another, Dr. Gregory Kipp, walked the two and one half miles from and to his house morning and evening, regardless of the weather.

Most of the men, like David, had no private office, but worked on their feet in big rectangular rooms that held vacuum tubes, rock separators, mass spectographs, and other machines for the analysis of physical matter. There were five or six students from Utica working toward degrees in physics. David's routine job was to tend the rock-separating machines and spectographs, and to remove the dust they produced, record its weight and affix a label. He was also to work with Dr. Osbourne on two or three projects that were outgrowths of that last voyage of the
Darwin
, Dickson-Rand's own ship. He could not have wished a more altruistic job: the Dickson-Rand Laboratory received hundreds of rock and soil samples per year, and gave its analyses free of charge to private citizens and to commercial firms. It was a far cry from the practices of Cheswick Fabrics, Inc.

Effie Brennan sent David a present of a gray linen tablecloth, darker gray napkins and four bamboo place mats. “Be happy in your new home,” said her card. It was quite a fine linen set, one that met David's standards, which were the standards he set for Annabelle.

Annabelle was unable to make a date with him during the second week he was in his new house. David felt restless and unhappy. He had called twice, both times in the evening. The first time there had been no answer, and the second time he had gotten Annabelle just as she was going out somewhere and had no time to talk, but she had said that every night that week was impossible, and so was the following weekend.

It was now March seventh, a Saturday. The day before, David had accepted Dr. Osbourne's invitation to dinner at his house on Saturday evening. Dr. Osbourne had invited him the preceding Saturday, but David had declined, thinking he might be able to see Annabelle. When Dr. Osbourne repeated the invitation, David had awkwardly said he would not know if he were able to come until Thursday evening, a time he arbitrarily set to call Annabelle with a last hope for the weekend.

“Well! I didn't know you were so popular,” Dr. Osbourne had said cheerfully.

David, after a moment's hesitation, decided to wear chino pants, loafers, and a tweed jacket to the Osbournes'. Informality went unnoticed among the Dickson-Rand personnel. He followed the little map that Dr. Osbourne had drawn on a scrap of graph paper, and arrived at a massive two-story house set back on a dark lawn. A light came on in the hall, and Dr. Osbourne greeted him with a handshake. A colored maid took his overcoat. Then they went into a solid, old-fashioned-looking living room where a fire was burning in the fireplace. Mrs. Osbourne, a plump woman with fuzzy gray hair, was sitting on a sofa, cracking nuts in a silver bowl.

“Hello-o, David,” she said, as if she had known him all her life. “Pardon me for not getting up, but once I'm ensconced here—My, you are tall, aren't you? Wilbur said you were tall. What will you have to drink?” And a walnut cracked in the silver nutcracker.

David liked her at once and at once felt at ease. They did not think it odd that he declined a drink and they did not press him. At their insistence, David sat on a hassock near the fire while Dr. Osbourne drank his bourbon and his wife her sherry. Mrs. Osbourne said she couldn't understand how anyone could go around in cotton clothes in such weather.

“This boy runs on intellectual heat,” said Dr. Osbourne.

“Tuh!” from his wife.

The dinner was substantial and the dishes arrived in heavy silver tureens. There was a joke, that David paid little attention to, about the tureen's bearing the initial of Mrs. Osbourne's maiden name. For the benefit of his wife, Dr. Osbourne went over David's achievements at his school in California and his credits with the laboratory in Oakley, and though David usually squirmed at such times, he was flattered by Mrs. Osbourne's knowledge of what her husband was talking about, and gratified that Dr. Osbourne rated him highly and considered the laboratory fortunate in having him.

“I hope I am here the rest of my life,” David said.

“Why, Wilbur was telling me you've already bought a house,” said Mrs. Osbourne. “Tell me where it is.”

David told her and said it had formerly been owned by some people called Twilling.

“Twilling? The Twilling house? Wilbur, why didn't you tell me it was the Twilling house?”

“Because I didn't know, my dear,” said the doctor.

“Why, I know that house well. I'm a friend of Mrs. Twilling, you see, and I used to visit her. Wilbur doesn't happen to like Mr. Twilling but that's neither here nor there,” she said with a smile.

“Twilling's an ass,” said Dr. Osbourne, pouring more wine for David and himself. “Never associate with asses or their wives. Life's too short.”

“To return to the house,” said his wife, “it has a lot of charm, hasn't it? And you can't say there isn't enough room there. You're not going to be lonely, all by yourself?”

“Why should he be lonely?” asked Dr. Osbourne. “Besides, he may be doomed to matrimony. I daresay that's what you're feeling around for.” Dr. Osbourne's eyes kept moving over the things on the table as if he were looking for something that was missing. David had passed him the salt earlier in the dinner.

“Well, I hope that's in David's picture—
some
time,” said the doctor's wife.

David sat up a little. “Matter of fact, it is. I don't know when it'll be—the date—but certainly before this year is out. Before the summer is out,” he said with more conviction.

“Why, congratulations, David! Where is she and what's her name?” Mrs. Osbourne asked.

He hesitated, wondering if he had already gone too far, until both of them looked at him expectantly. “She's in Connecticut,” David said. “Her name's Annabelle.” And he felt immediately better, happier, more sure of everything. The Osbournes were his friends. He suddenly even wanted Mrs. Osbourne to meet Annabelle. Yes, he wanted that especially. “You'll like her,” David added with a smile.

“Hmph,” said Dr. Osbourne. “Just when you're about to get married, you leave a highly paid job for a much less well-paying one.”

“Yes, but I explained why in my letters, sir. I never liked the job in the plastics factory.”

“Why'd you take it in the first place?”

“I thought I wanted the money then—in order to get married,” David said, feeling himself grow warm in the face, with embarrassment or anger.

“To the same girl?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But you had that job nearly two years. What's holding her up? Can't she make up her mind?”

“Wilbur!” his wife admonished. “Maybe David doesn't want to answer all those questions.”

The ice cream had arrived, garnished with the walnut halves that Mrs. Osbourne had been preparing in the living room.

“No, it's perfectly all right. I don't mind answering them,” David said in a frank manner.

“Is she interested in your work?” asked Dr. Osbourne.

“Well—”

“Good.”

Mrs. Osbourne began to talk of something else with David, and the burning left his cheeks, but he felt in Dr. Osbourne's silence that he was still mulling over the unanswered question—the Situation. Dr. Osbourne's first-class brain, so used to the abstract, was trying to put together the two or three pieces of concrete fact he had picked up, and from them infer the truth about David Kelsey. David felt suddenly panicked. It was as if Dr. Osbourne were going to spring up suddenly with a great “
Good God, man!
You mean to say you've been obtuse enough to fret away more than two years on a Situation as utterly hopeless as this?” From Dr. Osbourne, David could not have borne that. He would have gone to pieces. But the word “hopeless,” David thought angrily, was merely an echo of Effie Brennan's idiotic remarks, or of Wes Carmichael's.

“You're too warm, David?” Mrs. Osbourne interrupted herself. “Would you like to go in the other room?”

“No, I'm perfectly all right. Thank you. But I realized I didn't answer one of your husband's questions and I didn't want him to think I was avoiding anything. The question was what's holding us up—Annabelle and me. She's had some trouble in her family, you see. A death—or two. And I suppose that's what's delayed us. Nothing more than that, sir.”

There was a terrible silence, and Dr. Osbourne stared at him with his terrifying air of wisdom, and of disbelief.

Again Mrs. Osbourne tried to dispel the horror with a polite statement of understanding, and again the horror stubbornly remained. It was worse. Did Dr. Osbourne think he was merely eccentric or really off his head, David wondered.

They had coffee and brandy in the living room. David nearly sat on their Sealyham before he saw him. He managed to get through the next forty-five minutes with no more strange outbursts, but he felt visibly rigid and unnatural. The brandy, of which he drank two small snifters, did not help at all. They said good-bye in the front hall, and Mrs. Osbourne told David that he must come again. David felt that she deliberately left the hall sooner than she might have, in order for her husband to say something to him alone.

Dr. Osbourne jerked his head back as he often did before a statement of importance, then said, “Sorry I pressed you on a personal matter, David. It's only that I'm interested in how you work, you know. Personal problems can be damnably upsetting and can interfere with the imagination. I don't have to tell you that, do I?”

“No, sir. But I don't consider I have a problem. I mean, even if I do, I can keep it separate from my work. Believe me, I know. They're two separate worlds to me. I've been this way all my life.”

Dr. Osbourne nodded, but there was something dubious about it.

David drove home slowly, following Dr. Osbourne's map backward in his mind until he was on his familiar road. He decided that the evening hadn't been as awkward as he had thought. Certain phrases that he had said and that Dr. Osbourne had said flitted across his mind. Well, what was so bad about it? The pain and the awkwardness had all been inside his own head. He felt that he always exaggerated his own disturbance, thinking that it stuck out all over him, while it was really inside him and invisible to another person. Believing this, he began to feel much better. He put his car in his garage and went into the warm, comfortable house. He had left a standing lamp on in the living room, and its light fell directly onto the telephone on the table at the end of the couch. Had Annabelle called earlier and had he missed it?

The light focusing on the telephone seemed to tell him so. Quickly he looked at his watch. Ten minutes of eleven. She would not likely call again. But suppose he had missed a call from her? So tenuous was her impulse to call him, he knew, that if she missed him once she would probably not gather the inspiration to call him again. Why should he feel so strongly that she had called him tonight? It didn't make sense, in view of the fact she hadn't once called him here. Twenty times he had thought he heard the telephone ringing and had nearly broken his neck running downstairs from the bedroom or running in from outdoors, only to realize just before he lifted the telephone that it was not ringing.