This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith Page A

ermine. They sat in a box at the Met and heard Die Zauberflöte , Elektra , and Wozzeck , and when they went to a party together, they were always liked though a little envied by the married and the unmarried. When he bought a suit on his own, which he insisted upon doing, Annabelle sometimes made him take it back. There were certain ties of his that she liked, others that she didn’t like that he seldom or never wore. He made up her favorite foods, and pretended that she did not like shrimps or eggplant.
    The house was for dreaming, not plotting or fretting, and not a single worry about anything, any suspicion, any failure, any delay—because not even time existed here—clouded his visions as he lay before the fireplace, while his music, like incense, influenced his moods, the noble mathematics of Bach, the heroic tenderness of Brahms.

10
    M rs. Beecham was extremely touched by David’s gift. (“Why, it’s too beautiful for an ugly old woman like me.”) She went on so about it, words of praise that David could not reply anything to, and when for the third time she asked at what shop he had found such a pretty thing (she was aware that Froudsburg offered little), he blurted out that it had been his mother’s.
    â€œBut she didn’t like it very much,” he hastened to add, when Mrs. Beecham’s mouth fell open. “I don’t even know how I came to have it.”
    â€œWhy, shouldn’t you give it back to her?” Mrs. Beecham asked, and David suddenly realized the error in tenses he had made.
    â€œThat’s why I have it, I suppose. She doesn’t like it.”
    Then Mrs. Beecham looked at him tenderly, and grotesque as her enlarged eyes were behind the thick round lenses, something within David’s heart stirred, awkwardly, unused to such a look. It’s just that the lenses magnify the look, David thought suddenly, and smiled.
    â€œWell, it’ll still be yours, David,” she said, holding the little pin in her boney sapless fingers. “You know it’ll never go out of this house, and when I die, I’ll see that you get it back.”
    David so recoiled, for safety’s sake, from the blunt truth of this statement, that it missed him, emotionally speaking. He left her room as soon as he could.
    At his writing table in his room, David wrote Annabelle two letters in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, the second more violent, more derogatory of Gerald than the first. He demanded, in all fairness, that Annabelle write him a real letter, one that she really meant, one over which Gerald didn’t seem to be hanging, reading, and passing on every word as she wrote it. David loathed the holiday coming up, New Year’s, even though he would be at his house and perhaps not hear a single car horn or drunken hoot. He received a letter from Annabelle, very short and not at all in answer to his, the same day that the little package containing the diamond clip arrived at Mrs. McCartney’s by special delivery. The note was intended to be very kind, very grateful, but she was sending it back. Gerald himself might have written it. David missed in it that one word, or two, that he had always found in Annabelle’s letters, words in which her own feelings showed through. My God, he thought, it’s as if she’s become a puppet of that freak!
    Surely she’d write him another letter. He had asked her some specific questions in his last letter, how many hours a day was she able to practice her piano, did she have many friends in Hartford, did she ever go to the theater, did she like espresso coffee, and again what did she intend to do about her Mozart-Schubert idea whose outline David had once seen? He felt reasonably sure she would answer those questions, perhaps after New Year’s when she would have more time, and he thought also that she would apologize for the coolness of her note concerning the return of his Christmas