This Sweet Sickness (28 page)

“Who is he?”

“Why don't they try to lasso him?”

“What's he trying to do?”

“Is he trying to kill himself?”

“Na-aw,” growled the policeman, still watching him as if he were a laboratory experiment.

David squeezed his eyes shut and tried to shut them all out. He had endured heckling before, and there was nothing at all new about it. This was the way it had been at Mrs. McCartney's and a few times at Annabelle's too, on a smaller scale. He shut them out, and Annabelle's face came more clearly to him than he had ever remembered it before, and with it a realization that she existed. It was like those moments on awakening, empty and blank, in the morning, when his first thoughts turned to her and he remembered once more that she lived and breathed, and he was like an empty sail filling and finding its purpose again.

Water, or something wet, splashed on his head, and a woman or a child laughed above him.

“Cut that out!” said a gruff voice. “We want him alive!”

They won't get me alive, David thought, and like a scream of laughter or defiance that might have come from his own throat, a siren shrieked. David edged closer to the corner of the building, more to change the position of his aching fingertips than to move anywhere, and he concentrated on the image of Annabelle's face with the blind faith that dying men sometimes put in a cross. He realized with indifference that they were fussing around with ladders and nets below, and that they could conceivably reach him, even if he was on the ninth floor. The thought of sending a ladder flying off with a push of his foot gave him some satisfaction. Or would they have the ladder rigidly fixed below? And he would have to turn around to face them. He debated this perilous move very briefly, knowing that the more he imagined it, the more difficult it would be.

He brought his right hand over beside his left, pressed his fingers into the crevice, and turned his body as much as he could before he let go with his left hand and whipped it around his body. His fingers fumbled for a moment to find a crevice, but his right hand held him flat enough against the building, and all in all, he thought, he had done it as gracefully as a ballet dancer making a pirouette.

“Don't jump, Kelsey! We're going to reach you!” a voice said.

It was like looking down on a circus from a swinging trapeze. There was a ring of light around two bright red fire trucks that stood at right angles to each other, and a big spotlight wobbled and found him. Policemen blew whistles and motioned violently for cars to move, but the cars did not move. Cars were chocka-block around the corner of the Drive and a side street. David laughed—not because it was all about him, which he did reluctantly admit to himself, but because grown-up people had stopped whatever they had been doing to stare, to get themselves in a traffic jam, to gawk like monkeys with their heads in an unnatural position, just because a human being might fall or jump and kill himself.

“Don't worry, I'm not going to jump,” David said quietly to the heavy policeman who was endangering himself or possibly trying to impress anyone who looked at him by leaning far out the window, balancing himself on one hip on the sill.

A second policeman, of obviously earnest intent, stuck his head out and took the heavy policeman's place, extending something like a yardstick, but on second glance David saw it was a broom and the policeman held the bristle end. “Take hold, Kelsey! Come on in! We won't let you fall!”

David wanted to laugh and couldn't. A broom! That domestic article, that symbol of home! Now David more courageously looked below him and above. Scared faces stared down at him, a jagged row of them, all upside down and sideways. David felt melancholic.

A whistle screamed for attention. There was a terrible clang of metal as a section of ladder fell, and now David had to laugh as three rubber-clad firemen scrambled to pick the ladder up as if it were a sacred object that should never have touched ground.

“Like some coffee, David?” asked a male voice, and looking at his left, David saw the earnest young policeman extending an arm, a cup of coffee in his hand.

“I'd like my wife,” David said.

“Yeah? What's her name?”

David did not choose to answer. He looked calmly at the black-green line of trees beyond Riverside Drive, and he thought of the boundless woods around his house in Ballard and around the house in Troy that Annabelle had never seen. Or had she? Had she not been there?

“What's her name, David? We'll get her,” said the efficient, obtuse voice.

David cleared his throat and said nothing. He considered once more rounding the corner and fighting his way through another window: but of course they'd be glad to yank him in and he would then have to fight his way out of the apartment. He had a memory of the three or four men attacking him in Annabelle's apartment. There was a limit to human strength, he thought with a sigh, and he felt very tired. He swayed outward, and a wave of surprise, a communal gasp from below made him press harder with his fingers. And here he was again, upright, not fallen at all. David smiled.

David could hear the people giggling nervously too, and the beginning of a rhythmic handclapping, the kind heard in theaters when the show is late. Firemen shushed it. The ladder was coming up.

“Okay, David, this is it now,” said a calm voice, perhaps Ed's, from the window, but David did not glance that way. “Okay, David, take it easy.”

He had a feeling William Neumeister was watching him, with an absolute confidence in him. William Neumeister with folded arms and a calm expression.

“We're going to get your girl, David. What's her name? Annabelle?”

David looked up at a star, disdaining to reply.

“She's down there waiting for you, David. Down on the street. You've got to go down that ladder.” The voice was false as false could be.

Nothing was true but the fatigue of life and the eternal disappointment.

The firemen shouted orders and explanations to one another. A little man was crawling up the ladder, even as the ladder was swaying and being raised. David grew alert and felt quite capable of kicking the fellow off the ladder, but he shouldn't, wouldn't do that unless the fellow became violent. After all, what did the man care about him, one way or the other? He was simply doing his duty.

“She's down there, David. See her?” asked the voice from the window. “She's waving to you.”

David did not believe him, but he looked. He saw no girl waving.

“Hang on, boy,” said the climbing fireman in a scared voice, and it was the closeness of it that shocked David.

There were only a few more seconds left. David blinked and looked around him at his small circle of possibilities: the corner, the window whose half-dozen grasping hands he could not have borne to walk into, above him a dangling blanket that did not quite reach him and might have been meant as a joke or a taunt anyway. Or he could jump. He had been here so often before, he thought, in the center of a meager circle of possibilities, each of which offered essentially nothing. He fidgeted, wondering. Blood had sealed shut the lashes of his left eye.

“Okay, boy. Hold on,” said the fireman.

“
Olé
!” cried a voice from the street.

“They'll get him,” said a deeper voice from above.

There was a girl in a white coat or a light-colored raincoat, hatless, motionless, her face turned up and her hands one over the other tensely in front of her. Her hair was the color of Annabelle's hair, he thought, though in the darkness it was hard to be sure.

“Say hello to her, David,” said the policeman's voice (and he hadn't stopped talking). “Tell her you'll be down. Just a couple of minutes now—”

The ladder grated on the brick only a few feet below the ledge where David stood.

The girl did not wave to him, which made David think all the more that she could be Annabelle. Annabelle wouldn't have waved, perhaps, even if he had wanted her to. There wasn't any other way, he thought. To be touched by the fireman was a loathsome prospect.

Thinking no more about it, he stepped off into that cool space, that fast descent to her, with nothing in his mind but a memory of a curve of her shoulder, naked, as he had never seen it.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. Her first novel,
Strangers on a Train
, published initially in 1950, proved to be a major commercial success and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite this early recognition, Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career.

Writing under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan, she then published
The Price of Salt
in 1952, which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes. Her most popular literary creation was Tom Ripley, the dapper sociopath who first debuted in her 1955 novel,
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. She followed with four other Ripley novels. Posthumously made into a major motion picture,
The Talented Mr. Ripley
has helped bring about a renewed appreciation of Highsmith's work in the United States as has the posthumous publication of
The Selected Stories
, which received widespread acclaim when it was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2001.

The author of more than twenty books, Highsmith has won the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.

P
RAISE FOR
P
ATRICIA
H
IGHSMITH

“[Highsmith] is no more a practitioner of the murder mystery genre . . . than are Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Camus.”

—Joan Smith,
Los Angeles Times

“Highsmith's writing is wicked . . . it puts a spell on you, after which you feel altered, even tainted. . . . A great American writer is back to stay.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“She edges her readers toward the insane territory inhabited by her people. . . . Readers are sure to be left feeling by turns startled, oppressed, amused and queasy.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“Savage in the way of Rabelais or Swift.”

—Joyce Carol Oates,
New York Review of Books

“Highsmith's gift as a suspense novelist is to show how this secret desire can bridge the normal and abnormal. . . . She seduces us with whisky-smooth surfaces only to lead us blindly into darker terrain.”

—
Commercial Appeal

“Patricia Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”

—
The New Yorker

“A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental. . . . Highsmith achieves the effect of the occult without any recourse to supernatural machinery.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“Though Highsmith would no doubt disclaim any kinship with Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh, the best of [her work] is in the same tradition. . . . It is Highsmith's dark and sometimes savage humor, and the intelligence that informs her precise and hard-edged prose which puts one in mind of those authors.”

—
Newsday

“Murder, in Patricia Highsmith's hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic . . . has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”

—Robert Towers,
New York Review of Books

“For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith.”

—
Time

“The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels, the sense that ideas and attitudes alien to the reasonable everyday ordering of society are suggested, has made many readers uneasy. One closes most of her books with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined.”

—Julian Symons,
New York Times Book Review

“Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable.”

—
Washington Post Book World

“A writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger. . . . Miss Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”

—Graham Greene

“Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there's nothing quite like it.”

—
Boston Globe

“[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror.”

—
Times Literary Supplement

“To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability.”

—
Sunday Times
(London)

“Highsmith is an exquisitely sardonic etcher of the casually treacherous personality.”

—
Newsday

“Highsmith's novels skew your sense of literary justice, tilt your internal scales of right and wrong. The ethical order of things in the real world seems less stable [as she] deftly warps the moral sense of her readers.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Highsmith . . . conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil—personal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Highsmith's writing is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.”

—
Boston Phoenix

“Highsmith writes the verbal equivalent of a drug—easy to consume, darkly euphoric, totally addictive. . . . Highsmith belongs in the moody company of Dostoevsky or Angela Carter.”

—
Time Out

“No one has created psychological suspense more densely and deliciously satisfying.”

—
Vogue

“Read [
The Selected Stories
] at your own risk, knowing that this is not everyone's cup of poisoned tea.”

—Janet Maslin,
New York Times