This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith Page B

but lonely face.
    â€œI hear if you drink water the next morning, you can feel the champagne all over again,” Effie was saying, giggling. She kept David at his door, saying in a rush of words that an interesting movie was starting Saturday at the Odeon.
    â€œBut I’m afraid I won’t be here.”
    â€œOh, that’s right. But it’ll still be playing Monday. Think about it.” And she turned suddenly as if embarrassed and went to her own door. “Good night, David.”
    â€œGood night.”
    In the ten days that followed David’s pessimistic predictions seemed to be borne out. Effie went to the movie on Saturday night with Wes, Wes told him. She had let him kiss her—once. Laura called Wes at the factory several times, Wes said, but he refused to speak to her. Once Laura called and asked for David Kelsey. She wanted to know where Wes was staying, but since Wes had asked him not to tell her, David said that he didn’t know. Laura persisted, her voice as impersonal as a military officer’s. “Then I wish you would find out for me. It’s important.” David asked Wes if there could be some crisis, if he ought to get in touch with her.
    â€œShe’s got no target for her nagging right now. That’s all Laura wants, someone she can yell at.”
    It depressed David, and he thought about Wes and Effie as little as he could, though Effie, at breakfast and at dinner, always tried to include him in their conversation, and twice asked him to watch television with them. Wes had gotten his portable set from home. David realized that it was not Wes’s morals he objected to, not the morals that depressed him. He was sad that his friend had lost the stature David had given him, sad that Wes had never really possessed that stature.

5
    B y December twelfth, David could not wait any longer. On Saturday, December thirteenth, at his house in Ballard, he wrote another letter to Annabelle, hiding his painful urgency, he hoped, behind a pretended fear that the letter asking her about Christmas might never have arrived. He was sure it had arrived, it just might have been opened and kept from her by Gerald. Or Gerald might have seen it and forbidden her to answer him. Then for an instant David imagined Gerald reading a certain letter of the other four he had sent Annabelle, one in which he had said he would never be happy without her, that he would move heaven and earth to be with her, and that he had not begun to use—David had forgotten his precise words, but the sense was that he had unlimited power at his command, which he had not yet drawn upon. He had meant, of course, psychical or emotional powers. David believed strongly in the power of letters to sway, to fortify, to convince—and by the same token to destroy, if that was their intention. It had been Annabelle herself who lent him a book of Heloïse’s and Abelard’s letters. Annabelle knew, too. But if that swine had ever read that letter, he would have done the instinctive thing to protect himself, forbidden Annabelle to answer, perhaps forbidden her to open any more of his letters, if they came. For all his eunuchoid appearance, Gerald laid the law down in the household, according to what his aunt had said, and his aunt had gotten it from Annabelle’s family in La Jolla.
    David no longer liked to have Wes visit him in his room in the evenings, and noticing this, Wes began to resent it.
    â€œI knew you were chaste,” Wes said with a mitigating laugh, “but I didn’t know you were a prig. All I’ve done with the girl is take her to two movies.”
    â€œI hope I’m not a prig,” David said quietly. “I just find it depressing. Nothing can come of it.”
    â€œAnd what about that girl you said you were in love with? You haven’t even seen her for two years. What do you think can come of that? Don’t you think she might meet some other fellow who’s