Read Online This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith - Free Book Online

a little more attentive?”
    â€œI doubt it.” David was driving his car, on the way to the factory on the north side of town.
    â€œMeanwhile, you want to shut out the rest of life.”
    David kept silent. A year ago Wes had introduced him to two of his own ex-girlfriends, but David had never tried to see either of them again, much to Wes’s surprise and disappointment. “Why, I nearly married so-and-so myself!” Wes had said. That had been just after David had found out Annabelle was married, and it was a wonder he had been able to make himself meet the girls at all. He had declined, he remembered, to go to Wes and Laura’s new and happy home, and Wes had arranged that he and David and the girls meet in the Red Schooner Inn for dinner. The girls were friends, and one of them lived in Froudsburg. Wes had harped so on his “having a little social life” that David had finally told him there was a girl in California he was in love with and intended to marry. David said she was finishing college, and wanted to work a year before she married. This, David recalled, had brought a dubious expression to Wes’s face, and he had remarked that she must be an unusual kind of girl, or David must be unusually cold about women. “It’s not that I’m cold to women,” David had told Wes, “It’s the intensity of my feeling for this one . Can’t you understand something as simple as that?” It was more difficult for Wes to understand that than to understand a complicated chemical equation. Wes even said that the girl—David never told him her name—had made him inhuman, whereas Annabelle had done just the opposite. What was human to Wes, to get drunk and be promiscuous?
    But David could not forget and did not want to forget the many hours he had spent with Wes talking of other things than women, the evenings when Wes, mellow on long, slow scotches, would talk in an entranced, monologic way. Wes was not obtuse in matters of the human heart, but alcohol had to paralyze or at least hold in abeyance his conscious thinking in order for his emotions to show. Wes had invented one night the story of an old woman in rags reverently touching the dead and mutilated body of her prodigal son, who even at the end had not come home, and whom she had had to trudge for miles to see finally in a horrible state. Rhetorically Wes had asked why. And he had rambled on: the prodigal son was childless, had never done anything in life that could be mentioned to his credit, and people had told the mother not to go look at him because it would hurt her, and yet you found her creeping, weeping, on hands and knees to touch his filthy skin with her fingertips. Wes had been talking about the futility and illogic of human relationships. He knew as well as David that they were as unfathomable as the physical universe was understandable and even predictable. That symbol of the mother and the prodigal son had come at the time when Wes had begun having his troubles with Laura, the time of the first dimming of happiness, and David wondered if in an allegorical way the story could mean that he really would always love Laura, no matter what she did.
    The girl Effie had moved on December first to her new apartment, and though Wes said he had been there a couple of times, he still spent half his evenings at Mrs. McCartney’s, and on the evenings he went out, it was by himself, David knew, because Wes often asked him to go out with him. Laura now knew where Wes was staying, and Wes kept her off, he said, only by a promise to come home on the twentieth of the month. There was a mystery for you, David thought: Laura dying to have him back, according to Wes, only so she could rant and scream at him again, and Wes obeying like a little dog.
    â€œThat house is going to be so clean I won’t be able to breathe the air,” Wes said. “An angel would be afraid to walk across the rug. And