Misery

"Oh…" She trailed away. Turned off. Came unplugged. He waited patiently for her to return, eating his soup as he did so, holding the spoon awkwardly between the first and second fingers of his left hand.

At last she did come back and looked at him, smiling radiantly like a woman just awakening and realizing it was going to be a beautiful day. "Soup almost gone? I’ve got something very special, if it is." He showed her the bowl, empty except for a few noodles stuck to the bottom. "See what a Do-Bee I am, Annie?" he said without even a trace of a smile.

"You’re the most goodest Do-Bee there ever was, Paul and you get a whole row of gold stars! In fact… wait! Wait till you see this!" She left, leaving Paul to look first at the calendar and then at the Arc de Triomphe. He looked up at the ceiling and saw the intertinked W’s waltzing drunkenly across the plaster. Last of all he looked across at the typewriter and the vast, untidy pile of manuscript. Goodbye to all that, he thought randomly, and then Annie was bustling back in with another tray.

On it were four dishes: wedges of lemon on one, grated egg on a second, toast points on a third. In the middle was a larger plate, and on this one was a vast (oogy) gooey pile of caviar.

"I don’t know if you like this stuff or not," she said shyly. I don’t even know if I like it. I never had it." Paul began to laugh. It hurt his middle and it hurt his legs and it even hurt his hand; soon he would probably hurt even more, because Annie was paranoid enough to think that if someone was laughing it must be at her. But still he couldn’t stop. He laughed until he was choking and coughing, his cheeks red, tears spurting from the corners of his eyes. The woman had cut off his foot with an axe and his thumb with an electric knife, and here she was with a pile of caviar big enough to choke a warthog. And for a wonder, that black look of crevasse did not dawn on her face. She began to laugh with him, instead.

Caviar was supposed to be one of those things you either loved or hated, but Paul had never felt either way. If he was flying first class and a stewardess stuck a plate of it in front of him, he ate it and then forgot there was such a thing as caviar until the next time a stewardess stuck a plate of it in front of him. But now he ate it hungrily, with all the trimmings, as if discovering the great principle of food for the first time in his life.

Annie didn’t care for it at all. She nibbled at the one dainty teaspoonful she’d put on a toast point, wrinkled her face in disgust, and put it aside. Paul, however, plowed ahead with undimmed enthusiasm. In a space of fifteen minutes he had eaten half of Mount Beluga. He belched, covered his mouth, and looked guiltily at Annie, who went off into another g*y gust of laughter.

I think I’m going to kill you, Annie, he thought, and smiled warmly at her. I really do. I may go with you – probably will, in fact – but I am going to go with a by-God bellyful of caviar. Things could be worse.

"That was great, but I can’t eat any more," he said.

"You’d probably throw up if you did," she said. "That stuff is very rich." She smiled back. "There’s another surprise. I have a bottle of champagne. For later… when you finish the book. It’s called Dom Perignon. It cost seventy-five dollars! For one bottle! But Chuckie Yoder down at liquor store says it’s the best there is."

"Chuckie Yoder is right," Paul said, thinking that it was partly Dom’s fault that he’d gotten himself into this hell in the first place. He paused a moment and then said: "There’s something else I’d like, as well. For when I finish."

"Oh? What’s that?"

"You said once you had all of my things."

"I do."

"Well… there was a carton of cigarettes in my suitcase. I’d like to have a smoke when I finish." Her smile had faded slowly. "You know those things are no good for you, Paul. They cause cancer."

"Annie, would you say that cancer is something I have to worry about just now?" She didn’t answer.

"I just want that one single cigarette. I’ve always leaned back and smoked one when I finished. It’s the one that always tastes the best, believe me – even better than the one you have after a really fine meal. At least that’s how it used to be. I suppose this time it’ll make me feel dizzy and like puking, but I’d like that little link with the past. What do you say, Annie? Be a sport. I have been."

"All right… but before the champagne. I’m not drinking a seventy-five-dollar bottle of fizzy beer in the same room where you’ve been blowing that poison around."

"That’s fine. If you bring it to me around noon, I’ll put it on the windowsill where I can look at it once in awhile. I’ll finish, and then I’ll fill in the letters, and then I’ll smoke it until I feel like I’m going to fall down unconscious, and then I’ll butt it. Then I’ll call you."

"All right," she said. "But I’m still not happy about it. Even if you don’t get lung cancer from just one, I’m still not happy about it. And do you know why, Paul?"

"No." Because only Don’t-Bees smoke," she said, and began to gather up the dishes.

"Mistuh Boss Ian, is she -?"

"Shhhhh!" Ian hissed fiercely, and Hezekiah subsided. Geoffrey felt a pulse beating with wild rapidity in his throat. From outside came the steady soft creak of lines and rigging, the slow flap of the sails in the first faint breezes of the freshening trade winds, the occasional cry of a bird. Dimly, from the afterdeck, Geoffrey could hear a gang of men singing a shanty in bellowing, off-key voices. But in here all was silence as the three men, two white and one black, waited to see if Misery would live… or – Ian groaned hoarsely, and Hezekiah gripped his arm. Geoffrey merely tightened his already hysterically tight hold on himself. After all of this, could God really be cruel enough to let her die? Once he would have denied such a possibility confidently, and with humor rather than indignation. The, idea that God could be cruel would in those days have struck him as absurd.