Misery(97)

37

He woke up around eleven, and almost as soon as Annie heard him stirring about, she came in with orange juice, his pills, and a bowl of hot chicken soup. She was glowing with excitement. "It's a very special day, Paul, isn't it?"

"Yes." He tried to pick up the spoon with his right hand and could not. It was puffy and red, so swollen the skin was shiny. When he tried to bend it into a fist, it felt as though long rods of metal had been pushed through it at random. The last few days, he thought, had been like some nightmare autographing session that just never ended.

"Oh, your poor hand!" she cried. "I'll get you another pill! I'll do it right now!"

"No. This is the push. I want my head clear for it."

"But you can't write with your hand like that!"

"No," he agreed. "My hand's shot. I'm going to finish this baby the way I started - with that Royal. Eight or ten pages should see it through. I guess I can fight my way through that many n's, t's, and e's."

"I should have gotten you another machine," she said. She looked honestly sorry; tears stood in her eyes. Paul thought that the occasional moments like this were the most ghastly of all, because in them he saw the woman she might have been if her upbringing had been right or the drugs squirted out by all the funny little glands inside her had been less wrong. Or both. "I goofed. It's hard for me to admit that, but it's true. It was because I didn't want to admit that Dartmonger woman got the better of me. I'm sorry, Paul. Your poor hand." She raised it, gentle as Niobe at the pool, and kissed it.

"That's all right," he said. "We'll manage, Ducky Daddles and I. I hate him, but I've got a feeling he hates me as well, so I guess we're even."

"Who are you talking about?"

"The Royal. I've nicknamed it after a cartoon character."

"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.

38

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."