Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  “They’re quite nice,” I said, casually shuffling a sheaf of them into the deck of cards, on our resuming the game with me dealer.

  “One should have a hobby,” she said, noting my fumbles. “It’s relaxing. Do you have any?”

  “A hobby? Well, I used to do a bit of sketching,” I said. “Charcoal and a little water color. I found that pleasant.”

  “As I did modeling. It is a change.” She rose. “Would you like something to eat? There’s some cold chicken I broiled yesterday and I’m kind of hungry myself.” I said I’d love some and she went into the kitchen. “Well, if you ever need a subject …”

  “Oh, I think not. Thanks just the same though.”

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Thicknesse said into the open icebox. “It would be no trouble.”

  “Well, I’m afraid—”

  “I’m being quite honest with you. I enjoy modeling.” She turned and smiled down the corridor into the dining room at me. She stood with her hand on the refrigerator door, silhouetted against a composition of cold viands, like Betty Furness on television. “It’s perfectly the same as a hobby for me.”

  I laughed. “I’m only a Sunday painter.”

  “I understand. Would Thursday be a good day?”

  “Thursday will be fine.”

  Eight

  I had set up my easel and was waiting for Mrs. Thicknesse. The room she had suggested might do handily for a studio was a large corner one with windows along two sides, on the second floor of her house. It was early afternoon and the light was rich. A couch covered with a length of Paisley stood in the widest window embrasure awaiting the model. I put a piece of drawing paper on the easel and got out some charcoal. The door opened and Mrs. Thicknesse entered, wearing a frown.

  “I do hope it won’t be too warm in here,” she said, crossing the floor to the couch, on which she lay down. “It did turn a bit chilly and I put the furnance on this morning. Is this all right, for an attitude?”

  “Your attitude is fine. Just make yourself comfortable. Lie any which way. It makes no difference.”

  I encouraged conversation as I worked, to induce relaxation in the subject and also to obtain those plays of animation that illuminate character to the artist. I coaxed her into speaking of what she liked rather than lamented, and there was a world of difference. At one point we got on the theme of immortality, in which she believed without being sure of its precise form. “There is no death,” she said. “No, my dear lady, but there are funerals.” My mouth was a taut “o” as I strove to record the living flow of the throat, a shoulder, the impact of dialogue on the human breast. Finding us momentarily back on her bugbear, psychology, I explained that nowadays a man in my profession often had the problems reach him in that fashion. A woman of eighty had written to me complaining that a son of sixty was still tied to her apron strings, and there had. been nothing for me to advise but that she wean him forcibly away even at this late juncture, if it meant putting him in an old people’s home. “Another woman wrote me letters for five weeks about her cleaning compulsion,” I related. “What did you do about her?” the model murmured. “I washed my hands of it,” I rather amusedly returned.

  While the colloquies went swimmingly, the work in hand was another matter. Years of disuse had rusted a talent feeble at best, even for a Sunday painter. With cold tongs of fingers I evolved on the drawing paper a teat which was a criminal libel of the original, whose possessor lay stretched on her back, in turn, in a pulsing mockery of the craftsman. She was at her ease, but look at my position. The fact that I had gotten into this ridiculous trap to humor her was no help in getting out of it. I couldn’t let the woman see what I was doing. Masking my inability to draw by dashing off something nonobjective would produce an even more insupportable result, because I had undertaken this work fully knowing my hostess’s abhorrence of the vein.

  “Oh, it won’t come right,” I said and, by way of displaying at least that facet of the creative spirit, tore what I had done into shreds and threw it in the fireplace. The charcoal followed for good measure.

  “Would you like to take a turn through the garden?” Mrs. Thicknesse sat up with her arms clasped around her knees and regarded me as one who has a stake in another’s mood.

  Mrs. Thicknesse dressed and we did, coursing at random among its rustling shrubs in a way that was in keeping with the easy convolutions of our speech: for the upshot of the hour was cardinally to further one’s reconstruction on Continental lines. The summer was cooling observably toward autumn, as the afternoon toward evening, prompting Mrs. Thicknesse, with a toss of a flannel scarf, to remark that the air was like wine. “That accounts for the nip in it,” her young friend rejoined. Nothing much, you understand, just the small change of intellect we were jingling, not its gold coins. Up among the bypaths we went, and there was a brewing sense in it all, for me, of old remembered Henry James, of choked fountains starting, of muted desires and passions ranging in the afternoon. What infinities are in the mind! The idlest thought teems like a waterdrop with microscopic life, and no day’s awakening but renews that long symbolic dream that is as dense and haunting as the sequences we know to be compressed into a wink of sleep. I was not oblivious to the air of financial weal my lady breathed, that sense of real money that lubricates so much. I dallied secure in the knowledge of not being expected home for dinner, and of being regarded as bowling after that, as on Thursday last. The name of Thomas Wolfe was dropped, and swinging a birch stick I had picked up from the grass, I said, “If it must be Thomas let it be Mann, and if it must be Wolfe let it be Nero, but let it never be Thomas Wolfe.” This of course my friend appreciated as a paraphrase of the old Viennese coffee shop mot, “If it must be Richard let it be Wagner, and if it must be Strauss let it be Johann, but let it never be Richard Strauss.”

  I divined in her mood, as she took my arm with a shiver of pleasure and the leaves overhead went shrdlu, shrdlu, that blend of peace and disturbance which comprised my own. “I like crowds, people,” she said, “but true intercourse is possible only between the pair.”

  “That’s so true,” I answered. “I believe Emerson has said something of the sort, though of course his choice of words is slightly different.”

  It’s hard to isolate the elements that went into our rather complex relationship. In part, Mrs. Thicknesse undermined me by praising the character in my face. Which compliment did not precede by long my head’s landing in her lap. We twisted tassels with voluptuous woe, listened to Sibelius with an air of shipwreck. We had our chocolates, sadness, kisses. Mrs. Thicknesse, apart from being rather more interesting than was really necessary, was a most attractive specimen of her sex. In part, she deepened our bond by ostensibly formalizing it.

  Among the vanished graces mourned by Mrs. Thicknesse was letter writing. What was it that made the great friendships of history seem that but the very epistolary woof in which they have come down to us? Letter writing was communion, phone calls mere communication, and that further alloyed by “Is so and so there? Oh, this is just a friend of his. No, no message.” Too, in privacy one pulls out stops at which one might in person shy. “How beautiful you looked as the Palestrina flowed remorselessly on last evening,” the Lamplighter wrote to Mrs. Thicknesse in the winter of that year, when his work was going poorly and he sought repeated refuge in her home. (The Pick had dropped its “Musical Notes,” so we never met in the offices there any more.) “You have not only a good ear but a lovely one,” he wrote in the spring of the next. And in a lighter vein: “You ask whether I ever observe Lent. I do, from a distance, and find it one of the more diverting aspects of the human pageant.” So I sat scratching away like Voltaire in the office in which I received my replies, thinking that some of this seemed as good as a lot I’d read in “collected correspondences.” It happened that the Swallow-Thicknesse exchanges, too, were destined for a wider audience than its parties—thanks to those two great editors, Cheshire and Lammermoor—but that was still some months off. Now the Lam
plighter’s one disquiet was his wife—for it was useless of me to go on pretending that it was Clammidge I was two-timing. To make it up to her, I gave over my entire fantasy life to her, so that she was its heroine rather than I its hero.

  I wish to comment.

  If you think that small amends, try gathering wool for somebody else sometime. Just try it. For the Self, which activates all revery, naturally clamors that it be wish-fulfillment. What my restitution consisted in was imagining sequences in which my wife outdid both me and Mrs. Thicknesse as a wit—and greater sacrifice could not be asked of me. I made her the Dorothy Parker of our generation. How sick she made me and my inamorata look one night, for example, when our. imaginary set had foregathered for cocktails preparatory to dinner on the town and it was asked around whether a woman could be got for an unexpected man. “How about Clara Thicknesse?” someone suggested; “is she dated?” “Dated, she’s antique,” crackled my spouse. Another time a man admired a new dress Clara had on, a risky combination of colors about which she’d been worried. “Oh, it comes off,” the man assured her, and Crystal was heard to say behind her hand to a group nearby, “Easier than he dreams.” A woman chatted about her husband’s casual air travel. “Last week he went to Paris with an overnight bag.” “Anyone you know?” That one got into the columns and was known by the inner set to refer to Mrs. Thicknesse. Oh, how I built her up in these fantasies, and how those arrows quivered in their marks! Asked what the Lamplighter was like at home, what kind of barbs his were, she answered promptly, “Phenobarbs.” By mid-spring she was the rage of Wise Acres, for it was most convenient to lay these expiatory ordeals in that English country seat remembered from the play of the same name, in that youth of mine which had been cut off. I have often wondered what the two women would have thought of one another actually, for they never met in real life, but only in my now fevered and self-flagellating fancies.

  I hammered out some of the best of these sequences when my head was on the pillow assigned to me by law, and their principal slept peacefully on hers. As I lay wincing and groaning wakefully under the lash of laughter unloosed against me by her acid wit, I wondered where all this would end. I did not think I. deserved such punishment for my peccancies. I felt the person against whom any “infidelities” were technically committed to be actually far more in my moral debt than I in hers. What had I done less than sell my birthright, for her? For her I had suffered my talent to be buried, my wit to be pickled in platitude, I had taken a job. We have seen all this. The gulf between us was a cross, moreover, which I alone bore, and nothing showed its breadth so much as her opinion of what I ground out for groceries. She liked my stuff—at least I might have been spared that! There was now no longer any question of “educating” her away from that level without treading on the delicate memory of her father, in whose mantle I was thus doomed to walk the earth awhile. And what purpose is served by relating that I heard fall from her lips, in a discussion with Clammidge’s cultured wife, the name Of Edna St. Vincent Benét? Except to indicate the stresses from which Mrs. Thicknesse vouchsafed me at least intermittent relief.

  So being already my wife’s moral creditor, the additional immolation of myself in reveries enabled me—after perhaps a scowl in her direction—to turn over in the darkness and go to sleep secure in the sense of being treated shabbily.

  One evening Mrs. Thicknesse thought she would like to give bowling a try. I took her to Pulsifer’s Alleys, where I actually did continue to go, nowadays, in the afternoon whenever I could work it in. She wasn’t very good but gave it another fling the next week. It was then I bowled my best game in ages, making seven strikes in a row, and people crowded around from other alleys at the prospect of a perfect game.

  I heard a familiar voice behind me: “Bowling the ladies over?” It was Pete Cheshire.

  He was wearing a green double-breasted chalk-stripe and a tie with actual trout flies hooked into it. I missed on the next roll, getting only three pins, and the tension relaxed. My score was two hundred and seventy. Cheshire invited Mrs. Thicknesse and me to be his guests in the supper lounge adjoining: he hadn’t seen me for three months and Mrs. Thicknesse since they’d first met, and he had news for us.

  We wound up over hamburgers. Mrs. Thicknesse confided a great passion for these and remarked, as she stirred her coffee, what an industry this country had made of forcemeat. Cheshire frowned and said he doubted whether Pulsifer, a guy he knew, would use horsemeat in his sandwiches. “Not horsemeat—forcemeat,” Mrs. Thicknesse said; “the generic term for ground flesh.” Pete had if anything more aplomb than last time, and he smoked a Between the Acts and fingered the dry-flies on his tie as he told his news.

  “I’ve got eight hundred dollars saved up”—how we widened our eyes at that—“and I’ll slip you some more tidings. I just put a binder on a lot. To build my restaurant on.”

  “Pete, where is this lot?” I put down my bitten sandwich and demanded to know.

  “Corner of Buchanan and Jericho. I can see the scene already. Women with teeth as white as toothpaste clinging to men’s arms—”

  “What??” I looked at his head as though it were a gong that had been struck and given forth no sound. “A street that runs dead a few blocks away, a lot overgrown with weeds? What ails you?”

  “Buchanan runs dead but Jericho don’t. That’s the coming rue.”

  Mrs. Thicknesse, who was piling condiments on her hamburger from every container as an indication that she fitted in with all classes, asked, “How can you erect a restaurant in a residential zone?” Cheshire smiled calmly, and, twisting out his cigarillo, drew his sandwich toward him.

  “Buchanan’s residential but Jericho was once an old business street—so? I build on a Jericho address. No zoning there. Humdinger, that German with the chain of restaurants, he’s bought the old Cobbett mansion on Jericho to make into his latest. If a smart operator like that … I mean I see it as the street to get my stinger in.” He bit into his sandwich and, with a quid of food in his cheek, said: “I’ve already taken out my liquor license. I’m twenty-one, now, you know.”

  This was so feeble-minded that I didn’t even stop to argue about it, but only, studying the two-finger span between his eyebrows and his hairline, asked whether I hadn’t read in the paper that they were rushing plans to restrict Jericho Street. “Yar, and I’m in under the wire with my permit. I have a mutual friend in Orlando Heights who explained it all to me. It’ll be what they call a pre-existing nonconformity.” That shut us up.

  Pete looked away with too much innocence and inquired, “Kind of a fellow is this Humdinger? Anybody here know him personally?”

  “Slightly,” declared Mrs. Thicknesse, “and I am not impressed by philanthropists who can’t get to their appointments on time, and pillars of society who knock people up in the middle of the night and think nothing of it.”

  Pete pricked up his ears and set his half-raised sandwich down. “Who what people in the middle of the night?”

  “Knock them up. Which is what he did to the Everly sisters, out there in the country. Frightened them half to death.” I fidgeted on my chair. “Mr. Humdinger was lost on the road in his car, and instead of taking the trouble to find a lighted house he knocks up the poor Everly sisters.”

  “Both of them?”

  “I think what Mrs. Thicknesse means is the English usage—” I began miserably, pressing Pete’s foot under the table. Except that by mistake I got Mrs. Thicknesse’s. Who in turn thought it was Pete who was squeezing it, because she stared at him and said, “Really!” The confusion was utter. Peter continued with excruciating relish, “This I got to hear about How did he go about it? What gave?”

  “Well, they were both in bed of course—”

  “That was convenient,” he said with a shattering laugh. I thought I would go out of my one and only mind. “Oh, good God,” I said, and signaled for the waiter. “We really must go.”

  “This is on me,” said Pete. He tore the check from th
e waiter’s pad when it was figured up and rose, digging into his pocket. When we thanked him he said it had been his pleasure. “Au reservoir,” he said humorously, and made off with great urbanity.

  Mrs. Thicknesse and I agreed that a business of his own was probably the only solution for him because he was obviously unemployable. “He’s up to something,” I murmured, watching him stop at a table to pump hands and slap backs, as though already grooming himself for proprietorship. “I’d give a lot to know what.”

  I found out soon enough.

  I was paging through the day’s issue of the Pick, one afternoon at the office, when my eye was caught by a story caption with “Old Cobbett Manse” in it. My feet came slowly off the desk as I read:

  Louis Humdinger, who has just completed conversion of the old Elihu Cobbett home on South Jericho Street into a restaurant and had announced plans for a grand opening next month, has run into a zoning snag that may doom his long-cherished project. He has been denied a liquor license because one has been recently issued for a site eight hundred feet from his, to a Peter Cheshire, of 718 Marble Street, for a café and cocktail lounge which he plans to erect at an undisclosed date. A city ordinance forbids more than one liquor-dispensing establishment within a distance of fifteen hundred feet …

  I had Pete in my office inside of three hours.

  “The whole thing is a ruse now, isn’t it? Isn’t it?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Somehow, somewhere, you got wind of this zoning gimmick, and the minute you were twenty-one, snuck in there first to get poor old Humdinger over a barrel. You plan now to milk him, blackmail him, something, because you know restaurants break even on the food and make their profit on liquor. Is that it?”

  “Blackmail’s a nasty word, and why is Humdinger ‘poor old’? Because he’s an advertiser in this rag? Why should I waste sympathy on a guy like that? He pays his help lousy, and you heard what Mrs. Thicknesse—”