Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  “Why does a shaggy dog cross the road?” I asked, walking up to them.

  They giggled and looked at one another. The taller mortifiedly fingered a badge pinned to her dress which read “Hospitality Committee.”

  I drank from the double Scotch I was carrying and said:

  “It is possible to administer a bromide without inducing a headache.”

  They tittered, exchanging glances again, and shrank farther back into the shadows. I pitched a cigarette into the shrubbery and went back toward the clubhouse. On the way I stopped at a fountain. Brooding there, I thought I had more tears to shed than it, could they but be unstopped. I hurled my glass into it. It shattered on a stone dolphin. The fountain plashed serenely on. I got a fresh highball at the bar and then I was sitting with it on one of the many folding chairs arranged along one wall, watching the dancers. They seemed, in my haze, to have a busy and yet at the same time dreamy quality, like speeded up slow motion. I turned to look at the woman sitting on my left and the profile seemed familiar. It was Mrs. Gutman, to put it crudely. My old first-grade teacher. She recognized me and was off.

  This person was a deluge of words and a drizzle of thought. And I imagined as she talked how that fluency ought to be channeled over her chin and down along a spillway for conversion into cheap power. She breathed through a gherkin in the middle of her face, audibly over some of the softer orchestral strains. Her hair was an arrangement of plaited bowels, and her face was a spiral nebula of freckles. It merged into other Milky Ways running along her neck and shoulders, which were lost in turn in further super-galactic systems at which the imagination reeled …

  “What is the matter with you, Charles? Are you ill?”

  “Not yet. Go on. You were saying?”

  Because I wanted to sit glazed in stupefaction and listen to Mrs. Gutman. I wanted to be bored to death, as good a way to go as any. I wanted to lie down in boredom as in drifted snow, numbed to rest. The liquor was warming me for that farewell, and I sank in grateful somnolence as the flakes everywhere dreamily descended. She spoke of her garden and what seemed a way of broiling roses. That couldn’t be right, any more than the floors of pork on which she next seemed to be discoursing. Cork? No, leave it pork. Pork floors. Go out on that note.

  Where was Lila? What was Crystal doing? Mrs. Thicknesse? Nickie? Would he come back later after seeing Oscar Wilde suitably adjourned?

  “… Need good eyes for driving. Since I learned to—”

  “Driving, my dear Mrs. Gutman, has become pedestrian. Jay-walking is the last adventure open to man.” A final twitch of assertion, a hand raised feebly in the falling snow …

  Later beneficent hands, very possibly Mrs. Gutman’s, laid a plate of foodstuffs in my lap. Tilting to the left, I watched beet juice trickle off the scalloped edge of the paper plate and stain the knee of my trousers, and laughed weakly. Because I hated me so. Was it a character in Millay’s Aria Da Capo who loved humanity but hated people?

  The industrial consultant hung over me.

  “Look, the hospitality committee feel left out of things. Could you dance with them?”

  “One at a time?”

  “They’re over there.”

  “I’ll be glad to,” I said, already weaving a little as though in preparation as I rose. She took my plate.

  “It would help make them feel at home.” She was a thin, frail bulldozer of a woman who was bent on seeing her stratagem through, even if it meant nervous breakdowns for the beneficiaries. The hostesses had been cajoled, threatened and possibly dragged indoors by sheer physical force, and now stood quaking in a corner of the dance floor as the woman led me toward them. She towed me along by the hand, like a boy at his first function.

  But not for long. I broke free of her grasp and capered on across the floor in a pantomime of already holding someone in my arms, in a general invitation to hilarity. Without missing a step I caught up the taller of the hostesses and plucked her away into the swirl. “When will the dancers leave her alone?” I quoted prettily in her ear. I had been wrong about mankind. We were O.K. We were all right in there. “And I said to the rose, ‘The brief night goes in babble and revel and wine.’” Next I would snatch up her friend, and after that the psychological consultant and even Mrs. Gutman herself, with whom, a broiled rose at her waist, we would glide till dawn across floors of pork.

  “Santayana has called skepticism the chastity of the intellect,” I panted. “Just so might we call chastity the skepticism of the flesh.”

  We bore through the traffic toward a palm, also potted. Another couple bumped us, and I paused to jot an imaginary license number, amusing all. Then off and away again. The band paused between songs and we stood a moment. I put the flat of my hand against the trunk of the palm and leaned against it with one foot crossed over the other. I drew a long breath. “Chesticism—”

  I went over in a wealth of foliage.

  “Officer! Officer!”

  “Where’s that cop?”

  “Here he comes. Officer!”

  Then unseen arms were bearing me up, and I was going away in a chair of hands like Sewell Avery from Montgomery Ward. Only we swam drowsily through enlarging seas, lost latitudes from which in youth we’d heard the names of ports like summoning bells. A surf of voices beat about my ears. Did I wake or sleep? The mad bronze of moonlit waters stretched a. path to islands held to be blessed. But the waters darkened subtly; and at nightfall, plunging downward to their velvet depths, we sank to rest among the stars we had not touched.

  I came to in my living room with Nickie bending over me. When he saw I was all right he sat down in an overstuffed chair and returned to a cup of coffee he’d had on a table. His coat was off and his tie loose.

  I sat up slowly. He looked over without getting up. “I took you home. It’s only a quarter to one. Lila’s still there. It’ll probably last till dawn.”

  “More than I will,” I said flopping back and putting my hand to my head. “Where’s Chris?”

  “Went to dance after all. Jumped out of bed and off in a taxi We probably passed her coming home. I took you in your car. It’s in the garage. Your mother told me about Chris. She helped me drag you in.”

  I rolled an eye apprehensively around. “Where is my mother?”

  “I made her go back to bed. She wasn’t well. Something she ate, apparently.” Nickie sipped coffee again.

  “Could I have some of that?”

  He got me some from the kitchen, strong and black. After that and a raw egg in cold tomato juice, drunk in the kitchen, I felt better. But when I wandered back to the living room I saw something that stopped me short.

  Nickie was sitting in the chair with his police special pistol in his hand. I watched him raise it in an arc till the muzzle came to rest against his temple.

  “Stop that,” I said, these words tasting like tinfoil in my mouth.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, taking another drink from the coffee cup which he held in the other hand. “Just getting the feel of it. When I do I won’t take any chances.” He shoved the pistol back into its holster. “What I’ll do is drive out to the Bulfinch Bridge. I’ll tie a rope around my neck and the other to the parapet. Then I’m going to drink a bottle of poison, slash my wrists, put a bullet through my head and jump into the river.”

  What a death was that for a man pledged to understatement? Besides, it was derived from Mencken. I remembered Mencken’s description of just such a suicide in one of his reminiscences.

  I sat down on the sofa again, slinging my legs out on a chair.

  “I’m considered a marriage counselor too, you know,” I said. “I’ve got an idea.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “The idea that for you to go down to headquarters and wrap the case up for yourself and family will take more plain heroism than either of us is likely to see again in a lifetime. I don’t know whether you’ve got it in you. Maybe you have. My one regret is that no one will ever know about it, exc
ept two other people. Not even my wife. Now what do you say? I’m very tired. I’ve been through a lot and have more to face tomorrow. I’m going to be named in a divorce action for adultery.”

  He looked down at me, for he had gotten to his feet and was putting his coat on. “Sweet jumping Jesus. Who’s the woman? You never told me.”

  “Do you remember Mrs. Thicknesse? You drove her out of the bookstore.”

  “Yes. Hm … I thought her quite attractive. In fact I was trying to impress her.”

  “Would to God you had!” I groaned, turning my face to the wall—for I myself had lain down again. “Now I don’t want to talk about it tonight. But let’s keep in touch. We’ve got to help one another—because that’s all each of us has got now.”

  “You can count on me. But won’t it be a little like the two bums in the loan office offering to co-sign for each other?”

  “Something like that. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He hadn’t been gone five minutes when the phone made me jump off the sofa. I answered it before it could ring a second time.

  “Hello.” It was Mrs. Thicknesse. Her voice was like something puncturing my middle, out of which my insides seemed to be running like sawdust out of a rag doll. “Is it all right to call you? I thought I would because it’s good news.”

  “What is it? Where have you been? I’ve been trying to find out what’s going on.”

  “Everything is all right.”

  “All right,” I exclaimed, incensed. “All right. What the devil—”

  “Bennett got a crushing wire from his girl saying she’d married someone else. A younger man. He was in Sheol for two days—”

  “Where is that?”

  “Hell. The Old Testament. But slowly came out of it. We went to Lake George for a week, a sort of second honeymoon. The rebound, I believe they call it. I was in such a dither I forgot to phone you then. Of course there’ll be no action, since we’ve patched it up.…”

  I didn’t hear the rest. After hanging up I sat, walked, lay in a daze. I was free! Free! I don’t know how much time passed. I listened in a heavenly fog for the front door to open. At last it did, and Crystal entered. She started right on upstairs.

  I followed slowly, after turning the lights off and locking up the house. I took my time, holding in the good news for a bit, savoring the very agony as one with a glass of cold water in his hands savors a moment his thirst.

  “Did you have a good time, darling?” I asked from the bedroom door, through which I could see her undressing.

  “Who gave you permission to come into this room?”

  “I’ve just talked to Mrs. Thicknesse. Everything is all right. There’ll be no suit.”

  She answered from inside the closet: “Don’t be too sure.”

  I came into the room a step.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m going to sue.”

  “Who?”

  “Her. For a start.”

  “Her?” The word came out in a falsetto of extraordinary purity. “What for?”

  “Alienation of affections.”

  “Oh, no. Can’t you see it along the lines I said this afternoon? A little affair like this is a slight form of the real disease against which, as a result, lifelong immunity may in most cases be expected.”

  I watched her timorously through a crack in the door as she pulled her dress over her head and hung it up.

  “How much are you going to sue her for?”

  “Sixty-five dollars.”

  “Sixty-five! Is that all?”

  “I don’t want to overcharge her.”

  “But my God! You’ll make me a laughingstock.”

  “Then you’ll know how it feels.”

  “But I’m trying to tell you you won’t be. Everything’s blown over.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  She came out of the closet and went into the bathroom to take a shower. I was waiting for her when she came out, in her nightgown.

  “Can’t you up that figure a little? Make it ten thousand. That’s the least you can sue for and still leave a man with a grain of self-respect. To broadcast to the world that sixty-five dollars is all you value his feelings at—You must be mad.”

  “Plenty!” she said, getting into bed. She hurled my pillow at me.

  “It’ll go out on the AP wire and everything,” I said, catching it. “Why, hell, that’s probably no more than a man is worth chemically these days.”

  She snapped the light out from a switch accessible from the bed, leaving me in darkness.

  “It’s an outrage,” I went on, finding my voice. “You’ve been drinking. That’s it. You don’t know what you’re doing. How can a man handle anything as unreasonable as this? What am I to do?”

  The last was an apostrophe, not uttered for an answer. But I was given one anyway.

  “Why don’t you write Norman Vincent Peale?” came ironically from the darkened bed. “He’s that man who helps people in trouble.”

  Eighteen

  The deflation of the lobster ruse brought the first break in Cheshire’s composure and in the Van Allstyne case. After two hours of hammering interrogation he admitted the jewel theft, or rather took credit for it. He denied authorship of the other jobs at first; but when the flashbulbs began to explode and the prospect of his picture in the paper to materialize, he suddenly blurted out that he was the Smoothie. The photograph that greeted me on the front page of the Herald the next morning showed him declaring as much with a smug grin, under a caption reading “Local Raffles.” Next to him, grasping him firmly by the arm in the established tradition, was the rather sheepish “officer whose brilliant sleuthing cracked the case.”

  So Nickie was man enough to put Cheshire away on the strength of his wife’s wits. But that was all he would do. I mean he wouldn’t take the promotion offered him in his now skyrocketing prestige, not even with the promise of an opening on the detective bureau in two months. He did what he had to do, to keep the wheels of justice turning, but he couldn’t build his career on it That much pride he couldn’t swallow.

  He quit the department and got a job driving a truck for a diaper wash. I could see his own private wheels turning. Working in an office, or at any white-collar job that made some kind of sense, he would be just another chap who hadn’t lived up to his promise. Driving a laundry truck was an indictment of society. Also, he knew now the pleasure of talking Shakespeare and Kierkegaard while incongruously clothed; for he wore a uniform now too, a gray one across the back of whose jacket was written in crimson script, The Tidy Didy.

  So I would trail him furtively again in my car and watch him rub it into society. He would twirl the pick-up bags on their necks to knot the tops, fling the bags into the back of the truck, slam the doors shut and clap the locking hasp to, as if in sardonic suggestion that anyone would want to steal the contents, get behind the wheel and drive off with one foot hitched up on the dash and a pencil sticking out from under the side of his cap and that cap at a heedless angle, in abnegation of all vainglory. I would shake my head as I was supposed to and as any who saw him were supposed to, in witness of the ever-rolling mockeries of Time, the hustling and no longer even protested vanities of sentient dust. I used to think that he must have some almost mystical bond with mischance; that he was geared for it, simply put together wrong, like the differential installed backwards by the Canadian car owner, so that the car had one speed forward and four in reverse. Not that the comparison is anything but metaphorical. As a matter of kinetic fact, Nickie went like hell behind the Tidy Didy wheel, rocketing like a madman through traffic and taking corners on two wheels, as though still experimenting with that recipe for self-destruction.

  Lila didn’t understand it. Or she understood it but couldn’t have any patience with it. Or wouldn’t. She stormed out of the house one night after a particularly vehement quarrel about it, taking the now two children with her, and moved in with us. She made it plain that she wasn’t “leaving”
him, merely using the move as a lever to make him come to his senses and go back to his old job. She wouldn’t go back to him till he went there.

  I was content thus to let our two domestic situations hang fire for a bit, since my own work was taking my full time and mental energy. My mail was by this time itself almost exclusively psychological. Waves of this or that theme appeared in it. For instance, there was a rash of letters from wives complaining that their husbands “stuck up” for meddling mothers when it came to that. I struck out sharply at the apron-string male in a series of articles which I ran under the title “Oedipus Wrecks.” I went into the whole Mom thing, equally rebuking husbands who didn’t realize where their responsibilities began and mothers who didn’t see where their rights ended. Sometimes I scolded the complaining wife for detectable impatience itself neurotic. “The bonds of matrimony,” I wrote in a concluding Pepigram, “are like any other bonds—they mature slowly.”

  I had heard mumblings and mutterings from psychiatrists before, about newspaper counselors muscling in on their profession, but this time there were shrieks and howls even from plain psychologists and case workers telling me to get out of a field for which I had no training. I replied quietly that I was simply doing my best to help the overflow which was mysteriously piling up in the face of all the sterling healers that were around. This “stink correspondence,” as Clammidge relishingly called it, added to my swelling chores—which included more and more people coming to my office to see me personally for help. One of these was the expected friend of Lammermoor’s.