Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  “Put in a fine lager,” I threw out as I roosted over a hamburger for which I had no more relish than if it had been my straw hat I was eating.

  The Greek turned with a look of slow speculation to a partner he had acquired, a brother-in-law who opened early in a new policy aimed at the breakfast trade, while Nachtgeborn came in the afternoon and stayed till one a.m. The brother-in-law’s name was Constantine but he was called Al for short. “Beer has made a lot of places liquid,” I said, able to laugh at the joke despite my troubles.

  The two turned with a look of wild surmise to the back mirror. Flanked with fluted mahogany columns and surmounted by imaginative scrollwork and fat Cupids—well, who could fail to see it in the heart of a period saloon? A cool bower where old timers would recall close presidential races, vintage crimes, and the great rail and marine disasters.

  I wet my lips nervously. “I was thinking out loud,” I said, dismounting my stool, and fled after tumbling half a buck on the counter.

  Deep in spates of exchanged Greek, they did not notice my exit. Eight days later they were in the same spot gesticulating toward the same mirror; evidently I had agitated them like a hot poker thrust into a mug of claret. I sped on by in my car, not daring to think about it. I was on my way to the Golden Ass for dinner with Lammermoor.

  What did you expect me to expect? A reed shaken by the wind? Eyes like buckshot and a mouth out of the corner of which maledictions would be leaking? Lammermoor was a lean, handsome egg in his thirties, with perfect teeth and eyes like black jawbreakers. He was bent over a Pocket Book copy of Moon and Sixpence when I drew up to the booth where he and Pete were waiting for me.

  “Know why Maugham is the author he is?” he asked me after the introductions. “He knows people.”

  “Yar, it’s the same with everything—who you know.” Pete was slouched over the table chin in hand, spinning the overturned lid of the sugar bowl on its pivot. “Good old pull.”

  I winked at Lammermoor, who smiled back. My spirits rose. There seemed to be a bond between us, and if I played this right… I glanced at a bulge in the breast pocket of his plaid coat.

  “Well, what’ll we have?” I asked as the waiter thrust menus between us “This is on me, you know.”

  We had two rounds of Martinis and then dinner of roast beef and red wine. Lammermoor and I talked about books, and to impress him I ordered a demitasse. Pete cut in on our discussions with a disparaging opinion of the place.

  “They put in fancy fixtures and some cheap wine, and dilute the people into thinking they’re in a first-class restaurant.”

  “Recommended by Duncan Phyfe,” I said with another wink at Lammermoor. But then I saw Pete glower, and not wanting him to feel left out of it I began to butter him up. I asked him to tell how he had foxed the police in the Jellico job. He opened up after a moment. The unjibing auto tracks? He had switched tires. The left-hand, right-hand confusion? He was amphibious. The indecipherable footprints? Overshoes and on the wrong feet. And how about the theft of the Van Allstyne jewels several days before, in broad daylight? That seemed the latest of the Smoothie didoes though the work had not been signed, no doubt to shed the aggregate risk of the preceding jobs. Pete denied all knowledge of the Van Allstyne affair, though praising it as a caper. “I was up on that damn scaffold at the time, painting the other side.” I looked at Lammermoor. So did Pete. Could it be that all along …? “How about his letters?” Pete suddenly put to Lammermoor.

  Lammennoor conjured them from elsewhere on his person than the bulge I had noted in his breast pocket, simultaneously twisting out a cigarette. “These are brilliant,” he said, unfolding one. “But I think editing has improved them. See if you don’t.”

  He turned a page round to me and indicated a passage in which adroit deletions before and after permitted the phrase “we have been bedfellows” to stand out in unexpectedly startling dimensions.

  “But I meant intellectual!” I protested. “This is outrageous.”

  It wasn’t a patch on another bit of tinkering Lammermoor let me inspect—a line scissored off at the bottom of the page and a period put after the words, “our peculiar intercourse.”

  “Think of the position this puts me in!” I exploded as subduedly as I could in a public place. “What will people think? Why, we haven’t even slept together.”

  Lammermoor smiled. “It shows you what a little judicions cutting will do, as I think you call it in your profession. I’d say the value of the letters has doubled if not tripled, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, Pete, was this done in cahoots with you?” I demanded, blazing.

  “Not at my express behest.”

  “Do you know what you’re saying?”

  “It was before I found out what you told me.”

  I could only vent my anger on the waiter, who happened to be passing.

  “Look,” I said, catching him by the coattails, “I distinctly asked for a demitasse. You’ve given me a large cup.”

  “Just drink a little,” he said, and was off.

  I sat back in defeat.

  “All right. How much do you want?”

  To my surprise Lammermoor snapped round the letters the heavy rubber band in which they had been originally secured, and tossed them over to me.

  “I don’t want any money. Just a favor I think you’re in a position to do me.”

  He moved dishes away to make room for his arms along the table-edge.

  “I’m all gummed up with a woman. A girl I guess I should say. I’ve got my foot in a tangle of barbed wire.” His narrative and his expression reminded me of the origin of his nickname—the hell he proverbially went through with females. “I’m trying to get rid of her is the plain fact, but she’s hysterical and all mixed up. She needs psychoanalyzing. I’ve been reading your column the last few days—are you a trained psychiatrist?”

  “If you mean am I a licensed practitioner,” I answered modestly, “no-o …”

  “You wouldn’t know it from your stuff.” (The shift in policy had begun to be heavily shown in my recent copy.) “I’d take it very kindly if you’d try to help this girl.”

  “But of course. Have her write me a letter.”

  “That’s not enough. She needs the works. Talking to.”

  “There are doctors in town who I’m sure—”

  “She won’t go to a head shrinker. But she just might see you. You wouldn’t scare her, I mean it’d be different. What do you say?”

  What could I say? My job was after all to help people. And I was ecstatically grateful for the letters. “I’ll do what I can for the young lady,” I said.

  Lammermoor was on his feet already casting around for the phone booth. “I’ll call Sherry right away and arrange for the first interview.”

  He had no more than done that than I had Mrs. Thicknesse on the wire to tell her the good news about the letters.

  “Hurrah!” she exclaimed. We were both so hysterical with joy we could hardly talk. “Come on right over and we’ll celebrate.”

  “I’ll be there in two shakes.”

  Fourteen

  We met with outstretched arms and embraced with cries of pleasure. We were free, free! Our being up in Mrs. Thicknesse’s bedroom gave us an extra sense of seclusion, of safety from the world and all harm. She had laid a fire against the evening’s chill, for the weather had turned abruptly cold, but neither of us got round to lighting it then. She asked to see the letters. I refused at first but she teased them out of me with the reminder that they’d been intended for her originally. I sat near a window while she read them. Oddly enough in the cooled weather, a storm seemed to be threatening in the west, where the sky was the color of body bruises except for one herniated cloud which let through a little sulphurous sunset light. Mrs. Thicknesse screamed with laughter at the emendations, and I laughed too.

  Then came the let-down. We had been through a lot, and had discharged what energy we had in a spasm of jubilation. Now we were quite tired. Mrs. Thi
cknesse leaned with her hand on the mantel and her head on her hand, like a mountain climber pausing to rest on an escarpment to which he has barely the strength to cling. “Done up,” she. said. Her gaze wandered toward the bed.

  “I know. Why don’t you lie down for a bit?”

  “Faint.” She held out a hand which I took.

  We went toward the bed arm in arm, supporting one another. The fatigue which lent sanction to our progress toward it threatened to overcome us before we had gained it. But we made it, the bed, which is to say we unmade it.

  “Funny,” Mrs. Thicknesse murmured from it, in the deepening twilight. “We paid for what we didn’t do—oh, how we suffered for pleasures we’d really not enjoyed, you know. Now we take what we’ve paid for anyway …”

  “This way we’ll have done our penance in advance,” I said, hanging my trousers over the back of a chair.

  I did not forget my mother in the jasper dusk. As I climbed into bed I remembered having promised her I wouldn’t do this sort of thing. My religious training passed before me. I recalled a line from the Bible, “Thy belly is an heap of wheat.” By pretending a fit of passion I managed to smother a nervous laugh in my pillow. I felt sorry for that. I quickened the play of my hands and panted deceptively. “Oh, Mrs. Thicknesse.”

  But she was not fooled.

  “These things are always psychological,” I said at last, falling away.

  “I suppose,” said Mrs. Thicknesse hopelessly.

  We lay in a truce for a time. Then out of her own gathering tensions she took over prosecuting the hour herself. “What ails thee, knight at arms?”

  This was the wrong approach to take with me. All her efforts only multiplied the torpor in which I lay disabled; which in turn drove her to redoubled efforts. “You’re hurting me,” I said at last, trying to free an arm pinioned in her embrace.

  She lay over with her head on her own pillow and brushed a ringlet of hair back from her brow. “Go light the fire. It will give you something to do. Relax you …” I thought that she had never seemed more royal than now in abandon, and I wanted very much to let her know I felt this.

  “My own queen,” I said, and backed out of bed.

  I set briskly to work at the hearth. No fire, but my joints crackled merrily as I stooped to prod it into being. “Damp,” I said. I sat for a time on the floor, dueling the inanimate wood with a black poker. I thought I heard a low grumble and looked to the darkened window beyond which the storm might be brewing. I remembered reading somewhere that the signs of middle age begin to set in at twenty-six.

  Between the sheets again I was at least as hot from my exertions as the fire would have made me had it caught. Mrs. Thicknesse had devised in my absence a new stratagem. She now cultivated the fiction that it was I who was the impetuous one, the principle being presumably that of suggestion, which obtains results by pretending that they are under way. Taking my hand in hers, she conducted it on a tour of her divinity.

  “No,” she said at length, as though I required bridling.

  “Yes,” I said, falling in with the plan.

  Here another damnable association befell. I remembered a man who boasted of having “rutted and roostered his way across the eastern seaboard” once describing the three stages of love making as those of golf: namely the drive, the approach, and the putt. I wondered at which of the stages I was, and became self-conscious. However, Mrs. Thicknesse noted nothing this time.

  “You like this sort of thing?” she whispered.

  “Very much indeed.”

  A corner of the fire caught. It illumined the room momentarily, fluttering wild shadows on the ceiling. Then it died away and the room became dark. “What was that noise?” I said, sitting up. “I thought I heard something.”

  “Come, come,” she said, drawing me back. “Don’t start imagining things. Lie still, palely loitering one, think of nothing …”

  There was a blinding flash in the room. We both sat up.

  “Lightning?” I said.

  “But no thunder.”

  “Are all the windows closed?”

  “Yes … Lie down. It will be wonderful in bed with a storm.”

  We had been lying down about two or three minutes when there was another flash of light. This time it stayed on, and a middle-aged man in well-cut tweeds turned from the wall switch and began to set up photographic equipment at the foot of the bed.

  “Bennett, what is the meaning of this?”

  “Suppose you tell me.”

  Mrs. Thicknesse sat against the headboard with the sheet drawn up to her chin, an arrangement which covered me completely and for which I was grateful; in fact I ducked even farther under the covers as the colloquy over head went forward.

  “Bennett, aren’t you being ludicrous?”

  “Not I, my dear.”

  The voice was rather pleasant, in a nasal way. Its possessor was outwardly pleasing too, from the brief look I’d had at him. A handsome man of medium height, in his fifties I should have judged, with a sickle nose and one eye a bit higher than the other. He looked like a seasoned character actor.

  “What do you want?” Mrs. Thicknesse asked, threshing in such a fury that I clutched at the covers to keep them around my head.

  “Just one or two more. The one I got looked good, but you can never tell. If the young man will oblige.”

  . “Never!” I called through the bedclothes. “And that’s final.”

  “I can wait.”

  “Oh!” Mrs. Thicknesse gasped, and flung round and buried her face in her pillow. Lying over on my side, rolled up into a tight foetal ball, I did some clear, hard thinking.

  No picture not discernibly containing both of us would cut any ice in litigation. I knew without being told that that was what Thicknesse wanted the photographs for. Mrs. Thicknesse had once hinted that he wanted a divorce, and more than hinted that she would not give it to him. “I have it on good authority he’s keeping a young chit in an apartment in Buenos Aires. A café society girl, you’ve probably seen her picture in the supplements, those horrible brown things that come on Sunday. He wants to marry her. Well, I’ll not be treated in any such fashion.” All this went through my mind now as Thicknesse adjusted his tripod or inserted flashlights or whatever he was doing out there. There was a long pause broken only by those sounds; then even they stopped; we had reached an impasse. Since a likeness of either of us would be useless without the other, I reasoned forward, it would be safe for one of us to emerge and try a little persuasion. So after whispering to the overturned Mrs. Thicknesse, “Don’t show yourself till I get back,” I lowered the sheet cautiously till only my eyes were visible above it and raised myself on one elbow.

  “I’d like to propose a meeting of minds,” I said.

  Thicknesse cleared his throat and took in what he could of me, which wasn’t much more than you can of a face wearing a yashmak. I appraised him more fully in turn, and found my original fleeting impression confirmed in detail, except for a small trim mustache not then noted. I said at last: “I understand you’re quite a camera fiend.”

  “This will be the first time I’ve shot a man in bed.”

  I dropped the sheet to my shoulders and sat up against the pillow. I watched him tilt the camera down a bit on the tripod, at an angle more accurately in relation to the occupants of the bed. “I hope you don’t think I’m a sexual bolshevik,” I said after a moment.

  “Not at all. You’re probably a nice enough sort, and I’m sorry about this for your sake. But there are quite sound reasons for my—for this.”

  “Rake!” came muffledly from the rigid Mrs. Thicknesse. I reached a hand to make sure she had not uncovered herself in the flounce which accompanied the exclamation, and also to tell her to let me handle this. Her hand groped out and drew my pillow over her too, so that her head lay between two. I returned my attention to Thicknesse.

  “I suppose this is nothing by your standards, breaking in like this. Sex isn’t sacred at all to you, jus
t a farce. To be indulged in according to one’s whims too, I have no doubt. A mere bagatelle. Well, let me tell you something, sir—”

  “I’m not the judge,” he replied dryly.

  I paused and watched him again as he made cryptic minor adjustments in his gear. I must take another line; gain his confidence and friendship.

  “I take terrible pictures,” I said. “I mean the ones I take of other people. A poor subject, too, for that matter. What do you think people will think when they see a picture of this scene?”

  “I don’t think they’ll think it’s a mere bagatelle.”

  “In that case I bagatelle out of here,” I said, and smiled shyly at him to see if I hadn’t a certain saving humor. “I guess I lack the bump of sense.”

  “You may get one.”

  No need to worry about the unction with which this was going forward. I could only be grateful to him for the support he gave me in handling the contretemps with at least a bit of dash, style. This was a duel of wits. Very well then. I glanced covertly at the chair with my clothes on it, then quickly in another direction so as not to give my game away. I mentally plotted my dash for freedom as I continued to engage him in diverting conversation.

  “I understand you’ve been in South America.”

  “Yes. I returned unexpectedly, as of course you know. But then I often do. Affairs have a way of winding themselves up without warning.”

  “That is very true,” I agreed.

  “Although that was my longest stay yet.”

  “You’re in soft drinks I believe? One of the better Colas Mrs. Thicknesse tells me.”

  “And a number of other things.”

  “Oh, really?” I said. “Tell me, do you know Elizabeth and Neil Gumm? They live in South America.”

  “I can’t say I’ve ever met them.”

  “Down around Bogotá way I believe. What are you thinking as you stand there? What a fool to get caught like this?”

  “Not at all. Just rotten luck. You’re probably a finished Casanova.”