Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  “Would you give me a cigarette? There’s a pack on the dresser.” I pointed in a direction away from where the chair was. A naked leap, a moment of anthropoid comedy, and the thing would be over.

  “Try one of mine,” he said, extending a pack to me. Turning back after I’d taken one, he drew the impeding chair away toward the window, quite out of reach. Asphyxiating that hope.

  Of course I could have leaped out of bed, grappled with the sonofabitch, smashed his camera to bits or at least overturned it, but I didn’t. It was never a question of a scuffle. Instinct, breeding, call it what you will, precluded any such squalid messings about. We were two men of the world who could certainly resolve this in a manner consonant with that plane.

  But try as I might to put my brain to work at the problem, all I could do was barrenly revolve the thesis that this was a day I should have stood in bed.

  “I pictured you as different somehow,” I said, judging him sorely over a width of upheld bed-linen. “Not someone who’d do a thing like this. I thought of you as more … more …” The fact was I hadn’t thought of him as anything but cuckolded, and very little of that. “What’s so damnably unfair about it all is that it’s not in the least the way it looks. We haven’t actually …” A smothered sound came from the pillow sandwich as of woman wailing for her demon lover to do something. “When two essentially decent people get together like this, morality, the higher things or whatever you want to call them, intervene, so that one is unable to consummate.… is up against …”

  “Pricks of conscience?” he said, sighting me experimentally through the finder of his camera.

  “You could call them that.”

  “Well, you can always pride yourself on having been good in bed.”

  He prolonged squinting at me, then turned his camera a hair’s-breadth.

  “We’ll die if anything comes of this,” I said. “We’ll absolutely die of …”

  “Exposure? Oh, I’m sorry. You want a light.”

  “No, I don’t!” I hurled the cigarette into a corner. The man’s sang-froid made my blood boil. Indignation now seized and shook me like a reed. I plowed the bedclothes with my legs and said, “Maybe you’re the wicked one. Wanting in the capacity to appreciate the kind of thing we had between us. An intellectual union—oh, yes, it was!—of the sort Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet had. Not that I’m comparing myself to Voltaire, that’s not the point. But the point is that her husband understood. Voltaire and his wife, du Châtelet’s that is, had many pursuits and interests in common. They shared books, listened to music. They conducted scientific experiments together. Together, they tried to weigh fire.”

  “Did they ever play with it?”

  I turned with a disgusted expression to Mrs. Thicknesse and said, “Suppose you talk to him.”

  I had meant that she spell me while I went back under the covers and tried to work out a plan there. Instead, in a burst of anger ten times more vehement than my own she suddenly hurled about and said, “Bennett, you can go to Halifax! I will not stand for this! All right, have your divorce and your golddigger!”—into a burst of light that seemed to fuse with the blaze of her own wrath. He had his picture before I could get under the covers again.

  So now he had two. Enough for a divorce on the grounds he wanted—adultery. Guaranteeing the settlement he wanted too, not merely what Mrs. Thicknesse would voluntarily have agreed to. All these speculations went, quite accurately it turned out, through my mind as I dressed in silence presently, after Thicknesse had gathered up his truck and gone. “I’ll have a drink ready for you downstairs if you want one,” he told us as he made off with the tripod over his shoulder, for all the world no more as if a ruckus had been concluded than if he’d been an itinerant photographer snapping kiddies in a donkey cart in their back yard.

  So that was the way it was, I reflected. Instead of committing what we’d paid for in advance, we were to be hanged for what we had not done at all. I saw the scene in court clearly. The Pick would have no reporter there but the Herald was a flourishing new morning paper, addicted to scandal and with a keen sense of rivalry. Lamplighter to take stand today … Co-respondent confronted with pictures … No, damn it, no! There must be some way out. Something at least easier than those photographs.

  My eye fell on the white envelopes on the dresser where they’d been dropped in our merrymaking. The letters … I picked them up, put them in my pocket and went downstairs.

  Thicknesse was sitting in the living room stroking the stem of a Martini glass between his fingers. He got to his feet and asked, “What would you like?”

  “The same,” I said. “Very dry, if you don’t mind.”

  I looked up the staircase down which faint sounds of lamentation came. Mrs. Thicknesse had remained in bed. “I shall never rise again,” she’d exclaimed as I’d left the bedroom. The last sight I had of her was lying with her hair streaming out over the edge of the bed, like a smoking torch. “I shall never, never rise again. I shall see no one, I shall take no nourishment …” There was certainly no point in expecting her for cocktails, whatever portion of her vows she kept.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” Thicknesse said as he handed me the drink which had been prepared with pharmaceutical care, “but if you knew the whole story I think you’d feel less bitterly than perhaps you do. I’d got wind of your little business here, it makes no difference how, and it seemed absurd to pass up a chance for which I have really every justification. Clara’s a splendid as well as attractive woman, but it just didn’t wash, with us. Yet she’s refused to give me a divorce. That strange pride women have about a thing like that.” Something occurred to him and he asked, “Are you married?”

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  “Oh. I was just thinking if you two hit it off—”

  “Look, those pictures,” I cut in. “You can’t put me through that. I’ve got some letters here that would be equally, well, convincing, but not as rough on a man, if you know what I mean. I’m willing to trade them for the negatives. Oh, you needn’t worry, they’re authentic,” I said as he eyed me skeptically over his Martini. “Here. Sit down and read them.”

  He took them and did, after another dubious glance at me. His face was expressionless as he turned the pages. Then his eyebrows lifted. I was glad now for Lammermoor’s emendations, which gave the letters at least the force of the photographs, which they might have lacked in their unbutchered state.

  “You’d have me dead to rights,” I said, pressing my advantage. “Nothing could stand up any better in court than those. They’d suit your purpose admirably while being from my point of view a little more …”

  “O.K.” He stuffed the letters in his pocket and rose, setting his drink down on a table. “The negatives are upstairs. I’ll get them. Call it a fair exchange.” He paused at the foot of the stairs. “You might write something on a slip of paper, so I’ll be sure these are your handwriting. Just an extra precaution.”

  “Of course.”

  When he returned I had the handwriting sample ready, and he compared it with the script in the letters to his satisfaction. Then he gave me the negatives, which I promptly destroyed. As I did so I reflected that the substitute evidence would be infinitely better for Mrs. Thicknesse too, as documentary matter in which she was verbally extolled rather than caught flagrante delicto.

  “No hard feelings I hope?” Thicknesse said.

  “No,” I answered in a tone as dry as the Martini. “Well drink to it.”

  “We’ll do better than that.” Bennett Thicknesse came forward with his hand extended. “Shake.”

  I was.

  Fifteen

  Troubles are like hills. They look impossibly steep from a distance but as we approach them they seem to flatten out before us,” I wrote. I applied the maxim to the necessity of telling my wife about Mrs. Thicknesse, with no cardinal reduction in the size of the incline stretching before me. Two weeks had passed and I knew nothing more. No one answered the te
lephone at the Thicknesse place.

  It was hot again and I was working home in the silo (as we still always called the library), where it was a little cooler than the Pick office, but only a little. I paced the floor naked except for an eyeshade, and the clouds from chain-smoked cigarettes which enveloped me. The need to break the news of my affair to Crystal became momently more urgent as that hour drew near in which the expected summons from Thicknesse would be served. Some preparation must be made for its arrival. But instead of getting the matter out in the domestic open, I had been spending my spare time repeating words until they became meaningless. I had the day before seen a book of songs on the piano, opened to its index, and my eye had lit on an entry reading “Camptown Races, De.” This monstrosity resulting from the simple convention of putting the article in a title last had been enough to keep me awake half the night. Camptown Races, De … Camptown Races, De … went maniacally through my head. Now in the silo something else got its hooks into me. Among the overflow from the living room was a beer mug from Germanic Milwaukee which bore in Gothic letters the inscription Gott Mit Uns. It stood on a shelf in my line of vision, and I must ceaselessly revolve this legend as a declaration that one had gloves. Gott Mit Uns, I read, Gott Mit Uns … Was I going mad? No such luck.

  But I was not without means of soliciting leniency. I had just come from my dentist where I had taken leave of a corrupt incisor, and my jaw was so swollen that everybody felt sorry for me. Surely enough sympathy could be extracted from my wife to at least blunt the edge of the scene we were about to go through.

  The door opened and she brought in my third egg-malted for that day.

  “I think something’s bothering you,” she said as I sucked at the straw, fixing her with eyes that mooched pity.

  “Why?” I said, exaggerating the difficulty I had in talking, and giving her telling glimpses of the bloody gap in my face. I belched dismally and said, “Why do you say that?”

  “All this food! You’ve put away enough for an army the last week. Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us. Why do you laugh? You said so yourself in your column.”

  “You put things so much better than I,” I said, catching sight of my ruined grin in a wall mirror.

  “You’ve got suitcases under your eyes.”

  That reminded me of her “overnight bag” crack at Mrs. Thicknesse, in the repartee I fabricated for her and thanks to which she was now the rage of the international set. Ready to throw me over, everybody said. “What does she see in him?” I heard them all ask. Her latest went like this. Someone at Cannes had commented, “Clara Thicknesse makes friends easily.” Crystal had retorted, “And they make her easily.” How I writhed under that one, perhaps her best. I never begrudged her the time and effort that went into confecting rejoinders of which I was the butt, never complained or whined about the mental labor—often very great and undertaken to the now almost total neglect of my own fantasies—which was earmarked for her idealization. But the idealization had become so vivid to me that I was sometimes startled by the real-life dissimilarity to it. Once, for example, she had jarred me out of an intense concentration, during which I was trying to get her entrance right, at a party at Maugham’s at Cap Ferrat, by suddenly asking, “Where are you going all duked up?” I had replied, “Not to see anyone who says ‘all duked up’ and ‘my main meal.’” The wear and tear of all this had many angles and ramifications. I answered now about the suitcases under my eyes: “I work hard. I have four mouths to feed.”

  “Four?” she said, mentally tallying the members of the family. “How do you make four? Whose is the fourth?”

  “My own!”

  I gave the visor a tug and drank some more malted milk, cross with myself for letting myself get cross. Suddenly I had to have the whole business over with.

  “Won’t you sit down?” I said. What an idiotic opening to one’s wife. “I mean stay awhile. It’s a little cooler in here and I like to have you around,” I added, drawing on shorts. “You don’t even bother me when I’m working. Get your fingernail stuff or whatever you were doing and stay in here with me. Mother can keep the kids awhile. Listen to them thudding about overhead.”

  “I’m through with my nails—that country-club dance tonight, don’t forget—but I’ll sit down.” She did so with the kind of prim expectancy of women in plays who are about to get acquainted with a man. Which was probably about the size of it here!

  I sat down at my desk and began shuffling through some papers in elucidation of a man who can work with his wife around. The wooden chair was clammy against my skin. I gave the eyeshade another tug and sighed efficiently. “Now let me see. Where was I?” I faked some jottings, then I turned a little and said over my shoulder, “I saw Syd Phaneuf the other day.”

  This was a carefully planned opening. The program I had roughly devised was, first to speak in general terms about extramarital affairs, laying the groundwork for a tolerant viewpoint which would be highlighted by a display of that virtue in my own attitude toward human frailty. Then, having laid this groundwork, to disclose my own tangent I chose Syd Phaneuf to tee off with because his own marriage had been rocked by adultery but was now again on an even keel.

  “Syd Phaneuf, really? How is he?”

  “Oh, fine. Grace too. I’ve heard that from other sources, that everything is dandy between them after Syd’s little peccadillo. In fact they seem to be hitting it off better now than they did before he got mixed up with that Akron woman. Sometimes a thing like that is good for a relationship.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Plows it over. Opens two people’s eyes to what they’ve got, by putting it momentarily in jeopardy. Brings them together with a richer, deeper understanding.”

  I paused to let this sink in, more particularly to watch her in the wall glass in which she was visible if I raised myself in my chair a little. I could see her select a nut from a dish at her elbow and chew it. She swallowed and said, “There must be easier ways to find happiness.”

  “There are, but it isn’t the same thing. Happiness comes hard,” I said, writing. “You have to work for it, deserve it. Its price is eternal understanding, just as that of liberty is eternal vigilance.”

  I peeked in the mirror again to see how this line of thinking was going down. She selected and munched another nut.

  “Does Syd still make that funny noise out of the side of his teeth? That hotcha noise? Tsck, tsck.”

  “I don’t know. We only talked a few minutes on the street. I can find out.”

  “I don’t know why he makes that noise. He’s been through college.”

  “No he hasn’t. He’s only had two years.”

  “Of course I haven’t seen either of the Phaneufs in over a year, but at parties he was always kissing somebody’s wife behind a door. Such shenanigans.”

  “I agree with you. You mean if two people are going to have an affair, for heaven’s sake go ahead and have it.”

  “Certainly not! I think it’s disgusting.”

  “What would you do if you were the wife in a case like that?”

  She drew a finger across her throat and made a tearing noise, a good deal like the one she had just imitated of Syd Phaneuf’s, as a matter of fact. The gesture left a vivid red smear under her chin, indicating that her nails hadn’t fully dried, but the gesture itself was ambiguous. My next question was aimed at clearing up a point.

  “Whose throat would you cut, your own or your husband’s?” I asked, hoping for the best.

  “My husband’s.”

  I turned back to my desk and focused on the more general aspects of the subject. Evidently a little more groundwork had to be laid.

  “I was reading an article the other day by a noted anthropologist who claims that man is riot instinctively monogramous. His name is Schnewind. For that reason, tensions are built up in civilized man, and digressions are the rule rather than the exception, notably among the more evolved levels,” I said. If
this seems a little polished for domestic conversation it’s because I was reading it from some notes I had prepared for the occasion and which lay in a drawer which I had furtively slid open a crack. I had my back to her of course. “The very generalness of the defections proves that a more resilient attitude is imperative, Schnewind says.”

  “Cut open Schnewind’s head, and inside will be found a large helping of fried noodles.”

  I cleared my throat and continued: “Think of Warren Gamaliel Harding, said to have had a mistress while occupying the high office of …”

  I was reading the wrong card. I had jumped way ahead in my remarks, like a lecturer perceiving in panic that he has got his notes mixed. This was from a section about Noted Men Who Have Had Affairs, which was to have been led up to by a series of lesser examples shading modestly upward from Syd Phaneuf.

  “You think statisticians exaggerate?” I said, not having mentioned any statistics yet. “But if you stop to think, you realize that almost every couple we know has had something of the sort, provided they’ve been married long enough. There’s the Phaneufs, Ned and Phoebe Shields, that blowup the Hushneckers had—” I could have bit my tongue off, too late.

  “Blowup is right. I don’t blame Frieda for sticking him for every nickel he’s got.”

  I wheeled about in my chair. “They’ve been divorced?”

  “Where have you been?”

  I turned around and went back to my column copy.

  “What brings all this on?” I heard behind me, presently.

  My plan was like a road map in that it was hard to unfold in part. One premature word, an overemphasis, and she would see male trade-unionism coining at her. Maybe I had already given the game away.

  “Oh, we were talking about Syd, and then we got on this,” I said. “But the thing is, statistics show that the average mature American married male has a point-seven affair.”

  “A what affair?”

  “Seven-tenths of an affair. In other words, among ten married men, seven will have had complete extraconnubial relations. And this article says—and it was the point I was trying to make about Syd and Grace—that most marriages survive them. In the vast majority of cases the men remain model husbands after their misstep.” I rose and stood facing her with a tremulous smile. “I’ve got mine out of the way.”