She had picked up another nut, which never reached her lips.
“What are you talking about?”
“My seven-tenths of an affair. I’m that ail-American, typical, average man. My digression is out of the way and we’re statistically secure. For the rest of our lives.” My smile broadened as it became more tremulous. “Aren’t you glad?”
She said in a lowered, altered tone: “You’ve been seeing another woman?”
“We were fools. Caught in something that—I wrote some foolish letters which unfortunately fell into the hands of her husband, who’s going to name me in an adultery charge, but don’t you believe for one minute that—”
“Ohh!” she gasped, and turned away. “Do anything but don’t stand there and try to justify yourself.”
“Now don’t call me a liar before I’ve started. Wait till I’ve finished.”
“You’re finished as far as I’m concerned.”
“Don’t go. We’ve got to talk about this.”
She went to the door where she stood rigidly as though ill. “Put some more things on,” she said, turning her head away.
I hurried into the rest of my clothes, which lay scattered about.
“Do you think I don’t know how you feel? The man you’ve lived with all these years turning out to have feet of clay …”
“Feet! It’s your head that’s clay! Getting into a muddle like this.”
“I know I’ve got it coming, but damn it, for a man who himself has always been broad-minded—”
“Broad-minded is right. Where did you pick this one up? What’s her name?”
A funny thing was happening: she began to approximate the apotheosis.
It goes without saying that I was grateful to her for flaring up instead of bursting into tears. But she is one of those people whom anger makes articulate, and I was subjected to a rain of barbs at least as keen as those I had fashioned for discharge at Mrs. Thicknesse, in my penitential dreams. I was a Pygmalion whose statue had come to life, but to express enmity rather than love. That was still not the core of the irony. She had always lacked, to me, a certain sophistication, worldliness, call it what you will; she was too innocent of mind for me to feel us completely compatible. I had fixed all that. No sentimental, gullible girl stood here dishing out what-for. The woman of the world I had for years tried in vain to make her into was crystallizing magically before my eyes in a matter of minutes. Disillusionment with her husband did the trick.
“The lady’s name,” I said, “is Mrs. Thicknesse.”
She paced away from me.
“It’s not as bad as you think, and that other developments will make you think. It was only an intellectual friendship. She just appealed to a certain side of me. You must believe this. There was that facet of me wanting expression. I saw the opportunity and embraced it.”
“I can see you.”
“The real villain is her husband, a smooth rogue who has got hold of these letters, doctored ones, I’ll explain that later, and when they’re read in court—”
“Court!”
“I’m afraid so. He’s going to sue her for adultery which we have not committed and I’m to be named corespondent.”
She turned in a complete circle, plowing her hair upward.
“The way I feel … A man couldn’t ask for a better wife.”
“Please omit the flowers. Go on. Where does Mrs. Sickness live?”
“Thicknesse. In a house out on Bulfinch Highway. It’s an old place but nice, on beautiful grounds. They were formal once but have been let go, and the result is really quite picturesque. Really lovely grounds. Why, it’s just past that long curve where the new motels are. Have you seen them?”
“Not inside anyway.”
“Let’s see. Where were we?”
“Grounds. Probably for divorce.”
“Wonderful. You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Gould you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?” I picked up a cigarette and threw it down. “Oh, damn! This is a muddle I’m a victim of as well as you. If I could only make you skip everything up to now, the way I feel in relation to you, what it’s made of me. It’s not only that I’m going to wend my maze. Mend my ways. Please believe that the husband you see,” I went on, rather inappropriately as she had put her hands to her face to blot out the sight of me, “is ten times more loyal, more sure he wants you than when he walked into it.” Here I remembered something from the notes. “Our morals, like our bodies, are better for a little relaxing.” I realized as I uttered it that this couldn’t possibly be taken seriously and quickly added, “You don’t like my little joke?”
“Joke! Don’t make me laugh.”
“Wow.”
This time she opened the door and marched out. And as I dogtrotted beside her from room to room, crying “Touché!” and reiterating that I had been faithless in my fashion, I could feel the gap closing between us. We were now compatible. Completely. And as she threw a suitcase on the bed and began flinging things into it with the declaration that she was leaving me and never wanted to see me again as long as she lived, then ordered me out and slammed the door after me, I knew, as I had never known before, that she was the woman for me.
Sixteen
She decided, on second thought, in order to give the children as little sense of ruction as possible, to stay but to banish me to the spare room. This was my old room, the one to which I had been sent for paradoxes in the long ago. The dear dead days beyond recall. I remembered as I moved out of ours a pleasanter migration in which we had jocularly swapped sides of the bed, because we “both needed a change.” The switching of bedside truck such as reading matter and pet ashtrays and lamps, over the cords of which we hilariously tripped, had been only last month, yet it, too, was another time, and involved two other people.
Crystal had lost interest in the dance. I went, because anything was better than staying home, where in addition to everything else there was my mother, ever telepathically alert for trouble to get her teeth into. Besides, I wanted to at least look at the Thicknesse place which was on the way to the country club. I was to tell anybody who asked that Crystal wasn’t feeling well, as I had told my mother in explaining her absence from the dinner table. Dinner consisted of an incinerated rack of lamb fixed by myself, equally burnt potatoes, and popsicles. My mother, though outwardly hale on arrival at table, pleaded indisposition in the early stages of the meal and betook herself to her rooms.
Hanging over the table chin in hand, I watched Mike and Fillmore lap their sweets. These popsicles were blue, a color certainly absent from the gamut of latter-day ices as I knew them.
“What on earth flavor is that?” I asked Mike.
“Blue.”
“What flavor?”
“Blue.”
After a few more contented licks, each preceded by an anticipatory glance at his target, Mike asked:
“Does God go to church?”
“No.”
“What’s wholesale?”
“Lots and lots.”
“Why can’t you tickle yourself?” I had noticed him earlier in the day, rummaging in his ribs in a baffled attempt to provoke mirth.
“I don’t know,” I said, and rose to gather up the dishes. “The maid left because she was dissatisfied with her quarters. Should have paid her in half dollars, eh, Mike? Eh, Fillmore?”
The Thicknesse house was dark. The shutters were closed, the doors locked—as one knew without trying them. I got out of the car and peered in a garage window. The garage too was empty. Where had they gone? Thicknesse to gird himself for litigation, Mrs. Thicknesse—God only knew. Perhaps she had gone mad, deflecting the course of things … I stood bare-headed in the moonlit driveway and listened. The garden among whose byways we had ambled in another year whispered behind me, its trees rustling in a wind which had sprung off the Sound, setting astir within oneself, as it were, a whole foliage of association
s one wished he might shed as, simply as the trees did theirs, when the time of tempests came. I climbed back into the car and sped for the country club.
Here all was light and revelry. The nearest place I could find to park seemed half a mile away.
I locked the car and started toward the clubhouse across the golf links.
“That’s illegal you know,” said a familiar voice. Nickie drifted out of the shadows, hand resting on sheathed baton, into the moonlight.
“Are you on duty here tonight?” I asked, taking in his uniform. “I thought you were at the summer theater.” These were both nuisance chores at which local cops took their turns. Nickie had been assigned to the trafficdirecting stint at the theater for the night, because they were doing Lady Windermere’s Fan.
“Took care of the arrival jam. Have to be back at eleven for the leaving. Dundee’s sick and I’m filling in here too as long as I’m out.”
“I’m sorry to hear about Dundee. Chris is sick too.”
“Oh? I’m sorry to hear about that.”
We strolled toward the swimming pool where Lila had by prearrangement grabbed a table for four of us. She was alone at it, behind a highball, chin in hand, in the fashion favored by all of us that summer. We joined her and I explained Crystal’s absence again. Nickie relaxed and talked for all the world as though he were in summer linens like the rest of the men and not sitting there in a cop’s habit—for he had learned the frustrate’s trick of inverting a disadvantage, the shock value of being a flat-foot who talked about the Pre-Raphaelite movement. As he began to now in a loud voice. People at nearby tables turned and looked, but none came over. Friends who might once have stopped by now waved and hurried past in consternation. A waiter bending over him with some muttered challenge was sent packing by a membership card which Nickie whisked from his wallet.
Lila looked into her drink. Nickie addressed his remarks on Dante Gabriel Rossetti to me, ignoring her tolerantly, as a man who has simply married beneath his intellectual level. A delicate Swiss watch who must make the best of a union with a dollar Ingersoll.
“How about the Van Allstyne jewel robbery?” I asked in a pause. “Do you think it was Cheshire?”
Nickie had no doubt about it. Cheshire had been run in again for questioning but had wriggled out of things, as related to me at dinner with Lammermoor. Nickie fell to the discussion with zest, for he had been putting his mind zealously and painstakingly on that crucial case.
“Cheshire could actually have looked into Mrs. Van Allstyne’s bedroom from that scaffold where I determined he’d been painting at the time. With a good pair of binoculars I mean,” he said. “But again the son of a gun’s alibi is watertight.”
“What is it?” Lila asked, looking up with the first show of interest in the conversation. I remember her glance, as I do every detail of these next few moments, because it was only about two minutes later that disaster struck.
“Well,” said Nickie, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs, “the time of the burglary has been fixed at one twenty-five in the afternoon, from an electric clock which was stopped at that time. It had been standing on her dressing table and was knocked to the floor and unplugged in the course of the thief’s ransacking drawers for the jewel box. I ought to say that another link in the chain of evidence against him is Mrs. Van Allstyne’s testimony that she had discussed her jewels and where she kept them with a woman she’d been lunching with at the Jolly Fisherman when. Cheshire was waiting on tables there.”
“Good. Everything fits so far,” I said.
“Well now.” Nickie uncrossed his legs and leaned toward us, warming to the subject. I noticed that in spite of his confident manner his face was drawn and his color poor. He had been thinking of little else for days. All his eggs were in this basket. “With those binoculars I know he owns because he goes to the races, Cheshire could have seen Mrs. Van Allstyne leave the house with her maid and drive off to do the marketing, as she did that day. She’s a widow, and since the maid is the only servant, that would leave the house empty. Pete saw his chance, stole into the back yard from the alleyway that runs behind the restaurant too, and shinnied up the rainpipe that goes along the bedroom window. It’s been established that he wasn’t on the scaffold painting at the time, but he has an airtight alibi. He had finished painting the white part of the building and had to go to the hardware store for paint to fill in the letters and the lobsters, which were only done in outline. They were to be filled in in red paint, which he hadn’t bought yet. His story’s been checked and he did go to the hardware store. I’ve retraced his walk from the job to the store and back, and allowing for five minutes in the store and another five he spent dropping in for a Coke somewhere, it accounts for forty minutes of his absence from the scaffold. But the testimony of others proves that he was gone for a full hour at least. Problem: how to account for the remaining twenty minutes?”
“How do you?” I asked. I recall noting again that Lila was watching Nickie and listening closely.
“Cheshire’s story is that he had been given a paint chart with two shades of red marked by the proprietor. Either would be O.K., whichever he could get. But Cheshire claims that he had begun to take pride in the job and wanted to get the exact shade of a lobster. So—this is his story—he walked around by way of Captain Ambrose’s waterfront market to have a look at the lobsters and match the color.”
“Why couldn’t he do it in the restaurant?” I asked. “They serve them there.”
“It didn’t occur to him to do this until he was on the way, he says. By that time it was easier to drop by the market than go back. He only stopped at Captain Ambrose’s to see which of the marked shades of red was truer to life, and went on, but it could account for the other twenty minutes. The alibi has a flimsy sound, but how can you break it down?”
“Easy,” said Lila.
“How?” Nickie asked, smiling tolerantly.
“Because only cooked lobsters are red. Live ones are brown.”
Now his own color was better, Nickie’s; lobster-red, you might say. But only for a moment. Then it drained out of his face leaving a pallor which was conspicuous even under the dim, mottling lights of the Japanese lanterns.
“So he couldn’t have been doing any matching at any fish market. The whole story is ridiculous.”
I said, “Most fish markets sell both kinds.”
“Not Captain Ambrose. You ought to know that. You’ve been there often enough.”
“But surely Cheshire wouldn’t make a mistake like that. He must have seen both kinds every day at the restaurant,” I said, my voice shrill with fear.
Nickie was lowering his drink to the table. “Not necessarily,” he said in a tone that was odd and dry despite his just having copiously wet his whistle. “You see, as a waiter his sight of lobsters was preponderantly of the cooked ones, and could very well have blotted out his impression of the live ones—if he ever did see them. At any rate he forgot about the difference in the heat of hammering out his alibi.”
“It could have slipped anybody’s mind,” I said. “It was too obvious not to be overlooked by the active intelligence.”
Nickie wet his lips with his tongue. We all three looked thoughtfully into our glasses and then raised them simultaneously, so that someone glancing over might have thought we were drinking to something. Which could scarcely have been less the case.
Nickie rose and shoved his chair in under the table.
“I really must get over to the theater,” he said, consulting his wrist watch. “It’ll be out in fifteen or twenty minutes, and it’s a nightmare when there’s nobody on traffic.”
“Sure,” I said.
He seemed to hesitate, and we, motionless in our chairs, with him, as though jammed in some horrible traffic of the nerves which was beyond any hope of organizing. Lila impulsively put out a hand to him, and out of her woman’s depth of compassion said—and no one will ever know whether it was the right thing or the wrong: “I’m
such a buttinsky. Always finishing people’s stories for them.”
“Always, Sis,” I said, my feet dancing under the table in rage and pain. “I remember one time, I mean the way she seems to know what’s on the tip of people’s tongue …”
“We won’t tell anyone. No one need ever know …”
Nickie drained his glass standing up and said, “You two have a good time. I’ll be back in about an hour.”
I watched him shoulder his way through the crowd past the far edge of the swimming pool and out across the golf course, its groomed grass silver in the streaming moonlight. The last thing I saw was his broad back vanishing into the shadows of a cypress grove which skirted the final hole.
I looked at Lila. She was sitting with her hands in her lap, her head bent. At last, darting me a glance, she picked up her glass and quickly emptied it.
“I suppose you realize,” I said, “that you’ve just destroyed your marriage.”
Seventeen
The rest of that night remains a jumbled but nonetheless dramatic blur of recollections, like the climaxes of a pageant witnessed while one is intoxicated. Which as a matter of fact I soon was. I’m not sure of the precise order of events but I remember at one point a woman imploring her wet-blanket husband to stay. “The night is still young,” she said. “Yes, but you’re not,” answered he. That must have been relatively far along in what I do remember—after I caught my last sight of Lila waltzing lethargically in the arms of a bond salesman named Nat Williams, as I made my way out of the dance floor out onto the lawn where stood the chance booths, and specifically toward a pair of rangy girls who were standing together somewhat off from the crowd.
The woman in charge of arrangements for the affair, a benefit, was an industrial psychological consultant who was currently being retained by a corporation with feelings of anxiety. She was the one for turning every opportunity to therapeutic account, and at her suggestion the jobs of hostesses had been given these two gawky girls on the ground that they above all needed the experience of greeting people, to build up their poise. The oncoming crowds had instead shattered what little self-confidence they might have had, and as a consequence they spent most of the evening cowering in corners together. I made it my job to try to put them at their ease.
Comfort Me with Apples Page 18
