Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  Sherry Budd arrived one warm afternoon toward the end of summer. She was a small sumptuosity in a dress of blue silk which wasn’t so much dress as another layer of epithelium. Its neckline, nowhere near her neck, was secured by a drawstring which ill contained the tender chucks within. What struck the nervous system was a plectrum so crude as scarcely to constitute temptation. I laughed at the transparency of Lammermoor’s gambit. What kind of fool did he take me for? Sending this creature to lure me no doubt to a worse vulnerability than that from which I had just climbed free, with correspondingly higher profits to himself. That was why he had solicited my confidence by so freely releasing the letters. “Confidence” was the right word for this game. Well, let him fancy himself another Yellow Kid, but get himself another mark!

  I began by not shutting the door, then or during subsequent interviews (for I would discharge my side of the bargain, and besides I was curious). Sherry made for the sofa I had in my office to take naps on, curling up on it rather too felinely for neural excavation, but anyhow. She started to talk about her childhood. She had a habit of shifting about on the couch, so that I was always presented with a decolletage or its thermal equivalent. So as not to be accused of aerial reconnaissance, I paced at the other end of the room or sat listening in the club chair, with her behind me. I would sit there tasting my own worthiness and smiling secretly at what she must think of the Jesuitical back offered to her.

  “When I was a little girl,” she related in a high yet somehow throaty voice, “we lived in a rambling house on the outskirts of Bridgeport, and blee-me, it was no fun. It was old and drafty. My father had a greenhouse behind it. He grew flowers for commercial use. The greenhouse was really his sole love. Until one day.”

  I waited in my chair, notebook in lap and pencil poised.

  “The greenhouse was pretty big and so was his business. He had to have a helper, he said. Of all the applicants who answered his want ad, the best one he said was a woman who lived near there. He hired her. He said she had experience. She did, all right. I used to take coffee out to him in the middle of the morning, but now he told me that wasn’t necessary any more. But one day I went out there anyway with some. He and the woman were on a pile of peat moss over which they had thrown a blanket. I was shocked. I didn’t know what to do. For days I thought to myself, Shy tell Mother? Shy?”

  “And did you?”

  “No. So hence it’s been bottled up inside of me all these years. Mixing up my whole viewpoint and coloring my whole attitude toward men.”

  I made a notation, then asked: “What are your current connections, if any?”

  Here she described being “interested” in somebody who answered to Lammermoor’s description without a doubt.

  “The thing is that I cling to him, but emotionally, not letting it get physical. I suppose I’m looking for a father image and that’s why I can’t cross the line and become physical with any man.”

  Now I thought I understood the nature of Lammermoor’s agony all right; involved with a girl who held him at arm’s length at the same time she dressed, sprayed and deported herself as aphrodisiacally as the law allowed. Poor Lammermoor. I drew myself back to the subject at hand.

  “The thing you have never been able to do is forgive your father,” I said, rising and walking about the room. “You extend your animosity to every man you meet. What we must do is make you forgive him. When you’ve done that, you’ll be able to judge every male on his own merits. That will be the object of our treatment.”

  “That makes a lot of sense. How can you make me do that?”

  It was a problem. Her father sounded like a shabby sonofabitch indeed. Still he was gone now, and what difference did it make how we silvered him o’er, if it meant easing the burdens of someone yet alive? At last I had an answer worked out.

  “The temperature in a hothouse is high,” I said, leaning back against a window sill and looking over at her. “The air is close, heavy, exactly like that in the tropics. Don’t you think that being thrown together under these circumstances must be as demoralizing as it is in the jungle countries? It’s been proved that that kind of heat has a pathological sexual effect, especially in combination with the suggestive vegetative lushness that goes with it and that went with it in the case of your father’s day-to-day environment.”

  I watched her as she nodded thoughtfully. She was sitting up on the sofa now, lengthwise, with her hand on the back.

  “Suppose your father had been an official in the British Colonial service, assigned, say, to Tanganyika. And suppose rumors reached you that he was conducting himself in a manner like that you’ve described. Wouldn’t you have the same tolerance we customarily show toward men who have gone native, as the saying is?”

  Again she nodded. I drove my point home.

  “Crossing the few hundred feet between your kitchen and that greenhouse every morning, your father crossed the five thousand miles of ocean that separate us from the steaming countries of the south. He became a primitive. He went native. Think of your father, out there on that blanket over the peat moss, as having gone to pieces in the tropics,” I finished, “and I think you’ll find it in your heart to forgive him.”

  She lowered her head and looked into her lap.

  “How much is that?” she said. “How much is all this brilliant advice costing me? I never thought I’d find anybody this keen, and this understanding. What you say is absolutely right. I must learn to forgive him, starting today.”

  Feeling this was the right note on which to close the interview, I set my notebook down on the desk and said, “That will be all for today.”

  “I can’t thank you enough,” she said, rising. She hesitated with her bag open. “I don’t know how much you charge. By the interview or send a bill for the whole—?”

  “No charge,” I said, waving the query off. “Any help I can be is reward enough.”

  She came the next week, by appointment, and the one after that, and the one after that. She declared that I was helping her a great deal, in fact that she looked forward to our visits intensely.

  “I suppose I’m clinging to you,” she said at last, looking at the floor.

  I got behind my desk.

  “This must be what they call transference,” I said in an unsteady tone, casting an anxious eye at the open door. “It’s a stage a patient goes through, and our object will be to get you through it as fast as possible. What’s the matter with Lammermoor? I thought you were clinging to him.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “What did you dream about last night?”

  “You.”

  “We can’t go on meeting like this,” I told her the next time. The week after that I was my brisk, efficient self again. Folding my hands on the desk I asked:

  “Now then, what did you dream last night?”

  “I didn’t sleep. I felt I had to see you. I was going to call you at home.”

  “No.”

  “Hypmatize me.”

  “I will not.”

  “So I can at least get some rest. Go on—hypmatize me.”

  “Never.”

  “I love you.”

  I stepped over and closed the door.

  “This is crazy,” I said.

  “I know. It’s just the way it is.”

  “What about your father?”

  “I’ve forgiven him.”

  I stood over her, holding my eyeglasses firmly by the braces.

  “Now, look. This has gone far enough,” I said. “And you can go tell Lammermoor for me—”

  She flew to her feet.

  “That’s all finished. Haven’t you got eyes in your head? Oh, everything you suspected about us is true—that he put me up to this and all. But I’m through with him. It’s you I love. I love you, love you, love you!” she repeated with grueling zest.

  “Shh! Someone might hear you,” I said. “Now sit down there calmly and listen to what I’m going to tell you. Because I’m only going to s
ay it once.”

  I got out the bottle of whisky and poured her a drink. I had one myself. I got down to brass tacks. I told her we were through. I made it plain that she was never to set foot in here again, and certainly never to phone my home under pain of death. She protested at first, but finally gave in. She said in a low, quite controlled tone: “Then I want to pay you what I owe you.”

  “I don’t want anything. I’ve told you that.”

  “But don’t you see, it’ll help me realize this was a purely professional relationship, as you say. Get the other nonsense out of my head. It’s the best beginning I can make toward that and besides, it’s something I want very much to do. For my own self-respect if nothing else. I don’t care what you do with the check. Give it to your favorite charity, eat it. The important thing is the act of my giving it to you.” She had produced a pen and checkbook and was already writing on the arm of the sofa.

  Since I had no intention of doing anything with it but tear it up, I saw no harm in letting her draft the check and drop it on my desk. She suggested a hundred dollars and I said that was all right with me. I just wanted to get her out of there as fast as I could. Before going, she asked me to recommend a sedative. I told her only a physician could do that, but did give her the name of a new pill, Easerol, for which no prescription was required. She asked me to jot it on a slip of paper in case she should forget.

  After bundling her out the door, I poured myself another stiff one. Sipping it gratefully, I congratulated myself on having wound up the nuisance and extricated myself from it as adroitly as I had. I was free, free! My eye fell on the check, lying between my two feet which I had hoisted up on the desk. I reached for it and was about to tear it up when something made me pause. Instead of destroying it, I put it in my wallet, tucking it well down in a secret compartment. I couldn’t have said then just why I did that. But I wasn’t long in finding out.

  We say that nothing succeeds like success, and so, I suppose, nothing deteriorates like deterioration. Lila held fast to her ultimatum, but not to the exclusion of running over to the apartment now and then to try a little verbal persuasion on the hermit. One night she phoned me ten minutes after she’d left our house on one of these often impromptu descents.

  “Can you come right over?” she said. “He doesn’t know me.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Nickie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I’m saying. He was sitting in the armchair with the glazed expression when I walked in, and said, ‘Who are you?’ Then he asked me what I wanted. He doesn’t recognize me.”

  “Great Scott, he’s denying you.”

  “Can you come right over?”

  I did, and what she’d reported was true. But he did know me. In fact he greeted me with every indication of being delighted to see me, if not of having been expecting me. He rose and got into a tweed jacket.

  “Shall we go have some of the Greek’s alleged coffee?” he proposed with the airy unconcern of ten years back. A delicate chill went up my spine.

  Lila now insisted on going back to him, but I talked her out of it. It seemed to me precisely the wrong thing to do. She could do him no good, and the sight of her might make him worse. “Who’ll look after him?” she asked.

  “I will,” I said. “You stay at the house. I’ll move in with him.” I went on to explain that I was in the doghouse anyway and would be killing two birds with one stone by moving into a house where I was needed as well as out of one where I wasn’t wanted. Besides, I had a plan for straightening him out.

  Nickie had made reality livable by editing from it what was insupportable. So far so good. But why banish the person responsible for the incident that was repugnant to him? Why couldn’t merely purging the incident itself from his memory be enough? My aim was to manipulate the factors in the case in such a way that he could take his wife back into his cognition while the episode for which he could not forgive her remained excised. It would be a delicate operation, to be performed slowly and subtly through the day-to-day contacts which living with him would afford me, and without his realizing what was going on. The important thing was to keep him out of the hands of some quack who might botch the job and leave him off somewhere in the backside of beyond.

  So I moved in and we batched together. I kept his environment reduced to as narrow a compass as possible. I made no reference to my own marriage, at first. He thought he was around eighteen or nineteen again, and I too, and that our favorite haunt was still the Samothrace. His kids slipped his mind, along with his wife, as was to be expected. In fact, he expunged from his ken everything that had happened since the old days. He wrote plays again, also a little verse. Correspondence with the dreadful Al Roquefort was revived, experiments in half-assonance resumed. He knew he worked for the Tidy Didy, which job he regarded as a stopgap until his plays were produced or his poetry published. He became a boulevardier again, strolling with the renewed ease of one who has got out from behind a perambulator. Alone of all of us, he seemed in excellent spirits. He spoke once of sinking into eternal darkness but nothing ever came of it.

  “Let’s go to the Greek’s tonight,” he suggested at breakfast one morning. “I don’t know why you keep resisting the idea. He has liquor now, you know. Since Labor Day.”

  “How’s he doing?” I coughed and scuffled my feet about so I wouldn’t hear Nickie’s answer.

  The thing was, I knew very well the Greek had acted on my advice, from the brewery name in red neon letters now over his door, but, afraid to learn how things were going, I had postponed dropping in to see him. I knew that if they were going poorly he would give me a bad time. That was why I preferred facing him alone first. So I pulled myself together and dropped in that afternoon.

  The Curator looked as though he had been waiting for me.

  “Well, well,” he said, raising his head from a newspaper he was reading at the cash register. “Look who’s here.”

  “Hello, hello, hello!” I advanced to the counter with a pantomime of soaping my hands. Beverage glasses were geometrically ranged among the ice-cream ware, and two shiny new draft taps flanked the soda-water spigots. Whisky bottles with pouring spouts also stood ranked along the base of the back mirror, and among these gleaming props a second pair of moose eyes, the brother-in-law’s, quietly awaited me. The scene had the expectant gravity of a tribunal. I saw that I had my choice of stools.

  “I haven’t seen you lately,” Nachtgeborn said, coming down behind the combination bar and soda fountain. “You weren’t here for the Grand Opening. There was room.”

  “I happened to be out of town at the time on business.”

  “Some firm that you’re in the advisory capacity of?” The Greek brushed a shred of tobacco from the otherwise immaculate counter with his little finger.

  “I should have sent you a congratulatory wire, I know.” I put myself astride a stool and rubbed my hands some more. “Well, so! How’s business?”

  “Russian.”

  “Russian by the door,” the brother-in-law put in. They operated like a vaudeville team.

  “Let me see,” I said. “I think I’ll have a—Tom Collins! The days are drawing in again.”

  “Yeah, they’re drawing in.”

  “Is nothing changed then?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say nothing is. Some of the teen-agers we used to get for Cokes, their parents won’t let them come in now that hard liquor is being served here.”

  I saw that I was not to be let off lightly. Nachtgeborn donned his spectacles, which he had just removed, and began to thumb through a liquor recipe book, looking for the one for Tom Collins. The brother-in-law hung over his shoulder.

  “Oh, give me a glass of beer,” I said. Pasted to the mirror I saw a homemade sign which read: WET YOUR APPETITE WITH ONE OF OUR TASTY COCKTAILS. I bowed my head in misery. Nachtgeborn drew the beer, with every indication of its being an operation not frequently required, trimmed the collar and set it before me.
I drank to their health and said “Ahh!” with false gusto. I watched the Greek swab the counter with a fixed gaze, as though something in the act mesmerized me. Pausing to scratch at a blemish with his thumbnail, the Greek said, “Any more ideas?”

  I swung around on the stool and looked down the street.

  “All right, now let’s see. Four taverns in one block,” I said analytically.

  “This neighborhood is going to pot.”

  “Yours is the only place with any character, Nachtgeborn.” I glanced over at the nickelodeon. “Let’s have a tune!” I said, making for it.

  “How about ‘Ida, sweet as apple cider?’” said the Greek, whose gift for irony was apparently infinite. “You haven’t brought the family in for chicken and pilaf lately.” He drifted over.

  “Like I used to?” I put a nickel in the piano slot.

  “Mrs. Sleet was in last week,” he said, referring to my high school English teacher. “With her nephew.”

  “He sells clever remarks,” the brother-in-law said. He held aloft a sign reading, WE CAN’T ADMIT YOU TO THE BAR UNLESS YOU’RE OF LEGAL AGE. I opened my mouth to comment but was cut off by the nickelodeon starting up. I waved a finger rhythmically in the air and rocked my head with a smile. However, the piano stopped almost immediately with a strangled groan and some of its giblets were heard to clatter to the tile floor. I wished we were all dead and in hell. But I ordered a hamburger, which I didn’t want any more than I did the beer, and gnawed it moodily while the Curator hinted that the drinking trade I had so recklessly foretold was sitting this very minute in the new Roof Garden at the Windsor, three blocks away.

  “Roof Garden! On top of a three-story hotel!” I said, inviting them to laugh with me at this uproarious thing. Revived, I drew a distinction between culture and mere swank, looking the Greek straight in the eye as I stated that all that was good in our civilization we owed to the golden Athenian age.

  “We’re morally bankrupt,” I finished.

  “We’re a damn sight worse than that. We’re bankrupt.”

  Having again drawn off the Greek’s accumulated venom for the time being, I felt easier about going back there in the company of my cloven friend. Needless to say, visiting the Samothrace with him was the least of the hazards in the obstacle course over whose hurdles we fraternally flew. The mechanics of living with him were too involved to recapitulate in full here: how, if he was single, we were to explain the arrival of mail for a woman with his name, the presence of her and the children’s effects, and so on and so on. I let him try to account for it, as the best way of driving home that something was wrong. He felt that we were renting a furnished place sublet us by a relative. But each explanation bred a new discrepancy, and finally I told him frankly what was what. I said he was married and had suffered a blow on the head. Which was after all pretty much the case. I filled him in slowly, clarifying as fast as I thought he could take. I took Crystal to see him and he recognized her. (She had had to be let in on everything, of course). Had he got worse I should naturally have called in help; but he got, as I am implying, better. He recalled what he damn well wanted to, and taking his own sweet time. Perhaps he knew more than he let on, even to himself. For the game was being played out within himself. The fabulous fish we hunted, the Ego, sported at depths impenetrable to himself, and in those dim, washed solitudes where even the ships of memory sink. One of the authorities over whom I now continually pored in my spare time put it this way. He said that, rather than plunge after that fish and lash up a great froth and maybe scare it to the bottom for good, you try to coax it to the surface. That was why I stressed one thing every chance I got: namely, Nickie’s brilliant deductive powers, which remained unimpaired throughout.