Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  “I’ll find that out next time. I’m having drinks with him Sunday. Justice moves with dignity, you know.”

  On Monday, I learned that the major evidence was the check I had accepted as payment for services (and deliberately endorsed, of course); the slip of paper with the name of the drug written on it; and something I hadn’t, certainly, suspected existed. It was a diary of Sherry’s, in which was presumably recorded from day to day the agonies she had undergone in the course of my thrall.

  “It’s not much to stand on, as Bruno knows,” Sipperly said. “I think we can wind this up without any trouble in a week or two. Oh, and Mr. Clammidge phoned this morning. He said to bill the paper for my fee. So there’s nothing for you to worry about.” And with a smile, he clapped a hand on my shoulder.

  It was now high time to tell my wife what was going on. I had meant to reveal it when my danger was at its peak, but the gravity was draining so rapidly from my plight that the minimum which could alarm her on my behalf might already have been passed. I therefore made all haste in getting over to the house, stopping off only at a drugstore which carried Schrafft’s candies.

  The house seemed empty. Lila I knew to be shopping in town. Her oldest child and ours would be in nursery school, the rest napping or upstairs with my mother, who took the children over part of every day. That left only my wife to be accounted for. I found her at last on the back porch. She was sitting on the glider in a halo of gnats—which had been given a new lease on life in the cuff on a boy’s pants.

  I set down a wrapped box of peppermint sprills beside her on the glider, and said directly, “I’m in trouble again.”

  She drew the length of thread through the cloth and pulled it tight, the needle aloft. Then she thrust the needle back down for another stitch.

  “Don’t say anything till I’m through,” I said into the stony silence. “At an earlier stage in the Mrs. Thicknesse business, now so happily concluded, the letters fell into the hands of a guy who gave them back to me on a promise that I would psychoanalyze his girl, for free. I did, knowing he was trying to lure me into some kind of a mess with her. We’ll see in a moment why I finally walked into the trap. But first, a word about my initial reactions.”

  I unwrapped the peppermint sprills and offered her one. She shook her head without taking her eyes from the sewing. I ate one, walking slowly around the porch. I stopped and shook my head in amused recall.

  “Picture the scene if you will. This ravishing creature stretched out on the couch in my office, all there for the taking for your obedient servant. Well,” I related, strolling, “I was glad for the temptation. I welcomed it. Why? It would be a test of my immunity to that disease against which my previous bout had presumably left me with sufficient antibodies—to revert to the figure you’ll remember I used to explain the other. You know how the writers for the Reader’s Digest entitle pieces ‘Thank God for My Ulcers’ and so on. Just so I said, “Thank God for my previous affair.’ For a stumble may prevent a fall, and we are indeed strongest where broken.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “What?”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  I drew in a breath which drained the porch of gnats. Which lungful I immediately coughed back, as being a man and not a nightjar which subsisted on such fare. I paused long enough to scribble a supplication on the roof of my mouth with my tongue—hastily—there was so little time. Then I went on:

  “Strongest where broken, but even then it is best to be safe. So you’ll be glad to hear I took precautions.”

  She put the sewing down.

  “Yes, I’m glad you did that,” she said stiffly, and rose and walked into the house.

  I stood looking after her open-mouthed. Open-mouthed I heard her march upstairs. This was the end! I was about to spring up the stairs after her and straighten out the muddle, explain what kind of precautions I had meant, when I said to myself, Wait. Now you have the grievance you want and from an unexpected quarter. What I had been playing for was to bring her to my side when others wronged me. Now she was chief among those who were wronging me. What luck! Work this right and I would have balanced the moral ledger by evening: she she would be owing me an apology rather than I her. The longer I permitted the misunderstanding to continue, the more time she would have to look back on as having caused me suffering in.

  So I stayed out on the porch awhile, eating peppermint sprills and imagining to myself the scene that would follow. I would go to the bedroom where she undoubtedly was, and, taking it from where I was open-mouthed, say, “Oh, I see what you mean. Oh, how could you! I only meant so and so.” Then after I had straightened that part of it out, I would reveal the deed of moral worth, rare in our time, that was behind it all. “Oh, darling, how can you ever forgive me,” she would say, and I would answer something like, “No, it’s all my fault. I should have made myself clearer. There, there, now let’s forget it all, shall we? We’ve got a bit of a row to hoe—together.”

  Five minutes passed, ten. I paced on the porch in a kind of nervous ecstasy, hoping I wasn’t letting the fires of confusion burn too long. This had to be seized at the psychological moment, for the reconciliation to follow right. I flung away a cigarette I was smoking and hurried up the stairs two at a time.

  Standing at the closed bedroom door, I could hear indeterminate noises inside. Rustlings, a slid-out drawer. I turned the knob expecting to find the door locked. It wasn’t.

  “What do you want?” Crystal said from over an open dresser drawer.

  “Oh, I see what you mean. Oh, my God.” I stumbled blindly to the bed with my face in my hands. “How could you know me so little?” I sat on the bed rocking from side to side, watching her through my fingers. The scene suddenly had such reality that tears came to my eyes. “All I mean was that I took safeguards against even suspicion of anything—kept the door open every interview, and so on. Do you think I could want a little package of sachet like that? Even if I hadn’t known her game? Well, anyhow,” I continued, able to walk about again, “the long and short of it is that I thought there’d be a case in it for Nickie. One last chance for him to rehabilitate himself. And he’s got it. He’s out every spare minute investigating this chit and her friend. If he muffs it, good-by. If he comes through, everything may be all right. I feel the risk was worth taking to save a life. Did you think I was thinking of myself?”

  She sat down on a bench before the dresser.

  “But how can Nickie do anything for you? I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Read this,” I drew the summons from my pocket and handed it to her.

  Her face darkened as she took in its substance. When she reached the end of it, she put an elbow on the dresser and leaned her head in her hand.

  “Please don’t reproach yourself,” I said.

  She lifted her head “What in the name …?”

  “Just because you put pressure on me to play ball with the office? Do what Clammidge wanted, get mixed up in this kind of thing to where I could get maneuvered into such a box—is that what you’re thinking? Forget it, darling. It’s no more than any loyal husband and father would do—what he has to, to keep his job. So forget it. I won’t let you say what you’re thinking, about this or that other little misunderstanding a minute ago.”

  “Have you called a lawyer about this?”

  “Clammidge did. He feels guilty. The whole thing is trumped up, except for the practicing psychiatry without a license. That’s a very grave charge. But I do wish you’d all stop crucifying yourselves on my account. Clammidge embarrassed me with his attitude; gratitude for being man enough to go it alone. Practically saving the paper to hear him tell it. So let’s not hear any more about it, or that other either.”

  “What other?” her blank expression asked.

  “That one who sailed through bloody seas, who put his hand in the flame for his friend. Courage? A touch of moral grandeur maybe? Cut it out!”

  “Fifty thousand dollars!�
� she said, reading the summons again. “It’ll ruin us.”

  I felt justified in concealing the true size of our danger until some acknowledgment had been made of my valor. I therefore turned and walked to the window, where I stood gazing out.

  “So they’re hanging me in the morning.” I shrugged. “It was something I had to do. Because there are still standards. So let’s not hear any more about it. About that high fealty to firm and family, not to mention friendship which if it be truly that—”

  “The Pick will bail you out financially, at least behind the scenes, won’t they?”

  I shrugged again.

  “They’d better! They got you into this and they’re going to get you out, if I have to go down there and beat it out of them with my own two hands.”

  Good. I turned, to welcome whatever other words might-fly, like birds, across the gulf between us. But she seemed to bridle as she said:

  “Oh, Chick, how could you be so foolish as to stick your neck out this far?”

  I played my last card—my trump.

  “I don’t think your father would have said that to me, Chris,” I answered softly.

  She jerked her head away and stared at the dresser-top.

  “That’s the final reason why I wanted to do this thing. I’ve always felt—how shall I put it?—not big enough for the mantle I inherited. Walking around in shoes not my size at all. I wanted to do something that would bring me more nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with the man from whom I got my job.”

  I was standing behind her now, a little to the left, to avoid any reflections in the mirror. I saw one shoulder twitch and the fair head drop.

  “I don’t know how this will turn out, but at least I’ll have done one decent thing. I don’t suppose he thought much of me in life. Maybe I can fix that yet.”

  Her eyes were institutions of mercy which must decide in their own good time when to stop dunning me for payment and start binding up my wounds. Her hands lay on the dresser-top like pale, malingering starfish. I wanted to reach down and take them in mine, but I knew better than to press this moment. I had gained enough for now. Beneath the frostline lay the eternal feminine warmth. Wait.

  “Now how about something to eat,” I said, “maybe after I run up and see the kids and Mother. I’m starved.”

  “Starved.” She threw up her hands. “Other people can’t eat when they’re in trouble. Come on, I’ll fix you something…. Anyhow, that’ll be something in your favor. No jury could picture you a Lothario very easily. With that pot you’re getting.”

  While Sipperly concerned himself with negotiations, and Nickie scrounged around on his side of the street, I prepared for the eventuality of a court appearance by trying to take off a little weight. To that end I permitted myself to be methodically flailed by a giant Swede in a gymnasium which I joined for the purpose. I lost no weight, but the violence of the Swede’s exertions suggested it might be otherwise with him. I walked both to work and on brisk hikes into the nearby countryside, armed with a stick to fend off the numerous regional dogs in whom apparently boiled an accumulated resentment toward a man remembered as someone barreling down the road in an Oldsmobile to their constant peril. I got more exercise out of swinging the cane than out of walking, but in any case my exertions were as fruitless as the Swede’s. I did extract from these all-weather rambles a certain lyric sustenance; I had a sense that, for housewives glancing from their cottage windows and for passing motorists, I pulled the whole scene together by offering to the eye that solitary figure for which all landscapes cry; of representing, as I strode cross-lots or climbed a stile, abiding values. I walked everywhere I had to go, determined on the satisfaction of at least looking like the part of which I was being falsely accused. I wanted an acquittal, but not one which I would have to be ashamed of myself about. I walked to Sipperly’s. What he had to report was that he was making an “interlocutory motion” before the court for the right to examine the documents on which the plaintiff was basing her case. I had asked what the chances were of getting our hands particularly on that diary, which I wanted Nickie to see as possible grist for his genius, and Sipperly had offered to make a stab at it The motion would be entered on what he called “short calendar,” evidently a term used for the court’s availability, every Friday, to hear preliminary motions and other incidental business connected with cases due to come up.

  “It’ll be next Friday or the one after,” he assured me.

  “Can we all go? This friend I was telling you about too?”

  Sipperly shrugged Ms shoulders, a gesture almost imperceptible in his case, they were so thin. “Why not?”

  I walked home and when I got there I weighed myself, gingerly boarding the bathroom scale. There was some change but not much; I had gained four pounds.

  The reason was not hard to find. I returned from my excursions ravenous, and as a result (taking the fueling of a furnace as the metaphor for caloric consumption) I had been shoveling it in as fast as I was burning it up—faster. At about this time there fell into my hands a document containing some computations made by a Dr. L. H. Newburgh of the medical school of the University of Michigan, who had done work in the metabolism of obesity. A man weighing two hundred and fifty pounds, he wrote, “will have to climb twenty flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread.” A horizontal walk of a mile will reduce the man’s weight “only 12½ grams (less than one-half ounce). He must walk thirty-six miles to rid himself of one pound of adipose tissue—how disappointing!”

  On the basis of Dr. Newburgh’s findings, I figured that the only way for me to make appreciable inroads on myself on foot would be to walk across the United States, like Bernarr MacFadden, a discipline almost certain to be neutralized by Gargantuan snacks at Altoona, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and so on, along the way. The inevitable remained.

  There are of course numerous diets always being recommended, published and discussed. One is the familiar “du Pont’s executives’ diet,” which I tried first. Its motif is meat. For lunch the first day I had a pair of lamb chops with accessories too dismal to mention. For dinner I had a planked steak. Steaks and chops two or three times a day are, in addition to an ideal way of sustaining the high protein intake required, a neat formula for bankruptcy, unless you happen to be a du Pont executive. I realized, as the long, carnivorous days went by, that I was eating myself into destitution, and switched to another feeding plan—hastily, as the hour of my initial court appearance was drawing on.

  This one permitted me, implacably, for breakfast half a grapefruit, one boiled egg, black coffee. To eat that at seven A.M. and nothing till lunch at one o’clock is to engage in what theologians call mortification of the flesh. Noon, in fact, often found me close to that crystalline fatigue in which the early Christian anchorites are said to have had their visions. I carried a check-list of low-calorie foods with which to assuage the worst pangs of hunger. One was tangerines. I once ate seven of these blameless things at a sitting, pips and all. Another was cottage cheese, of which I sometimes devoured an entire container. One Saturday Nickie came home to find me hunched over an eighteen-ounce jar of it, a flying spoon in my hand.

  “What are you gorging yourself for?” he asked.

  “I’m on a diet. You know that. Have you found anything out?”

  “She’s been seeing Lammermoor regularly, and if he’s the matrimonial prospect you sabotaged—well. I got a snapshot of them mushing about on a park bench,” he said, setting down the tiny camera which he carried concealed on his person. “I hope Sipperly’s arranged for the motion next Friday. I’m dying to get my hands on that diary.”

  I began a third diet without wholly abandoning the other, then still another while retaining features of its predecessors. Soon I had three or four going simultaneously, and grew bewildered and discouraged. Nickie observed, “Getting a bit thick in the flitch, aren’t you?” My excess weight was now one of the very troubles from which I sought emotional escape in food. What
a vicious circle! I once heard of a man who hit the bottle because of a number of harsh realities, not the least of which was the realization of the wasted, bibulous years behind him. Hence he had reached a point where it was in large measure liquor that was driving him to drink, just as the melancholy of expanding girth was driving me to the pleasures of the table. I must stop all this nonsense and forget about it if, when the flashbulbs started to explode in the courtroom, I was not, rather than having mortified my flesh, to be mortified by it.

  Sipperly alerted us for an appearance the following Friday. I was still staying with Nickie, and Lila still keeping away from him. I felt that to be wisest, till we saw what we saw. My mother had had to be given some explanation of the arrangement but it had only been a partial one. I decided to disclose the legal involvements to her the Monday evening before the court appearance, when I had a chance to talk to her while driving her to the doctor’s to have a blistered foot attended to.

  “I’ll be all right, Moms,” I said as she kneaded my hand. “Don’t worry.”

  “But I do. All those lawyers and things. Is Nickie handling this all right?”

  “It’s the chance he needs. That’s all I know.”

  When we stopped for a traffic light, a cop sauntered over.

  “No one-arm driving in this town, Mac,” he said, his head at the window.

  “This is my mother.”

  “Oh.”

  I shifted gears and started away.

  “The problem is to make people grow up,” I resumed. “Some live in a dream world till some rude awakening brings them down to earth. I think things will work out all right, so let’s talk about something else. I’ve been on a diet, Moms. Several in fact. Do I look thinner?”

  She inspected me dubiously.

  “No,” she said at last, with a shake of her head. “The only thing about you that’s getting any thinner is your hair.”

  The barber saw that he hadn’t tightened the gown around my neck quite enough, so he unpinned it again and gave it an extra hitch, till my eyes were bulging nicely and my face was the color of eggplant. A newspaper ad had led me to this shop, which was one of those where they claim to check molting. Glancing furtively about at the owners of shrinking oases in adjoining chairs, I said in a low voice, “Give me the treatment that you say saves hair.”