The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Chick, stop talking like an idiot. ‘Making a go of it’! Really!”

  “The E. E. Cummings’ are making a go of it.”

  “If you say that one more time I’ll scream. Of course there are exceptions. I’m talking about by and large. Joyce wanted his Nora always by his side, but I’d hate to have been her …”

  We went at it hammer and tongs for half an hour or more, drinking steadily. The debate raged as we disrobed upstairs. “Hold on there, this average man you keep talking about,” I said, gesturing with a shoe, “I want him defined.”

  “Oh, defined! You talk like somebody on a high-school debating team.”

  “Thank you.”

  An absurd domesticity enveloped the scene as we quarreled together in the upstairs bedroom.

  “‘Eliot is a churchwarden,” I said, my voice hoarse with passion.

  “So?”

  “‘He married his secretary. It’s straight out of Hollywood, woman!”

  I had to check my desire for Sweetie as I climbed, yelling, into the bed she had cleared of writing junk. This must be kept objective, a purely functional passion.

  “I still think you’re making a mistake,” I said, slipping between the sheets. “I want to go on record as saying that this whole thing is ill-advised. However.”

  She switched off the sunlamp and a reading light over her pillow. “How pale you are,” she said, settling beside me. “You ought to try one of these ultra-violet lamps. Do you realize I even feel better after using it? Probably psychological, but what’s the difference.”

  “You’re quite right. Tell me, how much do they cost?”

  She looked up at it. “I really couldn’t say. We seem to always have had one around. Anyhoo.” She remolded her pillow somewhat. “You know, Chick, you have nice shoulders.”

  “So do you. And your skin. It’s that soft brown in which French provincial furniture is, for the most part, finished.”

  I was aware in a drowsy haze of Sweetie rising and drawing on her blouse and toreador pants. I had dropped off. I watched with one eye as she buttoned her clothing and combed her hair. When she turned to glance down at me I shut it. She came quietly back to the bed.

  “Take forty winks for yourself while I fix us some coffee,” she said, a faint smile discernible in her murmur. “Here, get yourself a load of the sunlamp if you’d like.” She switched it on and adjusted it over my head, tucking the sheet down off my shoulder. “Feel good? Not more than a few minutes the first time, mind, or him will burn. Did you hear Sweetie?” I nodded, smiling as I snoozed away again. The warmth of the lamp did feel good. I had a sense of delicious lassitude as I sank into oblivion with the sound of her footsteps fading down the carpeted stair …

  I awoke from a dream of being quizzed at police head-quarters. Blinking, I pushed the glaring light away and sat up.

  One side of my face itched quite a bit. When I pressed a palm to it my hand felt hot. A dresser clock said twenty to four. I sprang out of bed and into my clothes, hearing Sweetie’s voice downstairs. It was the drone of someone on the telephone. Twisting into my shirt I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. My right cheek and shoulder were a glowing pink.

  Sweetie hung up and met me as I hurried into the living room.

  “That was Valerie Lewis. Trying to get her to sign off—Lord, Chick, look at you.”

  “I already have.” I stood buttoning a shirt cuff. “What’s the idea, leaving a man under there like a chicken under a broiler while you gab away with your women friends?”

  “I’m sorry, darling, but I told you only a few minutes at first—”

  “How am I going to explain this at home? Or the office for that matter? Come on, help me think of an alibi. Where could a working man spend an afternoon that would also reasonably explain his face being cooked to a crisp?”

  “Oh, dear,” she grieved, wringing her hands. “First let’s put something on it.” She flew to the bathroom, returning with a jar of vaseline as I was getting into my coat. “It’s too late for that now,” I said. “And what good will it do to look sautéed on top of it?”

  “But, darling, it could be serious. Who was that actor who fell asleep under one and had to be rushed to the—”

  “I told you this would lead to no good. But no, you needed a man to assert your independence of men with, big deal. I’m not denying the intellectual validity of varied and possibly interlocking causes—” I could not make out what else I said as the door slammed behind me and I ran down the porch stairs to my car.

  I shot up Beacon for four blocks and turned left on Chestnut, one side of me red hot and the other stone cold. I slammed to a stop before a corner drugstore, having by this time worked out a plan of action, or, more accurately, analyzed the logical imperatives under which I labored. The only account of my appearance that would hold water would be for me to have a sunlamp too. I would have to take the sunlamp up.

  The drugstore was Hickett’s. I was surprised to find Mr. Hickett still alive and in there, years having elapsed since we had plagued him with superb dialogue and learned allusions at the soda fountain. I was at least grateful no one else was.

  Keeping in stern profile, like a figure in a Babylonian frieze, I said with some urgency, “Have you got a sunlamp?

  “Sunlamp?”

  “Yes, you know—those ultraviolet things. I need one right away.”

  Out of the tail of my eye I was aware of him appraising my own radiation. His mustache had whitened, his hair thinned, his general appearance grown more motheaten; he had on the same gray suit he had worn for perhaps half a century and would no doubt commence eternity in. His blue eyes were as misaligned as ever, so that when he kept circling to get a view of my incandescent side and I swiveled as steadily to keep it hidden, the choreography was weird indeed.

  “No, we don’t,” he said. “But we have those sun bulbs. Just the bulb, that you can stick in any ordinary socket.”

  “Will they do the trick?”

  “Trick?”

  “Yes. Give you a sunburn. Or tan, rather.”

  Mr. Hickett had edged out from behind the counter in his determination to get a look at the fried side of my face, and his elbow brushed a display card of combs, knocking it down. I turned involuntarily toward it as it tumbled to the floor, giving him a fleeting but decisive glimpse of what he wanted to see. “Do you need it right away?” he asked, paling slightly himself.

  “That’s what I said. The bulb, please.”

  “But—” He began a gesture at the scarlet jowl, but it died in midair as his hand fell away.

  “Will you please give me one of those things? I’m in a hurry!”

  He swallowed his eyeballs. I had not witnessed this agonized rigmarole for a decade or more—indeed I had forgotten that feature of my student days—and its enactment struck me with fresh impact. Mr. Hickett’s pupils seemed to bulge as they disappeared from view under his fluttering lids, while his mouth worked in a grimace of their own. He plucked a cube-shaped carton from under the counter while with the other hand he drew a yard of wrapping paper from a roll.

  “Never mind that,” I said, taking the box from him. “How much is it?”

  “Nine fifty.”

  Standing laterally, I fished a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and gave it to him. He turned to the cash register to make change in a deliberate manner. “Do you want to match the other side of your face with it?” he asked. “Is that what you want to do?”

  “I don’t see that that’s any concern of yours. I asked whether this bulb would do the trick and you haven’t answered my question.”

  “It’s not as good as a regular sunlamp but it’s ultraviolet. It’s five hundred watts. I had a woman get third-degree burns with one the other day. Will that do?”

  “That will be fine,” I said, taking the fifty-cent piece, and hurried sideways out of the store.

  So far so good. I sped toward the Pick office in a sudden shower, perfecting my plan of
action and occasionally glancing at myself in the rear-view mirror. There was no doubt I had sustained a severe burn. Its color was deepening momentarily; by evening I would resemble a boiled lobster.

  Halfway to the office I suddenly stopped at the curb. I tapped the steering wheel in thought. My wife was attending a committee meeting for some kind of women’s club symposium that afternoon. Did that change the picture? Yes, and in my favor. Now would be the time to sneak into the house with my purchase, so that when she returned I might be found lying under it, home from the office early with a cold, which I was doctoring in this fashion, and with an imprudent first exposure, etc. It was foolproof. I phoned the office from a street booth, and over Miss McConkey’s spluttered spate of messages and queries about where the devil had I been, most of them in the name of Bulwinkle, said, “I’m sick. Put off my appointments till tomorrow or the next day,” and hurried home.

  My heart sank at the sight of ten cars in my driveway. The women were meeting at our house. Well, no matter. I must go on with the plan, feeling my way and extemporizing around any possible obstacles. If I was seen entering with my purchase under my arm I would say that I had overdosed myself with it on my office couch, which had been my original idea anyway.

  I parked the car as quietly as I could behind the garage, then stole round in the rain to the back yard. The damnable Blitzstein set up a loud barking, which I squelched by pausing to pet him and to enact the march around the pole which freed his tie-out chain. Shifting the parcel under my arm, I tiptoed to the house and listened under a dining room window. A gabble of voices mingled with the clatter of tea crockery told me the women were hard at it. This would be a cinch. I crept unheard into the front door and up the inside stairs to our bedroom. Working quietly as a thief, I unscrewed the bulb from the reading lamp over my side of the bed and screwed in the ultra-violet, which I snapped on. Then I removed my shoes and coat and stretched out on the bed, at peace, except for the urge to scratch my now fiercely itching face. I kept that well out of the rays of the lamp, until such time as Crystal walked into the bedroom. When I heard her footsteps, I would have but to shift my head on the pillow to be in the clear.

  After about ten minutes the buzz of voices rose to the shrill clamor of adjournment. Five more and they were all out. Presently Crystal’s tread was heard approaching up the hall. I put my head, cooked side up, under the light. She entered.

  “Well, where on earth—”

  “Oh, hello, dear.” I stirred as from a sleep, blinking. “What time is it? Oh, my goodness, how long have I been lying here under this—My face—look at it!”

  Crystal came round the foot of the bed. There were six or seven different expressions on her face.

  “When in God’s name did you get home? What are you—When—The office has been calling since ten o’clock this morning.”

  “Oh, I’ve been here for some time. Hour maybe. I was feeling punk but I didn’t want to disturb you, so I went quietly to bed. Sinuses acting up again, one thing and another, and this character at the office has been talking up sunlamps so long that I thought I’d give it a whirl. Well so. How did the meeting go?”

  “But I came up here for something just a while ago and I didn’t see you.”

  “Well, perhaps I was asleep.”

  “God, look at you!”

  “I know. Shall we call the doctor?” I said, my anxiety shifting to that quarter. Flaming pain and unappeasable prurience mingled in my cheek, which I now clawed in a voluptuous frenzy. “Is there something we can do till he comes?”

  “Wait a minute. Agnes Howe had that and there was only one simple thing of any use. What was it?” Crystal snapped her fingers in the effort to recall. “Cold cream.” She darted into the bathroom from which she instantly emerged with a jar of it.

  A bell rang as she twisted off its cap.

  Round that pot of pomade hovered a nagging coincidence of the kind that often appear in cycles of passion or distress, and that satisfy the taste for cheap symbolism. It is said to hound lunatics and criminals, as well as those in comparable extremities. Or perhaps these repetitions occur constantly in daily life but are only noticed in the heightened awareness that accompanies emotional strain. At any rate, I recognized the blue crock of skin cream for which Crystal had come into the bathroom on the evening when, sitting in the tub, I had heard the name of the sitter which touched off all these events.

  “Where were you earlier though?” she asked as she spread it gently on my cheek. “Miss McConkey phoned before lunch and then after, in a perfect—”

  “I was busy with Nickie. You haven’t been in touch with Lila, I take it. Well then, I’d better tell you what’s going on. I think that’ll do. Thanks, darling. Here, sit down on the bed while we forget about me and talk about somebody else. I’m afraid it isn’t a very pretty story.”

  “Just let me get this part here. It seems to go down your neck and—”

  “She call me Dr. Swallow? Hey? Miss McConkey call me that? I have to laugh at her.”

  “Loosen your collar … That’s better. It seems to go clear down—For heaven’s sake, your whole shoulder and back are burned. I thought you had your shirt on when I came in just now.”

  11

  NICKIE’S intervals on the island—to continue viewing him in that light—became more frequent and prolonged. Not, fortunately, that each assumption of the Johnny Velours identity entailed a fresh theft. There was only one new burglary in the next few weeks, that of a Jackson Pollock from the twenty-room Burwash place, thought impregnable by virtue of an alarm system which the police had considered foolproof. That, perhaps more than the literate nature of the heist, was the clincher to me that it was Nickie. Having worked on the local force he must have been familiar with the installation. Which in no way lessened the wonder of his beating it. How had he brought the coup off?

  And he was a joy as a person. An errant charm, with no more Continental hand-munching than you could stand, made him quite the ladies’ man. Lila fell in love with him all over again, if I shouldn’t rather put it that she was now tempted to her first disloyalty to her husband on his account. I took her into a bar to meet him one day. Because when his vagueness about placing her became at last a total blank, I suggested she accept the challenge innate in the situation and cultivate him in his new guise. She looked pretty in a blue tweed and matching hat over cropped curls, and when I left them hitting it off in a twilit booth I sensed that I had made a fine match. My mother was luckily still on hand to take the children in this crisis as she had the last, leaving Lila free to pursue the alternate romance. That was my plan of procedure. With her entrenched on both island and mainland, we stood a much better chance of integrating Nickums. Of pulling Nickums together. And by George if he didn’t fall in love with her.

  “He’s asked me to marry him,” Lila told me.

  “I’m so happy for you.”

  “He’s promised to go straight.”

  A development like this becomes more credible when it is remembered that the separate elements in a split are subterraneously linked. Somewhere underwater the island is connected with the mainland, if only unconsciously. There was a further bond, that between Nickie and me in a mutual past. Johnny Velours had his roots deep in a character in a play Nickie and I had written years before. I recognized some of the mannerisms and even a phrase or two thrown out by a nimble persifleur drawing freely on the old days. Our county, for instance, abounds in authors of novels suitable for conversion into movies. Johnny Velours called them writers marquee. “Swell,” I said. I found him wholly delightful. He listened too. Nor did he seize proprietorship of your ideas in mid-statement for more adroit dilation than your own, like that awful Nickie Sherman.

  “By all means marry him,” I told Lila. “I certainly prefer him as a brother-in-law. The thing has my blessing.”

  “Wouldn’t that be bigamy?”

  “I doubt it in this case, but I’ll look it up. I know there are problems. There’s the chil
dren. But I’ll bet one thing. When you spring them on Johnny, he won’t back out. There’s that gallantry about him. Another hunch I have is that the thefts are over, or at least tapering off. They’ve satisfied what in his emotions had to be satisfied. And your marrying him will arrest Johnny Velours, so to speak, before the cops can. For Pete’s sake don’t let him get away!”

  All this—the plan to reverse our thinking and absorb the mainland into the island, to reform Johnny Velours rather than organize Nickie Sherman—might have worked, had it not been for a development from a totally unexpected quarter.

  Pete Cheshire had been all this time the chief suspect, of course, and was periodically hauled in for grilling. Each time he managed to clear himself—no surprise to us under the circumstances. Then when the papers were full of the Jackson Pollock job and its sparkling execution, Pete suddenly changed his tune. He stepped forward and claimed authorship of it. There he was in the morning paper, grinning vainly between two cops. I dashed over to my sister’s the minute I saw it.

  “Did you see the paper?” I said.

  “Yes. What do you make of it?”

  “It’s hard to tell. But it’s obviously one of those ‘crank confessions.’ He couldn’t resist getting out there to take those bows.” I could hear someone moving about in the rear of the house, a man’s footsteps. I sank wearily into a chair. “Who’s in back?”

  “We’ll see when he comes in.” Seated, Lila pruned a window fern of dead leaves. “He ferries between that island of yours and the mainland so often that I never know from one minute to the next who I’m up against. Did you know they’re now calling you King Solomon?”

  The acceleration and contraction of the cycles indicated a struggle, perhaps an approaching climax. They were fighting for the mastery, that pair. Nickie knew it better than Johnny; he had finally discussed it freely with me in his more limpid hours as himself. Here was a battle of wits for you: a man trying to catch and elude himself simultaneously, sleuth and malefactor in one. Oh, he had got to put on the whole show himself, all right. Well might he ask as he had, “Who am I!”