“How do you like this new poem?” she said, turning over. “It’s called ‘Taste,’ and listen, Chickie, because this is my first nonparody. Here’s Beth Appleyard on her own.”
I stood modestly with my back turned while she read it aloud:
If burlap typifies the taste
That marks the common ilk,
A handful of us, I’d have said,
Constitute the silk.
We drink espresso, we eat snails,
We do not read for plot;
Preferring music classical
We also like it hot.
Many friends have fallen from
My grace, as down a well,
By playing me recorded Strauss,
Or serving zinfandel.
Thus one by one they failed the test
Of Sensibility,
Leaving, in a world of clods,
Him and you and me.
But lately flaws in his façade
Have sometimes made me blench;
“Intriguing” is a word of his;
He laughs at fractured French;
His stories, though not shaggy dog,
With subtle sickness fill me;
The temperatures at which he serves
His vintage clarets chill me.
By gradients often so minute
Offenders miss the bus.
Oh, spirits rare are rare indeed!
It seems there’s only us.
Together we—What’s that you say?
You’re fond of Duncan Phyfe?
You can stand Post-New Orleans jazz?
Lord, what a lonely life!
“Swell. See here,” I said over my shoulder while she penciled in revisions and called me swine, “your life is your own business and I realize the amorality of the artist. But leave Nickie Sherman alone!”
“Nickie who?”
“Sherman. You know who I mean.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Stop lying—and get up. He’s a respectable married man, married to my sister is where I come in on this, and I’ll not have you getting your hooks into him and mucking up their already rickety life. An involvement like this might finish it.”
She had slipped into shorts and a sweater, and now bent over a table to fish a cigarette out of a box.
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then who did I see you get into a cab with this afternoon?”
“Oh, him. Is that his name? He was rather vague about it. He’s a nice chap I met in a bar. Very amusing.”
“Are you going to see him again?”
“He has my number.”
And I had hers. This girl’s purpose was firm. All the firmer must be mine: to protect my sister from infidelity by that lout. Nickie was weak and might be unable to extricate himself. I could. Nickie was a romantic who might follow her to the sands of Taos. I wouldn’t.
“All right,” I said with a sigh of resignation. “I’ll do what you ask. Provided one thing: you leave Nickie alone. Do you promise?”
“I do.”
“Then I’ll keep my side of the bargain. When do you want to get this show on the road, as they say?”
“Tomorrow, Chickie? There’s a lawyer coming in the morning to go over some things, but I’ll be home alone after two. How’s two o’clock? Can we make it firm?”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” I said, starting for the door.
Lila asked me to stop by the next morning as she had something urgent to show me. Nickie was out and the children were at day camp. Even that wasn’t enough secrecy. She bolted the door after admitting me and drew the living room blinds. She then disappeared to the rear of the apartment, returning with a small carton which she overturned on a table, spilling out a shower of jewelry.
“What is all this?” I asked, fingering some.
She disentangled one of the pieces from the snarled mass of gems and gave it to me. “Recognize this?”
It was a gold bar pin monogrammed in the letter F with tiny green stones. I had seen a photograph of it in the paper.
“Isn’t that the emerald pin the Flickendens had stolen?” I said.
“And this must be that signet ring of the Babcocks’, and this seed-pearl necklace fits the description of the one taken from the Mulhollands’ bedroom. Everything here tallies with something in the robbery lists. We’ve kept clippings. There it is—all four jobs.”
“Then he’s caught Johnny Velours!”
Lila shook her head, her eyes closed. “Guess again.”
“I simply don’t understand. Where did you find all this stuff?”
“Pockets of his clothes, drawers, hidden behind things on the closet shelf. I found this necklace when I was emptying a jacket of his for the cleaners, and kept looking for more. I really got suspicious when—”
“Over how long a period?”
“Just this week.”
“But I don’t understand. He recovers all this loot from Johnny Velours and still doesn’t turn him in, though the whole town’s laughing at him. It makes no sense.”
“There’s one other explanation that does.” Lila drew a long breath and ran her palms down the sides of her hips. “He is Johnny Velours.”
“Oh, come now, Lila, what are you talking about?”
“Something I’ve been thinking over for days. It all fits. I realize now he’s been going out nights more than before—afternoons were usually his time out—and acting rather mysteriously. There are gaps and discrepancies in the stories he tells me. And it makes sense psychologically.”
“How?”
“Turning the tables for that hoax.” She looked me hard in the eye. “Just think about it a minute. He’s the butt of a practical joke he can’t take. What better revenge than to nip back to the Flickendens’ on the very same night and lift some of their jewels while the revelry’s still going on downstairs? Maybe on the way to the washroom. That’s not the end—making them laugh out of the other side of their mouths isn’t enough. He’s smelled the excitement of crime and likes it. He goes out another night—”
I turned around, running my fingers through my hair. “But the whole thing was supposed to be therapeutic—”
“—and another night, to the homes of people he knows are away in Florida and Bermuda—thanks to those pictures your paper runs of vacationing citizens—most of them cards who had the first laugh, till he’s leading a career of crime. That’s my husband. A jewel thief!”
“You see, his ego needed some sort of appeasement, so having failed in one life he migrates to its opposite; but not its opposite really, since it’s simply the other side of the same coin. He had got to put on the whole show himself. That make it clear to you, Sweets?”
She turned to the window, whirling away from me with a vehemence aimed at no other. I went over and laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Now, Sis, you’re all wrought up …”
“Wrought up! Why shouldn’t I be? You’ve made a burglar out of my husband!”
I nodded in diagnostic thought, totting up the factors in the case, now shown to be as grave as I’d all along thought. “We have a detective manqué who rather than bear the shame of that becomes a crook succès, in a switch that bids fair to make my patient the most famous, I might say artistically tidy, case of dual personality in modern medicine.”
“Yes, but you didn’t cure it—you produced it!” She whirled back.
“If you mean that we purposely hastened the crisis we know to be inevitable in cases like this, yes, I accept that. But don’t get panicky. We induce these things now, just as obstetricians induce labor. But it’s important for you not to tell Nickie you know. Let me handle it. The utmost delicacy is required. One misstep and we’re all in the bottom of the gorge.”
“I can’t go to Reno now, of course. This is too serious. I couldn’t leave him now.”
“And to that extent we’ve gained ground. I’m proud of you, Sis. If it’ll help, Nickie’s is an ex
aggeration of a kind of split we all have in our natures. What Van Kuykens calls the Janus complex. We’re all two-faced. How many have the gumption to be two-headed?”
“Who is Van Kuykens?”
“A psychiatrist I’m interested in.”
“Shall we call him in?”
“He lives in Amsterdam. Please don’t get hysterical, but not that cold calm either. Something in between. I must find Nickie and have this out with him. Maybe he’s had enough of the cream of the jest to call it quits; we’ll get the jewels anonymously to the police, and the whole thing will blow over.”
The sound of a car stopping and footsteps outside sent me to the table where I scooped the mass of loot back into the carton. I popped it into a sideboard. The car drove off and the footsteps in the hall continued softly past the door and on up to an apartment overhead.
“Now, sit tight till you hear from me,” I said. “I’ll go out and see if I can find Nickie.”
This wasn’t easy, since he was now roaming about under two identities. He wasn’t in the Samothrace, nor any of a few bars and coffee shops I knew shared his favor. Then by chance I glanced into a barber shop I was passing and saw him sitting in the chair. I watched him from behind a newspaper kiosk outside. He had that curiously meek look men have when their hair is being cut. But when he emerged, in a neat gray pinstripe, his manner was jaunty.
“Nickie?” I said, popping from cover.
He gave me a blank look and hurried on.
“Nickie?” I said, trotting abreast of him.
“I’m afraid you’ve got me confused with someone else, old chap,” he said amiably.
My knees melted as I recognized the look in his eyes that I remembered from the brief period when his wits had wandered before. He didn’t know he’d been committing the crimes.
“Of course. You’re Johnny Velours.”
“Righto. But …?”
“My name is Swallow,” I said, a word which meant nothing to him. “We met in a bar near here.” I indicated a tavern across the street. “How about a nooner? Or is it too early for you?”
“Not at all. Feel as though I could do with a spot of downfall.”
The conviction that he was Johnny Velours set well on Nickie. The caustic turn to which his manner had increasingly tended was softened. This island off the mainland of his psyche on which he had temporarily taken refuge, so to speak, was a warm, balmy place of easy tempo and gentle conversational breezes. He was a joy to talk to, to loaf over drinks with—I’ll say that for him. He was vague about what he did and where he lived, whether because he didn’t know much about that, having only just assumed his alter ego, or out of intentional elusiveness, as Sweetie had implied. Needless to say I had now little stomach for the tryst with her. It was two o’clock before I remembered it, and that I was due there. I would call it off; or simply drop the whole thing from my mind. Nickie required my full attention now.
It was by way of granting it that my purposes were rudely shuttled back to the other. Nickie—or I should say Johnny Velours—fished in his pocket, and finding it barren of small change, asked, “Oh, I say, could I borrow a dime? I’ve a call to make.”
The faintly British note was in conformity to the tradition in which his present role was, after all, cast. The touch of Raffles roguishness in the way he went to the phone booth alerted me. I slipped over and listened behind it to the dial clicks. They corresponded well enough to the Appleyard number. When he returned I was seated at our table again, sipping. “Damn,” he said. “She claims she’s busy this afternoon. Can you ever believe a woman?”
“Sometimes,” I said, with the sigh of one called sternly back to his obligations.
For it was all now only too grimly plain. It had been obviously as Johnny Velours that he had made Sweetie’s acquaintance, therefore all the more urgent that I keep it from developing. The island must be re-integrated with the mainland before it acquired a sovereignty of its own, and a temporary fugue the dimensions of a complete split. Nickie needed time to resolve his conflict, Sweetie to wind up her affairs and be off for New Mexico and whatever D. H. Lawrence existence she had in mind for herself there; meanwhile those two must be kept in strict quarantine from one another. Certainly he must be prevented from becoming a full-fledged principal in her flamboyant adventure. Nobody on earth could see to that but me. Such was the office I saw duty as squarely placing before me.
So after picking up the check and bidding Johnny Velours good-by with the hope that we might meet here for a spot of downfall on the morrow, I paid, got my hat, and with a heavy heart set off in the direction of Sweetie Appleyard’s.
“Come in!” I heard her voice call from upstairs when I rapped the brass knocker. I did, closing the door quietly behind me. “Chick? Come up.”
She awaited me on the landing with a smile. She had on black toreador pants of the sort popular with the ladies that season, and was twirling a pair of horn-rimmed glasses which she explained, as I gained the final stair, she had just got for work and reading. She looked both more iconoclastic and more than ever a woman of the world who knew exactly what she wanted. I had the sense, that is to say, of an accredited revolutionary having at last thoroughly supplanted the merely rebellious child. Only recently I could not have sworn to this certainty, seeing in her progress but the surface application of Kafka over Fitzgerald, and Proust over both; like one wallpaper over another. (She was reading avidly in the small but stellar library left her by Mme. Piquepuss.) For our private development is all too often a matter of mechanical stages for which there is as yet no corresponding enrichment of the spiritual soil. Just as in those commercial billboards on which, on wet days, underlying previous advertisements can be seen “bleeding” through, so that mingled with representations of married couples being conversationally stimulated by their choice of morning paper can be discerned a genial grandmother pressing a chest remedy on a bedridden child, while a phantom rivet-worker smoking Camels haunts them both, just so I could catch, through the surface layer of Sweetie’s new sophisticated self, glimpses and echoes of that wayward girl the new self had not quite yet replaced but merely overlaid; while closer scrutiny revealed that first avatar in which our odyssey in time had begun: the moppet tearing among the summer trees. Now all that was different. I saw a mature woman whose work was going well and who had a firm grasp of her purposes. So molecular, however, are the processes of growth that no word or gesture of a friend whose evolution we may prize is too slight to bear its print. Just as the enamored hero of The Guermantes Way could trace Albertine’s transformation since last seen by the most trivial additions to her vocabulary, so that her mere use of the phrase “to my mind”—in an observation itself of no moment—was sufficiently a gauge of burgeoning womanhood for him to assure us that on hearing it. “I drew Albertine towards me, and at ‘I regard’ made her sit on the side of my bed,” so I detected in Sweetie’s laughing allusion to herself as “Constant Writer” an aspect of balanced self-derision, and in her “Bet you like me behind this windshield, yuk, yuk,” the grain of true worldliness. Through an open door I saw a bed strewn with writing materials, under a burning sunlamp.
“You look as though you need a drink.”
I followed her downstairs, swinging my still undisposed of hat.
“Before we begin, there are a few things I’d like to say,” I said. “I’m not sure whether you’ve thought this thing through from every angle. Supposing—”
“Oh, stop supposing,” she laughed, taking my hat, which she hooked insecurely on a hall peg, so that I had to stoop and recover it. “The lawyer just left and the financial picture is even better than I’d thought. And guess what—Father named you my guardian in his will.”
“In that case,” I said, stiffening in a sudden access of opinion, “I must advise you against this whole business and withdraw from any further participation in it.”
“Oh, don’t be childish. The whole guardian idea is senseless anyway since I’m of age. It was just
a gesture on his part. Pour us drinks. Give me any old thing. I want you to listen to a poem I’ve been sweating over.”
“Ah. Let’s hear it.”
She dropped into a chair with a page of manuscript. “It’s something I’ve been working at off and on, as well as thinking about for a long time. It’s the theme of the artist versus society. Talent in conflict with the conventional mold. I only have the first stanza finished, but here it is:
Coleridge caused his wife unrest,
Liking other company best.
Dickens, never quite enthralled,
Sent his packing when she palled.
Gauguin broke the marriage vow
In quest of Paradise enow.
These things attest in monochrome:
Genius is the scourge of home.
“I’ll go on from there to other examples, you see. Byron, Wagner, Shelley, all impossible. Then to get around to the women: George Sand, Isadora Duncan, Edith Wharton, and so on. I thought maybe you could help me with some. Who are some other geniuses whose dish of tea home life wasn’t?”
“Well, I was just thinking about Bach,” I said, handing her a highball. “Loyal not only to one wife but two, with twenty children all told. Not just an ideal husband but a loving paterfamilias. Then there’s Mark Twain, Thomas Mann, Conan Doyle who adored his family …”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“No, you’re pulling your own. I think it’s wishful thinking, this idea you artistic types hug, that you can’t be one of the folks. It’s a self-justification, a kind of goofing off. Why take pride in being a lousy human being, for Christ’s sake?” She watched me owlishly over her glass as I gestured with mine. “Take Camus. He lives quietly with his wife in Paris. They seem to be making a go of it. Lovely daughter—”
The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel Page 14
