The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  How I got through that day I’ll never know. I wandered about with that bemused indifference to traffic, to people, to falling timbers at demolition jobs that characterizes a certain stage of intoxication. Shunning the Appleyard house now that I knew what die had been cast there, I returned to the office, where I plunged into work for the rest of the day. At six o’clock I took another capsule and girded my loins for the return home, striding into the house head high, like a doomed arrival entering perdition.

  “Where’s Mother?” I asked the boys, who seemed alone inside.

  “Building a fire in the barbecue pit,” Fillmore said. “We’re cooking out tonight.” The touch of routine restored a measure of sanity to the nightmare in which I groped. I thrust my head out of the bedroom window and called down “Hi,” to Crystal. She looked up from the pit, into which she was dumping charcoal from a bag. “Hello.” She turned back to her chores. I kneeled at the window while she soaked the charcoal with lighter fluid, grinning aimlessly into the empty air. “I’ll do that.”

  I was waiting to take the things from her in the garage.

  “Well, did you look in on Sweetie?” I asked, putting the lighter fluid on a shelf.

  “Yes. I did.” She walked into the kitchen while I held the door open for her. We were like two people observing the forms of courtesy during a tour of hell.

  “How is she?”

  “She was sitting on the floor playing records, so I had to shout at her. She’s obviously feeling no pain, which is something to envy in itself. She’s dotty. And one thing about the insane—they have no nervous breakdowns.”

  “Terrific. No nervous breakdowns among the insane. What a revelation. Like an apocalypse. What perception. Almost Nietzschean in its sweep.”

  “She looks good. She even has a fine tan. As though she just got back from Florida rather than Chickenfoot.”

  “Swell.”

  “Where on earth would she get a coat of tan like that?” Crystal asked, her head in the icebox now. She rummaged in a drawer of greens. “It’s been cloudy all summer except for this last week.”

  “Search me,” I said. “Well, that’s that. You’ve done your good deed for the day. Heck, I don’t see why you should bother yourself about it any more. Ah, these pork chops look beautiful.” I had unwrapped the meat on the table. I remembered the Village days when Sweetie and her set had identified cuts of flesh according to what painter they recalled.

  How could I explain to Crystal the woman of the world Sweetie had been then? “Guess the charcoal’s soaked enough now, so I’ll go light the fire before I take my bath. We’ll need a good bed of coals for these babies. They must be two inches thick.”

  Sitting in my bath, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the wall switch. Staring at it, I remembered something about a Kansas farmer who had electrocuted himself listening to a radio in the tub. When I had finished washing, I rose and stood dripping a moment in the water. I started to reach for a towel, but instead my hand extended itself toward the light switch. Raising my eyes heavenward, I felt across the metal plate till my finger found the switch, and snapped it. The room became flooded with light. Drying myself on the mat, my glance tended toward the open medicine chest at the slot for used razor blades. I reminded myself that I must get some new ones. I stretched out on the bed where I lay naked in the breeze from a fan. It was one of those powerful fans set in the window, designed to suck the cooling night air into a still warm house, during hot spells. It was powerful enough also to suck in the gnats that would otherwise not have made it through the screen mesh, and I soon found myself in a cloud of them, and of the smoke from a cigarette on which I mournfully drew, all violently whipped about in currents of air. Half of the midges were damaged in entry, and lay dead or dying on the bedclothes or on my bare body. Crystal entered. “That’s how to get a good case of double pneumonia,” she said. I nodded, staring at the whirling blades. I rarely smoked. The cigarette was one of hers, and she noted its consumption with interest. “Better get the chops on,” she said. “They’ll need at least half an hour. They’re thick.”

  I slipped on Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt and went into the bathroom. I took two more aspirin, swallowing both at once. They went down abreast and became stuck in my throat. There was some “after you” nonsense between them while I waited. “Goddam you, get on with it,” I said to them. Crystal heard me from an adjacent bedroom and said, “Who were you talking to?” “Nobody.” She gave me another look before going down the hall to the kitchen, where she proceeded to assemble a green salad with great abstraction.

  I laid the chops on the grill—eight of them, two apiece. The fire was far from having settled down to the bed of coals outdoor cooking really wants, and, after fifteen or twenty minutes, when I began to take them off, I heard Crystal behind me.

  “Oh, I don’t think they’re nearly done. Let’s see.” She had a knife in her hand, with which she sliced one open. It was crisp enough outside, but pink inside. “That’s how to get trichinosis.”

  I nodded, setting two of them well to the side of the grill when I put them back, where it was unlikely the heat would adequately reach them. “I’m going to kill myself before something happens to me,” was the way I seemed to be summarizing the situation to myself.

  16

  “WELL, thank God that’s over.” Crystal dropped into a chair and put her stocking feet on another. “No more speechifying for me. Oh, the bliss of not having it to worry about.” She rubbed her feet together with pleasure. “Oh, the bliss.”

  “How’d it go off?” I asked, carrying a Martini to her. “How’d it go down with the ladies?”

  “They loved it. They laughed and applauded the stuff from the Shaw play. A kind of nervous laugh, but they applauded.”

  “I told you they would.”

  “But it isn’t Shaw speaking,” she noted argumentatively to me. “It’s just Shaw giving a character his head, as one point of view. He doesn’t advocate it himself, as you led me to believe.” I shrugged. She watched me, sipping the drink. “It seems to me you’re awfully eager to plug the emancipated woman these days. Why is that?” She set the glass down and dug a cigarette out of her bag, for which I was ready with a lighted match. “What more can you tell me about this whole Sweetie business? It grows more confusing by the day. Now Mabel Apthorpe says she’s willing to go to another agency, or give one a try anyway. Are you ready to talk about it?”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what kind of a day I had? I spent it in court, you know.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said, with a gasp at her own forgetfulness. “How wound up we can get in our own affairs. Poor Nickie. How did it go?”

  “Never mind the poor Nickies. He wasn’t feeling any pain. It went off just about as expected. Nickie proved to the court’s satisfaction that he committed the robberies, and without help. He was very amusing, almost like Oscar Wilde in the dock at Old Bailey. He tied his own lawyer up in knots when the lawyer tried to suggest he’d had a collaborator, and asked the D.A. to take him as a client. He said to have no fears about the fee. He’s going to claim the reward money for catching himself. Two alienists said he was quite batty—using other words of course. Van Kuykens hasn’t showed up, damn him, but we didn’t need him. Nickie was exonerated and remanded to Round Hill for observation. He’ll be out of there by the week end if things go according to plan.” I sighed with relief, stretching my own legs out. “We’ll have an intact Nickums coming home to us, so we’d better have a plan of action ready. Of course it’s almost certain now he’ll study for a teaching certificate. He’s raring to go back to school. Thinking about his wardrobe and all already. He’ll make an amusing teacher somewhere. Perhaps Bennington could use him, or Sarah Lawrence. He wants to offer a course in Listening.”

  “Listening?”

  “Yes. He claims nobody knows how to do that any more. Just all public speaking. We hear but we don’t listen. The General Semantics idea.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it�
�s all coming out in the wash this way.” Crystal sighed and shook her head soberly. “It’s something to give a prayer of thanks for.” She drained her glass and held it out for another, which I promptly poured from the shaker. “Now let’s talk about Sweetie. Who’s the man?”

  “Professional ethics—” I began, knocking at the buttons of my shirt.

  Crystal jerked her feet off the chair. “Oh, damn your professional ethics! Why do you keep pulling that every time I ask for a simple piece of information? I really do insist on being treated as your wife.”

  I looked over at her from my chair, after sinking back into it. My hand was under my shirt. “Ought we to rile me in this way?”

  She rose and padded into the kitchen with her drink. I followed after a minute, to find her tying on an apron. She went to the sink to scrape some carrots. I sat down.

  “My idea about all that is as follows,” I said. “She’ll snap out of it once it’s over and they, as we say, lay the child in her arms. It’s just pregnancy that’s got her jittery—motherhood will make her get hold of herself again. It often happens. She’ll be all right. And in the end she’ll up and take the child to New Mexico with her as planned.”

  “As planned? You mean she wanted this child?”

  “Of course. That’s the whole point.”

  “Planned?” Crystal wheeled slowly from the sink till she faced me, a half-pared carrot in one hand and the vegetable scraper in the other. “Like the woman in the Shaw play? The model self-sufficient modern woman I was up there touting for you this afternoon? Is that what you had me up there doing? Taking up the cudgels for your cause?”

  “It’s the principle of the thing—the other is only incidental. Anyhow, is it a bad thing to see that a child so bred enters a world congenial to it?”

  “‘So bred’? How deeply are you mixed up in this thing?”

  “I gave it my blessing, yes. Not without protest, I assure you! I approved of the experiment on intellectual grounds, of course, as any civilized person must, but I warned her it was too much to bite off. I really did try to discourage it, and to bring Sweetie down to earth generally. Remember that trip I made to New York, just after the shopping one you made there? It was to fetch her home when poor old Appleyard asked me.”

  “Now for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, if such an old-fashioned thing as a traditional housewife may presume to pry into the intellectual life of her husband. Did she get her tan from the same sunlamp that burned you?”

  I bent over in the chair and put my head well down between my knees. I loosened my tie and collar, also the buckle of my trouser belt. “It stands in the book that this is one of the cozier forms of domestic murder, in our time.”

  “Did you—”

  “I feel I must warn you … I can’t answer for the—”

  She dropped the carrot and the knife both in the sink, wiped her hands on a towel and went out, closing the door with satirical care. After sitting in the silence for ten minutes staring with a leaden stupor out the kitchen window at nothing, I rose and went to the bedroom. She was stretched out on the bed, her head propped on a wadded pillow, staring out the window at nothing.

  “To think I was up there pulling your chestnuts out of the fire for you. Publicly spouting the rationalizations you put in my mouth. Up there on the platform of the Decency Women’s Club making your filthy defense for you! Don’t touch me! How could you do such a thing? I’m too curious to be furious. How could you?”

  “Maybe to provide you with a cushion against outrage, in case it ever all came out. To remind you that you have a tolerant point of view about such things, a mind hospitable to experiment, and thus to spare you the pain that comes when we let the emotions rush in and overwhelm that fortress.” I tapped my skull to emphasize the point. “It’s a long story, but to keep it to the bare essentials—”

  “Bare essentials, yes. By all means let’s have those. Those are the ones we want.”

  “Don’t say things unworthy of you.”

  “The bare essentials and the naked truth.”

  “Don’t. To begin with, your correspondent refused flatly to have any part of it. Period. Then one day I saw Nickie with her, and I knew damn well if I didn’t consent to father her child—” I flinched as Crystal jerked her head on the pillow, her eyes shut, as under a lash laid on her. “If I didn’t, he would. And he’s weak. There seemed to be no doubt that he’d get emotionally involved, which would mean curtains for his marriage. Which, as you know, we’ve been trying to save. Whereas I wouldn’t—I mean get emotionally involved. So, weird as it may sound, I thought it best that I consent precisely because I’m the kind of man with more sense than to get mixed up in a thing like that. Sweetie even wanted me for that reason—to give her child that sort of heritage.”

  Crystal threshed on the bed with her back arched, like a tormented fish. I felt as though hot wires were being drawn through my flesh. I had never wanted more to take her in my arms, now when it had never been more out of the question.

  “But a girl like that, Chick. How could you?”

  “She wasn’t like that then, don’t you see?” I moved to the. side of the bed, my arms outspread. “That’s the thing. She was a sophisticated woman of the world then. The woman who wrote that book of poems. You’ve read them. You must know the girl you saw the other day isn’t that one. I saw a child as probably just the thing to complete her maturity, seeing she didn’t want a husband and marriage. But when the chips were down she wasn’t up to it. She folded in the stretch. Or call it a sort of backsliding. Anyhow there you have the cards on the table at last. On the table and face up.”

  She shook her head, not in denial but in disbelief. “It’s still impossible to take in.”

  “Can’t you see how completely impersonal my part in it was?” I pleaded. “Lots of women have children by men not their husbands, and I don’t mean only the mixed parentages of all these divorces. I mean artificial insemination. All right. Think of it as just a case of that. Of artificial insemination, only using me as the test tube. There. Isn’t it beginning to seem a lot better already?”

  “Oh!” she gasped, bringing her fists to the sides of her head as she rose. “Don’t make it sound any more like trash than you have to. Don’t stand there jabbering like somebody out of Tobacco Road, or as though we’re talking about cattle!”

  “Tobacco Road!” I exclaimed resentfully. “Tobacco Road!”

  In my gropings for a literary formula that would get us all out of this with a whole hide, I had certainly never thought of that. And yet was it as far-fetched as I liked to imagine? If what had begun as Marquand could deflect into Faulkner, why couldn’t what had proceeded as Fitzgerald end in Erskine Caldwell?

  “Oh, my God,” I said, smiting my own brow now. “This is the end.” I banged my head on the wall. I suppose this was the point at which I went to pieces. “I can’t handle it any more. You take it from here if you want. Try to make head nor tail out of it. I can’t. You see her through from here, you and Mabel Apthorpe—she’s your sex, not mine. See her into a new agency, get a good lawyer to break the will, sell the house, bundle her off to New Mexico with her brat. There she can carry on in the spirit of D. H. Lawrence. Lady Loverly’s Chatter. Oh, my God. I’m glad I won’t be around to hear it, there or anywhere probably. Because I’m finished. I’ve had it. Oh, my God, my God.” I slid down along the wall onto a hassock, dropping from there to the floor, where I sat among some pairs of shoes laid in a row along the wainscoting. I pulled a bookcase over with me, spilling the contents in all directions.

  Crystal had stopped in the middle of the room, and now watched me writhing among the reading matter and the footwear. “What’s the matter with you?” she said in a shocked tone. “Pull yourself together.”

  It was then the idea of lunacy returned, as an alternative avenue to self-removal. Yes, it would be better for all concerned if I took leave of my senses. Was I already doing so? My behavior just now seemed to indicate as
much, and the expression on Crystal’s face as she helped me to my feet seemed to confirm it. My conduct that had led to this pass was suddenly illuminated in the light of it. Of course—only a man not responsible for his actions would have gotten himself into such a muddle.

  “Are you saying that just because you heard me talking to myself?” I said as she hauled me up by the armpits. “I always do that.”

  “Steady. Come over to the bed.” My legs shot out from under me, like a beginning ice skater’s.

  “Don’t you think the floor is beginning to buckle?” I babbled as we started toward the bed. “What kind of a summer will it be? Will the Dodgers beat Yale?”

  She got me to lie down and felt my forehead.

  “Do you feel sick? You seem hot.”

  “Your hand feels cool. Ye ministering angels—”

  “Shh. Our thermometer’s broken, too. I think I’ll just call Dr. Bradshaw. I told you you’d catch your death lying around in drafts the way you do.”

  “Oh, what rubbish … Well, if it’ll make you feel better.”

  Dr. Bradshaw didn’t arrive till nine o’clock. He sat on the bed and quizzed me in a manner he had that was both expansive and distrustful.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Not so hot. He’s burning up.”

  The doctor poked a thermometer into my mouth, and as I lay there waiting for it to register and for him to finish taking my pulse, I wondered if it mightn’t be pneumonia taking hold, and became apprehensive. My temperature was between ninety-nine and a hundred—just about the degree a certain percentage of the medical profession think can be emotionally induced. He asked whether I had any aches and pains, and I said no. “Are you worried about anything?” he said, a little too readily I thought.

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are. Tell Dr. Bradshaw about your angina.”

  “He already has,” the doctor said, raking the gray hair that made him seem so distinguished (except for its being crew-cut). “I’ve explained it’s what we call false angina. Rather common. Muscular spasm that sets in when a person is under strain.”