The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel Read online

  “Oh, this so-called realism.” Crystal tilted the rear-view mirror to get a look at her hair, and having done so, swiveled it back. “Is it ever anything but exaggerating the seamy side? I mean God, I’m beginning to agree with that radio reviewer you intellectuals are always complaining about. I mean this book—they pop in and out of bed like seals in and out of water. They’re always in the sack.”

  “They overdo it,” I said, with a disagreeable feeling of “selling out,” of capitulating to garden-club standards that made me avoid my reflection in the mirror when I gave it an extra twist of adjustment. “Why do modern novelists dish out so much sex? Why have they always got everybody in the sack?”

  “Maybe they don’t know the facts of life.”

  “Swell. Touché. Thou’st a nimble wit, I think it was made of Atalanta’s heel.”

  My spirits rose, Sweetie all forgot. I even let up on the accelerator a little, not to get to the Groteguts’ sooner than necessary; to enjoy the cool, delaying ride.

  Crystal drew a stocking up and fastened a garter clasp.

  “You said this girl and you were talking about old times. How old?”

  I stepped on the gas.

  “There was never anything between us.”

  I gritted my teeth. But what answer would not have been idiotic? It had been one of those questions to which no reply is adequate since denial can’t be made without automatically implying a situation about which it can be said that there is nothing to it.

  “I love you,” I said loosely. “You know that. There’s never been …” I shifted up in the seat, gripping the steering wheel. I felt like the golfer in the comic strip who with every stroke digs himself the more deeply into the sandtrap from which he is trying to extricate himself. “Never been anyone else …”

  I was glad to see the Grotegut house loom into view, a situation which I should not have thought possible.

  My mood swiftly reversed itself on seeing the trap into which I had escaped.

  The Groteguts were the sort of whom Nickie was fond of saying that they couldn’t like people or they wouldn’t have so damn many of them around. The house was a bedlam, though of motionless occupants. The guests exceeded by half a hundred the demonstrable maximum for a decent evening—say eight or ten—and stood vertically massed like passengers in a subway crush. Eager hostesses ought perhaps to have their living rooms posted with signs like those in commercial establishments which specify the number of persons occupancy by more than which is illegal. The chairs were all empty: they were inaccessible. A group near where I stood, hesitating before the plunge, was being well presided over by my boss’s rather muscular, oblong wife, the veins in whose neck swelled in mid-emphasis of some point. Behind her was a large leather couch, on which I longed to pitch forward and go to sleep.

  I spotted what I was looking for—Nickie at the other end of this room. I wanted a word with him, long enough to bring up Sweetie Appleyard’s name and see if it rang a bell. Snatching a highball from a tray borne by a white-jacketed waiter from the caterer’s, I began the long journey to his side.

  To pass among a cocktail jam of this sort requires a special kind of movement not unlike osmosis. One seeps and sidles through walls of flesh seemingly solid; nor is passage ever straight but circuitous, as counterpressures carry one off course. Delays are unavoidable as faces familiar to one swim into view and require pauses for greeting and graceful extrication. A man named Harry Larkin, a funny-story-dispenser, materialized in my path, ready with three new ones. He was moon-faced and a shade too expansive, and just now had a heavy summer cold which gave new meaning to the term “infectious laugh.” I laughed dutifully at his three stories and oozed away to the left, and freedom. But not for long. Bearing down through heavy seas was the cultural freighter, Mrs. Adelaide Crewes, who in a twinkling could be saying to you, “But don’t you think Tennyson …?” By sagging at the knees I lowered my height six inches and hid behind a fat woman with noodles in her shrug, till the danger was passed.

  One is, of course, contrarily, a chore to others. Two or three were visibly put out at having to take me into account. Knoedler, the German-born violinist who would play for us later, greeted my approach with an expression morose and even despairing. I hoped we would not get into politics, a subject on which he was aggressive without being informed. He had the thick shirts and high color of those who demand radical changes in government. What he did—with the obvious aim of scaling the encounter to my level—was to launch an account of a recent motor trip in which he had encountered several dead chickens on the turnpike. When I showed no interest in this theme he seized my arm and said, “But these chickens were plucked and dressed!” I thought of those film fantasies in which flocks of geese are plowed into by speeding airships to emerge, fully cooked, through the exhaust. Murmuring something about refrigerator vans, I twisted free of his grasp and made off. A woman I knew slightly named Mrs. Lumpey was next. She discoursed mainly on the absence of her husband from these festivities. “He has this peculiar pain in his stomach,” she said. “I don’t blame him,” I said, and inched off. I squeezed apologetically between a woman with brown lipstick and a man to whom she was telling a story, so that a fragment, perhaps the climax, lodged in my ear: “… and held that ear of corn up for the dog and turned it for him while he ate it!” she said, grinning richly into my face.

  A caterer hove near with a bowl of that fish paste into which one is bidden to thrust a potato chip, the body of which then breaks off in the paste, leaving a small residue for one to raise, dry, to one’s lips. I declined the offering, which was by now replete with shards, and reached instead into my coat pocket for a salted peanut, which I slipped covertly into my mouth. Knowing what is served at these affairs, I often go to them armed with a supply of fresh nuts or even a few squares of Cheddar concealed on my person, on which to nibble privately. Such a practice is hard to justify, but it has become too habitual with me to give a second thought. I tucked a nut or two between my teeth and drank from my glass, which in the congestion I was obliged to hold at chest level, like a libation carried in an antique rite. To the conversational caldron, now deafening, was added the scent of mingled perfumes, growing steadily denser in the warm air. Before me loomed the powdered shoulders, flecked with rust, of Mrs. Tolliver. She was a pretty woman of middle years who smelled, herself, deliciously of soap, and I paused a moment to drink her in, olfactorily speaking. She stood with a young divine, new to Decency, named Harmon. They were gnawing triangular canapés which looked like pimples on toast, and both talking at once. Harmon spoke with an air of fluent worldliness that struck me as a bit spurious. I had heard him preach at a recent service, “Let us load the camera of our heart with the film of the Gospel, and set the light meter of our spirit at Infinity.” So he seemed to me not quite the man to stand with a Martini saying, “Oh, really? And the Hewitts, are they off to Rome for the summer?” There was a note of imposture somewhere.

  I mopped my brow, I hoped with my own handkerchief, and raised my glass for another gulp. It was getting decidedly hot in there. The voices mingling into one Voice were now a physical pressure applied to all the senses, a weight like water underseas, in which arms waved like dreamy fronds and teeth snapped at bright scraps dislodged from coral reefs by the pulse and thrust of the tide, or at twitching fish reconstructed back into their original forms out of the paste to which they had been reduced. To what end was all this? I knew the Indian dinner, complete with chutney, that lay in wait for us on the sideboard. “The Groteguts are perfectly matched for small-city social life,” I formulated meticulously to myself. “She favors curry while he curries favor.” “My parents are in the iron and steel business. Oh, they are? Yes—my mother irons while my father steals.” That sort of thing. My eyes were growing heavy. They were ball bearings which the muscles assigned to their control could no longer support, and down they went, down the front of Mrs. Tolliver’s dress. The promise of rest and airborne dreams after the long night o
f foolishness was over. The what, for God’s sake? Harmon was looking at me with his own round eyes, the oustanding feature of his “sensitive” face. One was a plea for the humanities in a time threatened by overemphasis on technological skills while the other was a sustained flute note in turn resembling a single gull drifting over seas of measureless blue. I gave a nod intended to be meaningless, and holding my glass carefully, swiveled by degrees out of their vicinity. To find myself squarely in that of Oscar Shook.

  Well, poor Oscar. Oscar was a nursery owner to whose rival I had let some recent landscaping work. Some hysterical compulsion made me bring the subject up. He writhed more wretchedly than I. “You see,” he said, scratching his thin leg just above the knee, “I visualized a bank of evergreen trees as right for that side of your house, but passing by the other day I seen, urn, I noticed someone had put in deciduous.” What could I say? What was there to say? “Well,” I answered, “I phoned your office at the time, but deciduous out,” and laughed hideously. I was seeking a formula, not for conversation or even for sheer human amenities, mind you, but a means by which a terrible dismay with collective mankind could be reduced to an expiatory self-disgust. It would make disintegration honest, and thereby restore my membership in that race I had no call to fix in perpetual caricature.

  It was now nine o’clock. I now saw my plight in terms of the postman in Dickens who plied his rounds in a quarter of London so tortuous that he could not get to houses he was in sight of. Nickie couldn’t be more than fifteen feet away—half the original distance—yet he seemed as far distant as ever, due mainly to two enormously pregnant women who materialized in my path. I weighed the cogency of getting down on all fours and completing the trip in that position. It would be easier to thread one’s way through human legs than among their owner’s upper bulks, certainly. Nearby stood, again, my Boss’s wife, who, glimpsed in sections, was trying to catch my eye, but I shifted mine well to the left and gesticulated at a nonexistent person, presumed to have a prior claim on my attentions, that I would be right over. This brought into my ken her husband—my Boss—which would have completed a nice dilemma were he not in a cozy tê’te-à-tête with a girl he was damn well not going to let anyone butt in on, judging from the way he flicked his eye away from me. … Hey, what’s that just under your conscious mind, clamoring for attention? Which novel is it of Dickens, about the part of town so tortuous mailmen can’t get around in it? Who can tell you? Mme. Piquepuss? Oh, no, let’s not think about her now. Back to the Boss; that ogre will drive out any other.

  He was thick-figured, thick-fingered, thick-necked, thick. He wore a hand-painted necktie depicting a scene of the kind more normally seen on bass drums. It was a woodland prospect featuring a waterfall, which spilled the length of the cravat, knotted so that it would. He had taste. He nodded at something the girl was saying, his head down and his chin, or rather chins, resting in a pleated assortment on the knot of the tie, just above the source of the cataract, affording one the fancy of its all running out of the side of his mouth. O my people, why are ye not home in groups of four and six, giving and taking in easy communion all that is pleasant and foolish and lovably human? Why stand ye here in this woman’s house taking meat and drink in such wise that what cometh out of your mouth is no better than what goeth in? … That girl with the Boss was lovely. If hitching down her shoulder straps I sought her breasts as in the love of globed fruit, would I be accused of an unhealthy mysticism? But the dress had been designed to flatten away not only those hillocks but all of her. All of her. Most of the women there wore the shrouds decreed by fashion. The only ones with any shape to them were the two pregnant ones. Their bellies boomed out a praise of life. I wanted to stop by and say as much, perhaps laying a hand on their sweet burdens, but I would have been misunderstood. If a man acted on every instinct normal to the yearning to make a sacrament of life, he would soon be put away. But let’s think about this stroking an expectant mother a moment. If it were made a custom, like kissing the bride or shaking hands, mightn’t it have a salutary effect on our nervous systems? A palm laid ceremoniously on their middles—and most ceremonies are casual—would purge me of fear and boredom and lust for the rest of the evening.

  A movement in the crowd suddenly cleared a gap between me and Nickie. I darted through it to his side. He was talking to a guy from whom I knew he would appreciate being rescued, a feature writer on the Pick who had just had a volume of his humorous sketches of city life published under the title How To Arrest a Policeman. “They told me the advance on Policeman was seven thousand eight hundred and—” he was saying.

  I reached out to tap Nickie on the shoulder. As I did so, I felt another hand come out of the mob and grasp my own wrist. Turning, I saw my sister Lila.

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” she said into my ear. “It’s about Nickie. I know. But this time’ll be the last. I promise. Because—come on, let’s go into the library. There won’t be anybody there.”

  She towed me through the edge of the crowd toward a pair of tall doors at the end of the room.

  The library was the place for privacy, all right. No one ever went in there. Not even the Groteguts would dream of profaning the tomblike sanctity of those beautiful sets of books. It would be safe to say of George Grotegut that he had never even heard of some of the authors on his shelves. There was no vulgarity in this attitude, because no pretension: he simply recognized the contents of the room as the treasures of human genius for which he had provided a shrine best not desecrated by his frequent appearance. Grotegut manufactured commercial candies which were sold in tinned assortments bearing such labels as “Bridge Mix” and “TV Munch,” with a “quality” line packaged in wicker containers later usable as sewing baskets. No, the books were safe in their noble ranks till Doomsday. First editions were in a special locked cabinet the key to which had been lost. I took down a volume of Lamartine’s essays and opened it. It gave out a report like a pistol shot.

  “Books like that aren’t meant to be read,” said Lila, returning with fresh drinks she had gone to fetch us.

  “They’re bound to sit upon the shelf.”

  She smiled at my little joke. She looked wan and tired, with circles under her normally bright blue eyes. Even so she was as pretty a girl as a man could want, with a figure shapely still after two children. I cursed Nickie for the trouble he caused. Not a month went by but some fresh facet of his impossibility came up for me to worry about. If only it were women! That would be something specific to be specifically dealt with. And if only he were not so likable. I steeled myself for another lament from Lila, to be followed by another pep talk from me—a simple airing of her feelings that would serve her till the next time. I was quite unprepared for what she told me now.

  “What is it this time, Sis?” I asked, taking the glass. “What’s he done now?”

  “It’s not what he’s done, this time, Chick,” she said. “It’s what I’m going to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m going to divorce him.”

  She walked to the nearest chair, where she sat and drank from her highball as though it were a glass of water and she a child quite parched from thirst.

  5

  WHEN Lila told me she wanted to divorce Nickie, I instantly exclaimed, “But you hardly know the boy!”

  She took this to be facetious. Actually, I was trying with gentle irony to remind her that I had opposed the match, just as firmly as I now would the divorce. I continued:

  “It’s all right for two people to rush into marriage, but divorce is a step that should be taken seriously. Splitting up a home! What will become of the children?”

  “What is becoming of them now? If a judge decides, say, that they shall see their father week ends and three nights a month, that’s just about the status quo. When he had a job, it could be said that he supported his family. Now that he’s come into that ridiculous ‘inheritance’ he sits at the Greek’s all day being a man of means. Maybe if a judge t
ells him to pony up five hundred smackers a month alimony it’ll put some iron in his blood.”

  Lila had not overstated her case. The thumbnail sketch of her husband was accurate, though executed in bitterness and in a tone verging on hysteria. Life which mauls most of us into reliability (so that we can fruitfully for our allotted years ply the brooms and typewriters “they” put into our hands) had failed to deflect Nickie Sherman from his course, if you can call “drifting with every passion till your soul is a stringed lute on which all winds can play” a course. So now, though married and the father of two children one of whom had malocclusion, he still carried a blackthorn stick and said things like, “I hate having my life disrupted by routine,” and “I have only once heard Gluck made interesting, and that was by a conductor who misunderstood him.”

  This brought in no money. Nickie had once briefly worked on the local police force (an outlet I had urged as ideal for his inductive mind) but he had no more than settled down on the city payroll than an aunt had foolishly died and left him a small trust fund, the interest from which (roughly ninety-five dollars a week) he saw as bringing a cultivated insouciance once more within his reach, by conferring on him the status of Young Man With a Private Income. He had but to quit his job to become a free-lance sleuth. And quit it he had! So now we were presumably waiting for a hysterical woman not his wife to burst in on him with the news that her husband of a day had vanished, leaving no trace, and to press on him a retainer of ten thousand dollars. Meanwhile he was to be seen nightly at the Samothrace, the Greek’s, quoting Cyril Connolly to the effect that he vegetated, while other people merely lived, when fresh out of aphorisms of his own. Of his indolence he said, “I’m developing character the hard way—with plenty to eat and drink and no worries.”