Villiers Touch

by Brian Garfield

  “You don’t? Christ, honey, you gotta listen to somebody. You got it sticking out all over you—you think you’re in love with this bastard, you’re taking it seriously, but he ain’t, he won’t even interduce you to his precious mother, right? You want love and marriage, and he wants something else, right? I know these guys, believe me—all he wants is sex.”

  “That’s not so!”

  “You think about it, honey. And while you’re with this guy, you see if you can tell yourself it ain’t just sex. You think I don’t know the way you kids carry on nowadays? Hell, I’m a broad-minded old sonofabitch, I don’t carry no horse whip, you know that. But this guy—Christ, I never even met the bastard, and I can read him like a book.”

  “It’s not so! It isn’t!”

  Her father lowered his eyes to the can of beer. He said softly, “Don’t try to persuade me, honey—see if you can persuade yourself first. Y’unnerstand what I mean?”

  “All right,” she snapped viciously. “Maybe he is just toying with my affections. Maybe I’m just in a mood to have my affections toyed with.”

  He murmured, “Don’t talk like that, Anne. Not to your old man.”

  Wound up, she said with glittering anger, “Loving is more important than being loved, anyway. Isn’t it? What does it matter if—”

  “It matters, honey. You think about him not taking you to meet his mother, and you think hard, and you see what you come up with.” He leaned forward suddenly and gripped her wrist. She tried to jerk back, but he held her in a tight fist; he said earnestly, “You really love him, Anne? You really want the guy? Then make him marry you before he leeches his way out!”

  “What? How?”

  “How have women done it for five thousand years?”

  “Poppa!”

  He released her and slumped back in his chair; his jowls seemed to sag. He said, “Forget that. I take it back. Christ, I got troubles of my own, honey, half the time I don’t know what I’m saying myself, y’know what I mean? It’s only, well, hell, I’d like to see you get yourself a good husband, get out of this rat hole here. Nothing’s ever gonna get any better here. You gotta get out of it while you can, honey. You gotta grab any chance you can get. And don’t worry about me and her. We’re all used up anyway—I don’t want you throwing your whole life away on a couple old wrecks like your mother and me. We got nothing left to look forward to. You have. You got your youth, which is a precious thing, y’unnerstand what I’m tryna tell you?”

  “Stop talking like that, Poppa. I don’t know what to think.”

  He said slowly, as if thinking it out with great care, “Listen to me, honey. When you’re in love the way you are, you seem to lose a lot of your self-respect. Maybe you get to thinking, ‘I’m gonna have him, marriage or no marriage, it don’t matter.’ But it does matter. You gotta have something to show for it, or you’ll find out the world’s full of bastards that’ll use you up and throw you out. You gotta fight that, honey—you gotta grab your chance when you can.”

  He chugged the rest of the beer down and hurled the can in the paper bag by the sink, got up and shuffled heavily toward the door. She hadn’t realized before how old he was getting.

  He mumbled, “You think about it, honey,” and went out of the kitchen.

  She sat for a long time in the silence. Confused by double loyalties, she sat motionless until finally her hand, almost of its own will, reached for the phone, and she began to dial Steve’s number, hardly aware of what she was doing. She was remembering the evening he had taken her window-shopping and given her the silver from Jensen’s; thinking of him, listening to the phone ring and ring and ring, her body was in torment.

  20. Steve Wyatt

  Attended by four servants and a yard man, Fran Wyckliffe Wyatt lived in barely adequate comfort in a gabled rococo house on sufficient East Hampton acreage to ensure privacy, with a long soft lawn that rolled down to a grove of big old willows around a pond, on which floated a few swans and ducks. There was, inevitably, a gazebo. The faint fishy smell of the Atlantic came up from the nearby beach, and the evening breeze seemed to have cleared away the gnats and moths and some of the heat, making it possible for the Friday-night gathering—a tradition with Wyatts for eighty years—to move out onto the lawn after the late dinner.

  Fran Wyckliffe Wyatt was sixty-seven. Her hair, waved tightly and meticulously, looked like a gray stone sculpture, done in a style that had not changed in forty years. She had a homely angular resemblance to Andrew Jackson and looked as if she might drink straight from the bottle, though no one had ever actually witnessed her doing so. She was confident enough of her impeccable antecedents and the position which accrued to it that she had long ago given up demure pretense; she had allowed her natural self to emerge, and in so doing she revealed that for all her imperious nobility she was in fact a creature of remarkable vulgarity—loud, vital, hearty, with tenacious jaw and strong whiskey-baritone voice. She was a character—a landmark.

  Of the nine guests who had attended the dinner gathering, five had departed shortly after ten o’clock, pleading fatigue and the long drive back to Morristown, where they lived amid polo ponies and tennis courts. Letting the group out the front door with the aid of his mother’s maid, Steve Wyatt heard one of the departing guests complain as they got into chauffeured Mercedes, “Really, you don’t get invited to dinner at Fran’s—you get sentenced to it.” Steve exchanged glances with the maid, whose face gave away absolutely nothing, and listened to the low run of laughter from the departing guests before the car pulled away, its headlights stabbing the night, and surged toward the highway.

  When he returned to the rear lawn, he found his mother engaged in spirited argument with Prescott Van Alstyne, bitterly declaiming “those imbeciles in Washington,” by which she meant Congress, not the administration; she had had a Democrat in the house once, but she hadn’t known about it until after he left, and he had never been invited to return. It was said, with reasonable accuracy, that anybody at all could be invited once to Fran Wyatt’s, provided of course he had minimum credentials; the real sign of acceptance was a second invitation, which was extended to few.

  The Van Alstynes were among the select—not the Best Known People perhaps, but assuredly the Best People. You had to catch Prescott Van Alstyne between yachting expeditions to the Adriatic and skiing safaris to Austria. He had played poker with Onassis on a yacht in the Aegean, and his wife had been photographed dancing with the Duke of Windsor. She was a fleshy woman in rubber-soled shoes and matter-of-fact tweeds, wearing the careless look of old wealth and good horses.

  They had with them tonight their daughter Beth, a tall chic blond who spent her time Junior Leaguing—being decorative, attending concerts and ballets, opening exhibitions in galleries, and performing Good Works: her current passion was a foundation raising money to aid Asian children whose limbs her government had blown off. She never admitted her main purpose in all these activities was to show off clothes.

  Wyatt’s mother had thrust Beth Van Alstyne upon him without trying to disguise her motives. He always did his best to humor his mother; but Beth conformed to her inbred type; she was a dull creature of ritual and repetition, preoccupied with appearance and gratuitous gossip. Within the past month he had learned firsthand that she disapproved of sexual experimentation—not on moral principle, but because it was vulgar. By now, merely the way she said “Hellew” was enough to make his skin crawl.

  Even so, she was a pretty girl. Very tan, just slightly leathery, with squint creases from tennis and riding. She had sun-streaked blond hair, medium length, and for this occasion she wore the kind of upper-crust clothing that never went out of fashion—a McMullen blouse with round collar and short sleeves, a poplin skirt, practical shoes, a simple double strand of pearls. Wyatt rather enjoyed looking at her. He amused himself with a fantasy of sewing her lips shut with surgical sutures and taking her on an involuntary tour of exploration of the country discovered by the Marquis de Sade.
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  It would not come to pass. At any rate, she was rapidly becoming a copy of her mother, and that alone was enough to make him keep his distance. Letting the conversation ride by, he glanced across the group at Mrs. Daisy Van Alstyne and held his eyes against her until she met them. Her gaze shifted away quickly; color crawled up her cheeks. It made him smile slightly with recollection. It had often amused him to speculate how much she knew about the extent of his obligation to her. Everything I am, he thought dryly, I owe to you, dear old Daisy.

  She was—what?—fifty-one now? She must have been about thirty-seven then. A thirty-seven-year-old blonde with abundant hips and breasts and, even then, the suggestion of a double chin. Her husband had been deeply engaged in international finance in those days and rarely spent more than a fourth of his time at home.

  For Steve Wyatt it had been an adolescent summer of sexual fantasies. He and his second cousin had bored a peephole through the wall above the john in the ladies’ loo at the back of Chisolm’s Restaurant; at night they took turns shivering in the damp chill of the seaside woods, watching through it. One night, on a dare, Steve had gone around the building and intercepted a waitress, a fat jolly girl with pendulous breasts. He had tried to make a pass at her. She had laughed. “You’re a kid. Come back when you’re big enough.”

  “Big enough where?” But she had only laughed and skipped away, leaving him red-faced, aggravating his sexual tension.

  One evening in July or August he had gone into the Van Alstynes’ house after a tennis match on their courts, and had found the guest-bathroom door ajar and Mrs. Van Alstyne unexpectedly there, standing in front of the bathroom mirror with her blouse unbuttoned to the waist, posing with the tip of her tongue caught in the corner of her mouth, both breasts heavy and white, lifted in her palms. Preoccupied and consumed, incredibly she hadn’t seen him behind the half-open door. Passionately he watched her tickling her own breasts. He held his breath, wide-eyed, not stirring; but suddenly she saw him.

  He wheeled in fear, confused; but she whispered, “Wait?”

  She came to him slowly; she reached for his hand and would not let him go. She sat down on the edge of the guest-room bed. He stood looking wildly down at her while she tugged the tails of her blouse free of her skirt and pushed his hand against one of her soft heavy breasts. Tormented by fear and hardening excitement, he watched her eager eyes and felt the quick rise of her breathing, the sudden warm hard swell of her nipple under his palm. He sat down slowly, almost hypnotically, terrified of what she might do, just as terrified of what she might not do.

  A slow smile spread across her face. She disengaged his hand and stood up languidly. He saw the blouse come off and the skirt drop. He looked away, afraid he would have an orgasm right then. The hard pressure in the lap of his pants made him feel hot-faced and ludicrous.

  She stood swaying, a thick sweet fragrance of colognes and gin. He looked out of the corner of his eye in time to see her slip her panties down, exposing a tangle of hair which, freed, exploded into a soft hazy triangle, startlingly dark against the pale weight of her thick inner thighs.

  His mouth was dry. He shook his head, afraid to speak. She tipped his face up with one hand, and he saw her mystical smile, vague and submissive and demanding all at once.

  Her hand touched the front of his trousers. There was sudden flame. She brought him to his feet and undid his buckle and fly. He blinked very fast. She helped him push his underpants down and moved close against him. He felt her pull him down onto the bed. She was moist inside; she guided him into her. He lay on top of her while she curled her fat legs around him and began to pump.

  His body felt rock-hard. Braced on his elbows, he held his hands cupped over her huge loose breasts, squeezing them with sucking rhythm. Her body came alive against him, pitching and bucking, and all the while she stared directly into his eyes with a look of incandescent heat.

  In his agony of pleasure he went back into her again and again, unable to leave her alone for more than a half-hour at a time. Sometimes he could come twice or even three times before he lost his erection. She kept exciting him over again by the swell of her breasts when he was inside her, her cries of anguish, until most of the night was spent.

  The rest of that summer he hadn’t been able to stay away from her; she wouldn’t have let him if he could. She was there whenever he came—waiting, aroused and tense, to do as her violent needs demanded. His own passions, stored up so long, matched her uncontrollable lust. Yet when he was not with her he felt sick with revulsion against the force which, greater than himself, drew him to her. She was ugly, going to fat; her compulsive hunger for sex—not for him, but for it—was as impersonal as cannibalism; she was intent on nothing but her own gratification. Yet through the spiral of degradation he felt growth, a sense of dynamic power surging in him. Lying with her, drained, limp, exhausted, he felt alive in his manhood for the first time.

  She made of him an expert, ardent lover. After that summer he never bedded her again. She found other lovers; he found other women like her. He was never without a woman for long, usually an older woman. He had learned from her—he turned it onto the other ones, knowing how to suck them dry, make them ache in torment waiting for him, make their bodies sing with the drug of him.

  Seated off to the side of the lawn party, listening to the conversation but not taking part, he watched the guests with secret amusement. Van Alstyne, a clumsy, pompous idiot still, after all these years, evidently unaware his wife was putting horns on him every chance she got. Daisy, squirming in her seat, not meeting Steve’s glance. Beth, the blonde daughter, blithely unaware, chattering on about clothes and charities.

  Finally, near midnight, the guests rose to leave. Wyatt’s mother steered him stubbornly toward Beth’s elbow, but he remained oblivious, and in due course the Van Alstynes trundled off in their determinedly anonymous Oldsmobile.

  Fran Wyckliffe Wyatt sent the servants to bed and went striding across the foyer. “I’m pouring in the study, if you’d care to join me,” she said, and thundered into the oak-paneled den.

  He ambled in after her and said, “You’re making an ass of yourself, trying to throw me at that bitch.”

  “Balls.”

  “You’re a Goddamn snob,” he said.

  “Of course I’m a snob. I want my son to mingle with his own kind. The Van Alstynes are most acceptable—and they live damned comfortably.”

  “Comfortable” was one of those words in his mother’s vocabulary that needed interpreting. It translated to mean filthy rich.

  He said with a straight face, “But she wears such distressing clothes.”

  “Balls. She’s got marvelous taste in clothes.”

  Wyatt grinned, accepting the brandy she had poured; he swirled it gently, sniffing the bouquet.

  His mother sat down with one of her bony legs skewed over the arm of the chair. “She’s a lovely thing, Steve. You might do far worse.”

  “She’s dull. I’ve taken her out half a dozen times. Take my word for it, I’ve had more fun touring the BMT subway.”

  “She’s a hell of an attractive girl. I can’t understand why you’ve never sneaked her upstairs during one of these deadly parties and raped hell out of her.”

  “How do you know I haven’t?”

  “I’d know.”

  “The last woman I took upstairs in this house gave me the clap,” he said. “This is good brandy.”

  “Cousin Howard gave me half a case.”

  “Good old cousin Howard.”

  She pinned him with her shrewd gaze. “I spoke to him about you last night.”

  “To Howard Claiborne?”

  “He seems satisfied with your work, but when I hinted he might see his way clear to promoting you, he turned a deaf ear. Have you done something to offend him?”

  “Not that I know of. He’s a skinflint by nature—the fellow I work with describes him by saying ‘His guiding principle is “No,”’ and that’s a good way to sum him up
, isn’t it? What are you worrying about? I’m doing all right.”

  “What’s happened to your ambition? Balls—when your grandfather was your age he’d already made his first million.”

  “They didn’t have the income tax then.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. What do you think I brought you up to do? Waste your life working for someone else on a salary?”

  “And,” he said dryly, “it is very expensive to be rich, is it not?”

  “Money,” she said, “does not matter as long as one has it. But you’ve a long way to go before you reach that point.”

  “Your trouble, mater, is you were born chewing on a silver spoon, thinking that money, because it had always been there, always would be there. Then suddenly it disappeared, and my father killed himself, and you decided to forge me into a weapon of revenge and retaliation against the world for the injustices the world had visited upon you. Now, of course, you’re getting anxious because you want to see me succeed before you die. Well, you were a good teacher, and I’ve been a good willing student, and it won’t be long at all before we’ll have our fortune back. But I wish you wouldn’t keep trying to marry me off to bitches like Beth Van Alstyne—I’ve collected enough stud fees in my time and from now on I’d rather do it my own way.”

  She didn’t answer right away. He lit a cigarette and inhaled too deeply.

  Finally she smiled at him. “Very well. But let me remind you, your background and your social position impose certain great obligations on you—one of them being the choice of a wife. You can’t afford to pick up with just any sexy guttersnipe. If you want to have flings with some hatcheck girl, then by all means have your fling—take a mistress, be discreet, and let it run its course. But that kind of marriage is out. You understand? Your position rules it out. You’ll have to start thinking about marriage, Steve, and you’ll have to start thinking about it in terms of girls like Beth, whether you like her or not.”