Who is Teddy Villanova?

by Thomas Berger

  “That Villanova sure gets around,” Peggy said in her lightest voice, tossing her locks.

  “It’s no joke, Peggy. We’re dealing with professionals for whom the slightest detail is important. Take that underwear in the bathroom—”

  Her nostrils arched. But I couldn’t worry about her prudery at this point. “I’ll wager that the labels have been carefully removed. Also from the clothes in the closet and those in the suitcase.” Pursuing my theory, I went, or rather limped, to the valise, opened it, and found the black brassiere that Knox had fondled. It was a skimpy garment, made of lace netting, and at the point of each cup was a large aperture that would permit the nipple and aureole to project nakedly. I was wrong about the label. It was there: Pierre’s of Broadway.

  “Ha!” I exclaimed. “Hooker indeed. Prostitutes never wear this type of garb or gear.”

  Behind me Peggy said: “You should know.”

  “There’d be no point, you see. This is the food of fantasy, Peg. Frustrated housewives, unfledged maidens, even female impersonators…”

  But Peggy did not stay in position to be scandalized. She had almost reached the bathroom in her mad dash, when I threw down the piece of erotic raiment and called her back.

  “I’m afraid I have been the victim of an underworld gang again,” I went on to say. “It’s yet too early to determine whether they are in league with the earlier lot. If they can furnish hordes of fake policemen, they must be a formidable mob. But what do they want? Drugs? They took this place to pieces and didn’t find anything. They would hardly go to all that trouble to shake me down for two hundred dollars. But maybe the cloud has lifted with this latest incursion. They must realize now that I don’t have anything they want. But why do they keep putting that corpse on my premises and hauling it away?”

  Suddenly Peggy’s own story seemed suspect.

  I asked: “If you thought they were making a movie, then why did you come in and save me from Zwingli?”

  “Because I lost my head when I saw him with that gun!” Peggy cried. Then she colored and looked at the floor.

  “You really care, don’t you?” I said softly, betraying too much vanity.

  “I’d do it for a dog,” she replied, back in self-possession.

  “Yes,” I barked, back in harness myself, “that canine. I’m going down to look for him. And I’m also going to tackle that damned doorman.”

  “Let me do that, partner,” Peggy said. “You get on the Washburn job. That’s our sole hope of getting some ready cash. If you don’t find anything to impress him with, make up something that will keep him on the hook for a while so we can ask another retainer. And when you get it, remember half is mine.”

  I did not recall having agreed to the partnership except on receipt of the hundred dollars, but I couldn’t take another argument at this point, especially one involving numbers. Anyway, she was my only ally, and I needed no more adversaries.

  I resisted making a show of undue affection, however, and instead went to the bathroom and, at long last, attended to my needs as quietly as I could: the door was embarrassingly thin.

  When I emerged, Peggy had a finger tip between her front teeth.

  “Now that I think of it, the truck maybe had Movers written on it, not Movies. Still, one of those actors in a cop’s uniform outside did tell me this thing about The Reformers—”

  “God,” I said, distracting myself from thoughts of the outrageous imposture, “look at this place! I guess I’ll continue to live at the office. Anyway, I don’t have the money now to buy the super’s good will.”

  “Will you get going?” Peggy commanded.

  The next time I got my hands on any cash at all, I intended to declare our “agreement” null and void, because obtained under duress.

  The doorman was not in evidence as I passed through the lobby, though the tomato sauce from his hero sandwich, along with one meatball, squashed, on which he had apparently sat, was still glazing the last cushion on the couch. I was really only too happy to turn that phase of the investigation over to Peggy, and the matter of the dog as well.

  On Third Avenue I caught a cab and had to endure the abuse of the driver when I confessed that I hadn’t yet thought of where I was going. He was an embittered middle-aged man with obviously dyed hair and a pair of glasses one lens of which was pulverized, yet stayed opaquely in place.

  “I’ll tell you this,” he assured me splenetically, “I’m putting the meter on while you decide.” And did so, using his wrist as if it were a wrench. And, as always with New York cabbies, took off as though in competition at Monza, en route to oblivion.

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “Sutton Place.”

  “Which is exactly where?”

  I had been through this many times before, even when asking for Grand Central Station or Times Square. When I first arrived in Gotham, I assumed such questions were disingenuous. I soon learned better. To many veteran drivers Manhattan has remained a mysterious terrain throughout their careers; they orient themselves only by counting the numbered streets.

  “No, strike that.” I got out my poor billfold, full of the Villanova documents, but managed to find the Altman’s envelope on which I had jotted down Washburn’s wife’s schedule. If I could read my Sanskrit, she should soon be at her yoga class, at the studio of one Chai Wallah, which Washburn had said, loosely, was in the Village. He had not however provided the precise address.

  I dreaded asking the surly driver to stop at a phone booth so that I might look Wallah up in the directory, and therefore instructed him merely to deposit me on Eighth Street.

  I should have known this would result only in his assailing me vocally for not furnishing a particular number. Somehow when the moment is at hand I can never realize my long-held intention to tell a New York taxi driver of the abysmal contempt in which I hold him.

  “All right, all right,” I said. “Let me out at the next light.”

  “Nothing doing,” he said. “I ain’t letting you dodge the issue. Whoduhyuhwannasee? I probly know the address cold.”

  He had gone too far in his arrogance. I decided to humble him. “It happens to be a little-known studio at which an obscure Hindu gives lessons in Yoga, a Far Eastern discipline of mind and body. You never even heard of Sutton Place.”

  His insufferably knowing eye appeared in the rear-vision mirror. “Mumser, you just lost duh bet.”

  He made a high-speed turn onto Fourteenth Street and roared west for several blocks without stopping once, though at best the lights were orange, then turned south and soon got involved in those Village streets which run on the bias, breaking the regular gridiron pattern of the rest of the island.

  I was immediately disoriented. But the driver seemed in his element, swooping, twisting, tacking as if under sail, but sometimes merely ramming his passage through the congestion, human and vehicular, in the narrow byways. At last he drew up before a facade bearing the name YOGHURT CITY.

  “So I rubbed your nose in it, yeah, wise guy?” he jeered. I forgot to say earlier that the metal frame was all that remained of the divider between front and back seats; the Plexiglas was gone. I could easily have leaned forward and throttled him with a mugger’s forearm across the Adam’s apple.

  However, I instead stoically paid the fare, the rates on which it was calculated having seemingly risen another twenty percent since yesterday, and even added a lavish tip, for which I got no thanks, and in fact the door was ripped from my hands by his quick getaway. I was almost projected into the gutter. Within thirty yards he braked sharply and the door slammed shut of its own inertia.

  Yoghurt City was a health-food emporium. One window was stacked with bottled vitamins, the other with bags of horse fodder, hanks of slimy kelp, and a pile of blanched nuts like tiny skulls.

  Averting my eyes, I slunk to the corner, where one of the new public-phone arrangements stood: two instruments hanging on a panel exposed to the weather. Involved in a conversation, you might have your pockets picke
d—or, in certain areas (and this might well be one, many deviates being diet cranks as well), be quickly, deftly sodomized while making an apology for dialing a wrong number. Paranoid fantasies, perhaps, but New York is a bad place in which to offer the unguarded spine.

  In the old phone booths, which were invariably carpeted with urine and vomit, the directory was always either defaced to illegibility or gone altogether. With the new type of apparatus, no book was offered. I had no combination of coins to make ten cents with which to call Information. I was not yet so desperate as to waste a quarter. Nor did I wish to ask change from either person just then adjacent on the sidewalk: an extremely obese young woman with a sweaty face and green-streaked blonde hair, and a comely, almost beautiful young boy in the beanie and blazer of a private school; because she was talking violently to herself, and he might have assumed I was but another of the pederasts no doubt familiar to him on his homeward route.

  The store at the corner, an ex-tobacco shop by the fading letters on its window, was now a lair of gypsies. A mustached woman in a filthy saffron dressing gown, showing a pneumatic cleavage, leaned forward on her camp chair behind the glass and beckoned to me in what she believed was a lascivious gesture (a pistoned index finger plunging into a cylinder of fist).

  With the next step, I saw, for the first time, the dingy doorway between the health-food shop and the gypsy den. It seemed to have been inserted there as if in a dream— I could have sworn…A cardboard sign appeared behind its panel of glass: YOGA WALLAH.

  I pushed in. I ascended the flight of stairs that rose directly behind the door. Winded when I reached the second floor, I was disappointed to see at the end of the hall a twin of the downstairs sign, with the difference that a red arrow was appended to this one, pointing upwards. The signs proved eventually to be quadruplets, the last one, on the fourth level, sans arrow: it was affixed to a solid door.

  I was gasping, and my bruises ached. I knocked at the door and then opened it. I looked into one large room that occupied most of the fourth story of the small building. The floor had been lately refinished, varnished, and waxed. The impeccably whitewashed integrity of the walls was broken only by windows here and there: there were no decorations. Neither was any furniture in evidence. It seemed a place that had lately been made ready for a new occupant, who had not as yet moved in.

  It was, I think, just as I stepped across the threshold that I was sapped. Had I not been in motion in a direction away from the source of the powerful blow, my skull might well have been sundered.

  8

  When I came to, another face was very close to mine: its skin was polished brown; its lips were thin yet flabby. It wore a white turban. Its breath smelled of a melange of spices, which I was in no state to identify severally and name, though no doubt cumin, coriander, and turmeric would have been among them.

  A high-tenor voice had apparently been speaking for some moments before I regained full consciousness. Its tone must be called morally hectoring.

  “…leading to wiolence, madness, and strife, and concupiscence with vimmin, you see?”

  It took me a moment to understand that the pressure on my chest, which thoroughly inhibited my breathing, was due to the kneeling of this man thereupon. It was far from easy to dislodge him: he had some Oriental mastery of balance, such as is used with advantage in jujitsu, and his sharp little kneecaps were seemingly prehensile at, or in, my rib cage.

  But, at last, by first feinting left with my shoulders alone, and so evoking his compensatory movement in the opposite direction—though effortlessly, and he was still lecturing me—I proceeded actually to twist my trunk leftwards rather than to the right, tricking his anticipation of equilibrium, and he was thrown.

  He was not however helplessly toppled. He used the momentum to such practical effect that when his narrow buttocks met the floor they were transformed into two brown points intersected by a tense white cache-sexe, and his heels were joined behind his neck.

  Within this singular frame his face assumed a smile that glittered in one gold tooth and a pair of jet eyes.

  He continued to speak: “Pain does not exist of itself. It is but the absence of vell-being. And den one goes farther: vellbeing has no reality, because it cannot be defined except as the absence of pain. Reality, therefore, finally has no existence. The man who stands upon a bridge over a river and reaches the first level of awareness by understanding that the vater is still and that the bridge is moving, goes on to the next: the realization that there is neither bridge nor water, because there is no self.”

  My skull was roaring with the brutal blow it had received. I was in no condition to toy with metaphysical concepts, not even such farcical ones as I have always considered those emanating from Asiatic sources, at any rate, when they reach the West, far from the Ganges, leprosy, untouchables, chutney, etc., which give them perhaps greater substance on their own terrain.

  I clasped my head and determined that at the first recession of the pounding surf between my ears I should rise and place-kick that little turbaned swine through a window. Meanwhile, I had only strength enough to promise him this treatment in a roar that was perhaps incomprehensible, for it did not seem to jar him.

  At length he unraveled himself and stood up. He was a tiny person, utterly hairless, with no visible muscles or sinews; his diaper, small legs, and positively minuscule feet gave him an infantile cut of jib.

  “Good heavens,” said he. “Vot a naughty man you are.” His grin became more intense. “But dis is the study of a lifetime, and you can have been but one hour at it. Instant serenity cannot be expected. Traveling the path of truth is to tread the edge of the razor. Before the next lesson, you must, incidentally, read the well-known volume by W. Somerset Maw-gum.”

  The tide flowed in behind my eyes, obscuring them for a moment, and when I looked next he had vanished, without benefit of the legendary rope. I was actually relieved to see him again, when he emerged from a door at the rear of the room, which I had not previously noticed.

  He carried a book, a sheet of paper, and a ball-point pen. I had not yet managed to get to my feet. Sitting on the floor, I was as high as his navel, “that tortuosity or complicated nodosity,” in the definition of Sir Thomas Browne.

  The wallah handed me all three items, directing me to sign and return the paper and keep both pen and book. I examined the trio: the volume of course was a used copy of Maugham’s Razor’s Edge. The barrel of the pen was imprinted with some advertisement. The document was a contract by which I agreed not only to advance one thousand dollars for a preliminary course of instruction in the Nonreality of Existence, but also to pay $2.98 for the novel and 790¢ for the pen.

  Infuriated by this swindle, I found the strength to rise.However, I was frustrated in my intent to hurl the book at him, owing to a sporadic multiplicity of vision and also a constant sense of bonelessness in my limbs. I was able only to threaten him with a suit for assault.

  “Your state of unhealthiness is much worse than one first assumed,” said the little Hindu. “Indeed, it was one who found you upon the floor and brought you round. One perceived that you were in a pseudoreligious trance, but one has no respect for such rubbish. It is merely the spurious response to accumulated rage.”

  “It wasn’t you who sapped me?” But on the instant I had begun to think that unlikely: he could scarcely fleece me of $1,003.77 if I were dead or thoroughly disabled—and believe me, that blow was intended to be lethal. “Then who did? I suppose you claim you saw nobody.” Though exonerating him, I still had reason to be peevish about his manifest lack of sympathy.

  “Betveen appointments one meditates in private,” said he, indicating the rear door with a backward push of his little brown heel, succeeding which he exhibitionistically sank on one leg until his knee was perhaps an inch above the floor, the other ankle folded up against the small of his back. He stared at nothing interminably, and then sprang erect as if impelled by an expanding spring. I realized that no man who cou
ld do that sort of thing could be called simply a charlatan.

  I told him who I was and why I had come there, adding: “I’m afraid that I’m not in the market for your course, though I must say your acrobatics are impressive to a man who has himself always been extremely inept in that area. As a boy, for example, I was never even able to perform a backward somersault.”

  “You are not then Mr. Frederick A. Vashburn?”

  As if I needed a further confusion! It took some time to clear up this matter, for he was incapable of remaining immobile for half a minute, unless delivering one of his own lectures, and it is disconcerting to interrogate a man who incessantly transforms himself into inhuman figures— which suggests to me that the mythical Proteus may well have be n an actual yogi.

  But eventually I determined that, at least according to his statement, a male voice had telephoned him the afternoon before and made an appointment for the hour at which I subsequently arrived. The name given was Washburn. Hearing “Frederick A.” rather than “Frederika” was understandable, given his alien ear.

  “But I thought she was a regular student long since?” I asked, when each of us had got through his own account.

  “Never,” said he, and as if mocking my confessed boyhood inability, performed not only a backward somersault, but his began and ended in a standing position. When he landed he squinted suspiciously at me.

  “Though despising all that is vordly, one is not to be considered gullible. One should like to examine your documents of identification, you see.”

  I groaned. “I’m afraid this will take a further explanation, Mr. Chai. My own were mysteriously replaced by those bearing another name, a name that has repeatedly appeared elsewhere in my affairs, beginning only with this morning, as it happens. Indeed, it is a sinister matter.”