Who is Teddy Villanova?

by Thomas Berger

  ARE YOU TEDDY VILLANOVA?

  And held it to the glass.

  His change of controls was imperceptible, but the machine moved closer to the building, so near indeed that the windows would seem in imminent danger from the extravagant vibration. He pressed his goggles against the Lucite wall of the bubble, a wall-eyed pike in an aquarium.

  Finally he drew his helmet away and nodded deliberately.

  “It is he!” I gasped.

  And Boris, after flinching from my immediate side with a grimace, which I suppose meant Alice’s animadversion on my breath had had cause, confirmed in like wonder: “He bestrides the narrow world like a colossus.”

  “Get that damn window open!” shouted Peggy. She swung the empty champagne bottle by its neck.

  But now that Teddy hung there before me, he who had been fabulous as the griffin, I did not wish him ill. Also, an unprovoked attack on him who has offered you no harm is illegal in any society however barbarous. No doubt it was in violation of some ordinance to operate an aircraft so close to a multiple dwelling, but to be brought down by a makeshift missile, in the unlikely event that Peggy could launch it accurately, was grave punishment for what as yet was more lark than crime—and as if so to characterize it, Teddy decompressed his lips and smiled, true, in a fashion that might be seen as saturnine, though one must always remember the effect of the grim jet helmet.

  “Come on,” Peggy cried. “I’m gonna nail that bird.” She shoved between Boris and me and assaulted the window. I supposed that I must help her. Despite his rococo style, Villanova was no doubt, as she had said, but a brute—and in fact it was surely he who had sapped me, with intent to kill, on the Hindu’s threshold. Assailing him now would be mere self-defense, if anachronous.

  “There’s a trick to that,” I said, clearing Peg and Boris from the window. It required a punch-and-lift effect eluding description and achieved gracefully only by my bimonthly ham-handed window washer. With some battering and more agitation, I had worked the sash up an inch or two when suddenly it ceased to resist and shot to the top of its travel in the immemorial mockery of the mortal by the material.

  Peggy inserted herself across the sill, bottle, both arms, and, necessarily, breasts. With more than half her corporal mass beyond the exterior face of the building wall, and warming up her arm with great revolutions of the vessel that had lately held the Widow Clicquot’s froth (no doubt emptied down Peg’s hatch; she looked, now that I thought of it, drunk as a tar), she began to pedal her spike heels, and the angle between her calves and thighs rapidly alternated between the obtuse and the acute—as she proceeded to kick herself farther through the open window.

  She did not bring this venture to the sorry issue for which it would have been destined: I seized one limb and Boris the other, though his hand, so far along her thigh as to be more wanton than supportive, was of such small help in retrieving her that I was sole creditor of her debt for life.

  Peggy displayed no gratitude. Indeed, she resisted the effort to withdraw her, hooking her elbows over the outside sill. What Teddy thought of this grappling match could not be known. Perhaps by the cruel gauge he might routinely apply to all phenomena, he assessed it as rather our attempt to defenestrate an exhausted tart, quite a standard disposal in his degenerate world.

  Meanwhile Boris went too far in applying Father Hopkins to a helicoptered hoodlum, shouting: “Daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon…” as his hand was also too inordinate in tracing an imaginary line on Peggy’s upper inside thigh.

  I dropped her ankle and seized his wrist, exhuming his buried hand with the old schoolboy probe of nerve-amidst-sinews.

  “Ouch! Damn your eyes,” said he.

  “This wench is my ward,” I told him. “Toy with her fine foot if you like, but eschew her quivering thigh and the demesnes that there adjacent lie.”

  “I assure you,” he replied, “that I was distracted by Teddy’s purchase on plain air, to what purpose I cannot say.

  Peggy yet swung her bottle and, presumably, sounded fishwife expletives, given the yaw of her back-of-head, this clamor unheard over that of Teddy’s whirligig. Boris and I had spoken in yells.

  I might have commented on the NYPD’s assigning the vicious to Vice, as with Zwingli it had employed the addict in Narcotics—a Dantesque practice of condemning the sinner to a surfeit of same, as life’s gluttons are literal pigs in Inferno—did not Teddy Villanova at that point produce an alteration not in his attitude but rather in the furnishings thereof: a Jacob’s ladder began to unreel from the basement of his portable heaven.

  His hover was so firm that this hempen device, metal-runged, scarcely swung or swayed.

  At the same moment Peggy hurled the Veuve’s dead green soldier, and as foreseen by anybody not in thrall to megalomania, the shot was far short, the heavy bottle scarcely climbing before it obeyed gravity’s command to plunge. If Teddy’s demonstration had collected a crowd, one of them might soon be brained.

  The lowest aluminum rung of the ladder was soon near enough to tantalize my secretary, but never quite within her reach if my restraint of her ankle was maintained; and it was. In fact, I seized the other calf as well and, catching her by surprise, wheelbarrowed her from the window altogether now, her hands accepting the fall to the floor.

  I took myself to the sill. My belief that the ladder hung near enough to be grasped had been based on an illusion of my former perspective. Though in length its dangle reached my level, the breadth of intervening air was some dozen feet, and not to be crossed by any unfeathered creature.

  Boris shouted: “He’ll go now, if he can’t have her, and God knows when we’ll look on him again, or on his like.”

  “It occurs to me,” said I, “as it should have to you, that the police have helicopters, have they not, and if they had been called when we first sighted his whirl, he might now have been chased to the landing pad he must necessarily maintain somewhere in the metropolitan area.”

  “Alas,” said Boris, “I don’t know the drill for getting hold of our sky arm. In Vice we seldom need air support, you see, the typical pimpmobile being so burdened with accessories, with a consequent reduction of its horsepower, that the unmarked cars we favor, rusty old high-finned models that suggest the Puerto Rican family chariot, can easily overtake them in hot pursuit.”

  With asperity I yelled: “Though some of you have attained to a level of civilization undreamt of by the lowbrow copper of yore, you have acquired a concomitant fecklessness…Speaking of panders, do you by chance know a Calvin Peachtree, who may be a policeman as well?”

  “A Moor?”

  “Yes, and his Desdemona is a murderous albino.”

  “Black gangs compete with white for control of the rackets,” said Boris. “Owing to his hue, Peachtree goes easily under cover in that milieu—as he could not, say, on the Olympic ski team.”

  “Meanwhile, Signor Villanova continues to hover.” And, as I looked up now, was gesturing at us with a hooked finger. “What can that mean?”

  “From all we know,” Boris shouted, “he may well be a polymorphous pervert, as ready to sodomize a man as flog a strumpet or molest a child of either sex.”

  “A veritable fiend,” I agreed. I had waxed and waned towards Teddy throughout, though the charges against him, while growing more immoderate, had stayed unproven.

  “I think he has now taken a fancy to you,” said Boris. “Exploiting which, you might nab him.”

  Before I could respond to this insolent suggestion, Villanova swung the craft so that the end of the rope ladder whipped, more smartly than could have been anticipated from its lazy look, almost into the window, and luckily so, for at the same moment Boris defenestrated me with one great shove, and willy-nilly, seizing the aluminum tube of the terminal rung, I embarked on my career as Flying Wren, death-defying aerialist.

  Perhaps you have never hung from a helicopter: the lack of a palpable surround is uncanny. Add to this the shock of being untimely ripped fr
om the womb of one’s home, from which Boris’ bawdy cries of encouragement and Peggy’s keening soon became inaudible as Teddy simultaneously soared the machine and winched me towards its abdominal trap door.

  We topped Manhattan’s towers in that district; a gust spun me briefly to see my apparent fellows in altitude to the north, Empire and Chrysler; and on the backswing, the World Trade Chang & Eng, to whom at that distance I seemed superior. The last phase of my ingestion into the helicopter’s maw seemed endless; the winch grew reluctant when my forehead reached the level of the cabin floor; the blur-blown focus of my eyes stayed for an eternity on the struts of undercarriage; my body felt as though stripped by the wanton wind.

  Finally, helped less by grudging gears than by fingers, forearms, and elbows, I scrambled within, crawled two paces forward, and, swallowing to reseat my gorge, stared gingerly ahead at what I could discern of Teddy Villanova over the back of seat, which was: mere hemisphere of black helmet.

  The guest accommodation in this craft was filed behind, not ranked with, the pilot. I knee-walked to it and sat on, then withdrew and buckled, a safety belt. Trying to address Teddy by voice, under the din of engine and blades, would have been useless. But after a moment’s study of glossy Fiberglas pate, I reached over the seat top and tapped his shoulder.

  I don’t remember what message I meant him to read into this.

  His response, without turning, was to raise his left hand, gloved continuously with the black leather of his flying costume, and with index finger and thumb form the familiar O of the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, the K signified by the three digits erected erratically in diminishing perspective beyond.

  I added this impudence to the account I would draw up against him and present for payment when we landed. I felt my pockets for my Browning, loosened the constraint of the seat belt, and felt again: it was gone, had long since plummeted, no doubt, through skylight or skull. Whatever Teddy’s crimes, the damage caused by trying to bring him to book was extensive, perhaps the burning of the sty to dine on roast pork.

  I stared down through the bubble. The East River was the brimming gutter below, a traffic of aphids along its near curb, a smoking chip or two on its flood. The immediate question was: where did Ted head? To some Fire Island fastness of inversion, there, confirming Boris’ theory, to attempt to breach, by brutality or blandishment, my heterosexual defenses? Before I played Lawrence of Arabia to Teddy’s Turk, I would cook both our geese! I made feral claws of my hands and moved them slowly towards his nape, but to throttle him effectively I should have had to lift my hands farther than the seatbelt would tolerate.

  I dropped them to the buckle, but as I freed its grasp Villanova put his machine into a swinging turn and directed it back towards Manhattan. Centrifugation hurled me from the seat.

  When I had remounted and belted again, we were near the place whence we had risen and losing altitude, so that I could identify the rooftop elevator-shack on my building, the incinerator-exhaust stack, the pimpled terminations of other ducts, the unfoliated TV tree, and a congeries of human beings, among whom I first recognized the most and the least: giant Bakewell and the tiny Hindu, the latter from his turban, looking at my range like the bulbous eraser on a pencil stub. The other recognitions came between these extremes: Boris’ shako, Peggy’s wig, Washburn’s fair head, Zwingli’s crown of Brillo, Calvin’s white Stetson, the slouch felt of Hus, Natalie’s pigtails, and a half-dozen lavender discs of schoolgirl hats. The principals were assembled, but director Teddy kept the mise en scene aloft while they practiced stage businesses, in the main thrust fingers and shaken fists.

  For a moment I thought Villanova might cause his machine to sink farther, perhaps continue on to the very roof-ful of his enemies and ruthlessly sweep it clean with his broom of wind. But in fact he did nothing in the nature of assault, swinging rather, as if on an invisible cord attached to their pivot, he and I inclining in unison with the craft’s new attitude towards the horizon, in a great encompassment of not only the appropriate building but some of its neighborhood, including Christopher Columbus’ hospital, Washington living’s place, and the little private park that exemplifies Milton’s “What gramercy to be sober, just, or continent,” being ever kept locked against all strangers and denied even to locals who carry bottles, air a dog, or walk seminude.

  Teddy’s purpose in tracing a circle in the nullity was unknown to me, whether in salute, taunt, or, in perverse kindness, to dissipate the suspended soot and make the atmosphere more salubrious for his adversaries. He looked down, but, I thought, idly, his trace of lips available to my vision being of a repose that indicated nothing, and when we had come round to point northwards again, he corrected our obliquity, and levelly we moved towards Twenty-third Street, leaving the convocation of constables, et al., to their bootless fury—if such it was, and not now, with me a de facto prisoner of Teddy, the expression of the greatest ruse of all.

  Indeed, as paranoia came like a plow to my momentarily fallow fields of emotion, recently overfarmed, I could not even exempt Peggy Tumulty from complicity in my complex confounding of the past twenty-four hours. How did that wardrobe of bawdy underwear happen to fit her so snugly? How had Natalie so quickly escaped the patrolmen, and why were Washburn & Bakewell back so soon from Teterboro? And it seemed only by chance that Teddy’s ladder had swung near just as the vice-squad Cossack forced me through the window: Boris was would-be assassin, whether for hire or because he could not endure my breath—for his was a personality that tended towards hysteria—remained to be proved. I also came to entertain a belief that Calvin and his blanched bitch had intended to shotgun me on Union Square, not Pete & Tony, whose fortuitous intervention proved their own ruin. Even Natalie’s claim to the Lesbian persuasion, whether sound or in mere bravado, was a kind of attempted homicide, given my previous association with her. As to those depraved schoolgirls, memory seemed insistent to the effect that their visages were unduly wizened for the tender-aged: could this have been the result of mere vice, too much too soon, or were they really a troop of midget policewomen, like Calvin equipped by Nature to work under cover as reputed rogues?

  Notice that I now accepted the law-enforcement credentials of the entire rooftop lot, and placing these in conjunction with their various performances, had been captured by that terrible nightmare of the sensibility founded on the arts called liberal: cynicism; though common sense to any unlettered rustic. Had all this learning led only to the simple apprehension of the peasant on seeing a neighbor filch his flitch of bacon, viz., that man is ineluctably incorrigible?

  Or was this the moment for the formulation of general principles, with the helicopter in descent? In fact, in a trice, landing—on what would appear to be the narrow roof of the building in which I maintained my office.

  The great fan overhead made one last lazy swish and came to stasis. The engine sounded a few gasps and mumbles and expired. Teddy’s seat squeaked and the buckle of his safety belt snickered and then clattered. I made mine do the same. His black leather hand threw a lever, and an oval door broke the wall of the bubble.

  I was nearer the exit than he, and had more need to leave first, too much to offer courteous deference in departure.

  I grasped the Lucite edges of the opening and hurled myself out. My exertion, evoked by a need to relieve psychic strain, embarrassed the requirement by excess. I took one step on the tarred roof; the next, impelled into a spring by irresistible impetus, inertia’s lackey, took me over the low parapet, and I plunged…

  15

  …Fetching up, however, in another embarrassment, not far below, for the contiguous building rose to within two feet of that from which I had leaped, and its roof was a roosting place for pigeons: guano abounded, too little gone to powder, much yet as slime. My landing was three-point and sliding, and a pretext for the unseating of a parliament of fowls, who fled with a feathery commotion which, along with the mess on my left hand and both knees, diverted me from a surveillance on Teddy.


  When I clambered across to the heliport he was gone, though his machine remained. Obviously he had lifted the trap door at the roofs rear and insinuated himself into the building like a virus in a vein.

  Another reversal of relative roles: I was pardoned as prisoner and once again he was prey. I opened the hatch and more slid than stepped down the fixed iron ladder so revealed, precipitating myself into a crepuscular corner of the fifth-floor rear, opposite which was a battered door labeled 5B. Behind this, if memory served, the rock-music group called Custer’s Last Dance practiced their apishness, the none too distant howls of which could often be clearly heard at my own third-floor front.

  All was silent now. My polite knock was simultaneously delivered with my rude turn and thrust of knob. An empty chamber yawned before me, from scarred threshold to windows filmed with filth, beneath them what close inspection proved a raisin heap of dead flies. No Teddy Villanova, and no hairy, guitar-clutching epigones of that craze of my later youth or, as it now seemed, my earlier middle age.

  I flung out into the corridor and pelted to the entrance to 5A, for which I could remember no tenant, and appropriately so, for the door stood open and there was no one within, nor by the look of the old lesions on the walls, the newspapers gone tobacco-brown and brittle on the floor, and the skeleton of a rat, scoured by the teeth of its pragmatic brethren (like Homo sapiens, a cannibal breed)— but I shrink from the lavishness of saying since Peter Stuyvesant had toured the Bowery on silver peg leg: it seemed, anyway, ever so long.

  I used the stairs to inject myself headlong into the fourth floor, of which the rearmore door bore the rubric B and beneath it, from a runny heliotrope stencil: FUN THINGS INC, SO often mischievously misrepresented on the lobby directory board, if you can remember, as “Fucing,” and pronounced by Sam Polidor according to its altered orthography. I took an instant to think of that banal, venal man and sigh at all that eluded his simple philosophy of leases. A helicopter now sat on his roof, an archcriminal had penetrated his building.