Who is Teddy Villanova?

by Thomas Berger

  “Just a moment. Defer telling me Why and explain What Other Offers. You said nothing, before a few moments ago, about any offer for whatever.”

  Sam winced. “So I tole Big Boobs to tell you. That’s the way it works, professional dealing. Like these niggers, see, they dint come to me direct, went through my wife’s nephew. ‘Got some buyers for your dump,’ he tells me. He never mentions their color, the two-timer, till I heard the price. So to take it I got to buy out the leases, the ones that still got time to run, right? Gimme Meat is leaving anyhow, going outa business; nobody cooks any more when you got Kentucky Fried Chickens on every corner: makes the home cleaner. Custard Stand owes six months’ rent; should of evicted them long ago. Jack Alpenstock, that chiseler—”

  “Mine still has fourteen months to go,” I said.

  “Thirteen plus a matter of days,” said Sam.

  “You assert that you offered to buy out my lease, submitting such offer to Peggy Tumulty?”

  “More than once!” cried Sam. “You know that, Rissel Run, you fucks.”

  “Fox? I hardly deserve that honorific,” I said. “As it happens, she never passed those offers on.” I picked up the cartridge clip and in fancy pumped the remaining slugs, through the barrel of my index finger, into Peggy’s navel. “I’ll get her for that.”

  “Come awn,” said Sam. “For what, if you’re telling the truth? For making me up the price?”

  “I took a lot of abuse because of her fecklessness.”

  “So what!” He threw his arms aloft and followed them with his body. “Take my word for it, you don’t come into a buck in this day and age without getting a little shit on your hands. I’ll tell the lawyer to make the papers and fix you a check. That was four?”

  “It was five, but not accepted,” said I. “It’s six now.”

  “Six thousand dollars!”

  I confess I was even more incredulous: I thought he had meant hundreds. He went into a howl of exquisite agony, maintained it throughout the handshake, his half of which was insubstantial as that of the victim of a mortal disease, continued howling as he left, went along the hall, and entered the elevator. And even above the hoarse moan of the motor, the cacophony of cable, I could hear the thrill of his keen as he sang earthwards.

  But we seemed to have a deal, and I was rich. I decided impulsively to abandon the squalor of the office as was, leaving behind even the complete, boxed Plato, along with the files on white adulterers, for the edification of the black newcomers. I could now afford to return to my play, which Zwingli had been good enough to admire, and he was a movie star. The work of a moment would convert it to film script, and already my imagination had begun to roam in the wider scope thus offered…This might well be Ziggy Zimmerman’s next vehicle. He anyway owed me a favor for the scene I had, unwittingly and unwaged, played in The Reformers.

  I rushed to the window that gave on Twenty-third Street, raised the sash, and put my head into the noisy, noisome atmosphere without. Soon seeing the sheen of Sam Polidor’s bald spot emerge from the building, I eventually succeeded in catching his ear and, subsequently, under an Indian-scout hand, his eyeglasses.

  The following dialogue consumed more time than can here be represented conveniently, having to wait as it did for the rare interstices in an all but solid wall of din.

  “Where did you get the name Teddy Villanova?”

  Explosive flatulence of bus.

  “Teee-Veee!”

  Teddy’s initials. “News or play?” “Police show.”

  Thunder of jackhammer. “Major character or minor?”

  “Walk-on!” shouted Sam, lowered his face, and walked on, leaving me with all I needed. I adored that name and would pluck it from the public domain for my title, Who Is Teddy Villanova?

  I had no further business in the building—the razing of which, to go beyond the temporal range of this narrative, was begun a fortnight hence: the great iron orb swinging on its cable, succeeded by the voracious bulldozer, and secreted within the resulting rubbish, hauled away to make new land of some old swamp or bay, were my grayed T-shirts, unpaid bills, a Blimpie bag, and a Tab can. The new owners of the property, will, I have been apprised— by Sam, who has with their money purchased three tenements in Spanish Harlem—erect thereupon an “automated garage,” a jargon title I interpret to suggest that the churlish fender-smashing, bumper-bashing attendant of yore will give way to a courteous robot-mechanism, and thus one more bit of the inhumane is replaced by the non-human.

  I used the water closet for the last time ever—finding Sam’s helmet and flayed flying suit on the floor: what a fanatic he had proved; though justifiably enough, the motive being purely mercenary and not ideological—and then voided the building. My progress was jaunty along Third Avenue, but was given pause when, between Twentieth and Twenty-first streets, I was passed, at great speed, by the mauve minibus of the Stavrogin Academy for Young Ladies, and saw serially through the windows headgear of fur, felt, lavender, and cocooned silk, a pigtailed wig, Washburn’s blond hair, and the great sphere Bakewell carried on his redwood neck.

  Seemingly they did not see me—they looked as if in some intestine squabble, competing no doubt for exotic preeminence—and though I might in my projected screenplay have role for them all, I did not yearn for their present company.

  With the sight of my doorman, my stride became a stalk, but he soon became foremost an obsequious display of teeth. “Ziggy showed us the rushes last night. You’re terrific, Mr. Wren, a real sta.”

  Anything but a show of modesty here would have been infra dig. “Thanks,” said I. “It was a piece of cake, once I had worked out the motivation. The character is essentially a moral leper, yet human like us all, mon semblable, mon frère.”

  I swept into the elevator, mounted to my floor, and, remembering that I had not seen Peggy among those in the Stavrogin bus, worked out, on my progress through the hall, a technique for dealing with her should she be yet in the apartment.

  She was. She wore her office attire and her quotidian hair and eyes. The familiar quarter-moons were in the armpits of her off-white blouse, her ankles were wrinkled, and the zipper of her skirt lay in front of her hipbone. She sat on the couch, sucking the chromium push button of a crimson Paper-Mate. What appeared from its size to be a copy of TV Guide, opened to the crossword puzzle, lay in her rumpled lap.

  “Say, Russ,” she said, without looking up, “who’s that Frenchman does the stuff on the ocean?”

  “Peg, I haven’t watched TV religiously since ‘Speed Racer’ went off the air.”

  “What?” She counted squares with a cracked fingernail.

  “Saturday morning kid-cartoon. I was an addict. Hero had a remarkable car, used it to rout those who sought to control the world, generally porcine types with guttural accents…Fantasy has its uses, Peggy. In dreams begin responsibilities, according to your countryman Yeats.”

  “Jacques!” she screamed, and her pen began to hop the scotches.

  “Whose Crazy Jane poems I can recommend wholeheartedly,” I added.

  Completing the puzzle with one final extravagant uncial—upside down, the page, in red ink, had a medieval look— she closed the magazine with a slap of covers and hurled it away as an offensive thing. Like all grand masters at such terminological games—at which I am hopeless—she despised words.

  I surveyed my quarters. “I see you have disposed of the unmentionables.”

  She pointed at the window, through which I saw a lowering pall.

  “Yes,” I said stoically, “that super burns rubbish at any hour he has a savage’s whim to make fire. Santayana says the ‘barbarian believes that the outflow of energy is the absolute good, irrespective of motives or consequences.’”

  “That’s them,” said Peg, “all that dirty stuff. I threw it down the incinerator.”

  “No, Peggy,” said I, sinking to a seat alongside her on the sofa. “It’s not ‘dirty.’ That’s a received idea, engendered by grim-lipped, icy-vein
ed Calvinists. Nothing’s wrong with pleasure—unless of course it’s imposed against one’s will. The cult of underwear may not be one which I would join—for me, much sistered in my youth, it is even a repellent association—but I cannot see it bringing social harm. In fact, taking sexual enterprise, as we must, individually, such fetishism may well be healthy.” I raised my chin. “Let me explain, dear Peg, old comrade—”

  “Partner!” she corrected me.

  I fluttered my lashes. “In my former business, now dissolved.”

  “Sam met your price.”

  “For a few sous, scarcely enough to pay the costs of moving.

  “Don’t give me that bull. I’d say he went as high as four, maybe five. If you had let me handle it, he’d of paid through the nose. Know what he’s getting for that firetrap? A million-two. And we alone were holding up his deal— which if he didn’t take it right away might of blown up in his face. You know how they are.” I had never heard Peggy refer to Afro-Americans except pronominally.

  That I had settled for six was small satisfaction. However, I had a thousand to which she could never, being ignorant, lay claim. Which theory was immediately exploded.

  “Whatever you got—and I’ll find out from Sam—half belongs to me.”

  I moved my head from one shoulder to the other. “Since when are you so close to that shark?”

  “He’s sweet on me,” said Peggy, reminding me, with a nuance of trunk, of the opulent body beneath her rumple.

  “But did you know he was Teddy Villanova?” I asked triumphantly.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You didn’t figure it out, did you? And you wanted to be a private investigator.”

  “You mean to sit there and tell me Sam Polidor owned that filthy junk, those whips and chains and helmets and spurs—”

  “Oh, stop! Don’t get too Mitteleuropäisch with your Queens fancy,” I warned. “There was a bra or two and a vulgar garter belt, et cetera.” I put up a finger. “Because you see, Peggy—and I say this sympathetically—on my route down the hall just now I understood. That accounts for my foregoing comments on fetishism. I see they did not penetrate. I’ll be frank, then: you’ve lived a sheltered life,while all around you are unrestrained animals, spending their spirits in a waste of shame. You’ve looked in a book or two, contemporary trash that exalts the passions while jeering at every stern tenet you learned from the nuns, and you’ve stared with open mouth at movies that do worse. Even popular TV shows, far cries from ‘Speed Racer,’ now accept sexual irregularities as inconsequential under the aspect of the social moment. Yet an untarnished maiden at the ripe age of twenty-nine—”

  “Twenty-eight, ten months, and three days!” Peggy shouted.

  “—you wonder whether,” I proceeded doggedly, “you are withering on the vine. Somewhere you come across Pierre’s catalogue, see therein what in your innocence you assume arouses male ardor, and in a desperate stroke, purchase by mail a shipment of naughty underclothes, which you don in a private place, unwittingly provided by me, my apartment being unoccupied. You secretly borrow my keys and have copies made. Owing to your series of wigs, the doorman believes you a sequence of different harlots.”

  I must announce that in medias res Peggy had got up and gone into the bathroom, and I had spoken the several latter sentences to the closed door.

  “Believe me, I don’t condemn you,” I continued. “It was a necessary rite of initiation, harmless to your fellow man. It was the first giant step. But sexuality at its best, Peggy, is sharing, and not what the French call solitary pleasures, valuable as they are to introduce a new state of mind.”

  I feared I was going too far, and left off. Perhaps she merely adorned herself and paraded around the apartment. Whatever, I never sneer at the fantasy-prone.

  I had left the immediate vicinity of the door but quite clearly heard her quiet question within.

  “Russ, underneath it all, are you saying you are really queer?”

  Before I had time to fashion an answer that would meet my needs, the telephone rang. I loped to the kitchenette, removed the wall-hung instrument, and supported myself with the other hand, fisted, on the lip of the sink.

  “Wren?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Villanova.”

  I lowered my voice: “Say, Sam, do me a favor: kindly don’t mention to Peggy Tumulty the price at which you are buying out my lease. And forget about your aspiration to know her in the Biblical sense.” I peered towards the bathroom door and spoke behind a clamshelled hand. “She’s of the other persuasion: same breed, I’m afraid, as Nat and Al, Gertrude Stein, and—”

  “Delphine and Hippolyte?”

  This was not Sam Polidor. Washburn was given to hoaxes, if paid, and Boris like all czarists was a Francophile, but the steely ring of derisive insolence did not quite suit either of them. Nor did the voice, a mellifluous baritone, resemble Zwingli’s hoarse whisper. But I answered as if to another of the drug-dick’s literary quizzes.

  “Racine, surely?”

  “Sot!” he crowed. “Dummkopf! It is of course Femmes damnees: Delphine et Hippolyte.”

  “You caught me off guard, whoever you are. And I know Sade only in translations; the French texts are rare birds over here.”

  “That’s Bawdy Liar, you ass.”

  “You couldn’t be—?” No, my old French teacher at State, Hyacinthe Greuze, whose acerbity was here being brought to memory, had long since chain-smoked himself into the grave.

  “Look here, you are a droll type, but there is no Teddy Villanova. The name was an invention of Sam Polidor’s or rather lifted from some TV trash.”

  “Speaking of trash,” said the voice, “while I used your flat, I perused your fragment of play.”

  Obviously this was a cunning fellow, who hoped to trap me in an extravagance of spleen.

  “No doubt its wit is too keen for your coarse sensors,” I said. “But Ziggy will be mad about it. I’ll admit, though, it is yet imperfect and needs a few dotting of i’s to work on the big screen.” I jeered. “My flat, eh? You lie. A hysterical friend stored that underwear here.”

  “And the implements of discipline?”

  “There were none such. And besides, they weren’t mine.”

  “No,” said he, “they are mine.”

  “You’re Boris, aren’t you, speaking through a scarf?”

  “I keep a keep in Bavaria, one of the few castles built by Ludwig the Mad that are not tourist attractions, but mine is isolated, and protected by a private guard of husky brutes recruited from the local peasantry. However, having business in New York and needing a discreet hideaway, there to pursue the peculiar pleasures that I find, haha! I cannot long deny myself”—he struck a petulant note— “and why should I?, I came upon your abandoned apartment, admittance to which I gained by flinging a few sovereigns to a servitor.”

  “What is your business?” asked I, tongue in cheek.

  “Obscene art-objects on classical themes, opiates: poppy, mandragora, wolfsbane—”

  “It’s too late in the game for me to be gulled again,” said I. “I no longer believe in archcriminals and polymorphous perverts. Quixotism cannot long survive among the Panzas of Manhattan.”

  The voice took on what sounded very like a timbre of compassion. “Wren, I am in your debt. I have been called a fiend, but no man can charge me with a failure to meet my obligations. I left behind some delicacies, as well as certain pieces of armor and the like. Do consider them your own. Still, that’s small compensation. There is no doubt certain visible wear and tear. Alas, your suede chair was besmirched by one of my unguents.”

  “Anyone could have made that stain. The place was full of film crew.”

  “I rang you up now—my private jet is warming its afterburners on the runway—to make amends. Kindly state a sum that would compensate you for particular stain and general strain, double it to represent a certain affection I acquired for you while roaming your pretentious little
library—I have a weakness for the intellectual poseur—and soon you will be the recipient of a package of banknotes in some stable currency, suitably disguised of course and unrecorded by any tax bureau.”

  “I still would like to find the scoundrel who inscribed false ex libris in my books or who replaced my identification with a license for a great Dane.”

  “Ophelia’s head is at my elbow,” said he. “You may discard her lingerie and wigs.” I heard a basso bark, but he could have made that himself.

  I had enough of this. I still had to answer Peggy’s insulting question. “Well, ‘Teddy,’ you are a raffish fellow indeed, but my presence is required elsewhere.”

  “If it’s with those Stavrogin tots, be careful: they’re police plants, old boy. If you crave green fruit, come visit me in Bavaria.” He proceeded to specify certain amusements that I could not entertain even in joke.

  I hung up, went to the bathroom door, and cried: “No, I’m not homosexual, nor zoophile, pederast, pedophile, flagellant, nor fetishist!”

  I went across the room and, in defiance, sat upon the defaced suede chair; my trousers were anyway streaked with pigeon dung.

  “Glad to hear that,” said Peggy, opening the door and emerging in my old mulberry bathrobe.

  “I received a preposterous telephone call,” I said. “Some movie mountebank, with execrable taste, pretending, at this thirteenth hour, to be Teddy Villanova.”

  Peggy went to the couch and began to remove the pillows.

  I frowned. “I didn’t recognize the voice…No, it couldn’t be. Everyone knows of the series of fantastic Bavarian castles built by Ludwig II, surnamed der Verrtickte.”

  Peggy’s forthright forearm levered open the concealed bed. She removed my old robe. She was nude. Her mode of entering bed was as kneewalker. She was not of the school who sit down and swivel, with thighs adhesively paralleled. Show me how a woman approaches the horizontal, and I will tell you her philosophy. —A useless prescription, like most that address themselves to moral variations. I assumed that Peggy, as worn as I by the cares of this case, had climbed on the train for a nap.