The Villiers Touch

She said faintly, “I wish I could understand all this. I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“I just don’t want to be hurt.”

“I could never hurt you,” he breathed, and tipped her face up with his finger to kiss her mouth. Within his palm, through the fabric of the nightie, her nipple hardened.

“Oh, Steve darling,” she said, with a long breath escaping; she began to smile with childlike eagerness. “I’m so sorry-forgive me?”

He laughed in his throat and carried her to the bed. Happy with the cruelty of planting doubts in her mind, he made love to her languorously and quietly.

Afterward he lay back, drowsy, caressing her absently.

She said, “Talk to me, darling.”

After a pause he said, “About what?”

21. Russell Hastings

By the time Russ Hastings arrived at the airport Saturday morning, he was in a state of depressed anxiety that bordered on paranoid rage. In the past twelve hours the world had smitten him from every direction with petty, maddening a

Too restless to go straight home from Carol McCloud’s last night, he had gone walking; somehow he had found himself, near midnight, on upper Broadway on the fringes of Harlem, buying an early edition of the Times and watching a workman on a ladder fix new letters on a movie marquee. On the dark side streets around him took place the transactions of night commerce: burglaries, furtive exchanges of money and narcotics. The lonely outcries in the hot night might have been those of people being bitten by rats in the sullen wretched tenements. He walked slowly down the gray sidewalks, avoiding refuse and shuffling bums; he passed a clutch of fags on parade, cruising for a mark, and a Spanish streetwalker wearing a loose, flowing cotton dress-he tried to ascertain her figure, but the dress made it hard to tell; she gave him a smile, and he went on, an i

That had been last night. This morning he had gone into a coffee shop for breakfast, and a waiter had spilled coffee on his cuff. There was hardly time to rush back and change into an old tweed suit which he hadn’t packed because it was too warm. Then, breakfastless, he had stood on a corner in ten minutes’ growing panic before a taxi appeared.

Now there was the long hassle at the check-in counter-it seemed the airline had sold the same seat to another passenger as well, as airlines were wont to do. He had to pull rank by showing his government I.D. before they would let him on the plane. He knew full well the airlines had as much feeling toward their passengers as an armed robber had toward his victims, but it still enraged him. The eternal i

In time the plane boarded and taxied four miles to a runway where eighteen jets stood in line waiting to take off. He tried to adjust himself in the seat, which, neither sitting nor reclining, had clearly been designed with something other than a human body in mind.

Seventy minutes after its scheduled departure time the plane got off, launched by fifty thousands pound of pollutant thrust. He closed his eyes and drowsed. But of course every six minutes a stewardess woke him up to inquire if he wanted a magazine or a drink, or insist that he uncross his legs so she could tip down the folding table, which sat empty above his cramped knees for twenty minutes before she set before him a meal reminiscent of fried concrete garnished with fossil ferns, served on a wood-grained plastic tray. “I don’t mind plastic,” he said unreasonably, “but why does it always have to look like something else? Why can’t they just let it look like plastic?”

“Is anything wrong with your lunch, sir?”

He waved her away.

Below, through the window, he could see a section of superhighway crawling with trucks and cars. I used to like to drive, he complained to himself, thinking of the awful turnpike food at overcrowded One Stop Service Areas, the stalled cars with their hoods lifted in the smoggy heat, the insulting stink of diesel exhausts, the construction-RIGHT LANE CLOSED 1 MI AHEAD-the unmarked cop cars and periodic bloody wrecks, the surly chargings of cars full of restless screaming kids, all of them bound to or from the great nerve center, Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson, the predatory megalopolis where eight million crushed bodies supported the weight of a handful of People Who Counted, who endlessly played games in which they fought to win, and having won, used victory-earned power to change the rules of the game to their own advantage. Rats, birds, fish, humans-it was all the same: crowd too many into too small a space and they lost their biological inhibitions and turned into mindless ca

At the end of the flight lay the open land-miles between beings. He harked back to male weekends in a damp duck blind, birds calling over the water. I have got to make up my mind to get out of it. Why care if someone played basketball with NCI? How could it possibly matter to those teeming ants down there? He had a vague recollection of last night’s whimsical conversation with Carol McCloud. “All you have to do is make things matter.”

Air travel always depressed him; ultimately the ordeal ended. Through the hair-oil-greasy plastic i

When he walked into the terminal, he did not expect to be met, but still he found himself seeking familiar faces; he saw none, and walked up the long ramp to the terminal center, silently congratulating himself on having survived yet another adventure.

He spent twenty boring minutes at the Rent-A-Car counter, signed a dangerous-looking document in exchange for a set of car keys, and stopped at a phone booth on his way out. His ring was answered by an alert baritone voice that belonged to Lewis Downey, Judd’s longtime private secretary, who gave him an affably courteous greeting and added, “I’m afraid Mr. Judd still isn’t taking any phone calls, Mr. Hastings-my orders are specific, and he made no exceptions.”