The Villiers Touch

“Stop being silly. It isn’t all that bad. In fact, quite a few of them are good.”

“You’re a Philistine. I’m the buyer around here, I’m supposed to be the expert on art, and I say that stuff would be a swindle if you peddled it at three-ninety-eight a yard. My deah, a painting is supposed to capture a feeling that will rouse you when you look at it. Even revulsion will do. But these are just nyeh.” Cynthia threw up her arms and wailed, “Where oh where are the promising young geniuses of yesteryear? I’d like to sue them all for breach of promise!”

“Wherever they are,” Diane answered mildly, “they’re not offering paintings to us for thirty dollars per original oil. I’m sorry these are beneath you, but let’s not forget we have fourteen offices down that corridor occupied by men and women who get paid to supply paintings and whatnot to sixty-one galleries. You’re welcome to junk the whole lot if you like, but you’ve got just two weeks left to replace it.”

Cynthia blinked and scowled. “Quit sounding like a shop foreman. Where’s your barefoot dash?”

It made Diane look away in discomfort. “I’m sorry. Was I being hard-boiled again?”

“A little. Honey, don’t you recognize the symptoms when I start to bitch and moan like this? It’s only frustration because they haven’t invited me to be acquisitions chief at the Met. With my background, in this crass job of yours I’m slumming.”

“And getting paid twice what you’d get at the Met.”

“See what I mean?” Cynthia demanded. “Crass!”

Diane poked her pencil toward the big girl. “I see it now. The real trouble is, you’ve broken up with the latest boyfriend.”

“Curses! Foiled again!” Cynthia cried. “Am I that transparent? You sting me to the quick!”

“It happens every other week.” Diane smiled with half her mouth. “I’m begi

“How did you know?”

“You’ve bought too many God-awful paintings of his.”

Cynthia’s face fell. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-I usually don’t let that kind of thing interfere with my judgment. It won’t happen again-were they really God-awful?”

“Pretty bad. How’d you manage to get rid of him? Insult his mother?”

“No, that was the last one.” A crafty gleam came into Cynthia’s eye. “At a really passionate moment, I called him Phyllis.” She winked elaborately and exploded in barking laughter that doubled her over.

Diane shook her head in ironic disbelief. “Only you could have thought that one up. He must have left at full gallop.”

“He almost forgot his pants,” Cynthia gasped through her tears. She straightened up, gave a few post-paroxysm snorts of subsiding laughter, and dragged a vinyl sleeve across her eyes. She added weakly, “You should’ve seen his stricken face.”

“Why do you do it?”

“Oh, hell, honey, they make me want to puke when they get so damned serious and intense. I can’t help it, it just comes out. Sex is supposed to be fun.”

Diane put the pencil down. “Easy to say. Not all of us can be so carefree about it.”

“Hah!” Cynthia roared, and composed her face to snarl in her Humphrey Bogart rasp, “Now you liften here, fweetheart, ya gotta think of yourfelf af a fwinger, fee?” She came to the front of the desk and braced both long arms against it, leaned forward, and peered close. “What good does it do to make a ladies’ magazine heroine out of yourself, all the time waiting for love? Shit, there are all kinds of things you can get along without if you have to-arms, legs, eyesight. Lots of people do. Love. Okay, forget it-you just take stock of what you’ve got left, and you convince yourself it’s just as important, and maybe a whole lot more fun. I wasn’t kidding just now-it’s a hell of a lot easier to tolerate yourself if you think of yourself as a swinger instead of using a loaded word like ‘promiscuous.’ Why lock yourself up in a chastity belt? Think of what you’re missing out on.” She straightened and lunged around the room, talking with big swings of her arms. “Do I sound like some old Lana Turner movie on the late show? Hell, put it down to my stunted intellect-I started smoking when I was fourteen. But it makes me a little sad to see you locking yourself up, and I hate things that make me sad. It’s a swinging world, honey-there aren’t any hellfire-brimstone Calvinists around here to punish a girl for going out and getting laid when she feels like it. Why do it yourself with leg irons and twenty lashes of Freudian guilt?”

“You make it sound simple.”

“Do I? That’s the disadvantaged child in me. I make profound truths sound like comic-book cliches. Now, if I had your breeding, I could make even the most nonsensical small talk sound distinguished-think what I could do with the Great Truths! Christ, I’d hang out a shingle and put a couch in my office and charge two hundred dollars an hour!”

The intercom buzzed. Diane flicked a switch, and the secretary’s voice came through: “I’m going out to lunch now, Mrs. Hastings. Shall I switch incoming calls to your phone?”

“Yes, thank you, Maude.”

The intercom clicked; Cynthia said immediately, “You ought to tell her to quit calling you Mrs. Hastings.”

“Oh, I’m still Mrs. Hastings to the trade-it would be too confusing to change my name back now.”

Cynthia stopped patrolling; she stopped with her shoulder blades against the wall, folded her arms, and said, “Come off it, dahling. That’s not the real reason.”

“If you’re suggesting I’m still-”

“In love with Russ? No; even I am not that cornball. What I’m suggesting is that you give yourself a kind of untouchable immunity as long as you keep that ‘Mrs.’ in front of your name. And I don’t think it’s healthy.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I simply don’t want to resume my maiden name, because I’ve always been too proud to trade on my father’s name. Really, Cynthia, sometimes I wish you’d quit jumping to conclusions.”

“Are you sure that’s what I’m doing? Look, if what you say is true, why not keep the ‘Hastings’ but change the ‘Mrs.’ to ‘Miss’?”

“Because it just isn’t done.”

“Oh! A thousand pardons, memsahib!” Cynthia bowed elaborately from the waist. “You must forgive my gauche ignorance. I have lousy table ma

“The result of your disadvantaged childhood, no doubt.”

Cynthia gri

Diane made a face and reached for the stack of correspondence in her In tray, indicating that so far as she was concerned, the conversation was ended. But Cynthia said stubbornly, “Have you met Emiliano Upton?”

“No. Why?”

“Know who he is?”

“He paints, doesn’t he?”

“You could call it that. He used to paint enormous canvases of, ah, human sexual organs-in exquisitely enlarged detail. A real howl, but it didn’t find much of a market outside of a few rich voyeurs. Your ordinary dimestore-art buyer would hardly hang one on his living-room wall. I persuaded him to try something a bit more genteel, and I’m going down next week to see the results. He’s a big sumbitch, really hung-I think maybe I’ll fix you up with him for openers.” Cynthia gri

“When I want a matchmaker,” Diane snapped, “I’ll let you-”

The phone rang, cutting her off. She punched the blinking button and lifted the receiver. “Mrs. Hastings.”

A man’s voice laughed. “Answering your own phone now? Have they knocked you down that far?”

She recognized his voice immediately but refused to give him the satisfaction of it; she said coolly, “Who is this?”

“I was hoping you’d know my voice,” he said. She gave him no encouragement. After a moment he said, “It’s Mace Villiers. Remember?”

“Yes, I do.” Giving away nothing, she was trying to make up her mind whether to be pleased or angry.

“I left a message I’d call. Didn’t you get it?”