He chugged the rest of the beer down and hurled the can in the paper bag by the sink, got up and shuffled heavily toward the door. She hadn’t realized before how old he was getting.
He mumbled, “You think about it, honey,” and went out of the kitchen.
She sat for a long time in the silence. Confused by double loyalties, she sat motionless until finally her hand, almost of its own will, reached for the phone, and she began to dial Steve’s number, hardly aware of what she was doing. She was remembering the evening he had taken her window-shopping and given her the silver from Jensen’s; thinking of him, listening to the phone ring and ring and ring, her body was in torment.
Brian Garfield
Villiers Touch
20. Steve Wyatt
Attended by four servants and a yard man, Fran Wyckliffe Wyatt lived in barely adequate comfort in a gabled rococo house on sufficient East Hampton acreage to ensure privacy, with a long soft lawn that rolled down to a grove of big old willows around a pond, on which floated a few swans and ducks. There was, inevitably, a gazebo. The faint fishy smell of the Atlantic came up from the nearby beach, and the evening breeze seemed to have cleared away the gnats and moths and some of the heat, making it possible for the Friday-night gathering-a tradition with Wyatts for eighty years-to move out onto the lawn after the late dinner.
Fran Wyckliffe Wyatt was sixty-seven. Her hair, waved tightly and meticulously, looked like a gray stone sculpture, done in a style that had not changed in forty years. She had a homely angular resemblance to Andrew Jackson and looked as if she might drink straight from the bottle, though no one had ever actually witnessed her doing so. She was confident enough of her impeccable antecedents and the position which accrued to it that she had long ago given up demure pretense; she had allowed her natural self to emerge, and in so doing she revealed that for all her imperious nobility she was in fact a creature of remarkable vulgarity-loud, vital, hearty, with tenacious jaw and strong whiskey-baritone voice. She was a character-a landmark.
Of the nine guests who had attended the dinner gathering, five had departed shortly after ten o’clock, pleading fatigue and the long drive back to Morristown, where they lived amid polo ponies and tennis courts. Letting the group out the front door with the aid of his mother’s maid, Steve Wyatt heard one of the departing guests complain as they got into chauffeured Mercedes, “Really, you don’t get invited to dinner at Fran’s-you get sentenced to it.” Steve exchanged glances with the maid, whose face gave away absolutely nothing, and listened to the low run of laughter from the departing guests before the car pulled away, its headlights stabbing the night, and surged toward the highway.
When he returned to the rear lawn, he found his mother engaged in spirited argument with Prescott Van Alstyne, bitterly declaiming “those imbeciles in Washington,” by which she meant Congress, not the administration; she had had a Democrat in the house once, but she hadn’t known about it until after he left, and he had never been invited to return. It was said, with reasonable accuracy, that anybody at all could be invited once to Fran Wyatt’s, provided of course he had minimum credentials; the real sign of acceptance was a second invitation, which was extended to few.
The Van Alstynes were among the select-not the Best Known People perhaps, but assuredly the Best People. You had to catch Prescott Van Alstyne between yachting expeditions to the Adriatic and skiing safaris to Austria. He had played poker with Onassis on a yacht in the Aegean, and his wife had been photographed dancing with the Duke of Windsor. She was a fleshy woman in rubber-soled shoes and matter-of-fact tweeds, wearing the careless look of old wealth and good horses.
They had with them tonight their daughter Beth, a tall chic blond who spent her time Junior Leaguing-being decorative, attending concerts and ballets, opening exhibitions in galleries, and performing Good Works: her current passion was a foundation raising money to aid Asian children whose limbs her government had blown off. She never admitted her main purpose in all these activities was to show off clothes.
Wyatt’s mother had thrust Beth Van Alstyne upon him without trying to disguise her motives. He always did his best to humor his mother; but Beth conformed to her inbred type; she was a dull creature of ritual and repetition, preoccupied with appearance and gratuitous gossip. Within the past month he had learned firsthand that she disapproved of sexual experimentation-not on moral principle, but because it was vulgar. By now, merely the way she said “Hellew” was enough to make his skin crawl.
Even so, she was a pretty girl. Very tan, just slightly leathery, with squint creases from tennis and riding. She had sun-streaked blond hair, medium length, and for this occasion she wore the kind of upper-crust clothing that never went out of fashion-a McMullen blouse with round collar and short sleeves, a poplin skirt, practical shoes, a simple double strand of pearls. Wyatt rather enjoyed looking at her. He amused himself with a fantasy of sewing her lips shut with surgical sutures and taking her on an involuntary tour of exploration of the country discovered by the Marquis de Sade.
It would not come to pass. At any rate, she was rapidly becoming a copy of her mother, and that alone was enough to make him keep his distance. Letting the conversation ride by, he glanced across the group at Mrs. Daisy Van Alstyne and held his eyes against her until she met them. Her gaze shifted away quickly; color crawled up her cheeks. It made him smile slightly with recollection. It had often amused him to speculate how much she knew about the extent of his obligation to her. Everything I am, he thought dryly, I owe to you, dear old Daisy.
She was-what? — fifty-one now? She must have been about thirty-seven then. A thirty-seven-year-old blonde with abundant hips and breasts and, even then, the suggestion of a double chin. Her husband had been deeply engaged in international finance in those days and rarely spent more than a fourth of his time at home.
For Steve Wyatt it had been an adolescent summer of sexual fantasies. He and his second cousin had bored a peephole through the wall above the john in the ladies’ loo at the back of Chisolm’s Restaurant; at night they took turns shivering in the damp chill of the seaside woods, watching through it. One night, on a dare, Steve had gone around the building and intercepted a waitress, a fat jolly girl with pendulous breasts. He had tried to make a pass at her. She had laughed. “You’re a kid. Come back when you’re big enough.”
“Big enough where?” But she had only laughed and skipped away, leaving him red-faced, aggravating his sexual tension.
One evening in July or August he had gone into the Van Alstynes’ house after a tennis match on their courts, and had found the guest-bathroom door ajar and Mrs. Van Alstyne unexpectedly there, standing in front of the bathroom mirror with her blouse unbuttoned to the waist, posing with the tip of her tongue caught in the corner of her mouth, both breasts heavy and white, lifted in her palms. Preoccupied and consumed, incredibly she hadn’t seen him behind the half-open door. Passionately he watched her tickling her own breasts. He held his breath, wide-eyed, not stirring; but suddenly she saw him.
He wheeled in fear, confused; but she whispered, “Wait?”
She came to him slowly; she reached for his hand and would not let him go. She sat down on the edge of the guest-room bed. He stood looking wildly down at her while she tugged the tails of her blouse free of her skirt and pushed his hand against one of her soft heavy breasts. Tormented by fear and hardening excitement, he watched her eager eyes and felt the quick rise of her breathing, the sudden warm hard swell of her nipple under his palm. He sat down slowly, almost hypnotically, terrified of what she might do, just as terrified of what she might not do.