Candy Read online

  She couldn’t complain about any lack of attention on my part that night either. As far as I was concerned the chapter with Miss Candy Cain was over and done with, the most expensive roll in the hayloft that I had ever had, but one which was almost worth it. I never figured to see the girl again and I made up to Lucy that night by making desperately passionate love to her.

  And Monday afternoon Candy called. The conversation went something like this:

  “Don’t you want to see me?”

  “Can’t afford it. How come?”

  “I just feel like it.”

  I called Lucy from a booth outside, told her I had to work late. Then after work I went up to Candy’s room. And the bedsprings squealed in protest for hours.

  The pattern was on—there was no way to stop it. I saw her every other day, then every day. Before I entirely understood what was happening I was addicted to her as sure as a junkie is addicted to heroin, and I had about as much chance of breaking the habit as a junkie does. She hooked me in the traditional manner—at first it was free until the habit had built itself up gradually. Then, when I couldn’t live without her, it started to cost.

  The price was not high. All she wanted was security—her rent paid, her meals bought, a small allowance for clothes and amusements. She was happy seeing two movies a day and eating hamburgers, and all I had to do was give her seventy dollars a week and I could have her whenever I wanted.

  I earned roughly a hundred and eighty at Beverley. The pay varied with the volume of loans I landed, but it worked out in that neighborhood. It was a very livable salary, but chopping seventy a week out of it cut it down one hell of a lot.

  But the savings account was there. I could dip into it for a long time before it ran out and I had to figure out a new way to support my edible little Candy.

  Yeah, sure.

  So here I was with my wife in the bedroom and myself on the couch and the pillow under my head feeling for all the world like a sack of dirty laundry.

  And the savings account, as of that morning, was flat as a flounder.

  Chapter Three

  WHEN I WOKE UP it was Saturday. If you want to be technical, it was Saturday when I went to sleep as it was after midnight, but that sort of outlook never gets you anywhere. When I woke up it was Saturday, a little after ten in the morning, and the apartment was empty.

  If you want to get technical, the apartment was not empty. I was in it, for one thing. So was the furniture and the confounded television set. But Lucy was not in it, and therefore the apartment was empty.

  So I took a fast shower and put on some clean clothes and cast a baleful eye at the couch. My back seemed to be missing a few vertebrae and I felt as though I had spent a night on the rack, but when I counted vertebrae I couldn’t avoid admitting that they were all present. I brushed my teeth with a vengeance and got out of the house and had a disjointed breakfast of hot wheaties and cold coffee at a luncheonette on Broadway. Don’t ask me why the wheaties were hot. I’d guess that they were hot for the same reason that the coffee was cold, but the reason escapes me.

  It was Saturday and Beverley Finance was mercifully closed and shuttered. This left me with a morning on the town. There I was, all alone in the big city. I wandered around like a lost soul for a little while, then found my way to 96th and Broadway and let the IRT float me south to Times Square. There I climbed out of the soot and stench of the subway system back into the soot and stench of New York. It was fun.

  I took a mid-morning stroll on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th, just sort of relaxing and enjoying the sights. I gobbled a hot dog at Grants, gulped a cup of battery acid at Bickford’s, and wandered over to Eddie’s place to watch people buy pornography. The store was empty except for Eddie, one of the clerks, and a scrawny red-necked kid who was reading the latest novel by Alan Marshall with one hand plunged deep into the pocket of his dungarees.

  Eddie and I exchanged a few words and smoked a couple cigarettes. He told me how lousy the pornography business was, and I told him how lousy the usury business was, and we felt sorry for each other.

  After Eddie and I said good-bye he wandered over to the bar next door for a drink and I drifted off in the other direction. The street was generally dull and I was at the point of giving up when it happened.

  In case you haven’t figured out by now why I was wandering around 42nd Street like a star-struck tourist, let me draw you a picture. Candy lived two blocks away. I was very carefully getting within two blocks of her and stubbornly refusing to go over to her apartment. I was making a last-ditch attempt to assert my independence, and I was managing it, and for this reason it was inevitable that I would meet her right on 42nd Street.

  Which, of course, is precisely what happened.

  It wasn’t quite so much of a coincidence as it might have seemed. She went to at least one and generally two movies a day, and the cheap movie houses are all concentrated into one or two blocks on 42nd Street. The fact that I was standing right in front of the Liberty when she popped out of it was pretty coincidental, but I suppose it had to happen if I hung around the street long enough. If you want to play Freud, I suppose I knew this to begin with, and that was why I was hanging around the street in the first place.

  “Hello,” she said brightly. “Were you waiting long?”

  “Waiting?”

  “Weren’t you waiting for me?”

  I explained how I just happened to be there and she said that it sure was a small world.

  “Come on,” she said, taking hold of my arm. She looked so cute and young and sensual that I felt like having her right there on 42nd Street. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea. Everything else happens on the street. Some of the tourists might even have thrown us a few coins if we did a good job.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

  “My place,” she replied unnecessarily.

  She gave me a little hip action then, bumping her hot little fanny into me. It was fun and I bumped her back. She was wearing a yellow blouse the same color as her hair and a pair of slacks in that loden green color. How many females do you know that look good in slacks? This one did.

  “Your place?”

  “Sure.”

  “What for?”

  “To hold hands, silly. Why else do we go to my place? I’m in the mood for it.”

  She wasn’t the type of girl who whispered. I hurried her along, but I still managed to catch a look at one old buck who overheard the last remark. He had a look on his face which said silently that either Armegeddon had come or he had.

  I know just how he felt.

  We got to her hotel. The Somerville, a relic of forgotten days, days when it was a first-class hotel. It was still a good forty degrees away from the cockroaches-and-bad-plumbing category but things were looking down.

  As I said, we got to her hotel.

  We did not get to her room.

  It was the elevator, you see. There should be a law against self-service elevators. They’re damnably dangerous. Why, a man with evil intentions could trap a woman in an elevator and lord only knows what might happen.

  Then again, the reverse could be the case. That morning the reverse was. As soon as we were in the elevator and the door had slid shut, her arms were around me and her tongue was looking for my tongue like an old friend after a five-year separation.

  With one of her hands she took hold of one of my hands. She unbuttoned her blouse with her other hand and then stuck my hand inside the blouse and pressed it against one of her breasts. I took it from there and we worked a few variations on that theme for awhile. She started panting and with a tremendous effort pushed herself free of me and threw some kind of lever. The elevator squealed in mechanical agony and stopped on a nickel, and there we were in the middle of nowhere.

  “Hey!”

  “What’s wrong, Jeff?”

  “What did you do that for?”

  “Guess, silly.”

  “I�
��”

  “There’s no point in waiting until we get to the room, is there? I’m ready.”

  “But—”

  “And,” she said, “you’re ready, too. Let’s do it right here in the elevator.”

  “But—”

  “Maybe it’s dangerous,” she said. “Is that what you’re thinking? I suppose it is. Maybe the car will fall and we’ll wind up getting killed when it hits the basement.”

  “!”

  “Just so we finish first I wouldn’t mind so much. Come on, silly.”

  Afterwards in her room she took off her clothes and sprawled out on the bed. I stripped, too, and sprawled out next to her. We just lay like that for a long time, not touching, and not saying a word. Once she reached out a hand and stroked the side of my face, but that was all.

  I must have dozed off. When I woke up maybe a half hour later she was still lying next to me, a far-away smile on her face and a lazy look in her eyes. “I wish it could always be like this,” she whispered. “I wish we could have each other all the time.”

  I didn’t say anything because I thought she was just making the idle sort of conversation of which she was eminently capable. I gave her a lazy smile to match the lazy smile that she was giving me.

  “It’s a shame,” she was saying. “It’s really a terrible shame.”

  “What is?”

  “That we can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  I didn’t know. “Candy,” I said, “what in the name of bejesus are you talking about?”

  “Us.”

  “Us?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I reached for a cigarette, set fire to one end of it and put the other end in my mouth. That’s the standard procedure for me. Sometimes for the hell of it I put the lighted end in my mouth, but I don’t seem to get as much smoking pleasure that way.

  “Candy,” I said, trying valiantly, “let’s take it from the top. What in hell are you talking about?”

  “Us,” she said, standing pat.

  “Well, what are you trying to say about us?”

  “It’s a shame.”

  “What’s a shame?”

  A strange gleam of comprehension came into her innocent little eyes. “Oh,” she said very slowly, “I forgot to tell you about it. I meant to tell you but I guess I forgot. In the elevator and all it just got shoved out of my mind.”

  “What did?”

  “What I was going to tell you.”

  “What were you going to tell me?”

  “About us.”

  “Well, what in hell was it?”

  “You don’t have to shout,” she said, pouting. “I’m going to tell you right now if you’ll just give me a chance to get the words out. Honestly, Jeff—sometimes you’re so darned impatient that a girl doesn’t have a chance to speak out about what’s on her mind.”

  I gritted my teeth, then relaxed and took a drag on the cigarette. Whatever it was couldn’t be especially important, and there was no point in letting the failure in communication between the two of us get too deeply under my skin. The little sexpot managed to build everything up—the vital information she had for me was probably as dynamic as to tell me she had a hangnail on her little toe, or something equally astounding and significant.

  “I’m waiting,” I told her.

  “I don’t know how to start.”

  “Just plunge right in,” I advised. “Take a big jump and spit out what you’re going to say.” That wound up as a fairly strangled metaphor but she didn’t know what a metaphor was in the first place so it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference.

  “Well, all right, Jeff, I’m going to plunge right in and spit it all out.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Clever of you to put it that way.”

  She bit her lip, then leaned on one elbow so that she was looking right into my eyes.

  “Jeff,” she said, “we can’t see each other any more.”

  “Have another stick.”

  “I’m serious, Jeff.”

  “I assume it’s sticks,” I said. “I never noticed any needle marks on your arms or legs. Of course, you could be taking a shot under the nail of your big toe. They tell me lots of women junkies load up that way.”

  I reached for her toe playfully. She jerked her foot away unplayfully.

  “I’m serious, Jeff.”

  About this point I realized that she wasn’t kidding.

  “Honest?”

  “Honest.”

  “Maybe I’m stupid,” I said. “I’ve never been much in the way of being a mental giant, but I don’t understand what in hell you’re talking about. We can’t see each other any more?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Jeff,” she said solemnly, “what kind of a girl do you think I am?”

  Since she had asked the question, I answered it. This may not have been the ultimate in tact, but tact has never been my special strong point. Look at it this way—when you’ve just finished plowing some fertile earth in a very earthy manner, you do not have to talk with kid gloves on.

  Or something like that.

  Anyway, I told her what I thought she was. I used a four-letter and highly unprintable word.

  “Jeff,” she said, “you’re being vulgar.”

  I grunted.

  “Jeff,” she said, “yesterday after you left I went for a walk. I walked over on the East Side in the Fifties. Do you know what I saw?”

  “What?”

  “Women.”

  “So?”

  “Women walking dogs,” she went on. “Women in mink coats and sable wraps walking poodles with their hair cut all funny. The dogs’ hair, I mean. I took a good look and some of them were kind of pretty, but they weren’t as pretty as I am. They looked better, what with the mink coats and sable wraps and all that, but underneath they weren’t any better looking. And I bet they weren’t any better in bed than I am. I’ll bet good money on it.”

  “No bet.”

  “And you know why those women were out walking dogs? Do you know why?”

  “Maybe they dig dogs.”

  “They were being kept, Jeff.”

  “By the dogs? I don’t see—”

  “By men, Jeff. Men with a lot of money were keeping them in fancy apartments and paying them loads of money so they could afford the dogs and the mink coats and sable wraps and probably even have lots left over to send home to their folks or put in the bank or whatever they wanted. And there were all those women that weren’t any better in bed or any nicer to look at, and here I was with a ratty little room in the Somerville and no money and no dog—”

  “If you want,” I put in, “I could pick up a mongrel for you at the dog pound.”

  “Don’t try to make funny jokes,” she said, “because it just won’t work. I’m not kidding now, Jeff. I like you and all that and I really love to do it with you more than I ever loved it before, but we can’t do it any more. You earn around $200 a week and you can’t even afford what you give me as it is, and if I wanted to, I bet I could find some man who would pay me as much a week as you earn and maybe more. And I won’t find a man like that unless I work at it, so I can’t spend my time with you. So I guess what I’ve been trying to tell you is that we can’t do it any more.”

  She said all of this in one gigantic rush of words, and when she was done she broke off quite suddenly and gulped for air. I sat there on the edge of the bed looking down at her and I’m not sure just how to describe the way I felt. It’s very hard to get it across. Here she was—the girl who had monopolized my thoughts and my time and my money and my spermatozoa for the past too-long, and she had just finished telling me that as far as she was concerned I could go do biologically impossible things with myself. Here was I, sitting there and looking at all of her lovely body, and thinking that the obvious course of action was to plant a kiss on her little rump, get into my clothes, give her a parting line out of one of Swinburn
e’s choicer epics, and take leave of her for the rest of eternity.

  There was more to it than that. I didn’t want her, not physically or even emotionally. The elevator interlude had quenched that particular thirst. But I knew that as soon as I was capable of getting excited again I wouldn’t be able to live without her. That’s the way it was—our relationship was sex and nothing but sex, but I knew that when I was deprived of her and when I needed her again I’d go absolutely nuts without her. It was an aggravating type of scene.

  I said: “You developed expensive tastes in a hurry, didn’t you? A little while back you were happy with hamburgers. What’s the big switch all about?”

  “It’s not a big switch,” she said very seriously. “I decided even before I left Gibbsville that I was going to get kept by a millionaire or somebody close to it. If I hadn’t met you I probably would be a millionaire’s mistress right now.”

  “Why was I so lucky?”

  Her eyes were very wide, very soft for such a tough little number. She was baby and tiger all at once and it was hard to remember what a complex character she had.

  “Jeff,” she said, “I like you.”

  “Sure. Like Macy likes Gimbel.”

  “Honest.”

  “Like the Armenians like the Turks.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “Like Cain likes Abel. That’s you—Candy Cain. And I’m Jeff Unable. Did you ever look at it that way?”

  “Jeff—”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Jeff,” she said, with deadly logic, “if I didn’t like you I wouldn’t have let you love me in the first place.”

  “There was a small matter of a thousand bucks—”

  “I could have gotten it some other way. And I didn’t have to call you a second time, did I?”

  “No,” I admitted. “You didn’t.”

  “I like you. I like doing it with you. I’d rather do it with you for the rest of my life than do it with some musty old millionaire. But I see all of those other women and I want what they have. Why should they have more than me? Why should they live where they live while I live here? Why should they be the lucky ones? I’m as good as they are.”