Candy Page 5

  This is what it said:

  Dear Jeff:

  I have taken as much as I can take. I don’t care how good she is, you didn’t have to spend the night with her. I’m going to Mother’s and I’ll be there when you read this, and after that I’m going away from there and I’m not telling you where I’m going. Maybe someday we can be together again but not now because I just can’t take it any more and you’ll be better off without me.

  I still love you and I always will.

  Lucy

  I read the letter once standing up, then sat down and read it through a second time and a third time after that. It didn’t make sense, I told myself; it just didn’t add up at all. I yanked out a cigarette and wasted three matches before I got the damn thing lit—then after two puffs it tasted terrible and I dropped it on the floor and stepped on it.

  I had come home to her. I was back, through with Candy, wanting only to be with my wife forever.

  But Wifey doesn’t live here any more.

  Wifey done gone home to Mama.

  Wifey done left.

  I lit another cigarette. If I’d only had the brains to come home the night before, it would have been all right. But no—I had to stay out, and Lucy had put two and two together and came up with five.

  So I put out the cigarette and snatched up the phone and called her at her mother’s house in Brooklyn. Her mother croaked nastily at me and hung up, but before the phone went dead I heard a familiar screech in the background. I called back and this time Lucy answered.

  “Look,” I began, “I have to see you.”

  She said: “No.” She said it as though she meant it.

  “I wasn’t where you think I was last night.”

  “I don’t care where you were. I don’t care if you did it in Macy’s window with a crowd of two thousand watching you. I don’t care—”

  “I was alone last night.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “I mean it, Lucy. I was alone all night.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Lucy, I love you. Lucy, honey—”

  “Stay away from me,” she said. “And don’t call me again, because the next time you call I won’t be here any more. I’m going away, I think I’m going out of the state, maybe I’m going to Nevada to divorce you. I don’t know.”

  “Lucy,” I broke in. “Honey, it’s all over. I’m through with the girl, you’re the only one who matters, I—”

  “What’s the matter—did she throw you out?”

  That one hit me in the head. I wondered for a split-second whether I would ever have been saying these things to Lucy if Candy hadn’t broken things off.

  “Lucy—”

  “Go chase yourself,” she said.

  Approximately.

  Because it was Sunday I called my landlord at home. I told him he could have his apartment back and he told me about the lease. I told him he could keep the furniture in return for letting me off the lease, since it only had three months to run before renewal time. He thought it over for a second or two and agreed that it was a good deal, too good a deal, and wouldn’t I be getting a screwing under those terms? I told him I was used to getting a screwing and didn’t mind it a bit and he said he’d have his lawyer draw up papers and send them over sometime during the week. I told him to send them to my office and rang off.

  I threw what clothes I wanted to keep in a suitcase, jumped in a cab and gave the driver the address of the fleabag where I’d spent the past night. The hotel clerk greeted me royally and I gave him seventy bucks for a month’s rent on a slightly better room than last night’s roach-trap. This one had a double bed and a john all its own, which was something.

  I thought about Lucy for a while. It was over with her; maybe there would be a time to begin again but the decision had to be up to her. It wasn’t a decision I could make for her. Now, with all the will drained out of me, I didn’t much care what her decision was. She had bawled everything up, whether she was right and I was wrong or not. If she had stuck with me for just another week I would have been over Candy and things would have worked out. The hell with her.

  I thought about Candy, but after thinking about Candy for a minute or two I got jittery and decided not to think about Candy any more.

  So I forgot about Candy.

  Sure I forgot about Candy.

  I drank a little that night, just enough to get to sleep, and the next morning it was Monday and time to go to work. I got to the Beverley Finance Company, where it didn’t matter if you were a little hungover or not as long as you managed to sweet-talk the marks in the proper manner, and I threw myself into my work and forgot completely about the existence of a sexy little blonde named Candace Cain.

  Sure I did.

  The first mark of the morning got scared off by the interest rates. The second was a fifty-buck personal loan which I tentatively approved until they checked on his references and found out that he was faking. I threw him out of the office.

  Things like this made it easy for me to forget about Candy.

  The third prospect was the ideal type of mark—three little kids, a wife, a steady job. And a pile of bills. So my friend the mark swallowed the propaganda in our ads and decided it would be a fine idea to float one loan and pay all his bills. It cost him about fifty bucks more this way but he didn’t stop to think about that part. I didn’t give him time, just stuck the pen in his hand and showed him where to sign. One quick call to his boss and he was walking out of the office with the money in his hot little hand.

  The fourth boy’s references stank and I told him to find himself a good co-maker, the same line I had handed Candy.

  Remember Candy?

  She’s the girl I had forgotten about.

  Sure.

  That’s why at precisely a quarter to two that afternoon I picked up the phone and called the Hotel Somerville. The message I got surprised me. I guess I should have expected it but I didn’t.

  Candy didn’t live there any more.

  Chapter Five

  I WAS PROCESSING the application of a Miss Matilda Ferkel, a shrivelled little thing who had taught school for thirty-two years, who lived alone in a residential hotel off Gramercy Park, and who wanted to borrow one hundred dollars to give her Siamese cat Lemuel a decent burial.

  It’s a genuine pleasure to do business with people like Matilda Ferkel.

  Processing her application was just so much paperwork, just a matter of form. There was about as much chance that Miss Ferkel would default on her loan as there was of the Washington Senators winning the World Series. Matilda Ferkel just didn’t come on like a crook.

  Besides, her story had touched the strings of my heart. Her cat Lemuel had been her constant companion for almost twelve years, which is evidently quite a distance for a cat, and then poor old Lemuel just sort of dried up and died, and now that Lemuel was in heaven it didn’t seem fitting and proper to consign his corporeal remains to the incinerator.

  Hence the loan, and it was for a good cause. It was also for a cunning twenty-five percent interest, but that is neither here nor there.

  Anyway, here I am processing Miss Ferkel’s application when my faithful co-worker Les Boloff ups from his chair, meanders over to my desk and leans on it with his face sort of hanging. He looked sad.

  Hell, he always looked sad. Les was one of those unfortunate bastards who always seems to have recently emerged from a Turkish bath. It can be twenty below out and he is still swimming in his own sweat. He’s a soft, fat guy to begin with, the type of guy you know after one glance to be a real sweet slob, a nice Joe who’ll do anything for you, and a guy who has never made much of anything out of his life.

  “Jeff—”

  I tried to smile but it hurt. It was tough enough raising my head the way I felt, let alone smiling. So I just looked up at him with an expressionless expression on my poor face and waited for him to say something.

  “Jeff—”

  “What gives, Les?”

>   “Let’s have lunch together.”

  I shrugged. “That’s all?”

  “Yeah, I figured it might be nice to go out together to get a bite instead of ordering food up. About noon or so?”

  “Okay by me.”

  “Fine,” he said. “There’s a Chink place around the corner that gives you a good meal for a buck or so. I used to eat there once, twice a week.”

  He turned to go.

  “Les—”

  “Yeah, Jeff?”

  “What’s the bit?”

  He hesitated—just for a split-second, but enough so that I knew there was plenty that wasn’t right in the world. “Nothing,” he said. “We’ll talk about it at lunch.”

  I went back to Miss Matilda Ferkel and her dead cat but my heart wasn’t in it. Something was wrong, something that was deeply disturbing to my good friend Les, and to make things just that much cooler I was hungover to beat the band. The band that I wanted to beat was the one that was playing funereal rhythms inside my head. I didn’t mind too much that the drummer was pounding my cerebellum or that the cat on trumpet didn’t have the decency to use a mute—this was par. But if the bastards would only have played something cheerful, things would have been rosier.

  I glanced around the office and saw gleefully that it was empty of customers. This isn’t normally an occasion for rejoicing but I had something special in mind. I opened the bottom drawer of my desk, unearthed a bottle of rye and took a hearty guzzle from the bottle.

  It worked.

  The band was playing happy music now. And the trumpet genius had a mute on his horn now.

  Ah.

  You see, I didn’t mind the band as such because I was used to it, used to a morning hangover as part of the daily routine, used to drinking myself quietly to sleep every night in my revolting little room in the Kismet Hotel, used to waking up every morning with the boys jamming in my skull. It was all part of the game, and the fact that the game was not worth the candle is a fact everybody should kindly refrain from mentioning.

  One solid month.

  One month without seeing or speaking to my mistress, one month without knowing where she was or what she was doing or if I would ever see her again.

  Candy.

  My mistress.

  Oh, it had been one hell of a month, let me tell you. Things had settled down to a monotonous routine that was almost comfortable until you stopped to think about it. A room at the Kismet Hotel complete with a liquor store across the street. A job at the Beverley Finance Company complete with a bottle in my bottom drawer. A couple drinks during the day to take the edge off. A few quick belts at the bar around the corner the minute I got out of the office. A dinner of sorts at a lunch counter and a bottle to take to bed.

  What else could I take to bed?

  Not Lucy.

  Not Candy.

  That left me with a bottle.

  Which was better than nothing at all, I suppose.

  One night it got bad enough for me to go whore-hunting, and for that it has to be very bad indeed. But the bottle was no great soulmate that night and I got up, put on a suit and tie and got the hell out of the hotel. The whores had switched their location since my last visit to Whore Row, which wasn’t particularly astounding. I hadn’t needed to go on a whore-hunt in the past eleven years.

  They used to be on Eighth Avenue between 42nd and 48th. Then the city had a clean-up campaign and for all of a week, I guess, they went into hiding. Now they were on Seventh Avenue between 47th and 52nd, which is as good a place as any. They stand in doorways and say nothing, and little men dressed very nattily stop occasional passers-by and exalt the charms of the various whores.

  Dressed nattily. That reminds me of the old vaudeville bit that went something like:

  Do you like to dress nattily?

  No, but I’d like to undress Natalie.

  Oh, well. So I found my whore next to the Brass Rail and we repaired to a hotel that was, if possible, worse than the Kismet. It made the Somerville look like something Hilton was saving up to buy. No roaches in this place—they were afraid of the big bugs.

  So we checked into the hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Mordecai Sledge at a cost of a hot two bucks and checked into bed for another ten. The girl told me her name was Mildred and she was no bargain. She wouldn’t have been much of a bargain at fifty cents in Gimbel’s basement, and at ten bucks I was really getting a screwing.

  Which had been my object to begin with, so why fight it?

  But she was really pretty awful. I got undressed and sat down on the edge of the bed while she peeled off a cruddy red dress with nothing under it. There should have been something under it—she would have looked a hell of a lot better.

  She had big breasts but they were the type that could put you off breasts for life. To say that they were not firm is like saying that the ocean is not dry. They drooped like wet noodles.

  So did I.

  Breasts—hell, she could have slung them over her shoulder. I was half expecting her to grin at me and tie them in a bow or something.

  So there we were, both of us naked and both of us on the bed and both of us equally bored with the whole procedure. I didn’t even mind the ten-spot at this point; I just wished I was home in bed with my bottle. My lack of enthusiasm must have been evident because she asked me what was the matter.

  I started to tell her that what I really wanted was a piece of Candy, but I don’t think she would have understood. Instead I told her it was all a horrible mistake and I’d better get home to my bottle.

  “Here,” she said, pushing me back down on the bed. “I know what’s wrong. You’re just a little tired is all.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You been drinking?”

  I nodded miserably.

  “That’ll do it. Here, you just lie down like this and I’ll see what I can do to help you. I’ll make it real easy for you.”

  “I’d rather you made it hard for me.”

  She laughed at that one. They stopped laughing at it forty years ago at Minsky’s but she was in a happy mood.

  “Lie down,” she said. “Relax.”

  I tried to.

  “Close your eyes.”

  I closed my eyes. Ah, it was better already—I didn’t have to look at her.

  “Now,” she cooed. “Now I just know everything’s going to be all right. You just wait and see if I don’t know what I’m talking about. Everything’s just going to be all hunkydory now.”

  If there was ever a speech less flawlessly designed to get a man in the mood …

  But the gal knew what she was doing. Her hands were soft and she put them to good use. They were all over me, touching, caressing, squeezing, pinching, fondling, and doing all these diverse tasks with the utmost in competent professionalism.

  Hand and lips, teeth and tongue.

  Her mouth warm and demanding. Her hands quick and certain.

  Her hungry mouth.

  When I got home I took three showers and still felt dirty. I drained the bottle dry and collapsed in the chair and slept for six hours sitting bolt upright.

  The Chinese restaurant, coyly called the Hoy Polloy, got rich on buck-a-plate lunches by cramming the tables close together, so close that you could gobble up somebody else’s chop suey if your own moo goo gai pan wasn’t to your liking. Les and I had a table in the back that we got to by air-lift. He ordered two dishes from number something and one from number something else and I drank a double rye with a little soda while we waited for our slop to come. The rye was good and I lapped it up like a camel after a long trek across the Sahara. Les stared balefully at the rye until it had all been transferred from the glass to my gullet, which is where it obviously belonged. Then he took the cigarettes that I offered him and lit them both with the lighter his wife gave him as a birthday present.

  “Jeff,” he said. “I don’t know how to say this—”

  I let him try again.

  “Look, Jeff—Joe and Phil are right guys, wouldn�
��t you say?”

  He meant our bosses, Joe Burns and Phil Delfy. “Yeah,” I agreed. “Thieves, too. Crooks, undoubtedly. Loan sharks, inevitably. But I’ll go along with the notion that they’re right guys.”

  He pouted. “They always treated me decent.”

  “Me too.”

  “They aren’t tough to work for, Jeff. They don’t make a guy hit a time clock or work like a galley slave like some of the bastards in the business.”

  “Hell,” I said. “We work on an incentive basis. A time clock would hurt them as much as it would aggravate us. It’s only to their own advantage—”

  He held up a hand. “I know it,” he said, “but a lot of momsers wouldn’t see it that way. Joe and Phil give the pair of us a pretty straight deal.”

  I nodded. I wanted to find out what he was getting at. “Jeff,” he said. “You’ve been with Beverley how long?”

  “Four, five years. Something like that.”

  “You figuring on going somewhere else soon?”

  I just stared at him for a minute. It took me that long to make sure that he wasn’t kidding.

  “No,” I said. “No, but—”

  “I don’t like to be the one to say this,” he cut in, “but if you don’t straighten out soon you’re going to be out on your ear. If—”

  “Hey, hang on a minute!”

  He held up the hand again. “Jeff,” he said pleadingly, “it’s not my idea. Believe me, to me you’re a nice guy. I want you working in the same office with me forever. I mean it—it’s not that we know each other so closely because we don’t, but I like working with you and by me you’re all right. But the way you’ve been going at it lately—”

  “Like how?”

  “Like that,” he said, pointing to the rye. There were two more ounces in it now—I’d managed to catch the waiter’s eye while Les was talking. “You’ve been drinking like you heard rumors of another Prohibition.”

  I swallowed the rye.

  He looked hurt. “Jeff,” he said, “believe me, by me you could drink oceans and it wouldn’t bother me. But—”