Candy

Chapter Nine

THE VOICE ON THE phone was Candy’s voice, high-pitched and thin, a whisper that was as tense as a bowstring and, to me at least, as loud as a siren. She did not waste words, and I remember now that her speech was pure East 53rd Street without a trace of Gibbsville in it.

“I have to see you,” she said.

I started to tell her that I had given her plenty of chances to see me but I didn’t get more than a word out before she interrupted me.

“Meet me at the Astor Bar,” she said. “Right away and hurry.”

And before I could say a word, before I could tell her yes, I was coming or no, and to hell with you, before I could mouth a solitary syllable she had hung up and the phone clicked in my ear.

I looked at the phone, looked at the bottle in my fist, looked at a grease spot on the far wall.

To hell with her. To hell with the woman who was no woman, the lady who was no lady, the Candy who was not sweet at all. To hell with her—my life was enough of a mess now without any more of her. I could spend the rest of my life trying to forget her and the preliminary step consisted of ignoring this phone call right now.

The preliminary step.

And, of course, there would be a lot of steps following that first one. I’d have to get out of New York, get away somewhere where she could never find me and somewhere where I could never run the risk of encountering her again. Out of New York, away from New York, far away from the stinking steaming stench of a city with all its memories. Away from the Kismet and the Somerville, away from 42nd Street and 100th Street and 53rd Street, away from Sweet Lucy and Bitter Candy and Queer Caroline, away from Beverley Finance and all the bars and all the movie houses and all the places where I had spent all my life.

Far away.

I even had a place in mind. Somewhere quiet, somewhere devoid of people. I thought about a properly isolated island in the Florida keys where a man could live without working and without thinking and above all without seeing another man or woman or child. You bought a boat and a shack and you ate what you caught with a rod and reel. You picked up a few bucks taking parties of tourists fishing and you were your own man, free and independent, secure with the marvellous and rare security of complete and total solitude.

I stood up and took a look at myself in the mirror. My body looked as good as ever but I knew better. What used to be muscle was now mostly flab and what used to be flab was now more like butter that had spent too much time under a sunlamp. My complexion looked like the belly of a fish, a very dead fish, and my lungs were soggy with cigarette smoke and my arteries were alternately dilated by alcohol and constricted by tobacco. I held out my hand and tried to make it as steady as the Rock of Gibraltar and I got nervous inside when I saw my fingers shaking involuntarily, trembling so obviously that I wondered for a minute whether or not I was still in the camp of the living.

I was a mess. No matter how you looked at it I was a mess. It was nothing out of the ordinary—every city dweller is a mess. You ride the subway instead of walking and you eat the wrong things and breathe the foulest air known to modern man. If you stay off the booze you still drink the wrong things—cola drinks that rot out your stomach or coffee that races your heart or lunch-counter fruit juices that poison you with methodical ease.

You not only eat between meals but you eat instead of meals—poisonous hot dogs at corner ptomaineries and candy bars and hamburgers and ice cream on a stick and all the other useless appurtenances of twentieth century urban civilization. And even if you led the good life and subsisted entirely on carrot juice and raw eggs, even if you slept eight hours every night and walked through the park and breathed deeply and refrained from smoking and drinking and losing your temper, even if you did all these things you still lived in New York and breathed New York air and killed yourself slowly.

I was a mess.

Physically I was a mess; emotionally I had Candy on the brain. A to-hell-with-it trip to the Keys, a permanent relocation in a cleaner, greener land could save me.

And there could be no halfway measures. I had to go whole hog, and I had to go at once. Period. End of report. Tan pronto como posible.

Will you believe me when I tell you that I was sipping a dry gibson in the Astor Bar roughly twenty minutes after Candy rang off?

You better believe it.

That’s how it happened.

In the bar of the Hotel Astor the waiters speak softly and carry big drinks. I had a big drink in my fist and it was mostly gin. There was a little bourbon in my stomach to begin with, but not enough to bother me, and the gin combined pleasantly with it.

In the bar of the Hotel Astor the tables are small and chic and set far apart. The tables are made of formica that is made to look as much like marble as is formically possible and the bases of the tables are very heavy. The chairs are also neat and chic with wrought-iron backs and leather-covered seats.

In the bar of the Hotel Astor the conversation is sophisticated without being subdued. The clientele has money but not an enormous amount of money and not old money. The drinkers in the Astor Bar are partly show people and partly business people, with the business crowd largely in the advertising and public relations fields.

In the bar of the Hotel Astor there was a small and chic table with two small and chic chairs. In one of the chairs there was a very attractive young woman with blonde hair, a lovely thing encased in a green sheath dress that she seemed quite likely to burst out of. In the other chair across from the blonde young lady there was a dull-witted guy, a clod with two left hands, wearing a shoddy-looking gray flannel suit. His red striped tie was at a slight angle and so was his jaw. He looked stupid and lost.

He was stupid and lost.

He was me.

“I don’t understand it,” Candy was saying. “I don’t see how in the world you could have done a thing like that.”

“It wasn’t easy.”

“Don’t make jokes,” she snapped. “It’s no time to make jokes. My God, Jeff, how in the world—”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I went up there to talk to her and—”

“Talk to her? Why on earth would you want to talk to Caroline? What did you hope to gain from that?”

I shrugged. “I wanted to convince her to let you go.”

“She hardly had me lashed to a post, Jeff.”

I shrugged again and sipped gin. “I don’t know,” I said. “I went there to talk to her and something snapped inside me. I completely lost control of myself. I know that’s a poor excuse but that’s the way it happened. One minute everything was all right and under control, and the next minute I barely knew what I was doing. Call it temporary insanity, if you want—I suppose that’s what it was. I just couldn’t stop myself until I was finished.”

She looked at me and I tried to read what was blazing gently in her eyes. Whether it was love or hate or fear or whatever was something I couldn’t determine. Her eyes were cool; they were always cool and would always be cool. She was cool and beautiful and I loved her and hated her with an unendurable intensity.

“You had to come up there,” she said levelly. “You had to find out where I lived. You couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

She was right.

“You had to stop me on the street,” she went on. “Couldn’t you understand what I was trying to tell you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you? Are you even sorry?”

I shrugged. I’m a great one for shrugging.

“How did you even find out about Caroline? How did you know?”

I told her, told her how easily I had followed her and how I had watched them from the fire escape. I expected a look of horror or disgust on her face and I was surprised when I got an amused smile instead. I couldn’t figure it out until she spoke and then it made its own kind of sense.

“Did you like it?” she asked anxiously. “Did you enjoy it, Jeff?”

“What do you mean?”

“What you watched,” she said. She sounded as if she were pointing something out to a backward child. “Did you get a kick out of watching us? I’ve heard that a man gets awful excited watching two women loving each other up. Did it affect you that way or didn’t it?”

“It made me sick.”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly. Candy, how could you do anything like that? How?”

Her smile spread on that beautiful face. “I didn’t mind it a bit.”

“You couldn’t have enjoyed it—”

“Of course I did.”

Suddenly I had to know. “As much as you enjoyed it with me?”

She hesitated. Then she said very softly: “Not as much as with you. Never as much as with you, Jeff. Never in my whole life. You’re better than anybody I’ve ever been with, miles better.”

I relaxed.

“Jeff—”

Her face was slightly drawn now and I waited for her to go on, wanted to know what she was trying to say. I didn’t have long to wait.

“Jeff,” she said, “I took a room in this hotel before I called you. Let’s go to it.”

Hell, I was born stupid.

“What for?” I asked brilliantly. And it was the old Candy who answered, the Candy I knew so well.

“I want it,” she said. “It’s been one hell of a long time.”

I suppose the room was quite luxurious but not quite up to the rigourous standards of the House on 53rd Street. I’m only supposing. I never saw the room.

Don’t misunderstand me. If you misinterpret the last sentence and assume that I never saw the room because I lit out of that hotel like a bat out of a belfry and moseyed on down to that dreamy little island in the Florida Keys you have rocks in your head.

I did not do this.

I didn’t see the room—but that is not to say that I did not spend considerable time in it. I did not see the room because I was too busy with other things to devote one iota of my attention to the room or its furnishings. I spent the bulk of my time on the bed, and the bed is the only article of furniture that I can be positively certain that the room contained. No doubt there was a bureau and a chair or two, but I never saw them and they might just as well not have been there.

After I paid for the drinks, Candy led the way to the elevator and we got off on the fourteenth floor. I was jittery in the elevator and I couldn’t forget the last elevator episode in the Somerville. I would have gleefully accepted a repeat performance of that little routine but this elevator was equipped with an elevator operator, a grey-haired and paunchy old coot whose presence annoyed me.

But I didn’t have long to be annoyed because suddenly the elevator had come to a quiet stop and Candy was leading me from the car by the arm. I followed with manners as perfect as the dachshund she had been walking the night I met her on 54th Street. We paraded down the corridor to her room and I stood and trembled while she fished a key out of her alligator bag and played Elementary Housebreaking with the keyhole.

Then we were inside the door and she was shutting it.

Then I was taking her into my arms.

And I realized just what I had been missing.

There was a man once who had but two claims to fame. His name was Hartley Coleridge. Claim One was his father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a guy who wrote some of the hippest poetry in the English language. Claim Two was one poem that li’l Hartley wrote, just one poem that hasn’t been relegated to the dustheap, with one couplet in it that makes it worth preserving.

It goes:

Her very frowns are fairer far

Than smiles of other maidens are.

That is how Candy affected me and that one quick embrace proved it to me, proved that I could never run away from her and that no other woman could ever take her place.

When I let go of her I was trembling and so was she. For a moment we stood very still and stared at each other and then we grabbed onto each other again and didn’t let go. I kissed her and it was something I hadn’t done in a long time. Once I quit smoking for a week and when I broke down and took a cigarette the first puff almost knocked me over. It was the same thing now—I kissed her red mouth and her lips opened up and my tongue went between them. Her arms tightened around my back and our bodies were closer than subway air in mid-July. Her breasts against my chest were warm and firm and hard. Her hips pressed into me and my hands cupped her buttocks to press our bodies together even tighter.

Her mouth tasted better than wine. Her warm body smelled sweeter than a faggot’s penthouse. I was beginning to feel like a stallion on a steady diet of Spanish fly.

The kiss went on forever. Maybe it just seemed that way. When it was over we forced ourselves apart and my eyes caught hold of her eyes and drank deep.

She was the most beautiful woman in the world.

“Jeff,” she said fiercely. “Jeff, let’s not rush. Let’s do it slow and careful and make it perfect. It’s been an awful long time.”

“You said it.”

“I want you, Jeff. I want you so much it hurts. I’ve been going crazy without you. I don’t know how I managed to stand it this long.”

I got an ugly mental picture of her and Caroline. I almost said something about it, told her how she’d managed to fend off her hunger for me. But desire flooded over me and soaked me to the ears and I didn’t say anything.

“We’re good for each other, Jeff. We’re good, we’re both good. Nobody can like you can, Jeff. Nobody in the world.”

I blushed modestly.

“Take your clothes off, Jeff. Take ’em off real slow and let me watch you. That’s what I want you to do. I want to just stand here and watch you take off your clothes and I want to keep on watching until you’re naked.”

The tie gave me a little trouble. I got it off, though. I got the shirt off, too, and one of the buttons popped and skittered across the room.

I didn’t care.

I didn’t hang up the shirt or the tie. I dropped them both to the floor and peeled off the tee shirt and dropped it, too.

She was watching me and her eyes were as hot as blast furnaces.

I loosened the belt of my pants and unzipped the fly.

“Slower,” she said. “Make it last, Jeff. Take a lot of time.”

I never had any burlesque experience but I did my best. I dropped the pants to the floor and stepped out of them with the grace of a pregnant hippopotamus. I unlaced my shoes and tugged them off my feet. I got my socks off, too. I don’t know if there is anything in the world as sexless as a man removing his socks and shoes, but Candy seemed to be getting a large charge out of it.

Then the shorts. That, as the feller says, is all there was to it.

“Now you just stand there,” she told me. “You just stand there and watch.”

I stood there and watched. Who was I to argue?

The green sheath dress zipped down the back and she didn’t want any help with it. She reached around behind her to hunt for the zipper and the movement served to emphasize her breasts by pulling the sheath dress even tighter over them. Breasts like hers don’t need any emphasis. They’re emphatic enough just by themselves.

The hunt took awhile—I think she made it take longer than necessary to prolong the suspense—but finally she located the zipper and started to tug it downward. She took her time doing that, too, and I must have looked like a statue of Don Juan as I stood there with my eyes following her every inch of the way.

When the thing was unzipped, she shrugged. That’s the only word for it. She shrugged—then the sheath dress fell away from her and there was nothing there but Candy.

No bra. I don’t think this girl owned a bra.

No slip.

No panties.

No stockings—and nobody goes without stockings in the Astor Bar.

Nobody but Candy.

Then she kicked off her shoes and there was nothing but blonde hair and smooth skin and more blonde hair and more smooth skin. I had to catch my breath. It was as if I was seeing her for the first time, as if I had never seen a naked woman before in my entire life.

It was quite a sight.

“Jeff—”

When I took her in my arms the contact of our naked bodies nearly killed me. It was that exciting. I couldn’t stand up and if the bed hadn’t been next to us we would have wound up on the floor.

We tumbled onto the bed. I heaved myself on top of her and her arms were locked around my neck. We kissed and it was as though a volcano had erupted in the neighborhood. That’s how it was.

“Jeff—”

For a minute I remembered what she and Caroline had done but now it didn’t sicken me any longer. Now it didn’t matter. It was as though it had never happened.

“Jeff—”

Then I remembered what I had done with Caroline. This also passed away from me. There was nothing but Candy and myself and the mutual passion that enveloped us and drove through us.

For just an instant the dream came to me. I saw myself alone and proud and independent, alone on an island in the Florida Keys getting back in shape and learning how to be a man again. The dream came and the dream was suddenly gone. It was a good dream, a beautiful dream, and if I had never met Candy I might someday have realized that dream.

Now it was gone forever.

“Jeff—”

I planted little kisses all over that face. I kissed her throat and the nape of her neck and the softness of her skin drove me out of my mind.

It was a time of discovery, of rediscovery. It was as if I was finding and falling in love with every curve and valley of that perfect body for the first time; simultaneously it was a return to a body I had known and loved as no man had ever known and loved the body of any woman.

“Jeff!”

“You like this, don’t you?”

“Make it last forever …”

Kisses and caresses and a whirling world. Make it last forever.

I could neither see nor hear nor smell or taste nor feel. I could do nothing but love her with all the strength of my being.

Her nails raked my back and drew blood. My teeth sank into the lobe of her ear; they also drew blood.

She screamed once shrilly. I do not know what word she screamed or if she screamed any word at all.

The scream was very loud in my ears.

Then it was over.

It was over and we lay side by side, our bodies touching, our breathing loud in the silence of the room.

I felt half-dead, weak and drained and empty, used up and ready for the incinerator.

I also felt alive, fully alive for the first time in an eternity.

I had her now. She was mine and I swore to myself that I would never let her go. The time without her, the overwhelming emptiness of life without her, vanished and ceased to be. We were together now and we would be together until death, and whether we were bound by love or hate or hunger ceased to matter.

“Jeff—”

I broke off my thoughts and listened to her.

“I’m glad you did it, Jeff. For that it was worth it. That was wonderful, Jeff.”

I smiled gently at the ceiling.

“It’ll be tough, Jeff. You did a horrible thing but we’ll get away and everything’ll be all right.”

Something was out of focus.

“I still don’t see how you did it, Jeff. I can understand why you would want to do it, but I can’t see a man like you doing a thing like that. It just isn’t the sort of thing you would do.”

“What?”

“What you did.”

I was lost.

“What are you talking about, honey?”

“You know.”

“If I knew I wouldn’t ask. I’m afraid you’ve got me running around in circles.”

She shook her head and I leaned over her on one elbow, looking down at her and thinking what a beautiful woman she was. There was a clock in the room somewhere and I could hear it ticking loud and strong, hear it beating out a rhythm as primitive as the one Candy and I had just finished.

I put out a hand and cupped one of her perfect breasts. I stroked the nipple and Candy purred at me soulfully.

“Honey,” I said again, “what were you talking about?”

She pulled me down on top of her and bruised my mouth with a kiss. I returned the kiss and we worked that one out for a while.

“You know,” she said after a while.

“But I don’t know.”

“Caroline.”

“Your lessie girl friend?”

She nodded.

“Hell,” I said. “I thought we were over and done with that little episode. It happened and it’s finished. That’s all there is to it. I’m sorry about it and all but it just happened and I couldn’t help it.”

She had a very strange look in her eye.

“Jeff—”

She paused and I got the feeling that the two of us were talking on two entirely different levels of meaning. It was a very strange feeling and, I’ll admit, an eminently distressing one.

I banished it by devoting renewed attention to her breasts, but she didn’t let herself get carried away. She pushed me away and looked deeply into my eyes.

“Jeff,” she said, “either you’re the coldest man I ever met or you’ve got things mixed up.”

“Cold?”

She nodded soberly.

I did something to prove that I wasn’t cold and she giggled. Then she seemed to remember what we had been talking about and the giggle broke off sharply.

“Jeff,” she said, “about Caroline—”

“To hell with Caroline. She should drop dead.”

“Oh, God.”

“What’s the matter?”

“You don’t know,” she said. “I can’t believe it. You don’t know!”

“What don’t I know?”

“Caroline is dead,” she said patiently. “You killed her.”