Candy

Chapter One

I THOUGHT SHE’D BE asleep by the time I got home but she wasn’t. I didn’t find out this intriguing fact until I was inside the door. Our apartment doesn’t have a window facing out on 100th Street where the building entrance is and I hadn’t taken the time to walk around to West End Avenue and have a look at our window. Even with a light on she could have been asleep anyway.

I opened the door with my key and I saw her. She was sitting in the armchair in front of the television set but the late late show was over and done with and she was staring at a test pattern. I’m not sure what time it was but when it’s too late for the late late show it is very late indeed, from what I understand. I’m just going on guesswork, as it happens, because as far as I’m concerned television is just one of those conveniences of modern living which I am in the habit of asking the bartender to turn off.

But anyway, you get the picture. It’s late, I’m coming in quietly, and my dear wife is still up.

I said Hello because it seemed to be the most nearly logical thing to say.

She got up from the chair and turned around to look at me. Her face was perfectly composed but I could tell that the composure was about as genuine as a giveaway show. When you live with a woman for over eleven years you can tell when she’s faking. There were little lines around the corners of her mouth and the redness round her eyes didn’t come from peeling onions. She had been crying, and this made me feel like the first-class Grade-A bastard which I was. She’d been crying because of me, and it figured.

I smiled. I walked over to her and I took her in my arms and I kissed her. She was wearing a nylon nightgown with nothing on under it and she was soft and warm and irrepressibly and undeniably female, with soft short brown hair and velvety brown eyes.

But the kiss was a short one. At first she clutched at me desperately; then she straightened up and twisted away. I didn’t attempt to hold her because I knew she didn’t want me to.

It figured. When a woman lives with a man for over eleven years she can tell when he’s faking. And I was faking. And she could tell. I wanted to kiss her about as much as I wanted to kiss a pig and she knew it.

“How was she, Jeff?”

I looked away. I didn’t say anything because there wasn’t much to say.

“I don’t like her perfume, Jeff. Did you know that you reek of her perfume? I can smell it on you. You ought to take a shower or something after you—”

She broke off and for a minute or two I thought she was going to start crying again. But she grabbed hold of herself and turned around so that she was facing me. Her mouth was closed and her lips formed a thin red line. When she spoke she talked slowly, carefully, as if she was afraid she wouldn’t make it without breaking down unless she pronounced each word meticulously and took her time between words.

“Let’s sit down,” she said. “We’ve got to talk this out, Jeff. It’s no good the way it is.”

“What’s there to talk about?”

“There’s quite a bit to talk about.”

I gave a half-hearted shrug and went over to her. She sat down on the sofa and I took a seat next to her. We just sat there in perfect silence for what must have been at least three or four minutes.

“I suppose it happens all the time,” she said softly. “It always happens. You go on being a good wife day after day and finally your husband finds another girl and she’s more exciting and more beautiful and more interesting, and she’s new and different and all of a sudden he’s sleeping with her and you sit home alone and stare at the damned television. You sit home alone rubbing your knees together like a teenager because you want him so much you could scream and all the while he’s with some nameless bitch and the two of them are doing all the things you used to do and—”

“Lucy—”

“Don’t interrupt me!” Her face was drawn now and she was rummaging around with her hands the way she always did when she wanted a cigarette. I got a pack out of my shirt pocket and gave her one and took one for myself. That emptied the pack and I crumpled it up in a ball and heaved it at the wastebasket on the other side of the room. It sailed through the air, bounced off the wall and dropped into the basket.

“Two points,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“They tell me women live through this,” she said. Her cigarette was lit and she had taken two or three deep drags on it. She was calmer now.

“Women live through this,” she went on. “It’s supposed to happen all the time. After a man’s married so many years he gets hungry for something new and the wife goes around with her eyes shut and her mouth shut and waits for him to get tired of the new one and come back home to mama. Then things are all right again.”

I got my cigarette going and took a long drag. It didn’t taste good and I blew the smoke out in a long thin column that held together all the way to the ceiling. I stared at the damned smoke with the fascination of a catatonic staring at a blank wall.

“I tried pretending, Jeff. I’ve known about her for … oh, I don’t know how long. I half-guessed it when you began being too tired to make love and knew it when you started having to work late night after night. But I can’t stand pretending. I just can’t take it any more.”

She took the cigarette between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand and stubbed it out in an ashtray. She put it out so viciously that she almost knocked the ashtray off the table. She hadn’t smoked more than a quarter of the cigarette.

“Is she that much better than I am?”

I sure as hell didn’t attempt to answer that one.

“She couldn’t be that much better,” she said. “There’s not that much to it. You just lie on your back and spread your legs and show some life. Maybe she knows something I don’t know. Maybe that’s it.”

Outside it was starting to rain. The rain fell in a steady pattern and the wind was blowing it against our window. It provided a sort of background to our conversation.

“Who is she, Jeff?”

“You wouldn’t know her.”

“I suppose that’s some consolation. I’d hate it if it was somebody we both knew. I … Are you in love with her, Jeff?”

“I don’t know.” It was the truth.

“Are you going to go on seeing her?”

I closed my eyes. I just sat there with my eyes closed and my heart beating much faster than it should and I didn’t know what to say.

“Jeff, can’t you stop seeing her? Don’t you see what you’re doing to me? Can’t you see?”

My cigarette had burned down to a stub about an inch long. I put it out.

Lucy was saying: “Jeff, don’t I mean enough to you so that you can give up that little bitch? Please, Jeff. I want you. I want you so much I don’t think I could go on living without you. Can’t you give her up?”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t? Or don’t want to?”

“Can’t.”

She shrugged, defeated. “I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve been married eleven years and for all that time I haven’t stopped loving you. I love you right now and I hate you, too, and I just don’t understand it. Don’t you love me any more?”

“I don’t know.”

She was smiling now but it was a very sad smile. She shook her head and when she started talking it was as much to herself as it was to me. “We should have had another baby,” she said. “When Timothy died we should have had another baby right away instead of waiting. If we had a baby maybe this whole thing wouldn’t have happened.”

Timothy had been born prematurely about six years ago. He lived a grand total of four hours and then gave up the ghost. The whole thing didn’t hit me the way it struck Lucy—hell, he didn’t live long enough for me to have any real feelings about him one way or the other. It was different for her. She had carried him for over seven months, and she loved him with that instinctive mother love that they write and preach about. It broke her up so that, after the doctor said she was in danger of repeated miscarriages, we decided not to have any more kids for awhile.

“Maybe it’s better this way. If we had a child and then you ran off with another woman it would ruin things for the child. Maybe it’s better this way, Jeff.”

I kept my mouth shut.

“Do you want a divorce, Jeff?”

I let my mouth stay shut.

“If you want it you can have it. Not right away because I love you too much to let you make a mistake. But if you want it in another month or so we can get divorced.”

“Is that what you want?” I put it to her straight as she was the one who had brought it up.

“What does it matter?”

I waited for her to go on.

“What I want,” she said, finally, “is for everything to be the way it was at the beginning. What I want is for this other bitch to stop existing and for us to love each other. But I guess that’s impossible.”

Deep and all-pervading silence. I listened to the rain outside for awhile, and then I listened to the faucet in the kitchen trying to compete with the rain and made a mental note to put in a new washer as soon as I got a chance. I listened to the clock a little but it was pretty boring, and then I was listening to Lucy again.

“We can go on like this for the time being,” she said. “You sleep here on the couch because I don’t want you in the same bed with me if you don’t deserve me any more. If you give her up I’ll take you back; and if you decide you want a divorce I’ll give you a divorce. That’s all I can do, Jeff. Whatever you want you can have. I’m not much at driving a shrewd bargain. I’m not a sharp Yankee trader or anything of the sort. I’m just a woman who happens to love you—like crazy.”

She stood up then. She turned around slowly to face me and I saw that there were tears in the corners of her eyes. Her face was dead serious and she was like a little girl poised on a high-wire at a circus.

“Look at me, Jeff.”

I did. She slipped the nightgown over her shoulders and it fell to the floor. There was nothing under the nightgown—no, that’s not quite true. There was plenty under the nightgown, plenty of soft and lovely womanliness, plenty of warm flesh and soft curves.

“I’m not that bad to look at, am I?”

She wasn’t. She was very good to look at, as a matter of fact, and it didn’t require any effort for me to keep my eyes on her.

Even now.

But at the same time she was simply somebody to look at, just a naked woman who deserved a certain amount of attention because of the view she presented to the eye. She wasn’t a woman to take to bed, wasn’t a woman to want.

Just something easy to look at.

“It’s not as if I was ugly,” she said. “Or flat-chested. I’m not flat, am I?”

She was cupping her breasts with her hands, holding them from underneath as if she were presenting them to me as an offering. The gesture reminded me of the poem by Garcia Lorca on the martyrdom of Saint Eulalia, with the last line that goes something like: And as a passion of manes and swords is shaking in confusion, the Consul bears on a platter the smoky breasts of Eulalia. It was that type of scene.

She ran her hands over her body, touching herself everywhere, showing me that everything she had belonged to me and to me alone. And it didn’t do a thing to me. It didn’t move me, and all that I could do was sit there and stare at her and hate myself.

She took two small steps and then she was standing inches in front of me. She had evidently taken a bath within the past hour or so and I could smell the fresh after-bath smell of her soft skin.

She reached out a hand and touched me.

I didn’t move.

“No response,” she said, that same sad smile coming back to her face. “No reaction, no excitement, no interest, nothing doing. You just don’t feel like having some loving with your wife, do you?”

No answer from me.

“Look what I’m doing to myself,” she said. “I know you’ve just come from her, and I know you don’t want me, and I still ache for you so much that I can hardly stay on my feet. You know what it’s like, Jeff? It’s a genuine physical ache.”

With her hand she showed me where the pain was.

She shook her head, then stopped and picked up the discarded nightgown and stood up and put it on again. I sat there like a mummy while she got dressed and sat down next to me on the couch.

She was sitting closer now. She leaned toward me and slipped one arm around my neck. Her other hand rested on my thigh and she was stroking me gently, her little mouth at my ear.

“You bastard,” she was saying, but saying it gently, sexily, her voice all throaty and hot. “You dirty bastard. I love you, you bastard.”

I couldn’t move.

Her lips went up and down the side of my neck, kissing me. Her hand was doing weird and wonderful things and I felt myself responding in spite of myself. It was impossible not to. I wanted to get up and get the hell away but I couldn’t.

“You beautiful bastard,” she said. “You’re going to have me tonight. You’re going to take me if I have to do all the work myself. I won’t mind it. I just want you. Oh, and you want me too. I can tell. Isn’t that nice? It’s nice that you do.”

The room began to revolve in slow circles.

“This damned zipper,” she said. “There … there we go. I’m very clever with zippers. I knew I’d manage it after awhile. Oh, goodness, you want me quite a bit, don’t you? Don’t you, Jeff?”

With the hand that had been around my neck she peeled the nightgown off again. Then she leaned against me harder and a second later I was lying on my back and she was on top of me. She forced her mouth against mine and pried my lips apart with her tongue and then my arms went around her. She was soft and warm against me.

She couldn’t wait any more.

That made two of us.

It was a new kind of lovemaking, a love born of mutual desperation. I was too excited to control myself and she wanted me so much that she had less than I did. We made love but it was not love; it was brief and fast and furious, and at the very end she screamed my name at the top of her lungs and the whole big beautiful world came apart at the seams.

We didn’t lay very long in each other’s arms. We didn’t hold each other and say the sweet things that lovers are supposed to say.

It figured.

We weren’t lovers.

When it was over I was limp and weak and exhausted and entirely disgusted with myself. I was Jeff Flanders and at that particular moment Jeff Flanders was somebody I hated.

A few hours ago I had been with Candy. A few hours ago Candy and I had made the whole world turn upside-down and inside-out, had loved each other and had made love to each other.

So Jeff Flanders, bastard that he was, had promptly come home and knocked off a quickie with his wife.

Which was one hell of a note.

I was sitting on the couch getting my clothes back on and Lucy was sitting at the other end of the couch and not moving. I was sitting there thinking of the several varieties of bastard that Jeff Flanders was, when suddenly a great revelation came to me.

I damned near jumped.

Lucy read my mind and she laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh or even a vaguely humourous one. It was harsh.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know you didn’t use any protection but it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to worry, Jeff. I planned it all very carefully.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Yes,” she continued. “Yes, I planned it all. It didn’t work, did it? I don’t know—I thought if we did it spontaneously it might turn out that you wanted me after all and you only wanted her because she was something different. But that’s not how it was, is it?”

“Lucy—”

“I won’t do it again,” she said. “I’ll be a good girl, Jeff. I’ll be a good sweet loving wife and I’ll be very certain never to seduce my husband any more.

“But it was fun, Jeff. Even if it didn’t work it was fun. You’re the only man in my whole life and I still love it with you. You know that, don’t you?”

She got up from where she was sitting and scooped up her nightgown from the floor. She didn’t bother to put it on this time but held it cradled in her hands as she walked to the bedroom. She didn’t turn around, didn’t say goodnight or anything like that. She just walked, very quickly and very steadily, out of the livingroom and into the bedroom. The door closed behind her and I sat for ten minutes staring at the closed door.

By the time I got bored with staring at the silly door it was time to take my clothes off again. Putting them on hadn’t made much sense in the first place, but most of the things I’d been doing lately didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. I got undressed and turned off the lights and stretched out on the couch with an afghan wrapped around me and a goofy little sofa pillow under my head.

Jeff Flanders.

Thirty-four years old. White. Male. Married. No religious preference. Employed as assistant vice-president at the Murray Hill Branch of the Beverley Finance Company. The position wasn’t as important as it sounded, because the assistant vice-president was third in command in a five-man office, and the Murray Hill Branch was the only branch there was of the Beverley Finance Company. The title was there for the express purpose of impressing prospective clients, which wasn’t a difficult matter to begin with.

Jeff Flanders.

A good Joe with a decent job and a beautiful wife. An average sort of jerk who had suddenly managed to louse up everything. A certain idiot who was in the quiet and gradual process of turning his life into a reasonable facsimile of the lower depths of hell.

Jeff Flanders.

Me.

The sofa was less suited to sleeping than it had been to the previous activity. The silly little sofa pillow was about as comfortable as a sack full of dirty laundry and I was tired without being sleepy. I had a cigarette after searching around for five minutes for a fresh pack, then crawled back onto the sofa and tried to sleep.

It didn’t work.

So I lay there thinking instead. And, because there was nothing much worth thinking about except the strange and absurd mess I was in, that is precisely what I thought about.

It went something like this: