Candy

Chapter Four

SOCIOLOGISTS HAVE MANY TERMS which sum up life very well. Veblenisms lead the list, in my opinion. Conspicuous Consumption, for example, which means spending money to prove that you have it. You drive a Caddy instead of a Plymouth not because a Caddy is worth the price difference, which it isn’t, but so all the world will know that you can afford a Caddy. Conspicuous Leisure, which means that instead of lying around the house guzzling beer you go out and take your yacht out for a spin so everybody can watch you relax.

My own particular favorite is Pecuniary Emulation, which means that you spend money which you don’t have because you really wish you had it. It’s a term I’ve always liked, and it may serve to explain why I was drinking straight shots of Old Bushmill’s in Macmahon’s at the corner of Third Avenue and 37th Street rather than tossing off tumblers of bar rye in a Bowery gin mill. I wanted to be a millionaire at that particular moment more than I had ever wanted to be a millionaire in all my thirty-four years, and if I couldn’t be one I could sure as hell drink like one.

Macmahon’s is the right place for it. High ceilings with crystal chandeliers. Luxurious wood paneling on the walls. A bartender with a soft British accent. An eminently well-dressed clientele. Service with an unobtrusive smile. Good liquor behind the bar.

The whiskey I was drinking was costing me eighty cents a shot and was worth every last farthing of it. I had enough money with me to get as drunk as a skunk without counting pennies, and this is precisely what I intended to do. I was drinking like a gentleman and I even looked like a gentleman. From Candy’s lopsided little love nest in the Somerville, I had scooted back to my own apartment and changed into my best suit, my best shoes and my best tie.

Just get me out of your system.

I glared at the Bushmill’s, wrapped my fingers around the heavy shot glass and tossed the liquor down. It warmed me, and that made me think of Candy all over again. She warmed me, too. She did a damn good job of it.

The bartender refilled the shot glass, took a dollar from the disorderly pile of change and bills on the bar in front of me and returned my two dimes a moment or two later. I didn’t throw the shot down this time but sipped off about a third of it and followed it down the hatch with a sip of the water chaser.

Just get me out of your system.

Uh-huh, that’s what the lady said. Except it wasn’t all that easy. I had her inside of me like an infection, and perhaps the best way to get rid of an infection is to douse it liberally with alcohol.

Down went the rest of the shot. Slosh went another ounce of good Irish whiskey into the shot glass. Whoosh went the bill, clang went the cash register, clinkle went the two dimes that came back home to me.

Glub went the shot.

Just forget you ever met me.

Yeah, tell us another one. Did you ever see a picture that played 42nd Street under the magnificent title of The Giant Gila Monster? It was a picture-and-a-half, one of those horrible horror flicks with a gila monster a good four hundred feet long made out of rotten papier-mache. It kept sticking its little pink tongue out and making sick sounds from somewhere in its abominable abdominal region as it knocked over freight trains and devoured herds of cattle. You get it now, don’t you? Yeah, one of those pictures.

It’s hard to say just what was the high point of the picture. For one thing, it was also a rock-’n’-roll epic and one of the numbers was entitled The Gila Monster Crawl. But even better was a little sequence that went something like this between the county sheriff and the oily juvenile lead:

Oily: But how on earth could a … a gila monster grow so large?

Sheriff: Nature does strange things. Why, I was reading just the other day about a woman in the Ukraine who gave birth to a baby who weighed a hundred pounds by the time he was three months old and was taller than his mother before he was a year old.

Oily: Golly gee!

Sheriff: I suspect this is the case with our gila monster, son.

Oily: Leaping lizards!

Sheriff: You said it. But don’t worry, son. Put the gila monster out of your mind. Just go to the dance and have yourself a good time.

Now you’ve got to visualize this. Here’s this son of a bitch of a gila monster a mile long and two miles wide with a boundless appetite and a great passion for eating people. Oily and his girl friend are right in the middle of all this nonsense. And here’s this moron of a sheriff telling the kid to relax and have a good time at the dance. Just forget the gila monster, that was the general idea.

Now can you picture Oily forgetting the monster?

Or, by analogy, can you picture me forgetting my own private monster, my blonde monster with a mind like a steel trap?

Yeah.

Just forget you ever met me.

I couldn’t forget and I knew that I would never forget. I pictured her putting out for some fat millionaire and my stomach started to leap through the top of my head. I pictured anybody else, any nonentity with a blank face and a shapeless body, doing to her the wonderful things that I had done to her and my gorge rose in my throat.

I thought of me, Jeff Flanders, with anybody else, without Candy.

I had another shot.

“Sir—”

My eyes jumped open like startled sentries. I was still on my stool at Macmahon’s but I must have dozed off for a moment and the bartender was shaking my shoulder gently but persuasively. It’s the same the whole world over, I thought groggily. At a posh place like Macmahon’s they call you Sir instead of Mac or Ya bum ya, but the pervading philosophy remains an eternal constant.

Drink all you want.

But don’t get drunk.

I kept my dignity. I wasn’t drunk, just a little light in the head, but I knew that it was time to bundle myself up and go elsewhere. I smiled agreeably at the bartender who smiled back, scooped up my bills and left him my change, and headed for the door. I did not stagger. I walked very well, all things considered, and when I was out the door and walking downtown on Third Avenue, my arms swinging militantly at my sides and a half-formed whistle on my lips, I possessed the utter serenity of the well-oiled.

Candy Cain.

That’s what I wanted for Christmas.

Or for Thanksgiving.

Or to help me shoot off firecrackers on the Fourth of July.

Or at any other special occasion.

Or at any ordinary occasion.

Candy Cain.

That utter serenity was fading. By the time I hit 34th Street it was gone. By the time my feet, which were growing steadier by the minute, had carried me west as far as Fifth Avenue, any trace of serenity had long since vanished.

It was late—I had drunk my dinner at Macmahon’s and it was probably nine or a little after by now. I flagged down a cab at the corner of 34th and Fifth and gave the hackie my home address. Then, after we had gone a few blocks, a thought found its way into my empty head and I changed my mind.

“Times Square,” I told him.

He nodded without saying anything and I leaned back in my seat and relaxed. I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing Candy, seeing her dressed or naked, seeing all that beautiful flesh, seeing the two of us in bed, seeing us in the elevator, seeing anything and everything. With my eyes open I didn’t see her. Instead I saw the wart on the back of the cabdriver’s neck. This got to be a bore by the time we hit 38th Street so I turned my attention to the placard next to the meter which told me that the driver’s name was Ignatz Bludge. There was Ignatz’s picture on the placard over his name but I couldn’t tell if it was him. It was a mug shot and I couldn’t see whether or not the guy in the picture had a wart on the back of his neck.

I got off at 42nd Street and 7th, tipped Ignatz a buck to preserve the pecuniary emulation, and drifted around until I found a grubby hotel. I settled on one located at 45th Street and Eighth Avenue, a palatial mansion where the roaches scurried across the register while I was struggling to sign my name. The room had more roaches than the lobby and less space, but it had a bed and a washbowl and that was enough.

I sat down on the bed, set fire to a cigarette and asphyxiated three roaches with a single puff of smoke. Roaches weren’t what they used to be. These little bugs took a deep whiff of the smoke, clawed the air vacantly, and fell from the wall to the floor, where they lay on their backs and wiggled all eighteen legs. I got to feeling sorry for them and stepped on them. Then I remembered that I had taken off my shoes and socks and I got hold of a towel and wiped scrambled roach from my bare feet.

I finished the cigarette and lit another one from the butt of the first. The walk and the ride and the walk had taken the edge off that the Bushmill’s had given me and I just felt tired. I was glad I had decided on a hotel instead of going home. I didn’t feel like facing Lucy. Not that night. Not with Candy clogging my brain and Bushmill’s still swimming around in my bloodstream. Better I should sack out on a lumpy bed in a lumpy hotel and fight the roaches for breathing space.

At least it gave me a chance to think.

I did a lot of thinking. The drinks had loosened me up and now that I was practically sober again I was able to relax, to look at things almost dispassionately. It gave me a fresh outlook on the blonde sexpot who went by the name of Candace Cain.

Candace Cain.

Not a woman. A disease. Something that could kill you as quickly as triple pneumonia. Something that left you dead with a smirk on your fat face.

I had had her, possessed her, had her again and again and still been unable to get enough of her. I had Candy with a Bushmill’s chaser, and this reminded me of Ogden Nash’s little poem that goes—

“Candy is dandy

but liquor is quicker”

Candace Cain.

I had had her; now I couldn’t have her any more. I wanted her so badly that I even offered to divorce Lucy to marry her, even was ready to give up a woman who loved me, for one who was only interested in money. I thought about Lucy and a little jolt of guilt jabbed me in the navel. It was a physical thing and I felt sick to my stomach about the whole thing.

Oh, I could have Candy. All I had to do was get my hands on something in the approximate neighborhood of one hundred thousand dollars, that’s all. Then we could hop a plane to Acapulco and live together in sin and harmony for the rest of our unnatural lives. Well, maybe not that long. But at least until the money ran out.

Now where in hell was I going to get my hands on a cool hundred grand?

The answer was obvious.

Nowhere.

I lit a third cigarette from the butt of the second, stood up and paced the floor of my humble abode. Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. And this was no place like home. I paced the grubby floor four times and killed five roaches en route. Then I dropped the cigarette on one of the roach corpses and ground it out. I flopped on the bed and closed my eyes with my dumb head buried face down in the pillow.

I just lay there, not thinking, not moving, with my mind a big continuous void. When I sat up again I could think very clearly. There were, I saw, two possibilities.

Possibility Number One—I could get hold of a hundred thousand dollars and hustle Candy off to Acapulco.

Possibility Number Two—I could live without her. And, because what the two of us had was not love but sex, I figured that I could do it.

Lucy. Lucy was my wife, my woman, a woman who had been mine first and who had never had anybody else. I remembered the first time when neither of us could wait any more, how we registered under phony names in a little hotel, how we went to the room together, how she was shaking with fear and how I was trembling with love for her.

How we undressed with the lights out, how the light filtered in from a street lamp through the window and how beautiful she was, how soft and warm her body was when I pressed myself against her.

How our love grew, swelled up higher and higher with the passion of our two young bodies moving together. How it happened, happened incredibly; first for her and then for me, instants apart, how we lay in each other’s arms and said quiet words to each other. How we slept.

How we were married, married with both of us very young and very much in love, how we found out that it was even better when you were married.

How we lived together.

How the years passed.

There is something wonderful that happens when two people live together for eleven years. There is something very good about knowing one other person inside and out, back and front, knowing how that special person’s mind and body work, knowing what every gesture and every facial expression means. They tell me that married couples who grow old together get so they look alike and this is something which I find it fairly easy to believe. There was a telepathy that had developed between Lucy and me, a different kind of telepathy from that nonsense with Doc Rhine’s ESP cards. She always knew what I was thinking; I could always say the very thought that had just come into her mind before she said it.

We loved each other.

We knew each other.

We had each other.

And I had been ready to throw it away for a sexed-up bitch who wanted to lay for a millionaire! It was hard to believe that Candy had such a great hold on me, but it was a hold I was suddenly determined to break.

What was the difference between them? Candy was good in bed; Lucy was as good. Candy was beautiful; Lucy’s looks were more subtle but no less attractive.

I tossed off my clothes, crawled under the covers and let my head submerge itself in the dumpy pillow. My mind was made up. In the morning I would go home, home to my wife. Somehow, God knows how, I would make it up with her. I would put myself on a diet and there would be no Candy on that diet, none at all.

I thought about it—how good it would be, how life would become sane again and the world would stop turning upside-down and giggling at me like a schizoid hyena. I thought about Lucy, my wife, my love, and my eyes closed and my body relaxed and I slept.

I got up, washed with the weird red water that came out of the rusty tap, put my dirty clothes back on again and got the hell out of the hotel. I didn’t bother about breakfast; I wasn’t hungry. Only one thing mattered now. I had to get home, had to get back to Lucy, had to get everything straightened out again.

The elements conspired against me. The subway took a long time coming. It waited at 72nd Street for ten goddamned minutes while I sat on my hands and some clods did things with the tracks. Finally the train limped to 96th Street and I got out and managed to get home.

I ran all the way, jumped into the elevator and got off at my apartment. I unlocked the door with my key and went inside.

I didn’t see Lucy.

Ah, I thought. It’s still early. The poor dear must be sleeping.

Her bed was empty.

Ah, I thought. It’s not that early. The poor dear must be out shopping.

And then I saw the note.

The note was propped up on the dining room table right where I couldn’t miss seeing it, which, of course, explains why I had missed seeing it. It was hand-written in Lucy’s perennial childish scrawl on a piece of her blue note-paper. I unfolded it, switched on the light, and read it.

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.