Candy

Chapter Six

THE ALAMO CHILE HOUSE, the only place I’ve ever come across where it is possible to get a really good plate of chile con carne, is situated on 47th Street between Sixth Avenue and Seventh Avenue, directly across the street from the Hotel Rio. I left the chile house a few minutes after six, wandered across the street to exchange pleasant words with the clerk on duty at the Rio, and wandered back out to the street a few minutes later.

From there I wandered over to Sixth, glanced around balefully at throngs of tourists from Wisconsin, and headed uptown. The damnedest thing was that I kept passing bars. There are roughly four bars to a block in midtown Manhattan and you never notice them quite as inevitably as when you have decided to cut down on your drinking. I passed Lippy’s Bar and Hogan’s Bar and the Left Field Bar & Grill and the Goldfish Bowl. I passed Alcoholics Unanimous and Ye Olde Cornere Saloone and Raoul Dufy’s Tavern. I passed one dyke bar, three fag bars, and any number of heterosexual establishments. I passed posh bars and crud bars, patrician bars and plebian bars, bourgeois bars and proletarian bars.

Bar.

After bar.

After bar.

Each bar beckoned to me. Each bar murmured whorishly that one drink would make all the difference in the world. Hey, called each bar in turn. One drink ain’t gonna hurtcha, fellow. Just a lil nip to take the edges off. A taste of the stuff to rub off the corners. Whaddaya say, fellow?

I said to hell with it.

At 57th Street I made a right turn and walked east, figuring that if worse came to worst I could always go swimming in the East River. What the hell, I was having a nice walk. It was a nice evening after an essentially horrible day and I was just good old Jeff Flanders out for a stroll.

I crossed Fifth, sniffed appreciatively at the healthy smell of money that permeates the Avenue, and kept on walking. I looked at people and decided that they were all ugly. I looked in store windows and decided that there wasn’t anything I particularly wanted to buy for myself. I walked quickly past the bars and pretended they weren’t there.

I crossed Madison.

Nice Street, Madison.

I kept going.

I crossed Park.

Nice Street, Park.

And I kept going.

Another right at Lex, straight for a couple blocks, right again at 54th and back toward home.

Across Park.

Almost across Madison.

But not quite.

Because there she was.

I almost missed her. She didn’t look like Gibbsville anymore, didn’t look like nineteen years old or like the Hotel Somerville.

She looked like money.

A black jersey dress that fit her like a second skin. An ermine stole that dangled around her lovely throat like it belonged there. A braided leather leash that connected her hand with a simpy-looking brown dachshund.

Candy.

My first reaction was one of shock. I hadn’t forgotten her, of course. She was not the type of woman you’d forget any more than you’d forget you’re dying of cancer. Every day I remembered her, thought about her, ached physically and emotionally for her. But if someone had predicted that I would run into her on the street I would have laughed in his face.

Ha-ha.

Double ha-ha.

But the bit was this—I thought of her as something out of reach, something I would never get hold of again. Once I called her and all I got was an Annie-doesn’t-live-here-any-more answer. I figured from then on that wherever she was she was out of my world. Our two worlds collided.

She was walking toward me, her and her two-bit gold-plated puppy on a string, and I saw her before she saw me. I also saw her discover me, which was a rather interesting experience. Her eyes went wide for just the briefest fraction of an instant; then they turned away and she hurried on, hoping she could pass me without my seeing her.

I waited until she was next to me on the sidewalk; then I shot out a hand and caught hold of her elbow. I have to give her credit—she didn’t lose any of that perfect composure, didn’t jump or get startled or let out a scream or anything. She turned her head and looked at me and said in a very soft and very level tone: “Let go of me.”

I let go of her. But when she started to walk on I grabbed hold of her again.

“Look,” I said. “I’ve got to see you.”

“Why?”

The question caught me intellectually flat-footed. I didn’t say anything for a minute.

“Jeff,” she said softly, “you don’t have to see me. We don’t have anything to talk about.”

“But—”

“I have everything I want,” she said. “Without you.”

I looked at her clothes, her hair-do, her dumb little dog. It looked as though she was right.

“Land your millionaire?”

She nodded.

“What’s he like in bed?”

She smiled—a sick little Mona Lisa smile that said she knew more than she was telling.

“I’m happy,” she said. “I’m as happy as I could possibly be.”

“Don’t you ever want me?”

She thought that one over for all of three seconds. “I used to,” she said. “I told you that I’d rather get tossed by you than anybody else. But a girl has to make certain sacrifices.”

“You talk fancy,” I said. “You talk a lot more precisely.”

She smiled again. The same smile, the one that let me know I was in the dark on some salient point.

“Candy,” I said. “Baby, I need you. I need you more than I ever needed anything or anybody.”

“You have your wife, don’t you?”

I told her about that.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” she said, and she said it as though she meant it. “I really am, Jeff. But what do you expect me to do about it?”

I told her what I expected her to do about it.

“Jeff,” she said, sadly. “Jeff, you can’t possibly think I’m going to leave the person who’s supporting me and go back with you, do you? I’ve got exactly where I always wanted to get and you expect me to throw it all up? That just doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’ve got where you wanted to get, huh? Just where the hell are you?”

“In the lap of luxury.”

“You’re a kept woman,” I said. “You’re the same thing as a whore except a whore is more democratic. A whore does it for anybody and you do it for just one customer, but you’re still the same thing.”

She didn’t say anything. The words seemed to roll right off her.

“You think you’re happy, Candy? You’re not happy. You’re sick.”

“If I’m sick,” she said, “I can go to an analyst. I can afford it now.”

“Candy—”

“Do you realize that some analysts get fifty dollars an hour? If I went to one of those five days a week it would cost fifty dollars more than you earn. Think about it, Jeff. Think that part over.”

“Candy, a man who makes ten thousand dollars a year is hardly a poor man.”

“Or a rich man.”

“Candy—”

“Jeff,” she said, impatiently, “just what in the world do you want?”

“I want you to live with me.”

“I’m sorry.”

I took a breath. “Then … then go to bed with me just one more time. Just once—it won’t hurt you and it sure as hell won’t hurt the bastard who’s keeping you. And I’d … appreciate it.”

It sounds ridiculous now; it must have sounded equally ridiculous to her at the time. The only person to whom it seemed sensible and logical was a grade-A moron by the name of Jeff Flanders, and it even seemed pretty silly to him a second or two after he said it.

“No,” she said, which was a relatively sane thing for her to say.

“Candy—”

“I’ve entered into a business arrangement,” she said. “You don’t seem to understand that.”

“But—”

“I have a code of ethics. Part of the arrangement was the stipulation that I remain true to the bastard who’s keeping me, as you put it. Therefore—”

“Stipulation,” I echoed. “Pretty big word for a hick from Gibbsville, wouldn’t you say?”

She frowned at me.

“Candy,” I pleaded. “Just once—”

She turned away from me but I caught her arm again and she turned reluctantly to face me.

“Remember what it was like? Remember the time in the elevator, the time on the floor, the time we took a bath together?”

She remembered—it was plain to see in the shadow of a grin that crossed that beautiful face. I barely heard her when she murmured It was nice in a very soft and infinitely sensual whisper.

She remembered—but she chose to forget. In a second she was all business, all frigidity, all coldness. She shrugged away from me and her eyes were hard as diamonds as she stared at me.

“I’m going now,” she said.

“Let me come with you.”

“You may not come with me. I want to walk alone and I do not want you with me.”

“I’m coming anyway. I’m damned better company than that silly-looking hound.”

“If you don’t leave me alone,” she said, the Gibbsville creeping back into her voice, “I’ll call a cop—and there’s one right on the corner.”

Candy was not the brightest girl in the world. She had never been remarkable for her intellectual prowess and she proved it that fine evening.

I let her alone. But when she was half a block away I started following her and she didn’t so much as turn her head to see if I was around. Maybe she took it for granted that I would disappear from her life as she had tried to disappear from mine. That was the type of uncomplicated mental activity of which she was capable. When things didn’t fit for her she ignored them, and now she was trying to ignore me.

That was her way. It made life with her or without her equally impossible, but it also simplified the job of following her. Tailing a person is not the hardest poser in the world when the person being tailed is unaware of the presence of the tail. You simply walk after the person. That’s all. You don’t dodge into alleyways or duck behind parked cars or any other moronical games that private eyes play in motion pictures. You just walk, and the person that you’re tailing also walks, and it’s lots of fun all around.

I was a natural-born detective. She walked and I walked—over 54th to Madison, down Madison to 53rd, five doors down 53rd to an imposing brownstone where the doorman opened the door for her and in she went.

A nice short simple walk, uncomplicated except for a moment when the damnable dachshund urinated on a lamppost. That was the sole interruption.

So there I was, Jeff Flanders, the defective detective, standing on the street in front of an imposing brownstone in which lived my erstwhile lady-love.

Now what?

Ah, of course. Now I had to find out which apartment she lived in. I reached back into my bagful of fictional-private-eye lore and took a ten-dollar bill from my wallet, planning to bribe the docile-looking doorman. That was the way the guys did it in the movies. Lord, do they throw money around! A good doorman must get five yards a week in bribes alone.

Then something struck me, something which may well have never occurred to Mike Hammer or Ellery Queen or Hercule Poirot or Shell Scott. Hell, I didn’t have to stick ten bucks in the doorman’s grubby paw.

All I had to do was look on the mailbox.

I walked bravely past the doorman, entered the plush little vestibule and turned an inquiring eye upon the row of mailboxes and doorbells. I found what I was looking for in a hurry—Candace Cain in raised script on a little white card over the bell for apartment 4-B.

Now what?

I considered taking the elevator to the fourth floor and knocking on Candy’s door. After seven seconds of careful deliberation I figured out what a prime example of human stupidity that would be. She would toss me out on my rump, maybe call in the law. She had made it relatively plain that she didn’t want to be bothered and if I showed up knocking on her door I was only asking for trouble.

So the natural thing to do was to go home, pick up a bottle and start in where I had left off before Les Boloff had so rudely interrupted me. To hell with Les Boloff. To hell with Joe Burns and Phil Delfy and the Beverley Finance Company. To hell with Candace Cain, raised script and ermine stole and funny dog. To hell, for that matter, with Jeff Flanders.

That was the natural thing to do.

In case you have not already mapped this much out for yourself, I have not made a life’s work out of doing the natural thing.

I got on the elevator and instructed the lackey operating the car to deliver me safe and sound on the fifth floor. Mark that well—the fifth floor. There I got out of the car, wandered around long enough to discover the precise location of apartment 5-B, and rang again for the elevator. I rode back down to the ground floor and left the building.

Clever subterfuge, eh? By this shifty means I managed to figure out what part of the building Candy’s apartment was in. Through such nefarious plotting I could determine which window to peer through if I wanted to set eyes on Candy.

I wanted to set eyes on Candy.

The doorman gave me a funny look on the way out so I gave him an equally funny look right back to put him in his place. I walked around the side of the building where he couldn’t see me and stood like an oaf staring up at Candy’s window. It was a nice window. It even had curtains.

And, more important, it had a fire escape.

Get the message? The situation was made-to-order for Jeff Flanders, boy detective and ace second-story man. All I had to do was mount the fire escape, climb helter-skelter to the fourth floor, and make like a Peeping Tom.

Kindly refrain from asking me at this point just why I wanted to do these things. I would be hard-pressed to explain it to you. A psychiatrist might say I was suffering from temporary insanity. A psychiatrist who knew me well might say that I was suffering from permanent insanity. The hell with it. I hate psychiatrists.

The fire escape posed a minor problem. The last section of it didn’t reach to the ground. The notion behind it evidently was that the last section was lowered from above in the event of fire, but remained up in the air otherwise to discourage clods like me from using it as a stepladder to success. This does make a certain amount of sense—it’s a good deal better than the jackass of a fire escape on the hotel I lived in, the cockeyed Kismet, where the fire escape drops you off in a blank alley. You can spend the rest of your life trapped between four dull buildings if there’s ever a fire in the Kismet.

As I observed, the fire escape posed a minor problem. It might have been enough to deter an ordinary mortal, but not a rare bird like Jeff Flanders. Hell, no. I backed up a few paces, took a running start and leaped high into the air. I missed the first time and fell on my face, sort of. The second time I did better and caught the bottom rungs of the fire escape with both hands.

There was a hellish instant or two while I dangled in the middle of the air. Then I managed to haul myself up and I was perched on the fire escape like a poached egg on a slab of burnt toast.

There was no place to go but up.

So up I went.

I’m not a natural-born Peeping Tom, so I passed up any view I might have had of happenings in apartments 2-B and 3-B. I didn’t know, or care, what has been happening in those two apartments. For all I know there could have been an old Roman orgy in progress, or a marijuana party, or an auction of rare coins, or a singing of twelfth-century hymns, or any one of a number of events pleasant to contemplate and fascinating to consider.

But on I climbed until I was at the window of apartment 4-B. Candace Cain’s apartment.

I do not know what I expected to see any more than I know what prompted me to look. Perhaps I expected to observe Candy herself. Maybe all I wanted was a good look at that stupid mutt of hers. Then again I might have expected a squint at a bald and paunchy gentleman to whom the fine body of Miss Candace Cain now belonged.

Whatever my sick brain expected, it was definitely not what I saw.

I kneeled by the side of the window, which, as chance would have it, was the window of the bedroom. The lights were on but the room was empty. My nose was at sill level so that I could watch while keeping as little of myself visible as possible. I waited patiently for somebody to appear.

Somebody appeared.

It was Candy and she was naked and at once my body responded with tangible evidence of my interest in the girl. She was even more lovely than I remembered her. Her golden hair trailed down over those perfect shoulders. Her breasts were big and high and proud and beautiful, and I wanted to reach a hand through the window to touch them. Her whole body was exercised in feminine pulchritude. She was a vision.

She walked to the bed, threw the covers back and stretched out on a pale green sheet. The color of the sheet served as a fitting background to that body of hers. The light was a glareless bowl set in the ceiling and it suffused the room with a soft gentle glow that made the magnificent body on the pale green sheet just that much more lovely.

She sprawled on the bed, her head on a pillow, her eyes looking up at the ceiling, her hands at her sides and her legs parted slightly. There was a vaguely expectant half-smile on her face.

She looked as though she was waiting for someone.

Which made a certain amount of sense, because, logically enough, she was waiting for someone.

Someone entered.

That someone was shorter than Candy, which was as I had more or less expected. I figured on a short fat guy with a bald spot, but in this figuring I was wrong. The short part jibed but the rest didn’t.

The person who entered was not fat. The person who entered was slender and almost boyish in build.

The person who entered was not bald. The person who entered had jet black hair combed in what dissident youth calls a duck’s ass haircut.

And, most important of all, the person who entered was not a guy.

I almost fell off the fire escape. This would have meant a plunge of thirty feet or so onto hard pavement and might well have killed me.

Damn it, I should have fallen.

But I didn’t.

I watched.

The woman with Candy was, I guessed, around my own age. She was a rotten lesbian and she was with my girl and I hated her on sight, but I still had to admit that she was damned attractive. It was a good thing she was never going to have a baby because any child she might have had would have starved if it depended upon her breasts for nourishment. They were so small they almost weren’t there.

But the rest of her was nice. Her face was just a trifle hard, a trifle mannish, but if you met her on the street you wouldn’t peg her as a man or as a lesbian and you might well want to take her to bed. Her waist was narrow and her hips were nicely rounded and she had a nice tight little behind, neat and trim. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on the woman.

I should have left. Whether I fell off that fire escape or whether I got up nonchalantly and clambered on down, I should have left. But I didn’t—I stayed, and I watched, and I could not have left just then if my life depended upon it. Not then.

The woman walked to the bed. She was naked as a jaybird and so was Candy and it was easy to see they were not there to play tiddly-winks. She lay down on the bed next to Candy and their bodies touched, and the woman said something which I couldn’t hear and Candy answered something that I couldn’t hear either and they both smiled—that same sick Mona Lisa smile Candy had handed me on 54th Street.

I got slightly sick.

The woman took Candy in her arms. She ran her hands through that gorgeous blonde hair and pressed her lips to that gorgeous red mouth. A sisterly kiss it wasn’t. Her tongue went between Candy’s lips and Candy’s arms went around her body, holding her close.

They went on like that, which was horrible, and I went on watching.

Which was also horrible.

For this I hadn’t had a drink since lunch. For this I walked past every bar on Sixth Avenue. For this I played detective, climbed fire escapes, peeked through windows. For this nausea.

The nameless dyke finally gave up the breast-kissing routine and got down to brass tacks.

Etc.

One hell of an etc., believe me.

The girl obviously loved the whole thing. Girl? She wasn’t a girl and she wasn’t a man. She was a wretched middle-of-the-roader and I hated her like poison.

Candy was also obviously enjoying herself. I couldn’t hear the noises she was making but I could imagine them. I remembered the noises she used to make with me.

Yeah, everybody was enjoying the bit.

Everyone but me.

I watched it until it was over, watched in stricken fascination, and when they had finished and lay there holding each other and cooing like doves, I stood up and gripped onto the railing of the fire escape and let go. My stomach turned itself inside out and the vomit sailed through the air.

The sight of it made me nauseous and I puked again. It was a great night for puking.

Somehow I got down from the fire escape. I passed apartments 3-B and 2-B, again without a glance, and dropped down to the pavement. I headed west, headed for Sixth Avenue with my eyes half-shut and my stomach still feeling as though someone had stepped on it, someone who weighed five hundred pounds and wore lead underwear.

I crossed Madison.

I crossed Fifth.

I reached Sixth.

Remember Sixth? That’s the street I strolled down in the beginning, the street with all the bars, all the temptation that I so bravely resisted the first time around. Resisted—and for what? For a disgusting view of the most desirable woman in the world doing the most nauseating act in the world and loving every minute of it.

Well, I made up for it.

This time I didn’t pass those bars. I hit every one of them, all but the three fag joints and the one dyke joint, hit the Goldfish Bowl and the Left Field Bar & Grill and Hogan’s Bar and Lippy’s Bar. Hit Alcoholics Unanimous and Ye Olde Cornere Saloone and Raoul Dufy’s Tavern. Hit posh bars and crud bars, patrician bars and plebian bars, bourgeois bars and proletarian bars.

Bar.

After bar.

After bar.

And I couldn’t wash the foul taste of what I had seen from my mouth or drown the memory of it.