Evan Hunter: Candyland

"I hope you haven't."

"Do you think I just sit around here waiting for you to call?"

"No, but. "

"Waiting for you to tell me to take off my panties?"

"Can you meet me?"

"Where?"

"Wherever you like. Trattoria dell'Arte? We can have dinner and then…"

"Where's that?"

"Right across the street from Carnegie Hall. Or would you rather I came downtown?"

There is another long silence.

Then she says, "I told you. I'm going to a party."

"Skip the party. We'll have our own party."

"I'll have my own party, anyway. You didn't think I was going alone, did you? Don't you think I have any friends?"

"I'm sure you do."

"Why don't you take your wife to Trattoria whatever?"

"She's in Los Angeles. That's what I'm trying to tell you, Heather. I'm alone. I want to see you. I want to spend the night with you."

He waits.

"I'm sorry," she says, "I've made other plans," and hangs up.

He looks at the phone receiver. He puts it back on the cradle. Rain is lashing the windows. I should have accepted whatever she was ready to give, he thinks.

He dresses casually but elegantly, a gray cashmere jacket, darker gray flannel trousers, a pale blue button-down shirt with a darker blue fie, blue socks and black shoes. He looks at himself in the mirror inside the closet door. Studies himself for several moments, and then shrugs. To tell the truth, he does not think of himself as particularly good looking In a world of spectacularly handsome men sporting Calvin Klein jeans and bulging pectorals, he considers himself only so-so. Quite average, in fact. Five-feet ten-inches tall, a hundred and seventy pounds, eyes brown, nose a trifle too long for his face, hair dark, a totally average American male. Who are you? he wonders.

He goes to the mini bar, opens himself a Beefeater from one of the small bottles arrayed on the shelf, pours it over ice. He opens a small jar of olives, drops a pair into the gin. The olives slide down past the ice cubes. He holds the glass up to the light, shakes the cubes. Everything twinkles like silver and jade. Grace doesn't like him to drink gin. That's why he drinks it. Fuck you, Grace. Sitting in a black leather easy chair under a standing floor lamp, he sips his drink and leisurely consults his address book again. He can feel the brittle booze burning its way down to his gut, feel too a spreading anticipative warmth in his groin. He does not yet know who, but some woman somewhere will soon be offering him comfort.

Most of the listings are out-of- town numbers, the names changed so that they appear to be men's names. Sometimes, he transmogrifies the name so completely that even with his phenomena] memory, he cannot for the life of him decipher the code. The challenge to recall becomes even more difficult wherever he's substituted one city for another. Sarah Gillis, for example, who lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he spoke at the Art Institute on two separate occasions, is listed as Sam Dobie and her Chicago street address is listed properly, but he's displaced it to Atlanta, Georgia. Her true telephone number follows not the 312 Chicago area code but instead the 404 code for Atlanta. He remembers Sarah Gillis with considerable ease because The Affairs of Dobie Gillis was one of his favorite movies, and Sarah was an astonishingly agile and inventive bed partner for the entire three nights he was in Chicago the first time, and the full week he stayed the second time.

Sarah has long blond hair on her head and wild black hair on her crotch and her unshaven armpits. She is a librarian, go ask. He frequently calls her from the office, and she describes torrid sex scenes for him while they both masturbate. He visualizes her in the stacks, coming all over Remembrance of Things Past . He is constantly amazed by the number of desirable women who will readily take off their panties and fondle themselves for him on the telephone. He attributes this neither to his charm nor his appearance. He merely wishes he'd known all this when he was sixteen. He may call Sarah later tonight. He is thinking that tonight he may pull out all the stops. Even call Heather again in the middle of the night, get her to do herself for him in contrition for her abrupt behavior ten minutes ago. Tonight is going to be the X-rated version of Home Alone . Tonight is going to be The Rains Came in garter belt and open-crotch panties.

Samantha is a black girl he met in New Orleans. He can remember every detail of her face and her body, but not her last name. Face as perfectly sculpted as Nefertiti's, perky little breasts with stubby brown nipples, crinkly crisp cunt hair, they'd fucked the hours away on a rainy summer night while the funky sound of jazz floated up from Bourbon Street-Samantha what? Not that she would do him any good here in New York City on a dark and stormy night, not all the way down there in New Orleans. He keeps leafing through the pages of his little black book, which is in fact soft brown Italian leather, purchased at Gucci on Rodeo Drive. Soft Italian leather and something much harder, more insistently prominent in his English flannel trousers now. He sips at his gin. Drinking and sex go well together, he's discovered, the hell with Shakespeare's observation. He takes another sip, exclaims, "Beautiful," out loud, and keeps turning pages. He is leafing through the M's when he comes to Milton, David. Oh yes, he thinks, Millicent Davies, right here in New York City, although the area code listed in his book is 8 13. Yes. Dear, dark-eyed, dark-haired Millie. He takes another sip of the gin…

"Beautiful," he says again.

… and dials.

He gets a busy signal, hangs up, puts on the speaker phone — nobody home to eavesdrop, how nice — and hits the redial button. Still busy. He picks up a pencil, begins alternately doodling and hitting the redial button. Millie is a marathon talker. He looks at his watch. It is already five minutes to eight. Ahh, the phone is ringing now. Once, twice…

"Hello?"

"Millie?"

"Who's this?"

"Ben.,

"Jesus, Ben, I've got a house full of people here!"

"I just wanted to. "

"I told you never to call me again! What the hell's wrong with you?"

And hangs up.

He looks at the receiver. He feels instant anger. What the hell's wrong with me? he thinks. What the hell's wrong with you? After everything we did together on the phone? All those times? You ungrateful bitch! he thinks, and slams the receiver down onto the cradle.

He is not a man who frequents saloons as such, but he does enjoy sitting at restaurant bars — waiting for Grace, usually — or at hotel bars when he's alone in another town, as he is alone tonight. He sits alone on a stool toying with the olive in his second gin since sundown, listening to the heavy rain lashing the windows on the street side of the room, hearing the sound of the lounge piano smoothing the clatter of cocktail conversation.

Come to think of it, he cannot remember a single occasion when Grace was on time. He is usually early, Grace is invariably late. in fact, promptness is a habit with him, and he prides himself on arriving at any given destination some five or ten minutes before time, which isn't easy to do in Los Angeles, the goddamn freeways. He remembers, before they relocated out there from New York, they were dining one night with Frank and his wife, and he was selling them on L.A., bragging about how "convenient" the city was, explaining that here you were always only twenty minutes from wherever you wanted to go. Frank's wife, a bit in her cups, said, "Only problem is there's no place to go."

He sits alone.

The buzz in the lounge is all about the discovery of the three bodies some seven miles off Martha's Vineyard. Everyone is talking about the tragedy. It is now ten minutes past eight. The men and women sitting here drinking and chatting have already known for several hours that JFK, Jr. and his wife and sister-in-law are in fact dead. Ben can remember the day President Kennedy got killed — well, his eighth birthday, how could he forget? The grief in this room is almost palpable. Some of these people are perhaps guests here, some may later be dining in the hotel dining room, others may be moving on to other restaurants or bars, but there is a shared intimacy among these strangers joined in mutual sorrow.