Lawrence Block - Candy

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.