Lawrence Block - Candy

Eddie and I exchanged a few words and smoked a couple cigarettes. He told me how lousy the pornography business was, and I told him how lousy the usury business was, and we felt sorry for each other.

After Eddie and I said good-bye he wandered over to the bar next door for a drink and I drifted off in the other direction. The street was generally dull and I was at the point of giving up when it happened.

In case you haven’t figured out by now why I was wandering around 42nd Street like a star-struck tourist, let me draw you a picture. Candy lived two blocks away. I was very carefully getting within two blocks of her and stubbornly refusing to go over to her apartment. I was making a last-ditch attempt to assert my independence, and I was managing it, and for this reason it was inevitable that I would meet her right on 42nd Street.

Which, of course, is precisely what happened.

It wasn’t quite so much of a coincidence as it might have seemed. She went to at least one and generally two movies a day, and the cheap movie houses are all concentrated into one or two blocks on 42nd Street. The fact that I was standing right in front of the Liberty when she popped out of it was pretty coincidental, but I suppose it had to happen if I hung around the street long enough. If you want to play Freud, I suppose I knew this to begin with, and that was why I was hanging around the street in the first place.

“Hello,” she said brightly. “Were you waiting long?”

“Waiting?”

“Weren’t you waiting for me?”

I explained how I just happened to be there and she said that it sure was a small world.

“Come on,” she said, taking hold of my arm. She looked so cute and young and sensual that I felt like having her right there on 42nd Street. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea. Everything else happens on the street. Some of the tourists might even have thrown us a few coins if we did a good job.

“Where are we going?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

“My place,” she replied unnecessarily.

She gave me a little hip action then, bumping her hot little fanny into me. It was fun and I bumped her back. She was wearing a yellow blouse the same color as her hair and a pair of slacks in that loden green color. How many females do you know that look good in slacks? This one did.

“Your place?”

“Sure.”

“What for?”

“To hold hands, silly. Why else do we go to my place? I’m in the mood for it.”

She wasn’t the type of girl who whispered. I hurried her along, but I still managed to catch a look at one old buck who overheard the last remark. He had a look on his face which said silently that either Armegeddon had come or he had.

I know just how he felt.

We got to her hotel. The Somerville, a relic of forgotten days, days when it was a first-class hotel. It was still a good forty degrees away from the cockroaches-and-bad-plumbing category but things were looking down.

As I said, we got to her hotel.

We did not get to her room.

It was the elevator, you see. There should be a law against self-service elevators. They’re damnably dangerous. Why, a man with evil intentions could trap a woman in an elevator and lord only knows what might happen.

Then again, the reverse could be the case. That morning the reverse was. As soon as we were in the elevator and the door had slid shut, her arms were around me and her tongue was looking for my tongue like an old friend after a five-year separation.

With one of her hands she took hold of one of my hands. She unbuttoned her blouse with her other hand and then stuck my hand inside the blouse and pressed it against one of her breasts. I took it from there and we worked a few variations on that theme for awhile. She started panting and with a tremendous effort pushed herself free of me and threw some kind of lever. The elevator squealed in mechanical agony and stopped on a nickel, and there we were in the middle of nowhere.

“Hey!”

“What’s wrong, Jeff?”

“What did you do that for?”

“Guess, silly.”

“I—”

“There’s no point in waiting until we get to the room, is there? I’m ready.”

“But—”

“And,” she said, “you’re ready, too. Let’s do it right here in the elevator.”

“But—”

“Maybe it’s dangerous,” she said. “Is that what you’re thinking? I suppose it is. Maybe the car will fall and we’ll wind up getting killed when it hits the basement.”

“!”

“Just so we finish first I wouldn’t mind so much. Come on, silly.”

Afterwards in her room she took off her clothes and sprawled out on the bed. I stripped, too, and sprawled out next to her. We just lay like that for a long time, not touching, and not saying a word. Once she reached out a hand and stroked the side of my face, but that was all.

I must have dozed off. When I woke up maybe a half hour later she was still lying next to me, a far-away smile on her face and a lazy look in her eyes. “I wish it could always be like this,” she whispered. “I wish we could have each other all the time.”

I didn’t say anything because I thought she was just making the idle sort of conversation of which she was eminently capable. I gave her a lazy smile to match the lazy smile that she was giving me.

“It’s a shame,” she was saying. “It’s really a terrible shame.”

“What is?”

“That we can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Oh, you know.”

I didn’t know. “Candy,” I said, “what in the name of bejesus are you talking about?”

“Us.”

“Us?”

“Uh-huh.”

I reached for a cigarette, set fire to one end of it and put the other end in my mouth. That’s the standard procedure for me. Sometimes for the hell of it I put the lighted end in my mouth, but I don’t seem to get as much smoking pleasure that way.

“Candy,” I said, trying valiantly, “let’s take it from the top. What in hell are you talking about?”

“Us,” she said, standing pat.

“Well, what are you trying to say about us?”

“It’s a shame.”

“ What’s a shame?”

A strange gleam of comprehension came into her innocent little eyes. “Oh,” she said very slowly, “I forgot to tell you about it. I meant to tell you but I guess I forgot. In the elevator and all it just got shoved out of my mind.”

“What did?”

“What I was going to tell you.”

“What were you going to tell me?”

“About us.”

“Well, what in hell was it?”

“You don’t have to shout,” she said, pouting. “I’m going to tell you right now if you’ll just give me a chance to get the words out. Honestly, Jeff—sometimes you’re so darned impatient that a girl doesn’t have a chance to speak out about what’s on her mind.”

I gritted my teeth, then relaxed and took a drag on the cigarette. Whatever it was couldn’t be especially important, and there was no point in letting the failure in communication between the two of us get too deeply under my skin. The little sexpot managed to build everything up—the vital information she had for me was probably as dynamic as to tell me she had a hangnail on her little toe, or something equally astounding and significant.

“I’m waiting,” I told her.

“I don’t know how to start.”

“Just plunge right in,” I advised. “Take a big jump and spit out what you’re going to say.” That wound up as a fairly strangled metaphor but she didn’t know what a metaphor was in the first place so it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference.

“Well, all right, Jeff, I’m going to plunge right in and spit it all out.”

“Good idea,” I said. “Clever of you to put it that way.”