Lawrence Block - Candy

She bit her lip, then leaned on one elbow so that she was looking right into my eyes.

“Jeff,” she said, “we can’t see each other any more.”

“Have another stick.”

“I’m serious, Jeff.”

“I assume it’s sticks,” I said. “I never noticed any needle marks on your arms or legs. Of course, you could be taking a shot under the nail of your big toe. They tell me lots of women junkies load up that way.”

I reached for her toe playfully. She jerked her foot away unplayfully.

“I’m serious, Jeff.”

About this point I realized that she wasn’t kidding.

“Honest?”

“Honest.”

“Maybe I’m stupid,” I said. “I’ve never been much in the way of being a mental giant, but I don’t understand what in hell you’re talking about. We can’t see each other any more?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Jeff,” she said solemnly, “what kind of a girl do you think I am?”

Since she had asked the question, I answered it. This may not have been the ultimate in tact, but tact has never been my special strong point. Look at it this way—when you’ve just finished plowing some fertile earth in a very earthy manner, you do not have to talk with kid gloves on.

Or something like that.

Anyway, I told her what I thought she was. I used a four-letter and highly unprintable word.

“Jeff,” she said, “you’re being vulgar.”

I grunted.

“Jeff,” she said, “yesterday after you left I went for a walk. I walked over on the East Side in the Fifties. Do you know what I saw?”

“What?”

“Women.”

“So?”

“Women walking dogs,” she went on. “Women in mink coats and sable wraps walking poodles with their hair cut all funny. The dogs’ hair, I mean. I took a good look and some of them were kind of pretty, but they weren’t as pretty as I am. They looked better, what with the mink coats and sable wraps and all that, but underneath they weren’t any better looking. And I bet they weren’t any better in bed than I am. I’ll bet good money on it.”

“No bet.”

“And you know why those women were out walking dogs? Do you know why?”

“Maybe they dig dogs.”

“They were being kept, Jeff.”

“By the dogs? I don’t see—”

“By men, Jeff. Men with a lot of money were keeping them in fancy apartments and paying them loads of money so they could afford the dogs and the mink coats and sable wraps and probably even have lots left over to send home to their folks or put in the bank or whatever they wanted. And there were all those women that weren’t any better in bed or any nicer to look at, and here I was with a ratty little room in the Somerville and no money and no dog—”

“If you want,” I put in, “I could pick up a mongrel for you at the dog pound.”

“Don’t try to make funny jokes,” she said, “because it just won’t work. I’m not kidding now, Jeff. I like you and all that and I really love to do it with you more than I ever loved it before, but we can’t do it any more. You earn around $200 a week and you can’t even afford what you give me as it is, and if I wanted to, I bet I could find some man who would pay me as much a week as you earn and maybe more. And I won’t find a man like that unless I work at it, so I can’t spend my time with you. So I guess what I’ve been trying to tell you is that we can’t do it any more.”

She said all of this in one gigantic rush of words, and when she was done she broke off quite suddenly and gulped for air. I sat there on the edge of the bed looking down at her and I’m not sure just how to describe the way I felt. It’s very hard to get it across. Here she was—the girl who had monopolized my thoughts and my time and my money and my spermatozoa for the past too-long, and she had just finished telling me that as far as she was concerned I could go do biologically impossible things with myself. Here was I, sitting there and looking at all of her lovely body, and thinking that the obvious course of action was to plant a kiss on her little rump, get into my clothes, give her a parting line out of one of Swinburne’s choicer epics, and take leave of her for the rest of eternity.

There was more to it than that. I didn’t want her, not physically or even emotionally. The elevator interlude had quenched that particular thirst. But I knew that as soon as I was capable of getting excited again I wouldn’t be able to live without her. That’s the way it was—our relationship was sex and nothing but sex, but I knew that when I was deprived of her and when I needed her again I’d go absolutely nuts without her. It was an aggravating type of scene.

I said: “You developed expensive tastes in a hurry, didn’t you? A little while back you were happy with hamburgers. What’s the big switch all about?”

“It’s not a big switch,” she said very seriously. “I decided even before I left Gibbsville that I was going to get kept by a millionaire or somebody close to it. If I hadn’t met you I probably would be a millionaire’s mistress right now.”

“Why was I so lucky?”

Her eyes were very wide, very soft for such a tough little number. She was baby and tiger all at once and it was hard to remember what a complex character she had.

“Jeff,” she said, “I like you.”

“Sure. Like Macy likes Gimbel.”

“Honest.”

“Like the Armenians like the Turks.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“Like Cain likes Abel. That’s you—Candy Cain. And I’m Jeff Unable. Did you ever look at it that way?”

“Jeff—”

“Go ahead.”

“Jeff,” she said, with deadly logic, “if I didn’t like you I wouldn’t have let you love me in the first place.”

“There was a small matter of a thousand bucks—”

“I could have gotten it some other way. And I didn’t have to call you a second time, did I?”

“No,” I admitted. “You didn’t.”

“I like you. I like doing it with you. I’d rather do it with you for the rest of my life than do it with some musty old millionaire. But I see all of those other women and I want what they have. Why should they have more than me? Why should they live where they live while I live here? Why should they be the lucky ones? I’m as good as they are.”

She had a point there.

“Believe me,” she said, “I’d rather do it with you any time. I’d like to do it with you forever and ever, over and over, until we were both seventy years old, and we’d still do it three times a day. I wish you were a millionaire, Jeff. Then everything would be just perfect.”

Uh-huh. Sure.

“But you aren’t. You can’t even afford the seventy dollars a week that you give me—why, your savings must be about gone now, and you’re going to have to scrape to support me. That’s no good.”

She fell silent. The funny thing is that the little bitch was depressed now. She wanted the moon—me plus a million bucks. And she was sorry she couldn’t have it. She was lying on her back with her legs parted slightly and her breasts pointing at the ceiling and her eyes were half-closed. I stretched out next to her and touched her without really wanting to. It was an unconscious sort of thing. I put one hand on one of her breasts and I began to squeeze the firm flesh, manipulating it gently. I slid the hand downward and caressed her flat stomach, then rubbed her warm thighs.

Now I wanted her. Not as urgently as I had wanted her in the elevator, but I wanted her.

“Candy,” I said, “I can get a divorce. Lucy’ll give me a divorce if I ask for it. Then there’ll just be the two of us and if I hustle I can haul in a steady two hundred a week. That’s not peanuts, not when there’s just two people living on it. That’s good dough. That’s ten thousand dollars a year and on that we can have a hell of a good apartment and—”