Lawrence Block: Candy

Candy

Lawrence Block

Writing as Sheldon Lord

This is for

LARRY and SUE

and for Prudence as well

Chapter One

I THOUGHT SHE’D BE asleep by the time I got home but she wasn’t. I didn’t find out this intriguing fact until I was inside the door. Our apartment doesn’t have a window facing out on 100th Street where the building entrance is and I hadn’t taken the time to walk around to West End Avenue and have a look at our window. Even with a light on she could have been asleep anyway.

I opened the door with my key and I saw her. She was sitting in the armchair in front of the television set but the late late show was over and done with and she was staring at a test pattern. I’m not sure what time it was but when it’s too late for the late late show it is very late indeed, from what I understand. I’m just going on guesswork, as it happens, because as far as I’m concerned television is just one of those conveniences of modern living which I am in the habit of asking the bartender to turn off.

But anyway, you get the picture. It’s late, I’m coming in quietly, and my dear wife is still up.

I said Hello because it seemed to be the most nearly logical thing to say.

She got up from the chair and turned around to look at me. Her face was perfectly composed but I could tell that the composure was about as genuine as a giveaway show. When you live with a woman for over eleven years you can tell when she’s faking. There were little lines around the corners of her mouth and the redness round her eyes didn’t come from peeling onions. She had been crying, and this made me feel like the first-class Grade-A bastard which I was. She’d been crying because of me, and it figured.

I smiled. I walked over to her and I took her in my arms and I kissed her. She was wearing a nylon nightgown with nothing on under it and she was soft and warm and irrepressibly and undeniably female, with soft short brown hair and velvety brown eyes.

But the kiss was a short one. At first she clutched at me desperately; then she straightened up and twisted away. I didn’t attempt to hold her because I knew she didn’t want me to.

It figured. When a woman lives with a man for over eleven years she can tell when he’s faking. And I was faking. And she could tell. I wanted to kiss her about as much as I wanted to kiss a pig and she knew it.

“How was she, Jeff?”

I looked away. I didn’t say anything because there wasn’t much to say.

“I don’t like her perfume, Jeff. Did you know that you reek of her perfume? I can smell it on you. You ought to take a shower or something after you—”

She broke off and for a minute or two I thought she was going to start crying again. But she grabbed hold of herself and turned around so that she was facing me. Her mouth was closed and her lips formed a thin red line. When she spoke she talked slowly, carefully, as if she was afraid she wouldn’t make it without breaking down unless she pronounced each word meticulously and took her time between words.

“Let’s sit down,” she said. “We’ve got to talk this out, Jeff. It’s no good the way it is.”

“What’s there to talk about?”

“There’s quite a bit to talk about.”

I gave a half-hearted shrug and went over to her. She sat down on the sofa and I took a seat next to her. We just sat there in perfect silence for what must have been at least three or four minutes.

“I suppose it happens all the time,” she said softly. “It always happens. You go on being a good wife day after day and finally your husband finds another girl and she’s more exciting and more beautiful and more interesting, and she’s new and different and all of a sudden he’s sleeping with her and you sit home alone and stare at the damned television. You sit home alone rubbing your knees together like a teenager because you want him so much you could scream and all the while he’s with some nameless bitch and the two of them are doing all the things you used to do and—”

“Lucy—”

“Don’t interrupt me!” Her face was drawn now and she was rummaging around with her hands the way she always did when she wanted a cigarette. I got a pack out of my shirt pocket and gave her one and took one for myself. That emptied the pack and I crumpled it up in a ball and heaved it at the wastebasket on the other side of the room. It sailed through the air, bounced off the wall and dropped into the basket.

“Two points,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“They tell me women live through this,” she said. Her cigarette was lit and she had taken two or three deep drags on it. She was calmer now.

“Women live through this,” she went on. “It’s supposed to happen all the time. After a man’s married so many years he gets hungry for something new and the wife goes around with her eyes shut and her mouth shut and waits for him to get tired of the new one and come back home to mama. Then things are all right again.”

I got my cigarette going and took a long drag. It didn’t taste good and I blew the smoke out in a long thin column that held together all the way to the ceiling. I stared at the damned smoke with the fascination of a catatonic staring at a blank wall.

“I tried pretending, Jeff. I’ve known about her for … oh, I don’t know how long. I half-guessed it when you began being too tired to make love and knew it when you started having to work late night after night. But I can’t stand pretending. I just can’t take it any more.”

She took the cigarette between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand and stubbed it out in an ashtray. She put it out so viciously that she almost knocked the ashtray off the table. She hadn’t smoked more than a quarter of the cigarette.

“Is she that much better than I am?”

I sure as hell didn’t attempt to answer that one.

“She couldn’t be that much better,” she said. “There’s not that much to it. You just lie on your back and spread your legs and show some life. Maybe she knows something I don’t know. Maybe that’s it.”

Outside it was starting to rain. The rain fell in a steady pattern and the wind was blowing it against our window. It provided a sort of background to our conversation.

“Who is she, Jeff?”

“You wouldn’t know her.”

“I suppose that’s some consolation. I’d hate it if it was somebody we both knew. I … Are you in love with her, Jeff?”

“I don’t know.” It was the truth.

“Are you going to go on seeing her?”

I closed my eyes. I just sat there with my eyes closed and my heart beating much faster than it should and I didn’t know what to say.

“Jeff, can’t you stop seeing her? Don’t you see what you’re doing to me? Can’t you see?”

My cigarette had burned down to a stub about an inch long. I put it out.

Lucy was saying: “Jeff, don’t I mean enough to you so that you can give up that little bitch? Please, Jeff. I want you. I want you so much I don’t think I could go on living without you. Can’t you give her up?”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t? Or don’t want to?”

“Can’t.”

She shrugged, defeated. “I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve been married eleven years and for all that time I haven’t stopped loving you. I love you right now and I hate you, too, and I just don’t understand it. Don’t you love me any more?”

“I don’t know.”

She was smiling now but it was a very sad smile. She shook her head and when she started talking it was as much to herself as it was to me. “We should have had another baby,” she said. “When Timothy died we should have had another baby right away instead of waiting. If we had a baby maybe this whole thing wouldn’t have happened.”