Donald Westlake - Two Much!

“It’s too bad most of them become old so fast,” she said.

“Don’t I know the feeling.”

We stood smiling at one another, me near the kitchen counter and Liz in the living room area, until all at once Candy marched between us, heading for the door, carrying what appeared to be my suitcase. We watched her kick open the screen door, rear back, and toss the suitcase out of the house. Underhanded, of course: It lofted up and over the railing and landed in the poison ivy.

Candy turned on me a smile that would crack granite. “I hope,” she said, through her gritted grin, “you’ll have a glorious time in Point O’ Woods.” Approaching me, she said, “And that’s my drink, thank you very much.” And plucked from my hand my rum and tonic.

Liz suddenly started laughing. “Oh, Art,” she said, “what a beautiful face!”

“Well,” I said.

Candy had taken a slug of my drink. “You get out of here, Art,” she said. “Get out of here right now .” From the look in her eye, she’d be picking up a steak knife next.

I backed toward the door, irritably aware of Liz grinning in the corner of my vision. “I suppose that goes for Bart too,” I said, and before she could respond I quickly added, “Does Ralph know about this? Does he go along with this? He is, after all—”

“You leave Ralph out of this! I don’t even want you to mention his name !”

“He’ll just wonder why I’m not here.”

“You don’t think I’ll tell him? You don’t think so?”

I thought she was capable of any idiocy, given her present mood, so rather than reply I stepped outside, picked up the mop leaning against the wall near the door, and went fishing for my suitcase.

Meanwhile, Candy had turned on Liz. It’s amazing how many coarse names she knew for female private parts. And while the pebbles Liz dropped into Candy’s stream of invective were rather quieter, I wouldn’t exactly say they were gentler.

I grasped my suitcase, hauled it up onto the deck, and went cautiously back inside. Candy was heaving so much in her little two-piece yellow bathing suit she looked like a belly dancer trainee, and Liz was also a bit red around the face. Neither, however, was speaking at this precise moment. “My attaché case,” I whispered to them both, as though there were a sleeper nearby that I didn’t want to wake, and I tiptoed to the ladder. Up I went, packed the last few items — including Bart’s glasses — and carried the attaché case down.

Candy, though still panting, had developed now the beginnings of a puzzled frown on her foxy face. She said to me, “Who?”

Whoops. “All I can say, Candy,” I said, “is that I did my best to ease your loneliness, and to be a true friend to you when you needed me.”

“Why, you filthy son of a bitch,” she said, “I’m going to cut your balls off!” And she went around the end of the counter into the kitchen.

“Come, Liz,” I said, with dignity. “I know when I’m not wanted.”

I crossed the room, opened the screen door, and a bottle of Firehouse Jubilee bloody Mary mix sailed past my head and into the poison ivy. Liz and I exited, and I closed the screen door behind me and spoke through it. “I’ll tell Bart your decision,” I said, “and I know he’ll be just as hurt as I am that all our acts of kindness, our attempts to bring solace into the drab life of a trapped housewife, have been misunderstood and unap—”

An egg strained itself through the screen; some of it reached my chest.

“Mp,” I said. I picked up my suitcase, and Liz and I departed.

We’d gone a block when the shouts started behind us: “Who? Who ?” Fortunately, Liz was laughing too hard to hear it.

Walking with Liz to Hommel’s, toting my suitcase, I had leisure to think things over. What next, I wondered. I’d done my con and made it work, I’d screwed both sisters, I’d precipitated the break with Candy that I suppose I must have been angling for, so now everything was obviously finished. To repeat the twin gag would be insanity; I couldn’t possibly get away with it twice. And while Liz was fun in her way she was hardly restful; I might as well have stayed with Candy.

So what I should do right now was take the next ferry/cab/train back to the city, move into my office (ah, the sleeping bag stored in the closet), and start hustling around for someone else to put me up for the rest of August. Also for another female, though that was at the moment secondary.

But I just couldn’t seem to let go. I’d made the Art-Bart phone call to Betty the minute I’d gotten off the ferry, I’d risked severe physical impairment to drop Bart’s name into my farewell scene with Candy, and now I was walking to Hommel’s with Liz, my mind searching for a way to get invited to spend the rest of the summer at the Kerner house. Why?

Well, partly for the Laurentian Lumber Mills, I suppose. And maybe a tenny little bit for that television station in Indiana. I was, after all, engaged to an heiress, or at least Bart was.

And also for the sheer silly intrigue of it. I’ve never been able to quit when I was ahead, never known how to stop before I got caught, and I wasn’t likely to learn now. So I went with Liz to Hommel’s, watched a ferry depart, and waited to be invited home.

For a while it looked as though it wouldn’t happen. Liz spent her first two drinks making remarks about Candy, some of which I thought were probably unfair, then devoted her third to class-conscious slurs of the citizens around us. It must be hard to be a promiscuous snob, but Liz managed.

Finally, partway into her fourth vodka-ice, she looked at me and said, “So what do you do now?”

“Swelter in the city, I suppose. I’ll hate to break the news to Bart.”

“Screw Bart.”

“He’s my brother.”

“He isn’t mine,” she said, callously, I thought.

“Then there’s my apartment,” I said. I sighed, but was manful about it. “Well, I’ve camped in my office before.”

“What’s wrong with your apartment?”

I was just about to tell her it was sublet when I realized I was supposed to have been spending half of every week in the damn place. “Bart,” I said. “It’s just a one-and-a-half in the Village, there isn’t room for both of us.”

“He’s in your place?”

That didn’t make sense, did it? “Well,” I said. Invention flowed through me, bred by necessity, and I said, “Bart doesn’t have his own place yet Not till after Labor Day.”

“Why not?”

“He spent several years out on the Coast,” I explained. (Of course! If a friend of mine expressed bewilderment about Bart in Liz’s presence, this would explain it; he was a long-lost brother.) “He just came back the beginning of the summer,” I said, “when he came into the business with me.”

“Oh. Well, you want to come stay at my house?”

“Do I have to sleep in the closet?”

She showed me her sour grin. “I like being around you,” she said. “You’re a little funnier than most people. Like back at your lady-friend’s house.”

“I give all credit to my supporting cast.”

“Uh huh.” She downed her drink and signaled to the proprietor for another. “Can you get hold of that brat with the boat?”

“I can try.” But should I plead Bart’s case? No. Screw Bart, as Liz so correctly pointed out. Let him plead his own case, with Betty. “I’ll be right back,” I said, and headed for the pay phone.

And then i wrote: “Christmas comes but once a year — I’m glad you can do better.”

That was on the ferry, Wednesday morning, three days after I’d moved in at Point O’ Woods. I was old family there by now, and I was sure Bart would do every bit as well.