“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know you didn’t use any protection but it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to worry, Jeff. I planned it all very carefully.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Yes,” she continued. “Yes, I planned it all. It didn’t work, did it? I don’t know—I thought if we did it spontaneously it might turn out that you wanted me after all and you only wanted her because she was something different. But that’s not how it was, is it?”
“Lucy—”
“I won’t do it again,” she said. “I’ll be a good girl, Jeff. I’ll be a good sweet loving wife and I’ll be very certain never to seduce my husband any more.
“But it was fun, Jeff. Even if it didn’t work it was fun. You’re the only man in my whole life and I still love it with you. You know that, don’t you?”
She got up from where she was sitting and scooped up her nightgown from the floor. She didn’t bother to put it on this time but held it cradled in her hands as she walked to the bedroom. She didn’t turn around, didn’t say goodnight or anything like that. She just walked, very quickly and very steadily, out of the livingroom and into the bedroom. The door closed behind her and I sat for ten minutes staring at the closed door.
By the time I got bored with staring at the silly door it was time to take my clothes off again. Putting them on hadn’t made much sense in the first place, but most of the things I’d been doing lately didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. I got undressed and turned off the lights and stretched out on the couch with an afghan wrapped around me and a goofy little sofa pillow under my head.
Jeff Flanders.
Thirty-four years old. White. Male. Married. No religious preference. Employed as assistant vice-president at the Murray Hill Branch of the Beverley Finance Company. The position wasn’t as important as it sounded, because the assistant vice-president was third in command in a five-man office, and the Murray Hill Branch was the only branch there was of the Beverley Finance Company. The title was there for the express purpose of impressing prospective clients, which wasn’t a difficult matter to begin with.
Jeff Flanders.
A good Joe with a decent job and a beautiful wife. An average sort of jerk who had suddenly managed to louse up everything. A certain idiot who was in the quiet and gradual process of turning his life into a reasonable facsimile of the lower depths of hell.
Jeff Flanders.
Me.
The sofa was less suited to sleeping than it had been to the previous activity. The silly little sofa pillow was about as comfortable as a sack full of dirty laundry and I was tired without being sleepy. I had a cigarette after searching around for five minutes for a fresh pack, then crawled back onto the sofa and tried to sleep.
It didn’t work.
So I lay there thinking instead. And, because there was nothing much worth thinking about except the strange and absurd mess I was in, that is precisely what I thought about.
It went something like this:
Chapter Two
I WAS SITTING at my desk using a bottle of Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda to wash down a pastrami sandwich on rye when she came into the office. When I looked at her I almost choked on the cream soda, which is a hell of a thing. As it was I managed to miss my mouth with most of it and spilled it all over the front of my shirt.
Joe Burns and Phil Delfy, president and vice-president respectively of Beverley Finance Company, were out to lunch. Their positions entitled them to be out for lunch. That left three of us, the three lucky ones who stayed at our desks for lunch. Les Boloff was staring rather intently at the visitor’s chest, Harry Grimes was concentrating on the pelvic region, and I was looking at all of her.
She picked me.
She came over and every movement was a lesson in how to walk. Her hair was blonde and either her own or the world’s greatest dye job. She wore it long and she didn’t play games with upsweeps or chignons or any fancy nonsense. It fell right down around her shoulders. Her sweater was a white cashmere job and it takes a hell of a lot of guts to wear a white sweater without a bra. This one was tight and you could almost see her breasts through it.
Her skirt hugged her so intimately it could have been arrested for public indecency. It was a black job and that plus the white sweater plus the blonde hair was an indescribable combination. This added to the face of a sixteen-year-old who had spent all those years in the most cloistered of convents added up to a positive symphony of sex. I felt myself drooling into my cream soda.
She sat down in the chair next to my desk and gave me a sort of wary smile. Then she crossed her legs at the knee and I thought the skirt would split into atoms. I hoped it would.
She said hello and the voice matched the face. Soft and sexily virginal, if you know what I mean. She could have played the lead in Baby Doll.
“Can I help you, Miss—”
That’s a standard. Corny, but you get the name right away, and you have to push in this game. The finance company racket is legalized usury and nothing more. A whole batch of very clever dodges make it possible for a finance company to haul in close to thirty-five percent interest on loans to people who can’t get loans from banks. That high rate makes it worthwhile to trap any poor sap who isn’t an obvious ex-convict. What the hell, it’s better than taking in washing.
“—Cain,” she supplied. “Candace Cain. And you can help me. I want money.”
I gave the standard smile and the standard Who doesn’t? and wrote Candace on one of the forms and asked her how to spell the last name and she spelled it for me. Then we were ready to move on to bigger and better things.
“How large a loan did you have in mind, Miss Cain?”
“A thousand dollars.”
“Well, our limit on individual loans is five hundred—”
“Five hundred, then.”
“—but in some cases we can make an exception.” Some cases. Yeah. Like any cases that happen to want five hundred more than the limit.
I asked her where she lived and she gave me an address in the west Forties, a hotel in the theatrical district. When I asked her how long she’d been living there she told me less than a month. Before that she was somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania.
This immediately is not good. Despite the Shylock nature of Beverley Finance, the company would go broke quickly if we didn’t watch who we loaned money to. The idea behind the operation is that of loaning money to people who have first demonstrated that they don’t really need it. The bulk of our customers could probably get bank loans if they worked hard at it. But it’s easier working through us, and interest rates don’t soak into their thick heads.
If a prospective borrower has been living steadily at the same place for a length of time, has held a job—the same job—for a period of several years, owns property of one sort or another, or has the president of the Chase Manhattan Bank as a co-maker, there’s no problem.
But a local yokel from the Pennsylvania hills with one month in New York and, as it turned out, no job and no references and no property, had about as much chance of squeezing money out of Beverley Finance as a homo has of fathering a child. I explained all of this to the gal and her face didn’t fall while I told her. She just sat there perfectly impassive, with her breasts standing up, and I had trouble keeping my end of the dialogue straight. It reminded me of the gag about the guy who asked the stacked airlines clerk for two pickets to Titsburgh.
“That’s about it,” I wound up. “I don’t see how we can accommodate you, Miss Cain.”
“Call me Candy.”
The only thing to do at that point would have been to call her Candy, which seemed slightly on the moronic side. I just sat there and waited for her to do something.