The other two, as it turned out, counted. Mentally I tripled the figure—the gal must have been had by everybody in the rollicking town of Gibbsville. But somehow this did not make me one whit less anxious to see what sort of bomb was ticking inside her.
“Candy,” I said, “I can’t be your co-maker.”
She made the no-Santa-Claus face at me again and it was so sad I felt like helping her cry. But I didn’t. Instead I did something that changed her expression, and I’ll be damned if I know why I did it. Perhaps it was the fact that three Gibsons were enough to cloud my brain. Maybe it was just that I was born with an addled brain.
Whatever it was, I said: “I’ll loan you the money myself.”
I had a savings account at the Bowery Bank with a little over three grand in it. It was a nice quiet account that Lucy knew of without having the vaguest idea how much was salted away. The account fluctuated anyway—occasionally I dipped into it if I had a good tip on the market and occasionally I added to it if the tip came home. I drew a cool grand out of the account and solemnly presented it to Candy.
“You won’t regret it,” she assured me.
Yeah.
Her hotel was a reasonably good one and as we went inside I wondered how much rent she owed them. The elevator was self-service and on the way up I stopped wondering about things like rent because I was all wrapped up in Candy. That may sound like some kind of pun but I don’t much care. I had those knockers of hers drilling happy little holes in my chest and that innocent little mouth pressed against my not-very-innocent big mouth. Kissing her like that was like drinking her, except that you can’t drink Candy. You can eat Candy. That came later.
“I really like you,” she told me on the way into her room. “It isn’t like I was just doing this for the money. I need the cash but you’re so nice I probably would have done it with you anyway.”
I didn’t say anything to that. As a matter of fact neither of us said a hell of a lot after that. We were too busy doing other things.
She was right. Her breasts were hard and firm and huge. I couldn’t keep my hands off them and she didn’t want me to. She was one of those girls with remarkably sensitive breasts and she went absolutely wild when I touched her. It really had her jumping.
And she liked to be touched there, too.
And the other thing she said was true as well. She was wonderful in bed, except any adjective like wonderful is entirely inadequate to describe an experience like Candy. She was just that, a totally new and perfect adventure.
She was not Love. She was almost anything other than that. She was, if anything, Sex. She was the complete personification of sex, and she acted as if it was the only thing in the entire world that mattered.
Maybe it was.
I didn’t get back to the office at all that afternoon. It was a Friday and since Friday is traditionally payday it was a slow day. The morons who borrow money usually do it on a Monday after having blown their paycheck over the weekend. So I could stay away from the office on a Friday afternoon without the world falling in.
Except that the world fell in. Not at the office. The world fell in a room at the Somerville Hotel on West 44th Street where Candy Cain and a bastard named Jeff Flanders made sex all afternoon. Note the terminology. We did not make love. We made sex.
And we did it very well.
I’m sure Lucy didn’t suspect anything that first night. She couldn’t have because I know my guilt couldn’t have shown. That’s what bothered me the most—that I didn’t feel guilty. I wound up feeling guilty about not feeling guilty, and that’s as nutty a one as I’ve ever come across.
She couldn’t complain about any lack of attention on my part that night either. As far as I was concerned the chapter with Miss Candy Cain was over and done with, the most expensive roll in the hayloft that I had ever had, but one which was almost worth it. I never figured to see the girl again and I made up to Lucy that night by making desperately passionate love to her.
And Monday afternoon Candy called. The conversation went something like this:
“Don’t you want to see me?”
“Can’t afford it. How come?”
“I just feel like it.”
I called Lucy from a booth outside, told her I had to work late. Then after work I went up to Candy’s room. And the bedsprings squealed in protest for hours.
The pattern was on—there was no way to stop it. I saw her every other day, then every day. Before I entirely understood what was happening I was addicted to her as sure as a junkie is addicted to heroin, and I had about as much chance of breaking the habit as a junkie does. She hooked me in the traditional manner—at first it was free until the habit had built itself up gradually. Then, when I couldn’t live without her, it started to cost.
The price was not high. All she wanted was security—her rent paid, her meals bought, a small allowance for clothes and amusements. She was happy seeing two movies a day and eating hamburgers, and all I had to do was give her seventy dollars a week and I could have her whenever I wanted.
I earned roughly a hundred and eighty at Beverley. The pay varied with the volume of loans I landed, but it worked out in that neighborhood. It was a very livable salary, but chopping seventy a week out of it cut it down one hell of a lot.
But the savings account was there. I could dip into it for a long time before it ran out and I had to figure out a new way to support my edible little Candy.
Yeah, sure.
So here I was with my wife in the bedroom and myself on the couch and the pillow under my head feeling for all the world like a sack of dirty laundry.
And the savings account, as of that morning, was flat as a flounder.
Chapter Three
WHEN I WOKE UP it was Saturday. If you want to be technical, it was Saturday when I went to sleep as it was after midnight, but that sort of outlook never gets you anywhere. When I woke up it was Saturday, a little after ten in the morning, and the apartment was empty.
If you want to get technical, the apartment was not empty. I was in it, for one thing. So was the furniture and the confounded television set. But Lucy was not in it, and therefore the apartment was empty.
So I took a fast shower and put on some clean clothes and cast a baleful eye at the couch. My back seemed to be missing a few vertebrae and I felt as though I had spent a night on the rack, but when I counted vertebrae I couldn’t avoid admitting that they were all present. I brushed my teeth with a vengeance and got out of the house and had a disjointed breakfast of hot wheaties and cold coffee at a luncheonette on Broadway. Don’t ask me why the wheaties were hot. I’d guess that they were hot for the same reason that the coffee was cold, but the reason escapes me.
It was Saturday and Beverley Finance was mercifully closed and shuttered. This left me with a morning on the town. There I was, all alone in the big city. I wandered around like a lost soul for a little while, then found my way to 96th and Broadway and let the IRT float me south to Times Square. There I climbed out of the soot and stench of the subway system back into the soot and stench of New York. It was fun.
I took a mid-morning stroll on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th, just sort of relaxing and enjoying the sights. I gobbled a hot dog at Grants, gulped a cup of battery acid at Bickford’s, and wandered over to Eddie’s place to watch people buy pornography. The store was empty except for Eddie, one of the clerks, and a scrawny red-necked kid who was reading the latest novel by Alan Marshall with one hand plunged deep into the pocket of his dungarees.
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.