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.
“Mr. Flanders,” she said, which made me wonder why I should call her Candy if she was going to call me Mr. Flanders, “isn’t there some way I can get the money?”
“Well—” I said.
“I mean I really have to have it.”
“Well, if you had a first-class co-maker—”
“What,” she wanted to know, “is a co-maker?”
“Someone who’ll make good the money if you don’t.”
“Oh, but I’ll make good the money.”
I nodded vacantly. “We need more than that. If you can dig up somebody who knows you well, who’s willing to co-sign the loan application, who’s been employed at the same job and lived at the same address for a considerable length of time, who’s draft-free, who’s married—”
“I don’t know anyone like that.”
“Oh,” I said. The next thing I should have said was good-bye, but the helplessness of the gal kept me from giving her the brush-off. Well, it was partly the helplessness. The view I was getting of her sweater wasn’t helping matters any.
“Mr. Flanders,” she said suddenly, “how long have you been working here?”
“A little over three years.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes, but—”
God alone knows what I was going to say after that but.
“That’s it!” she squealed, clapping her hands like a kid who had just won a game of jacks.
“What’s what?”
“You!”
“Me?”
“You can be my co-maker or whatever it is.”
I stared at her blankly.
“Won’t you do it for me?” Her face looked as though someone had just told her that there wasn’t a Santa Claus and she wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t see how I can.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t even know you.”
“That’s nothing,” she said. “You can take me out to lunch and you’ll get to know me and then you can be my co-maker. Would that be all right?”
“Well—”
“Come on,” she said. She got up from the chair and smiled at me. “I can really use a dinner. I haven’t had anything to eat in days.”
There was only one thing to do at this point. I should have snarled at her, told her I hoped she starved to death and ordered her off the premises of the Beverley Finance Company, never to return.
That would have been the smart thing to do.
Needless to say, I did nothing of the sort.
I got up from my chair, walked around the desk and took her arm. I informed Les Boloff that I would be back eventually and he gave me one of those man-to-man winks that was positively obscene.
And away we went.
Ahfen Yahm is an Arabian restaurant on 38th Street just east of Fifth Avenue. The food starts with that thin Lebanese bread that’s great for scooping up yogurt with if that happens to be your cup of tea. It runs a course through the usual run of shishkebabish dishes and winds up with this far-out pudding that’s on fire when they bring it to your table.
I had just finished my pastrami-plus-cream-soda lunch and I wasn’t especially hungry, so I drank my lunch while Candy Cain polished off everything that the waitress put in front of her. The waitress was a big fat sow of a woman and her uniform looked as though it had been specially designed for her by Omar the Tentmaker. She watched Candy devour the food with a very sympathetic smile on her cowlike face.
It was about this time that I realized that Blondie’s name was Candy Cain, which was like the things they hang on Christmas trees. I clued her in on my brilliant observation and she let me know that this had gone through her parents’ minds when they named her. They thought it was cute. I, in turn, thought she was cute.
“Candy,” I said as I drank my third Gibson, “why do you need a thousand dollars?”
“To live on.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t have any money, Jeff. I came to New York with very little money to begin with and now it’s all gone.”
“Why don’t you get a job?”
“Doing what?”
“Can you type?”
She shook her head.
“Wait on tables?”
She shook her head again.
“Retail sales?”
She shook her head a third time and I began wondering how in the world anybody could be unqualified for something so elementary as slinging hash. Then she explained herself.
“You see,” she said, “I don’t want a job.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Jeff,” she said, as if she was spelling things out for an idiot, “if all I wanted was a job I could have stayed in Gibbsville.”
“Then—”
“I want to be supported,” she said.
“Looking to get married?”
“Possibly,” she said. “Or kept.”
I was, to put it mildly, floored. I tried to match the baby face and the baby voice and the incongruous words that kept coming out of the pretty mouth. They didn’t match.
She sipped her Turkish coffee and I slurped my Gibson and we stared at each other. She didn’t smoke but I had a cigarette between my fingers and I was flicking at it nervously. Up to this point, no thought of cheating on Lucy had entered my thick head. It was strictly a look-but-don’t-touch type of fling, but I was suddenly beginning to realize two things.
One—I could have this babe if I wanted to.
Two—I wanted to.
“Jeff,” she said gently, “are you going to be my co-maker?”
I opened my mouth to say God knows what but she didn’t give me time.
“If you’ll be my co-maker for a thousand dollars, I’ll let you.”
“Let me what?”
“You know.”
Yeah, I knew. But I had a feeling she was a little gone in the head and I wanted to hear her say it, so I asked her to explain what she had in mind.
“If you are my co-maker for a thousand-dollar loan,” she said slowly, “I’ll let you have what you want—anything!”
You figure it. I’m damned if I can. Here I was, a happily married joker with a spotless record as far as adultery was concerned, a guy who loved his wife and got along with her in bed as perfectly as two people can. Not an inexperienced guy, because while I was married at twenty-three, there were a lot of women before then. But no skirt-chaser.
There I was. And there, also, was Candy. Nineteen years old and built for boffing. Here we were, just the two of us, and she wanted me to pay a mere thousand dollars in return for which she would be my ever-lovin’ mistress.
Yeah, pay her a thousand dollars. Being co-maker was absurd—she had about as much intention of ever repaying that loan as Hitler had of settling for half of Czechoslovakia. It added up to paying her the grand, which I preferred to do than sign for her anyway, all things considered.
While I sat across from her being dumfounded she regaled me with details of how good she was in bed and what a hot number she was. It was impossible to believe those grown-up words were being spoken in that little-girl voice.
“I’ve got the hardest and firmest breasts of any girl I know,” she told me. “They’re big, too. You can see how big they are.”
I could see how big they were.
“And I know lots of tricks. I’m real good at it, and it’s not as if I did it with just anybody.”
“How many men have you had?”
“Four.”
“One doesn’t count,” she said, “because I was only sixteen then and he got me drunk on applejack and I didn’t know what he was doing. Another one only half-counts because we didn’t really.”
I asked her what in hell she meant and she told me. The explanation of just what it was that the two of them did would have made Krafft-Ebing blush.
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.
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