Candy

by Lawrence Block

  That was the natural thing to do.

  In case you have not already mapped this much out for yourself, I have not made a life’s work out of doing the natural thing.

  I got on the elevator and instructed the lackey operating the car to deliver me safe and sound on the fifth floor. Mark that well—the fifth floor. There I got out of the car, wandered around long enough to discover the precise location of apartment 5-B, and rang again for the elevator. I rode back down to the ground floor and left the building.

  Clever subterfuge, eh? By this shifty means I managed to figure out what part of the building Candy’s apartment was in. Through such nefarious plotting I could determine which window to peer through if I wanted to set eyes on Candy.

  I wanted to set eyes on Candy.

  The doorman gave me a funny look on the way out so I gave him an equally funny look right back to put him in his place. I walked around the side of the building where he couldn’t see me and stood like an oaf staring up at Candy’s window. It was a nice window. It even had curtains.

  And, more important, it had a fire escape.

  Get the message? The situation was made-to-order for Jeff Flanders, boy detective and ace second-story man. All I had to do was mount the fire escape, climb helter-skelter to the fourth floor, and make like a Peeping Tom.

  Kindly refrain from asking me at this point just why I wanted to do these things. I would be hard-pressed to explain it to you. A psychiatrist might say I was suffering from temporary insanity. A psychiatrist who knew me well might say that I was suffering from permanent insanity. The hell with it. I hate psychiatrists.

  The fire escape posed a minor problem. The last section of it didn’t reach to the ground. The notion behind it evidently was that the last section was lowered from above in the event of fire, but remained up in the air otherwise to discourage clods like me from using it as a stepladder to success. This does make a certain amount of sense—it’s a good deal better than the jackass of a fire escape on the hotel I lived in, the cockeyed Kismet, where the fire escape drops you off in a blank alley. You can spend the rest of your life trapped between four dull buildings if there’s ever a fire in the Kismet.

  As I observed, the fire escape posed a minor problem. It might have been enough to deter an ordinary mortal, but not a rare bird like Jeff Flanders. Hell, no. I backed up a few paces, took a running start and leaped high into the air. I missed the first time and fell on my face, sort of. The second time I did better and caught the bottom rungs of the fire escape with both hands.

  There was a hellish instant or two while I dangled in the middle of the air. Then I managed to haul myself up and I was perched on the fire escape like a poached egg on a slab of burnt toast.

  There was no place to go but up.

  So up I went.

  I’m not a natural-born Peeping Tom, so I passed up any view I might have had of happenings in apartments 2-B and 3-B. I didn’t know, or care, what has been happening in those two apartments. For all I know there could have been an old Roman orgy in progress, or a marijuana party, or an auction of rare coins, or a singing of twelfth-century hymns, or any one of a number of events pleasant to contemplate and fascinating to consider.

  But on I climbed until I was at the window of apartment 4-B. Candace Cain’s apartment.

  I do not know what I expected to see any more than I know what prompted me to look. Perhaps I expected to observe Candy herself. Maybe all I wanted was a good look at that stupid mutt of hers. Then again I might have expected a squint at a bald and paunchy gentleman to whom the fine body of Miss Candace Cain now belonged.

  Whatever my sick brain expected, it was definitely not what I saw.

  I kneeled by the side of the window, which, as chance would have it, was the window of the bedroom. The lights were on but the room was empty. My nose was at sill level so that I could watch while keeping as little of myself visible as possible. I waited patiently for somebody to appear.

  Somebody appeared.

  It was Candy and she was naked and at once my body responded with tangible evidence of my interest in the girl. She was even more lovely than I remembered her. Her golden hair trailed down over those perfect shoulders. Her breasts were big and high and proud and beautiful, and I wanted to reach a hand through the window to touch them. Her whole body was exercised in feminine pulchritude. She was a vision.

  She walked to the bed, threw the covers back and stretched out on a pale green sheet. The color of the sheet served as a fitting background to that body of hers. The light was a glareless bowl set in the ceiling and it suffused the room with a soft gentle glow that made the magnificent body on the pale green sheet just that much more lovely.

  She sprawled on the bed, her head on a pillow, her eyes looking up at the ceiling, her hands at her sides and her legs parted slightly. There was a vaguely expectant half-smile on her face.

  She looked as though she was waiting for someone.

  Which made a certain amount of sense, because, logically enough, she was waiting for someone.

  Someone entered.

  That someone was shorter than Candy, which was as I had more or less expected. I figured on a short fat guy with a bald spot, but in this figuring I was wrong. The short part jibed but the rest didn’t.

  The person who entered was not fat. The person who entered was slender and almost boyish in build.

  The person who entered was not bald. The person who entered had jet black hair combed in what dissident youth calls a duck’s ass haircut.

  And, most important of all, the person who entered was not a guy.

  I almost fell off the fire escape. This would have meant a plunge of thirty feet or so onto hard pavement and might well have killed me.

  Damn it, I should have fallen.

  But I didn’t.

  I watched.

  The woman with Candy was, I guessed, around my own age. She was a rotten lesbian and she was with my girl and I hated her on sight, but I still had to admit that she was damned attractive. It was a good thing she was never going to have a baby because any child she might have had would have starved if it depended upon her breasts for nourishment. They were so small they almost weren’t there.

  But the rest of her was nice. Her face was just a trifle hard, a trifle mannish, but if you met her on the street you wouldn’t peg her as a man or as a lesbian and you might well want to take her to bed. Her waist was narrow and her hips were nicely rounded and she had a nice tight little behind, neat and trim. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on the woman.

  I should have left. Whether I fell off that fire escape or whether I got up nonchalantly and clambered on down, I should have left. But I didn’t—I stayed, and I watched, and I could not have left just then if my life depended upon it. Not then.

  The woman walked to the bed. She was naked as a jaybird and so was Candy and it was easy to see they were not there to play tiddly-winks. She lay down on the bed next to Candy and their bodies touched, and the woman said something which I couldn’t hear and Candy answered something that I couldn’t hear either and they both smiled—that same sick Mona Lisa smile Candy had handed me on 54th Street.

  I got slightly sick.

  The woman took Candy in her arms. She ran her hands through that gorgeous blonde hair and pressed her lips to that gorgeous red mouth. A sisterly kiss it wasn’t. Her tongue went between Candy’s lips and Candy’s arms went around her body, holding her close.

  They went on like that, which was horrible, and I went on watching.

  Which was also horrible.

  For this I hadn’t had a drink since lunch. For this I walked past every bar on Sixth Avenue. For this I played detective, climbed fire escapes, peeked through windows. For this nausea.

  The nameless dyke finally gave up the breast-kissing routine and got down to brass tacks.

  Etc.

  One hell of an etc., believe me.

  The girl obviously loved the whole thing. Girl? She wasn’t a girl and she wasn�
�t a man. She was a wretched middle-of-the-roader and I hated her like poison.

  Candy was also obviously enjoying herself. I couldn’t hear the noises she was making but I could imagine them. I remembered the noises she used to make with me.

  Yeah, everybody was enjoying the bit.

  Everyone but me.

  I watched it until it was over, watched in stricken fascination, and when they had finished and lay there holding each other and cooing like doves, I stood up and gripped onto the railing of the fire escape and let go. My stomach turned itself inside out and the vomit sailed through the air.

  The sight of it made me nauseous and I puked again. It was a great night for puking.

  Somehow I got down from the fire escape. I passed apartments 3-B and 2-B, again without a glance, and dropped down to the pavement. I headed west, headed for Sixth Avenue with my eyes half-shut and my stomach still feeling as though someone had stepped on it, someone who weighed five hundred pounds and wore lead underwear.

  I crossed Madison.

  I crossed Fifth.

  I reached Sixth.

  Remember Sixth? That’s the street I strolled down in the beginning, the street with all the bars, all the temptation that I so bravely resisted the first time around. Resisted—and for what? For a disgusting view of the most desirable woman in the world doing the most nauseating act in the world and loving every minute of it.

  Well, I made up for it.

  This time I didn’t pass those bars. I hit every one of them, all but the three fag joints and the one dyke joint, hit the Goldfish Bowl and the Left Field Bar & Grill and Hogan’s Bar and Lippy’s Bar. Hit Alcoholics Unanimous and Ye Olde Cornere Saloone and Raoul Dufy’s Tavern. Hit posh bars and crud bars, patrician bars and plebian bars, bourgeois bars and proletarian bars.

  Bar.

  After bar.

  After bar.

  And I couldn’t wash the foul taste of what I had seen from my mouth or drown the memory of it.

  Chapter Seven

  HANGOVERS COME IN seven different varieties. They also come in an infinite variety of degrees, from chicken crap mildness to sulphur-and-brimstone severity, but this is a matter for specialists.

  The seven fundamental varieties, on the other hand, should be familiar to every hard-drinking layman. Just as the invalid ought to get thoroughly acquainted with his malady, the sot should know as much as he possibly can about the various aspects of the Morning After.

  He owes it to himself to do this.

  It doesn’t ease the hangover. For this there are as many remedies as there are modes and manners of getting fried in the first place. Hangover remedies range from tomato juice with Worcestershire sauce through raw eggs in warm milk all the way to the most physiologically logical notions of doses of Vitamin B-1 or doses of the hair of the dog in the manger. A shot or a pill—either one—usually comes closest to bringing back a semblance of order.

  But, without further ado, let us enumerate the seven varieties of the hangover.

  First and most common and trivial is the headache. In its uncomplicated form this variety is indistinguishable from mild eye-strain. You wake up and your head hurts. You take two aspirins with a water chaser, wait for time to pass, and with the passage of time the headache goes back to normal. If you’re one of those sad sacks who was born with a lifelong headache, or if you’re married to one, you can have this form of hangover without knowing it.

  Hangover Number Two is the Long Thirst. With this type of affliction you feel fine. You get out of bed, wander over to the sink and down six tumblers of water in quick succession. You’re still feeling fine so you get dressed, brush your teeth, shave, and drink another six tumblers of water. This goes on for as long as the hangover stays with you. It’s one of those hangovers that make perfect sense and as a result you don’t resent it. You realize that the alcohol has dried up your blood and your body craves water to wet your blood down again. So you drink constantly and urinate almost as constantly and after awhile everything’s all right again.

  Hangover Number Three is located in the stomach. The stomach, poor thing, has a habit of rejecting anything that is placed in it. When you try to take aspirin you vomit them back up, which is disconcerting to say the least. With this type of hangover you play a waiting game, hoping that it stops before you die of starvation.

  Number Four is a variation of Number Three. The stomach rejects your hopeful offerings in yet another manner by kicking everything out through the back door. I’ve yet to discover the right method of coping with this nonsense, although an acquaintance strongly recommends a good cork.

  Number Five is pain, soul-shattering pain, ear-splitting pain. You wake up wearing somebody else’s head and the head doesn’t fit. Your arms ache and when you close your eyes you can see your nerves twitching. I don’t want to talk any more about this one. It’s terrible.

  Number Six is Number Five with a hangover of its own. You see things and you hear things and even your hair hurts. The only way to lick this one is to join it. You have to go out and get drunk all over again, praying for an easier time the following morning.

  Number Seven is seventh heaven or seventh hell depending upon your point of view. The nicest thing about it is that it does not hurt. The nastiest thing about it is there is nothing you can do about it. It is a very complex problem and the novice is likely to suspect that he isn’t hungover at all, that the world is simply set at the wrong angle.

  This hangover deserves careful consideration. It goes something along these lines: you don’t ache but you can’t move. Well, you can move, but it is an enormous effort and you do not really want to. You just want to sit and think about things.

  Time passes very slowly. Your mind works at a staggering pace and you think with the speed of light. You can’t concentrate on anything in particular but you can see things very clearly and very logically within your limited perception.

  This is a dilly. In a weird way it is almost fun, which is fortunate in that it is with you for the duration of the day. The only thing that eliminates it is a good night’s sleep and even that has been known to fail. You have to resign yourself to sitting in one spot and doing nothing for a good sixteen hours.

  I woke up, in case you haven’t guessed it, with Hangover Number Seven.

  I woke up, probably, at seven-thirty.

  Probably, because I really have no way of knowing. I woke up, opened my eyes, and lay there on top of the bed waiting. Waiting? Yeah—for Godot, or for Lefty, or for Christmas, or for something else. God alone knows what I was waiting for.

  But I do not know what time I woke up. I do know that it was a few minutes after eight when I looked at the clock. It seemed several hours that I lay there without taking the trouble to look at the clock.

  A few minutes after eight. Plenty of time to get up, change clothes, eat a hearty breakfast and get to work at Beverley Finance Company.

  But why?

  Who in hell wanted to perform this array of jolly little tasks?

  Not me.

  So there I remained. I lay there with my eyes open and thought about the voyeuristic activities of the previous evening, with a nameless dyke doing nasty little things to my former mistress. It was hard to take the whole thing too seriously at this stage of the game. Not that I wasn’t furious with Candy, not that I didn’t want to beat the crap out of the gal who was keeping her.

  It was just that I couldn’t bring myself to feel too strongly about anything.

  It was nine-thirty when the phone rang. I can be sure of this because I remember glancing at the clock on my way to the phone. The phone rang a good minute before I picked it up. It was an extension of the hotel phone rather than a private line and it gave one long continuous ring. I took a lot of time walking over to the table where the phone was, sitting down in the chair beside it, and lifting the receiver to my ear.

  “Jeff?”

  I grunted. Anything else would have required more effort than I was willing to give it. “
Les, Jeff. You coming in today?”

  I grunted again.

  “Jeff? It’s nine-thirty. You sick or something?”

  “No.”

  “Coming in?”

  “No.”

  A long pause.

  “Jeff?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  I shrugged. I don’t suppose he could hear the shrug over the telephone but I didn’t have anything to say.

  “You drunk, Jeff?”

  “Nope.”

  Another long pause. His tone, when he spoke, was one of infinite patience. He sounded like a father explaining an eternal truth to a lost child.

  “Jeff,” he said, “this is Les Boloff. It is nine-thirty in the morning, Wednesday morning, and you were supposed to be at work half an hour ago. Your name is Jeff Flanders and you work here at the Beverley Finance Company.”

  I knew all these things so I didn’t say anything.

  “Coming in, Jeff?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t feel like it,” I said, simply.

  And I hung up on him.

  It was my day for phone calls.

  “Mr. Flanders?”

  I grunted.

  “My name’s Hardesty,” a voice assured me. “I’m serving as attorney for your wife. She wants me to institute divorce proceedings.”

  I grunted again. I wasn’t particularly surprised; I had been wondering when Lucy was going to get around to making our separation legally binding.

  “Do you plan to contest the divorce?”

  “Nope.”

  “Mrs. Flanders is planning a Nevada divorce on grounds of extreme mental cruelty. As you may know, the sole grounds for divorce in New York State is adultery, which makes for a rather embarrassing situation. False evidence and all that.”

  I didn’t say anything. He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know so I didn’t bother answering him.