I shrugged. I’m a great one for shrugging.
“How did you even find out about Caroline? How did you know?”
I told her, told her how easily I had followed her and how I had watched them from the fire escape. I expected a look of horror or disgust on her face and I was surprised when I got an amused smile instead. I couldn’t figure it out until she spoke and then it made its own kind of sense.
“Did you like it?” she asked anxiously. “Did you enjoy it, Jeff?”
“What do you mean?”
“What you watched,” she said. She sounded as if she were pointing something out to a backward child. “Did you get a kick out of watching us? I’ve heard that a man gets awful excited watching two women loving each other up. Did it affect you that way or didn’t it?”
“It made me sick.”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly. Candy, how could you do anything like that? How?”
Her smile spread on that beautiful face. “I didn’t mind it a bit.”
“You couldn’t have enjoyed it—”
“Of course I did.”
Suddenly I had to know. “As much as you enjoyed it with me?”
She hesitated. Then she said very softly: “Not as much as with you. Never as much as with you, Jeff. Never in my whole life. You’re better than anybody I’ve ever been with, miles better.”
I relaxed.
“Jeff—”
Her face was slightly drawn now and I waited for her to go on, wanted to know what she was trying to say. I didn’t have long to wait.
“Jeff,” she said, “I took a room in this hotel before I called you. Let’s go to it.”
Hell, I was born stupid.
“What for?” I asked brilliantly. And it was the old Candy who answered, the Candy I knew so well.
“I want it,” she said. “It’s been one hell of a long time.”
I suppose the room was quite luxurious but not quite up to the rigourous standards of the House on 53rd Street. I’m only supposing. I never saw the room.
Don’t misunderstand me. If you misinterpret the last sentence and assume that I never saw the room because I lit out of that hotel like a bat out of a belfry and moseyed on down to that dreamy little island in the Florida Keys you have rocks in your head.
I did not do this.
I didn’t see the room—but that is not to say that I did not spend considerable time in it. I did not see the room because I was too busy with other things to devote one iota of my attention to the room or its furnishings. I spent the bulk of my time on the bed, and the bed is the only article of furniture that I can be positively certain that the room contained. No doubt there was a bureau and a chair or two, but I never saw them and they might just as well not have been there.
After I paid for the drinks, Candy led the way to the elevator and we got off on the fourteenth floor. I was jittery in the elevator and I couldn’t forget the last elevator episode in the Somerville. I would have gleefully accepted a repeat performance of that little routine but this elevator was equipped with an elevator operator, a grey-haired and paunchy old coot whose presence annoyed me.
But I didn’t have long to be annoyed because suddenly the elevator had come to a quiet stop and Candy was leading me from the car by the arm. I followed with manners as perfect as the dachshund she had been walking the night I met her on 54th Street. We paraded down the corridor to her room and I stood and trembled while she fished a key out of her alligator bag and played Elementary Housebreaking with the keyhole.
Then we were inside the door and she was shutting it.
Then I was taking her into my arms.
And I realized just what I had been missing.
There was a man once who had but two claims to fame. His name was Hartley Coleridge. Claim One was his father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a guy who wrote some of the hippest poetry in the English language. Claim Two was one poem that li’l Hartley wrote, just one poem that hasn’t been relegated to the dustheap, with one couplet in it that makes it worth preserving.
It goes:
Her very frowns are fairer far
Than smiles of other maidens are.
That is how Candy affected me and that one quick embrace proved it to me, proved that I could never run away from her and that no other woman could ever take her place.
When I let go of her I was trembling and so was she. For a moment we stood very still and stared at each other and then we grabbed onto each other again and didn’t let go. I kissed her and it was something I hadn’t done in a long time. Once I quit smoking for a week and when I broke down and took a cigarette the first puff almost knocked me over. It was the same thing now—I kissed her red mouth and her lips opened up and my tongue went between them. Her arms tightened around my back and our bodies were closer than subway air in mid-July. Her breasts against my chest were warm and firm and hard. Her hips pressed into me and my hands cupped her buttocks to press our bodies together even tighter.
Her mouth tasted better than wine. Her warm body smelled sweeter than a faggot’s penthouse. I was beginning to feel like a stallion on a steady diet of Spanish fly.
The kiss went on forever. Maybe it just seemed that way. When it was over we forced ourselves apart and my eyes caught hold of her eyes and drank deep.
She was the most beautiful woman in the world.
“Jeff,” she said fiercely. “Jeff, let’s not rush. Let’s do it slow and careful and make it perfect. It’s been an awful long time.”
“You said it.”
“I want you, Jeff. I want you so much it hurts. I’ve been going crazy without you. I don’t know how I managed to stand it this long.”
I got an ugly mental picture of her and Caroline. I almost said something about it, told her how she’d managed to fend off her hunger for me. But desire flooded over me and soaked me to the ears and I didn’t say anything.
“We’re good for each other, Jeff. We’re good, we’re both good. Nobody can like you can, Jeff. Nobody in the world.”
I blushed modestly.
“Take your clothes off, Jeff. Take ’em off real slow and let me watch you. That’s what I want you to do. I want to just stand here and watch you take off your clothes and I want to keep on watching until you’re naked.”
The tie gave me a little trouble. I got it off, though. I got the shirt off, too, and one of the buttons popped and skittered across the room.
I didn’t care.
I didn’t hang up the shirt or the tie. I dropped them both to the floor and peeled off the tee shirt and dropped it, too.
She was watching me and her eyes were as hot as blast furnaces.
I loosened the belt of my pants and unzipped the fly.
“Slower,” she said. “Make it last, Jeff. Take a lot of time.”
I never had any burlesque experience but I did my best. I dropped the pants to the floor and stepped out of them with the grace of a pregnant hippopotamus. I unlaced my shoes and tugged them off my feet. I got my socks off, too. I don’t know if there is anything in the world as sexless as a man removing his socks and shoes, but Candy seemed to be getting a large charge out of it.
Then the shorts. That, as the feller says, is all there was to it.
“Now you just stand there,” she told me. “You just stand there and watch.”
I stood there and watched. Who was I to argue?
The green sheath dress zipped down the back and she didn’t want any help with it. She reached around behind her to hunt for the zipper and the movement served to emphasize her breasts by pulling the sheath dress even tighter over them. Breasts like hers don’t need any emphasis. They’re emphatic enough just by themselves.
The hunt took awhile—I think she made it take longer than necessary to prolong the suspense—but finally she located the zipper and started to tug it downward. She took her time doing that, too, and I must have looked like a statue of Don Juan as I stood there with my eyes following her every inch of the way.
When the thing was unzipped, she shrugged. That’s the only word for it. She shrugged—then the sheath dress fell away from her and there was nothing there but Candy.
No bra. I don’t think this girl owned a bra.
No slip.
No panties.
No stockings—and nobody goes without stockings in the Astor Bar.
Nobody but Candy.
Then she kicked off her shoes and there was nothing but blonde hair and smooth skin and more blonde hair and more smooth skin. I had to catch my breath. It was as if I was seeing her for the first time, as if I had never seen a naked woman before in my entire life.
It was quite a sight.
“Jeff—”
When I took her in my arms the contact of our naked bodies nearly killed me. It was that exciting. I couldn’t stand up and if the bed hadn’t been next to us we would have wound up on the floor.
We tumbled onto the bed. I heaved myself on top of her and her arms were locked around my neck. We kissed and it was as though a volcano had erupted in the neighborhood. That’s how it was.
“Jeff—”
For a minute I remembered what she and Caroline had done but now it didn’t sicken me any longer. Now it didn’t matter. It was as though it had never happened.
“Jeff—”
Then I remembered what I had done with Caroline. This also passed away from me. There was nothing but Candy and myself and the mutual passion that enveloped us and drove through us.
For just an instant the dream came to me. I saw myself alone and proud and independent, alone on an island in the Florida Keys getting back in shape and learning how to be a man again. The dream came and the dream was suddenly gone. It was a good dream, a beautiful dream, and if I had never met Candy I might someday have realized that dream.
Now it was gone forever.
“Jeff—”
I planted little kisses all over that face. I kissed her throat and the nape of her neck and the softness of her skin drove me out of my mind.
It was a time of discovery, of rediscovery. It was as if I was finding and falling in love with every curve and valley of that perfect body for the first time; simultaneously it was a return to a body I had known and loved as no man had ever known and loved the body of any woman.
“Jeff!”
“You like this, don’t you?”
“Make it last forever …”
Kisses and caresses and a whirling world. Make it last forever.
I could neither see nor hear nor smell or taste nor feel. I could do nothing but love her with all the strength of my being.
Her nails raked my back and drew blood. My teeth sank into the lobe of her ear; they also drew blood.
She screamed once shrilly. I do not know what word she screamed or if she screamed any word at all.
The scream was very loud in my ears.
Then it was over.
It was over and we lay side by side, our bodies touching, our breathing loud in the silence of the room.
I felt half-dead, weak and drained and empty, used up and ready for the incinerator.
I also felt alive, fully alive for the first time in an eternity.
I had her now. She was mine and I swore to myself that I would never let her go. The time without her, the overwhelming emptiness of life without her, vanished and ceased to be. We were together now and we would be together until death, and whether we were bound by love or hate or hunger ceased to matter.
“Jeff—”
I broke off my thoughts and listened to her.
“I’m glad you did it, Jeff. For that it was worth it. That was wonderful, Jeff.”
I smiled gently at the ceiling.
“It’ll be tough, Jeff. You did a horrible thing but we’ll get away and everything’ll be all right.”
Something was out of focus.
“I still don’t see how you did it, Jeff. I can understand why you would want to do it, but I can’t see a man like you doing a thing like that. It just isn’t the sort of thing you would do.”
“What?”
“What you did.”
I was lost.
“What are you talking about, honey?”
“You know.”
“If I knew I wouldn’t ask. I’m afraid you’ve got me running around in circles.”
She shook her head and I leaned over her on one elbow, looking down at her and thinking what a beautiful woman she was. There was a clock in the room somewhere and I could hear it ticking loud and strong, hear it beating out a rhythm as primitive as the one Candy and I had just finished.
I put out a hand and cupped one of her perfect breasts. I stroked the nipple and Candy purred at me soulfully.
“Honey,” I said again, “what were you talking about?”
She pulled me down on top of her and bruised my mouth with a kiss. I returned the kiss and we worked that one out for a while.
“You know,” she said after a while.
“But I don’t know.”
“Caroline.”
“Your lessie girl friend?”
She nodded.
“Hell,” I said. “I thought we were over and done with that little episode. It happened and it’s finished. That’s all there is to it. I’m sorry about it and all but it just happened and I couldn’t help it.”
She had a very strange look in her eye.
“Jeff—”
She paused and I got the feeling that the two of us were talking on two entirely different levels of meaning. It was a very strange feeling and, I’ll admit, an eminently distressing one.
I banished it by devoting renewed attention to her breasts, but she didn’t let herself get carried away. She pushed me away and looked deeply into my eyes.
“Jeff,” she said, “either you’re the coldest man I ever met or you’ve got things mixed up.”
“Cold?”
She nodded soberly.
I did something to prove that I wasn’t cold and she giggled. Then she seemed to remember what we had been talking about and the giggle broke off sharply.
“Jeff,” she said, “about Caroline—”
“To hell with Caroline. She should drop dead.”
“Oh, God.”
“What’s the matter?”
“You don’t know,” she said. “I can’t believe it. You don’t know!”
“What don’t I know?”
“Caroline is dead,” she said patiently. “You killed her.”
Chapter Ten
JEFF FLANDERS.
Unemployed.
Rapist.
Philanderer.
Incipient alcoholic.
I was only thirty-four years old and the list was already on the impressive side. Those thirty-four years were by no means wasted. Hell, I’d done a lot of things.
But the list was not complete. It lacked one rather intriguing item, one little eight-letter word that would fill in the blank space.
Murderer.
I sat up on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall while Candy filled in the blank spots in my brain. I had, it seemed, a very blank brain. I felt like letting my brain get a little air by the expedient process of knocking a hole in my fat and useless head.
“She was alive when I found her,” the light of my life explained. “She was alive when I went into the apartment and she lived just long enough to tell me what you had done to her. She told me and then she died. I was holding her in my arms and her face went pale and then she just stopped talking and she was dead. She died in my arms, Jeff.”
I got up and walked over to the window. The window faced out on Broadway and I looked through it. The street was glutted with traffic. People wandered back and forth, all in a hell of a hurry to get nowhere in particular.
A heavy-set, well-dressed man with a pretty little brunette on his arm hailed a taxi. He helped the girl into the back seat and got in beside her. The cab headed downtown.
“She’s dead, Jeff. You killed her. I thought … thought yo
u knew what you did to her. But she wasn’t dead when you left so I guess you didn’t realize it.”
The sun was still shining and it was warm outside. I felt sorry for all the office-workers who would mob together in the stinking subway for the long ride home. They were pushing and shoving each other on the street and it would be one hell of a ride on the BMT that night.
“Jeff?”
I left the window, walked back to her and sat down on the edge of the bed. I couldn’t talk or think or move. I was tense as a wire and limp as a wet rag all at once and my mind responded by shutting itself off. I knew she was speaking my name but I couldn’t answer her.
“Jeff?”
I turned and looked at her, looked at all of her. I managed to gulp some air, then managed to let it out.
“Jeff,” she was saying, “we’ll have to get out of town. We can’t stay here, not after what you did. The police’ll find the body before long and they’ll probably find out who it was that killed her. Did anybody see you going into the building?”
I thought about the clod at the door, the idiot of an elevator boy, the other people who must have noticed me. You can’t so much as spit in New York without somebody taking notice.
I nodded.
“Somebody must of,” she said. “And then the police’ll pick you up and then what’ll you do?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. “We can’t chance staying in town, Jeff. We’ll have to get out as fast as we can.”
“Where?”
“South,” she said. “We’ll get the first bus or train south and then get out and buy a car and head for the border. If we get across into Mexico everything’ll be all right. But we have to hurry or they’ll figure out and catch us and then it’ll be all over.”
It sounded as though she had it all mapped out. Maybe her plan was a good one and maybe it wasn’t. I couldn’t tell one way or the other. But I couldn’t come up with anything on my own. I was in no condition for long-range planning. I had to follow her lead.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What are we going to use in the way of money?”
She tossed her head impatiently. “I have money. Caroline always kept a lot around the apartment and I cleaned it out before I left. I’ve got a couple thousand in my purse and some jewelry we can pawn if we need more.”
Candy Page 10