Candy

“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.

“That’s why I advised a Reno divorce,” he went on. “I felt it would be better for all concerned.”

It was decent of the old bastard.

“Mr. Flanders?”

I gave another grunt.

“Mr. Flanders, divorce is a sideline with me and it’s something I’m not particularly fond of. I’ve sounded out Mrs. Flanders and I’m quite certain she’d be willing to try a reconciliation if you’d meet her halfway. She’s coming to my office early this afternoon and I thought that if you’d drop up to the office it might work out for the two of you. I may be costing myself a fee but I’d rather see it turn out that way.”

He said some more things that I didn’t listen to. I gave the notion a whirl in my mind. I’d wanted a reconciliation; hell, I would have given my right arm for it. Lucy and I together could push all the bad part out of the way and start fresh. Maybe we’d even have a kid this time—that might be good for us both.

“Mr. Hardesty?”

“Yes?”

“Where’s your office?”

He said it was way downtown in the financial district. I thought about going all the way down there, thought about getting out of bed and changing my clothes and taking a subway downtown and walking around and …

“Hell with it,” I said. “Let her get the divorce.”

And I hung up on him, too.

Gee, I thought a good half hour later, it’s a shame that lawyer couldn’t have brought Lucy over to the hotel. Then the two of us could have gotten together and everything would have been sweetness and light again. Funny how little things like the location of a law office can make all the difference in the world.

Yeah.

Funny.

Real funny.

Like a rubber crutch.

Like a wheelchair without wheels.

Funny. This is the way your mind works during a seventh grade hangover. Not that I spent all my time on such trivia as the way my life was going. I took a good hour figuring how many shots could be poured from a fifth of liquor, how many shots if the bartender was shorting you and giving you one-tenth of what you should have been getting, how many if he was filling the glass the same amount over the line.

Now these are important questions and I had to give them a great deal of thought. I gave all sorts of important questions a great deal of thought while the time crawled by on little cat feet, and I went on sitting and thinking and, occasionally, smoking, went on in this manner until it was midnight and I was tired enough to sleep.

This may be hard to believe. It should be hard to believe unless you have had the privilege of living through just this variety of hangover. But I actually sat in that chair for better than fourteen hours and did nothing more active than smoke.

Well, I made a few trips to the bathroom. And there was one time when I stared out the window at a woman who was parading around half-naked. But only for a minute or two because I remembered my last experience at window-peeping and decided it wasn’t worth it.

Fourteen hours.

It seems impossible. In retrospect it seems thoroughly impossible because, looking back on it, it seems as though I didn’t even do much thinking during that time. I should have taken notes but it didn’t seem to be worth the effort at the time.

At midnight I went back to bed, my stomach empty because I hadn’t eaten anything, my body ready for sleep more because of the weakness caused by lack of food than because of any tiredness or desire for sleep. But I went to sleep quickly and slept very soundly for eight solid hours. If I dreamed any dreams I cannot remember them.

When I woke up I felt as though I could eat a horse. Or a box of candy.

I got undressed—I never did manage to undress the night before—and I took a hot shower and followed it up with a cold shower, and I brushed my teeth and shaved my beard and combed my hair and got some clothes on.

I felt wonderful. It seemed positively indecent to feel that good, but that’s how I felt.

I took the elevator downstairs and went across to the Alamo for breakfast. Chile may not sound like the most sensible breakfast in the world, especially on an empty stomach, but it was delicious and I surprised myself by downing two plates full of the stuff. I washed them down with two bottles of ice-cold ale, which sounds nauseating now that I think about it, but which was great at the time.

And then, a spring to my step and a whistle on my lips, I walked briskly to my office.

There I was informed, without undue ceremony, that I was no longer an employee of the Beverley Finance Company.

Joe Burns did the honors. Weasel-faced Joe Burns with a gigoloish moustache and a perpetual sneer. He was waiting for me like a spider for a fly, leaning against my desk and sneering at me. It was a few minutes to nine when I walked in but both he and Les were already at the office, Joe sneering and Les looking very very sad.

“You’re through,” Joe Burns said.

I must have looked surprised. I should have. I was surprised.

“Clear the bottles out of your desk and get the hell out,” he said. “Your mustering-out pay’s in the top drawer. You were a good man but you sure went to hell in a hurry.”

I also left Beverley in a hurry. There was nothing in my desk that I wanted except for the pay; Joe and Les could fight over the nearly-empty bottle of rye in the bottom drawer. I didn’t want it any more than I wanted the picture of Lucy that still reposed in its cheap metal frame on the top of my desk.

So out I went from the office. So down I went in the elevator. So back I went to my room.

To brood.

There was plenty to brood about and if I hadn’t felt so god-damned great that morning I really would have felt terrible. God knows there was plenty to feel terrible about. No wife, no woman, no job.

But things didn’t seem that bad. I had been pulling down around two hundred a week for some time now with no expenses outside of food, liquor and rent. I had a lot of money in my wallet and a lot of money floating around the room so I could get by for a while without working. I couldn’t live like a king on the dough I had but I wouldn’t starve either, and if I felt like it I could get unemployment compensation. For that matter I could get another job on a moment’s notice. Legit loan sharks are like used car salesmen—they spend their lives floating from one outfit to another and they don’t need glowing recommendations from former employers in order to get work. Both businesses are too much on the border between respectability and thievery for employers to care much about their workingmen’s characters.

So, a member of the ranks of the unemployed after years of job-job-job, I felt positively great.