Candy

outside and bought a magazine and went back to the room to read it.

And, after awhile, the damned phone rang.

Like a fool I answered it.

Chapter Nine

THE VOICE ON THE phone was Candy’s voice, high-pitched and thin, a whisper that was as tense as a bowstring and, to me at least, as loud as a siren. She did not waste words, and I remember now that her speech was pure East 53rd Street without a trace of Gibbsville in it.

“I have to see you,” she said.

I started to tell her that I had given her plenty of chances to see me but I didn’t get more than a word out before she interrupted me.

“Meet me at the Astor Bar,” she said. “Right away and hurry.”

And before I could say a word, before I could tell her yes, I was coming or no, and to hell with you, before I could mouth a solitary syllable she had hung up and the phone clicked in my ear.

I looked at the phone, looked at the bottle in my fist, looked at a grease spot on the far wall.

To hell with her. To hell with the woman who was no woman, the lady who was no lady, the Candy who was not sweet at all. To hell with her—my life was enough of a mess now without any more of her. I could spend the rest of my life trying to forget her and the preliminary step consisted of ignoring this phone call right now.

The preliminary step.

And, of course, there would be a lot of steps following that first one. I’d have to get out of New York, get away somewhere where she could never find me and somewhere where I could never run the risk of encountering her again. Out of New York, away from New York, far away from the stinking steaming stench of a city with all its memories. Away from the Kismet and the Somerville, away from 42nd Street and 100th Street and 53rd Street, away from Sweet Lucy and Bitter Candy and Queer Caroline, away from Beverley Finance and all the bars and all the movie houses and all the places where I had spent all my life.

Far away.

I even had a place in mind. Somewhere quiet, somewhere devoid of people. I thought about a properly isolated island in the Florida keys where a man could live without working and without thinking and above all without seeing another man or woman or child. You bought a boat and a shack and you ate what you caught with a rod and reel. You picked up a few bucks taking parties of tourists fishing and you were your own man, free and independent, secure with the marvellous and rare security of complete and total solitude.

I stood up and took a look at myself in the mirror. My body looked as good as ever but I knew better. What used to be muscle was now mostly flab and what used to be flab was now more like butter that had spent too much time under a sunlamp. My complexion looked like the belly of a fish, a very dead fish, and my lungs were soggy with cigarette smoke and my arteries were alternately dilated by alcohol and constricted by tobacco. I held out my hand and tried to make it as steady as the Rock of Gibraltar and I got nervous inside when I saw my fingers shaking involuntarily, trembling so obviously that I wondered for a minute whether or not I was still in the camp of the living.

I was a mess. No matter how you looked at it I was a mess. It was nothing out of the ordinary—every city dweller is a mess. You ride the subway instead of walking and you eat the wrong things and breathe the foulest air known to modern man. If you stay off the booze you still drink the wrong things—cola drinks that rot out your stomach or coffee that races your heart or lunch-counter fruit juices that poison you with methodical ease.

You not only eat between meals but you eat instead of meals—poisonous hot dogs at corner ptomaineries and candy bars and hamburgers and ice cream on a stick and all the other useless appurtenances of twentieth century urban civilization. And even if you led the good life and subsisted entirely on carrot juice and raw eggs, even if you slept eight hours every night and walked through the park and breathed deeply and refrained from smoking and drinking and losing your temper, even if you did all these things you still lived in New York and breathed New York air and killed yourself slowly.

I was a mess.

Physically I was a mess; emotionally I had Candy on the brain. A to-hell-with-it trip to the Keys, a permanent relocation in a cleaner, greener land could save me.

And there could be no halfway measures. I had to go whole hog, and I had to go at once. Period. End of report. Tan pronto como posible.

Will you believe me when I tell you that I was sipping a dry gibson in the Astor Bar roughly twenty minutes after Candy rang off?

You better believe it.

That’s how it happened.

In the bar of the Hotel Astor the waiters speak softly and carry big drinks. I had a big drink in my fist and it was mostly gin. There was a little bourbon in my stomach to begin with, but not enough to bother me, and the gin combined pleasantly with it.

In the bar of the Hotel Astor the tables are small and chic and set far apart. The tables are made of formica that is made to look as much like marble as is formically possible and the bases of the tables are very heavy. The chairs are also neat and chic with wrought-iron backs and leather-covered seats.

In the bar of the Hotel Astor the conversation is sophisticated without being subdued. The clientele has money but not an enormous amount of money and not old money. The drinkers in the Astor Bar are partly show people and partly business people, with the business crowd largely in the advertising and public relations fields.

In the bar of the Hotel Astor there was a small and chic table with two small and chic chairs. In one of the chairs there was a very attractive young woman with blonde hair, a lovely thing encased in a green sheath dress that she seemed quite likely to burst out of. In the other chair across from the blonde young lady there was a dull- witted guy, a clod with two left hands, wearing a shoddy-looking gray flannel suit. His red striped tie was at a slight angle and so was his jaw. He looked stupid and lost.

He was stupid and lost.

He was me.

“I don’t understand it,” Candy was saying. “I don’t see how in the world you could have done a thing like that.”

“It wasn’t easy.”

“Don’t make jokes,” she snapped. “It’s no time to make jokes. My God, Jeff, how in the world—”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I went up there to talk to her and—”

“Talk to her? Why on earth would you want to talk to Caroline? What did you hope to gain from that?”

I shrugged. “I wanted to convince her to let you go.”

“She hardly had me lashed to a post, Jeff.”

I shrugged again and sipped gin. “I don’t know,” I said. “I went there to talk to her and something snapped inside me. I completely lost control of myself. I know that’s a poor excuse but that’s the way it happened. One minute everything was all right and under control, and the next minute I barely knew what I was doing. Call it temporary insanity, if you want—I suppose that’s what it was. I just couldn’t stop myself until I was finished.”

She looked at me and I tried to read what was blazing gently in her eyes. Whether it was love or hate or fear or whatever was something I couldn’t determine. Her eyes were cool; they were always cool and would always be cool. She was cool and beautiful and I loved her and hated her with an unendurable intensity.

“You had to come up there,” she said levelly. “You had to find out where I lived. You couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

She was right.

“You had to stop me on the street,” she went on. “Couldn’t you understand what I was trying to tell you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you? Are you even sorry?”

I shrugged. I’m a great one for shrugging.

“How did you even find out about Caroline? How did you know?”