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
“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:
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
