Candy

heads.

If a prospective borrower has been living steadily at the same place for a length of time, has held a job—the same job—for a period of several years, owns property of one sort or another, or has the president of the Chase Manhattan Bank as a co-maker, there’s no problem.

But a local yokel from the Pennsylvania hills with one month in New York and, as it turned out, no job and no references and no property, had about as much chance of squeezing money out of Beverley Finance as a homo has of fathering a child. I explained all of this to the gal and her face didn’t fall while I told her. She just sat there perfectly impassive, with her breasts standing up, and I had trouble keeping my end of the dialogue straight. It reminded me of the gag about the guy who asked the stacked airlines clerk for two pickets to Titsburgh.

“That’s about it,” I wound up. “I don’t see how we can accommodate you, Miss Cain.”

“Call me Candy.”

The only thing to do at that point would have been to call her Candy, which seemed slightly on the moronic side. I just sat there and waited for her to do something.

“Mr. Flanders,” she said, which made me wonder why I should call her Candy if she was going to call me Mr. Flanders, “isn’t there some way I can get the money?”

“Well—” I said.

“I mean I really have to have it.”

“Well, if you had a first-class co-maker—”

“What,” she wanted to know, “is a co-maker?”

“Someone who’ll make good the money if you don’t.”

“Oh, but I’ll make good the money.”

I nodded vacantly. “We need more than that. If you can dig up somebody who knows you well, who’s willing to co-sign the loan application, who’s been employed at the same job and lived at the same address for a considerable length of time, who’s draft-free, who’s married—”

“I don’t know anyone like that.”

“Oh,” I said. The next thing I should have said was good-bye, but the helplessness of the gal kept me from giving her the brush-off. Well, it was partly the helplessness. The view I was getting of her sweater wasn’t helping matters any.

“Mr. Flanders,” she said suddenly, “how long have you been working here?”

“A little over three years.”

“Are you married?”

“Yes, but—”

God alone knows what I was going to say after that but.

“That’s it!” she squealed, clapping her hands like a kid who had just won a game of jacks.

“What’s what?”

“You!”

“Me?”

“You can be my co-maker or whatever it is.”

I stared at her blankly.

“Won’t you do it for me?” Her face looked as though someone had just told her that there wasn’t a Santa Claus and she wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t see how I can.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t even know you.”

“That’s nothing,” she said. “You can take me out to lunch and you’ll get to know me and then you can be my co-maker. Would that be all right?”

“Well—”

“Come on,” she said. She got up from the chair and smiled at me. “I can really use a dinner. I haven’t had anything to eat in days.”

There was only one thing to do at this point. I should have snarled at her, told her I hoped she starved to death and ordered her off the premises of the Beverley Finance Company, never to return.

That would have been the smart thing to do.

Needless to say, I did nothing of the sort.

I got up from my chair, walked around the desk and took her arm. I informed Les Boloff that I would be back eventually and he gave me one of those man-to-man winks that was positively obscene.

And away we went.

Ahfen Yahm is an Arabian restaurant on 38th Street just east of Fifth Avenue. The food starts with that thin Lebanese bread that’s great for scooping up yogurt with if that happens to be your cup of tea. It runs a course through the usual run of shishkebabish dishes and winds up with this far-out pudding that’s on fire when they bring it to your table.

I had just finished my pastrami-plus-cream-soda lunch and I wasn’t especially hungry, so I drank my lunch while Candy Cain polished off everything that the waitress put in front of her. The waitress was a big fat sow of a woman and her uniform looked as though it had been specially designed for her by Omar the Tentmaker. She watched Candy devour the food with a very sympathetic smile on her cowlike face.

It was about this time that I realized that Blondie’s name was Candy Cain, which was like the things they hang on Christmas trees. I clued her in on my brilliant observation and she let me know that this had gone through her parents’ minds when they named her. They thought it was cute. I, in turn, thought she was cute.

“Candy,” I said as I drank my third Gibson, “why do you need a thousand dollars?”

“To live on.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t have any money, Jeff. I came to New York with very little money to begin with and now it’s all gone.”

“Why don’t you get a job?”

“Doing what?”

“Can you type?”

She shook her head.

“Wait on tables?”

She shook her head again.

“Retail sales?”

She shook her head a third time and I began wondering how in the world anybody could be unqualified for something so elementary as slinging hash. Then she explained herself.

“You see,” she said, “I don’t want a job.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Why on earth not?”

“Jeff,” she said, as if she was spelling things out for an idiot, “if all I wanted was a job I could have stayed in Gibbsville.”

“Then—”

“I want to be supported,” she said.

“Looking to get married?”

“Possibly,” she said. “Or kept.”

I was, to put it mildly, floored. I tried to match the baby face and the baby voice and the incongruous words that kept coming out of the pretty mouth. They didn’t match.

She sipped her Turkish coffee and I slurped my Gibson and we stared at each other. She didn’t smoke but I had a cigarette between my fingers and I was flicking at it nervously. Up to this point, no thought of cheating on Lucy had entered my thick head. It was strictly a look-but-don’t-touch type of fling, but I was suddenly beginning to realize two things.

One—I could have this babe if I wanted to.