new way to support my edible little Candy.
Yeah, sure.
So here I was with my wife in the bedroom and myself on the couch and the pillow under my head feeling for all the world like a sack of dirty laundry.
And the savings account, as of that morning, was flat as a flounder.
Chapter Three
WHEN I WOKE UP it was Saturday. If you want to be technical, it was Saturday when I went to sleep as it was after midnight, but that sort of outlook never gets you anywhere. When I woke up it was Saturday, a little after ten in the morning, and the apartment was empty.
If you want to get technical, the apartment was not empty. I was in it, for one thing. So was the furniture and the confounded television set. But Lucy was not in it, and therefore the apartment was empty.
So I took a fast shower and put on some clean clothes and cast a baleful eye at the couch. My back seemed to be missing a few vertebrae and I felt as though I had spent a night on the rack, but when I counted vertebrae I couldn’t avoid admitting that they were all present. I brushed my teeth with a vengeance and got out of the house and had a disjointed breakfast of hot wheaties and cold coffee at a luncheonette on Broadway. Don’t ask me why the wheaties were hot. I’d guess that they were hot for the same reason that the coffee was cold, but the reason escapes me.
It was Saturday and Beverley Finance was mercifully closed and shuttered. This left me with a morning on the town. There I was, all alone in the big city. I wandered around like a lost soul for a little while, then found my way to 96th and Broadway and let the IRT float me south to Times Square. There I climbed out of the soot and stench of the subway system back into the soot and stench of New York. It was fun.
I took a mid-morning stroll on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th, just sort of relaxing and enjoying the sights. I gobbled a hot dog at Grants, gulped a cup of battery acid at Bickford’s, and wandered over to Eddie’s place to watch people buy pornography. The store was empty except for Eddie, one of the clerks, and a scrawny red-necked kid who was reading the latest novel by Alan Marshall with one hand plunged deep into the pocket of his dungarees.
Eddie and I exchanged a few words and smoked a couple cigarettes. He told me how lousy the pornography business was, and I told him how lousy the usury business was, and we felt sorry for each other.
After Eddie and I said good-bye he wandered over to the bar next door for a drink and I drifted off in the other direction. The street was generally dull and I was at the point of giving up when it happened.
In case you haven’t figured out by now why I was wandering around 42nd Street like a star-struck tourist, let me draw you a picture. Candy lived two blocks away. I was very carefully getting within two blocks of her and stubbornly refusing to go over to her apartment. I was making a last-ditch attempt to assert my independence, and I was managing it, and for this reason it was inevitable that I would meet her right on 42nd Street.
Which, of course, is precisely what happened.
It wasn’t quite so much of a coincidence as it might have seemed. She went to at least one and generally two movies a day, and the cheap movie houses are all concentrated into one or two blocks on 42nd Street. The fact that I was standing right in front of the Liberty when she popped out of it was pretty coincidental, but I suppose it had to happen if I hung around the street long enough. If you want to play Freud, I suppose I knew this to begin with, and that was why I was hanging around the street in the first place.
“Hello,” she said brightly. “Were you waiting long?”
“Waiting?”
“Weren’t you waiting for me?”
I explained how I just happened to be there and she said that it sure was a small world.
“Come on,” she said, taking hold of my arm. She looked so cute and young and sensual that I felt like having her right there on 42nd Street. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea. Everything else happens on the street. Some of the tourists might even have thrown us a few coins if we did a good job.
“Where are we going?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.
“My place,” she replied unnecessarily.
She gave me a little hip action then, bumping her hot little fanny into me. It was fun and I bumped her back. She was wearing a yellow blouse the same color as her hair and a pair of slacks in that loden green color. How many females do you know that look good in slacks? This one did.
“Your place?”
“Sure.”
“What for?”
“To hold hands, silly. Why else do we go to my place? I’m in the mood for it.”
She wasn’t the type of girl who whispered. I hurried her along, but I still managed to catch a look at one old buck who overheard the last remark. He had a look on his face which said silently that either Armegeddon had come or he had.
I know just how he felt.
We got to her hotel. The Somerville, a relic of forgotten days, days when it was a first-class hotel. It was still a good forty degrees away from the cockroaches-and-bad-plumbing category but things were looking down.
As I said, we got to her hotel.
We did not get to her room.
It was the elevator, you see. There should be a law against self-service elevators. They’re damnably dangerous. Why, a man with evil intentions could trap a woman in an elevator and lord only knows what might happen.
Then again, the reverse could be the case. That morning the reverse was. As soon as we were in the elevator and the door had slid shut, her arms were around me and her tongue was looking for my tongue like an old friend after a five-year separation.
With one of her hands she took hold of one of my hands. She unbuttoned her blouse with her other hand and then stuck my hand inside the blouse and pressed it against one of her breasts. I took it from there and we worked a few variations on that theme for awhile. She started panting and with a tremendous effort pushed herself free of me and threw some kind of lever. The elevator squealed in mechanical agony and stopped on a nickel, and there we were in the middle of nowhere.
“Hey!”
“What’s wrong, Jeff?”
“What did you do that for?”
“Guess, silly.”
“I—”
“There’s no point in waiting until we get to the room, is there?
“But—”
“And,” she said, “you’re ready, too. Let’s do it right here in the elevator.”
“But—”
“Maybe it’s dangerous,” she said. “Is that what you’re thinking? I suppose it is. Maybe the car will fall and we’ll wind up getting killed when it hits the basement.”
“!”
“Just so we finish first I wouldn’t mind so much. Come on, silly.”
Afterwards in her room she took off her clothes and sprawled out on the bed. I stripped, too, and sprawled out next to her. We just lay like that for a long time, not touching, and not saying a word. Once she reached out a hand and stroked the side of my face, but that was all.
I must have dozed off. When I woke up maybe a half hour later she was still lying next to me, a far-away smile on her face and a lazy look in her eyes. “I wish it could always be like this,” she whispered. “I wish we could have each other all the time.”
I didn’t say anything because I thought she was just making the idle sort of conversation of which she was eminently capable. I gave her a lazy smile to match the lazy smile that she was giving me.
“It’s a shame,” she was saying. “It’s really a terrible shame.”
