“What is?”
“That we can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Oh, you know.”
I didn’t know. “Candy,” I said, “what in the name of bejesus are you talking about?”
“Us.”
“Us?”
“Uh-huh.”
I reached for a cigarette, set fire to one end of it and put the other end in my mouth. That’s the standard procedure for me. Sometimes for the hell of it I put the lighted end in my mouth, but I don’t seem to get as much smoking pleasure that way.
“Candy,” I said, trying valiantly, “let’s take it from the top. What in hell are you talking about?”
“Us,” she said, standing pat.
“Well, what are you trying to say about us?”
“It’s a shame.”
“
A strange gleam of comprehension came into her innocent little eyes. “Oh,” she said very slowly, “I forgot to tell you about it. I meant to tell you but I guess I forgot. In the elevator and all it just got shoved out of my mind.”
“What did?”
“What I was going to tell you.”
“What were you going to tell me?”
“About us.”
“You don’t have to shout,” she said, pouting. “I’m going to tell you right now if you’ll just give me a chance to get the words out. Honestly, Jeff—sometimes you’re so darned impatient that a girl doesn’t have a chance to speak out about what’s on her mind.”
I gritted my teeth, then relaxed and took a drag on the cigarette. Whatever it was couldn’t be especially important, and there was no point in letting the failure in communication between the two of us get too deeply under my skin. The little sexpot managed to build everything up—the vital information she had for me was probably as dynamic as to tell me she had a hangnail on her little toe, or something equally astounding and significant.
“I’m waiting,” I told her.
“I don’t know how to start.”
“Just plunge right in,” I advised. “Take a big jump and spit out what you’re going to say.” That wound up as a fairly strangled metaphor but she didn’t know what a metaphor was in the first place so it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference.
“Well, all right, Jeff, I’m going to plunge right in and spit it all out.”
“Good idea,” I said. “Clever of you to put it that way.”
She bit her lip, then leaned on one elbow so that she was looking right into my eyes.
“Jeff,” she said, “we can’t see each other any more.”
“Have another stick.”
“I’m serious, Jeff.”
“I assume it’s sticks,” I said. “I never noticed any needle marks on your arms or legs. Of course, you could be taking a shot under the nail of your big toe. They tell me lots of women junkies load up that way.”
I reached for her toe playfully. She jerked her foot away unplayfully.
“I’m serious, Jeff.”
About this point I realized that she wasn’t kidding.
“Honest?”
“Honest.”
“Maybe I’m stupid,” I said. “I’ve never been much in the way of being a mental giant, but I don’t understand what in hell you’re talking about. We can’t see each other any more?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Jeff,” she said solemnly, “what kind of a girl do you think I am?”
Since she had asked the question, I answered it. This may not have been the ultimate in tact, but tact has never been my special strong point. Look at it this way—when you’ve just finished plowing some fertile earth in a very earthy manner, you do not have to talk with kid gloves on.
Or something like that.
Anyway, I told her what I thought she was. I used a four-letter and highly unprintable word.
“Jeff,” she said, “you’re being vulgar.”
I grunted.
“Jeff,” she said, “yesterday after you left I went for a walk. I walked over on the East Side in the Fifties. Do you know what I saw?”
“What?”
“Women.”
“So?”
“Women walking dogs,” she went on. “Women in mink coats and sable wraps walking poodles with their hair cut all funny. The dogs’ hair, I mean. I took a good look and some of them were kind of pretty, but they weren’t as pretty as I am. They
“No bet.”
“And you know why those women were out walking dogs? Do you know why?”
“Maybe they dig dogs.”
“They were being kept, Jeff.”
“By the dogs? I don’t see—”
“By men, Jeff. Men with a lot of money were keeping them in fancy apartments and paying them loads of money so they could afford the dogs and the mink coats and sable wraps and probably even have lots left over to send home to their folks or put in the bank or whatever they wanted. And there were all those women that weren’t any better in bed or any nicer to look at, and here I was with a ratty little room in the Somerville and no money and no dog—”
“If you want,” I put in, “I could pick up a mongrel for you at the dog pound.”
“Don’t try to make funny jokes,” she said, “because it just won’t work. I’m not kidding now, Jeff. I like you and all that and I really love to do it with you more than I ever loved it before, but we can’t do it any more. You earn around $200 a week and you can’t even afford what you give me as it is, and if I wanted to, I bet I could find some man who would pay me as much a week as you earn and maybe more. And I won’t find a man like that unless I work at it, so I can’t spend my time with you. So I guess what I’ve been trying to tell you is that we can’t do it any more.”
She said all of this in one gigantic rush of words, and when she was done she broke off quite suddenly and gulped for air. I sat there on the edge of the bed looking down at her and I’m not sure just how to describe the way I felt. It’s very hard to get it across. Here she was—the girl who had monopolized my thoughts and my time and my money and my spermatozoa for the past too-long, and she had just finished telling me that as far as she was concerned I could go do biologically impossible things with myself. Here was I, sitting there and looking at all of her lovely body, and thinking that the obvious course of action was to plant a kiss on her little rump, get into my clothes, give her a parting line out of one of Swinburne’s choicer epics, and take leave of her for the rest of eternity.
There was more to it than that. I didn’t want her, not physically or even emotionally. The elevator interlude had quenched that particular thirst. But I knew that as soon as I was capable of getting excited again I wouldn’t be able to live without her. That’s the way it was—our relationship was sex and nothing but sex, but I knew that when
