Two Much! (25 page)

“Yeah, right.” I tapped the letter again. “But what if you do send it? How is that any skin off
my
nose?”

“Your
nose?
I didn't say anything about your nose, honeybunch.” How sharp her little teeth looked. “Now, with a lot of husbands,” she said, “you might have to worry about your nose, because a lot of husbands might just come over and punch you on the nose a good one. But
my
husband is a lawyer. He isn't going to punch anybody.”

“Right.”

“But do you know what I think Ralph might do?”

“What might he do, Candy?”

“Well, he might call a friend of his in one of the big law firms, and all of a sudden your distributor wouldn't want to handle your line of cards any more. Or he might talk to some other friend of his in the New York City tax department, and they might look at the corporate taxes you've been paying. Or he might—”

Shades of Volpinex (another lawyer) and the ghost of the IRS. “Okay,” I said.

“That's what a
lawyer
might do,” Candy said. “A husband might poke you in the nose, but a lawyer would do other things. And believe me, Art, when it comes to being either a husband or a lawyer, Ralph is much more likely to be a lawyer. You can take it from me.”

“I'm sure I can.”

She looked very hard at me, and I could see that one insult, one outright rejection at this point, would send her right out into the street and directly to the nearest mailbox. When the only reason for my being here was to take her directly to bed.

On the other hand, would an immediate capitulation be realistic? Unfortunately not. “Candy,” I said, “I noticed this carbon wasn't dated. Is there a date on the original?”

“There doesn't have to be,” she said. “He'll get it when he gets it.”

I looked troubled. I sighed. I gazed away at the other diners.

Candy said, “What's up?”

“These are new thoughts to me,” I said. I gave her my honest look. “Settling down, taking on the responsibility of a family, trying to make something of myself. I'm not sure I'm cut out for it.”

“You'll do just fine,” she said.

“It's such a new idea, though.” Her right hand was on the table, and my left hand had been tapping the folded letter; now I reached across, took her hand, and said, “Do I have to give you my answer right now?”

Her first convulsive reaction was to pull her hand away, but then she relaxed a bit, let the hand stay there, gave me a look in which suspicion mingled with hope, and said, “You wouldn't be trying to stall me, would you?”

“How much time do I have, Candy? Will you mail that letter tonight? Or will you give me a chance to get used to the idea?”

“Or maybe you'd like a chance to skip the country, disappear someplace, put that crummy little card business up for sale, and take off.”

“Take me home with you,” I said, and gave her hand a squeeze.

She frowned at me. “What?”

I gave her as meaningful a look as I knew how. “It's been a long time, Candy,” I said. “Take me home with you, let me—let me sleep on it. Then we can talk again tomorrow.”

She was weakening, I could see it, but before she made any answer at all the waiter came by: “Check, sir?”

“Yes, thank you.” I looked at Candy again, my heart melting into my eyes. “Shall we go home?” I asked her. “Candy?”

She held back a second or two longer, then abruptly nodded. “All right,” she said. But to retain her tough-guy image she added, “So I can keep an eye on you.”

“Right” I said. While I was rooting in my wallet for my Master Charge card I grinned at her and said, “Almost like a wedding night, isn't it?”

Y
OU'RE
MARRIED???”

“Yesterday was my lucky day,” I said. I'd waited till Candy had made us both breakfast and I'd finished eating mine before breaking the good news. She was still sitting at the kitchen table, a half-empty coffee cup in her hand, and I was standing over by the swing door to the hallway, in case she decided to throw anything.

“You son of a bitch,” she said, and then she said, “I don't believe you.”

“Stamford, Connecticut,” I told her. “The blushing bride was one Elizabeth Kerner, whom I believe you met a few weeks ago.”

I stepped through the swing door, pushed it closed, heard the coffee cup smash against it, and stepped back into the kitchen again. “I could have told you last night, I suppose,” I said, “but you were having so much fun lording it over me. Besides, you gave me a wonderful wedding night, one I'll never forget.”

This time I had to step outside long enough for an eggsmeared plate to disintegrate against the door. Leaning cautiously into the kitchen again, I said, “Candy, you're just too emotional. You should try to be more calm.”

“I'll send the letter,” she said. “I'll send it right away, right this morning.”

“Go ahead,” I told her. “Burn your bridges while you're standing on them.”

“You don't think I'll do it?”

“I don't
care
if you do it, Candy, because I'll deny every word of it.”

“And the photostats?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Dodge. I don't see
your
name there, Candy. I was in those motels with Liz Kerner, who is now my bride, and who will back up every word I say.”

She glared at me, very nearly speechless. “You'd
lie
?”

“Surely, Candy,” I said, “you've heard of people lying before. Listen, breakfast was super, but I'd really better be off now. And my advice to you is to give poor Ralph another chance.”

“You bastard! You bastard!”

Remembering my last experience with an enraged Candy, I doubted she was now pawing in that kitchen drawer for an ice cream scoop. “Well, ta ta,” I said, and departed. Some sort of banshee seemed to be moving through the apartment as I went out the front door.

I
T WAS THE THOUGHT OF
the sleeping bag on the floor of my office that drove me at last to a reconciliation with Betty. I'd originally intended to make her stew a couple of days longer, but what the hell. Why not be magnanimous? Besides, there was no answer when I tried calling Linda Ann Margolies.

Having spent last night with Candy rather than on the northbound road toward some placid lake, I now found myself in the unlikely position of trying to get away from New York for a few days on the Thursday before Labor Day. I had no reservations anywhere, and the roads were already beginning to fill up with those maniacal death-wish families from the provinces: three adults, seven children, and a dog in a nine-year-old Plymouth doing forty on the New York State Thruway. It was really too late to go anywhere, so I might just as well stay in the city.

The hot city. The muggy city. The impossible city. It had been your typical New York City August, coming in like an armpit and going out like a mass grave. The Alfa was well air-conditioned and my office was poorly airconditioned, but that was about the limit of my options. Unless I wanted to nap ‘all day in a movie house somewhere, which I didn't.

So, at four o'clock that afternoon, I phoned Betty. “Hello,” I said, when she came on the line, and I made myself sound properly depressed.

“Bart?”

An imp suggested to me that I be Art again, that I spend the next few days with Betty not as her husband but as her brother-in-law; but I briskly gave the imp the back of my hand—enough complexity is enough—and said, “Yes, it's Bart.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “I'm so glad you called.”

“I've been,” I said, “miserable.”

“Oh, so have I, darling.”

“I wish I could get you out of my system, Betty, but—”

“Oh, no, sweetheart, no! Darling, where are you?”

“In the office. Art's office.” My voice trailed away a bit. “Everything is Art's, I guess.”

“But I'm not!” she cried. “That was one mad—moment, one crazy—fling that didn't mean anything, sweetheart, it was loneliness and self-pity and—”

“And I know how persuasive Art can be,” I said. It was time to start giving her an out.

She's no dummy. She said nothing; she let the statement stand on its own teeny feet.

“Betty,” I said, “I want us to try again.”

“Oh, so do I, Bart, more than anything. We'll have tonight together, and then tomorrow we'll go out to the Island, just the two of us, no one around—”

“Won't Liz be there?”

“She's gone off someplace,” she said. “She was here last night, with some very very strange-looking man, and the two of them left this morning. She won't come out to the Island, she told me so herself.”

“We could make a new start,” I suggested, tremulously, as though the thought had just come to me.

“A
real
start, this time. Oh, Bart, I'm so glad you called, I've been so unhappy!”

“So have I, sweetheart.”

“I'll pack right now,” she said, rushing her words together. “I'll have Carlos bring the car around, I'll be down to pick you up in twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes?” Time enough to find a garage to stow the Alfa in; I wasn't about to leave a beauty like that out on the street for the next five days. “I'll be waiting,” I said.

“From now on,” she promised me, “life is going to be wonderful.”

“I believe you,” I said.

W
HEN
V
OLPINEX CAME
out on the terrace, I was sitting in a chaise longue, smiling at the sunny park out there, and rerunning in my head last night's Bart-Betty reconciliation. Betty herself was out right now with Carlos and the Lincoln, shopping for a surprise present for me, but she would be back before noon, when we would have the light snack—shrimp, lobster, and king crab salad—being prepared for us at this, very moment by Blondell. Following which, we would leave at once for our weekend together on Fire Island.

I was so content in my setting and my memories that at first I didn't notice the arrival of Volpinex, but all at once there he was, standing beside me, looking down with a slight smile on his lips that did nothing to alter the coldness of bis eyes. “Iy!” I said, startled, and sat up so quickly I spilled some of my champagne and orange juice. “Who let
you
in?”

“No one,” he said. His voice was so soft I could barely hear it over the shwush of traffic from far below. “I have my own key,” he said.

“Your own key?” What absurdity was that?

“From Liz.” His thin smile thickened briefly. “I doubt she remembers I have it.”

“Well, I'll be sure to tell her,” I said, and pushed my glasses up more firmly onto my nose. Bart's priggishness was uncomfortably easy to fall into.

“I don't think you will,” he said. The smile became so thin it nearly disappeared, then lived once more as he added, “But I don't intend to use it again after this, in any event.”