I DON’T KNOW how I took that one. Instinctively, I knew she wasn’t kidding, but even then I couldn’t believe it.
Twenty million dollars is a lot of money. Candy Livingston was a lot of girl. The combination was good. It wasn’t something you could laugh off even if you understood it. I didn’t.
I had gotten along pretty well up to now. I didn’t have to fight my way through college. I stepped into a fair job when I graduated, then I had a stretch in the army, and then I had walked into another job. My work seemed to suit Yarborough & Jensen, and it looked as though I might be going places. But not the places Candy was offering.
I sat on the couch alongside of her, doing nothing and saying the same thing. For the first time in our brief and unusual acquaintanceship, she was embarrassed. She dropped her cigarette in the ash try and let it smoulder. I reached over and ground it out. I could hear traffic noises. I could even hear the whirr inside the electric clock on the mantel.
I wanted to talk, but I couldn’t figure what to say. If it were a gag, I didn’t want to appear to take it seriously. If she was serious, I was equally anxious not to hurt her feelings. It was a ridiculous position for a man to be in. Especially a man named Kirk Douglas.
She said quietly, “You can’t quite figure whether I mean it, can you?”
I nodded.
“I mean it. Straight across the board.”
“Why?” The question popped out before I knew I was going to ask it.
She hesitated. “Perhaps,” she said, “because I’m in love with you.”
Once again I was hanging on the ropes. I didn’t know the procedure in a case like this. The faintest sort of a smile showed briefly on her lips. She said, “Unaccustomed as you are to public proposals . . . you still make some sort of an answer.”
“All right.” I took her hand. “I think you mean it. I still can’t figure why, and I still don’t believe you’d want me to take you up on it.”
“I know what I want. I usually get it.”
“That isn’t the point, Candy. Let me ask you a question: How many times have you been in love?”
“I lost count long ago.”
“You see!”
“I don’t see anything.” She toyed with the platinum cigarette case. “I wish people could talk about love without being trite. But it isn’t possible. There’s been so much written about it that you always sound like you’re repeating something you’ve read.” She let that sink in, and then went on. “Get this straight, Kirk. I’ve absorbed a large slice of life in my twenty-two years. That makes me wild, but it doesn’t make me dumb. When the real thing comes along: I know it.”
There it was. On a solid gold platter, ready to serve. I felt sorry as hell. What she was doing took courage. My knowledge of the English language wasn’t helping me. I knew the words, but I didn’t have the thoughts to back them up.
She stared at me levelly with her big blue eyes. I said slowly, “I wish we’d met a couple of years ago, Candy.”
She nodded. “I thought it was that way.”
“Let me explain. Dana and I want to get married. Unfortunately, her husband doesn’t see it like that.”
She laughed. There wasn’t much mirth in it. She said, “Candy Livingston also ran.”
“You’re a grand pal. It just happens that I’m all tied up emotionally.”
She asked abruptly, “How come Ricardo can’t be pushed into a divorce?”
I gave it to her briefly. There was an interesting light in her eyes. “I’m not checking out,” she said. “Not as long as Dana stays married.”
I still couldn’t think of anything that fitted. I liked her better, at that moment, than ever before. But that wasn’t being in love. She wasn’t Dana. She straightened up, and started to laugh. “I’ve really put you on the spot, haven’t I?”
I said, “I’m dazed, that’s all.”
“I’ll answer some of the questions you’re too considerate to ask. I fell for you the night I met you. Don’t ask me why. I wouldn’t be knowing the answer myself. I thought you could be had—in one way or another. I was all full of bright remarks: you would make your passes, and I’d tell you that the line formed on the right. But nothing like that happened, and I found myself staying awake nights thinking about you. The more I thought, the more it seemed to me that I’d enjoy having you around all the time. Maybe it’s because you didn’t make a play for me.”
She reached for another cigarette and lighted it. “Just remember this Kirk: Until you hear from me to the contrary, the proposal stands. Nod your head and I’ll come running. Now let’s drop it.”
That suited me fine. I started to say something. I don’t know what it was, but it didn’t matter because I never finished. A pair of arms were around my neck, a pair of soft, warm lips were pressed against mine. The universe commenced spinning.
She pulled away and got up. She said, “Better fix yourself up. You’re all over lipstick.”
I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I dabbed at my lips. I walked back into the room and tried to be nonchalant. I wouldn’t have gotten away with it except that she was willing to string along.
She carried the ball from then on. No more talk of love or marriage. She’d made her pitch and it hadn’t worked out. She was more of a person than I had thought. Crazy as three seagulls, perhaps, but there was something solid underneath.
We sat around and talked. We killed a lot of time. We killed it until almost three o’clock.
I insisted on taking her home. I knew she had an estate on Long Island, but that wasn’t where I took her. I rode her to a white apartment house that had a lobby choked with chromium and glass. She didn’t ask me upstairs. I went back in the same taxi. I flopped in my reading chair and said, “Wow!” I felt uncomfortable and at the same time I felt good. It was something to reflect that I had said No to twenty million dollars.
This was another night when I was slated to stay awake. There were getting to be too many of them. I made some firm resolutions. Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man . . . and I let it stop there.
At four o’clock my eyes were still pinned back. I was thinking of a lot of things and none of them fitted.
I was trying to connect Candy Livingston with the hundred thousand dollars which had been put to my credit at the bank. It wouldn’t mean a thing to her, and she might have felt that it would boost my morale when the big moment occurred. But that was wrong, too, because when the hundred thousand had been given to me I hadn’t even met Candy. I had no reason to believe she knew I was alive. So what might have been a good theory had to be pitched out of the window.
I don’t know what time I got to sleep. I do know that I felt drugged when the alarm clock went off. I took a shower and shaved while the coffee was percolating. I drank three cups of it. I looked out of the window and watched the sun trying to come up. I said, “Aw nuts!” and reached for my coat and hat. I got to the office late. A couple of the boys grinned and winked. They probably thought I had a hangover.
I telephoned Arthur and invited him to have dinner with me that night. At a nice, quiet, little table d’hote restaurant. He said he’d be tickled pink, and told me he was back on full-time duty and feeling good. His arm was sore, but it didn’t really bother him.
I held off speaking to Dana until late afternoon. When I did call her to say I wouldn’t be seeing her that evening, she was perfect. Her only reference to the previous night was casual. We talked for a few minutes and that was that.
Arthur met me at the restaurant. He looked nervous and worried, but that was nothing new. He asked how my work for Ferguson was getting on. We finished eating and went back to my apartment.
Arthur flopped in one chair and I sprawled out in another. Arthur pulled out a cigarette and tried to fit it into his holder. He used a special kind of a gadget that was supposed to protect him from nicotine. He was afraid of getting stomach ulcers.
The holder dropped out of his hand and rolled under the couch. He got down on his hands and knees and started searching for it. I started to help him, and he said he had it. He got up with the holder, and also with something else. He said, “You should tell the maid to sweep behind the couch, too.”
I shrugged. He said, “Finder’s keepers, isn’t it?”
“It all depends on what you find.”
“A quarter.” He smiled. “That’s a lot of money to a guy like me.”
He held it in his palm. I looked at it without interest. Then something clicked. I said, “Let me see that.”
He seemed surprised by my abruptness. He handed me the coin.
It was a quarter, all right, but it was like no other quarter in the world. One segment of it, perhaps a fifth of the coin, was absolutely flat. The rest of it was okay. Arthur said, “You can have it. I don’t believe it could be spent.”
I was staring at the coin. My brain was doing nip-ups.
I said, “You found this under the couch, Arthur?”
“Yeh. Sure. Why?”
I turned it over and looked at the other side. That was flat, too. I don’t know what else I expected. Ideas were crowding in on me; ideas that I didn’t like.
Arthur said, “Why all the excitement over a bum quarter?”
I said, “This is a very special quarter, Arthur. I know who it belongs to.”
“Well . . . ?”
“It belongs to Ricardo. It’s his luck piece. He’d rather lose his right eye than this.”
Arthur shrugged. “So it’s a busted quarter and you found it. You give it back to him. What’s wrong with that?”
“More than you know.” I moistened my lips. “I’m wondering how it got here. Ricardo has never been in my apartment.”
Arthur said, “You’re nuts. If the coin was here, Ricardo must have been.”
“Not when I was at home.”
Arthur and I stared at each other. I knew we must be thinking the same thing. Maybe Ricardo had been in my apartment one night when I wasn’t at home.
Maybe he had been there with a girl named Ethel Brower.