Two Much!

by Donald E. Westlake

  Dearest Ralph,

  Darling, I want you to know that no matter what happens from this point in time forward in time I have never lost respect and love for you and I never will lose that respect and that love.

  However, I have come to the distraught conclusion that it can no longer be possible for you Ralph and me Candice to continue to live together as husband and wife. The gulf mat stretches between us cannot be bridged by our best intentions no matter how good those intentions of ours might be.

  We are drifting apart, my darling, and I no longer see any possible way or circumstance in which we could drift back together again. Our problems of sexual and emotional incompatibility are simply too deep for us to be able to climb over them and find one another in the valley of love on the other side.

  You know that I have asked you repeatedly to see Doctor Zeeberger about your premature ejaculations and your occasional impotence and your general inability to satisfy me in the conduct of our conjugal affairs in the bedroom. I want to be honest with you, Ralph, now more than ever, and I do know that you have been to see Doctor Zeeberger, but I do not believe you could possibly have explained the situation to him or he would not have said it was me he wanted to talk to. I do not have premature ejaculations. I do not have occasional impotence. In fact, Ralph, if you will recall and be honest with yourself and with me, you will know that I have given you every possible verbal assistance and reassurance on this subject, saying such things to you as, “I’m sure it’ll be just fine this time,” and, “Don’t get tense, sweetheart,” every single time we go to bed together.

  Ralph, I have a confession to make. I am a woman, with the needs and desires of a woman, and in my frustration and anguish I have turned to another man. Yes, you know him, Ralph, he is your dearest friend and mine, Art Dodge. In his arms I have found the fulfillment that fled me within my marriage. Art and I have had intercourse on a regular basis for over a year now, in a variety of settings. I am enclosing photostats of four motel registers where we registered as Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Dodge.

  Ralph, I hate to cheat and lie. Desperation drove me to Art, but love has kept me with him. We love one another, Ralph, and we want you to give us our freedom so that we may marry and be honest before the world.

  It was this summer in Fair Harbor, when the children became aware of what was going on, that I knew I could be a dishonest woman no longer. Yes, they know, Ralph, in their childish way. That’s why I sent Art away, hoping against hope that you and I could somehow make a go of it, though the odds against us were astronomical.

  Well, it can’t happen. You will find a better woman than me, Ralph, I am sure. All I want is the children and child support, you know I would never be greedy. And don’t think too harshly of Art. Love hit him like a ton of bricks, just like it hit me.

  Hail and Farewell,

  Candy

  I finished reading this remarkable carbon, nodded slowly, refolded the thing on its original creases, laid it on the table, sipped at my coffee, looked at Candy sitting across from me like a sharper who’d just switched decks, and I said, “Do you really have those photostats?”

  “They’re in the envelope with the original.”

  “And where is this envelope?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You aren’t getting that. Besides, I can always write the letter again, and I can always get more photostats.”

  “Uh huh.” I tapped the folded letter, thinking things over. “Why, Candy?”

  She frowned, not understanding me. “What do you mean?”

  “Why me? Ralph makes a better living than I do, he’s more reliable, he’s more blind and therefore more safe, and he likes your kids. I hate them, you know, and I always will.”

  “You’ll get used to them.”

  “Why me, Candy?”

  The look she gave me was both vulnerable and defiant. “Maybe I love you,” she said.

  “Christ,” I said, in honest depression, “I believe you do.”

  “And I can make something of you,” she said.

  I half-closed my eyes when I looked at her; I didn’t like seeing her head on. “Make something of me?”

  “You’ve never had any ambition,” she said. “You’ve just been content to live on what you can con and cheat and steal. You’re very smart and very imaginative, and if you really tried you could be a big success.”

  Four hours ago Liz had married me, and here was Candy trying to turn me into a husband.

  “The only kind of big success I want to be,” I said, “is without trying. Money that’s earned by the sweat of my brow is tainted; I won’t touch it.”

  She pointed a triumphant red-tipped finger at me. “I’m going to change all that,” she said. “I’m going to make you a success in spite of yourself. You’ll have money, respectability, accomplishment. You’ll be proud of yourself, and I’ll be proud of you.”

  “You’ll reclaim me from Satan.”

  “You could say it that way,” she said, without flinching.

  “And if I say no,” I suggested, “you’ll send Ralph this letter.”

  “If you don’t think I should send it,” she told me, innocent and wide-eyed, “then I certainly won’t. I mean, if we’re friends and I think you’re somebody whose opinion I should listen to.”

  “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?”

  YOU’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.

  IT 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.

  WHEN VOLPINEX 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.

&n
bsp; “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.”

  “I should think not. You can’t just walk into other people’s houses.”

  “Or other people’s lives,” he suggested. “Or other people’s plans.”

  The morning sun was behind this building, casting its stunted shadow onto Fifth Avenue and a bit of the park, so there was no direct sunlight here on the terrace. Nevertheless, the sky was very bright and I couldn’t help but squint when I stared upward at Volpinex, whose face was little more than a silhouette, practically nothing showing but his cold eyes and that flickering humorless cold smile. I thought of standing, meeting him man to man, but became suddenly hyperaware of that railing very near me, and the masses of empty air just the other side. Seven stories down were the concrete sidewalk and the blacktop street. I seemed suddenly to have developed a fear of heights, to feel more secure with my entire body below the level of the railing.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” I said. “As long as you’re here. I mean, if you won’t go away.”

  “It’s your going away that I’m here to discuss,” he said. He remained standing. His hands, resting calmly at his sides—approximately my nose level—were very long and very thin, but with a look of strength about them. My earlier image of Volpinex as part vampire returned to me, more insistently.

  “I am going away,” I said. “Betty will be back any minute—” it seemed for some reason important to make that point, that I wouldn’t be alone for long “—and then we’ll be off for Point O’ Woods.”

  “I mean a different kind of going away.” His right hand lifted and made a slender graceful gesture toward the park, as though inviting me to admire it. Or perhaps to fly over it. “Something more permanent.”

  What had failed with brother number one he was apparently now going to try with brother number two. I said, “I’m not leaving. I’m staying with Betty.”

  An expression of cultured disgust rumpled the smiling lips. “I know you two are married.”