Two Much!

9

Sunday morning I took the ferry from Point O’ Woods to Bay Shore, stepped into a phone booth, and called the Kerner house. I knew it was Betty who answered, since Liz hadn’t been around all weekend, but I said, “Hi, is this Liz?”

“No, it’s Betty.”

“Oh, hello. This is Art Dodge. Is my brother there, by any chance?”

“Oh, you just missed him! He just now took the ferry.”

“Drat,” I said. “Well, I’ll call him tonight in the city. Is Liz around?”

“Not right now,” she said doubtfully. She wasn’t about to tell Art the hair-raising stories she’d told Bart, about Liz disappearing routinely for two or three days at a time. “Could she call you back?”

“Sure,” I said, and left Candy and Ralph’s number. Then I walked across Maple Avenue and took the Fair Harbor ferry, which wasn’t at all in the same league as the boat from Point O’ Woods.

Yesterday, after my hangover had ebbed a bit, and after Betty and I had committed sacrilege after all upon her father’s bed, I’d called my Fair Harbor hosts to tell them not to worry, I was more or less safe and sound. Happily, it was Ralph who answered, and he’d understood at once. “Go get ’em, Art,” he’d said, and I could just see him doing that little punching gesture.

Which left Candy still to be heard from.

She wasn’t home, I’m glad to say, but the kids were there, spreading peanut butter and jelly on the kitchen counter. I took my damn glasses off, popped my lenses in, changed into bathing trunks, grabbed a towel, and headed for the beach. After a night and a day and a night of romping with Betty in a Liz-less house I was ready for some restorative rest.

But I wasn’t to get it I hadn’t been lying there on my back twenty minutes when somebody kicked sand in my face. Squinting upward, I saw at first nothing but a blue-swathed crotch above tanned legs. Then Liz dropped to the sand beside me and said, “Hello, lover.”

“Hello, yourself.”

“Your brother came sniffing around,” she said.

I glared, “After you?”

“Hah,” she said. “You never saw a couple that belonged together like your Bart and my Betty.”

Had I been that bad? Grinning in relief, I lay my head back on the towel and said, “Well, that’s all right then.”

“So there you are,” said another voice, and when I looked up this new crotch was swathed in yellow. It dropped down toward me, and there was Candy sitting on my left, baring her teeth across my chest at Liz. “And this must be your new friend,” she said.

“Liz Kerner,” I said, “this is Candy Minck, my hostess.” And then, because one or the other of them would surely now say something that would blow the twin bit forever, with nothing I could possibly do about it, I rested my head back on the towel, closed my eyes, and folded my hands on my breast.

LIZ: “I recognized your voice from the phone. It’s so distinctive.”

CANDY: “You don’t look at all the way I pictured you.”

LIZ: “Really? You look exactly the way I thought you would.”

CANDY: “Oh? How’s that?”

LIZ: “Oh, I don’t know. Sort of cute and matronly.”

CANDY: “What a sweet thing to say. But Art has told us so little about you. Do you have a place of your own here, or do you just come over for the day?”

LIZ: “I have a little house in Point O’ Woods. Not as... casual as yours, of course.”

CANDY: “Yes, you have seen my place, haven’t you?”

Opening my eyes, I cautiously lifted my head. Claws were dug into the sand on both sides of my rib cage. I said, “Where do you suppose Ralph is?”

Candy, her eyes still fixed on Liz, waggled impatient fingers toward the ocean. “Drowning.” To Liz she said, “I want you always to feel free to drop in at my house just any time you want.”

“That’s so nice of you,” Liz said. “It’s so relaxing to be in a place where nobody cares about housekeeping and all of that.”

“Say,” I said, with a big friendly smile, “why don’t we have a drink?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Liz said.

Candy was already on her feet, wiping sand from her ass which just accidentally fell on my head. “We’ll all go to my place,” she said.

So we left the beach and strolled along the boardwalk toward Candy’s house. There was blessed silence for a minute or two, and then Candy said to Liz, “Do your people at Point O’ Woods give you many days off?”

“Not many,” Liz said. “Since I inherited my father’s estate it’s just business business business all the time.”

“Oh, are you an orphan, poor dear?”

I said, “Liz has a twin sister. There’s just the two of them left in the world.”

“There’s another one at home like you?” The idea seemed to daunt Candy slightly.

“You never know where you’ll run into twins, ha, ha,” I said, then pointed and said, “Isn’t that one of the kids on the roof?”

“Wha?” Candy squinted, she shielded her eyes from the sun. “I don’t see anybody.”

“My mistake,” I said. “For a second I thought I saw somebody there.”

We walked on to the house. If only Liz had to go to the john, I would take Candy to one side, explain the twin scam to her briefly, assure her my intentions toward the Kerners were strictly mercenary and that my dishonorable intentions were still centered on her own sweet self, insist that my motive was Kerner investment in Those Wonderful Folks, and beg her connivance in the plot. The idea should appeal to her; Candy had a natural love of the underhanded.

Unfortunately, when we entered the house it was Candy who headed immediately for the john, while Liz stood at the kitchen counter, touching the peanut butter and jelly with a hesitant finger and waiting for her usual. I called after Candy, “And what’s yours?”

“I’ll make it when I come back.”

Vodka-ice. Rum-and. “Cheers,” I said, and we both drank.

“You have a true taste for the gutter, don’t you?” Liz suggested.

“What, Candy? She’s my best friend’s wife.”

“I took that for granted.” She strolled around, looking at the furnishings. “It’s hard to believe people still live like this.”

“We are the people,” I told her. “The salt of the earth.”

She gave me a skeptical look. “You’re more the nutmeg,” she said. “But—” with another disdainful glance at her surroundings “—it’s easy to see why you were attracted to Betty. The simple smell of soap would probably drive you mad.”

I decided to ignore the crack about Betty; she couldn’t possibly still be annoyed about the party. “The last time you were here,” I said, “you seemed to find the accommodations, uh, satisfactory.”

“I’ll try anything once,” she said. “I like new experiences.”

I remembered she hadn’t been home since Friday evening. “I’m sure you do,” I said.

“It’s too bad most of them become old so fast,” she said.

“Don’t I know the feeling.”

We stood smiling at one another, me near the kitchen counter and Liz in the living room area, until all at once Candy marched between us, heading for the door, carrying what appeared to be my suitcase. We watched her kick open the screen door, rear back, and toss the suitcase out of the house. Underhanded, of course: It lofted up and over the railing and landed in the poison ivy.

Candy turned on me a smile that would crack granite. “I hope,” she said, through her gritted grin, “you’ll have a glorious time in Point O’ Woods.” Approaching me, she said, “And that’s my drink, thank you very much.” And plucked from my hand my rum and tonic.

Liz suddenly started laughing. “Oh, Art,” she said, “what a beautiful face!”

“Well,” I said.

Candy had taken a slug of my drink. “You get out of here, Art,” she said. “Get out of here right now.” From the look in her eye, she’d be picking up a steak knife next.

I backed toward the door, irritably aware of Liz grinning in the corner of my vision. “I suppose that goes for Bart too,” I said, and before she could respond I quickly added, “Does Ralph know about this? Does he go along with this? He is, after all—”

“You leave Ralph out of this! I don’t even want you to mention his name!”

“He’ll just wonder why I’m not here.”

“You don’t think I’ll tell him? You don’t think so?”

I thought she was capable of any idiocy, given her present mood, so rather than reply I stepped outside, picked up the mop leaning against the wall near the door, and went fishing for my suitcase.

Meanwhile, Candy had turned on Liz. It’s amazing how many coarse names she knew for female private parts. And while the pebbles Liz dropped into Candy’s stream of invective were rather quieter, I wouldn’t exactly say they were gentler.

I grasped my suitcase, hauled it up onto the deck, and went cautiously back inside. Candy was heaving so much in her little two-piece yellow bathing suit she looked like a belly dancer trainee, and Liz was also a bit red around the face. Neither, however, was speaking at this precise moment. “My attaché case,” I whispered to them both, as though there were a sleeper nearby that I didn’t want to wake, and I tiptoed to the ladder. Up I went, packed the last few items — including Bart’s glasses — and carried the attaché case down.

Candy, though still panting, had developed now the beginnings of a puzzled frown on her foxy face. She said to me, “Who?”

Whoops. “All I can say, Candy,” I said, “is that I did my best to ease your loneliness, and to be a true friend to you when you needed me.”

“Why, you filthy son of a bitch,” she said, “I’m going to cut your balls off!” And she went around the end of the counter into the kitchen.

“Come, Liz,” I said, with dignity. “I know when I’m not wanted.”

I crossed the room, opened the screen door, and a bottle of Firehouse Jubilee bloody Mary mix sailed past my head and into the poison ivy. Liz and I exited, and I closed the screen door behind me and spoke through it. “I’ll tell Bart your decision,” I said, “and I know he’ll be just as hurt as I am that all our acts of kindness, our attempts to bring solace into the drab life of a trapped housewife, have been misunderstood and unap—”

An egg strained itself through the screen; some of it reached my chest.

“Mp,” I said. I picked up my suitcase, and Liz and I departed.

We’d gone a block when the shouts started behind us: “Who? Who?” Fortunately, Liz was laughing too hard to hear it.