A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (16 page)

Judd firmly caught hold of Ruth’s right shoulder and she spun with surprise that changed to glee as Judd asked, “May I have this dance, madam?”

She grinned and said, “Of course,” and she fell into the rhythm of his graceful waltz.

“Have you been drinking?” Judd asked.

“Just a little. Was I being noisy? Albert says I’m noisy when I drink. Because that’s one reason I don’t drink. Noisiness. And I get sick.”

“You’ve cut your hair,” he said.

“Vogue
calls it ‘the Eton Crop.’ The Old Crab says it’s too mannish. Kitty and I were bored.”

“And you’re very brown.”

“You too.”

“Tennis, golf.” He scowled at the college boys scowling at them. Liking the pun, he said, “I haven’t ever seen you as
boisterous
as that.”

“Oh, they’re nothing to me. You know that, don’t you?”

“I frankly needed reassurance.”

Ruth listened to the singer and tipsily smiled. “Let’s make this our song. ‘Always.’ Okay?”

And then Judd sang in his baritone that he’d be loving Ruth forever, that his love would be true forever, and when the things she planned needed a helping hand, he would understand. Always.

She didn’t want to go back to Himself with it not yet midnight, so they strolled to West Meadow Beach, where they necked like kids and she tipped into Judd as they sat on fish-scented slabs of rock. She watched high tide flow over a sloping shelf below them and slide along it like a hand along an ebony table, wiping off silver dust. Judd drank from his flask and Ruth said, “I nearly became a widow this week.” Judd’s face was without reaction. She told him Albert had the Buick’s engine running in their Setauket garage as he adjusted the tappets and timing, and he felt himself weakening and getting faint, when he saw that the garage doors he’d flung open had somehow shut. Reeling, he got into fresh air. “The jerk has nine lives,” she said.

“Eight now,” Judd said, and tilted his flask again.

She grinned. “That’s it. Albert’s just a problem in subtraction, right?”

Judd said nothing. Alcohol had stolen his vocabulary.

There were flashes of light and the mutter of thunder far off on the Sound. There was a tang of rain on the breeze.

“You’d better hurry,” she said.

Judd got on all fours and then hesitantly managed to get upright. “I fine,” he said.

She stood and hugged him. “I’m so glad you got jealous and found me.”

But Judd just turned away and lopsidedly tottered toward Port Jefferson in search of a taxicab.

In September 1926, Judd and Isabel spent Labor Day weekend visiting automobile dealerships in Newark and East Orange and purchased, for $595, a new, cream-colored, four-door Chevrolet Series V Touring convertible with whitewall tires, black fenders and running boards, and a black canvas top. Isabel finally consented to its extravagance when Judd mentioned how much fun Jane and her friends would have on jaunts with the roof down—“It would be like a hay ride,” he said—but he was in fact fantasizing about Ruth snuggling into him in the crisp autumn air, the front brim of his hat blown upright, and both of their woolen scarves sailing behind them.

Hearing about the convertible, Ruth pleaded girlishly over the phone, “Oh, I want to go with you on your next trip! Oh, can I, please—pretty please with sugar on it?” And in order that she could join Judd on his ten-day sales route through upstate New York in October, she convinced her husband she was going to Canada with friends, Mr. and Mrs. Kehoe. It was just a name she’d
seen on a mailbox, but the lie scarcely mattered, for Albert took so little notice of what she did by then that he failed to cross-examine her; in fact, except for his worries about handling school days with Lorraine, he seemed relieved she’d be gone.

She was late, but on Monday, October 11th, she exited the subway in Newark in a green cloche hat and a knee-length coat of soft muskrat fur dyed to resemble mink. And she saw Judd smugly relaxing against his jazzy convertible in a raccoon coat and Yankees baseball cap. She asked, “What fraternity you pledging, college boy?”

He took the Hartmann suitcase from her and grinned as he swung it into the back seat. “Which one has the hosted bar?”

Riding north through the Hudson River Valley with Judd, she grimly told him The Governor and she had been arguing without letup since they returned from Setauket, and then she shifted to another mood, gladly reacting to the fall foliage as if she were seeing it for the first time, laughing as she called out the leaf colors as “carrot orange,” “saffron yellow,” “harlot red,” or “horse pee.” She was gay, hectic, joshing, tender, and so sexually insatiable that the judge at their Queens County trial threatened to forbid ladies to be seated in the courtroom when Judd gave his testimony about that jaunt through upstate New York.

Early on Ruth gave him fellatio as he drove, and after their luncheon in a village above Newburgh, she went with him into the wet moss and crackling leaves of the woods. Judd joked, “To err is human, but it feels divine.” And when they got in the car again, Judd was charmed to see her fling off her hat and lie down in the front seat, hugging her knees. She tranquilly slept just as Jane would on long trips, waking up, as Judd later wrote,
pink and refreshed and happy as a baby.

At four thirty, Judd checked them into the Stuyvesant Hotel in historic Kingston, introducing Ruth as “Mrs. Gray,” and then
sitting as formally upright as a bailiff as he used the hotel room’s telephone to arrange the next morning’s sales calls. They strolled along Rondout Creek after dinner, Judd found a speakeasy that sold Taittinger champagne, and she wore him out with lovemaking until two in the morning.

She woke him in the middle of the night by saying, “Albert’s birthday!”

“Hmm?”

“It’s October twelfth, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“He’s forty-four today. I forgot to leave him a gift. Even a card.”

“Don’t feel guilty, darling.”

“Actually, I feel just the opposite. Ain’t that somethin’?”

Wanting sleep, Judd lit a cigarette instead, and Ruth held him in the night of the room, liking the softness of his English skin, the traffic of his breathing, the male scent that was not Albert’s. She said, “We married in my mother and father’s place in front of some minister I’d never met. Walking from the kitchen in my grandmother’s ugly old bridal gown and Al’s sister banging Wagner’s ‘Wedding March’ on the piano. And me thinking,
Aren’t you supposed to love the groom?
But I didn’t at all. I mean, Al was handsome and smart and talented, and I was full of admiration for him, but there was nothing else. And even as the minister was having us repeat the wedding vows, I was thinking,
This doesn’t have to be permanent. I can divorce him.
And then I got violently ill. Mama told Albert I had the flu so his feelings wouldn’t be hurt, and he went home alone that night. And I realized how
jubilant
that made me. After a few days I had to admit I was well again, and I found out the old grouch gave up on the idea of our Poconos vacation after canceling our hotel reservations, so we never had a honeymoon.” She kissed Judd’s cool shoulder. “This is my first. And I’m overjoyed.”

Judd exhaled smoke. “And that makes me happy.”

“I have never felt sexual pleasure with Albert, just disgust and … what’s that word for making you feel lousy about yourself?”

“Degradation?”

She snuggled into him. “Whenever he gets into bed with me, I feel like killing him.”

Judd was silent.

“Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

She felt the shift in the mattress as he rotated to stub out his cigarette. “I feel like killing him,” she repeated. Judd’s thoughts hung like his cigarette smoke. She could feel his sentences forming but in his hesitation they soon deteriorated, and he finally offered only, “I have to get to sleep.”

She woke with him kissing her forehead, fully dressed and shaved and scented with Eau de Cologne. “I’m off,” he said.

“Oh, please, won’t you stay here and play?”

Rather sternly, he said, “This is a business trip, Ruth. I owe it to my employers.”

She noticed then that he held a tumbler that was half-filled with whisky. “Are you
drinking?”

“Hair of the dog that bit me,” he said, and swallowed all of it before he left the hotel room.

With Judd for full days now, she realized just how much liquor he consumed. Something to get over his hangover the first thing in the morning, then something in his breakfast cup to “give his coffee legs,” a hit from his flask and Sen-Sen licorice breath fresheners before he carried his sample cases into a shop, gin and ginger ale with his lunch, more hits from his flask through the afternoon, and then a full-on job of drinking after five.

She worried so much about his intake that after sleeping through their first days in Kingston, Albany, and Troy, she decided to accompany him on his Thursday sales calls in Schenectady, just waiting outside in the Chevrolet at the first shop, but getting so bored—the car radio had not yet been invented—that she described her mouth with Kissproof Lipstick and strolled into the other shops with him. She was introduced as his wife, which excited her, but then Judd added other lies that she found less delightful: that she graduated from Smith College, that she was a high-paid fashion model, that “You’ll see that hourglass figure of Mrs. Gray’s in our next Bien Jolie catalogue.” It was like she wasn’t good enough as is.

She considered Judd’s spiel too formal: “Your choicest gowns,” he’d say. “Don’t they deserve a foundation no less perfect than that afforded by this exquisite one-piece corsette?” And he could be overly teacherly: “Excuse me, miss, but our line is pronounced Be-Ann Jo-Lee.” But he flirted with even the not-pretty clerks and shopkeepers, and he could seem so intrigued and compassionate, frowning as if he were listening hard and feeling each of their joys and sorrows. Judd congratulated them on their changed hairstyles, flattered them for their shaped and painted fingernails, their choice of perfume, and those jujus and fashion accessories that other men failed to notice. And even though Ruth was watching, the women were so affectionate, each joyfully hugging Judd in greeting, kissing his handsome face, their hands fondly finding his forearms and chest as he conversed in his sane and soothing baritone.

She fidgeted. She felt she was suffocating, even that her throat was shutting. And her heart was hammering so loudly that she felt sure people even a few feet away must have wondered at its noise. And then Ruth fainted.

She woke on the floor some minutes later and found Judd kneeling over her, fanning her face with his fedora. Oh so concerned. “You son of a bitch,” she said.

“Ruth, please, darling. Don’t say that. You’re hysterical.”

All his adoring women were glaring down at her. Ugly sluts, the lot of them.

Ruth got some rest that afternoon, but she was still plagued with the certainty that he would not have resisted the solace and reward of sex given so many opportunities on his route. After all, Henry Judd Gray had established himself as a man who cheats on his wife. And Ruth was jealous enough that after he’d registered them into the Montgomery Hotel in Amsterdam, she sought to get even with his presumed infidelities by insisting she expensively call home on the Benjamin & Johnes account. As she heard the Queens phone ringing, she asked, “Where would I be by now?”

“Oh, Quebec somewhere, I suppose.”

Judd relaxed on the hotel bed and finished what was left in his flask as Ruth shouted over the long-distance line, “Hello, Mama? I’m in Quebec! Montreal! Yes, it’s very beautiful! In fact it’s
bien jolie!
And everyone here is so intelligent! Even the little children speak French!” Ruth’s palm covered the mouthpiece as she told Judd, “She didn’t get the joke.” And then she shouted, “But, Mama, how are things there? How’s the baby?”

Judd shot up from the bed and got back into his jacket and hat. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and walked a few blocks in Amsterdam’s downtown before he found the still-open hardware store where he knew he could purchase whisky in the basement. A hijacked quart of Johnnie Walker Scotch cost him a full day’s commissions, but he thought high-end whisky would give him gentler hangovers.

She was getting off the telephone when he got back. “Albert’s ill,” she said.

“Very?”

“Josephine says so.”

Judd filled a water glass with Scotch as he asked as a formality, “Would you like to go back?”

“Nah. Let the Old Crab die.” She was afraid she’d shocked him, but she found he was smiling.

“Wow,” he said, reflecting on it. “We could have a real celebration then.”

She walked to him and held him close as she whispered into his ear. “Oh, I love you so much right now. Shall we have sex all night long? Wouldn’t that be swell? Would you like that?”

“Would it be manly to object?”

She stared into his flannel-blue eyes with grave sincerity. “Are there wild fantasies you’ve had? Anything at all you’d like to try out?”

With a hint of shame, he said, “Yes.”

She grinned. “Then let’s.”

Each night on Judd’s sales route they stayed up later until Judd was waking at noon, still exhausted and in a whisky haze. After Amsterdam there was a sales call in Gloversville, followed by a jaunt through the gaudy woods alongside the Black River to a ladies’ everything shop in Boonville and three lingerie stores in Watertown. And on Saturday evening it was Syracuse, where Joseph Grogan, the front-desk manager of the Onondaga Hotel, was familiar with Judd and so pleased at finally meeting Mrs. Gray that he rewarded them with a palatial room that seemed fit for a Spanish grandee. Judd woke the next morning to the chiding of church bells but found jazz on the radio and ordered up coffee and apple pie for them both. Lounging in their matching silk pajamas, he confessed to Ruth that he would have liked to take her on a Sunday drive south to Cortland, where he was born, but he still had
relatives there who might see them. And he told Ruth that when he was in Syracuse he generally looked up a high school classmate named Haddon Jones who sold insurance there, but though Judd’s old friend had been told she was in a gruesome marriage and he even had seen Ruth’s photograph, Haddon had not yet been given her name, and Judd felt it was not the right time to introduce them.