by Ron Hansen
Ruth dangled her left hand in front of Judd’s intent and myopic stare, his owlish round glasses lifted up to his forehead so he could inspect the jewel.
“Lovely,” he said.
“I had lots of misgivings, but I said finally yes to getting hitched. Mostly because I wouldn’t have given up this goddamned ring for anything once I had it on my hand.”
His Shrimp Louie had arrived, and he’d finished it as she talked. And now he poured the final inch of Harry’s vodka as a waiter took the dishes and cutlery away. She glanced over Judd Gray’s shoulder to find Harry Folsom there, loosening his tie, his hair a wreck and his face flushed with sweat. “Are you kids going to join us on the floor or are you just going to make goo-goo eyes all night?”
“Are you up for it?” she asked Judd.
Harry intervened. “Up for it? The guy’s … What’s that fancy word, Judd?”
“Terpsichorean?”
“That’s him.”
Ruth was lost. Judd got up, the vodka tipping him off balance, and took her golden-ringed hand as she rose. He slurred, “Terpsichore is the goddess of dancing and choral song.”
She smiled. “How flattering for you to be likened to a goddess!”
His hand friended her back in a foretaste of waltzing. “Harry means well,” he said. “We all do.”
She loved dancing and Judd could do them all: the fox-trot, tango, Castle Walk, even the Charleston and American rumba, which he taught her there on Zari’s floor. Held by him, she felt the knotted muscles of his back, the jump and bunch of his upper arms, the shift of his deft thighs against hers. She liked it that she was taller than he. She could smell his hair and hair tonic and just a hint of his cigarettes. She grazed her nose on his neck. She asked, “Is that aftershave?”
“Eau de Cologne,” he said. “Jean Marie Farina’s fragrance. Worn by royalty throughout Europe.”
“Albert wouldn’t dream of smelling like anything but hand soap.”
“Well, it comes with the territory. Selling women’s undergarments.”
“And being a clotheshorse?”
Judd fell back so she could see his face and the hurt he was faking. “But I’m not that, I’m just ‘tailorish.’”
“Anything ‘-ish’ isn’t good.”
Corny as a yokel, he said, “And yet you rav-ish me.”
“I was thinking ‘fiendish.’ And ‘piggish.’ Like my husband.”
Judd laughed. “Is he as bad as all that?”
She swayed with him, feeling his genteel lead, and saw Harry in a hoofing four-step and frowning with jealousy over the head of his wife. Still eyeing Harry, she tilted her head to Judd so intimately that her mouth fluttered his ear like a kiss as she confided, “We had to cut our Shelter Island vacation short. Albert was caught necking with a yacht club wife and got slugged by her husband.”
Judd jerked his head away, his face rucked with vexation. “But that’s awful, Ruth!”
There was something tricky in her wet eyes. Was she lying? She nodded like a shamed unfortunate and huddled into his masculine symmetry to say, “I was so humiliated. Lora and I left that afternoon and Albert came later with his tail between his legs. We haven’t spoken in days. And then when I was on my way here, his first words were to accuse me of having an affair.” A hot tear slid down her cheek and she wiped it with the flat of her hand. “And then he said he marveled that he’d stayed with me for so many years and said any man who wanted me was welcome to have me. And other hateful things.”
Judd held her in a fatherly way. “Oh, Ruth. I’m so sorry.”
She eked out, “It’s okay.” She tucked her head against his neck and noted Harry Folsom’s wild jealousy, Mrs. Folsom’s scorn. She’d not noticed that the orchestra was playing “What’ll I Do.” She laid her hot cheek against Judd’s gray flannel shoulder and sang along with the girl in the evening gown onstage.
Around ten, the girls from the Madison Avenue shop left Zari’s and got on an uptown bus, and the out-of-town retailers joined Harry Folsom and his wife in their Packard for a jaunt out to Hyman’s nightclub on Merrick Road in Long Island. Ruth hurt Harry’s feelings by saying she wanted to call it a night, as did Judd, and they shared a taxi to his hotel at 33rd Street. She’d walk to Pennsylvania Station from there.
She shifted uneasily on the taxi’s bench seat. Seeing his curiosity, she explained, “The fabric hurts my sunburn.”
“But haven’t you been in the sun all summer?”
She seemed embarrassed for some reason.
“I have my golf clubs in my office and a jar of sunburn cream in the bag. Would you like it? We’re very close.”
The Benjamin & Johnes offices were in a twelve-story building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. There was a gruff night watchman who thought Judd was up to no good, but then all Judd needed was the elevator up and his Schlage key for the entrance.
She said, “I feel like a child on an escapade.”
Judd hung his fedora on a coat rack as he insisted, “We’re not doing anything wrong.” Switching on one bank of overhead lights, he tilted with drunkenness as he walked ahead of her down a herringboned oak hallway to a fundamental office of four paired desks, one shared telephone, a stack of Benjamin & Johnes catalogues, a persuasive store mannequin of the female torso, and pinned-up New York Times advertisements for Bien Jolie undergarments. Judd failed to notice Ruth shutting the Venetian blinds as he unzipped the pouch on a khaki, leather-trimmed golf bag monogrammed HJG. He stood up again with a jar of Dr. Bunting’s Sunburn Remedy, a Baltimore product that would soon be renamed Noxzema.
She asked, “What’s in it?”
Lifting his spectacles, he focused hard on the jar’s ingredients. “Camphor, menthol, and I think it says eucalyptus.”
Shyly, and with just a hint of a smile, she asked, “Will you put it on me? I can’t reach.”
“Certainly,” he said, and fell over into a goofy bow.
“I have to take off some things.”
“Oh.” And then with recognition, “Oh! I’ll go out.” But first he pulled open a door on the right pedestal of his desk, fetched a bottle of Canadian whisky, and carried it out in his right arm’s crook. Judd fell back into a secretary’s chair just outside the office, unscrewed the whisky cork, and took a long swallow, liking the scald in his throat, and forgetting why he was there. Some minutes passed and he fought sleep. He twirled in the oak chair to see the city lights and hunched over to find the moon. And then he heard her call, “Okay. I’m ready.”
She shocked him by standing in his office with her lovely back and rump revealed, very naked and very tan where her bathing suit failed to cover her, very pink wherever the skin was newly discovered by the sun. Without rotating, Ruth said, “I have no idea what I was thinking. I was hurt and mad and I rented a motorboat at Jones Beach and steered it far out to sea and it was hot so I took off all my clothes and just floated.”
Judd could only stare at her fine body for half a minute, stunned and aroused by its beauty. He tried to seem both fastidious and jaunty in case he was misinterpreting the moment. “You poor thing,” he finally said. “You’re fried.” His hands were shaking as he took hold of the jar of Dr. Bunting’s Sunburn Remedy and spooned out a glob with his fingers. He hesitated before he reached out and touched the hot skin of her left shoulder blade.
“Ooh!” she said. “Icy.”
Softly applying it, he felt the stirring of an erection, and he looked down with satisfaction at her firm, round rump. “Remember me talking about that famous sculptor’s model, Audrey Munson?”
She turned her head slightly left. “Yes.”
“You’re as breathtaking as she was.”
“Well, of course. I’m bien jolie.”
“Oh, right. We’ve established that, haven’t we?” His healing hand had reached her waist and he hesitated again before going farther. “May I?”
She shuddered as if she were sobbing.
Ever cautious, he said,
“I’ll stop.”
“Don’t,” she said, and she turned. Even with hot tears trickling down her face, she was electrifying. She held his cheeks in her hands and said, “It’s your kindness. You’re so, so kind, Judd! No man has ever been that way to me; not my father, not Albert—just the opposite.”
She fretfully watched as he hesitated at the foreign threshold of unfaithfulness, and then Judd took the initiative and kissed her and she held his head so that he couldn’t jerk away, her soft, full lips seeming ravenous for his, her full breasts pillowing against his chest. And then she let him retreat a little. She smiled. “I have been wanting to do that since I first saw you. I knew you’d be a good kisser.”
“You’re so gorgeous, Ruth. I hadn’t the daring to even dream—”
She kissed him again and lifted his left hand to her right breast. He cupped it in a measuring way and then squeezed its cushion. “You’re so much larger there than Isabel.”
She smiled. “You like?”
He hunched to revere it with a kiss and took the blunt pink nipple in his mouth, sucking it hard until he smacked. And then he straightened. “Shall I take off my clothes?”
Shyly, she said, “Yes, please.”
With his wife he’d get naked in a hidden way so he’d not scare her with “his thing,” but as he was turned away and getting out of his gray flannel trousers, Ruth squirmed against him from behind and reached around to grip him in her palm. She tenderly jerked him erect, and he held still, tottering with intoxication, a slave to the pleasure of her hand, and sighing out, “Oh, you’re amazing, Ruth.”
She stepped around to the front of him and knelt. “I have wanted to do this, too.” She took him in her mouth and her head moved frontward and back. She’d stop now and then to back away and examine his cock as if just looking gave her joy. And then she said, “Don’t come yet,” and flicked her tongue a last time before standing and walking over to his desk and slouching back on her forearms with her thighs receptively wide. “Have you been with your secretary here?” she asked.
“I haven’t had sex with anyone but my wife. And certainly not here.”
She grinned. “Good.”
“Shall I kiss you down there?”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’m ready.”
“Shall I pull out?”
She pouted. “No. I like the seed inside me.”
Judd walked into her and sneered a little as he entered the soft and velvety caress of Ruth. She wryly gasped with false wide eyes as if he were enormous, and he smiled as he jammed himself in and out, holding off as long as he could, and then feeling his semen lash out of him with such force he loudly cried, “Ah!”
She petted his head as he fell against her in exhaustion and feebly kissed her ear and neck. She cooed to him, “Oh yes, there’s my good boy. My Loverboy. I have such a nice place for you to visit.”
His heart was hammering as he said, “I haven’t felt this way. Ever.”
She whispered, “You will, Judd Gray. Whenever you want.”
And he smiled. “I so enjoyed meeting you and hope to do so again.”
THREE
MR. & MRS. GRAY
She got to Queens Village just before midnight on Friday. All the lights were still on in the house. She walked through the foyer and dining room to the kitchen, found the cellar door wide open, and heard the finale to Beethoven’s Fidelio playing on Albert’s Victrola in the attic. Because the baby would be sleeping, she didn’t call to him, but ascended the staircase and saw Albert was kneeling next to their clawfoot bathtub and gently lowering a steaming, three-gallon copper kettle of beer wort into a foot of ice water. His white shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. A hank of sandy brown hair fell over his forehead. She asked, “What are you brewing now?”
Albert glanced up at her. “I lucked onto some Saaz noble hops. I’m making a fine Pilsener lager.” He dipped a thermometer into the wort and watched the temperature gradually change. “Was the moving-picture show good?”
“Lots of action. Douglas Fairbanks in The Three Musketeers”
“Was the plot impossible to follow?”
It was his standard complaint. “Not really.”
“And how’s your nutty cousin?”
“Ethel’s fine.”
“I have to get this down to forty-five degrees,” Albert said.
She went into Lorraine’s room, kissed the sleeping girl’s cheek, and she woke. “Mommy?”
Ruth petted Lora’s straw-blonde hair and softly whispered, “Hey there, lovergirl. I’m home. Sweet dreams.”
On Saturday afternoon, Judd found a table for five clients at the gala that followed the Très Parisien fashion show, but he was too woozy with shock and guilt to stay. Each greeting and jibe seemed to carry an undercurrent of irony, as if his friends and associates detected his adultery, his coveting of another’s wife, and were grandly pretending to forgive him. At last he felt he needed his family more than sales commissions, and he offered a hurried goodbye in order to catch a train for New Jersey and his Craftsman bungalow in East Orange.
His house was havoc’s opposite and contained very little of him. The Vanity Fair and Success magazines he’d left scattered on the cocktail table had been overcome by Radio Digest in his absence. The Tiffany floor lamp he’d shifted for his reading was now reestablished to its seemingly fixed position. His high school mandolin was probably in its scarred case in the closet; the lid on the Priest upright piano was locked. And installed on the yielding, purple mohair sofa was his mother-in-law, Rebecca Kallenbach, whom he called Mrs. K. She’d divorced her husband, Ferdinand, a lithographer, just before Judd married Isabel, and she increasingly seemed to find her ex’s vices in her son-in-law. But now she was involved in crocheting a chair cushion as she listened to “Every Morn I Bring Thee Violets” on the phonograph, and she failed to notice his entrance.
But little Jane was at the dining room table in a yellow sundress, furiously coloring an apple orchard on butcher paper with the box of Crayolas he’d bought her in Easton. He softly laid a hand on her chocolate-brown hair as he said, “Hello, sweetie.”
She failed to look up. “Hi, Daddy.”
“Whose farm is that?”
“It’s imaginary.”
“Who’s that stick man standing way off in the distance?”
Jane frankly said, “You,” and his fathering heart felt stabbed.
“I have been gone a lot, haven’t I?”
Unprompted, Mrs. Kallenbach snidely offered, “Oh, we manage to get by without you.” She pulled red yarn taut with her hooked needle.
Isabel walked out of their spic-and-span kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. She forgot to smile as she said, “Hi, Bud. You’re home early.”
“I had enough.”
She kissed him and wrinkled her nose at the hint of railway whisky. “Smells like you had plenty.”
“And so it begins,” he said.
Judd Gray was sixteen and in the rigorous college preparatory course at William Barringer High School in Newark, intent on attending Cornell medical school. He was president of his high school fraternity, chairman of the Dance Committee, a Newark high schools sports reporter, manager of the basketball team, and in spite of his scrawniness, the quarterback on the football team. Yet he was high-strung and giddy around girls; he thought they could read his dirty mind. And then he met a considerate, pious, slender, solemn, not-pretty brunette named Isabel Kallenbach, of Van Siclen Avenue in New York City. She had a too-prominent nose and a jutting chin and he initially dated her out of chivalry and pity. His first and only sweetheart, Isabel married him in November 1915, when he was twenty-three and she twenty-four. Because of pneumonia, Judd had been forced to quit high school in his senior year, and when he was healthy again he took a job in his father’s jewelry factory, and then became a jewelry salesman, serving as a volunteer for the Red Cross during the Great War though he’d wanted to join the Army. His grandfather was an investor in the Empire Corset Compa
ny and offered Judd the greater freedom of a job with that firm, and later, in 1921, Judd shifted over to Benjamin & Johnes. And Isabel became a devoted but dowdy housewife, finicky in her cooking and cleaning, priggish, overweight, acting ever more disgraced by his job in lingerie sales, and in reaction given to wearing frowzy dresses and farmerish shoes.
“We’re having meat loaf and fresh sliced tomatoes,” Isabel said from the kitchen, verging on disgust as she added, “And you’re having your Scotch first, I suppose.”
Judd fetched his bottle of Johnnie Walker from the dining room sideboard. “Wouldn’t do without it.”
Mrs. Kallenbach would later state for journalists that she was “very close” to her son-in-law and hardly ever saw him drink, but she watched Judd flee into the back yard with his liquor and stridently called, “You have broken the law, buying that!”