A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

by Ron Hansen

  Ruth crooked a finger inside the front of his belt and pulled him to her. “Ditto,” she said.

  But then the field of force shifted and he said, “My turn,” as he lifted Ruth to her feet so his clotheshorse hands could deftly undo and tease off a hushed waterfall of jeweled white evening gown. In the still-new flapper fashion, she wore nothing underneath but a garter belt and silk stockings, and she liked his shock at her sudden nakedness and the frank wolfishness of his gaze as it seized information of her body. With a faint groan of veneration, Judd fell to his knees in front of her to unfasten each stocking and tug it free while offering tickling, reverent kisses to her inner thighs, her calves, her feet. “Sit,” he said then. “Lie back.”

  She took off the garter belt and did so, and watched the city’s flashing lights affect the Waldorf’s ceiling as she heard him taking off and folding his glasses, and then Judd was kneeling again and widening her legs in a firm, medical way, his face finding her crotch and wetly nuzzling there as his soft, almost feminine hands palmed and squeezed her breasts. She gasped with excitement as his mouth fluttered, examined, and worried her sex in a hungry, fervent ravishment, and she said, “Oh, you’re so good at that.” She said, “Oh, that feels so nice.” And still he continued, with no hint of duty or impatience, and she felt a finger stroking inside her, two, and she felt her heart going like mad, and she thought this freedom, this fun, this letting go was all she’d ever wanted from Albert, was just what Albert could not give, and it was right to have this intimacy, this tenderness, this sharing of sheer pleasure—it would have been cold, inhuman, and wrong to deny it—and she wanted to thank Isabel or whoever it was for teaching him so well, this Judd who was so selfless and generous and as talented with his tongue as a fantasy lover, and she could feel his fascination, his awe for her, his gratitude for the gift of this, and she couldn’t hold back, she cried out and bucked up from the bed again and again, shuddering in orgasm, and then inviting him up from the floor and guiding his erection inside her and joining him so tightly in the clench of her thighs and the hug of her arms that he could not possibly have seen she was crying.

  Afterward Judd phoned room service and ordered ginger ale for them and Waldorf salads. “And pretzels,” Ruth added.

  “And pretzels,” he said. Earlier he’d raised all the windows but it was still hot, so they stayed naked atop the fresh-smelling sheets, propped up against a six-foot-high Victorian headboard. Judd reclined on his elbow and admired her body for a while, softly grazing a scar near her navel as he inquired, “What caused that?”

  “I had an appendectomy when I was eleven.”

  He petted near it another scar from an incision. “And that?”

  “Surgery so I could get pregnant. Some female things were knotted up. Al blew his stack when he found out. He hates kids.”

  “I hope we never meet.”

  “You won’t.”

  Judd gently cupped the underside of Ruth’s right breast as though weighing it.

  She smiled. “C cup.”

  “I just can’t get over seeing such a gorgeous woman in the altogether like this. With me.”

  “I’m guessing Isabel’s a prude.”

  “Oh yes. She manages to be clothed at all times. She even wears these hideous, mannish pajamas that she must find in some sort of neuter shop. She’s afraid a glimpse of her flesh will get me, as she puts it, ‘riled up.’”

  She waggled him. “So that’s what he was earlier? Riled up?”

  “But you soothed the savage beast,” Judd said.

  Ruth rolled over onto him and softly laid her head on his hairless, alabaster chest. “Tell me about Isabel so I won’t be like her.”

  “I frankly don’t know a lot. And I have been connected to Isabel in one way or another for sixteen years. Yet I can’t honestly say what Isabel’s ambitions are, or her hopes, her fears, her ideals. We seldom talk about heady things. We’re raising Jane, we go to the occasional party, play contract bridge with our friends, dance. Always ostensibly together. Married. But not.”

  A finger abstractly doodled on his skin as she said, “Albert is stingy and I’m generous. He has a horrible temper. He criticizes and accuses. He hates movies or dancing. And he has a slew of hobbies so he’s always puttering in the basement or garage when he’s home, or haunting the attic with his books, like some old fogy.” She gazed up at Judd’s face. “I despise him.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  She seemed bewildered. “But why not if it’s true?”

  “Say you’re ill matched, Ruth. Say you disagree and your marriage is stagnant. But hating eats away at you.”

  She stared hard, as if he’d oddly launched into Russian and consigned his opinions to strange irrelevance. And then she slid into another emotion and girlishly asked, “Oh please, can we come here again, Bud?”

  He smiled. “Anytime.”

  “And Henry’s. That will be our place, too.”

  I faced Isabel with dread. I wanted to tell her, throw myself on her mercy, ask her aid before it was too late. I had not the courage. I kept insisting to myself: “This cannot go on. It would mean a breach in my family, disgrace, unhappiness for us all.” I told myself Ruth did not really love me, could not. Our affair would have to end.

  But it did not. She called their meetings “trysts,” Judd thought of them as “sinning,” and weekly stays in the Waldorf-Astoria became so regular that Judd purchased a red leather suitcase to have available for Mr. and Mrs. Gray in the hotel’s storage room. Ruth filled it with essentials they bought together: a gentleman’s silk pajamas and bathrobe and a matching set for her, white satin slippers, hairbrushes, a hair-curling iron, a blue eye pencil, a pearl-handled nail file, five shades of nail enamel, three toothbrushes, bicarbonate of soda, a box of needles and thread, three shades of Helena Rubinstein lipsticks, Richard Hudnut rouge, perfumed soaps from Erasmic of London, Kotex sanitary napkins, a box of Midas tablets, Amolin deodorant powder, a box containing Day Dream powder and Day Dream cream, Mavis talcum powder, a powder puff, a Gillette safety razor and a tube of Colgate’s Rapid Shaving Cream, and the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, with the inscription As if you didn’t know! Your Bud. But also included in what Judd referred to as their “honeymoon bag” were items that would heighten the scandal of their relationship when newspapers published the inventory: Trojan condoms, K-Y Lubricating Jelly, vaginal suppositories, and a green rubber douche. Each item could be found in many American households but was invariably concealed, and to find them all listed so graphically on a front page made the couple, not the press, seem outrageous.

  Elaborate efforts were in fact made by Ruth and Judd to hide what they were doing. To protect their frequent, even compulsive, correspondence, Ruth arranged for Judd to send mail to her care of Spindler’s drugstore in Queens, and she instructed her regular postman, George Marks, to hand-deliver solely to her both their telephone bills and letters to “Mrs. Jane Gray.”

  Judd sought to disguise his identity by altering his handwriting from the Palmer Method, which was gaining currency in business practice, to the loopier Zaner-Bloser style he’d learned as a boy. He had supplied Ruth with his fall sales travel schedule and the address of each hotel on his eastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York routes. Often when he checked in at a front desk there was already a handful of letters waiting for him. “Looks like someone’s in love,” a girl once said.

  And he needlessly lied, “We’re just good friends.”

  But he would write: It is but this morning that I knelt by my hotel bed and swore my allegiance to my wife while promising I would never contact you again. Reciting the Lord’s Prayer for the sake of its closing plea of not being led into temptation, I felt in mastery of our situation. But having got so near you through your last perfumed letter, I feel drawn into a vortex of emotions that upsets all rationality, all quests for honor and moral integrity. Let others name it shameful and scandalous, but a love as glorious as ours cannot be wrong.
You have become as essential as breath to me.

  Ruth was generally in a chirrupy mood in her letters, filling them not just with passion and endearments but with short reviews of the movies she’d seen and flighty particulars of her days rendered in the latest slang or in parodies of immigrant accents. But in one letter she was more practical, objecting that Albert carried only a one-thousand-dollar policy on his life. Was that enough?

  Judd wrote, “Life insurance is a good investment for a family man.” And with the dullness of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Judd detailed the estate Isabel would inherit if “something perchance happened to me.” She’d be the beneficiary of around six thousand dollars in stocks and bonds, whatever real estate equity there was in 37 Wayne Avenue, and a twenty-five-thousand-dollar policy from the Union Life Insurance Company of Cincinnati. She and Jane would be well set. Ruth should demand the same.

  Consequently, in the second week of November 1925, Ruth invited to the Snyder home Mr. Leroy Ashfield, a salesman employed by the Prudential Life Insurance Company. He was a fat, round-faced man in his twenties. His trousers were too short for him and hinted at the union suit he wore underneath. His cheeks were redly patched with the sudden cold.

  Albert was sitting on a stool at his easel in the northern sunroom, drinking Pilsener from his stein and executing a rather good oil painting of salmon-pink skies and a spew of zinc-white wave rising high into mist as it crashed onto a shoreline ridge that was mostly raw sienna. Ruth held a hand over her nose because of the turpentine smell and introduced the salesman to him. Albert dabbed his sable brush into linseed oil and mixed three colors on his palette as he ignored Ashfield’s offer of a handshake and said, “But you are interrupting me.”

  “He hates that,” Ruth said. She crossed her eyes and Ashfield snorted a laugh as he sneakily glanced at the fullness of her chest.

  Albert let his hands fall in his lap and glared frostily at the salesman. “What?”

  Speeding up his sales pitch, Ashfield nervously said, “You have a thousand-dollar policy on your life that’s up for renewal, and yet you make over five thousand dollars a year.”

  Albert shifted his glare to Ruth. “She told you that?”

  Ashfield continued, “Were you to die, and I hope you never do, your family would be penniless in a few months.” Reaching into his valise, he said, “I have some graphs here from the company—”

  Albert sighed. “What are you proposing?”

  “We recommend at a minimum a twenty-five-thousand-dollar policy. Five times your yearly income. Even better would be fifty thousand.”

  “Yes. Even better for you.” Albert resumed painting. “And next thing you’ll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance.”

  “We could just concentrate on the one.”

  “But then I’d be gambling against myself, wouldn’t I? I’d be betting I’m going to die soon, and you’d be betting I’m going to live.”

  Ashfield had heard that frequently and was about to give the company line when Ruth placatingly offered, “With old Winslow Homer here so busy, could you just leave the forms for us to fill out?”

  Ashfield seemed deflated. “But you won’t know what the premiums would be. I haven’t the basis—”

  Albert clacked his paintbrush against his palette and sighed again. “What is it you require, chum?”

  Ashfield hurried to sit on the plump arm of the sunroom’s easy chair, got a pencil from his jacket, and placed a fresh insurance form on his knee. “Your full name?”

  “Albert Edward Snyder,” he said.

  “Spelled the easy way,” said Ruth. “Like ‘snide.’”

  Ashfield printed as quickly as he could. “And your birth date?”

  Albert said, “Exactly three hundred ninety years after Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas.”

  Ruth said with scorn, “Oh, you are so stuck-up!”

  “And you are stupid,” Albert said. “Evidently, so is he.”

  Ashfield said, “No, I’m getting it.” Ruth could see concentration in his forehead and his lips humming through the children’s nursery rhyme until he said with achievement, “October twelfth! Eighteen eighty-two!”

  Ruth helped out by saying, “He just turned forty-three.”

  Ashfield wrote down the birthday.

  “Congratulations on your arithmetic,” Albert said. “And now I’m finished with you for the evening.” And he was squinting at his painting as he said, “Would you leave me a form to renew the thousand-dollar policy in case I decide to do just that?”

  Ruth took the insurance forms and gave the Prudential salesman one of those It’ll be okay, honey looks.

  She found her husband in the sunroom the next morning, fully dressed and ready to leave for the Motor Boating office but examining the problems and successes in his seascape as he finished a cup of coffee. She called upstairs, “Lora! Breakfast!” and then she said, “I agree.”

  Albert grinned. “You could stop right there.”

  “No, I gave it some thought last night and you’re so healthy we’d just be throwing premium money away on some gargantuan policy. Let’s just renew the cheapest one.”

  “Exactly what I wanted to do.”

  “Will you sign?” She put the Prudential one-thousand-dollar insurance policy on the front lid of the Aeolian player piano and handed him a fountain pen. Albert bent over to precisely execute his fine signature and was about to give the fountain pen back to Ruth when she lifted the form to another signature block. “You have to sign a duplicate copy for the agent’s files.”

  Albert shook his head. “Duplicates. Triplicates.” But he signed.

  “Thanks, sweetie,” she said, and kissed his cheek. She said, “Your painting’s the berries.”

  “Which means?”

  “It’s slang. Like ‘the bee’s knees.’ Like ‘nifty.’”

  Albert studied his seascape and said, “I agree.”

  She found Ashfield in his Queens office that afternoon and said, “We’re going to renew that thousand-dollar policy we have.” She handed it to him and he found Albert’s signature there. “And my husband has decided on the fifty-thousand-dollar policy, too.” She gave him the form the salesman had started in their house and he saw Albert’s fountain pen signature on it.

  “Well, great!”

  “We were confused about the double-indemnity part.”

  Ashfield rocked back in his oak chair, glorying in the superiority of an instructor. “An indemnity is just a fancy way of saying ‘compensation for a loss.’ Since the vast majority of people pass away through natural causes rather than accidents, it’s a good deal for the insurance company to entice buyers by making a policy seem like it’s worth twice as much. Is what I’m saying over your head?”

  She smiled indulgently but said nothing.

  With self-importance, Ashfield got out a slide rule for some calculations and then groaned. “We got a problem with the disability clause. Because of your husband’s income, my company cannot pay more than five hundred dollars a month, and the fifty-thousand-dollar policy works out to pay five hundred twenty.”

  She moped. “Oh.”

  “But if you’ll indulge me,” Ashfield said, “we could fill out a policy for forty-five thousand that would include the clauses for disability and double indemnity, and another policy for five thousand, without those clauses, and everything’s hunky-dory.”

  Mrs. Snyder seemed to him either confused or conflicted. “Would I need to get Albert’s signature again?”

  “We have established that he wants fifty thousand dollars in coverage, have we not?”

  She nodded.

  “With your permission, then, I’ll just trace his signature on this five-thousand-dollar policy and we’ll change the one for fifty to forty-five.”

  Ruth smiled. “You’re a very handsome man, do you know that?”

  He was not, but he blushed and got busy with his forms.

  She said, “
My husband worries about money and hates handling our bills. Would it be possible for you to personally contact me about the premiums?”

  Ashfield leered as he said, “It would be my pleasure.” Within ten minutes the forms were finished, and with his commissions Ashfield was five hundred dollars richer. She collected the policies and immediately walked to the Queens-Bellaire Bank, where she locked them in a safe-deposit box that she registered under her maiden name of Ruth M. Brown.

  The first accident occurred that weekend.

  Lorraine Snyder celebrated her eighth birthday on Sunday, November 15th. After the noon meal, Josephine and Ruth were in the kitchen, lighting eight candles on the birthday cake, when they heard Albert yell in the dining room, “Don’t eat with your elbows on the table, Lora! This is not a cafeteria!”

  She was still crying when her mother walked out with the cake. Ruth said, “I’ll take you to lunch in the city tomorrow, Lora. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  She nodded. Ruth gifted her with an “I Say Ma-Ma” doll, a nainsook “princess” slip, and tap-dancing shoes; she got a dollar bill and A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh from Mrs. Brown; and Albert, who still grieved that she was not a boy, gave Lora a jackknife and an Erector Set. Even as her father excitedly got down on all fours in the living room to help her bolt together the struts for an imaginary railway trestle, Lora lost interest and sat cross-legged on the floor in order to chatter with the doll about the state of its pretty rompers and bonnet. Albert knelt upright and frowned at his child, then at Ruth. “Well, that went over like a lead balloon,” he said.

  “Don’t blame me. It wasn’t my idea.”

  Hurt, Albert went outside to the garage to tinker with his Buick.

  Half an hour later, Ruth got into old gutta-percha overboots and her favorite leopard-skin coat, then filled a milk glass with Canadian whisky that she carried out through the first fall of snow. She was surprised at how warm it was inside the garage and saw that Albert had installed a natural-gas space heater and a stovepipe that vented through a chiseled-out windowpane. The Buick Eight was jacked up and the left front wheel was off, and Albert was lying on a trolley underneath the car so she could see only his grease-stained khaki trousers and his high-button shoes.