A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (9 page)

Walking up the gangplank, Judd encountered perhaps a hundred nautically costumed guests in the fashion business gabbling and laughing underneath the hanging ship’s lanterns and taking weenies, canapés, and Taittinger champagne from waiters attired like seamen. Judd was greeted by a buyer for Bloomingdale’s and hugged by a buyer at Macy’s, but there were few others he knew. The haute couture models—who were then known as mannequins—strutted around the schooner to parade the finest of the fall designs, but no lingerie was on display and he did little more than feel the fabric and inquire if one girl was wearing a Bien Jolie. She was not.

A gaudy flag of sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres had been laid out and he filched a few. And then he saw Ruth there, far off near the prow. Alone and dismally staring at him, but glamorous in a filmy, lyrical white evening gown encrusted with fiery little beads that were like dewdrops. She saw he’d seen her and she became demure, glancing away.

Judd noticed a few men watching her, getting up the courage to approach, and he stole two tulip glasses of champagne from a passing tray and affably strolled over.

“Hello, Ruth. You look exquisite.”

She smiled. “Really? I’m feeling self-conscious in this fashion crowd. I have no idea what the fall styles are.”

“Hemlines up; higher waistlines; straight silhouettes.” He held
out a champagne glass but she shook her head, so he drank it down and handed it on to a waiter. “How’d you get in?”

“I still have friends at
Cosmopolitan
.” She squinted beyond him. “I was expecting Harry—he invited me, too.”

“I guess I’m his stand-in.”

“Well, you’re quite an improvement.” She shyly glanced down. “You got my ravings?”

“Oh, they weren’t that. I couldn’t reply because I was on vacation in Sagaponack that week. And then when I got back I was swamped with work.”

She faced him solemnly as she said, “And you were feeling guilty. You worried about your hoity-toity reputation, and you wondered if you’d lose Jane if your wife found out about us.”

Judd laughed in a high-strung way, but she seemed to find nothing funny. She looked him flush in the eye. Ruth’s were intent and glistening and electric, and he felt cowed by them. “So,” he said. “You can read minds.”

“Aye-aye,
Captain
.”

Judd instantly felt foolish for his skipper’s cap and finished his second glass of champagne. And then he leaned on the starboard railing and gazed out at the scraps of moonlight writhing on the night of the river. “I haven’t been able to rid myself of you, Ruth. All I have to do is shut my eyes and your gorgeous face and figure are there. I find myself just wanting to say your name aloud. There was a time when my office phone rang and I imagined how glad I would be to hear your lovely voice in the earpiece.”

Just as Jane would often imitate his stance and manner, Ruth crossed her forearms on the railing, and she leaned slightly into him, giving him some of her weight in a delicacy of acknowledgment. His hand slid around a waist far more taut than his wife’s.

Judd continued, “I felt ashamed of myself for our fornication and my disloyalty to Isabel, and I was too much a coward to call
you or agree to see you because I find you so irresistible I couldn’t govern my emotions or good behavior. But now I feel ashamed of my disloyalty to
you,
to the joy you give me.” He twisted his head to her. “I’m crazy about you, Ruth.”

“I have a yen for you, too,” she said. But she retreated from the railing and hurried aft so hastily in her high heels that he was forced to scurry like a terrier to catch up. “Don’t talk,” she warned, and he honored that caution as they strolled the deck.

Judd looked out at a ferry slowly churning up the East River toward the Sound, the swift traffic and glittering lights of the Queensboro Bridge, the flicker and iridescence of the city skyline overlooking all the racy adventures of a sultry August night. She seemed not to notice the tribute of masculine stares as she walked past. There were glints of moonlight on her tears.

She finally recited sentences that seemed lifted from
Romance
or
True Story
magazine. “I have stayed up late just recalling how I fell in love with you at Zari’s. With your sweetness, your sympathy, your interest in me. My life has become intolerable, Judd. All the happiness that I have lacked for years is now completely lost. Albert calls upon my body only for his own needs. But I indulge him because then I can fantasize that it’s you, my Loverboy.” She was crying but she was trying to smile as she turned to him. “Are you aware I’m yours? Really, do whatever you want with me. I’ll run away with you. Anything.”

There was some hooting festivity near the mizzenmast as five half-naked showgirls from
Earl Carroll’s Vanities
were wickedly introduced by the acidic celebrity Peggy Hopkins Joyce, who was then thirty-two and on her fourth wealthy husband. Joyce was saying in an aside, “You know, I sometimes lie awake in the afternoon—because we do not generally rise before two—and I gaze at Gustave in the other bed and
My
God, I think,
whatever made me marry
that?”

There were gales of laughter, but Ruth just said, “She’s hitting too close to home.”

And Judd asked, “Shall we go?”

She nodded.

Judd hailed a horse-drawn carriage for a romantic ride to the Waldorf-Astoria on Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street. She wanted to kiss him out there in public but he primly insisted, “We cannot lose our heads.”

She noticed the green patina of the hotel’s oxidized copper roofing, and Judd told her it was called verdigris.

She asked, “Have you heard that expression ‘Ignorance is bliss’?” Then she smiled as she held up a shushing finger to his lips.

She admitted she’d never been inside the neighboring, brown-stone, Victorian hotels that the Astor family had joined into one. The famous George C. Boldt, who was said to have invented the modern hotel, had retired as general manager and was replaced by a gregarious Norwegian woman whose name, Jorgine, had been Americanized to Georgia. She’d talked with Judd before, and she grinned as she said, “Hey, sailor. What ship?”

Judd took off his skipper’s hat and said he didn’t believe she’d met his wife, introducing Ruth as Mrs. Jane Gray and signing the register that way.

Walking up the staircase, Ruth whispered, “Aren’t you feeling naughty?”

“Deliciously so,” Judd said.

She looked down and said with amazement, “This carpeting is soft as a sponge!”

“John Jacob Astor called it the most luxurious hotel in the world. Of course, that was thirty years ago.”

She grazed her fingers along the flocked wallpaper, then stooped
to praise a tazza urn on a hallway credenza. When they reached their room, she fondled the silken draperies, the tapestried furniture, and the woven fabric on the wide bed. She flipped off her high heels and flopped down on it and smiled. “The springs don’t creak!”

“Were you excruciatingly poor as a child?” he asked.

She seemed to take that as an insult. “Was I too dizzy?”

“Oh no, darling. It just makes me feel so good to give you things you haven’t had.”

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.