“Nah. Intoxicants don’t agree with me. But I love seeing everyone else having a good time.”
Slouching in his dining chair, he got his cigarettes out of an interior coat pocket and clumsily lit one.
She cocked her head like a child as she asked, “What kind?”
He exhaled gray smoke and faced the front of the package for her. “Sweet Caporals. I got hooked on them at fourteen when each pack carried a baseball trading card.”
“And weren’t there ‘Pretty Lady’ cards before that?”
Sheepishly grinning, he said, “Well, yes. I guess I got hooked on the cards at six.”
“And thus was a job in lingerie begun.”
Seeming embarrassed, he said, “So tell me how you met your husband.”
She said she was a secretary at the Tiffany Commercial Art Studio and was instructed to contact an art editor at Cosmopolitan but mistakenly placed the call to the art editor at Motor Boating in the same building. Albert was the lout who yelled that she’d interrupted him and she must be very stupid and just kept screaming insults until she hung up. But then she was called back and he was a changed man, apologetic and funny and suave, with a faint German accent. “Are you as pretty as your voice?” he’d asked. And he invited her to the magazine’s offices on West 40th Street. She was hired that afternoon as a stenographer, proofreader, and copyist in the secretarial pool shared by Motor Boating, Cosmopolitan, and The American Weekly. It was July 1914. She was nineteen years old. Soon Germany was involved in the Great War, and Albert changed the spelling of his last name from Schneider to Snyder, “as if that would fool anyone.” She was warned that he was a womanizer. But she dated him anyway, for he was cultured and educated, a manly connoisseur with a degree in art and graphic design from the famous Pratt Institute. And if he was hot-tempered and thirteen years older than she, and his favorite things to do, like fishing and sailing and going to the symphony, bored her to distraction, he also seemed the father she’d never had: a good provider who was vital and sensitive and very involved in her life. On Ruth’s twentieth birthday, Albert gifted her with a box of chocolates and she discovered inside a little jewelry box and a one-carat diamond solitaire fixed on a golden ring.
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?”