She nodded, and hot tears fluently ran down her face.
“And Albert?”
She carelessly said, “Oh, he just vomited all night.”
“But why would you do such a thing?”
She shrugged and sobbed, “I wanted to see what effect it had on him.”
“How’d you get the poison?”
She caught her breath and said, “Actually, it was only an overdose of medicine I got at Spindler’s.”
“Still, it would have been murder!”
She couldn’t stanch her tears even with the linen table napkin. Restaurant staff were frowning and confiding about them. Harry Folsom was dining alone and filling out a hosiery order but heard Judd’s raised voice and scowled from across the room.
“Don’t yell at me,” Ruth said. “I wasn’t trying to kill him. I was just angry and irritated. And it was like an experiment.”
Judd fell back in the booth and stared at Ruth, fully appalled. “I find your experiment loathsome. Wild, thoughtless actions like that—it’s really beyond the pale.”
“I hate him so much, though. There’s no love, no friendship, no interest in me. He either treats me like his servant or his whore.”
And then she halted and her face changed, and it was as if he’d turned a page in a book, or rather, as if he’d been reading one book and then gone to another, for she glared at him with a ferocity he’d never seen before, stood up from the table, gripped her muskrat coat at her neck, and said with so much venom she seemed to hiss, “But I guess I had you figured wrong. I guess you’re a coward and a sissy. You won’t help or defend me because Albert’s a he-man, and you’re just a low, cringing sneak who’s out to get his jollies with me, nothing more.”
Judd was so hurt and astonished he could only gape as she spun away and hurried to the entra
nce. He was getting up to rush after her when she stopped with a hand reaching out to the door and then seemed to crumple. She fell to her knees in a faint before Judd could get to her. With jostling emotions, Judd crouched over Ruth as she lay unconscious on the floor and he saw a face that wore the innocence of a sleeping child.
Waiters and onlookers crowded around as Judd gently patted her cheek and said, “Ruth. Ruth, wake up.”
Harry Folsom scooped crushed ice from the smorgasbord and folded it inside a wet hand towel that he stooped to put on Ruth’s forehead.
She seemed to gradually feel it and fluttered her eyelids and then focused on Judd and smiled. “Hi,” she said.
“You fainted. You said hurtful things.”
She ignored that to say, “Hi, Harry.”
“Hiya, Tommy. You feel okay?”
She gazed up at all the strangers surrounding her. “I feel like a celebrity.”
Harry Folsom smiled. “Well, maybe that’s your destiny, toots.”
Judd later wrote in his memoir:
As to conditions in my home, we had reached the stage that so many couples reach in their married life. We were just floating with the tide. The overpowering consciousness of guilt caused me to lie awake night after night, trying to work out my problem until I exhaustedly fell asleep. And vowing that the thing could go on no longer. I did not know that I was so steeped in this poisonous infatuation that it ultimately would hold me in the grip of death.
Ruth knew he idolized her and she loved his infatuation. But she loved even more the exercise of power over Judd, an intoxicating authority and governance she’d never felt in school, on a job, with Albert, or even with Lorraine. She’d softly tease Judd’s naked torso with a pheasant feather until he was giggling and excited, and then she’d shock him with a hard slap to the face. She’d kiss him with great tenderness and then abruptly spit into his mouth. She called him cruel names during intercourse so he’d ram her in a hot rage. She made him grovel and feel off balance and then she’d coo and caress him as he rounded into a fetal position at her feet.
Eventually, she brought two quarts of ersatz Scotch whisky up to their room in the Waldorf-Astoria and affectionately watched him as he finished a water glass of it.
She asked, “How is it?”
Judd coughed. “That’s the strongest, queerest stuff I ever tasted.”
“This will help,” she said. She got her green alligator handbag and took out two small vials of powder. She dumped one vial into the water glass and filled it with more whisky. “Bottoms up,” she said.