She fetched his cheek with the tenderness of her hand. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “We’ll have time for greetings when we’re married. We’re just a golden world of two now. That’s paradise enough.”
She liked chop suey so they went to a Chinese restaurant Sunday night. She gifted Judd with all her cash—thirty-four dollars—because he’d exhausted his. Waiting for the food, she asked, “Remember telling me about Audrey Munson when we first met? She’s from around here, isn’t she?”
“Close. Up north, near Lake Ontario.” Judd bent over a match to light a cigarette.
“And how was it she tried to commit suicide?”
Exhaling smoke, he said, “Bichloride of mercury tablets.”
“Well, I was reading about them, and there are so many household uses! You can swish it in your mouth
for gum diseases. You can swallow tiny amounts for chronic diarrhea and dysentery. It’s a skin lotion, a gargle—”
“And it’s poison,” Judd said. His face was a sheriff’s.
She smiled. “Oh. You caught on.”
“With jars on my hands, I could catch on.”
“But just think of all the accidents you could have with it if you weren’t careful.”
“Oh, Albert,” he said. “You poor bastard.”
“Won’t you take me seriously?”
Judd looked off to the kitchen. “Ah,” he said. “Our food.”
She watched him pour whisky into his water glass, then wedge his cigarette into the notch of an ashtray. She ate in silence, fuming, and Judd fumed over that. A five-member band was there, playing hits like “Linger a While,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” and “There’s a Yes! Yes! In Your Eyes.” And suddenly Ruth grinned, with sparks in her own flashing, yes-yes eyes, as if her mood had been chemically altered. She said, “Hasn’t this week been heavenly? Please say this is how happy we’ll be from now on.”
Surprised, he said, “Yes. Always.”
She noticed that the dance floor was still empty, and when the band started “Somebody Loves Me,” Ruth stood and yanked at Judd’s hand, saying, “Okay, Bud. You’re up. We haven’t danced since we left.”
Judd joined her in a fox-trot, but the Chinese manager hurried over and told Judd, “There no dancing allow Sundays.”
Reddening with fury, Ruth screamed, “Why are you getting in the way, you Chink? Why can’t you let us alone for one night? Why are people always interfering?” She scurried over to their table, collected her muskrat coat and purse, and ran off, jaggedly crying, as Judd worriedly paid the bill.
But she was waiting for him just outside the front door. Ha-haing. “Wasn’t that funny?” she said. “See his face?” She squinted and formed buck teeth and skewed her face grotesquely.
“The fellow was just following rules,” Judd said.
She frowned in another kind of infuriation and said, “You can be so dull and disappointing, Mr. Gray.” She quickly stalked ahead of him on her clacking high heels toward the Onondaga and Judd did not want to tag along, so he found the Elks club, where he calmed himself with four rounds of liquor. An hour later, he let himself into the hotel room and found Ruth tilting into the telephone on the dresser. She genially wiggled her fingers at him in hello as she said, “Oh, that’s so nice, Lora! I’m so glad you had a good time. Mommy has, too. But I’ll be back home very soon.”
Albert was reading Field & Stream magazine in his attic roost when she concluded ten days with Judd on Wednesday evening. Although he noticed his wife’s ascent on the stairs, he just smoked his cigar and flipped the page on a freshwater fishing article. There was gray in his hair, and hours of squinting on the sea had caused wrinkles to flare out from those steel-blue eyes, but Albert seemed more handsome now than when he first halted in front of Ruth’s typewriter at Cosmopolitan and invited the pretty nineteen-year-old to dinner. She’d said yes and he’d swiftly left, and she grinned at the hoots and envy of the other office girls. All of them so ignorant of Galahads like him.
Albert finally seemed to notice her and inquired, “Was Canada all you dreamed it would be?”
She caught an insinuation in the question but airily answered, “It was lovely.”
“You’ll have to tell me all about it,” he said, still reading.
“Are you feeling okay now?” Ruth asked.
“It was just a bad cold.”
“I’m glad.” She’d prepared for an inquisition but it seemed there would be none. “I hope you got my birthday card.”
“Yes,” Albert said, and as he took the cigar from his mouth he seemed to try to slay his wife with a scowl. “And you sent it Special Delivery? You seem to think I’m made out of money.”