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“Oh, did that sound practiced?”
Kitty asked what “Bien Jolie” meant.
“‘Very pretty,’” Judd said.
Kitty frowned. “Isn’t that très jolie?”
“Aren’t you the smart one,” Harry said, and grabbed her torso more tightly to him. Because of the heat, she wriggled away.
“I haven’t any French,” Judd said. “But I’m told the bien makes the jolie more intense.”
“Like ‘very, very pretty’?” Ruth asked.
Judd grinn
ed. “Like you.”
Ruth shied from the sultry pleasure of his gaze.
“And flattery like that is why he hauls in five thousand dollars a year,” Harry said.
Kitty gasped. “Five thousand dollars! Jeepers!”
“It’s just a number,” Judd said, and noticed Ruth’s interest. Judd noticed, too, that Ruth still had not lifted a glass with them, that her first iced drink was sweating onto the homey blue-and-white checkered tablecloth. “Are you a teetotaler, Mrs. Snyder?”
She seemed demure as she said, “I just pace myself. There’s nothing worse than a full day of drinking, then waking up next to some guy and not being able to remember how you met or why he’s dead.”
She shocked them into raucous laughter and the fat waiter took that as an invitation to finally take their food orders. But Harry Folsom noted that the four of them seemed to be having so much fun together that they all should flee the torrid city and head up to his shady porch in New Canaan, Connecticut. Mrs. Kaufman liked the idea, but Judd excused himself to go back to work, and on a glancing hint from Kitty, Ruth said she wanted to catch the train to Queens Village.
Exiting the booth, Judd asked, “Are you taking the Long Island line?”
Ruth said she was.
“I’ll walk you to Penn Station.”
She said nothing as they strolled west to Seventh Avenue. Looking at their reflections in the shop windows, Judd noticed that she would be at least two inches taller than he even without high heels. But she was glamorous, too, and the gin had made him zesty and loquacious, so as they walked down to 33rd Street, Judd filled the silence with chatter and facts about Pennsylvania Station. Did she know it took up seven acres and was the largest indoor space in America? And the enormous waiting room? Judd had heard it was inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla.
She seemed amused. “You know a lot, don’t you?” It did not seem a compliment.
“I have no idea why I’m so nervous around you.”
She wryly said, “Well, I’m ‘very, very pretty.’ Any man would be.”
Walking through the grand entrance, Judd noted for Ruth the Corinthian columns, and then the huge clock framed by a pink granite pair of sculpted females. “Day” was fully dressed in the flowing drapery of ancient Greece and was carrying a harvest of giant sunflowers, while “Night” was shaded by a shrouding cape she held over her head and she was naked from the waist up, the firm breasts inspiring some men there to become clock watchers.
“That’s Audrey Munson,” Judd said. “She was the highest-paid model in New York. All the great sculptors used her. You can find her everywhere in the city. And she appeared in moving picture shows, fully nude. Inspiration was one. And Purity. She was breathtaking. But a doctor she knew crazily murdered his wife to have Audrey, and at first the police suspected her of conspiring with him. She was finally cleared, but the gossip was devastating. She changed her lodgings to Mexico, New York, near where I was born, in Cortland, and tried to take her own life by swallowing bichloride of mercury tablets.”
Ruth was concentrating hard on what he’d just said. “She’s still alive?”
“But no longer right in the head, I’m afraid.”
“I feel so sorry for her.”
Was that where he was steering with that story? Sympathy? Judd wondered if he just wanted to use the word “nude” in Ruth’s presence.
“She is beautiful,” Ruth said.
“Like you,” Judd said.
