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Judd hesitated. “What is it?”
“Remember that Johnny at Creedmoor Psychiatric? The orderly? He stole it for me. We know what it does to his patients. I want to see what effect it has on you.”
He held up the glass, inspecting its contents. Some fine grains of powder still swirled and clouded the whisky and descended in it like flakes of snow. “And I do that for what reason?”
She was all sweetness as she said, “Because I asked you to.”
Judd drank it down.
She asked, “Aftertaste?”
He winced. “Yes, it’s bitter.”
“Here,” she said, and repeated the earlier process with the other powder. “Sample it first,” she said.
Judd just dipped his tongue to it.
“Can you detect it?”
“Yes. Like that sweet syrup in Chinese food.”
“Okay, maybe that’s better. Drink it down.”
“But what will it do to me?”
Her face was innocent, even daft. “I’m not sure.”
“I could be poisoned.”
She fiercely told him, “Oh, just do it, Judd!”
Judd obeyed. And soon he was affected. At first he couldn’t stop pacing the room, but he felt he was on stilts and he finally had to lie down. Wherever he looked, the hotel room seemed acres wide and as high as a cathedral. Air molecules struck his eyes like cold raindrops. His hearing changed so that Ruth’s sentences seemed to find him from a great distance. She was telling him she had to get home to Queens Village that night. Judd gallantly walked her to the hotel room’s door but then fell onto the bed, and he was sitting by the telephone and staring at the intriguing topography of his fingertips when Ruth called up from the lobby to find out how he was.
Hearing his slurred sentences and senselessness, she said, “Don’t leave the room! Stay there! Sleep! I’ll be back for you in the morning.”
But Judd must have gone out because he had a faint memory of a funny little lunchroom and a Reuben sandwich, and around four in the morning he found himself back in the room offering the Waldorf-Astoria’s night porter all his dollar bills.
Ruth called him at nine on Saturday morning. “And now how do you feel?”
“Terrible. Everything’s veiled. I can hardly navigate.”
“Well, you need to snap out of it. Don’t go to work. Call in sick. I’ll be there in a jiffy.”
An hour later she found him sleeping in a filled bathtub, its hot water now cold and his head just inches away from drowning. She woke and washed and toweled him. Judd got his Gillette safety razor and insisted on shaving himself, but she felt his face and informed him he already had. She ordered room service coffee and Bayer aspirin for his headache as he dressed. And then she smiled. “Well, I nearly finished you, didn’t I?” And to his silence she said, “Oh, don’t pout!”
Judd was a wreck, but he could totter forward if his hand braced him against the wall. Ruth hugged his waist as if he were an invalid and gave him instructions about each shift and forward movement. She paid a cashier eight dollars for the room and the chipper girl said, “Please join us again, Mrs. Gray.”
Walking frailly down to Pennsylvania Station with her, Judd said, “You have achieved supremacy, you know. I have relinquished my will and judgment. Because I’m so helplessly in love.”
She disdainfully said, “You’re mewling.”
“And you’re demeaning!”
She deflected that by noticing a fierce orange chow chow that was leashed to a fire hydrant and was snarling and leaping at shying passersby, his jaws and fangs chomping at the air near their bodies until the taut leash hauled him by the neck to the sidewalk and he got up even angrier. “Oh, look at the doggie!” Ruth said. “Want to pet him?”
Hearing her, a shocked man said, “That chow’s vicious, lady!”
“Oh, applesauce!” she said. And she called in that soothing, silken stroke of a voice, “Hi, sweetie! Hi, baby!” as she crouched toward the bulky dog that now cocked his head with curiosity. She got on her knees and face-to-face with him, and he sniffed her hair and then licked her. She giggled to Judd, “Don’t you love dog kisses?”
