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“Yes.”
She felt the shift in the mattress as he rotated to stub out his cigarette. “I feel like killing him,” she repeated. Judd’s thoughts hung like his cigarette smoke. She could feel his sentences forming but in his hesitation they soon deteriorated, and he finally offered only, “I have to get to sleep.”
She woke with him kissing her forehead, fully dressed and shaved and scented with Eau de Cologne. “I’m off,” he said.
“Oh, please, won’t you stay here and play?”
Rather sternly, he said, “This is a business trip, Ruth. I owe it to my employers.”
She noticed then that he held a tumbler that was half-filled with whisky. “Are you drinking?”
“Hair of the dog that bit me,” he said, and swallowed all of it before he left the hotel room.
With Judd for full days now, she realized just how much liquor he consumed. Something to get over his hangover the first thing in the morning, then something in his breakfast cup to “give his coffee legs,” a hit from his flask and Sen-Sen licorice breath fresheners before he carried his sample cases into a shop, gin and ginger ale with his lunch, more hits from his flask through the afternoon, and then a full-on job of drinking after five.
She worried so much about his intake that after sleeping through their first days in Kingston, Albany, and Troy, she decided to accompany him on his Thursday sales calls in Schenectady, just waiting outside in the Chevrolet at the first shop, but getting so bored—the car radio had not yet been invented—that she described her mouth with Kissproof Lipstick and strolled into the other shops with him. She was introduced as his wife, which excited her, but then Judd added other lies that she found less delightful: that she graduated from Smith College, that she was a high-paid fashion model, that “You’ll see that hourglass figure of Mrs. Gray’s in our next Bien Jolie catalogue.” It was like she wasn’t good enough as is.
She considered Judd’s spiel too formal: “Your choicest gowns,” he’d say. “Don’t they deserve a foundation no less perfect than that afforded by this exquisite one-piece corsette?” And he could be overly teacherly: “Excuse me, miss, but our line is pronounced Be-Ann Jo-Lee.” But he flirted with even the not-pretty clerks and shopkeepers, and he could seem so intrigued and compassionate, frowning as if he were listening hard and feeling each of their joys and sorrows. Judd congratulated them on their changed hairstyles, flattered them for their shaped and painted fingernails, their choice of perfume, and those jujus and fashion accessories that other men failed to notice. And even though Ruth was watching, the women were so affectionate, each joyfully hugging Judd in greeting, kissing his handsome face, their hands fondly finding his forearms and chest as he conversed in his sane and soothing baritone.
She fidgeted. She felt she was suffocating, even that her throat was shutting. And her heart was hammering so loudly that she felt sure people even a few feet away must have wondered at its noise. And then Ruth fainted.
She woke on the floor some minutes later and found Judd kneeling over her, fanning her face with his fedora. Oh so concerned. “You son of a bitch,” she said.
“Ruth, please, darling. Don’t say that. You’re hysterical.”
All his adoring women were glaring down at her. Ugly sluts, the lot of them.
Ruth got some rest that afternoon, but she was still plagued with the certainty that he would not have resisted the solace and reward of sex given so many opportunities on his route. After all, Henry Judd Gray had established himself as a man who cheats on his wife. And Ruth was jealous enough that after he’d registered them into the Montgomery Hotel in Amsterdam, she sought to get even with his presumed infidelities by insisting she expensively call home on the Benjamin & Johnes account. As she heard the Queens phone ringing, she asked, “Where would I be by now?”
“Oh, Quebec somewhere, I suppose.”
Judd relaxed on the hotel bed and finished what was left in his flask as Ruth shouted over the long-distance line, “Hello, Mama? I’m in Quebec! Montreal! Yes, it’s very beautiful! In fact it’s bien jolie! And everyone here is so intelligent! Even the little children speak French!” Ruth’s palm covered the mouthpiece as she told Judd, “She didn’t get the joke.” And then she shouted, “But, Mama, how are things there? How’s the baby?”
Judd shot up from the bed and got back into his jacket and hat. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and walked a few blocks in Amsterdam’s downtown before he found the still-open hardware store where he knew he could purchase whisky in the basement. A hijacked quart of Johnnie Walker Scotch cost him a full day’s commissions, but he thought high-end whisky would give him gentler hangovers.
She was getting off the telephone when he got back. “Albert’s ill,” she said.
“Very?”
“Josephine says so.”
Judd filled a water glass with Scotch as he asked as a formality, “Would you like to go back?”
“Nah. Let the Old Crab die.” She was afraid she’d shocked him, but she found he was smiling.
“Wow,” he said, reflecting on it. “We could have a real celebration then.”
She walked to him and held him close as she whispered into his ear. “Oh, I love you so much right now. Shall we have sex all night long? Wouldn’t that be swell? Would you like that?”
“Would it be manly to object?”
She stared into his flannel-blue eyes with grave sincerity. “Are there wild fantasies you’ve had? Anything at all you’d like to try out?”
With a hint of shame, he said, “Yes.”
She grinned. “Then let’s.”
Each night on Judd’s sales route they stayed up later until Judd was waking at noon, still exhausted and in a whisky haze. After Amsterdam there was a sales call in Gloversville, followed by a jaunt through the gaudy woods alongside the Black River to a ladies’ everything shop in Boonville and three lingerie stores in Watertown. And on Saturday evening it was Syracuse, where Joseph Grogan, the front-desk manager of the Onondaga Hotel, was familiar with Judd and so pleased at finally meeting Mrs. Gray that he rewarded them with a palatial room that seemed fit for a Spanish grandee. Judd woke the next morning to the chiding of church bells but found jazz on the radio and ordered up coffee and apple pie for them both. Lounging in their matching silk pajamas, he confessed to Ruth that he would have liked to take her on a Sunday drive south to Cortland, where he was born, but he still had relatives there who might see them. And he told Ruth that when he was in Syracuse he generally looked up a high school classmate named Haddon Jones who sold insurance there, but though Judd’s old friend had been told she was in a gruesome marriage and he even had seen Ruth’s photograph, Haddon had not yet been given her name, and Judd felt it was not the right time to introduce them.
