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Ruth laughed.
“But it feels so unfunny, Ruth! We have known each other for only a year and a half, and by whatever measure you choose, my life is in what the biplane pilots call a ‘death spiral.’ And yet I wouldn’t change a thing. You are an enormity—”
“Well, thanks a lot.”
“Oh, I don’t mean it that way, darling. I mean you have become the object of everything I do. The source of all that I am. Am I making any sense?”
She held his hands in hers. “Only if you meant to compliment me.”
“Really, it’s not flattery. It’s practically theology.”
The orchestra started “Someone to Watch Over Me” and Ruth requested the dance even in his drunkenness. She took him out to Zari’s dance floor and clung to him. Alcohol’s depressant effect caused Judd to jealously notice other men watching Ruth’s body as she moved, but she just joked, “Hey, it’s better to be looked over than it is to be overlooked.”
The skillful dancer he was could do nothing more than a box step, but that only caused Ruth to cling to Judd more tightly. After a while she shifted against his erection and slyly whispered, “I can feel Henry getting interested in me.”
But Judd was in a wretched and romantic mood. “I have no idea how this story ends, do you? Are we just going to continue like this?”
Seeming to ignore him, she sang along with the orchestra about a man who was not handsome but who carried the key to her heart. She sang that she wished the guy would get up to speed, because she was in need of his help.
And then Judd fell off balance.
Ruth caught him and said, “We need to plan.”
They stayed overnight at the Waldorf-Astoria. Judd called Isabel and said he was too drunk to get home. She found it easy to believe him. Ruth failed to inform her husband of her whereabouts and Albert’s sisters would later claim that was a sign of his great love for his wife, that he so often gave her such freedom.
Judd struggled out of his jacket but could do no more, so Ruth undressed him and asked what his plan for getting rid of The Governor was.
Tilting off balance, Judd said, “I’ll confront him and we’ll get into a fight. Have it out.”
“Well, no offense,” she said, “but you’re not strong enough.”
“Prolly not.” Concentrating hard, Judd finally decided on, “Remember that one movie we saw?”
“No.”
“Sure you remember. That movie? The guy gets hit over the head?”
She unbuckled and unzipped his trousers and yanked them down. “Lift up your right leg. And now your left.”
“A bur-la-gry.”
“Burglary.”
“Right,” Judd said. “I hit him over the head. And we make it look like … that word.”
“A burglary.”
“Uh-huh.”
Alcohol poisoning finally felled him where he stood and Judd woke up in his underwear and gartered stockings six hours later. He found Ruth kneeling in the half-filled hotel bathtub and rounding forward to rinse an avalanche of white foam from her hair. An amber bottle of Blondex shampoo was on the floor. She rose, twisting a tawny hank, and gasped with shock when she glimpsed Judd slouched against the doorway. “Oh! You scared me.”
“I scare myself sometimes.” He raked his hand through his hair and excused his exit to unconsciousness by saying, “The drink took a drink.”
She sat back on her heels, water gleaming on her breasts, and she grinned at his attention as she soaped a washrag. “Are you going to keep your promise?”
Judd knelt beside her and stole the washrag. “Which was?”
She allowed him to bathe her right arm, hand, and fingers. She smiled. “Like they say, give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you.”
