Judd had taken along the PerfumedGarden in French, and he translated a few of the best parts to Artie while they played a couple of hands of casino, a nickel a point, Judd winning. And all the time they were drinking, and Artie was getting looser, the way he had of clowning so you couldn’t tell exactly whether he was tight or only pretending to be tight. Artie talked of all the girls they would have in Charlevoix – he had them lined up; he knew some terrific lays on the farms around there; it would be a great summer – and all the while Judd kept feeling freer and bolder, and the pounding was in him.
He hardly knew how – perhaps he was half drunk himself, maudlin – they were patting each other. “Old pal.” Maybe singing. Then they started to go to bed. Artie lost the toss for the lower, but refused to abide by the decision. He dived into Judd’s bunk, and Judd started to push Artie out; and then horsing around like that, wrestling, they lay extended together to catch their breath, and when it began Artie made no sign, pretending to be half-drunkenly half asleep. Then Artie laughingly muttered a few dirty names, and let it happen as if he were too drunk to know or care.
In the morning they said nothing about it. The Straus car was at the station for them, and they drove up to the terrific showplace the Strauses had on the bluff over the lake, a reproduction of a castle on the Rhine.
They had adjoining bedrooms.
“Junior,” Max called from the hallway, and Judd leaped up from the bed and went to the door, to be told about their going downtown. Then he forced himself to sit at his desk again and look at his law notes.
As he hung up the receiver after calling Judd, Artie experienced one of those dark surges of feeling, as if he could have sent a wave of death through the telephone and seen Judd stricken by it, paralysed, turned to stone. Electrocution by telephone. Himself, the master criminal. He’d call up his enemies, and then they would be found dead, telephone in hand.
He saw Judd, sitting like that. And picturing it, Artie felt a flash of comprehension: Judd wanted to be caught and executed. For if you left things around like that, the glasses, the typewriter, you wanted to get caught. Like the kind of girl that leaves hairpins all over the back seat.
So Judd was a terrible danger to him. Rage and grief shuddered through Artie. Why did that punk bastard have to go and spoil the whole thing! All the other things he had done by himself, were done without a trace. The last one in winter, the ice-cold night, the upturned coat collar covering the face, the tape-wound chisel in his pocket, hard against his hand, then the body falling off the pier into the lake. Had he done it, or only pictured it to himself?
That was the sad part of doing things all by yourself, on your own. You lost them. You really needed someone else to be in a thing with you so that the deed stayed alive between you.
Then all the little things he and Judd had done together, the fires and the thing at the frat house in Ann Arbour – all those things rose up in Artie and pleaded for Judd. Pleaded for dog-eyes Jocko. But Artie wasn’t sure. He would decide about Judd after they had got rid of the typewriter. Perhaps, if the feeling came over him… He put his automatic into his pocket.
Artie did not fail to call out good-bye to the family, flashing a charming smile at Mumsie’s guest. Then, though it was the wrong direction for Judd’s, he walked past the Kessler house.
In that house, were they getting any clues leading to him? Ah, let them follow him now! Instead of leading them to his accomplice, he would throw them off the track! And Artie turned up Hyde Park Boulevard, toward Myra’s. Let Judd sit waiting, worrying.
In the gilded lobby of the Flamingo there sat the usual two groups of little ladies in retirement, and Artie could sense the buzz among them as he passed toward the elevators: there goes the brilliant Straus boy, youngest university graduate, they were saying, and surely plotting about catching him for their nieces and granddaughters.
Myra’s mother herself opened the door, welcoming him, but with an air of confusion. “Why, Artie! Hello, Artie. It’s so nice to see you, but you know Myra’s just going out.”
Myra bubbled out from her room; she had not quite finished dressing, and was holding a sash for her beaded green frock. He and she always laughed as soon as they saw each other, a kind of guilty conspiratorial laugh, like the times as kids when they were almost caught playing doctor. Yet despite the laughter, Myra’s eyes were always melancholy, befitting a poetess, and she talked in breathless rushes of words, curiously like Artie.
Her date was a goof, she said, a football player. She had been roped in, but “When he is silent, I can imagine he is a Greek god. Oh, I want to have lots of lovers, like Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
While Myra rushed back to her room to find a poem she had just written, Mrs. Seligman managed to inquire conventionally about his family. How was his mother? How was his father’s blood pressure?
Fine, Artie said, everyone was fine, but Mumsie was rushing to Charlevoix tomorrow morning with little Billy, because of that terrible crime – wasn’t it a monstrous thing? And spying a huge box of candy, Artie poked his finger into one of the chocolates. “Aha! Liqueur!” he cried, sucking the finger, and then poking it down the entire row of candies while Mrs. Seligman giggled in horror – “Really, Artie!”
“He’s wacky!” Myra called. He walked into her room.
Myra thrust herself up against him and kissed him briefly, moving the tip of her tongue, and gyrating her abdomen to show she knew how to be wicked. She broke off and pulled back, looking at him intently with her huge brown eyes. “Is anything wrong, Artie?”
The girl made him impatient sometimes with her understanding looks. He said, “Nah, I just got the willies,” and she said he had to hear her new sonnet. “My Unfaithful Lover” was the title; Artie picked it up and read out loud. “I share my lover with the wingspread sail-”
She shared her lover with the sleet, the gale. He said it was swell.
They were, of course, not lovers. And yet she was in love with Artie; she had loved him since she was a little girl. They were remote relatives, fifty-eleventh cousins they called themselves, Myra always explaining, with a bubble of laughter, that anyone whose family owned Straus stocks was a cousin. Her father had been one of the founders.
She called Artie “lover”, as a kind of promise within herself that it would one day be he. She was sure she knew the Artie others didn’t know; she knew an Artie who was not always shining and being smart, but who was torn. This she cherished as a love secret. Artie was much deeper than he let on.
So now he said there was nothing wrong, he just was sick of the world, had a touch of the blues, and that reminded Myra of a terrific place she had heard about, downtown, where they had a wonderful blues singer. It was in a cellar on Wabash. Why not go there tomorrow?
He agreed; maybe they would make it a double date.
Myra groaned. Not Judd.
Well, he had sort of agreed to help Judd celebrate his Harvard exams tomorrow. Why did she always have to pick on Judd?
“Maybe I’m jealous.” Myra laughed without meaning anything. But she simply couldn’t see why he let that dreary drip hang around.
It was not a new argument. Especially if you went in a crowd, she said, Judd was so unlikable, with his conceited ideas, and his eyes that never blinked.
Aw, Artie told her, Judd was a brilliant little sonofabitch, and the reason he was so unpopular was that people knew they were inferior to him.
“I don’t care how brilliant he is, he gives me the creeps,” she said.