She picks up her scarf and her handbag. “Aren’t you going to ask him up to introduce him?” her mother demands.
“Another time.” And Ruth runs downstairs to where Judd waits in the hallway.
Coming down, she makes a kind of illumination – her reddish hair, her yellow pleated skirt, her bare forearms, the streak of her scarf, giving a passing gladness to the hall. Ruth feels friendly – curious, she would say – toward Judd. Despite his reputation among the co-eds. Some say Judd gives them the creeps.
Ruth hasn’t found him at all repellent. He is somehow a stray person, and her upbringing has been in a house of warmth toward strays. Her mother and father are the kind who, some years back, attended Emma Goldman meetings and collected Yiddish poets visiting from New York, or stray anarchists, or intense-looking men with long hair who were vaguely “studying”.
So what others find odd or even disturbing in Judd rather attracts Ruth. And physically, though Judd is quite short, he is not smaller than she; they danced quite well together. He is something of a change from her gangling reporter.
There is in her, that day, the unworried adventurous confidence of a girl who has a devoted steady and yet is uncommitted, who may tease herself that perhaps there is yet something unknown, something supreme, in romance to be encountered.
With his curious perfection of manners that contains a touch of condescending irony for the custom itself, Judd opens the door of his car for her. Then he walks around to his own side.
As she settles into the fancy car, her skirt rimming her knees, Ruth smiles to Judd. “I almost expected to see you with Artie,” she says. “You’re practically inseparable, aren’t you?”
“Oh, I have a life of my own, too,” he parries. As he drives away with her, he wonders at the unusual feeling of glee that wells up in him. Is this a feeling of happiness? More likely an enjoyment of the power in himself, of his secret imaginings. Can there really be something special about this girl, about having her sitting next to him, and feeling her interest in him? Wryly, Judd permits himself to appreciate the image of the pretty girl and himself, gay youth breezing through the town in his Bearcat!
She too must be feeling the image, for she leans back with a delighted sigh, saying how perfect the day is for a ride. Then Judd has a suggestion: “Instead of going to a restaurant for lunch, why not pick up some hot dogs on the road?”
And Ruth says, “Oh, that sounds scrumptious.”
He heads through the park and along the lake. A hackneyed refrain comes into his mind. “A pretty girl is like a melody.” He drops one hand from the wheel and catches her knowing smile. Ruth lets her hand lie in his, against her thigh, so warmly firm through the short pleated skirt.
She remarks that she has been wondering about his friendship with Artie, because they really are so different. Artie acts like a college sheikh, while he is so quiet and even shy. Of course, as everyone says, Artie is very brilliant, and she supposes there aren’t many people around who-”
“-can meet my lofty requirements?” Judd says. “There is no sense in false modesty.”
That’s true, she agrees. The average man at the university is interested only in football and his frat. “You’re not a frat man, are you?”
“No,” he says.
“Sid practically dropped out,” Ruth remarks.
“Is Sid your lover?” Judd asks.
“Oh” – she gives him a candid glance – “it’s not that I believe strictly in the conventions. But I don’t believe in rushing things either. I mean, if I were really certain I was in love and we wanted each other, and for some reason we couldn’t get married, then I should give myself.” There is something almost prim in the way she makes this announcement. It excites him.
“And you’re not sure you’re in love?”
“Oh,” she says thoughtfully, “I sometimes feel as if it’s already settled that I’m going to marry Sid. And then sometimes I feel as if some wonderful unknown thing still has to happen.”
“Does he intend to marry you.”
She laughs softly. “Even after he gets out of school – a reporter doesn’t earn enough to get married on. And Sid wants to write. And… I don’t know.”
“I see.” They are silent for a moment. “You don’t mind my being so inquisitive?”
“Don’t you have to find out if the coast is clear?” Again her soft laugh.
“Is it?” He reflects how cleverly this female has put him into the rôle of a possible serious suitor. Judd finds himself saying, “Perhaps Sid will win the reward on the murder case – he’s working so hard on it. And then you can get married.” Why has he mentioned the case? He is getting as bad as Artie.
But it seems a normal subject to her. “Oh, is there a big reward?”
“The papers said several thousand dollars, I think.”
“I don’t think anybody needs a reward to try to catch them,” she remarks. And after a musing silence: “I’m not really ready to get married. There are still things I want to do.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, go abroad.”
She recalls that he is to go in a few weeks, and she says she envies him, and Judd offers the expected persiflage about her coming along, and she says she would if she only had the money, and he finds himself saying, “Well, I’ve got an idea how to get the money for you! I’ll confess to the murder! I’ll get the reward – and that will pay for your trip!”
“There’s only one thing wrong with that” – she takes up the game – “you wouldn’t be able to come along!” And then: “Would you really do that for me?”
“Why not?” he says. “And it would be an experience to see if I could make them believe me.”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t accept such a sacrifice,” she says, but then her voice drops. “It’s cruel for us to be joking about such a thing.”
“Why?” he demands. “Why is it cruel to joke about death? After all, what is one creature more or less in the world?”
Her mouth opens. But then, as though catching on to his line, she says, “I think you say things just to shock people, to be different.”
A tiny spasm of irritation runs through him at her words. Unaccountably, Judd thinks of his mother, of the first time he brought down a bird, a robin, with a B-B gun they had given him, as a little kid. How Mother Dear softly explained to him that he really didn’t want to kill the bird for no purpose. People made guns that could kill, it was true, Mother Dear had said, but they used their guns always for a reason. To protect themselves from wild beasts, or to hunt for food. Or to study animals, like the mounted birds in the museum. As she talked, Judd had felt angry, cheated. And the same shadowy feeling of resentment has come over him now at Ruth’s sententious words.
With a secret pleasure, he heads for the stand where he stopped with Artie. “They’ve got wonderful hot dogs here,” he says.
Ruth leans back. “Oh, I’m so hungry I could eat an elephant.”
“With mustard and piccalilli?”
“Everything!”
She sits waiting as he goes to the stand. She looks so right, the pretty girl in the car. Judd tells himself she isn’t precisely beautiful; it is rather a supremely blooming quality that gives her such appeal. It is the sex urge that is causing him to endow his reactions with aesthetic value. Why can’t this be just a date; why can’t he simply take a nice girl out on the dunes?
He turns down the side road toward Miller’s Beach, stopping the car at the edge of the sand. Ruth gets out; she stands for a moment, breathing full, her blouse rising with her breath. Judd takes the binoculars from the side pocket.
“Is this where you come to watch the birds?”
He tells her it was here that he discovered the Kirtland Warbler.
“Discovered?”
The species hadn’t been seen for decades, he informs her, and was assumed to be extinct. “I don’t go by other people’s assumptions,” he says. It is this kind of remark that makes people dislike him, Ruth realizes. But can’t they see that he has to do it, from some need, some weakness?