Myra appeared, touched Artie’s arm, and they started dancing. Judd danced with Ruth, feeling he was dancing better than ever in his life.
Later they were all at the punchbowl. Ruth was flushed. Judd was becoming somewhat drunk. Again, everybody was around Artie, talking about the crime. Judd signalled, trying to shut Artie up. But it was as though his excitement flashed between Artie and Ruth in an alternating current. Perversely, he did not entirely want Artie to stop. Judd heard himself laughing loudly at a monkey-gland joke about the castrated taxi driver. He was losing control of himself. In sudden need of escape, he went upstairs.
A moment later he realized Ruth had followed him. So this was his room. “How strange,” she said. “It isn’t like a room to be lived in at all.” It was so like a museum, with all these birds in their display cases. The collection was the work of ten years, he told her.
“But, Judd,” she said, “weren’t you ever a boy?”
The word shocked him. What did she mean?
Of course it was a thing boys did, collecting insects and birds. But the way he had done it, so seriously. “I just meant, you never seem to have had a real childhood. Always so precocious.” Her words, peculiarly, misted his eyes. Judd didn’t let anything show; he offered her a Beardsley book to look at, with risqué illustrations. But scarcely glancing at them, Ruth said, “You know, Judd, I can see you must feel all alone in your family. They’re not at all like you – your father and brother.”
She understood him, she understood him truly, he told himself; she was the first one, the only one. Then he felt a sweep of panic. He must get out, get out with her, escape! No, he was becoming intoxicated; he had been drinking since afternoon, mixing whisky with champagne. But Artie was certainly going to give everything away – he should stay and watch Artie! No, it was hopeless; he should flee. “Let’s get away from this,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere.”
Ruth would perhaps have wanted to stay longer at the party, yet in another sense she was an outsider. It was really an affair of the big South Side millionaire families, and from some of the girls she had already sensed a slightly hostile gleam. If she were to become truly close to Judd, if anything really developed between them, then she would have to be brought into his circle in some other way.
In the car he put his arm around her and they laughed. Being outside, away from those gasping, grinning faces, Judd felt all right again. He tried to think of a place to go – perhaps this was even a night for consummation; he should have brought a suitcase just in case. The way Artie said he always did.
Judd turned west; out on the Cicero road there was a place with a dance floor and booths. Maybe even rooms upstairs.
They danced. Then they were sitting and talking intently, again about love. Judd began sardonically: “My brother and that self-satisfied girl of his – could people like that really be in love?”
Ruth brought him down neatly. Could someone as conceited as he be in love? He said “touché”, and she pressed his hand and smiled, and then she said the essence of love was completely knowing each other. She hoped if she ever loved someone, they would always tell each other everything, no matter what they did, even infidelities.
Her words were banal, Judd told himself – she was after all ordinary – and yet the tug of her was more powerful than ever. He told himself that the two of them really looked like an ordinary nice college couple. Was that what he wanted so much, wanted to tears?
Something far inside him was laughing. It was as though he were with Artie, laughing at the sight of Judd sitting here with this girl. Then a thought came, one of those awfully simple things you suddenly recognize, things that everyone else must always have known. To experience everything, to experience every possibility of life – why, that included not only the unusual, the bizarre, the depths of evil, but it should have included the other side too; the other range of experience should have come first. How could he, now? How could he ever experience the most everyday common feelings, love and truth, with a girl like this? How could he know whether after all this common thing might not be the most important of all? An overwhelming sense of deprivation came to him because of what he had missed. And he had gone too far away now ever to secure it. Why had he not at least tried that ordinary experience before he went this far?
In the dim pink lamplight, Judd knuckled his eyes, as if he had a headache. Ruth suspected there were tears. But why? Why?
“Is something very wrong?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“I can’t.”
And Ruth began to feel that it was more than youthful melancholy, more than the dark self-dramatizing in men, when they assume a Hamlet moodiness and seek comforting. This was something serious and real. But what evil could she know? Seeing Judd so profoundly depressed, there came to her only the dread bogeys of childhood fantasies, used to explain any threat of great sorrow. They were the primal threats of girlish imaginings. What would I do if I loved a man and there was insanity in the family? There even appeared the spectre of the ghastly disease: perhaps he had caught syphilis in his running around with Artie. But she cleared all that away.
No, perhaps much more reasonably Judd was still disturbed about the occurrence on the beach. Being alone with her like this, that powerful male sexual desire that boys had to cope with, so much more powerful a desire than women’s, must be upon him again. It was a need that made men so miserable. He was perhaps afraid it would again force him to do something that would spoil things. But ugly as the moment had been, Ruth wanted to comfort Judd, to tell him she understood. This was the compelling thing of nature, and especially if you loved – if you began to have a feeling for a man – you only sympathized with him for it. True, that moment on the beach had had another kind of strangeness, disturbing, for an instant even terrifying, but Judd had mastered himself for her sake, and in a sense that made Ruth feel he did respect her. If he was “different”, even moodier than Sid, this was perhaps what attracted her; this was the challenge of him. Everyone knew he was brilliant, and it would take an extraordinary girl, an extraordinary woman, to be equal to a man like Judd. And he had never found one, he had been so lonesome. Now perhaps she could give him the first happy feeling of true friendship, and even love might develop.
“Judd,” she said, “if it’s something about me, you mustn’t worry. You’d never hurt me.”
He shook his head. “I know I’d hurt you. I’d make you miserable.”
She touched his hand, and moved her head forward with the tender smile of a woman who has no wish to belittle a man’s suffering but yet sees that other times will come. “Let’s dance,” she said.
Then later, I picture them sitting in a car in a small woods along the Desplaines River. The despondency has come over Judd again, even more darkly. Between kisses, Ruth chides him, “But, Judd, what’s so terrible? You’re young, bright, rich; you’ll get what you want out of life.”
“You don’t know,” he says. “I just feel-”
Gradually she begins to feel his hurt, to feel it powerfully, deeply, to know that there is some unknowable sorrow stemming perhaps even from the brilliance of his mind – his mind apprehending some fated evil that ordinary people cannot see, some inescapable world sorrow. And Ruth begins to believe that anything must be done to assuage such a hurt that comes only from very life itself. If sexual release may lift away even a little of this dreadful pain in man, then the whole structure of purity becomes meaningless.