by Meyer Levin
Artie started to tease him about Ruth, making cracks.
“Shut up,” Judd said.
“Wow,” said Artie. “This is getting serious.”
“Aaw, cut the crap!”
He looked at Artie, and all at once his friend’s face appeared to him the way he had seen it the very first time when his mother brought him over to Artie’s house: he saw it as long-jawed and pasty. A tumult of revulsions and fears raced through Judd; everything, everything in the whole past of creation was wrong. In that moment he knew Artie, knew him objectively, as a being apart from himself. In the thing that they had done, they had not been doing the same thing. Artie had been doing something else, something he had done before, like the one in the lake, and the ones Artie had made dark hints about – the campus fellow who had been found shot, the taxi driver found castrated. Artie was driven by some demonic force, and in himself it was not the same. Had everything, then, been a gargantuan mistake? When he had believed himself to be participating, joining with Artie, had they really been separate, doing their separate things? If that could be so, then what – what had he been doing there? The possibility was a gasping void. Judd closed it out of his mind, and yet found it continuing into another thought: when people imagined they could be immersed together performing the act of love together, it was also like that: each was doing a separate thing.
Judd was silent the rest of the way home. Artie once or twice took gulps from the flask, then brooded. He got off at his house, saying in no obvious connection, “All right for you, you -.”
The tumultuous sense of some impending change, something tremendously imminent, remained in Judd through half the night. He could not analyse it, though he attached it to Ruth. In the morning the feeling was still with him, and with it he felt a compulsion to talk. If he met Ruth, he would perhaps babble out everything.
Instead, he found himself talking about her, about being in love with her. On impulse he was visiting a young married member of his birding class, Mrs. Cyrilla Sloan – and his excuse for ringing her apartment bell on South Shore was the delivery of a book he had promised her.
It had come upon him, that morning, that he must leave no promise unfulfilled; it was as though he were propitiating the nonexistent gods of luck.
Just after his ten-o’clock class, he found her looking morning-fresh, neat; Ruth would be a young wife like that, a secret bird in her nice neat little package of an apartment.
Mrs. Sloan offered him coffee, drew him into conversation. And presently Judd was talking in a rush, more easily than to Aunt Bertha, saying he was considering changing his plans – perhaps he would get married, perhaps he would get a job as a teacher instead of going to law school. Of course, this might displease his father, but -
“Don’t tell me you’ve fallen in love, Judd!” She smiled warmly as though she now understood his sudden visit.
And as he described Ruth, Judd became convinced it was really love – he wanted only to be with Ruth; all the tumult in him was the result of some complete change-over.
She kept smiling, letting him talk, telling him that she was glad he had found someone to be interested in, that she had always felt he needed someone. But he mustn’t be too emotional, she said; he mustn’t let his emotions run away with him. For now he was talking about getting married secretly, about going away somewhere to live.
The tumult in him was subsiding a little. Judd had no idea why he had made up all these things about family opposition, going so far with the drama.
It seemed to him that she held his hand lingeringly, perhaps invitingly, as he was leaving. Only by telling her he was in love he had caused her to change toward him. It was as though he had inadvertently used a password for the closed little world of ordinary people.
As he came out of the apartment building Judd felt relieved, eased as never even by intercourse. He heard himself whistling.
He spied Ruth with a little group in Sleepy Hollow, and lay down beside her on the grass. The crowd would begin to talk of them as a pair. It was an idyllic scene.
Someone had left a newspaper lying on the grass, and after the first glimpse of the headlines, Judd made himself avoid looking at it. They were still churning, churning over the city. But he would be safe. He was changing; he had to be safe to find out what he was going to be like.
The house had a different atmosphere; there were plants all around, huge green potted palms and rubber plants, and there were vases filled with flowers. Against an entire wall of the so-called library were the catering tables. Cases of real stuff from Canada were stowed in readiness under the boards. Max, hustling everywhere, showed Judd all this while telling him what a good buy he had got on the liquor, and that Sandra would be down in a minute; she was resting.
Then, as though she had sensed the young brother’s arrival, Sandra appeared. She was a statuesque girl, and each speech seemed to have been thought out in advance so that every word was precise. “So this is the genius of the family,” she said, offering her hand and pressing his for a second, with proper sincerity. “I wonder if you know how proud your brothers are of your accomplishments! I understand you speak eleven languages.”
Max said that Sandra was interested in literature, especially the French, so they would have much in common. Judd tried her quickly, mentioning Huysmans, Verlaine, Anatole France. She had not read any of them – if she had even heard of them – but she declared she would make a mental note to look them up, and you could see her inscribing the titles on her mind.
Max was looking at them almost desperately, wanting everything to be right and fine, and Judd even felt a surge of warmth toward his brother on this day. “Looks like it’ll be some party!” he remarked stupidly, and suddenly wished nothing would go wrong. If they were going to catch him, let Max have his dumb engagement party first unspoiled.
The dinner was in grand style, the full table, all the aunts and uncles, and the old man at his best, even genial – a real feast of the high bourgeoisie, Judd told himself, and when he went to fetch Ruth he prepared her in that vein.
She looked as if she belonged perfectly in the crowd, he was surprised to find – her dress, shoes, all. He introduced her as he might an ordinary date. But Aunt Bertha gave Ruth her knowing scrutiny, then told him privately, “I don’t blame you – she’s charming. This time you can’t be blamed.” Then she added conspiratorially, “You haven’t told anybody? Nobody knows?”
“I haven’t told even her,” he said. He felt gay, suddenly crazily elated.
The whole South Side was there, all right, the Weisses and the Strauses in force, including Artie’s entire family. The moment Artie came in he began to make a noisy play for Ruth – “I saw her first!” Then Judd had a peculiar feeling, as if everything he had been building up in the last few days about himself and Ruth was an act; in Artie’s presence it all fell apart.
Artie was taunting Ruth about that reporter, Sid. Did Sid know Judd was giving her the big rush? “Oh, Sid’s so busy I can’t even see him to tell him.” She laughed, and then Artie was on the crime again, full of the latest reports, and – hey, here was an idea for her boy friend, the reporter. What about the other unsolved killings on the South Side during the last year? That university student who had been shot, and the young man who had disappeared, just a few blocks from here, in April, Perry Rosoff – maybe the same fiend was responsible for them all! She ought to tell Sid to investigate the connection.
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 con
trol 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.
She wants, by some magic womanly touch, to dispel his ache. Yet it is not her ignorance or even her own innocence, she feels sure, that impedes her. This trouble of his is something uncommon, as Judd is uncommon. This intensity of pain is not merely what other men feel.
She draws his head down to her bosom. “Tell me, tell me,” she whispers, desperate over her own inadequacy – a girl trying to play the rôle of a woman. He is silent, caught in some bleak indescribable horror.
Her dress has small buttons all down the front, and in a chaotic wish to help him, Ruth undoes the buttons and draws down the edge of her chemise. His cheek rests against her bare breast. As it touches her, Ruth feels a warm pulse through her entire body, and in her sex, and she wonders whether now, now she will become a woman. His lips touch, and she wishes that her body could draw from him all the hurt, all the grief of living. She places her hand on his head. She feels a slight shudder going through his body. Is he weeping?
Judd sees the boy. For the first time, he sees the face of the dead boy – a kid’s fac
e gazing up at him from the night-time water. And staring at him with a child’s unblinking candour, the face becomes his own.
Ruth is white-faced. She sits utterly still. And she hears Judd say, “I wish I had never been born.”
The words stagger Ruth; there is a strangeness in the intonation. It is not the way people usually say this.
She can only press his head tightly, feeling in herself a great distress that she cannot help this man, a great tugging to relieve his suffering, and a frightened wonder – can this be love?
Judd puts his hand on the gearshift. With an effort of will, he starts the car. Once the machine is in movement it is easier. He even is able to tell himself he has done a noble thing. He could have had Ruth tonight, and he refrained. Perhaps it will count, in a kind of bargain exchange with his fate. Perhaps it will help him not to get caught.
On the next day – the day Lieutenant Cassidy secured the list of Seemore spectacle owners – Judd was telling Artie how he had made Ruth. Judd assured himself he was talking that way only to keep himself from really talking about her to Artie. So he told how he had lifted her out of the car. Artie’s face wore a loose, sceptical look; no one was taking him in. That meant he was believing it. “You bastard!” Artie cried. “Why didn’t you take me along? You know I always had my eye on her; I knew she was tail. Let’s the two of us get her tonight-”
Judd shrugged. He wasn’t interested in her any more, he said.
“Okay, you bullshitter. I don’t believe you ever laid her.”
That was when the maid came in to say some gentlemen wished to see Judd.
Artie and Judd were in the library playing casino, not even for money; the débris of the engagement party was still around them. Now Artie sank far down in his chair, holding his cards in front of his face.
