She swayed with him, feeling his genteel lead, and saw Harry in a hoofing four-step and frowning with jealousy over the head of his wife. Still eyeing Harry, she tilted her head to Judd so intimately that her mouth fluttered his ear like a kiss as she confided, “We had to cut our Shelter Island vacation short. Albert was caught necking with a yacht club wife and got slugged by her husband.”
Judd jerked his head away, his face rucked with vexation. “But that’s awful, Ruth!”
There was something tricky in her wet eyes. Was she lying? She nodded like a shamed unfortunate and huddled into his masculine symmetry to say, “I was so humiliated. Lora and I left that afternoon and Albert came later with his tail between his legs. We haven’t spoken in days. And then when I was on my way here, his first words were to accuse me of having an affair.” A hot tear slid down her cheek and she wiped it with the flat of her hand. “And then he said he marveled that he’d stayed with me for so many years and said any man who wanted me was welcome to have me. And other hateful things.”
Judd held her in a fatherly way. “Oh, Ruth. I’m so sorry.”
She eked out, “It’s okay.” She tucked her head against his neck and noted Harry Folsom’s wild jealousy, Mrs. Folsom’s scorn. She’d not noticed that the orchestra was playing “What’ll I Do.” She laid her hot cheek against Judd’s gray flannel shoulder and sang along with the girl in the evening gown onstage.
Around ten, the girls from the Madison Avenue shop left Zari’s and got on an uptown bus, and the out-of-town retailers joined Harry Folsom and his wife in their Packard for a jaunt out to Hyman’s nightclub on Merrick Road in Long Island. Ruth hurt Harry’s feelings by saying she wanted to call it a night, as did Judd, and they shared a taxi to his hotel at 33rd Street. She’d walk to Pennsylvania Station from there.
She shifted uneasily on the taxi’s bench seat. Seeing his curiosity, she explained, “The fabric hurts my sunburn.”
“But haven’t you been in the sun all summer?”
She seemed embarrassed for some reason.
“I have my golf clubs in my office and a jar of sunburn cream in the bag. Would you like it? We’re very close.”
The Benjamin & Johnes offices were in a twelve-story building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. There was a gruff night watchman who thought Judd was up to no good, but then all Judd needed was the elevator up and his Schlage key for the entrance.
She said, “I feel like a child on an escapade.”
Judd hung his fedora on a coat rack as he insisted, “We’re not doing anything wrong.” Switching on one bank of overhead lights, he tilted with drunkenness as he walked ahead of her down a herringboned oak hallway to a fundamental office of four paired desks, one shared telephone, a stack of Benjamin & Johnes catalogues, a persuasive store mannequin of the female torso, and pinned-up New York Times advertisements for Bien Jolie undergarments. Judd failed to notice Ruth shutting the Venetian blinds as he unzipped the pouch on a khaki, leather-trimmed golf bag monogrammed HJG. He stood up again with a jar of Dr. Bunting’s Sunburn Remedy, a Baltimore product that would soon be renamed Noxzema.
She asked, “What’s in it?”
Lifting his spectacles, he focused hard on the jar’s ingredients. “Camphor, menthol, and I think it says eucalyptus.”
Shyly, and with just a hint of a smile, she asked, “Will you put it on me? I can’t reach.”
“Certainly,” he said, and fell over into a goofy bow.
“I have to take off some things.”
“Oh.” And then with recognition, “Oh! I’ll go out.” But first he pulled open a door on the right pedestal of his desk, fetched a bottle of Canadian whisky, and carried it out in his right arm’s crook. Judd fell back into a secretary’s chair just outside the office, unscrewed the whisky cork, and took a long swallow, liking the scald in his throat, and forgetting why he was there. Some minutes passed and he fought sleep. He twirled in the oak chair to see the city lights and hunched over to find the moon. And then he heard her call, “Okay. I’m ready.”
She shocked him by standing in his office with her lovely back and rump revealed, very naked and very tan where her bathing suit failed to cover her, very pink wherever the skin was newly discovered by the sun. Without rotating, Ruth said, “I have no idea what I was thinking. I was hurt and mad and I rented a motorboat at Jones Beach and steered it far out to sea and it was hot so I took off all my clothes and just floated.”
Judd could only stare at her fine body for half a minute, stunned and aroused by its beauty. He tried to seem both fastidious and jaunty in case he was misinterpreting the moment. “You poor thing,” he finally said. “You’re fried.” His hands were shaking as he took hold of the jar of Dr. Bunting’s Sunburn Remedy and spooned out a glob with his fingers. He hesitated before he reached out and touched the hot skin of her left shoulder blade.
“Ooh!” she said. “Icy.”
Softly applying it, he felt the stirring of an erection, and he looked down with satisfaction at her firm, round rump. “Remember me talking about that famous sculptor’s model, Audrey Munson?”
She turned her head slightly left. “Yes.”
“You’re as breathtaking as she was.”
“Well, of course. I’m bien jolie.”
“Oh, right. We’ve established that, haven’t we?” His healing hand had reached her waist and he hesitated again before going farther. “May I?”
She shuddered as if she were sobbing.
Ever cautious, he said,
“I’ll stop.”