Every man and every woman has a testing image, like the photographer’s painted setting with an opening for the sitter’s head. How will she look every morning, across from me at the breakfast table? Orthe girl is pictured in some graceful attitude of undressing. Or in the midst of a kiss, her lips parted. Or mothering a baby.
With Judd, the test image was the fantasy scene of rape that so haunted him. Was this the one to do it to? How would she look afterward, lying overcome, her clothes in shreds? Would he feel touched? Would love spread through him? Would he turn to her tenderly to devote a lifetime to removing the horror of his act?
The image of violence was perhaps a final assertion of his darker self, wrestling him down to keep him from a love that might alter him. And yet the violent fantasy had in it something of that very love. For below the image was a throbbing sense that therein lay release – afterwards he would no longer need Artie. This would be an action entirely on his own, just as Artie had done things on his own.
It was a struggle of wish and counterwish – in the same action to make himself equal to Artie and therefore more than ever a partner, and yet to make himself free of Artie through a woman.
Hardly identified, these images swept through him as he raised his heavy lids and looked at Ruth dancing with Artie, and she sent him a smile.
When we reached Ruth’s house, I told the others I’d walk home from there, and Artie made the expected remarks.
It wasn’t extremely late, about two. We could have gone upstairs. But this hallway was fairly private; only one other family lived in the building, above the Goldenbergs.
We embraced, and she said, “You liked Myra, didn’t you?” I laughed and teased her about Judd. We kissed a real love kiss, tenderly, without opening our lips, and then Ruth had to talk about him. I could sense her frowning a little in the dim hall. That Judd, she said, he was really brilliant. She had never met anyone so brilliant – squeezing my hand – but there was also something disturbing about him, something sad. Then she added, a bit archly, that he had asked her to lunch tomorrow. But of course I needn’t worry about competition, as he was going to Europe in two weeks.
I told her she was free to marry any millionaire she could get, and we kissed the last kiss, which was always frankly passionate. Then she would say, “Oh, Sid, I wish we really were lovers,” and then we would break because it was too much to endure, and then she would hurry upstairs, though I might pull her back by her fingertips for one more such embrace. Then I would walk home, resisting the impulse to grab a cab and indulge in the traditional after-date release of a whorehouse.
THE BOYS DROPPED Myra at the hotel, and then they picked up a paper. Chief Nolan still maintained that the suicide solved the crime.
“You didn’t give that bum a push?” Judd said to Artie.
“Naw, not this time.” Artie grinned. “We should have thought of it, though.”
It would have been the perfect idea. Again, Judd had that fleeting, melancholy sense that they were not as perfect as they had thought themselves.
Judd felt a sudden sag of energy; he didn’t want anything, not even to stay with Artie. He wanted only some absolute oblivion, perhaps not exactly death, but something cleaner, deeper than sleep, something like a permanent hibernation, crawling away somewhere, some place close and warm, to have no thoughts.
And I see him, remaining quite late in bed, drowsing, and rubbing against the bedclothes, and indulging in fantasies. There comes the image of Ruth. Has he made his date with her in order to do it? But there is a strong counter-feeling about this girl. He feels her almost as not a girl. A person. He has a certain eager curiosity about how it will be with her at lunch.
Then as he tries to seize and analyse the sensation, the sex thoughts grow over it.
Suppose only a short time is left to him, in freedom, even in life. Suppose he and Artie may soon be caught and locked up? (He never sees it farther than being locked up in a cell.) But then, if he is locked up for life, what of the things he has left undone, untried? Most insistent of all is the rape. Much stronger than the pressure had been for that deed with the boy. That deed had not been in him at all; he had told himself it stood for the rape; but in the act itself, no end had come. Had it been a wasted substitute for the deed that was still there in him, clamouring?
Should he tell Artie? Do this one with Artie?
No. Alone. At least, go on a way toward doing it alone.
Judd pictures himself driving to her house to pick her up. Take the pistol along, as Artie would? The lunch date is known; her mother would know. If he did only the rape, without the killing, a girl wouldn’t tell. The soldiers dragging the girls – the killing wasn’t always part of it. But an absolute part of it is the girl being a virgin. He has to find out for sure at lunch. After all, she goes out with this newspaper fellow; you can never know.
The maid knocked.
In an odd voice, constricted, the maid said there were two police officers downstairs who wished to speak with him.
Judd told himself he was delighted to observe there was no panic in him, none whatsoever. Undoubtedly they had traced the glasses. Now everything depended on his savoir-faire. Should he phone Artie, warn him? No, they might already be watching the telephone.
As he dressed, without undue haste, Judd could not help noticing a subtle fleeting sense of pleasure that they had come.
He had slept late; the old man had gone downtown, and Max was out golfing. Lucky they were out. Judd descended the stairs.
Two policemen stood there. On their faces there was nothing to go by; or did he detect a shade of deference for the neighbourhood, the house? The nearer one said Captain Cleary would like to ask him some questions. At the South Chicago station.
The easy way they talked, it couldn’t be that they had anything serious. “South Chicago?” Judd repeated as though completely mystified.
The cops exchanged glances, and now the second one said, respectfully, “He just told us to bring you in for some questions.”
“Is it for speeding or something?” He smiled. They smiled back but didn’t answer. Judd shrugged, and acted indulgent though a trifle worried as anyone should be when called for by the police. If only Artie had been watching!
Feeling the two of them bulking huge behind him, Judd led the way to the door. Would there be a police wagon? No, a Marmon.
One policeman got into the back seat with him. Judd glanced hurriedly around. The street was inordinately quiet; kids were still being kept indoors. Nobody had seen, he guessed.
Judd offered his Helmars. The cop’s fingers seemed almost too thick to grasp a cigarette. With a comforting snort he remarked, “It’s just something routine.”
But why the South Chicago station? From the way the papers had it, the case was being handled by the chiefs downtown.
Then Judd recalled, on our date the night before, my talking about interviewing the captain out there. About nature students. That was certainly it. Somehow they had got his name. Because of that punk reporter. That smart-alec reporter, Sid Silver, had to go nosing around. Rape his girl for him, would serve him right. And Judd imagined himself telling the whole thing to Artie, afterward, and Artie’s laughter.
But something could go wrong. And if they kept him under arrest, there would be no rape; in fact, Ruth would even be stood up on her lunch date.
Finally the car halted in front of the two-story brick station. It looked a lot like the Hyde Park station where he had been taken as a kid when some cops picked him up in Jackson Park with his.22, shooting birds. The old man had straightened that out quickly enough. Dragging a well-brought-up boy of good family into a police station! Indeed, Pater practically had the police apologizing, afraid of what he could do to them with his influence. “Why, this boy is already a recognized ornithologist!” And the old man had got him the only permit in the entire city, to use his gun in the parks. “You see?” His father had wanted him to be impressed. Judah Steiner, Sr., could handle anything, get anything he wanted in Chicago. Well, let the old man get him out of this one! And there arose in Judd that curious mixture of resentment and expectancy that came when he thought of his father. This whole thing was like a final challenge between them.