Free A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion by Ron Hansen Page A

you so irresistible I couldn’t govern my emotions or good behavior. But now I feel ashamed of my disloyalty to
you,
to the joy you give me.” He twisted his head to her. “I’m crazy about you, Ruth.”
    “I have a yen for you, too,” she said. But she retreated from the railing and hurried aft so hastily in her high heels that he was forced to scurry like a terrier to catch up. “Don’t talk,” she warned, and he honored that caution as they strolled the deck.
    Judd looked out at a ferry slowly churning up the East River toward the Sound, the swift traffic and glittering lights of the Queensboro Bridge, the flicker and iridescence of the city skyline overlooking all the racy adventures of a sultry August night. She seemed not to notice the tribute of masculine stares as she walked past. There were glints of moonlight on her tears.
    She finally recited sentences that seemed lifted from
Romance
or
True Story
magazine. “I have stayed up late just recalling how I fell in love with you at Zari’s. With your sweetness, your sympathy, your interest in me. My life has become intolerable, Judd. All the happiness that I have lacked for years is now completely lost. Albert calls upon my body only for his own needs. But I indulge him because then I can fantasize that it’s you, my Loverboy.” She was crying but she was trying to smile as she turned to him. “Are you aware I’m yours? Really, do whatever you want with me. I’ll run away with you. Anything.”
    There was some hooting festivity near the mizzenmast as five half-naked showgirls from
Earl Carroll’s Vanities
were wickedly introduced by the acidic celebrity Peggy Hopkins Joyce, who was then thirty-two and on her fourth wealthy husband. Joyce was saying in an aside, “You know, I sometimes lie awake in the afternoon—because we do not generally rise before two—and I gaze at Gustave in the other bed and
My
God, I think,
whatever made me marry
that?”
    There were gales of laughter, but Ruth just said, “She’s hitting too close to home.”
    And Judd asked, “Shall we go?”
    She nodded.
    Judd hailed a horse-drawn carriage for a romantic ride to the Waldorf-Astoria on Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street. She wanted to kiss him out there in public but he primly insisted, “We cannot lose our heads.”
    She noticed the green patina of the hotel’s oxidized copper roofing, and Judd told her it was called verdigris.
    She asked, “Have you heard that expression ‘Ignorance is bliss’?” Then she smiled as she held up a shushing finger to his lips.
    She admitted she’d never been inside the neighboring, brown-stone, Victorian hotels that the Astor family had joined into one. The famous George C. Boldt, who was said to have invented the modern hotel, had retired as general manager and was replaced by a gregarious Norwegian woman whose name, Jorgine, had been Americanized to Georgia. She’d talked with Judd before, and she grinned as she said, “Hey, sailor. What ship?”
    Judd took off his skipper’s hat and said he didn’t believe she’d met his wife, introducing Ruth as Mrs. Jane Gray and signing the register that way.
    Walking up the staircase, Ruth whispered, “Aren’t you feeling naughty?”
    “Deliciously so,” Judd said.
    She looked down and said with amazement, “This carpeting is soft as a sponge!”
    “John Jacob Astor called it the most luxurious hotel in the world. Of course, that was thirty years ago.”
    She grazed her fingers along the flocked wallpaper, then stoopedto praise a tazza urn on a hallway credenza. When they reached their room, she fondled the silken draperies, the tapestried furniture, and the woven fabric on the wide bed. She flipped off her high heels and flopped down on it and smiled. “The springs don’t creak!”
    “Were you excruciatingly poor as a child?” he asked.
    She seemed to take that as an insult. “Was I too dizzy?”
    “Oh no, darling. It just makes me feel so good to give you things you haven’t