A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion by Ron Hansen Page A

for me to justify termination.”
    Ruth joked, “Don’t he talk good?”
    Judd leaned forward to tell Syd in a slurred way, “It’s not just lust or passion for me.”
    “I haven’t made that accusation.”
    But Judd would not be overruled. “Ruth, she’s my ideal of womanhood. She’s a
goddess
.”
    After that he blacked out. Waking up fully dressed in a corner of the hotel room the next morning, he saw he’d vomited on his shirt and shoes. Ruth was in her silk kimono and sunshine filled the room. Room service had delivered coffee and cinnamon toast that morning. Holding his aching neck, he said, “I feel awful.”
    She glanced fleetingly at him, then sourly added cream to her coffee.
    He got out of his jacket and began unbuttoning his foul shirt. “Why did you let me stay like this?”
    “We argued.”
    “About?”
    Ruth told him they’d discussed heading down to Elkton, Maryland, where lax marriage regulations meant they could have gotten hitched.
    “And what did I say?”
    “Well, actually you couldn’t get the words right, but I think you thought that would be bigamy.”
    Judd was untying his shoes. “Even drunk I’m law-abiding,” he said.
    “Oh yeah. To a fault.”
    “Meaning?”
    Ruth told him she’d confessed she wanted Albert out of her life, gone, buried, dead, and Judd had yelled that she was insane. Raged that she could go to jail for that. Asked if she had any idea what a homicide meant in the eyes of God.
    Stripping off his stockings, Judd asked, “And what did you say?”
    Ruth focused her stunning blue eyes on him and said, “I don’t believe in a heaven or hell and anything like that.”
    “Well, that makes all this easy for you then.”
    “And ‘all this’ makes you a hypocrite.”
    “That’s true,” he said, and he went to the bathroom in his skivvies.
    “Oh, let’s not fight,” she said.
    But he was sulking. “I have to get to the office.”
    That evening Judd journeyed home to East Orange by trolley instead of the train, not because it was cheaper, but because he felt he needed the extra hour to find his role and rehearse his lines. He recalled his freshman year in high school when he first looked up the word: “adultery,” from the Latin
adulterare,
to defile. The generality of the definition had called up a host of fantasies, and Ruth was doing the same: calling out his vices, torturing him with affection, exhausting him with liquor and schemes and secrecy and shocking sexual practices until he felt dirtied and defiled. She’d seduced and dominated him, he thought, held his yearning heart in her hands, fondly and expertly played his frailties and hankerings as if he were her pet, her toy.
    And yet he found it impossible to stop desiring her, and if there was any infidelity, he thought, it was in his grim and loveless marriage to Isabel, a wedding of unequals that was now not just defiled but dead. All he could offer his wife in the future were the leftover scraps of an old friendship. And all she could offer him was his daughter. But that was enough. Jane was the glue.
    Walking up Wayne Avenue to his house, he was still inventing a night in which he told Isabel all about his affair and of his plans to end it, acknowledging that he would have to endure his wife’s wretched tears and full-throated screaming, Mrs. K’s interference and scorn, little Jane’s worries and pain.
    But when he got to number 37, he found the front sidewalk and driveway had not been shoveled, just shuffled through by overbootsduring the week, and he went back to the garage with his heavy luggage, his shoes crunching in the snow, his ears and nose smarting in the near-zero cold as he hauled down the snow shovel from its nail on a wall. And then he saw all three females skeptically watching him through the kitchen window, without gratitude or even welcome, as if whatever slavish job he carried out was a job long overdue. Judd demonstrated his insolence by hanging the wide shovel back on