The rage burned a week, after which she fell totally silent for three days: a silence broken by a grief like nothing she’d ever experienced before. Had it not been for her chance meeting with Estabrook—who saw through her tumbling, distracted manner to the woman she was—she might well have taken her own life.
Thus the tale of Judith and Gentle: one death short of tragedy, and a marriage short of farce.
She found Marlin already home, uncharacteristically agitated.
“Where have you been?” he wanted to know. “It’s six-thirty-nine.”
She instantly knew this was no time to be telling him what her trip to Bloomingdale’s had cost her in peace of mind. Instead she lied. “I couldn’t get a cab. I had to walk.”
“If that happens again, just call me. I’ll have you picked up by one of our limos. I don’t want you wandering the streets. It’s not safe. Anyhow, we’re late. We’ll have to eat after the performance.”
“What performance?”
“The show in the Village that Troy was yabbering about last night, remember? The Neo-Nativity? He said it was the best thing since Bethlehem.”
“It’s sold out.”
“I have my connections.” He gleamed.
“We’re going tonight?”
“Not if you don’t move your ass.”
“Marlin, sometimes you’re sublime” she said, dumping her purchases and racing to change.
“What about the rest of the time?” he hollered after her. “Sexy? Irresistible? Beddable?” .
If indeed he’d secured the tickets as a way of bribing her between the sheets, he suffered for his lust. He concealed his boredom through the first act, but by intermission he was itching to be away to claim his prize.
“Do we really need to stay for the rest?” he asked her as they sipped coffee in the tiny foyer. “I mean, it’s not like there’s any mystery about it. The kid gets born, the kid grows up, the kid gets crucified.”
“I’m enjoying it.”
“But it doesn’t make any sense,” he complained, in deadly earnest. The show’s eclecticism offended his rationalism deeply. “Why were the angels playing jazz?”
“Who knows what angels do?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know whether it’s a comedy or a satire or what the hell it is,” he said. “Do you know what it is?”
“I think it’s very funny.”
“So you’d like to stay?”
“I’d like to stay.”
The second half was even more of a grab bag than the first, the suspicion growing in Judc as she watched that the parody and pastiche was a smokescreen put up to cover the creators’ embarrassment at their own sincerity. In the end, with Charlie Parker angels wailing on the stable roof and Santa crooning at the manger, the piece collapsed into high camp. But even that was oddly moving. The child was born. Light had come into the world again, even if it was to the accompaniment of tap-dancing elves.
When they exited, there was sleet in the wind.
“Cold, cold, cold,” Marlin said. “I’d better take a leak.”
He went back inside to join the line for the toilets, leaving Jude at the door, watching the blobs of wet snow pass through the lamplight. The theater was not large, and the bulk of the audience was out in a couple of minutes, umbrellas raised, heads dropped, darting off into the Village to look for their cars, or a place where they could put some drink in their systems and play critic. The light above the .front door was switched off, and a cleaner emerged from the theater with a black plastic bag of rubbish and a broom and began to brush the foyer, ignoring Jude—who was the last visible occupant—until he reached her, when he gave her a glance of such venom she decided to put up her umbrella and stand on the darkened step. Marlin was taking his time emptying his bladder. She only hoped he wasn’t titivating himself, slicking his hair and freshening his breath in the hope of talking her into bed.
The first she knew of the assault was a motion glimpsed from the corner of her eye: a blurred form approaching her at speed through the thickening sleet. Alarmed, she turned towards her attacker. She had time to recognize the face on | Third Avenue; then the man was upon her.