The Housewife Blues Read online

  Jenny wondered if he really believed that. She supposed he was right about the price being high. That was his department. He had told her never to concern herself about money, only about properly managing her own allowance, which he would decide upon when they got their apartment. At the moment, Larry was providing her with pocket money "as needed."

  Not that she was totally ignorant about managing money. In the past ten years, she had actually saved nearly twenty thousand dollars from her earnings in various jobs. Larry had complimented her on that and had insisted that that money be kept in her own name even after they had married. His gesture was somewhat confusing since her view of marriage meant that everything was to be shared between them forever and ever. She supposed that this was meant by him to be a gesture of generosity, although in her own mind the money was considered shared assets.

  In Manhattan, Jenny had found, money had an entirely different meaning. Back in Indiana even two thousand a month was a king's ransom. This was nearly double her entire monthly take-home pay when she'd worked as an assistant to Dr. Parker. And even after paying her rent, food, and other necessities, she had enough left over for entertainment and savings.

  The three of them now headed for the apartment door. Jenny was crestfallen, but still hopeful. Although she was uncomfortable about Larry's tactics, she had full confidence that he knew what he was doing.

  After they reached the street, Mrs. Bradshaw turned to them.

  "If you really want this place," she told them, addressing herself mostly to Jenny, "I could make a call."

  "Suit yourself," Larry said, looking at Jenny sternly. "At the right price it might be considered."

  Mrs. Bradshaw's gaze lingered on Jenny's face. Jenny hoped she was registering indifference properly.

  "Yes," Jenny said. "At the right price." She noted Larry's quick glance of approval.

  They walked to the corner, where there was a telephone booth. Mrs. Bradshaw picked up the phone and dialed.

  "God, Larry. I can't stand it. I really love this apartment," Jenny whispered.

  "Easy. You're her target of opportunity," he said. "Show her nothing. No interest. You had me worried for minute."

  "My stomach is doing flip-flops."

  "Stay cool. Remember this is the Big Apple, the hustler's paradise. Our top price is twenty-five. She'll come back at maybe twenty-seven."

  "I can't stand it."

  "Trust me," he said, preparing his face for Mrs. Bradshaw's return. It was a blustery day, but that did not deter people from being on the streets. In fact, nothing deterred New Yorkers in anything, Jenny thought. People looked so determined and intense, although she had observed that they scowled a great deal and did not smile often.

  "Best we can do is twenty-seven, Mr. Burns," Mrs. Bradshaw said. Jenny noted that the woman's grandmotherly aspect was completely gone. "Frankly, I think that's very generous."

  "Not in this market," Larry said. "The vacancy rate is staggering."

  "I could call again," Mrs. Bradshaw said.

  "Okay then. Here's my bottom line. Twenty-five with the first month free and a three-year lease with an option for another three at a five-percent yearly rise."

  Jenny's level of anxiety soared. She couldn't bear to watch Mrs. Bradshaw's face.

  "Really, Mr. Burns..."

  "Make the call, then," Larry said.

  "It won't do any good," Mrs. Bradshaw said, shrugging.

  "Try," Larry said.

  Mrs. Bradshaw hesitated for a moment, then, shaking her head, went back to the phone.

  "I could never do this," Jenny confided when Mrs. Bradshaw was out of earshot.

  "Worry not, Jenny. She's a whore. All real estate people are whores. And the biggest whores are in New York."

  "She seems so nice."

  "'Nice.' That's a dangerous word in this town, Jenny. Nice is okay in Indiana. Not here. Get 'nice' out of your vocabulary while you're in this town."

  Mrs. Bradshaw finished her call and came back to them.

  "Twenty-five it is. Two-year lease with option. Six-percent-a-year rise for two-year renewal." She smiled, her crinkly lines back in place, and held out her hand. "Deal?"

  Jenny's heart was in her mouth.

  "I wanted three years," Larry said.

  "Leave us some dignity, Mr. Burns." Mrs. Bradshaw winked. "Our pants are down."

  He turned suddenly to Jenny.

  "What do you think, baby?"

  "Me?" Jenny searched his face. His eyes signaled that it was okay. She hesitated, then turned toward Mrs. Bradshaw. "I say deal," she said with mock assertiveness.

  "The little woman has spoken," Larry said, putting out his hand. Mrs. Bradshaw took it and pumped.

  "Now let's all get a cup of coffee and do the paperwork," Mrs. Bradshaw said.

  "Masterly," she told Larry later as they lay in bed in their hotel room. They had made love the rest of the day, and she had been gratefully aggressive.

  "You've got to know how to play the game," he said as she cuddled in the crook of his arm. She stroked his hard, muscular body, so well proportioned and sculpted by his regimen of pumping iron three times a week along with his daily jogging schedule.

  "I married a very smart cookie," she whispered.

  "Here in New York, you've got to base everything on the premise that the next guy is out to screw you. You want to make it here, you've got to learn survival skills. That goes for every human transaction. Every move you make has to be defensive. Watch your ass. They're out to do you. And, above all, never show your ruthlessness, unless you're ready to act on it. That's why I'm up there in the agency, not just some dumb numbers cruncher. And I've just begun to fight."

  "Gives me the shivers," Jenny said, cuddling closer, her fingers following the contours of his naked body from forehead to penis.

  "In this town never, ever take anything at face value," Larry continued. "People are never what they seem."

  "That will take some getting used to," Jenny said.

  "Just do it fast," Larry said, turning toward her.

  "Some things work better slower," Jenny said, giggling, as she continued to caress his body. She was so happy. Nothing but nothing was too good for her Larry.

  She had met him nearly a year ago when he came into Dr. Parker's office with a nasty gash on his arm that required some stitches. Apparently he had tripped on a rock while investigating possible sites in the area for a theme park that was being researched by the advertising agency.

  She had assisted Dr. Parker in the procedure. In fact, she had actually done the stitching, since it was one of those mornings when Dr. Parker's arthritis was acting up. For a year after high school, she had taken courses at the Bedford Hospital preparatory to becoming a paramedic, where she had learned a number of emergency procedures. But then the job with old Dr. Parker had come along, and she'd decided to forgo the complete course, reasoning that it would be a good opportunity to be "on her own," get her own place, and not be a financial burden on her parents.

  "Handy little helper," Larry had commented. She wore a white uniform and white stockings, and Dr. Parker called her "nurse." He told her often that she was "better than any graduate nurse," which flattered her enormously. In addition to his arthritis, Dr. Parker's eyes were failing and he relied on her to assist him to an extent that might have seemed borderline to the Medical Society of Indiana.

  "Couldn't do without her," Dr. Parker had responded.

  Jenny remembered that she had blushed beet red, not simply because of the compliment, which was well deserved, but because it was delivered in front of this handsome young man who had stirred in her a disturbing response to his presence. She sensed, too, that there might be a mutuality about it.

  After he had dressed, he had lingered in the reception area and engaged Jenny in conversation between her answering the doctor's telephone calls.

  "Didn't hurt a bit," he had told her.

  "We aim to please, Mr. Burns."

  "Do you do this o
ften?" he had asked. "Stitching up the wounded?"

  "Only on occasion," she had replied, compelled to be truthful as a point of sincerity. "I'm not really a nurse. More like a paramedical jack-of-all-trades."

  She could tell he was interested, and by then she was dead certain that she was attracted to him. He was so handsome and confident and immaculately dressed in beige pants and blazer with a crisp striped shirt with tab collar and a wonderful perfectly matched tie. He seemed so worldly and sophisticated, so in charge of himself, and above all, so different from most of the men she had dated in Bedford.

  "Maybe you can tell me about Bedford over lunch?" he had asked.

  After a brief hesitation for propriety's sake, she'd consented. But she would always remember the thought that had passed through her mind at just that moment: There must be a God, because he just dropped this beautiful man from heaven right on my doorstep.

  Attraction was a mysterious and magical thing and, almost always, unpredictable. She knew her own type, which was that category of woman whom people referred to as the "small packages" the "best things come in." Not that she was that small—five feet two—but well proportioned for her height, too small to win a beauty contest, but with the kind of figure that could and did turn a male eye. So far, heavy exercise was not a necessity, and no matter what she ate she never gained a pound. Her blue eyes dictated her colors, and she dressed to complement them.

  In school she was considered perky, the type that made a natural cheerleader. Her mother had pressed her to pursue that phase of her school career, even sending her to baton-twirling lessons. As a baton-twirling cheerleader, she was automatically a kind of local celebrity. Fame of that type was very sought after in a small town like Bedford, mostly because that kind of visibility gave one entrée to date the best boys, meaning the local athletic heroes.

  Despite being popular and visible in high school, she was also a conformer and definitely not a rebel, which meant, in that context, that she maintained a monogamous relationship with one boyfriend with whom she had sex, beginning around her sixteenth birthday, which seemed the obligatory age when one lost one's virginity in Bedford. The experience, as most of the girls agreed, was generally awful but was supposed to get better with time. She had looked forward to that with toleration and hope.

  She had never had any plans other than to get married, have children, and stay in Bedford to raise her family as her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother had done before her.

  Her mother had instilled in her the idea that when all was said and done, being a housewife and mother was the noblest profession a woman could aspire to. Nor did she envy any of her schoolmates who went on to college, determined to make it in the world at large. She knew, of course, that such an attitude was old-fashioned and totally contrary to the ideas fostered by the women's movement, but she saw herself as more of a traditionalist and felt no guilt about her well-defined ambition to run a happy home, have a loving husband, and raise two, maybe three children. She considered that a noble aspiration.

  But being a traditionalist did not mean that she was not modern in her ideas. One did not have to be militant and outspoken to understand her own version of liberation, which to her meant being respected by men and consulted as an equal on those subjects where she could contribute. In her mind, however, there was a distinct separation between home and business. Home was, generally speaking, a woman's domain, and business, also generally speaking, was a man's.

  Her own mother, for example, ruled the roost with tact and subtlety, never relegating her father to a secondary position in terms of respect and the illusion of command. He was always the man of the house, an authority figure to be deferred to and consulted for his wisdom and knowledge of the world. Early on, Jenny recognized that her parents' home was a repository of love and contentment. If she could replicate such a home in her life, Jenny decided, that would be the ultimate fulfillment.

  Unfortunately, there were drawbacks to her fulfilling these dreams of love and contentment. The mating rituals in a small town did not provide much variety in terms of husband material. Not if you were choosy like Jenny, whose personality and good looks demanded that she choose a mate who was a cut above most of the boys who stayed on in Bedford.

  The local boys who were going to make something of themselves had already moved out of town. This left the older men who had chosen to come back and set up shop in the professions and started to raise their own families.

  It was slim pickings indeed, but this never depressed her. She adored her parents and her brother, who had married a local girl before he was twenty and already had three children, and he was just twenty-seven. She envied him, but in a healthy way, not to the point of despair, and she loved her nieces and nephew and never gave up on the idea that her man would come along one day.

  Her family, naturally, wanted her to "settle down" and considered her too picky in her choice of men. Her defense was that she prized her independence, which she did, although in her heart of hearts she would have loved to settle down with the right man and raise a family.

  Jenny, who had her own small apartment not far from Dr. Parker's office, loved to come over to her mother's house and help with the chores. Most of the girls in town were well schooled in what was still referred to in Bedford as the "domestic arts." They were taught cooking, the care and cleaning of household furniture, sewing, knitting, petit point, simple repairs, gardening, and little specialties such as putting up preserves and canning. Weekly family gatherings were a ritual, as was going to church on Sunday in your best clothes, having the neighbors in for barbecues, and generally participating in community activities.

  This did not mean that Bedford was isolated from the realities of the surrounding world, the global village. It did, after all, have cable television and access to a wide variety of other media that provided a great deal of knowledge of what was happening beyond their cloistered small-town world. It even had its share of what were once considered exclusive aspects of big cities, drugs, crime, racial animosities, homosexuality, and, even in Bedford, AIDS. Bedford also had its Republicans and Democrats, its pettiness and gossip, its Gothic secrets, its hidden aberrations, its share of pain and poverty. For people with oversize dreams and ambitions, Bedford was a prison. But not for Jenny.

  Her father worked for a carpet manufacturer, a good solid job with a pension and health benefits that paid enough for the family to own their own small home with a nice yard and two old cars and to have raised a son and a daughter. The concept of the family fortress, their good name, being thought well of, doing the right thing, having compassion for the less fortunate, and being decent to your fellow man was the bedrock of her family's value system.

  Jenny's value system did, however, have its private exceptions, particularly in the practice of sexual congress, which carried with it an element of hypocrisy. The sexual revolution was a fact of life and the peer pressure extraordinary. It was the one value that couldn't, at this juncture, be multigenerational. It was simply not in her parents' lexicon of experience. Her mother had been a virgin until she was married, and, Jenny was certain, she believed in her heart that the same was true of her daughter, all the evidence around her notwithstanding.

  Her one overt break with the family value system was when she had an affair with a doctor who had offices in the same building as Dr. Parker, Darryl Phipps, a man in his mid-forties who was going through a trial separation at the time of their liaison. Yet officially he was still a married man, which carried with it a stigma that made Jenny uncomfortable and forced them into a secrecy that also made her ashamed.

  In retrospect, Jenny rationalized, their affair was part learning experience, part sexual awakening. Darryl Phipps was an import to Bedford, having married one of the local girls he had met on a skiing vacation. He was East Coast Ivy League with a level of sophistication that was unknown in her experience up until then. By osmosis and intimacy, she felt somehow socially and culturally elevated by the relat
ionship.

  More important, Darryl had confirmed what she had suspected, that her teenage jock boyfriend, long gone by then, was a sexual illiterate and probably a premature ejaculator, a condition that, by the testimony of her girlfriends, seemed to afflict the young men of Bedford in epic proportions. By contrast, her mature lover was enormously patient, considerate, and wonderfully instructive. In the end he opted to return to his wife and children. Actually Jenny felt relieved by his decision and was enormously grateful for the experience. Discretion had left her reputation intact, her self-esteem enhanced, and her sexual nature understood and vastly reinforced.

  This prior relationship stood her in good stead with Larry Burns, who had been married once before for a brief period and was still bitter about that episode in his life.

  According to Larry, his former wife had been a journalist, far more interested in her career than in him and their marriage. That was, in fact, the hidden agenda of their whirlwind courtship and the one thing that set Jenny apart from his former wife. It was, she told herself, fate intervening, as if Larry Burns did indeed drop from heaven, right into the target's bull's-eye. In a wife he wanted exactly what she aspired to be, homemaker, mother, nurturer, devoted helpmate, lover.

  To her family Larry was an awesome figure, a smashing success in the advertising business, handsome, intelligent, articulate, charming. He was extremely fastidious about the care of his body, and his grooming was tasteful and immaculate. She liked that. It showed that he had respect for himself and his good looks. Indeed, at that point in time she enjoyed watching him pose and primp in front of the mirror, and she was oddly pleased when she spotted him surreptitiously checking his image in whatever reflection was handy. Even the after-shave he used was deliciously enticing.

  He was also enormously organized, fastidious in keeping records of his expenditures and allocating his time. This greatly impressed her. It indicated that he was a man in charge of his own destiny, someone who would be in control of his and his family's life, able to intelligently plan the future, not be a victim of circumstances, a rolling stone.