The Housewife Blues Read online

  Not ten minutes later she heard Godfrey's regular tread coming down the stairs. No need for him to sneak now. It crossed her mind that his earlier caution had been for Jenny's benefit, since it was probably apparent to him as well as the other tenants that she was the only one who remained in the building on most weekdays.

  She heard the front door open, then Godfrey came into view. He was only visible in profile, his thin face seemed paler than before, his body hunched into his overcoat. She made a conscious effort to read his attitude, hoping that she might sense some element of saving grace, like guilt or remorse for what he had done. Without realizing it, her concentration made her less cautious. She had stepped closer, moving toward the center of the bay window.

  Then, suddenly, her attention shifted to the sycamore tree in front of the house. There was that tabby tomcat climbing the tree again. It belonged to the men who lived in the downstairs apartment and was always getting out somehow. Frequently she would see it climbing the tree, posting itself on the branch opposite her window and looking into her apartment, which it was doing now. Larry, who was allergic to cats, hated the sight of it.

  "Just don't give the bastard milk," he had warned her. "Then you'll never get rid of him."

  Godfrey's attention, too, might have been deflected by the cat, and he had turned. Perhaps he had sensed her observation of him as well. She felt a blush of embarrassment rise to her face. Their eyes met and stayed locked together for a brief moment. He did not smile in greeting but turned quickly like a man caught in the beam of a floodlight, then headed swiftly toward Third Avenue.

  He knows I know, she cried inside, burning with the discomfort of holding his dark secret, as if somehow she had become a coconspirator in his act of infidelity and betrayal.

  2

  DAMN, damn, Godfrey Richardson railed at himself. He was wallowing in self-disgust. His insides were churning. It had been a gross idea. He should have gone to a hotel, overcome his guilt, his paranoia of being seen, suffered through the little ritual of checking in, the process of paying in advance, in cash, endured the stares and imagined snickers of the room clerk.

  There was not a question in his mind that Jenny Burns had observed this ill-fated caper. If only the Kellys, who had the apartment before the Burnses, hadn't split up and were still there. At least both of them worked during the day like normal people. How was it possible that in this day and age, in Manhattan, there was such a thing as a professional housewife? It had irritated him that the woman seemed to revel in her role, as if she were doing something actually superior to what everyone else did.

  "What is more boring than being a housewife?" he had asked Terry when they had returned from dinner at the Burnses. "Meat loaf, for chrissake."

  "And succotash, your favorite dish," Terry teased.

  He put a finger in his mouth.

  "Barf."

  "She is a doll, Godfrey. And just a newlywed," Terry had responded.

  "I'll grant her that," Godfrey had replied. He had found her Lolita-like looks and her high small voice attractive and oddly sexy.

  "A pretty little thing, isn't she? She was a doctor's assistant in this small town in Indiana. I found her by no means stupid."

  "A doctor's assistant. Small town in Indiana. Meat loaf. Deliver me."

  "Quite a snob for the son of a high school teacher," Terry snapped.

  "Look who's talking. Your mother believes there are two places in the world—New York and out of town, with people from the latter mostly rednecks and KKK'ers with southern accents."

  "She may be right."

  "And I can be a snob if I choose. I am, after all, in the art world," Godfrey said, laughing.

  "Speaking of snobs, Larry took the cake. He struck me as real puckered up. What's his story?"

  "He's this big gun at this mega-advertising agency. Research. One of those guys with opinions up the wazoo. Dripping in yup values."

  "You were working him pretty good," Terry said.

  "Tight-ass guy like that will squeeze out all the aesthetics. He's looking to unlock the mysteries of finding gold in art."

  "And you're helping him along."

  "That's my racket," Godfrey had responded. "New York is filled with Larry Burnses. Guys that think they know exactly where they're going, destiny riders. He'll rise up the ladder like a hot knife through butter. And she'll be the dutiful wife, walking ten paces behind."

  "Well, aren't you the dutiful husband?"

  In a way he was. He knew how to play the game with her colleagues and her bosses. But, of course, he had his own ax to grind. He could sell the pompous sons of bitches art. Anyway, there was a limit on how far they would let her go. What do they call that? Glass ceiling?

  "What does she do with her time all day?" Godfrey asked, his mind still focused on the Burnses. "I know. She makes meat loaf."

  "And biscuits." Terry laughed. "Don't forget about the homemade biscuits."

  "Or apple pan dowdy."

  "I thought that was great," Terry said.

  "Apple pan dowdy, for crying out loud."

  "You're being intolerant," Terry remonstrated. "Her agenda is different from ours." She had grown momentarily pensive. "Maybe."

  Godfrey knew what she meant, of course, and it infuriated him. Her inability to conceive was driving him crazy. They had been together nearly twelve years, five of them married. In fact, that was exactly why they had gotten married. To begin a family. Terry had gone off the pill, and they had begun the so-called process.

  To everything there was a season. He had lived by that concept. A time to plant. A time to sow. Finally they were established financially. He had his own gallery. Terry had become a vice-president of Citibank. It was exactly the goals they had planned for themselves. They had socked away a tidy sum for a house in Connecticut. Raising a child in Manhattan was out of the question. They had made plans, dared to dream dreams. It was as if they'd finished one chapter and were trying to begin another.

  Their relationship had defied the odds, and they were proud of it. They had actually met at a bar on Second Avenue in the dwindling days, before AIDS, of swinging singles. His interest that night was pussy, strictly pussy. No encumbrances. No relationships. It was Friday night, and his objective was to cut a heifer from the herd. She was a bank teller then, and he was a contemporary-art appraiser.

  Meeting in a bar was strike one. Strike two was that they had marched right up to Terry's place and gone right to bed. The entire operation had taken less than an hour, leaving up in the air the question of who seduced whom. It was an issue still in limbo between them.

  "Just don't bullshit me," she had told him while they were still in the bar. "And don't pay me compliments," she'd said when they were in the cab. "Above all, don't tell me you love me, either before, during, or after."

  "Who's in charge here?" he had asked her as they got out of the cab.

  "We're about to work that out," she'd told him.

  Sunday night, after a weekend of sex, talk, and carryouts, he told her that he loved her, and she went through the roof.

  "Get out," she cried.

  "I mean it."

  "You're just setting me up for next weekend."

  "You got it."

  "Well, I'm busy," she told him. "And I'll be busy the weekend after that. In fact, for the next one hundred weekends."

  "That's only two years," he told her.

  "What are you, a mathematics freak?"

  "I told you. I love you. Look, Terry. I'm thirty. I know what I've been looking for. I found it, and I want it forever."

  "Liar."

  "I am not."

  "You're actually thirty-three. I picked your pocket when you were asleep and peeked in your wallet. I read your driver's license. Also, if it's any consolation, you're who you say you are. You were born in Elizabeth, New Jersey. And you are an art appraiser."

  "You have character flaws," he responded. "I like that. Nobody is perfect. Even me. You work where you say you work. You
r real name is Theresa, and you happen to be twenty-four, not twenty-two. You also don't weigh a hundred and twenty pounds, as your driver's license points out. I'd say..." He squeezed her breasts and buttocks and patted her stomach. "One hundred and thirty."

  "I'm five seven. I can carry it."

  There is such a thing as knowing, he had decided at that moment. Bar or no bar. First-night lay or not. This woman had his name on her. They made love again, and all of a sudden it was dawn on Monday morning and he opened his eyes to find her studying him, her head resting on her elbow.

  "While you were sleeping, I looked you over carefully, from stem to stern. Are there any major diseases in your family? My grandmother has mild hypertension."

  "How old is she?"

  "Eighty-seven."

  "How old was your grandfather?"

  "What do you mean, was? He's ninety-one. My parents are also alive and kicking. What about yours?"

  "Both died before they were sixty," he told her.

  "It would be like playing Russian roulette," she mused, continuing to study him.

  "Life's a gamble," he pressed. "Why not roll the dice?"

  "With those odds?" She started to laugh. "I'd have to be a fool. And be afflicted with infantile romanticism."

  "That's my affliction, too," he told her. "Incurable. I've had to learn to live with it. You can, too. In fact, I'll teach you. It's a very long course. Might take a lifetime."

  "That long?"

  "Longer, I hope."

  "Can I test it? See if it suits me?"

  "Of course. But be forewarned. I'll teach my heart out."

  "Where do I register?" she said haltingly, her voice breaking. Tears welled suddenly in her eyes, rolling down her cheeks.

  "Right here," he said, kissing her cheeks dry, then taking off from there.

  That Monday they never did get to work.

  Now this business of conception was consuming their lives. Beneath their banter and the effort to maintain the familiar routine of their relationship was this dominating, corrosive, aching sense of frustration. Neither of them wanted to admit or, more appropriately, surrender themselves to the idea of failure.

  The doctors had not found any organic reason for Terry's inability to conceive. She produced healthy eggs. Godfrey produced perfectly capable swarming schools of spermatozoa. But something went awry, as they say, between the cup and the lip.

  "I'm so, so sorry," Terry had cried after the doctors had diagnosed that she was the problem. For weeks after that she had wallowed in self-pity and depression, and it had taken a massive effort on his part to pry her out of it. He had feigned indifference at first, but she knew better. He had wanted children, perhaps even more than she did, had fantasized about fatherhood, and had been quite vocal on the subject. She had come to the idea reluctantly, reasoning that there was still time. But he had been insistent, and she had finally consented. Their failure to conceive was completely unexpected, a cruel blow.

  "Bet you're sorry we ever got hitched," Terry told him one day, a day engraved on his memory. They were scheduled to go through yet another fertility process. It was the third time. They had changed clinics, opting for one only two blocks away, a lucky find. All he had to do was ejaculate and rush the results and Terry over to the clinic for the procedure.

  By then the whole idea of sex, reduced now to pure biological mechanics, had lost most of its allure. It had become merely a medical process, a far, far cry from the wonderfully erotic pleasure it had once been, the rich exercise in fantasy and sex games that they had indulged in with such abandon. Not once in all the years that they had been together had he failed literally to rise to the occasion. And if he showed signs of flagging after three or four consecutive episodes, Terry, who had a finely tuned sense of the erotic and knew his parts intimately, could always manage to squeeze "one for the road" out of him.

  In fact, the menu of their sex life was daring, intense, and, they thought, quite original and always exciting. Sometimes they would call during the day and talk each other through mutual masturbation. She would be sitting at her desk wearing no panty hose, an idea that was a surefire inducer. Sometimes they would have sex adventures in uncommon places like taxicabs, ladies' rooms, airplanes, telephone booths, movie houses. They had tried tie-ups and paint-ups, making their own videos, and other oddments of a sexual nature that came of an active fantasy life and guiltless and uninhibited mutual trust. Everyone needed a hobby, they told each other, never tiring of the giddy humor they induced in each other.

  But on this crucial day, nothing, but nothing she tried could muster any excitement, and his penis simply remained in a state of flaccid indifference.

  "Where are you when I need you?" he said, addressing the uncooperative part, hoping the wisecrack might dispel the tension. After two hours of trying without success, she reached for the phone and called the clinic. He actually put his hands over his ears in embarrassment.

  "The doctor says it's not uncommon," Terry said after she had hung up. "He said to cool it for a while."

  "That's the problem, not the solution," Godfrey said.

  "He also said that maybe a little porno might get it going."

  He shrugged, then consented to the possibility, and she got dressed and went to the video store to rent some porno movies. While she was gone he tried to channel his thoughts into images of lewdness. Nothing worked. She came back quickly with three tapes, none of which, despite their salacious images, could induce an erection.

  It was maddening, embarrassing, debilitating, and by the end of the day mentally and physically exhausting. Naturally the appointment had to be canceled. Consultations followed at the clinic. All agreed that the situation was a common by-product of tension, and it was recommended that they stop thinking about conception for a few months. Producing an erection was, after all, a mental thing, and there was nothing organically wrong with him. Impotence, like death, was something that happened to other people.

  They tried to pretend that it was not affecting them profoundly. The fact was, though, that they still loved each other and that these events were actually bringing them closer together, an irony, since such closeness should have induced a natural sexual response. It didn't. Not at first.

  Then, like a miracle, a few weeks later Godfrey's impotence went away as mysteriously as it had arrived. Except that there was no more talk of fertility clinics. Soon they were up to their old sexual gymnastics. Indeed, absence, so to speak, made the hard-on grow fonder. The episode brought with it a greater renewal of their love. They had come through a crisis, and it had strengthened them. Not that they had ever been, in any way, even temporarily alienated. He had always been faithful, and it was no leap of faith to believe that she, too, had never strayed from the marriage bed. But somehow this setback, which both viewed as temporary, proved how deeply they cared for each other.

  They resumed their regular sex life with even more intensity than before. Finally they felt that they had conquered the problem and were ready to try again. The strategy they decided upon was for them to cease and desist until the fatal day. Store up the jism, they joked. She assured him, by observing his nocturnal erections, that he was wonderfully normal and that she had exerted great willpower in not throwing herself upon him as she did her research. Indeed, all the evidence pointed to both a lack of tension and a good attitude.

  Until the fateful day. Nothing. The more Terry tried, the more intractable the article. Finally the operation was terminated once again. There was another option, of course. In an interview the doctor had explained that in such cases of psychological impotency, the sperm, when produced and delivered within a short time, could be frozen for future use, meaning injected into Terry at a time of her choosing. On the surface this seemed like a splendid idea, except that the very suggestion of such a process had sent any recovery of potency into limbo.

  For months now nothing had happened, although she had been alert to his nocturnal erections in the hope that they, or only one
, could be productive. It continued to be debilitating and humiliating. At times she actually would begin to masturbate while he slept, the idea being that she would be ready to begin the process during the night at a moment's notice. Unfortunately he always awoke, which resulted in a complete collapse of the instrument. It was all so depressingly clinical.

  Their nerves were stretched thin, and often their eyes would meet and they would break into tears. How long before this finally rips us apart? he wondered. It was awful. He felt inadequate. He couldn't concentrate on his work. The gallery was going to hell.

  He got the hooker's name from another dealer who had admitted to using call girls as a service to his out-of-town clients. Godfrey had been appalled by the idea.

  "You don't sell art with pussy," he had remonstrated with the dealer.

  "You can sell anything with pussy," the dealer had countered. He was a fat, balding man with thick lips and a gravelly-voiced gift of gab so originally crude that it was memorable. "Besides, strange pussy is always exhilarating." It was that crude phrase that stuck in Godfrey's mind, that phrase that motivated his idea. He had even inquired at the clinic as to how the freezing process worked, including the specifics of time and distance. In his scenario the event would be the ultimate surprise gift for Terry, the means justifying the end. He would tell her he had masturbated.

  "Welcome to the world of corruption," the dealer told him when he called with his request.

  "I'll try your method," he told the dealer. "I've got one tough client."

  "I'll give you Wendy's number. Wendy is surefire. She majored in art history and is an artist herself. Guaranteed to put a client in a great frame of mind for art appreciation."

  "Is this what we've come to?" he found himself saying, as if to maintain his moral superiority.

  "Your tense is wrong, pal," the dealer said. "In this business what difference does it make as to how you fuck the client?"

  Godfrey made the assignation for a time when he knew Terry would be at her regular weekly loan-committee meeting. He couldn't bear the idea of having his assistant at the gallery lie about his whereabouts. The very centerpiece of his relationship with Terry was honesty, absolute, uncompromising honesty. And faithfulness. Even on the phone with Wendy his guilt was so acute that he offered her double her price, which came to two hundred dollars, an additional payoff to ensure her silence about his identity.