The Housewife Blues

BOOKS BY WARREN ADLER

Banquet Before Dawn

Blood Ties

Cult

Death of a Washington Madame

Empty Treasures

Flanagan's Dolls

Funny Boys

Madeline's Miracles

Mourning Glory

Natural Enemies

Private Lies

Random Hearts

Residue

The Casanova Embrace

The Children of the Roses

The David Embrace

The Henderson Equation

The Housewife Blues

The War of the Roses

The Womanizer

Trans-Siberian Express

Twilight Child

Undertow

We Are Holding the President
Hostage

SHORT STORIES

Jackson Hole, Uneasy Eden

Never Too Late For Love

New York Echoes

New York Echoes 2

The Sunset Gang

MYSTERIES

American Sextet

American Quartet

Immaculate Deception

Senator Love

The Ties That Bind

The Witch of Watergate

Copyright ©
1992
by Warren Adler.

ISBN 978-1-59006-098-8

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission. This novel is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, incidents are either the product
of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Inquiries: WarrenAdler.com

STONEHOUSE PRESS

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

For Sunny
Again and Always

IF SHE hadn't placed her great-great-grandmother's spinet
in that exact spot along the east wall and hadn't set aside time to polish it
on this particular April day, Jenny might have avoided any confrontation with
this bit of unsavory information.

First there was Godfrey Richardson letting himself into the
main hallway, which was unusual enough, since he was rarely at home during the
middle of a weekday morning. She heard him climb the single flight of stairs to
the apartment he shared with his wife, Terry, just above hers on the second
floor. The Richardsons rarely used the tiny mahogany-paneled elevator, and she
heard his ascending footfalls on the steps, not because she was deliberately listening,
but probably because his tread was lighter than usual, as if he were walking on
the tips of his toes.

She realized, of course, that she was conscious of the
difference because it was out of the ordinary pattern of sound and activity of
the weekday life of their building. In the two months that she and her husband,
Larry, had lived there, she had discovered that she was usually the only tenant
in residence on most days. A couple of the tenants had maids in for an hour or
two a week, but they came and went with barely a ripple.

There were five apartments in their converted East Side
Manhattan brownstone, and all of the tenants were normally off pursuing their
various vocations during the day. As a housewife, Jenny, too, was pursuing her
vocation, which she took as seriously as the others in the building took
theirs.

Godfrey Richardson's tiptoeing up the stairs, despite a
rational dismissal of it as being none of her business, had alerted her to what
followed. Looking out of the bay window through the lower branches of the
budding sycamore tree that fronted the building, she had noted that a young
woman had passed the building twice already, lingered in front of it briefly,
looked up toward the Richardsons' apartment, then proceeded toward Second Avenue. She was now headed toward the building once again, this time coming from the Third Avenue side.

Jenny continued to apply polish to the spinet. She had it
on her mental schedule to polish the heirloom once a week. This was exactly the
way her mother had treated the spinet in their house in Indiana, and one of the
conditions of the gift was that it be treated the same way in perpetuity. It
had been purchased by her great-great-grandmother, handed down to each
generation in turn, and had never left Indiana. So far it had fared quite well
in its new Manhattan life, had not warped and had kept its tune, although she
rarely played it.

Her concentration was deflected by this young woman
parading in front of the window. The woman was no more than twenty and wore tight
jeans, black cowboy boots, and a black leather jacket, which emphasized the
fullness of her breasts. Hussy type, her mother might have said, but then her
mother, like the spinet, had never been anywhere but Indiana. As a newly
anointed Manhattanite, Jenny felt herself superior to such judgments.

With obviously contrived casualness, the woman stopped in
front of the building, looked at her watch, then proceeded up the stone steps
to the front entrance. When the woman could no longer be seen from the window,
Jenny listened for the faint sound of the outside buzzer. Curiosity, she
supposed, had made her hearing more acute than usual. She heard the return
buzzer sound, then the door opening, and, after a short interval, the tiny
elevator moving in the shaft, stopping on the floor above her.

It was, of course, the kind of information that she would
have preferred avoiding, especially since she liked Terry Richardson, Godfrey's
wife. Not that they had been overly friendly, considering Jenny had had them,
over Larry's objections, for an informal dinner featuring her prized meat loaf
recipe and they had not yet reciprocated. According to Larry they might never,
which he told her would be a good thing. Neighbors, according to Larry, were a
nuisance, sometimes a danger, and a good thing to avoid, but he had let her
have her way just this once to prove the point.

New Yorkers were like that, Larry had explained, always too
busy to reciprocate, although sooner or later they'd invite you out for an
obligatory dinner at a restaurant. Such explanations did not jibe at all with
her midwestern upbringing. New people were always welcomed by their neighbors,
not the other way around.

Swallowing her pride and against her husband's wishes, she
had decided nevertheless not to be standoffish with the neighbors. She wasn't
going to change her Hoosier ways just because New Yorkers were crude and
ignorant of the social graces. People were people everywhere, her parents had
taught her. Prick them and they bleed. Their basic human instincts were the
same as hers, the good with the bad. Above all, follow your own value system.
Never stoop to theirs.

Larry thought this attitude naive, instructing her daily in
the survival tactics of New Yorkers. Live defensively. Double-lock doors. Avoid
carryout deliveries. The delivery man could be a thief, a rapist, or a
murderer. Stay off the streets after dark, and in the daytime be wary. Trust no
one. When in doubt, cross the street. Since she had never been to New York before their marriage, she had no other frame of reference than his various
caveats.

Once, about two weeks after she and Larry had moved into
the building, Terry Richardson had come downstairs and asked if she could
borrow a screwdriver because Godfrey, who was "all thumbs," had
misplaced theirs somewhere. Jenny had obliged and invited Terry in for coffee.
It was Sunday morning and Larry was off playing tennis with friends from the
advertising agency where he worked.

Terry was an open-faced brunette with hazel eyes and a
broad, toothy smile. To Jenny's surprise she had volunteered a great deal of
information about herself. Not to pry was another in Jenny's catalog of values
inculcated by her Indiana upbringing.

Terry was a vice-president of Citibank, which sounded very
awesome and important to Jenny, to whom bankers and banks, at least in the Midwest, still ranked, along with doctors and hospitals, as trusted professionals and
institutions.

"That's quite impressive," Jenny exclaimed.

"That's what my mother thinks," Terry said,
sipping her coffee. "But the pay is not quite commensurate with the title,
and I'm one of many. I will admit, though, that it does have a wow factor in
certain circles."

"It does to me," Jenny agreed. Back in Indiana a woman vice-president of a bank would have had real prestige.

"Prestige shmestige, my mother says. She'd rather see
me pregnant." Terry sighed and shook her head. But her hazel eyes revealed
a stab of sudden pain. "We tried this fertility clinic three times and are
about to go for number four. We're batting a thousand in strikeouts."

Jenny didn't quite know what to say. Encouraging Terry to
continue her revelations seemed patronizing. It also crossed her mind that her
own and Larry's fertility had not yet been tested, and she decided, probably on
superstitious grounds, to make no comment that might encourage Terry to
continue the subject.

"Puts a lot of pressure on Godfrey," Terry
persisted, speaking into the brief vacuum of silence. "I'm the weak sister
in the combination. Something about the sperm dying before it hits pay dirt.
Like the fallopian tubes were a kind of gas chamber. Only the doctors don't
quite know why. Anyway, we're going to try yet again." She contemplated
the thought in silence for a moment, then turned her attention to Jenny.

"Don't wait too long," Terry said. "I'm
thirty-seven. We didn't try until I was thirty-five."

In the pause that followed, Jenny held back any comment,
except to offer her own age, which was twenty-five, and to point out that she
and Larry were only married a little over two months and were not planning a
family for a while. After all, friendship and intimacy took time to develop.
That was another item in her value system. Perhaps that was the reason the
conversation drifted away and Terry swallowed her last mouthful of coffee,
thanked Jenny for the screwdriver, and went back to her apartment.

There was something open and fresh about Terry, and as soon
as she had left the apartment, Jenny regretted not opening up more than she
had. Telling somebody such personal information was, in fact, a confidence,
which should really be returned. Jenny made a mental note to reveal something
equally as intimate about herself, but she wasn't exactly sure what that might
be.

Certainly she could never tell Terry what she was
"witnessing" at this very moment. She tried to push the obvious from
her mind and put a better light on the circumstances. Perhaps she was jumping
to conclusions. Then why was the woman so cautious, passing the building a
number of times before going in? And there was something about the woman that
suggested, well, sex. Clandestine sex.

All right, she admonished herself, she was just a hayseed
from Indiana, a Hoosier hick, but under that blond blue-eyed curly-topped
adorable—some might say Lolita—look, she was not totally naive. She felt a
strong rapport with Terry, who was at that moment, Jenny was dead certain,
being betrayed by her husband.

The idea took some of the natural joy out of her day. Why
couldn't he do his dirty work away from their home? A home was a sacred place,
a nest. Birds never fouled their own nests.

Although she had never crossed the threshold of the Richardson apartment, she imagined that the deed was being done on the marriage bed, in
the bedroom, exactly above where Larry's and her bedroom was located. As if to
validate that point, she walked to the bedroom and looked upward at that point
where she was certain the Richardsons' bed was placed. It had to be queen-size.
A king or a double would simply not fit properly.

She admonished herself for allowing the silence to exist,
knowing that she was deliberately listening for the sounds of lovemaking,
feeling ashamed. Worse, she felt that telltale tingle of her own sexiness. The
power of suggestion, she rebuked herself, taking a surreptitious glance at her
face in the mirror and seeing the slight flush on her cheeks.

She went into the bathroom, ran the cold water tap, and
patted her cheeks, then returned to the spinet and resumed her polishing. But
she could not rid herself of the idea of those two up there and the sympathy
and outrage she felt on Terry's behalf.

It hadn't occurred to her when they first rented the
apartment that she would be the only tenant whose daily chores revolved around
the apartment itself. Of course, she did have lots of errands outside the
apartment. It wasn't easy putting a home together, and there was the regular
shopping to do, although most of the food shopping was done on weekends with
Larry, who particularly liked those fancy gourmet stores.

They considered themselves quite lucky to find the
apartment. They both detested those big impersonal high rises, which made
people feel more like transient cave dwellers than human beings. The location,
too, was perfect, being on Thirty-eighth Street between Second and Third, which
meant that Larry could actually jog the two miles to work at the advertising
agency on upper Madison Avenue, where he was a vice-president in charge of the
research department.

Mrs. Bradshaw, the rental agent who found them the
apartment, told them she knew instantly when it became available that it had
their name on it.

"I know this building intimately," she told them,
her half-glasses perched on the end of her nose, as she stood in the middle of
the living room reading the listing card and reciting the history of the
building. The two brownstones joined together, both built in 1911, had first
been converted to apartments before World War II, then refurbished in the early
sixties.

Jenny marveled at the spaciousness of the apartment, which
was on the first floor of the building. She inspected the high ceilings trimmed
with wonderfully elaborate molding, the working fireplace, the exposed brick
kitchen with shiny stainless-steel appliances and a gas cookstove and oven, the
wall of bookcases, the little mahogany-paneled den, the dining room with a
small crystal chandelier, and, best of all, the white-tiled bathroom with the
marvelous bathtub that sat on sculpted claw feet. She adored the bathtub and
could picture herself lying there enveloped by tingling soap bubbles. There was
nothing like a good warm soak to settle the mind and calm the spirit. Mrs.
Bradshaw was right about one thing: the apartment certainly had her name on it.

"A steal at three thousand dollars a month," Mrs.
Bradshaw said, smiling, the laugh lines on the sides of her eyes crinkling. She
had a grandmotherly air that Jenny liked and seemed sincerely interested in
their welfare.

"You're right about that," Larry said without
cracking a smile. He had told Jenny earlier that he had had one of his
researchers check out comparable rental values in the area. "It's really
way out of line. In fact, outrageous." He looked toward Jenny, who had
stiffened inside of herself. Larry had warned her not to appear enthusiastic:
"Please restrain yourself, Jenny. We mustn't give them the
advantage."

All this was against her grain. She hated negotiating,
exercising those little ploys and manipulations. The idea of it implied a sense
of being sharp, of trafficking in rejection and hurtfulness. Larry, on the
other hand, had no compunctions in that department. "In New York, it's
screw them before they screw you," he had lectured her, part of his
endless laundry list of advice about how to survive in the Big Apple. Above
all, he cautioned, trust no one. No one!

"That seems like a mighty cynical assessment,"
she had countered, offering her own time-honored homily: "People are
essentially good and the same everywhere."