The Housewife Blues (10 page)

"Oh, yes."

"Are you still confused?"

He shook his head. "Can I..."

He moved toward her, but she arranged herself so that any
penetration on his part would be impossible. Instead she stretched herself
lengthwise on the couch and held him against her naked flesh. His body
trembled, his breath came in gasps. He had ejaculated against her thigh. She
allowed him to embrace her for a long moment, then she got up and tied the robe
together. He sat up and fixed his trousers. Then their eyes met.

"I would rather we didn't discuss it, Teddy,"
Jenny said. "Not ever." She wanted to dismiss it from her mind.
"Call it a one-time experience, perhaps a lesson."

"I understand," he replied. "And I promise
never to tell anybody."

"I know you won't, Teddy. Also, I would prefer that
you didn't come here in the afternoons."

A shadow passed across his face. Then he smiled. It was the
broadest smile she had ever seen him make. She smiled back at him.

"Doesn't mean we shouldn't be friends," she said.

"I'll always be your friend, Mrs. Burns. No matter
what."

He started toward the door, then came back and kissed her
on the cheek.

"I'll never forget this," he said.

When he was gone, she felt a giggly sensation bubble up
inside of her. Assessing what she had done, she felt no remorse, no contrition,
and no guilt, none. She was not even sure it would have any effect at all on
Teddy's life, although she hoped it would.

"Can't say I haven't been a good neighbor," she
said aloud, the giggle bursting out of her mouth.

MYRNA L. DAVIS had often wondered if the name her father
had given her had profoundly influenced her behavior. The "L" stood
for Loy, and Myrna Loy was his favorite actress. Her mother had objected to it,
but then all of her mother's objections were feeble against her father's
overbearing and demanding ways.

She took after her father. Everybody told her so, and she
had become convinced that his strong genes had overpowered her mother's wimpy
ones and that she was created in his image. Physically she was, with the same
firm cleft chin, blue-gray piercing eyes, jet black curly hair. People said she
had also inherited his charisma and his manipulative ways. Like him, she could
turn on the charm when she had to but could be arrogant and demanding when that
conduct was called for.

As for her name, once people realized that she was named
after Myrna Loy, especially people from her father's generation, they always
remarked that that's probably where she got her gift for clever banter, meaning
that she took after the Myrna Loy of the
Thin Man
series, as if the real
Myrna Loy made up her own sophisticated one-liners. Few people in her age group
knew who Myrna Loy was, although the
Thin Man
series had come out on
cassettes and younger people were rediscovering her mastery of light comedy
banter. For years Myrna considered her name one of her father's cruder jokes.

He was a trial lawyer of awesome reputation in Los Angeles, where she had grown up under his thumb and tutelage. The divorce between her
parents when she was sixteen had hardly fazed her, since she had expected it
for years. Living with her father was impossible unless you were prepared to be
a doormat for the rest of your life. This had not been her mother's original
wish when she'd married, but that's what she had become, finally winding up a
horrid life as an alcoholic who had choked to death on her own vomit.

This, of course, would not have been Myrna's fate even if
she had chosen to stay in Los Angeles, living in her father's shadow. She was
too much like him to fall into that trap. He had fully expected her to follow
in his footsteps, joining the firm after dutifully finishing Harvard Law School, as he had done.

She did graduate from Harvard undergraduate as an English
major and had opted to stay in the East and pursue a career in journalism, a
profession her father detested but one that suited her just fine. His
detestation, in fact, actually enhanced the idea. Although she and her father
were constantly at war, neither of them had ever chosen the path of complete
alienation from each other.

They talked by phone and in person when each happened to be
in the other's territory. Their conversations were never less than contentious
and argumentative, and he was always prepared to offer a critique of every
aspect of her life, usually ending in his negative judgment.

It was almost an article of faith that they took positions
that were exact opposites of each other's on every subject imaginable. Even if
they didn't at first, they would quickly polarize. At times their arguments
disguised themselves as political, since they were both passionately interested
in "larger issues." The more conservative he became, the more liberal
her position.

It had taken her ten years of therapy to exorcise the invasion
of her father's demons, but even the painful acquisition of personal insight
did not end the need to continue the war between them, although it did make it
less painful and sometimes actually entertaining, as if their relationship had
become a game.

This acquired insight had gone a long way toward explaining
the reasons for the failure of her two marriages, each to a man who could not
withstand the rigors of her demanding nature. Each had buckled within a year,
even though each had begun with flaming passion. Her shrink, actually a series
of shrinks, had differing explanations for her crippled relationships with men,
but all hinted at some dark need of wanting to fuck her father to death. She
found the diagnosis interesting and probably correct, assuming that this was
exactly what he wanted to do to her.

Fortunately, time had withered the obsession, and the
qualities of manipulation, charm, and nut-cutting ambition that made her father
successful were doing the same for her. As an associate editor of
Vanity
Fair
she was acquiring both power and cachet, and through her job she was
meeting some of the most celebrated people in the country, putting her in
exactly those circles in which she wanted to operate.

She enjoyed her job and she was good at it, both as an
editor who could come up with exactly the right angle for a sugarcoated hatchet
job on an important celebrity and as a personality who perfectly represented
the trendy, sophisticated, know-it-all bitchiness that was at the heart of the
magazine's persona. Also, it fitted precisely with her agenda, which was to
surpass her father in everything, especially importance. With her job had come
the opportunity to use every facet of her talents and personality, the good
with the bad.

Now on the cusp of forty, she had, however, not given up
the idea of finding a mate who could satisfy the requirements of her dreams,
ambitions, and physical needs. She was not one of those people who ever gave up
on anything, another of her father's inbred traits. But, unlike her father, she
did not want progeny, certain that any child of hers would suffer the same fate
at her hands that she had suffered at her father's.

Let's face it, she told herself, underneath all her hubris
was a dyed-in-the-wool fourteen-karat bitch. Her moodiness alone would have
tried the patience of a tranquilized saint, and it took massive self-control to
keep that beast caged.

Since her last marriage she had entered into a number of
affairs, only to find the same sense of disillusionment and defeat. She
couldn't blame the guys. But for the last six months she had been carrying on a
torrid affair with Jack Springer, the junior senator from the state of New York, a Democrat. At last, she decided, she had met her dream man. So far.

Since it was impossible for her not to compare any man she
bedded to her father, she had concluded that Jack was as close to the real
thing as one got, without the toxin-ridden personal agenda. He was
opportunistic, charming, and charismatic, all essential tools of his occupation,
along with hypocrisy and duplicity. His public positions were tailor-made for
his constituency, which was an interesting mix of the liberal and the
conservative. At heart he was the latter. Worse, a closet bigot.

"Better than being a closet fag," he'd said,
chuckling, when she had first used the term. But his public hypocrisy by no
means neutered their relationship. In fact, the arguments they engaged in added
spice to their affair.

"Politics," he assured her, "is not about
conviction. It is about power, and the most essential ingredient of that power
is having it, which means getting elected, then reelected."

There were moments, though, when his pronouncements could
be genuinely irritating. Like her father, he was a bred-to-the-cloth elitist, a
product of old New York wealth, which was, aside from providing the money, a
considerable advantage for a Democrat. The great unwashed, Jack had assured
her, liked rich candidates on the assumption that the rich wouldn't have to
cheat and steal. It was, he pointed out, a false assumption, since the rich
were more likely than lesser-endowed mortals to have greed programmed into
their genes.

She fully understood his paranoia about being discovered
doing what would be perceived by voters as dirty business in his personal life.
Voters' perceptions, they both knew, had little to do with the inner man, but
he was married and had three grown children as well as an image, painstakingly
manufactured for public consumption, as a strict family man with deep moral and
religious convictions and a staunch upholder of traditional values. It was an
image that allowed upstate conservatives to partially swallow some of his
liberal positions, designed to win the needed portion of the city vote.

It was a source of enormous ego satisfaction to Myrna that
Jack chose to spend every weekend possible with her, despite the risks and
dangers, which to him were considerable. His wife accepted his weekend trips to
New York from Washington as the usual business of politics, and his staff
protected his privacy without question and without explanation. Naturally they
speculated about his whereabouts. But they didn't know. Fortunately his wife
was deeply involved in a career as a real estate broker, and weekends were
especially busy for her.

It wasn't easy for him to carry on this affair. Everything
had to be completely hidden. No financial records could attest to his
whereabouts. No telephone calls could be made. He had to be anonymous and
invisible.

He entered Myrna's apartment building, literally, in
disguise. He had even refused to accept a key of his own to her place, afraid
that if found in his possession, it might be traced to Myrna's apartment. It
was an unlikely assumption, of course, but it did indicate to her the
parameters of his paranoia.

With election coming up in less than a year, he had to
maintain his public political persona to the letter, knowing that there were
forces among his opponents that would love to get their hands on information
that could destroy his career, especially anything that had to do with chasing
women.

The media loved to crawl into a politician's pants. Not
that he had been a notorious womanizer like Ted Kennedy, which was seen to be a
traditional expectation for a Kennedy, or an arrogant womanizer like Gary Hart,
who had deliberately triggered the media blood lust that brought him down.

Jack's previous sexual peccadilloes, the senator had
explained to Myrna, were reduced to quickies under the safest circumstances,
and they were extremely infrequent. His relationship with Myrna was, he assured
her repetitively, vastly different. As a media person, Myrna completely
understood the realities of their affair, noting that the danger of potential
discovery actually added to the excitement.

To both of them, it had been an instant conflagration.
Myrna had gone down to Washington to supervise a photographic color layout of
Senator Springer. Ironically, most of the pictures were taken in his Chevy Chase home, and she and his wife, Nell, a postcard-perfect political wife, had gotten
along famously.

That had been the beginning. Myrna and Jack both knew that
they were at the mercy of a mysterious magnetizing force with inevitable
consequences.

"No one escapes from fate," he had explained even
as he posed for pictures. She knew exactly what he meant.

The very next weekend he had met her at her office in Manhattan to go over the pictures. The sexual tension between them was patently obvious to
both of them, and as soon as the business between them was over, they were off
to her apartment to spend the next two days in bed, keeping the pizza and
Chinese carryouts down the street busy for sustenance.

At fifty-three Jack was remarkably virile, literally a
sexual athlete of awesome powers. The more they saw of each other, the more
their addiction to each other increased and the more serious they became about
spending their future life together. This was, they could tell, even on that
first weekend, no quick roll in the hay.

"As I see it," he told her after a month of
weekends, "we've got two choices. I could confront Nell now, ask for a
divorce, but it would be a real long shot for reelection. Upstate, I'd have a
tough time, and up there are the numbers I need to mesh with the downstate
liberals. If I stay in this racket, the best bet would be to wait until after
the election. Between elections, divorce is quite acceptable for a
senator."

"That's only one choice," Myrna replied. As
usual, they lay in bed, waiting for desire to intrude on the conversation. It
was remarkable, Myrna thought, how much "quality" time they did spend
together being shacked up like this for forty-eight hours at a stretch.

"Actually three choices, then. I could divorce Nell
and stand for reelection with you at my side, take my chances. Or I could just
divorce Nell and say fuck it and go into law practice, make even more money,
and have you to myself without worrying about what the great unwashed
thinks."

"I like the part about the fuck it," Myrna said,
reaching out to caress him. "But let's face it, Jack. Senator is what you
want. In fact, I want it, too, even though I'm totally opposed to some of your
agenda." She felt his penis begin to stiffen. "Well, not to all of
it." She laughed, then bent down and kissed it. "It's what you want,
too, and you know it. Nor would I want to be the cause of your losing the
election and maybe your chances for higher office." Up till then he had
been deliberately evasive about any reference to higher office, which both knew
meant the presidency. But her exposure to politicians had taught her that the
"big P" was always on their minds, especially if they had all the
right physical and political credentials, like Jack Springer.

"It's a pipe dream," he had said with a sigh,
although he could not quite hide the yearning.

"Hey, pal," she had countered. "This is
little Myrna. The only pipe around here is that." She had pointed to the
obvious. "Besides, you don't smoke."

"All right. It's more than a pipe dream."

"A lot more. A possibility."

"And old Ron was divorced."

"Nuff said."

"So you'd like to be First Lady, would you?" he
had joked.

"Get laid by the president? In the White House? Who
wouldn't?"

"You're using me to fulfill your sexual
fantasies."

"Exactly. So I say we wait, then you do your split,
and we get married and live happily ever after. White House or not. Really,
Jack, that makes more sense."