The Housewife Blues (5 page)

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.

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. Your
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.