The Housewife Blues

by Warren Adler

  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."

  "Light as lain," Jack said, still in a playful mood. "I'm getting a yen for some more flied lice. But first let's do something about this election."

  "I love this election more than anything," Myrna said, kissing it again. And again.

  But once it was firmly decided to take no chances and wait until after the election for him to ask Nell for a divorce, his paranoia increased. A misstep, they both knew, could be a political disaster, and therefore the mechanics of their weekends grew more complicated as the fear of discovery upped the ante considerably. It boiled down to his need to continue to be a senator, thereby keeping his options open for higher office, and her new compulsion to be a senator's wife or more. How will that grab you, Pop? she fantasized secretly.

  "Maybe we should cool it until after the election," Myrna had suggested from time to time, knowing it was only a test. They were always testing each other. An affliction of lovers, she had told him. Never quite trusting the joy, the miracle, of it. It provided its share of pain as well. The pain of parting, the uncertainty of such love between them being sustained. "Suppose we're not in love like this after the election? Suppose you fall out of love with me?"

  "Or you with me?"

  "Never," she would attest. "Never. Never. Never."

  "Why so sure? You fell out of love with others. Your two husbands."

  "I never loved them."

  "Then why did you marry them?"

  "I was trying to fuck my father."

  "And did you?"

  "No. They were imposters."

  "And me?"

  "I want to fuck you, not my father. My father is yesterday. It's all over. I've taken over the blame." It had, she knew, the ring of truth. Only she could hear the hollow note.

  "One day you'll stop loving me. Find out I'm an imposter, just like the others," Jack said, another test, just to bait her. It was all part of it, the testing, the fear, the delicious insecurity, the exquisite danger.

  "And you? Didn't you once love Nell?"

  "There's love and love."

  "And this?"

  "It takes some maturity to understand the difference between the original and a knock-off."

  "And which are we?"

  "The original."

  "Then why do you keep knocking me off?" They both giggled at that. In fact, they spent lots of time giggling. At times she wondered if she had actually become the Myrna Loy of the Thin Man series. And he was the William Powell character. The irony amused her, despite its Pyrrhic victory for her father.

  At times during their weekends they would hear sounds in the hallway or on the stairs or the movement of the elevator.

  "You suppose any of them knows?" he would ask.

  "How could they know?"

  "They could have seen me, seen through my stupid disguise."

  "In this building? Everybody seems to be hiding something around here. It's a miracle if you even get a hello. Which is exactly the way I want it. All I need is to face a lot of bullshit from the neighbors. Hell, we couldn't be doing this if I had gotten friendly with them. Some yenta would be ringing the buzzer at the most inappropriate moment, wanting to borrow some herb tea, for chris-sake."

  "But you still couldn't be certain, dead certain."

  She contemplated his challenge for a long moment. "Certain. But not dead certain," she agreed. "What about you? Can you be certain that you got here clean and unspotted? I mean, how can you be so sure you weren't followed?"

  "I know how to shake a tail."

  "Yessirree. I vote yea to that one."

  "Good. That's exactly my immediate intention."

  "Okay. Here's my tail."

  She loved this easy banter between them, the sex, the closeness, the letting go, and she was sure the same went for him.

  One weekend, he asked her: "Is there anything you want?"

  At first the question confused her, and she had hesitated to answer it, but he had prodded her.

  "Something material, something you have on the top of a wish list, something personal."
On other occasions he had expressed some guilt in the fact that they spent the weekends holed up, hiding out like fugitives. This request, she assumed, obviously came about because of those feelings.

  "You don't have to, Jack," she told him. "My cup already runneth over."

  "You don't understand. I want to. No, I need to. And not just a token."

  She had thought about it for a number of weeks, deciding finally to tell him the truth, sure that it would be beyond his means. She had seen what she wanted at Henri Bendel one day. It had arrested her attention, and she had actually tried it on. Wanting a material thing had never turned her on. Except this.

  "A certain full-length sable coat," she told him, giving some specifics about her experience at Bendel's. "Pure frippery, I know. Against all liberal principles about animal rights and such. But you really wanted to know. I don't like jewelry. You said personal. So that's it, that full-length sable coat. The one that said 'Come and get me at Bendel's.' I'd love to go out with you in that sable coat. In fact, we don't even have to go out, I'll wear it with nothing on underneath. How's that for fantasy."

  She watched his face, expecting some expression of either ridicule or frustration.

  "Perfect," he said. "I'm of an age when I can still remember that once a woman's most fervent material desire was to have a fur coat."

  "See how traditional I am."

  "That's my girl. You want that full-length sable, you got it."

  "Come on, Jack. We're talking more than a hundred thousand dollars. I know you're loaded, but it's not easy to hide a purchase like that from the people who administer your private funds. Some one of your various retainers is bound to raise a red flag. You asked. I told you. It was meant to scare you, not to encourage you. Besides, you give me your love and your loving, and that's quite enough."

  He was silent for a long time after that. She let him alone, hoping he was in the process of rejecting the idea as foolhardy and dangerous. Finally, when he did not speak, she embellished her earlier note of caution.

  "First of all, in your position, you'd have to buy it in cash. No records, remember. Then you'd have to be sure that the name of the chippy, me, was totally hidden. Can't you see the headlines: 'Sable Coat to Secret Mistress in Senator's Love Nest.' The National Enquirer would have a field day."

  "That's exactly the point. We'll outsmart the bastards. Fool them."

  "Now that is crazy."

  "Crazy? Better yet, dangerous. I love the idea of outsmarting the bastards. Let's just figure out how to make it happen. Can the coat you want be described on the telephone?"

  "Of course. Actually, it may already be gone."

  "Did you ask the price?"

  "One hundred twenty-five thousand five hundred, plus luxury tax. So there. So much for fantasy."

  "Do you know the salesperson? Were you recognized?"

  "You can't be serious," she muttered. "But the answer is no."

  "Okay. So we keep you anonymous. Now getting it to you..." He mused for a while over the detail. Idle speculation, she decided. "We have it delivered to someone untraceable to me or you. A casual acquaintance, perhaps. The thing about this business is that you've got to protect your flanks."

  "Why bother?"

  "Because it's there."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" she said.

  "It means," Jack said, "that I'm going to do it. I need to do this. I need to show you how far I'm willing to go."

  "It's adolescent," she protested. "Like playing chicken."

  "Sort of," he admitted. "One way or another I'm going to do it. With or without your complicity."

  "You don't have to prove anything to me, Jack. I love you. Nothing can make me love you more."

  "And I love you. And I want to do this."

  "But, Jack, if the media, or some legitimate investigative body, or, for that matter, some illegitimate body, a private detective hired by an opponent, wants to dig up dirt, this will be a bonanza."

  "I'm all a-twitter," Jack said.

  "You have that much untraceable cash?"

  "In my stash."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means that most politicians have campaign cash hidden, unaccounted for. Even me."

  "Is that legal?"

  "Not legal. Just done. Standard practice. So you see, not to worry. Believe me, I can get the nicely laundered cash for the purchase. Like Nixon in the Watergate tapes saying he could get the cash. Anonymously. Then we get a private delivery service to deliver it to someone of your choice."

  No matter what she said, however convoluted her scenarios of doom, she knew that he had already figured things out and there could be no dissuading him. In an odd way she was glad that she had told him about it, although she still worried about the terrible risk to him.

  "You realize you're jeopardizing your career," she told him.

  "That's exactly the point. I want to risk it. I want to illustrate how much you truly mean to me."

  "Sounds like you want to get caught."

  "Psychobabble," he replied. "No. I want to get away with it, and I want you to have this gift. I've bought enough gifts for people that meant nothing. I want you to have a gift from me that means something."

  "It's romantic stupidity."

  "I know. Isn't it wonderful?"

  It did not take her long to be a party to it. The issue finally got down to who would be the perfect go-between. She wrestled over that one. It was not a matter of trust, more of naive ignorance, someone who would simply accept the assignment, relegating it to no more than a simple favor.

  That cute little woman downstairs! She remembered how she had dutifully delivered Myrna's shoes, how fresh, sweet, and naive she seemed. And apparently, from what Myrna had observed, she spent most of her time at home, the perfect little homemaker. What was her name? Burns. Janey or Jenny?

  Thinking about her caused Myrna to expand her thoughts about the people who occupied the building. Myrna had lived here for five years. It was perfect for her needs, spacious, high ceilings and thick plaster walls, well kept, and most important, away from the gossiping curiosity of concierges, doormen, and janitors who hung about high rises with their palms out and their eyes open.

  She considered finding such an apartment in a small building a stroke of luck. It would have been impossible for Jack to visit her like this if she lived in one of those luxury high rises. Someone was sure to spot him. Not that she was totally secure that he had not been recognized coming in or out of her building. But the odds seemed a lot less, and six months had passed without any suspicious incident.

  She had maintained a bare minimum of sociability with the neighbors, offering a pleasant hello or a trite comment about the weather. Invariably she kept her distance. The Richardsons, who lived in the apartment across from hers, seemed pleasant enough, and she heard their comings and goings without interest. Mr. Richardson had introduced himself to her, volunteering that he was an art dealer, which had immediately put her on alert. Art dealers were always hustling paintings.

  Upstairs, just above her place, were the Sterns. She looked like gloom and doom, and he seemed always self-absorbed and unfriendly. Their son, too, was equally strange. When they waited on the first-floor landing for the elevator, she would be sure to offer the most perfunctory acknowledgment she could think of, then dash up the stairs. Actually it was difficult to ascertain who was being more standoffish, she or them. Either way it suited her just fine.

  Then there was the gay couple on the ground level that were always losing their cat. Three times in the last year one of them had rung her buzzer looking for that damned cat. Once or twice she had spotted the Stern boy sitting on the steps stroking the cat, a tabby that looked like a miniature tiger. Beyond that, she had little or nothing to do with the couple.

  Which left the obvious, that sweet little thing on the first floor. Myrna remembered that she had this midwestern twang and a fresh, open, trusting look. It was obvious that she would have liked to come into
Myrna's apartment and pass the time of day. That, Myrna suspected, would be fatal, since the woman seemed to have lots of time on her hands.

  Perhaps she stayed home because she was pregnant or unemployed or had been cowed into accepting the role of housewife by what could be her overbearing twit of a husband. Indeed, she knew the type well from paternal experience.

  Her suspicions had been confirmed when she had observed the husband a couple of times as they passed in the hallway. He appeared to be a sleek, conceited, hard-body type. She felt certain that he was one of that vast army of nose-in-the-air, tight-ass, take-no-prisoners superyuppies, always dressed in the latest designer suits or jogging clothes. She had encountered hordes of them between husbands. They were always so cocksure of making it big and expected the world to bow down and admire them.

  She got her jollies ball-busting them, making them feel like shit, especially in the sack, where they really thought they were showing their stuff. She chuckled to herself, remembering how she had faked indifference to their lovemaking, after coming to beat the band. That really pissed them off. This Burns fellow, she decided, was a classic specimen.

  Actually, even though she was determined not to befriend the neighbors, he seemed to go beyond the pale, not even looking her way when they passed in the hall, offering not even the slightest impersonal grunt of recognition and leaving in his wake the stink of his trendy after-shave.

  "Sounds like a great idea," Jack told her when she broached the subject of this Janey or Jenny receiving the coat. By then the situation was a fait accompli, both of them treating it as a challenge to be faced, with this last detail of delivery to be accomplished.

  "If you don't hear from me to the contrary," she told Jack, "the coast is clear."

  "Great. Next weekend we'll have a party."

  "Don't we always. I'll wear it when we make love."

  "I can't wait."

  "So I see."

  Then it was decided. A perfect shill. Myrna was certain the woman would cream in her jeans at this opportunity to be a good neighbor.

  Even that first brief visit had indicated the whole story; the woman seemed so open, so natural, so midwestern, so corny, that the potential request actually gave her a pang of conscience, as if she were using her for some nefarious purpose. In a way, she was. Hell, it was only a delivery, for crying out loud.