The Housewife Blues (15 page)

"What the hell are you talking about, Jenny?"
Larry asked.

"The new business. You've told me nothing and Connie
knows all about it."

"I knew it. One meeting and you're already suspicious
of her. The fact is that she's a lawyer, and because of that Vince clued her
in."

"And me?"

"You're evading the issue, Jenny. Who gave you this
goddamned coat? It probably cost a bundle."

She considered a number of answers, none of which would be
satisfactory to him. Besides, they would be more lies.

"I can't say."

"Of course you can't," Larry fumed.

"It's not what you think," Jenny said.
"You've got to trust me on this."

"Trust you?"

"You say that all the time. Isn't that the basis of
all contracts, especially marriage contracts?"

"I used to think so," he snarled.

"Would you believe me if I told you it was delivered
to me but isn't really mine?"

"Now I've heard everything."

"It's the truth."

"Some truth. What do you take me for? The message is
coming through loud and clear. All the time my thinking I had married this
sweet little thing from Indiana, my true mate, my goody-goody homemaker. Who
sends a coat this expensive to a housewife, for chrissakes? Then to stand there
and say it wasn't meant for you. Maybe you think I'm one of your Indiana deadheads, stupid enough to swallow that story. And here I was out there working my
tail off for our future, and what were you doing? Come on, Jenny, who was the
lucky fucker?"

She inspected his face, appalled by his suspicions, hoping
he might be joking. He wasn't. Then, looking at the beautiful coat, she
softened and forced herself to give him the benefit of the doubt. It could,
indeed, seem like a tall story. But the point was that it was the true story,
even by virtue of who was telling it. Just who she was in relation to him
should be all he needed to believe her.

"Your imagination is running away with you,
Larry," she said, determined to remain calm. It seemed to enrage him still
more.

"I want to know who he is, Jenny," he fumed.
"How could you, living under the roof I pay for, eating the food I pay
for? I can't believe it. I guess you got bored with all that time on your
hands." When he had first confronted her, she had been carefully wiping
the stemware. Turning her back on him, she returned to her task.

"I told you the truth," she said as if addressing
the glass she was wiping. "It was only delivered to me, not meant for me.
And you should know better than to accuse me of ... of that."

She felt a sudden yank at her right shoulder, which caused
her to drop the glass she was working on. It fell to the floor and shattered.

"Waterford, Larry," she said, sighing.

"So what? What did you know about Waterford before I
married you? Besides, I paid for it. Now I want you to tell me about this
coat."

"I can't." Jenny turned to face him again. She
felt her lips trembling. "And I don't want you to ask me. Can't you just
trust me?"

"I've heard that before," Larry snickered.
Without another word he took a box of safety matches from a shelf above the
stove, took one out, and scraped it against the wall. The match burst into
flame.

With his left hand he held up the coat. With his right he
held the match. His objective was unmistakable as he brought the flame toward
the coat.

"You wouldn't," Jenny cried.

"Doesn't matter to me. I didn't pay for it."

"It has nothing to do with you," Jenny pleaded.

He brought the match closer. She watched it, peering into the
yellow flame, mesmerized for a moment. When it burned too close to his fingers,
he shook it out, then scraped another one into flame.

"Who is it from?" Larry asked.

"I can't say. I promised. It wasn't for me." She
felt a tightness in her chest that seemed to drown her words.

He brought the match closer. It was merely inches away from
the fur.

"I think it's even better than mink. Sable. I think
it's sable."

"Larry, please. I gave my word."

"Of course you did."

He brought the flame closer. Her nostrils quivered at the
first faint aroma of singed fur. Reaching out, she slapped the hand that held
the match.

"All right," she said.

"Well. Well. So who is the lucky fellow?"

"It's not a fellow," she whispered, watching his
face. His lips were curled into a snarl, his eyes blazing and unforgiving.
Obviously he expected the worst. "No, nothing like that." She wished
she had it in her to be more aggressive in her own defense. But how could she
have allowed him to burn the coat? "It belongs to Myrna Davis from upstairs.
And I feel awful telling you about it because I promised I wouldn't."

"You can't be serious," Larry said, his eyes
narrowing as if he were unable to shake his nagging suspicion. His brows
knitted in confusion. "Hard to swallow, Jenny. Why send it here?"

"Think about it."

"Didn't you ask?"

"I didn't have to. She admitted that it was a present
from someone who does not want it traced back to himself." She wanted him
to know only the bare minimum.

"That makes you a part of it," he said, shaking
his head, apparently taking another, more benign tack.

"I did a favor for a neighbor," she began.

"I don't believe this, after all the warnings. Can't
you understand that this is where involvement leads to?"

She raised both palms. "Please, Larry. I've heard all
that before. Frankly, I didn't see the harm in it."

"You should have consulted me."

"You would have said no."

"Damned straight."

Having dishonored her word, she felt humiliated, angry. Nor
was she willing to face any further lectures from him on the subject.

"I know you don't approve, Mr. High and Mighty,"
she began. She had always eschewed confrontations, but this was one time, she
told herself, that she could not turn the other cheek. "It's too
neighborly, too decent a thing to do for a neighbor, a stranger. Don't look at
me that way. I didn't exactly commit a murder."

"No, you didn't," he said, appearing to soften.
"You just got involved as a kind of shill, a go-between for a man and his
mistress. You've been used. Can't you see that? Do you know who the man is?"

"That's none of my business." She paused.
"Or yours."

"My business happens to be your business," Larry
said.

Suddenly the events of the evening roared back into her
mind.

"Sure, Larry. I saw that policy displayed tonight.
Your business doesn't happen to be my business. It works okay for the goose but
not for the gander. Frankly, I think it stinks."

"You wouldn't understand it," Larry said. He was
showing signs of contrition, but it didn't faze her. "Connie is a
lawyer," he muttered. "She understands what we're doing."

"And you all think I'm a dumb ninny?"

"Just not experienced in these matters."

"Can't you teach me?"

"I intend to," he said. "Someday, okay? Now
let's get back to the coat."

"Nothing to get back to. I told you about it. Now let
me put it back in the box. Tomorrow I will deliver it and the incident will, I
hope, be forgotten." She paused and took a deep breath. "And I thank
you for your trust and confidence. It's a wonderful feeling for a wife of four
months."

She took a broom from the closet and began to push the
broken shards of glass into a scoop.

"Considering the circumstances. My wife gets a coat
from an anonymous someone. What is a husband to think? Look at it from my point
of view." His tone had a hint of pleading about it. "I just hope you
learned your lesson."

She threw the glass into a garbage bag, then turned to look
at him. "What lesson is that?" she asked.

He sighed and shook his head, and his eyes danced
everywhere but on her face.

"Never to get involved. Now you see where it leads."

She pondered the ad infinitum so-called lesson for a few
moments, and as if something suddenly clicked in her mind, she no longer feared
his disapproval.

Perhaps it was for that reason that she allowed him to
apologize. It had happened at about 3:00 A.M. or, more precisely, 3:05 by the
digital clock that stood on her dresser. He had turned to her, folded himself
next to her like a spoon, and whispered in her ear.

"I'm so sorry, Jenny. I've been a shit. Can you
forgive me?"

She let the digital clock register another three minutes
before she responded, attributing his sincerity more to the urgency of his
erection, which she felt against her buttocks, than to any feelings of
contrition. It troubled her that such an idea should enter her head.

Nevertheless she demonstrated a kind of semiforgiveness by
her acquiescence and her lovemaking fervor. In her heart she wanted to accept
his apology. Her reaction to the events of the night continued to be troubling.
She wondered if her own sense of inadequacy had set off an unworthy chain
reaction of her emotions. Surely she wanted her husband to succeed in his
career. Unfortunately both the method and the people he had chosen to achieve
this success were, to be kind, suspect. The very suspicion about such things
was equally bothersome.

Perhaps, she decided finally sometime around dawn, she had
overstepped her role, invaded his turf, been childish and presumptuous, allowed
jealousy to warp her opinions. After all, wasn't Larry working for their future
and the future of their unborn children? She was out of line, she rebuked
herself. Business had its own rules, its own morality. She was a neophyte in
this area. How dare she intrude her negativity on his plan to better them
financially? Wasn't he, as her father said, a go-getter?

In the morning, feigning sleep, she felt his cool lips kiss
her forehead. Moments later she heard the door to the apartment close, and she
got out of bed. She didn't want to rehash last night's events. Actually she
felt a nagging sense of embarrassment. Hours of reflection had convinced her
that she was a victim of her own unworldliness, a true Hoosier hick.

What she needed to do, she decided, was expand her
horizons. She knew that Larry meant well with his protectiveness, but all this
isolation had left her mentally pinched, hemmed in. Not that she wasn't
respectful of his advice and counsel about living in New York. But it was
clouding her judgment about people and their motives. What she needed, she
decided, was to be open to her own observations. Not that Larry was wrong in
his assessment of the New York culture. Her problem, she decided, was that she
had no personal frame of reference to understand his evaluations. It was time
to embark on some observations of her own, see things through her own eyes.

Myrna Davis had said that she should deliver the package
around noon. This gave her a few hours simply to roam the streets, walk around,
with no goal in mind, no task other than to soak up the environment, observe,
fill the data bank of her mind.

She giggled at the idea. The weather was sunny and
pleasant, the streets less crowded than on an ordinary weekday. She slipped
into jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers, slung a leather pocketbook over her
shoulder, and, pumping herself up with an air of determination, set out on what
she now characterized as her private adventure.

The slight morning chill was bracing, and she walked fast,
turning south onto Third, heading downtown. She sensed that her eyes were
jumping at every sight, soaking them up, slotting them in her mind.

Images and sounds crowded into her consciousness. A young
Korean man dressing, moistening, and literally shining the fruit on display on
the sidewalk in front of his fruit stand; a dark-skinned, Indian-looking man
setting out the papers on a newsstand; a middle-aged, paunchy man using a long
winding tool to open the canopy over his jewelry store; a young woman in long
tights and bouncing pigtail jogging on the sidewalk; a teenage black man,
sporting a cocky lope, with a ghetto blaster on his shoulder; green plastic
garbage bags, like boulders strewn haphazardly after a violent earthquake,
lining the curbs. Through glass windows of cheek-to-jowl restaurants, with a
United Nations choice of cuisine, she observed men and women cleaning up,
preparing for the new day.

She tried smiling at the pedestrians she passed, a normal
ritual back in Bedford. Unfortunately those people who did not have earphones
stuck in their ears seemed equally intense and self-absorbed in their own
concerns.

It struck her that even on Saturday mornings the street
energy level was intense. Car horns honked, brakes squealed, and footsteps and
voices melded into the din. Sparkles of sunlight cast odd shadows along the
high buildings, and an occasional sunbeam caught on a spire, giving it the
appearance of a huge match bursting into flame.

Store windows seemed to overflow with displays of
abundance: food, jewelry, clothing, computers, cameras, eyeglasses, artwork,
liquor bottles, glassware and plates, stationery—a cornucopia of riches. She
felt the contagion of energy, of bigness.

Occasionally she caught glimpses of despair, men and women
squatting on the sidewalk, their eyes glazed with fatigue and disorientation,
or roaming aimlessly through the streets. Lost souls. Yet her compassion seemed
blunted by overexposure, and for the first time she sensed how it was possible
to become inured, to ignore, screen out, the idea of another's pain and
suffering.

In her mind everything, sights, sounds, smells, seemed
magnified, exaggerated, and, after walking twenty-odd blocks, overwhelming. The
agenda of this city, she realized, was set by its energy level, emanating from
what seemed, even on a comparatively quiet Saturday morning, an overpowering
variety of people engaged in an equally overpowering series of events. Even the
unseen millions who lived in buildings that lined the way were an undeniable
presence, living participants in her observations, both conscious and
subconscious.