Have you ever discovered something you wish you hadn't?
One day you're living blissfully unaware of some situation, and then suddenly, somehow, you find out something that you didn't want to know. Sometimes it creeps up on you, bit by bit, like putting puzzle pieces together until the overall pattern emerges. Other times, you learn about things all at once, and then, in hindsight, you see the little clues that were always there, but that you'd somehow ignored. Sometimes it's a current event; other times it was something that happened years earlier. This is one of those stories.
I'm Gar Winston. Gar is my nickname; it's short for Garrett, and rhymes with 'jar.' I'm fifty -- the big 'five-oh.' My wife Kim tells me I'm still as handsome and sexy as when she married me two decades earlier. I have tousled brown hair, steel gray eyes that can look green or blue depending on the color shirt I'm wearing, and I've kept pretty trim over the years thanks to Kim's obsession with her weight.
Kim is a knockout, even at forty-eight after having mothered two of our children to adulthood. She's an Irish lass with long, fiery red hair that is eye-catching and one of her best features. She occasionally has the fiery disposition to go with it, along with flashing green eyes. She's trim but naturally busty, and has long shapely legs that seem to go on forever, especially if she's wearing a short tennis skirt. People often stare at her; certain she's a movie star.
Long before I met her, she learned how to maximize her good looks and her sex appeal through the right clothing: a pair of high heels and a short skirt to bring out the best shape in her legs, a wide belt to accentuate her narrow waist, a buttoned blouse -- with not too many buttons fastened to highlight her breasts and cleavage, and the application of subtle makeup in just the right places to accentuate her cheekbones, soften her few freckles, and bring out her lovely facial features. She usually looked calm, relaxed, and regal, right on the edge of sexy, even when we were lounging around the house on a weekend and doing chores, or when we were on vacation hiking in the mountains in the western part of the state and she was wearing hiking gear with her mane of hair pulled back in a makeshift pony tail.
We both have good jobs, and have squirreled away enough money to put both kids through college and get a head start on thinking about retirement. Kim is the executive secretary to the CEO and president of a company called Pharmacol Health (the first word a concatenation of pharmacology). She's worked for the company for fifteen years and progressed to her senior position about seven years ago after educating herself about molecular pharmacology, the pharmaceuticals sector, and psychology.
Kim takes no shit off anyone, and near as I can tell never has. Repeatedly, I hear that her reputation is that of a highly efficient and effective executive assistant. When she first got the head admin job, everyone thought she'd screwed her way up there or was there just to be eye-candy on rug row. Those impressions quickly dissipated as she proved how tough she could be in managing her boss' time, demanding compliance with promised milestones, and even setting up and running meetings for him, including part of the annual shareholders' meeting. She was poised and unafraid of standing up in front of several hundred shareholders, calling a meeting to order, and then acting as moderator as the executives in the company spoke of their accomplishments and plans.
Kim was so good looking I had no doubt that people hit on her all the time. Before she got promoted she had more problems. She grew up and went to high school near Boston, but then lived in Los Angeles for six years. In LA, she assured me, she had learned every put down for every situation you could imagine. She told me she could repel male advances three ways: dismissively, flirtatiously, or the vocal equivalent of a hard kick in the groin. From what I heard at her company's social functions, she often used the latter approach to keep a lid on things, so much so that she became known as the 'ice queen' at Pharmacol. I stopped worrying about her fidelity or 'virginity' after a while.
I manage the information systems group in another nearby company called Intercont Logistics (IL) -- a multibillion dollar a year intercontinental logistics company. Because of the geographic spread of our company as well as the need to visit our hardware and software vendors, I travel all over the world -- a lot.
I can get overly focused on work. Kim has consistently nudged me back into 'family mode' over the years when I get remote, my thinking is too far a field, or when I've been away for too long. I know I'm seen as a competent manager, yet also a nice guy that goes out of his way to help and be supportive of the staff. Someone once told me I had low ego needs. I guess that goes with having a Pollyanna attitude about life, being a perpetual optimist, and believing that every cloud has a silver lining. I wasn't always that way at work. Early in my career I was quick to anger, and could be dismissive. Over time, and with some good mentors, I mellowed out.
Of course, all these traits set the stage for my 'discovery.' The one I wish had never come to light.
I can still recall the day. It was a Friday in October, and I'd just flown in from a four-day trip to Silicon Valley, stopping for half a day at one of our operations centers in Chicago. I got home about three o'clock. Kim was at work, and the house was empty, so I unpacked and set about catching up with mail and things on my desk after five days playing road warrior.
Kim always piled the bills and any mail on my desk. If I were away a long time, she'd work her way through the bills, paying most of them online in her efficient way. Any other mail sat until I got home. Thus, I sorted through the pile of mail, frequently dumping the things that obviously looked like junk mail into the trashcan without even opening the envelopes.
One envelope I started to throw away made me pause, however. It had no return address on it, yet the crisply typed address made it different from other advertisements. I slit open the envelope, fully anticipating that with one glance I'd be tossing the contents into the wastebasket.
The contents were one letter-size page with only a few words typed in the middle: 'Buy the DVD
Private Afternoons
. Someone you know has a starring role. More later.' I hesitated long enough to set aside the page and examine the envelope.