[NOTE TO READERS: This story will be in three chapters; I will post the other two over the next two days. There is some sex in the story, but that is not its main focus.]
My wife Jennie is the one who loves surprises. I have always hated them myself. Surprise parties, unexpected schedule changes—they make me uneasy. I'd rather know ahead of time what I'm going to be doing, and then do it. I like anticipating things, looking forward to an event several days in advance, having the pleasure of imagining how it will be.
Still—I love Jennie very much, and she loves surprises. Throughout our marriage, the best way for me to show her how much I love her has been to arrange some sort of surprise for her. Our twenty-fifth anniversary is coming up, and I was determined to give her the biggest and best surprise ever.
Which is how I've come to find myself sitting here in the bedroom of my house as darkness falls, looking at the unmade bed she and her lover have just climbed out of and wondering what the hell I'm going to do now.
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GETTING TO KNOW JENNIE
To understand Jennie at all, you have to begin with the fact that she is beautiful. And I don't mean "very attractive"—I mean beautiful in a way that you almost never see. Unless you live in New York or Paris, you have probably not seen four more beautiful women than Jennie in your entire life.
Jennie is the kind of beautiful that makes people on the street stop walking and stare at her. I've seen cars come to a dead stop in the middle of the block as their drivers lean out the window, forgetting for a moment where they were going. She has the kind of beauty that makes people run back to their offices and say to their co-workers, "you won't believe what a beautiful woman I just saw!"
In short, we're not just talking about an attractive woman here—we're talking about someone who, after you see her, you feel like your whole life has been changed.
Jennie is about 5'8", with a slim figure that is perfectly proportioned.. She has honey-blonde hair that she wears straight, about six inches past her shoulders. Her features are very regular, with a small straight nose and high cheekbones. Her complexion is dazzling—even now in her mid-40s—and her blue eyes are amazingly, startlingly beautiful, like the loveliest sapphires you have ever seen.
Of course, there is more than one kind of female beauty. Some beautiful women exude sexuality and sexual attraction—you take one look at them, and all you can think about is going to bed with them. (Think Angelina Jolie.) But that was not Jennie's kind.
With Jennie, you looked at her and felt you were seeing Nature at her absolute best, a kind of perfection that you didn't know existed. It was like looking at the masterpiece of an art museum's collection. You wanted to be around Jennie, look at her some more, and of course take her home if you could. But the feeling wasn't overtly and immediately sexual—it was more misty and romantic.
Jennie has always had this spectacular beauty, and she has always lived the unusual life that goes along with it. She stood out among her schoolmates from kindergarten on, getting the attention—positive and negative—that went along with such attractiveness.
Teachers were all too ready to assume the best of her, to believe that such beauty had to be the outer manifestation of a superior person. All the way through elementary and middle school, Jennie tended to get As, even when her work might have earned her A-s or B+s.
In high school things were different only in one respect. There the teachers, most of whom were male, were abashed and tongue-tied with Jennie. They simply weren't capable of treating her in the same peremptory way as they did all of her classmates. Her beauty intimidated them. She continued to get As without having to work very hard, and their college recommendation letters for her were glowing and enthusiastic.
While Jennie had a few girlfriends growing up, the boys her own age acted like her high-school teachers, only worse. The flirting and teasing they could comfortably do with her female classmates failed them when Jennie was in the room. Even the bravest of them could only manage to stammer, "Hi Jennie," when she walked by.
Tim Kramer, the captain of the football team and the most popular boy in her class, tried for weeks to get up the courage to ask Jennie out to the movies. He even worked himself up to calling her on the phone, only to lose his nerve and pretend he was calling to ask about math homework. After that, he gave up and contented himself with the numerous moderately attractive girls in the school who were dying to go out with him.
It was only older men—and not too many of those—who could overcome the urge simply to gaze at Jennie, open-mouthed in wonder, and actually make conversation with her. Jennie's first romance was a love-affair with a 36-year old man, the younger brother of a neighbor on her block. Stephen met her at a pool party on her street the summer after her junior year. Like everyone else who had ever seen her, he was smitten. But he was also a sophisticated, experienced man—recently divorced after an eight-year marriage—who had moved to her small town in central Pennsylvania after living and working in Chicago.
Stephen knew how to talk to women, even dazzling ones like Jennie. She, on the other hand, had very little experience with men who could overcome their admiration for her beauty enough to be charming, and Stephen had no trouble getting her to go out with him.
Their affair lasted nearly a year, ending just before Jennie's graduation when Stephen's work took him back to Chicago. Her parents were uneasy about the relationship she was having with a man twice her age—and Jennie's younger sister Elizabeth, herself very pretty but nowhere near Jennie's league, was unspeakably jealous—but Stephen was a considerate and gentle person, and his treatment of Jennie reassured her family.
It was a true affair, in both senses. By that I mean first that Jennie really loved him, and if he didn't love her in quite the same full-throttle, adolescent way, he was very fond of her. And second, it became a fully sexual relationship after a month or two. Jennie might have been able to date a teenage boy for some time and retain her virginity, but Stephen had very different expectations (and his own apartment). After they began sleeping together, he took her to a birth-control clinic several towns away and she started taking the pill.
Jennie was lucky, in that Stephen was a loving and patient partner. He did care for her, she was not just a conquest for him. And so he taught her the pleasures of sex with tenderness, and she avoided those grubby first sexual experiences that so many inexperienced teenaged girls suffer at the hands of equally inexperienced teenaged boys. She learned what it meant to make love, learned about giving and receiving oral sex, and even tried anal sex with him, though she found she disliked it.
While she is a warm and loving person, Jennie has never been particularly passionate. She enjoyed sex with Stephen but rarely initiated it, and seldom longed for it in his absence. For her its pleasure had a lot to do with the intimate closeness of it, and the pleasure of his complete focus on her.
This is not surprising, after all—as an extraordinary beauty Jennie had grown up with an extraordinary amount of attention from those around her. She had no conception of what it might feel like to be anonymous, to move through a crowd of people unnoticed, the way most of us can do in any large city. On the contrary, the constant feeling of people's eyes on her, and even the sound of approving murmurs around her, were aspects of existence that she took for granted.
I hope I'm not creating the impression that Jennie was a self-absorbed monster. She was not. She was and is a kind, cheerful, and affectionate person, with a great sense of humor. But there's no question that she missed out on a lot of the give-and-take of normal human relationships. Much was always given to her, and far less was asked of her. It was inevitable that such an imbalance would begin to seem normal after a while.
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Jennie was heart-broken when Stephen moved away, but within a few weeks her spirits were lifted by the approaching start of her first year of college, at Penn State. Life at the university was a great deal like life in high school: everyone was pretty much struck dumb by her beauty, teachers gave her As, most of her male classmates were way too intimidated to talk to her.
But at a big university like Penn State there are also lots of older men, both graduate students and faculty members. And while the sight of Jennie was just as ravishing to them, they were more able to approach her. In her first couple of years at Penn State Jennie had no shortage of admirers, and very few weekend evenings without a date. While she did not have any serious relationships like the one with Stephen, she certainly went out a lot.
I met her when we enrolled in the same sociology class, when she was a sophomore and I was a junior, majoring in business administration. The class of 120 students was divided into study groups of six, and by good fortune Jennie and I were in the same group. The six of us met twice a week for two hours in the evening, and after a few weeks I was not only bowled over by her beauty (as was everyone else she met), I had come to admire many other things about her as well.
Jennie was kind, and she was generous. She noticed early on that two members of our group were weaker students than the rest of us, and she looked for ways to support them and boost their confidence. Nothing obvious—just complimenting their contributions to our group, or cheering them up a bit if a midterm didn't go so well. She was also a lot of fun—she laughed as much as anyone at our jokes, and frequently contributed a quip or a mild teasing remark of her own. So it is no surprise that I began to think about Jennie in a more serious way than just admiring her from afar.
While I was a pretty good-looking guy, I was nowhere near Jennie's league. On the other hand, neither was anybody else at Penn State, so I didn't worry about that too much. I had a fair amount of self-confidence, so I began to think about how I might get Jennie to go out with me.
Learning about how she interacted with her dates was easy, because she was pursued by men so often. Nearly every one of our study group sessions ended with one of her current admirers coming to pick her up, or with her remarking that she had to go meet someone at the Student Center or at her dorm. It was easy to see that she was fully in charge of each of these relationships. The guys, in fact, were somewhat at her mercy.
She might agree to meet Ted at 9 pm, and not show up until quarter of ten. Or she might accept a dinner invitation for Friday with Bob, only to call him on Friday afternoon and tell him she had to cancel. Or she might ask Andy to meet her at study group when it ended at 9:30, then make him stand around in embarrassment for ten minutes or more while she continued to laugh and joke with us, as the group took its time about breaking up for the evening.
It may seem strange that the same woman who was so thoughtful to colleagues in her study group could be so unfeeling with her dates, but I found it easy to understand. To a degree most of us simply cannot imagine, Jennie was used to receiving intense male attention and admiration. I don't think she ever understood that some of these young men were incredibly, desperately smitten with her, and that her behavior hurt their feelings. To her, each of them was just another boy who wanted to take her out. She didn't dislike them, but since she was only casually dating them, she didn't go out of her way to treat them with consideration.
