Initially, Carol was appalled at his gaucheness. However, there was no question that his unmitigated gall was an essential characteristic of a successful entrepreneur and she fully realized that entrepreneurism was the modern road to personal wealth and the privileges that provided. She mused. Maybe, just maybe, this frenzied young man might be worth a second thought. They would never have a mutuality of intellectual interests of course but let's face facts. My career is my first order of business and his family's money can grease the skids in the academic world as well as anywhere else. Musing further, she perceived that Jeffrey's gene pool had given him the promise of doing exceptionally well in business himself quite beyond family money. He's never said it but it's obvious his primary objective in life is to exceed his father's wealth. Yes, she coldly calculated, this little Jeffrey and I might make a pair at that.
Warming to the chase, Jeffrey was delighted to introduce this tall and self-assured patrician blonde as his personal trophy to his Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity brothers and he launched a targeted courtship. Carol forewent further thought of a love match and initiated her own campaign to win his affection. Ever promising but never delivering physical pleasures, her seduction of Jeffrey was masterful. Within a month, he was a mass of sexual frustration.
The week after their joint graduation from Stanford, they eloped to Reno for a quick justice-of-the-peace marriage without family, friends or religious liturgy. The dismay this brought to the Episcopal Wilson and orthodox Greenberg families bothered neither Carol nor Jeffrey. The stage Carol had set was for a partnership of mutual material gain, not a warm, loving and sharing relationship.
While at Stanford, Carol had built on her teenage sexual experiences through several brief liaisons with student peers and a few more intense affairs with faculty members. One of the latter resulted in a rather ugly divorce action with her being named as correspondent in the suit brought by a vengeful wife. She was by no means virginal and was supremely confident that her highly skilled sexual techniques could manage Jeffrey's needs with ease. She was quite correct.
In the garish Lake Tahoe hotel selected by Jeffrey, their marriage was consummated. His physical energy evidenced itself in four missionary couplings during the night, none of which lasted more than ten minutes. With no more than cursory foreplay, Carol experienced considerable personal discomfort. She had a pang of pity for the ineptness of her husband and attempted to slow his brutish mountings but his premature climaxes defeated her best efforts. Carol came nowhere close to satisfaction that night. So this is what the physical side of marriage to Jeffrey Greenberg is going to be, she contemplated. I should have imagined as much. Dozing fitfully, she was awakened repeatedly to receive another of his inelegant approaches or listen to his unending descriptions of future business plans.
Eleven months into their marriage, a son, Aaron, was born who proved to be a loyal supporter of his father during and after his parents' acrimonious divorce eight years later. Named for his paternal grandfather, Aaron followed his father's lead in attending attended Stanford. Joining Nova Healthcare immediately after graduation, his personality became even more abrasive than that of his famous father. He held most of his colleagues in disdain and every Nova employee feared him. He became his father's primary source of information on executive gossip and who could be trusted. His negative opinion frequently led to an individual's unexpected departure.
Sixteen months later, Jeffrey and Carol's second son David appeared and he was Aaron's diametric opposite. A sensitive but assertive boy, he dramatically announced his homosexuality at age fifteen and Jeffrey emotionally shunned him from that moment on. Now a family tradition, he too graduated from Stanford and in his mid twenties became the nationally prominent executive director of a large nonprofit gay organization in Seattle. Through the years, David remained an embarrassment to his father who never mentioned his existence socially or in business. He became a treasured son to Carol who deeply respected his commitment to his chosen lifestyle, despite her own total heterosexuality.
Fourteen months after David, daughter Sarah arrived. Now twenty-three and a Yale law student, Sarah was a dedicated social liberal whose opinions closely paralleled those of her mother and her mother's new husband, Ambassador Ward. Sarah's last meeting with her father had been while he was visiting New Haven and it was a catastrophe. With two huge Bombay gin martinis before dinner and almost a full bottle of expensive pinot noir under his belt, Jeffrey launched a diatribe against her traitorous left wing socialist views and the perverted lifestyle of her college friends. Sarah attempted to answer with her own reasoned but opposing beliefs, and that led to a furious outburst by her father. Talking loudly over his daughter, he lost control of himself, threw his napkin on the floor and stalked out of the restaurant leaving her alone under the embarrassed glances of the surrounding diners. Taking a sip of her own drink, she reddened in anger at his boorish but all too typical behavior. The only redeeming virtue of the evening was that her father's current wife, an overdressed and affected English woman four years Sarah's senior in age, wasn't there to gloat over her humiliated stepdaughter. Later that night she called her mother in Washington to describe the incident and vow that she never wanted to see Jeffrey again. Once again, Carol was placed in the awkward position of placating her daughter while trying not to condemn her father.
Many times through the years, Carol thought of her marriage to Jeffrey with an ambivalent conclusion. He was unquestionably gauche and embarrassing in social situations. She was often repulsed by his violent sexual demands that almost always left her unsatisfied, nothing more than a chattel to satisfy his immediate need. Still, it was undeniable that his phenomenal business success had indeed provided the many advantages of wealth that she had desired from childhood. Their three children were a mixed blessing. David and Sarah bonded wonderfully with their mother and Carol loved them to the depth of her being. Aaron? Well, Aaron so reflected his father's negative characteristics that she had to admit he had become lost to her emotionally and that was a sad reality. Despite an unfulfilled marriage, Carol remained staunchly faithful to her husband and firmly rejected many opportunities to dally with desirable and highly placed men of business, government, the professions and academia. She took perverse pleasure in the knowledge that whatever her shortcomings, she had never betrayed her marriage vows. The same was not true of Jeffrey.
During her first pregnancy, Carol became painfully aware of her husband's infidelity. Short trysts became long-lived affairs that Jeffrey skirted but never fully denied. His libido was only a part, and a small part at that, of his philandering. Far more important was the ego enhancement he gained from being seen with young women of beauty and there were many available to share his attention and wealth. Deeply hurt by his increasingly open boasts of conquest, Carol began to regret her own faithfulness as three children were issued from their unpleasant couplings.
Thoroughly disillusioned with her husband and everything he represented, Carol sued for divorce in the eighth year of the marriage. Son Aaron was then seven, David five and daughter Sarah four. The divorce action was based on well-proven charges of Jeffrey's numerous adulteries. His army of attorneys fought hard and the acrimony of the suit was well publicized in the society pages of the Phoenix papers. The one grievous error Jeffrey had made, never to be repeated, was that in his youthful inexperience he had neglected to require a prenuptial agreement. Following her successful action, Carol found herself to be a very wealthy divorcee and the subsequent growth of her acquired equity shares in Epic Healthcare multiplied the value of her large cash settlement many times over the years. The settlement provided that Aaron would remain with his father while she gained custody of David and Sarah. Although visitation privileges were generous, the division of custody well suited the individual wishes of both parents and the children. All of the children were placed in the most expensive of private boarding schools until they reached college age. During their few overlapping undergraduate years at Stanford, David and Sarah saw each other frequently but almost never associated with Aaron.
