I don't understand women.
I know. Guys all say that, but I really mean it. Just wait until you hear my story.
I had a mother and a sister and I've had a girlfriend most of the time since 9th grade. As far as I can tell, nothing you learn about one woman teaches you anything about any other woman.
Not only that, but figuring out how one woman thinks doesn't mean she's going to continue thinking that way. Case in point: My wife and I dated off and on for three years in college. All that time she acted as if getting married had never entered her mind. Two summers in a row, she left me completely and took jobs in distant states. Sometimes I wasn't even sure she wanted to continue dating.
Then we were college seniors and dating again. Everything was fine until Christmas day when I went by to see how she liked the ski jacket I scrimped and saved to buy her. I thought her thanks were lukewarm. No, she was downright cold. I was baffled. She was certainly going to need the jacket when we went skiing in January!
I waited all night for Janet to tell me why she acting so cold. Finally it came out. She was expecting an engagement ring for Christmas!
Say WHAT!
That was the first time either of us had mentioned marriage. I guess the thought had crossed my mind, but I figured there was plenty of time to get serious after I graduated and got my first job. All of a sudden, Janet had other ideas. All of a sudden she wanted to know how I felt and if we "had a future together."
I stewed over it for a couple of weeks, but it made more and more sense to me. So I proposed and we got married in September after I graduated and started working for a big company. Twelve months later I was a father for the first time and the years just flew by. Now Janet and I are in our early 40s and our two boys are in college.
After a few years of working on routine little parts of big corporate projects, I started designing things at home to stave off boredom. I came up with several impractical gadgets before I thought up a process to streamline the manufacture of certain drugs.
By then my company had lost its biggest client in drug manufacturing. They weren't interested in my process, so I quit to develop the idea on my own. It was three long, lean years before I refined, prototyped and sold my idea. After that, the money came in a steadily increasing stream. We could have traveled and played golf the rest of our lives.
Instead I worked mornings at home, designing and consulting, and spent the afternoons with Janet and the kids. I coached the kids' teams, volunteered at their schools, led them in Scouts; the works. It was a great life until our second boy left for college and I began to find time dragging. The afternoons were especially slow. I still did some volunteering at the neighborhood school, but it's different when your own kids are gone.
Janet made a number of puzzling sharp turns in our first years together. She graduated with a teaching degree, then decided not to teach. She worked at several jobs while I was getting my manufacturing process off the ground. When the money started rolling in, she stayed home until the boys were in high school. Then she went back for her masters in education, but switched to exercise physiology.
Then Janet decided we should have another baby. We tried for a long time the old-fashioned way, then tried several kinds of medical intervention. Nothing worked. Finally, during our third complete physical evaluation, the doctors discovered a problem with Janet. Treatment failed and she had a hysterectomy. She was sad about that for long time.
Janet then started on a second master's, but quit after six months. She threw herself into the boys' lives, with mixed results. Finally she began volunteering at a battered women's shelter. Therapy, she called it. Before long, Safehouse became her life and her passion. She spent most of the daylight hours there, doing everything from clerical work to tutoring and leading exercise classes.
There was a big change in Janet after we married. From seeming very casual while we were dating, she was suddenly the stereotype of a jealous woman. Janet wanted to know everything about the women in my office. And I invited angry questions and a full day of sulking if I thoughtlessly complimented one. If I was half an hour late coming home from work, she accused me of being at a motel with some "slut." She hovered at my elbow at parties, and glared icicles at any woman who dared to get flirty.
I like to look at women, but Janet never had anything to fear. She was always willing and generous in bed, and she had the kind of beauty and curvy body that make men slow down and watch as she goes by. I've always loved digging my fingers into her curly brunette mop while we make love. She's all I could wish for in a wife, aside from her over-the-top jealousy.
I chafed at the restrictions, but gradually learned to reassure Janet and keep her jealousy in the background. She seemed to mellow over the years, but could still begin simmering at an innocent remark. Then one long summer my world went gradually, but completely, upside down.
It started some time before when the sweet, elderly Appletons next door decided to sell their house and move to a smaller place. The new owners are Curtis and Kathleen, a married couple in their late 20s. As much as we miss our old neighbors, Curtis and Kathleen are a lot more active and engaging. They immediately began redecorating and upgrading the house and working on the neglected yard.
Interestingly, they are both engineers. Neither is in my field, but we quickly found lots in common. They both worked for a big national firm, but a year after they moved next door Kathleen quit to do contract work from home.
Curtis is a thin, mild-mannered guy with a soft handshake and perfect manners. He's good-looking, pale and seems to lack energy. He languidly tends their roses, while Kathleen strides purposefully back and forth pushing the lawn mower. Curtis holds the ladder while Kathleen cleans out the rain gutters.
Kathleen is average in height, weight and build so she doesn't turn many heads, but she is certainly pretty in a quiet way. Her light blonde hair is straight, shoulder length and always clean. Her breasts are small, but she carries herself upright with her head up and shoulders back, so you can't help but notice their firm roundness. Watching her jog by one day I was struck by her straight back, muscular legs and beautifully rounded butt. I figured Curtis was a lucky man.
I also figured I would catch hell one day when Kathleen was doing yard work in a bikini top and cutoffs and Janet noticed me watching a little too closely. But for once she just smiled, stuck out her tongue at me and left it at that.
It surprised me how fast Janet and Kathleen became best friends, but they were soon visiting back and forth several times a day. They wore a path between our back doors. Curtis was usually out of town on business Sunday night through Friday afternoon, so I think Kathleen was lonely. One morning I stumbled downstairs at six in my boxers to find them sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking. They had a good laugh as I modestly dashed back upstairs. After that there were many mornings when Kathleen had breakfast with us.
Then remodelers started working on her kitchen and before long Kathleen was eating supper with us every night, too. Actually, it was a lot of fun and the three-way conversations were lively. And Kathleen's attendance inspired Janet to start coming home and cooking again. She'd almost given up cooking unless the boys were around.
Often Kathleen would show up at the back door with a covered dish while Janet was fixing supper and I was nursing a beer at the breakfast bar. Kathleen is not the cook Janet is, but she likes to experiment and she's had some notable successes. Sometimes it's like a competition and I've found Kathleen and Janet alternately feeding me tidbits and demanding to know whose entree or dessert is the best. They refuse to let me be diplomatic and insist on knowing whose dish I really prefer.
Surprisingly, Janet seems genuinely pleased when one of Kathleen's experiments pays off and I praise her cooking. And Kathleen is always effusive in her admiration of Janet's kitchen skills.
My relationship with Kathleen was based mainly on engineering and computers. I'm her computer help guy whenever she has a document that won't print, or balky software. And she occasionally comes to my upstairs office to talk through a problem she's having with a tricky design or ask my advice on handling a client. I have gotten involved in a couple of Kathleen's projects to the extent of doing sketches for parts of them. Truthfully, it was stimulating to learn about another branch of engineering and the places where it intersected my field.
Also stimulating were the times I found myself leaning over Kathleen, looking at the screen while she sat at her computer. People who work at home can wear what they want, and Kathleen's taste ran to bare feet, tennis shorts, loose blouses and delicate little bras in white or pink. It was distracting to see the tops of her small but full breasts partly visible down the front of her blouse.
Another time she crawled under her desk to check a power cord and the sight of her firm, round butt and tanned thighs made me gulp hard and look away. Nothing would be stupider, I told myself, than getting the hots for my next-door neighbor, who also happened to be my wife's best friend.
Janet's relationship with Curtis was much more distant than her friendship with Kathleen. In fact, she has made some cruelly remarks about him. That puzzled me since Curtis is such an inoffensive guy and Janet is not normally a harsh critic. So I asked her about the source of her disdain.
Well it seems Kathleen and Curtis had tried to get pregnant for several years without success. So Kathleen went to a fertility specialist who ran tests that showed her plumbing was fine. But Curtis refused to submit to fertility testing or consider medical intervention of any kind.
Embarrassed by the intimate details, I mumbled something about not even knowing Curtis and Kathleen wanted children. Janet glared at me.
"When a 20-something married woman moves into a four-bedroom house and starts decorating a nursery before she even unpacks her kitchen ... then *I* think she wants a baby!"
Janet went on in that vein for quite awhile, and I realized there was little she didn't know about our neighbors' personal life ... right up to how rarely they had sex. According to Janet, Curtis had little sex drive and Kathleen had to get very aggressive when she wanted sex. For a long time Kathleen assumed she hadn't gotten pregnant because she and Curtis had sex so rarely.
But after she was tested and found fertile, her doctor hinted that the problem probably lay with Curtis. Since Curtis refused to be tested, the doctor told Kathleen there was nothing he could do.
