Most of the places and institutions featured in this story are real and the events related actually happened. However, the reader who tries to discover the identities of the persons in this story will be frustrated by my having changed all names and places.
It had been nearly a half year since we'd moved from Wisconsin to New Jersey and unlike my husband, Bert, I still hadn't come to peace with the whole thing. An outsider viewing our situation might pretty quickly come to the conclusion that I resented Bert having profited much more from the move than I had. True, Bert's situation had improved enormously from the move while mine had tanked. As a university professor of electrical engineering, he had gotten a serious salary jump and he was now a tenured professor at a more prestigious institution. On the other hand, I had been reduced from being a respected and in-demand speech therapist to being an unemployed speech therapist having to take courses in order to get a license to practice a profession that I'd been practicing for close to 20 years.
But that wasn't the only thing that I'd lost as a result of the move. In Madison, Bert had been one of those professors who allow their academic lives to mix with their personal lives. He had a home office and often worked at home, but there was more - significantly more. Popular with his students, both graduate and undergraduate, they tended to show up at our house for advice, questions or just plain to shoot the shit. Plenty of wives object to that kind of situation and put a stop to it or don't even let it start. Our friends, at least those who mentioned it, thought that those students were making up for the children that Bert and I couldn't have -- in the way that some childless couples keep pets as surrogate children. True enough, had we had children, that state of affairs probably would never have gotten started. In any case, no one, not even our closest friends, suspected what was really going on and to what extent.
It all started one afternoon when Jerome, a red headed 19-year old undergrad dropped by to collect a set of notes that he'd forgotten after a tutoring session the day before. Jerome, from a small town in Iowa, was one of those shy, wanna-be geeks who admitted that his only experience with girls was (he claimed) limited to a short stint going steady in high school. I say 'wanna-be' geek because he wasn't brilliant, just a hard working young guy on his way to getting a bachelor degree and becoming a mid-level engineer in some Midwestern power company. Without intending to, I gained his confidence and he began confiding in me -- personal stuff like his insecurities and inexperience. One thing led to another and I was hooked. There's no shortage of sexually inexperienced geeks, both real and sort-of, in the engineering schools and over the years, I surely sampled my share.
It wasn't that there was something wrong with my marriage -- socially, intellectually, sexually or otherwise. Quite the opposite, in fact, I venture to say that sexually, my marriage with Bert was and still is in the upper 5 percentile. It's just that most people, wives included, develop passions for activities - tennis, literature, music, gardening, etc. I was into gardening but I had another passion - young men studying under my husband.
In this new setting in New Jersey, it would take time to develop the connections to pursue my passion for young male students. That and the impossibility of practicing my profession had made me somewhat bitter and resentful.
But Bert was not the target of that resentment. My resentment was aimed at the current political leaders in Wisconsin -- and even more so, the deplorables who had elected them. Essentially, policies introduced by the new conservative and business-friendly governor had left Bert with no other choice but to look for a professorship elsewhere.
Most of our new acquaintances think Bert changed jobs for better pay. Yes, the new governor had frozen faculty salaries but that wasn't the big issue most folks would think it was, because Bert supplemented his professor's salary by doing consulting work. No, the problem for Bert lay in the new governor's approach to science. Generally speaking and in the normal course of things, science is supposed to uncover facts and politicians are supposed to consider the facts when making policy. The new governor's approach was the reverse -- he preferred to make policy and then find scientists willing to produce facts to back up his policies.
As a professor of electrical engineering in the very unsexy field of power generation and transmission, Bert was no stranger to being attacked when his scientific publications ran counter to the wishes of special interests. At one time, environmentalists were proposing massive solar generation plants in the world's great deserts. Bert wrote an article showing that the transmission losses would be so great that the whole idea was nonsense. Overnight, he became the favorite whipping boy of most environmentalists and for a time was regularly attacked in magazine and newspaper articles and opinion pieces. For Bert that wasn't a problem. He relished being in the line of fire -- even seemed proud to be there.
Of a more serious nature and a big problem was when he wrote an article not convenient to the power industry. Those folks have money to engage big law and they do not hesitate to sue. That was okay with Bert too -- at least as long as the university had a policy of defending its scientists against such specious liability claims. When the new governor ended that policy and appointed an industry-friendly committee to identify the cases in which a professor would be backed up, Bert began looking for a new job.
So here we were on the East Coast, my husband with more prestige and a bigger salary and me taking courses so I could work in a profession that I'd been working in for almost 20 years.
Fortunately for us, the equity in our 2800 square foot arts and crafts home in Madison was enough for the down payment on a 1685 square foot ranch type home in New Jersey. Unfortunately though, downsizing forced us to part with some of our favourite pieces of furniture, including a 4-seat leather sofa that just didn't fit in the living room of the 1685 square foot house.
I had been shopping for an affordable smaller replacement and after getting shocked by prices at top line furniture stores, it occurred to me to stop at Home Depot. After pretty quickly getting disgusted by HD's line of sofas, I had some time to kill and started strolling around the store. Before long the JACUZZI bathtubs caught my eye. I'd never really looked at these things before so the sizes took me by surprise. Not so much the 60 and 66 inch length but the 42 inch width. Wondering how roomy one of these giants would feel, I pulled off my shoes and got in the biggest one on display.
Sitting there relaxing, I closed my eyes and imagined that there was hot water streaming out of the jets and Bert was sitting opposite me. I imagined him fondling my boobs and me taking his erection in my hand. Then a high male voice brought me out of my reverie.
"Lots of room in there. Real nice, ain't it?"
"Opening my eyes, I saw a slightly built man, around 5'-7'', mid-50's, black hair with lots of gray speckles, longish nose, narrow chin and a hint of a pot belly. His smock identified him as a Home Depot employee and the name tag on it told me his name was 'Eddie Traverse.' (Some months later, I started reading Daniel Silva's Gabriel Aron series of spy novels and decided that Eddie bore a resemblance to Gabriel Aron.)
"Well yeah, it is nice. And uh, yeah there is indeed lots of room." Just in case he was making a come on, I added, "Yeah, room for me and my husband."
He wasn't taken back a bit. "I'm always glad that we have so many on display. That way folks can try them out and see what size they really need."
"Too bad you don't have one filled and running. Then customers could really try them out. Like driving a demo before you buy a car."
"From time to time we discuss putting in a wet demo model, but the idea always stops with talk. You see Ma'am, we'd have to have a changing room, showers, make reservations and so on and so forth. We just don't have room in the store for the infrastructure. And that's not even mentioning the people we'd have to hire to run the whole demo service."
I looked at his name tag again to be sure I'd gotten his name right. "So Eddie, your customers just have to imagine how good it is."
"Yes Ma'am, I am afraid so. But you know most folks have been in a spa at one time or another. Would you and your husband be in the market for a home spa or bathroom JACUZZI?"
"Actually, we just moved here from Wisconsin and we're still getting our house organized. Oh by the way, I'm Sara."
