The Fourth Wife

This story contains no intimate sexual scenes. It is entirely fiction. Hopefully you will find the theme interesting. There will be a second chapter but you are invited to submit your own sequel. My sincere thanks go to Techscan for editing. He made well over 500 corrections.

THE FOURTH WIFE, DEJA VU

I was sitting there thinking something was seriously wrong. This was neither the first nor the last of my painful lonely solo times. I didn't know what it was. It certainly had everything to do with her months of on-site research in a strange community in southern Utah. My wife of 5 years had returned from two months of research in the desert parts of southern Utah.

She had been doing the final research for her PhD with a major in Sociology. Now she was spending day and night alone at her computer typing out her experiences and research findings for her thesis. It seems that I was spending many days and nights also alone at my desk trying to deal with the interpersonal problems building between Susan and me.

I felt it was all her fault. She would not participate in solving that growing serious problem of trust. She remained aloof to my pleas for dialog. I was running out of ideas on how to deliver myself from my growing pain and suspicions. Susan was not going to help. She had never been this way before we parted on our trips.

You will probably ask why I think something is wrong. Well, let me give you some stuff to digest and see if you come out wondering like I am. First let me give you a little history about us.

Well, I'm a geologist currently working for an oil exploration company. Yep, we study rock and what's in between them. Like oil and gas.I graduated with a master's degree three years ago. I'll brag just a little. Sorry about that but I am good at what I do. I graduated summa cum laude and I have great hand-eye coordination. Guess that's why I'm world class as a marksman and a reasonably good cellist. I can also deliver the echo probe at 800 feet underwater to within an inch of where we want it. My pay reflects my knowledge and skills.

After graduate school I was heavily recruited and went immediately to work in oil exploration. Being top of my class helped to get just the job I wanted. There still is a lot of competition in the oil exploration and drilling community about who will get to the oil first and cheapest. The big oil companies feel that new sources of oil are important. My job of finding new sources is important to them.

I'm an average white westerner 70 inches tall and 175 pounds, light brown hair and a little goatee. My name is Ethan Allen. Sorry, no relationship to the famous furniture manufacturer. I have to make my own fame.

My wife is 67 inches tall, with C cups, nice hips, and long black hair almost to her waist. She goes by Susan. She has a little "tic" of swirling her head to make her hair swing, sometimes even over her shoulder. She has a very plain Jane face but a little makeup and a smile with her hair hanging loosely over her shoulder onto a succulent breast is very sexy to me. She is lithe and slim with near perfect sensuous female proportions.

You can correctly surmise that she is quite intelligent also. Proof of this being that she had graduated magna cum laude and had been accepted into a well known doctoral program here in Utah. She's basically an academic type. She taught high school one year out of college before her masters. She loves academia. Research and teaching. As it turns out, she loved them too much.

My wife and I met in college in Colorado, my home state. We got married in college. That was five years ago. She was a junior and I was a senior. We both finished master's degrees in our chosen fields. Hers is Sociology (minor in psychology) i.e., the study of behavior of groups of people. Mine is a lot 'harder' field. Geologists study rocks and the earth and everything from the surface down. While in college I was elected president of the college's Marksman Society. This and playing cello in the concert orchestra were my extracurricular activities. I have maintained an interest in both. I was really good with numerous awards won in national collegiate competition. Susan had been active in the drama society also.

Let me say a little about our families.

I really know very little about her family other than her mother was divorced or was a single parent. Her mother never talked of Susan's father. Neither did Susan. I didn't care, presuming he was a nonentity now for the both of them. We continued to be on friendly terms with Susan's mom. I didn't push her about her past. She did finish high school and then went on to college here in Utah for a teaching certificate and bachelors in education. She teaches in the lower grades. She seems happy, very quiet, efficient and dedicated to her teaching. I think Susan picked up her traits. I detect a dark side when I ask Susan about her family of origin. Susan won't talk about her early years. I didn't push her either. My wife was an only child.

I have two younger brothers. One is in the Army and the other is in the Air Force. We don't see much of them as they are being constantly deployed around the world. My parents live in Colorado, not too far from us. We visit them occasionally and stay in touch frequently by telephone.

I just got back in town a couple of days ago. This was only a couple of days after she got back from her research study.

I picked up my car at the corporate headquarters where it had been stored in the secure parking area for the last two months. I had left it there before flying out to Africa. I drove the last 50 miles to our home town where we had a nice but small ranch style home in the beautiful valley. The little town is surrounded by distant high snow-covered peaks. The valley has plenty of water year round. This town is as close to heaven as I could get on this planet called earth.

I travel to off shore West Africa on and off doing oil exploratory studies. On this trip I had been gone almost nine weeks. In return I get plenty of in-between off time and can file reports on-line from home.

Originally Susan and I had agreed for her to spend one month on-site where her research for her thesis would be conducted. I was to be ship bound in the burning hot eastern Atlantic off the coast of West Africa. We both left home the same day, me to Atlantic Africa and she to southern Utah. I had taken her to the bus station then returned home. I drove to corporate headquarters, parked my car in the secure area and hailed a cab to the airport. Upon returning it was always just the opposite.

When I got back Susan greeted me at the door and welcomed me back to the states. She didn't say, "Welcome home," just, "Welcome back to the States."

She told me she had just gotten back a few days ago. Obviously she had been gone two months, not just one. Immediately after entering our front door and greeting Susan, she told me she had a very heavy schedule in preparing her thesis and she needed to be isolated in the den to continue recording and analyzing her data.

"For this reason," she stated simply, "I have put a lock on the den door to insure that I'm not disturbed, so please don't bother me when I'm working."

I saw no need for a lock as I would honor her reasonable request without need for a lock. I saw no need to lock me out. I told her that.

She had not informed me of her extra long stay. She did tell me she had no access to telephones or e-mail. She said she was living in this town and had to 'fit in' with their clannish and peculiar life style if she were to gather the information she wanted for her research thesis. Somehow I couldn't believe that she couldn't notify me. This seemed preposterous. After all cell phones are everywhere. She also has a prepaid long distance card. She took her laptop which has internet access. Heck, I could talk to our other teams off the coast of Brazil or the one researching the Artic Ocean off Alaska all from Africa. Surely she could call from southern Utah.

I had tried multiple times to contact her by e-mail but each had remained unchecked. That had been my only means of communicating directly with her and it didn't work. I didn't have a telephone number at which to call her. I also had e-mailed the University to help establish contact with her but they were of no help. She was not in communication with them either.

I had worried about her safety. I told I had worried about her.

Her counter to my statement about worldwide easy access to communications with me was that I was away so it didn't make any difference. She said she could take care of herself and I shouldn't have worried. She couldn't understand that I was interested in her and her activities even though I couldn't change anything. I don't think she tried very hard to tell me of her change in plans to stay longer.

She wouldn't tell me much of anything about her living conditions either. She did live with one of the families while she was there. She had made some contacts on prior visits to the targeted town that much I knew. Now she was typing away furiously and avoiding me. Her explanations were that she had to get her research into the computer and organized into thesis form.

She was doing her dissertation on a splinter group from the Mormon Church. These groups lived in closed rural isolated communal towns. Susan said that not much was known from a scientific point of view. Lots of accusations and innuendo abounded but there was not too much real research into the inner lives of the community. I think I recalled some scandal down there on the local news some years ago but couldn't recall the particulars. I knew that outsiders were not welcome.

Susan's research took her into one such closed community. Her project called for one month only on-site. She had stayed longer. She explained that she stayed to complete her research rather than having to go back again at a later date. I wondered if my perception that they really were a tightly closed exclusionary society was wrong. I wondered how Susan, being an "outsider," had gained access to them over such an extended period of time. Perhaps they had made some sort of exception for Susan. Did they know she was there to research them? These questions were perplexing and Susan wouldn't talk to me about anything that had to do with her research.

She really is dedicated to and working hard to complete her Ph.D. I admire her for those but know there is something radically different about her since she came back.

This lack of communications just didn't click with me. I told her so. She got a little irritated, saying that doctoral research is much more complicated and difficult than most people understand. The clear implication is that I am one of the "non-understanding" persons. She wouldn't discuss any issue regarding her two month stay with me further. She had shared her research project and methodology with me before departing.

Now that she had completed her research, even with the changes she had to make, why couldn't she share her experiences with me. She had had to tell her thesis committee everything but she wouldn't share anything with me. I felt like I was excluded from this part of our recent history. The questions seemed trivial and non-threatening to me but to her they obviously were in some twisted sense of her reasoning.

For this first time in our 5 years of married life together, I really felt Susan was hiding something from me. Something important enough had occurred to cause me constant friction and increasing tension. She just was close-mouthed about it all. She would tell me that she would tell me "someday after my thesis is done." This was of no comfort to me. Why not tell me now?

The most noticeable thing and the very first thing I had noticed on my return was just too obvious to miss. It was the way she dressed. Before all this, she dressed as any 26 year old married woman would: not too sexy and not to conservative. She always liked to show her C-cup cleavage but not too much of it. She had always worn skirts that were just above knee length. She enjoyed jeans and pant suits and looked great in them. She knew that she was not beautiful so she had concentrated on using her make up to brighten her face and it was successful. She always used perfume and make up.

Now, she was dressing ultra-conservatively. Her dresses were closed to her neck and elongated to ankle length. During the first month back, she changed her dress into even stranger attire. Essentially she was wearing what I call "tent dresses," the type things that terribly obese women wear to hide their bulging butts and guts. Susan was anything but fat. She had a body to die for even if her facial features were far less attractive.

Things had changed however. Now she wore very plain uninspiring longitudinally striped outfits, gray or gray-blue. God knows where she could find these monstrosities to wear but somehow she had acquired them.

I didn't like them at all. It did nothing to reveal her naturally beautiful body which she had been proud of before all this. She now wore no perfume or lipstick. Her arm pits smelled. Let's say they were more French than American but she wore no perfume to cover over the body odor as did the Frenchies. She had always had long straight black hair that she brushed and let hang down freely well below her shoulders. Now she rolled it up into a ball behind her head. Her presentation was nothing less than ugly. I told her that but she didn't care any more about her self-image or how badly I was disappointed in her.

"Susan, thanks for showing me what those perverts wear down there in the boonies. When will you get back into the 21st century? I appreciate your show but it will be wonderful to see you as you were. Your dresses are terrible, your hair is worse and your body stinks. How can you do this to me?"

All she said would say is - well, she would not reply, just turned away and went back into seclusion in her den. No mention of changing was ever made. She never wore decent clothes again, to my knowledge. I continually commented negatively, almost to the point of harassment. One time after my degrading comments, she got a little ticked off and said she had gotten used to dressing like the women there and actually enjoyed the looser clothing and the more conservative dress style. In addition, it helped keep her in the mood and mode of what she wore while she recorded her research and worked on her thesis.

I told her I didn't like it at all and would appreciate it if she would just dress like all the rest of us in the "outside world," as she identified us normal people now. She looked like the pictures I had seen in a magazine of those communal wives in towns back two hundred years or so. Maybe I had seen the picture on an oatmeal container. Anyway I hated it but she didn't care what I thought any more. She was surely acting strangely so far as I was concerned

At night, it was no different. She would come to bed in a long plain gray cotton night gown. She would not kiss me after we were in bed. Even the formerly very pleasant caressing of her beautiful and desirable breasts and hips was rebuffed day and night. Her body was off limits to me, her husband.

She would say, "If I get aroused, I won't be able to resist going all the way with you; that would mess with my emotions and my memories which would taint my unique research."

I kept trying but none of my pleading and requests would change her back into the sensuous female she had been. Finally I got tired of being refused and routinely turned my back to her in bed immediately, thus avoiding the inevitable rebuff and refusal. I told her it was like we weren't married any longer. Even that met with a flat response.

She continued to be glued to her computer. She hardly comes out of "our den" which she has taken over. Her excuse is that she is trying to avoid anything that would taint her recollection of her research. This line of "bullshit," as I called it to her face really ticked me off. Talking about it would, in her mind, taint her research. She was in communication with her thesis professor however. She would talk to him, yet not to me. I was really getting irritated. My house was no longer my home but a source of irritation, the reason being who was living in it at my expense, financially and emotionally. Could I do nothing about it? She was my wife and I wanted her back. Frustration rose.

Susan had apparently picked up some type of stomach infection while on-site. She had been sick for a few days before she arrived back and she continued to be sick now that she was back home. She was frequently nauseated especially in the mornings. She kept saltine crackers at her side of our queen sized marital bed. Those seemed to help her upset stomach.

Several times I asked her to go to a doctor to find out what was wrong. She promised to do this but to my knowledge she never did. After the first few weeks she was feeling well again. In fact she looked great. All I was allowed to see of her was her face and hands. She had warm full pink cheeks and her lips were so soft when she allowed me to kiss her. After she had recovered, she said since her nausea had gone away and had not come back she didn't see any need to go to a doctor. I didn't see a reason to go either; after all, she was not sick anymore.

A friend of mine at work, after I told him of my wife's condition, mentioned that hepatitis could have caused her upset stomach and inquired she had gotten all her hepatitis shots. Acute hepatitis can relent and then become chronic resulting in later liver failure, he had told me. I passed that on to Susan. We had both had all the immunizations recommended by the C.D.C. She never turned yellow. I suggested she visit a doctor to get the blood tests that would prove she was immune or had had an infection.

She refused to go since, "I feel okay now."

She does help with household duties but minimally. Before her trip she seemed to enjoy doing things with me around the house such as meals. Not so now. She attributes the need to meet a deadline for her thesis if she is to obtain her degree this spring. She had been working on this now for several years - that is, on her degree. She had not formerly expressed the urgent desire to finish her degree this year. She has another two years allocated by the university but now the race to completion has taken over her life. She was absolutely intent on completing everything NOW.

I told her that our relationship was suffering because of her sudden intense dedication to her thesis. She told me that the intensity of work needed to complete a thesis had always been known to me. Now was the best and only time to finish. I couldn't grasp the need for such a big rush all of a sudden.

I asked her if her academic goals had changed. If so then I might be able to understand. Her reply was that she wanted to use her high school teaching skills again beginning that coming fall. She wanted to have her terminal degree in hand when she started back again. That made some sense to me for her to go ahead and finish. Her reasoning didn't make total sense to me. She already had her teaching certificate. She also had two years remaining to finish her degree. So why did she have this sudden big push now. This sudden flurry of high intensity activity was testing our marriage to beyond the limits. A PhD isn't required for high school teaching. Only tenured university positions require that level of education. It didn't make sense to me. Her explanations fell short of satisfying my curiosity.

Now in the past, we always were very careful to talk about all our plans together before making decisions. She was carefully avoiding our previous snuggling and sex times. These were the times when our most intense sharing occurred. Now, here she was, off making decisions that affected our marriage. She hadn't even notified me; much less discussed these to see what my feelings were. I told her that this was very troubling. She was making such a decision unilaterally, without our usual husband/wife discussion.