It was a cold and gray November day and I was standing in a vacant lot in Chicago, the damp wind chilling me to the bone as I took in my surroundings. Small chunks of burnt wood and soot-stained dry wall combined with bits of broken glass to litter the ground while little bits of lightweight trash skipped through the lot, pushed by the incessant wind. It struck me that the scene was an appropriate metaphor for what my life had become, a burnt out empty shell of what it had been, cold and desolate, a monument to loneliness and bitterness and failure. I kicked at a hunk of concrete and continued to perseverate on what, if anything, I could do with what I had left.
---()---
I met Olivia at charity fundraiser a few weeks after my twenty-ninth birthday. At the time, I was essentially second in command of the family retail business, and my Great Uncle Seth, the main shareholder and CEO, ordered me to attend to fly the flag, try and make friends and maybe drum up some business. The event was beyond boring, loaded with overly dramatic, self important people who thought that raising a few thousand dollars to help build a local library put them on a similar plane as Mother Theresa. I was trying to be nice, nodding, smiling absentmindedly, occasionally biting my tongue until it nearly bled and desperately hoping, somehow, for a chance to make an early exit when she quietly slipped into the seat next to me, flashed a thousand watt smile and started talking like we were old friends. Olivia was lithe and graceful, a thin, brown-haired, bronze skinned beauty that oozed confidence and made conversation easy and, suddenly, I didn't mind the fundraiser at all.
I've always been a fairly hard driving, competitive guy in school, at work or playing sports, but had never been particularly comfortable in social situations. I'd been more or less married to my job since business school and that, in combination with my inherent social awkwardness, made it doubly tough to develop any kind of experience with women. My resultant shyness meant I almost never approached a woman for a date unless I'd known her for a long time, but I found Olivia irresistible and, by the end of the evening, I'd asked her out to dinner. We ended up having a great time and, contrary to my fears, we had a number of mutual interests and had plenty to talk about. I quickly became infatuated with her and the feeling appeared to be mutual and by the time I'd taken her home, it was very clear that we'd be seeing a lot of each other.
We dated off and on for a couple of months as the romance built up momentum and it wasn't long before we were seeing each other a couple of times a week and had started spending a fair amount of time on each date necking. Now, I obviously liked her and was more than a little interested in taking her to bed, but I wasn't sure at all how to take the next step forward without risking a painful rejection or even spooking her permanently. One night, though, Olivia made it clear that she thought I was dragging my feet way too much when, in lieu of a good night kiss just outside her front door, she literally took things into her own hands by unzipping my pants and pulling me into the house by the one appendage I was sure to follow.
I was no virgin, but I also didn't have a lot of experience with women, and I'd always thought that lustful passion was a male thing. Olivia disabused me of that notion with great alacrity. She gave me a ride that would make a mechanical bull look tame and by the time we were done, I was completely and utterly wrung out. It was, up to that point in time, the single most enjoyable thing I'd ever done in my life.
From that point forward, intimacy became frequent and easy as our relationship deepened. Within a few months we were living together and a little more than a year after we met, we were married. We moved into a 4 bedroom house in a nice, tree lined neighborhood, did a little landscaping and got ourselves a dog, and life was very, very good.
Nearly everything about being married agreed with me, the end of a loneliness that I'd been reluctant to recognize, the unconditional emotional support, the physical satisfaction of meaningful sex, having someone to love and to be loved. It was everything that I wanted and more.
There were, of course, some issues. I was always stretched a little thin at work, so Olivia was somewhat frustrated with my availability and I guess there were a few other habits that she found a little annoying. Naturally, there were some things that bugged me too. Maybe the biggest issue was that we had to socialize with her family a lot more than I would have liked. Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike her family, they were fine, upstanding people who were generally polite and didn't seem to have any particularly objectionable personality traits, but I just didn't want to spend lots and lots of time with them. Her parents were an outgoing, welcoming couple and they seemed to like me, but they had a tendency to lecture about how we should live our lives, and were putting some pressure on us to have kids. But we were never around long enough for me to get particularly annoyed, so there wasn't too much of an issue there.
Her younger sister Mindy and her husband were a little more problematic for me.
Mindy was a shorter, slightly rounder version of Olivia. She dressed like Olivia and talked like Olivia and when Olivia was around, was never away from her side for more than a few minutes. They were like virtual Siamese twins, whispering conspiratorially, laughing at inside jokes and gossiping about friends and family shamelessly and since she and her husband lived within 15 minutes of us, we spent quite a lot of time together. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, I suppose, and I guess it might have been a bit of jealously, but when she was with Mindy, she wasn't really with me, and that was more than a little frustrating.
Mindy's husband didn't make things better either. He was a tall, blonde, good looking guy named Bruce who was friendly, easy going and, in my view, not particularly bright. He had taken over his family's furniture store in Joliet and that was his favorite- and sometimes only- topic of conversation. He talked about that store like it was Microsoft and he was Bill Gates, bragging on how well run it was and how nobody else in the furniture business knew what they were doing. The issue with that outlook was that the store was struggling and I was pretty sure that anyone with a hint of business knowledge knew that part of the problem was Bruce himself. But, I wanted peace and I wanted Olivia to be happy, which meant not making waves with her family, so I spent more than a few evenings nodding my head numbly as I listened to Bruce drone on.
---()---
We'd been married nearly two years when Olivia first asked me to help out Mindy and Bruce. She'd made a fancy dinner with candles and mood music and dressed in a way that promised a satisfying night in bed, so, like a typical rookie husband, I thought she was just interested in having a great roll in the hay with me. But, as the evening went on, it became clear she had an agenda. She kept talking about how lucky we were to have such a great income and how she felt like we were in a great position to help others. Then, with a look of practiced distress, she went on to confess how worried she was about Mindy and Bruce who were just getting by. It turned out that Bruce owed some money and was having trouble making the payments and, without help, he wouldn't be able to fill out his floor inventory. I could see pretty quickly were this was going, and so I cut to the chase.
"How much do they want Liv?"
She paused and raised her eyebrows in a way that told me I'd short circuited her planned presentation. She chewed her lip, thinking for a minute and then looked shyly into my eyes.
