They say things happen the way they do for a reason, that certain factors lead to certain actions that play out in a certain way. That is certainly true in my case.
If I hadn't lost my wife and lost her in the manner that I did; if our daughter, our only child, had not been a virtual clone of her mother; if I hadn't gone nearly insane with grief; if, if, if… The bottom line is this, however: a little over a year after my wife died suddenly two years ago, my beautiful daughter and I fell into an intense sexual affair that shows no sign at all of abating. Here's the story.
This all started about three years ago, when my mother-in-law contracted lung cancer, the price of a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. We were living at the time in the Houston area, where I had grown up. Margaret's mother, however, lived in the mountains of western Virginia. Since Margaret hated to fly, was actually afraid to fly, she had tried driving to see about her mother. She'd only done it once, and the trip nearly broke her, so she had resigned herself to flying on her frequent visits to take care of her mom.
So it was that on a stormy April morning, Margaret got on a plane to return home from a visit to her mother and was one of 97 people killed when lightning struck the plane, causing it to lose power and go into a tumbling spiral. The stricken plane slammed into a mountain nearly nose-first and everyone on board perished. About all they ever found of Margaret that was readily identifiable was part of her jaw.
So there I was, with the love of my life suddenly taken from me and in the most awful way possible. More to the point, we were left with nothing of her. There was no body to bury, no casket, no gravesite, no headstone, no nothing. It was like – poof! – she had vanished into thin air. We did have a memorial service, but that's not the same as being able to see your beloved's body, to have some closure, to have some place to go where you could say you were visiting her shade.
Needless to say, I was lost without Margaret, and, for awhile, so was Marcie, our daughter. I had lost my best friend and lover; Marcie had lost her closest friend and confidante. You have to understand, Margaret and I had one of the great love affairs anyone could have. I'd met her our freshman year of college, at the University of Texas, when we had a class together. I was captivated by her long, silky dark brown hair, her pixyish looks, her deep blue eyes, her intelligence, her long slender body, and, well, just everything about her. She was from a small town in Virginia and had earned a scholarship to UT to major in journalism. She'd tried to get in to Missouri, reputed to be the best J-school in the country, but they weren't forthcoming with a scholarship, while UT was, for which I was forever grateful to my alma mater. Her folks were lower middle class folks, so getting someone else to pay for her college was crucial.
Since I'd grown up in the big city, while she was a small-town girl, I should have been the sophisticated one and her the naïve one, but the first time we slept together, after we'd been dating about four months, she showed me some things I didn't think supposedly nice, small-town girls did. We'd spent the whole weekend in my dorm room fucking our brains out, and from that point on, with the notable exception of a three-month period in our junior year, we'd been a pair. Mike and Margaret; we were inseparable, except, as I said, for the three months we'd separated.
Those three months apart had cemented our love. We'd been bickering a little bit, and finally we agreed to separate for a time to see what the rest of the world had to offer. It was the most miserable period in my life, until Margaret's death. I moped, I whined, I drank (a lot), I smoked a lot of dope and just generally made a complete nuisance of myself.
Apparently, Margaret felt the same way, because when I finally decided enough was enough and called her for a date, she practically tripped all over herself saying yes. We picked up where we'd left off, and were never apart for the rest of her life. I had supposedly majored in political science with a minor in public administration, but my real interests in college had been Margaret and partying. So when we graduated in 1977, she was the one with the career opportunities while I ended up getting an industrial job. Margaret got a job right out of college at a small-town newspaper and I went to work for the local industry as an office clerk. We shacked up together for a year before getting married in '78.
We didn't even think about having kids for the first three years of our marriage, then we tried for a year before Margaret became pregnant. It was a very difficult pregnancy, and it was touch and go whether the baby would make it. Thanks to superb medical care, we made it, but Marcie still had to be taken by cesarean section five weeks early in 1983. Although I wanted at least one more child, Margaret was adamant that she was not going through another ordeal like that again, and I reluctantly agreed. So Marcie became an only child, truly beloved by both of us.
It didn't take long to realize that she was her mother's child in every way. She had the same color hair, the same build, the same good looks, the same quick wit, the same intelligence, the same everything. Many times, only children grow up spoiled, but Marcie was definitely not spoiled. She was expected to help around the house and to act respectfully around others. All parents say their children are perfect angels, but Marcie really is an angel. She's got a sweet disposition, a loving nature and a very level head, something else she inherited from her mother. Margaret and I weren't necessarily against corporal punishment, but we'd only had to spank Marcie once, when she was about 8 or 9. She'd told us she was going to one friend's house and ended up at another's without telling us. Other than that, we could discipline her just by talking crossly to her. She wanted so much to please that it crushed her when we fussed at her.
Eventually, I landed a job in Houston as a buyer for a company that supplies valves for refineries, pipelines and oil fields; Margaret landed a nice job in the features department at the Houston Post. That lasted until the early '90s, when she decided to leave newspapering to become a full-time mom and a freelance writer. Actually, she saw earlier than most the writing on the wall for the Post, which ceased publishing in the mid-'90s. Freelancing enabled Margaret to work at home to bring in some extra money and keep her skills sharp. She sold stories to newspapers around the state and magazine articles, mostly on cultural events around Houston. We had a nice, fairly new house that we'd moved into in a suburb southeast of the Houston city limits. It was a good, comfortable life that we'd had until that awful day when Margaret's plane fell from the sky.
My boss generously gave me a month off to grieve; I was back at work within a week. Pacing an empty house full of memories about drove me crazy, and work was the only thing I knew that could take my mind off my misery. So I clamped a lid tightly on my emotions and tried to resume a normal life. I knew I had to be strong for my daughter. But it wasn't nearly the same. I'd get up, drive to work, plunge myself into the job, drive home, eat a dinner that Marcie had fixed, suck down four or five beers to numb myself, then crawl off to bed.
I did this like a robot just about every weekday, day after day for a year. I couldn't even look at other women, let alone date anybody; in fact, it was six months before I could even bring myself to masturbate, then I'd feel overcome with guilt. On weekends, Marcie and I would go to ball games or concerts or little weekend trips, anything to get out of the house. Oh, and we took a long trip to Virginia – we drove it – in October when Margaret's mom passed away.
It was around Christmas that year that I could sense a subtle change in my relationship with Marcie. Margaret's life insurance had paid off handsomely, so we had the money to take a long trip to Colorado to go skiing. Neither one of us was up to celebrating the holiday at home and we had both enjoyed skiing the times we'd been before. It had actually been Marcie's idea to take the trip. I guess it's the resiliency of the young, because Marcie returned to something like normality fairly quickly. It was her senior year of high school, and she'd thrown herself into school and activities. But her social life wasn't much to speak of; I found out later that she had consistently turned down dates with the excuse that she needed to be there for me. She did go out with some girl friends every now and then, but between schoolwork, playing on the school basketball team and tending to the house (and me), she didn't have much time for a social life.
I guess I should have seen it coming, but I was oblivious to everything except my own grief and the strict life schedule that I kept like an automaton. But I did notice when we spent two weeks together in a two-bedroom condo at Vail, that my baby had grown up. Maybe it was the maturity that came with dealing with such a horrific event, but I began to notice that Marcie carried herself a little differently, especially around me. She walked with more self-assurance; she began grabbing my arm, patting me on the back, sitting close to me on the couch. We'd always been a touchy-feely family, with lots of hugs and kisses, and, even in my grieving fog, I realized that she was filling out, that her body was finally catching up with her coltish legs and slender figure. And I certainly couldn't help but notice that with her nearly waist-length, dark brown hair and her fuller figure, she looked exactly like the woman I'd fallen in love with 27 years earlier.
