Another Love Pt. 01

Several editors have worked on this story which was sitting in my file, but Demirath did the last and most extensive work. This is a long story broken into four short parts. The first and second parts could stand alone but they just felt so incomplete even for me.

I apologize to all who were offended by my last story. Sometimes, I just go very dark. There is no BTB here and the sexual attitudes of the characters are closer to my own for those who are interested.

Comments are welcome but please no personal attacks on third parties, and if you wish to correct spelling and grammar mistakes please do but write me direct. I correct my personal copies when a mistake is pointed out but I don't always see the public comments.

*****

You couldn't hear the roar of the Boeing 737 Turbofan jet engines from the airport observation deck, but you could see the tremble of the large plane as the twenty thousand pounds of thrust kicked in. A jet engine is a marvelous creation. It is as beautiful as any work of art and has the deceptive simplicity of a flower, each delicate part intricately dependent on the others. I have spent the greater portion of my life in the pursuit of my passion for these beautiful and powerful creations. They are the first of my great passions, the second being my wife, Karen. My two great loves: my wife and jet engines.

You may find it odd that I hate planes and airports. Part of this is no doubt that the worst moments of my life have taken place at airports. Leaving home for the first time to enter the Navy, I said goodbye to my parents at the airport. I returned home to the same airport four years later to no one. My parents both died while I was in the service. I am an only child, and lonely does not describe how I felt coming home. But the worst time was leaving my wife and children to fly off to war, knowing they would be alone with no family to depend on while I would be half a world away fighting Arabs. That was more than twenty years ago.

Today I brought Karen to the airport at five forty-five a.m. on a rainy fall morning. It was depressing, parting for two weeks. We have been married for twenty-six years. She was leaving to embark on a cross-country trip visiting our adult children. My wife was suffering an exceptionally bad case of empty nest syndrome... or so I believed. I buried my feelings and sent her off with a smile and a plea to come home, "soon as you can."

We have two boys; the youngest left home at eighteen to attend UCLA, and I have seen him all of four times since then. Twice he came home and twice we traveled to California, but none of the four visits lasted more than two days. All four visits were strangely uncomfortable and awkward. The older boy was a bit more of a home body. Make that exceptionally hard to get rid of. He had gone to the university up the hill from out Victorian row house home, and but for his first semester freshman year, he had resided on the uppermost floor of our four story house. He had gone through grad school never leaving home, and only six months ago did he move out to take a job in Chicago.

Don't get me wrong, I love my sons. When they were little, I enjoyed their company and loved them more than life itself. Now, though, the children I loved are two adult males with whom I have nothing in common. In each other's company, we are bored, awkward, and in my opinion better off with our memories of each other. With my wife, it's different. She has some inner need for more than I can give her. My oldest son moved to Chicago. For the first several months after his move, Karen seemed alright, but after that, it was as if one day I came home to find her in mourning. She was grieving, and there was little I could do about it.

Having worked for the State of New York Department of Health for twenty-eight years, Karen has an extensive amount of leave time that she earns each year and accumulates year to year. Since we had taken no vacation time this year, she planned a visit to see the kids as she referred to my two tall, well-built sons. I was not able to get the time off from my current research work at the University. My current government contract is behind schedule, and my work provided an excuse for my not schlepping cross-country to see children who would rather keep their interaction with me to brief conversations on the phone.

I will miss Karen. We have, as I have said, been together twenty-six years—more if you count our courtship. We met when I transitioned out of the Navy after four years of active duty. I am a mechanical engineer with a specialty in jet engines. I spent my Navy service aboard a carrier where I made my reputation as a man who could fix anything. I guess it's a talent, almost a feeling, for what is wrong with an engine. I seem to have an uncanny knack for spotting the problem before it happens and brings down the plane. Four years of fixing engines were more than enough. Naval work was grueling. A carrier can be a pressure cooker for those who are in charge and, therefore, responsible. Every time a plane took off you said a silent prayer it would come back safe, and more to the point that you had not missed something.

I met Karen one day at a health fair at the Empire State Plaza, which the locals call the South Mall, about two weeks after I had returned from the Navy. It is a massive complex. Seen from the outside, from the street or better yet from across the river, it is an impressive set of monolithic structures. The most distinctive is a flying saucer shaped building which lends a futuristic presence to the Mall. The saucer is referred to as the Egg and is a theater complex. Inside the mall is a long sterile set of corridors running between the State Capitol, the State Museum, and the State office buildings. The sterility is broken by the modern art collection that is on display in this very public space. There is shielding in place due to the attacks the art has suffered from deranged individuals in the past.

After I had visited the Civil Service Office seeking employment, I wandered through the South Mall because I had no actual job other than the naval reserves. I remained in the reserves for years after my active duty. In the corridor of the Mall, I passed a set of tables set up to do health screening.

Karen was working the tables doing the screening. She is a nurse, but had become a health administrator with the State. Her employer had a new commissioner back then, and he was big on outreach. With her seductive smile and a blink of her golden brown eyes, she talked me into a blood pressure check that I failed. I could see the concern come over her lovely oval face as she flipped back her shoulder length hair. She is what they call a strawberry blonde that's a red head with that temper that sometimes comes out. However, her the color is more golden and blond than red. The brown eyes with the hair were an unexpected combination, but they looked fantastic together.

"What do you do for a living?" she said.

"Nothing right now, just got out of the Navy," I replied.

"Oh, and did they check your blood pressure there?" she said.

"Yes, it was a bit high but not to worry. I had a high-pressure job,"

I said.

"And what did you do?"

I explained, and then she told me that my pressure was 170 over 120 which is way too high. I needed to get it checked again by my family physician. One thing led to another since I did not have a doctor, and she ended up taking it for me the following day. My blood pressure was high normal then, and we proceeded to take it for a week getting high, low, and normal readings. She made me an appointment at the VA where a very experienced doctor explained that I needed to monitor the pressure and get into a relaxation or lowering stress program.

"This is not uncommon; for a while your body will be trying to adjust to the lack of the incredible stress you were under. You can help this by learning how to control your stress," he said.

I followed the doctor's recommendation, and went back to Karen giving her the line that I needed her to help me control my stress. I am sure she did not buy this, but she apparently wanted to date me as much as I wanted her.

Our first date was at a neighborhood Italian restaurant that Karen knew. It was a great little place with homemade food called Citone's, sadly it is gone many years now. At dinner, Karen showed her bubbly extroverted personality and wanted to know all about me and what it was like to be in the Navy. I must have talked for hours, which is rare for me. She has that effect on people, you want to talk to Karen.

"A carrier is the top of the line as ships go. It's really a floating city. The pilots are the princes of the city, but the place is run by the chief petty officers and a handful of officers," I said.

"Were you one of the officers?" she asked.

"Not really, I ran the planes. Once they know you can do the job, they leave you to it. I guess my problem was, I took it to heart. Too much responsibility can be difficult," I said.

"Your blood pressure sure shows that," she said.

I laughed although it was not very funny.

"People don't realize that we lose as many crewmen as pilots. It is a very dangerous environment full of fire, fuel, and explosives. Accidents happen; you just keep praying, not on my watch. You know all too often you have no option but to place someone at risk," I said, and she must have seen I was getting melancholy.

"Well, visiting all those exotic places must have been fun. Did you have a girl in every port?" she said.

Now I did laugh.

"No, I am afraid that I have no luck when it comes to the ladies," I said.

"Now you are putting me on, a handsome man like you, and I bet you are to die for in your uniform," she said.

"But I have no luck. When we docked in Manila, my shore leave was canceled to upgrade the F-14A's with new radar. Again when we were in Thailand, I was with a beautiful girl in a bar, and the place was raided. But the worst was the girl that I dated for six months in Sidney. I thought we were getting real serious then one night we were out at a club, and this man walked up to her and gave her a big kiss. Then he told me to treat his lady right. When I asked her who that was she said "That's my husband."

"You are mighty friendly with your ex," I said.

"No, he is my current husband. We have an understanding. He doesn't mind my dating," she said.

"So, as I said, I have no luck with women."

Then Karen took my hand and just looked at me with those deep brown eyes she has.

After a moment, she said, "Maybe your luck has changed sailor, but not tonight. I am a twenty-four-year-old virgin and need to get to know you better," she said.

"That is just as well, as I'm still a virgin and I think rather lucky after all."

Three months later I was working at the University and married to the most wonderful woman in the world. We were both virgins, but we remedied that before we married. I believe we both wanted to make sure there was no problem.

We didn't have a big wedding as neither of us had any family. We each had a few cousins in some remote places, but no one but a few friends to invite to the wedding. Karen made a deal with me.

"I don't want a big wedding, but a house would be nice," she said.

We only waited nine months before we began trying for a baby. In the interim, we house hunted.

We found Karen's ideal house in one of the old industrial cities on the east side of the river, a huge rundown row house. It was down the hill from the University where I worked and where our first born would one day go to school. The neighborhood was anything but ideal, the forgotten core of a dying industrial city. Its Victorian houses were broken into tiny apartments for students and the elderly, the river front buried behind layers of dead factories.

The house was a four-story brick edifice with what is called an English basement, which is a floor half above and half below ground. The first floor you enter by a short set of steps called a stoop, and there is a separate front entrance below the steps. Presumably this is where the word stoop comes from, as you must bend to enter the lower door. It was a mid-nineteenth-century house with all the Victorian gingerbread charm and with all the problems that go therewith. By the time, we moved in Karen was pregnant.

"I am the happiest woman in the world," she said.

And I believed her.

Twenty-five years later, I took Karen to the airport on a Wednesday morning unaware of how my life was about to change. Actually, how it had changed without my knowing it. She called that evening and each day after that. Saturday began clear and bright. I decided to do yard work. I was just entering our basement to switch from the light leaf rake to the heavy iron rake when I heard the doorbell.

If I were still out in the yard, I would not have heard it. If it had rained and I had gone to see the new Ben Affleck film, then I would not have answered. It rained Friday making the leaves too heavy for the light rake, but it was sunny and clear on Saturday. Such are the vagaries of the weather and the fortunes of life. It was this bare chance that shattered the myth of my happy marriage—rain one day, none the next.

I crossed our small vestibule and opened the outer door, and saw a small Asian woman standing outside. She was even smaller than she at first seemed. Her petite body was perched atop sexy high heeled black leather boots. In its dark shading, the rest of her clothing matched her boots from the expensively cut black dress suit to the gray silk blouse showing under her dress coat. She was, I thought, dressed a bit young for her age, which I guessed to be about my fifty-two years, but she wore it well. She was one of those women who hold the visage of a rare beauty well into advanced age, and she knew it. Something about her brought Karen to mind. They were very different in appearance, but something about the way they held themselves and looked at you was the same.

"May I help you?" I said.

" Oui, I am seeking Karen," she said shifting a large rectangular package wrapped in brown paper. She had a grip on it with her right hand as it rested against the iron stair rail of our front steps.

"I'm sorry, she's not home at the moment. Would you like to come in and leave a message?" I said.

"Oh, I'm sorry I missed her. I'm Avril Du Monte. I just stopped on my way to New York to bring her painting," she said, indicating the package that had the right shape for a fairly large work of art.

"You must be her husband Robert. Could you help me with it? It has gotten a bit heavy between my car and your front door," she said, crossing our threshold while attempting to pick up the picture.

I took the package from her and followed her into the house. She seemed to know the floor plan as she headed straight for the large front parlor. The way she said her name as if I should know her was confusing, as was her clear knowledge of me and my home. I had never met anyone with the last name of Du Monte or heard the name used. Avril spoke English with a light but decided French accent. Her accent fitted her name, and I was rethinking my first impression of her race, she was not fully oriental.

I seated Avril in the old fashioned loveseat that we had inherited from my wife's mother and offered her refreshment. She asked for tea.

"Formosa Bai Hao, if you still have any. I am afraid Karen has gotten me addicted," she said, naming the expensive tea my wife loved and kept on hand for visitors and special times.

"No problem," I said, now thoroughly confused as to how this woman knew my wife so well.

With my guest's tea served I took a seat opposite her in the big wingback leather chair with my coffee—the Formosa tea is a taste I had never acquired.

"Please excuse my appearance, I was working in the yard," I said.

"Nothing to excuse, you are just as roughly handsome as Karen described you. Any fault is mine. I called this morning on a spur of the instant as I remembered that I had her portrait to deliver. I'm driving to New York for the discussions on Philippe's retrospective exposition at the Museum of Modern Art. I left a message in her mail, but perhaps she did not get it," she said between sips of tea as if I should know who Philippe was.

"She could not have been here for you. She is, I believe, in California as we speak.. or just arriving as it is early afternoon here and still morning there. She is visiting our son, Oscar," I said.

"Oh dear, I should have called sooner. I so wanted to see her hang it. I think it is one of Philippe's best works. Certainly the most lovingly done, if a bit out of his usual style," she said.

I was about to ask her who Philippe was and herself for that matter when she beat me to the punch by unveiling the picture that she had positioned beside herself on the love seat. The brown paper fell away with the rustle of wrapping paper that was reminiscent of the Christmases and birthdays we had celebrated in that very room. But it should have been a loud scream. It knocked me back against the wings of the chair, as a man who sees his life passing away from him.

The woman in the picture was caught in the simple act of bending forward to recover her panties from the ornate needlepoint seat of a small delicate chair. The hint of her dressing table was fringing one side of the picture. Her golden red hair fluttered around her as if with the motion of her actions. Those gorgeous brown eyes with their hint of gold were looking out from the picture. She was a true redhead, as the triangle of lush hair between her legs proved. Her perfect breasts hung down. They were big teardrops tipped with a slightly deeper pink than the panties she was retrieving.

The woman was naked, and the light came from the window set due east at the back of our house, in the bedroom we have shared for the last twenty-five years. We bought the house with the last of my Navy savings and a loan from her state pension. It was a battered house in a dying city neighborhood which in the time since has undergone a surprising renaissance. Our dream home was a broken down fixer upper. One of the first things we did was to hang wallpaper in the bedrooms. We purchased the green and gold striped paper for thirty cents a roll from the discontinued shop that existed at that time in the old mill city of Cohoes. We did my unborn son's room in Ninja Turtles. My very pregnant wife and I did the work ourselves.

The picture was painted later, clearly after the birth of our second son. Karen still carried a slight swelling in her lower abdomen that she had for several years after the birth of Oscar. She eventually drove the little bump away with Yoga and running, but I missed it. Somehow the little swell suggested the deep sexual drive that my wife possessed. It enhanced her allure although she would never believe it.

The painter had not missed this or the slight suggestive smirk that her smile possessed. The smile that bid you come here and let's see what you got. He was good, maybe even great, I did not know. He had painted my wife in the early morning as the sun shown in through our bedroom window against the background of the unmade double bed. She was bending to pick her pink lace panties up from her grandmother's vanity chair, an action I had seen her do thousands of times in that very room.

As Avril turned from the picture to me, she wore a please and prideful smile that quickly faded. My expression must have said it all. There was no doubt in my mind the picture was a nude of my wife painted about twenty years before. How or why I could not tell, but any explanation must involve activities the least of which no faithful wife would be engaged in. I could not believe this.