Chapter 3

As I said, Valerie was (and is) an intelligent woman. She’s also very pragmatic. I saw her the next day outside the student union and waved. She was with two other girls and waved back like nothing was wrong. She cupped her hands and yelled, “Study tonight?” I yelled back “Yes!” instinctively and we went on about our business.

I decided to cook again. This time I made goulash, which is ground beef, macaroni, diced tomatoes (canned), mushrooms (also canned), and a hazardous mix of spices that’s never the same from one making to the next. One time I put jalapeños in it, which was a big mistake.

I was pacing by six, afraid she wasn’t coming after all, when she opened the door and breezed in. She dropped her book bag on the recliner and came straight to me before she took off her coat. She stared into my eyes for five or six heartbeats.

“This is serious, Bob,” she said.

“I agree,” I replied.

“I’ve never done this,” she said.

“Be serious?” I asked, carefully. She could be talking about any number of things.

“Yes,” she said.

I realized I was holding my breath and let it out.

“I’ve had crushes before,” I said. “I mean I know now that they were crushes. And I know it because of how I feel about you.” I blinked, but held her stare. “Val, the thought of trying to live without you terrifies me.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” she said, letting go of me and stepping back. She started taking off her coat. “I have all these feelings and you say things like that, and it makes me feel like I stepped through a rift in the universe, into a world where I don’t know what to do.”

“Of course you feel that way,” I said. “Most girls get to process things slowly by dating in high school. You never did that. This has to be like learning a foreign language for you.”

“That’s close,” she said, putting her coat on the coat tree. “But I know what it’s like to be horny. I just don’t know how to handle all these feelings about you.”

“What’s to handle?”

“You said you couldn’t live without me. That’s sweet, but it’s also terrifying. I’ve never meant that much to anybody besides my mother.”

“It’s just how I feel.”

She paced. Then she stopped and faced me.

“I had a dream last night. In it you were kissing some girl. I can’t remember where. But in this dream, I suddenly had a gun in my hand and I wanted to shoot that girl.”

“That’s simple jealousy,” I said.

“I’ve never been jealous before,” she groaned. “This is all new to me. I’m a stranger in a strange land. Did you ever read that book, Bob?”

“Sure,” I said. “It had lots of sex in it.”

She stared at me.

“Is sex all men think about?”

“Not all men,” I said. “At least when you aren’t around.”

“Ha - ha,” she said.

“Look,” I said. “I’m different in the sense that I’ve loved you from afar for a long time. I never thought anything would happen between us, but I kept hoping, dreaming that it would. And that dream was enough. But then things changed and it’s not enough anymore. Am I making sense?”

“Yes,” she said. “I get that. I never intended to have sex with you, but now that I have, I think about it a lot. I think that’s what makes me so nervous. I never wanted to run to some man and let him do that to me.”

“And now you do?” I asked, hopefully.

She came and invaded my personal space.

“I had a very good time last night,” she said, softly.

I beamed.

“I tried to make it good,” I said, proudly.

“It wasn’t the sex,” she said.

My ego deflated.

“It was because I finally felt like I could trust you with something that intimate.”

My philosophical mind translated that to: “I finally met the man I wanted to give my virginity to.”

Ego re-inflated.

“Well, last night was the best night of my entire life,” I said.

Her hands snaked around my waist and she pressed her body against me. Her lips came up for a kiss.

“Surely we can have better nights. Don’t they say practice makes perfect?”

We went to bed - a real bed - and we got no studying done that night. That sounds idyllic, but it glosses over all the emotion and fears and hopes of the two people involved. Sex is easy while you’re actually engaged in it. It’s either good sex, or merely okay sex, but it’s generally pretty automatic. It’s the before and after that gets complicated. Lots of animals handle that by the process of being in heat. When the female isn’t in heat, there’s no sex. When she is in heat, she lets some male breed her and then she just walks away. There are no complications, no recriminations, no social games.

But that kind of sex is also joyless. You have to stick your neck out to wring something more from the sexual act. Procreation is fine, but humans try to add other layers into it.

Then again, as I spend thirty seconds thinking about it, it’s entirely possible that when a male turtle, or lizard, or lion fertilizes his mate, that orgasm is just as intense and satisfying as a human male feels. We don’t know. And some animals do mate for life.

Anyway, my point is that the earthquake that was our sexual awakening did have aftershocks.

One of those was when I proposed to her. It was during the sex act, which one of my brothers told me you’re not supposed to do. After those two first tumultuous nights, we more or less forced ourselves to moderate the ‘fucking like bunnies’ thing. Part of that was because we still weren’t using protection. Valerie had been raised Catholic. She wasn’t a ‘practicing’ Catholic, but that didn’t mean some of what she’d been taught hadn’t stuck with her.

It was, in fact, two months after we began making love before I asked her to marry me.

She said, “Yes!” (which my brother warned me about) and I went a little bonkers. I always ejaculated in her. I couldn’t resist. I think it was in my genes. But it felt completely different this time. This time there was no hint of shame that I might be putting this woman at risk of having a child she might not be happy about.

The aftershock part was afterwards, when the import of what had happened so quickly began to sink in. I had proposed, and she had accepted. Both of us knew that it had been an emotional decision, rather than one which was thought out with the seriousness it deserved.

It took another week for the aftershock to settle down, and then we were fine. That means we were on the same level as any other couple that had decided to get married.

And that was when I met Aoibheann O’Malley, Valerie’s mother and my future mother-in-law.

I may as well stop and answer the question I know you’re asking. Who the hell names a little girl Aoibheann? Well, if you’re from Ireland, maybe you know. It’s an old Irish name, pronounced Eve-een. It means “little Eve” or “pleasant, beautiful sheen, of radiant beauty.” She represented both meanings very well. The first refers back to the original mother of us all, with all the baggage that tows along. It was Eve that messed things up and got us kicked out of paradise. That Eve was stubborn, willful, mischievous, and a rule-breaker. On the other hand, Aoibheann O’Malley was one of those women who draw the eyes of both men and women with frank appreciation. She had the mature beauty of a Cindy Crawford, with a smile that brightened up the room with its beautiful sheen.

Of course I didn’t know all that when I met her. She went by Eve to most people, and when she met me, she made it crystal clear that I had a long row to hoe before I earned her approval and acceptance. She was mistrustful of men in general, and me in particular. Val told me to shrug it off, that her mother would come around, eventually.

“If you can get past my defenses, you can get past hers,” she said.

It was crazy for two students to get married. Neither of us could support the other. We were doing okay in terms of supporting ourselves, but if you’ll recall, my parents were helping with my rent. When I introduced Valerie to them and said, “We’re engaged!” I learned a little about the politics of giving your parents some warning. It helps if they know you have a girlfriend, for example, before you tell them you’re going to marry said girlfriend. For some reason, mothers want to meet the girl long before an engagement is announced.

Both my folks and her mother tried to talk us out of getting married. We didn’t listen. And unhappy parents don’t go overboard to help the newlyweds. My folks’ attitude would change, but at that time they got obstinate. Parents always think they know what’s best. They decided that if I was ‘grown up’ enough to get married under circumstances that seemed foolish to them, then I didn’t need their financial help.

This is how a vicious cycle gets started. By withdrawing their financial (and moral) support, it strained the marriage. They didn’t intend for it to hurt us, but it couldn’t help but cause problems. Neither did any of the parents feel like helping plan a foolish wedding.

So Valerie and I got married in the chapel of the ecumenical campus ministry building on campus. It was a non-denominational wedding. It wasn’t Catholic, nor was it Presbyterian.

All the parents were furious about it when we told them.

So ... what do you do when you’re bucking the system because love demands it? What do you do when there’s no money coming in, or at least not enough to live on after you start your new, (and supposedly) joyous life as newlyweds?

Well ... there’s one outfit that has job openings all the time, 365 days a year. They’re always hiring. And they offer a wide variety of kinds of work.

After that semester was finished, I joined the Army.

It was not an easy decision. We’d just gotten married and that particular profession is known for taking the service member away from his or her family both on a regular basis and for extended periods of time. But it’s a steady paycheck, and the benefits can’t be beat. As soon as I joined, both Val and I had great health care coverage. My paycheck was enough to keep Val in school and the Army clothed and fed me. I had a roof over my head. Granted, at times that roof was made of canvas, or was the roof of a vehicle, but I had what I needed to survive.

It had the added benefit of getting me into the GI Bill, which meant when I got out, I could go back to school and there’d be serious financial help. And by then, Valerie would have finished her law degree anyway. Even starting wages for a lawyer are pretty decent.

So while it meant some sacrifice, initially, it would be good for us in the long run. And we were looking at the long haul.

It also got the attention of my parents, and Valerie’s mother. It got their attention in the same way a late-night call from the police does, asking if you are so and so, the parent of so and so. My parents were terrified for me, and Eve was terrified for her daughter.