Chapter 2

Am I crazy?

I sat in a large overstuffed brown leather arm chair outside a door marked "employees only" waiting for Jessica.

Second thoughts? Oh yes.

Once I was alone all those memories of our time together came rushing back.

Sure, we were like that line from that Eagles' song, "Life in the Fast lane".

"They had one thing in common they were good in bed..."

At twenty two that seemed enough.

A couple of weeks after we were engaged on Christmas Eve 2001, we moved into an upscale apartment together not far from campus but near Lake Michigan. It was very nice and since I was only paying half the rent I could afford it, well just barely. I had worked all through college. My parents paid my tuition and books but all living expenses were on me. It wasn't that they couldn't afford it; they just felt it was a way to teach responsibility. My two older brothers had been treated the same way.

Jessica, on the other hand had money from her parents — lots of it. She drove a new BMW and had plenty of money for shopping and making all those "on a whim" purchases she was used to.

I never said anything to her even though I disapproved. She and her two closet friends, Amber and Jennifer, who I called the "two bitches" would typically head downtown on a weekend and spend the day shopping. She would always bring me something despite my protestations. I had to say my wardrobe got markedly better though.

I really didn't care about wardrobe; I was an engineering student into computers and especially robotics. I was also a teacher's assistant. And I also made a few extra bucks developing games for a small Chicago start up.

Jessica hated the fact I had to work.

"Matt, why can't you just let me take care of us? We'd then have lots more time together."

I was stubborn and I wouldn't and couldn't be a kept man. My parent's had taught me to be self reliant and as much as I liked Jessica's parents I wasn't going to take their money. That was a trap I wasn't going to fall into.

Another bone of contention was the housekeeping. Every week Jessica paid to have a house cleaner come in. I thought that was ridiculous with just the two of us there, but Jessica refused to "clean".

"My parent's didn't send me to college so I could clean sinks and toilets." She would say.

I just let it go along with dishes that never seemed to make it into the dishwasher unless I put them there. The unmade bed also drove me crazy. My engineer's brain was very methodical and I liked order.

Jessica majored in marketing and communications, which I thought was ridiculous. How the hell did that make the world any better? It was just hucksterism by another name.

As we headed toward graduation my time became more filled with work and school. Plus I was the president of the student robotics club.

Unfortunately Jessica's student schedule became less and less busy. She landed an internship with Nieman Marcus on Michigan Avenue and was invited to lots of functions and parties, which to her anger and dismay I rarely had time for. I had difficulty hiding my disdain for her coworkers.

I think it was sometime early in the spring we began to realize we were not a match made in heaven. We were so young and dissimilar that we were headed for the inevitable breakup. It got to the point that Jessica was constantly complaining about my absences. I just couldn't understand why she didn't understand. And the two bitches didn't help with their constant sniping. I had overheard them more than once while they thought I was out of earshot telling Jessica that she could do so much better. Of course neither of them could sustain a relationship and frankly they were jealous that we had a wedding date in September. Once I heard Amber suggest to Jessica that I must have a girlfriend on the side.

With my schedule, that was laughable. I was so tense, one of my students said that even my hair was clenched. Funny, but probably true.

Despite her beauty, Jessica was insecure.

I took to going to the gym every weekday morning. Jessica was not an early riser so she certainly couldn't miss me then.

And then there was Allison.

She was a dark haired beauty from central Wisconsin who was one of the few women in the engineering program and was also in the robotics club. Her parents owned a dairy farm and we had much in common. We were great friends, and at a party one weekend I introduced her to Jessica.

How dumb was that?

I thought since they were both beautiful intelligent women they would get along. Not a chance.

They hated each other on sight and I was in the middle of a verbal cat fight.

After that, every time I came home from an evening meeting of the robotics club Jessica would be very interested for a change in how the evening went. I finally figured out that Jessica was horribly jealous and felt especially threatened by Allison.

One evening I was amazed when Jessica showed up at a club meeting, ostensibly to bring me dinner — which had never happened before.

Allison and I were sitting very close, peering at lines of code on a computer screen trying to find a flaw that was causing our program to crash, when Jessica came in. She was dressed to kill, short but elegantly fashionable skirt, silk blouse and very high-heeled pumps. Every geek in the place, me included stopped and stared.

When she spotted me with Allison, I saw such a flash of anger I was taken aback.

She came over to me and ignoring Allison altogether, put a gourmet pizza in front of me, kissed me and walked out.

That night we had our first real fight. She brought in all the heavy artillery right from the first ... about not loving her enough to spend time with her instead of my computer nerd friends ... and why was I sitting so close with Allison? Did I love her? Was I being unfaithful with Allison?

I was dumbfounded. Certainly not the first time, or the last time in my life that I was broadsided by a woman's ridiculous insecurities.

Things were frosty for awhile but finally we made up, or I thought we had. It took me a little while before I realized that Jessica wasn't around as much as before. She and the two bitches were always "out" somewhere and she often didn't answer her cell phone.

The island of sanity was always Sundays at her parent's home. They lived in a giant old red brick house north of Chicago near Lake Michigan, in the town of Lake Forest. Typically Jessica and I would spend Saturday night there. I had my own room across the hall from Jessica. We could make love for half the night in her room, but in the morning I had to be in "my" room. Sunday mornings we would go to church with her parents and brother and sister and then go back to the big house and eat brunch prepared by Jessica's mother Carolyn. After brunch Jessica would head for downtown and shopping, usually with the bitches. The others would drift off somewhere and I would head to my room to study and grade papers.

Jessica's mother was a blonde beauty and just an older version, in looks anyway, of Jessica. She was in her early forties, mother of a son and two daughters. Jessica was the oldest. Carolyn was the kindest and most unselfish person I ever met and I came to realize that she treated me a damn sight better than Jessica did.

Each Sunday afternoon Carolyn would bring me a snack and we would sit and talk on the big sofa in front of the fireplace in my room. She was beautiful, bright and articulate. I thought I was in love with her.

Tom, Jessica's dad, an investment banker had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia just before Christmas of 2001, but with radiation and chemo by graduation he had made a comeback. For awhile during the winter and early spring it had been touch and go. He spent long periods in the hospital.

Those Sunday afternoon talks were a wonderful respite for both of us and brought us together. Carolyn and I became good friends after some initial misgivings on her part. It wasn't that she was worried about me, but she knew her daughter very well and her history of failed relationships and the fact Jessica was superficial and spoiled and willful. She and I became allies and friends as our conversations deepened. I helped her through some rough times and her fears that she once tearfully conveyed that she was going to lose Tom to cancer and become "a forty two year old widow".

Carolyn was also the glue that held the household together and never publicly faltered even when faced with Tom's cancer. With me she could unburden herself and she knew she could trust me.

She was also very gracious to my parents and insisted they stay with them during the graduation celebrations.

By graduation things were pretty tense around the apartment. Jessica and I went through all the motions around our parents who came to the ceremony, but the ardor had cooled.

My parents finally got a chance to meet Jessica's folks. They got along very well to my surprise considering their different backgrounds.

My dad and Tom had much more in common than one would think. They were both businessmen, highly regarded in their communities and they loved the Chicago Bears and could talk for hours about football and the glory days and the freezing weather at Soldier Field.

Carolyn and my mother, Joyce had weekly telephone calls as they planned the wedding. They seemed to get along great. One Sunday afternoon I came into the kitchen to find Carolyn laughing into the phone.

"Joyce that's wonderful of you to say that. We think Jessica's pretty special too ... but ... if they ever split up we've decided we get to keep Matt!"

Carolyn laughed again and winked at me.

Over the years I thought of Carolyn often, especially each Christmas when a card would arrive with a short note about how she was doing. The note was always on her own stationary, written in her hand and always smelled faintly of her perfume. She never mentioned Jessica. The cards were not the mass-produced kind and the photo was always of Carolyn alone. She had taken care to pick out a unique and special card for me each year. Obviously she had kept contact with my parents because the address was current despite how much I moved around. And each year I would write her a long letter. Sometimes it wouldn't get written until January, but I always let her know how I was doing. I shared things I told no one else just as if we were sitting close together on that sofa in front of the fire.