ALOHA

I gaped at her like a freshly landed trout, "having sex? What do you mean having sex?"

She raised that one eyebrow, "I mean, like you inserting your penis into my vagina, and then creating enough friction that, hopefully, I experience my first orgasm. Look, Richard, I'm leaving for Duke at the end of August, and I'm still a virgin. I'd like to depend on my best friend to give me the Prom first sex experience and to share this with me."

I just looked at her as if I were a dog in calculus class, and asked superfluously, "me, you want to have sex with me? And I'm your best friend?"

With a frustrated huff, she answered, "yes, I do, and of course, you're my best friend. I mean, honestly, Richard, who do I spend more time with than anyone else outside my home? Who else could be remotely classified as a close friend than you? And on top of that, look at you. You're a very presentable man, tall, well-muscled, and attractive, ... I suppose."

I was understandably underwhelmed by her characterization of me and thought the whole thing was as crazy as a cat sandwich, but I've certainly never been one to over-examine an issue if sex were involved.

I finally said agreeably, with a smile, "OK, I'm in."

Looking smugly self-satisfied, she told me to go down to the front desk and rent a separate room, and when I'd returned, she suggested that we slip out while no one was watching. That's extremely hard to do when there are only eight people in the room, even when at least two-thirds of them are drunk as a boiled owl, and when we began edging out, the other girls swooped in, gathered Alecia up, and dragged her to the bathroom for whatever kind of high-level deliberations women have there. She came out back a few minutes later with an exasperated look on her face, shaking her head, and just blurted out, "women"!

I won't bore you with details of the rest of the night, but I must say that I was shocked out of my tiny Georgia mind when Alecia undressed and she had on stockings, a garter belt, and a lingerie set that included a thong and one of those crazy bras that supported her completely, stupendously beautiful breasts from below, leaving the upper part and nipples exposed. My mouth was hanging open while she went about the business of preparing for us to have sex with an uninhibited manner as if we had been naked around one another for years. And we hadn't; most emphatically hadn't.

To be blunt about it, she was, simply, a goddess. And, while I was standing there drinking her in, she briskly and efficiently turned the bed down, switched the bedside light on, and headed for the bathroom. She stopped, looked back at me, and asked with some exasperation what I was still doing standing there dressed. She walked into the bathroom, still in her heels and lingerie, and I watched the cheeks of her butt, hypnotized. I heard her peeing which shook me out of my trance, and I hurriedly tore off my clothes and jumped into the bed and under the covers.

She walked casually back out, and just as casually, took off the lingerie and stockings. If I thought she was gorgeous before, she was breathtaking when nude. Without another word, and without turning off the light, she pulled the covers off me, and with a studious and determined look on her face, simply screwed me into a stupor over the next three hours. Long after I lost the capacity to speak, respond or reciprocate her attentions, she did things that I had only read about, and directed what I would in retrospect title "A Comprehensive Study Into The Sexual Capabilities and Limits of the Average North Georgia Male"; at least that's how I imagined she captioned it in her computer of a mind.

I fell soundly asleep and awoke the next morning to the sound of the shower, but when I tried to join her, she indignantly told me that "wasn't happening". When I belatedly asked her about birth control, since it most definitely didn't come up the night before, she only told me not to worry about it, she had been on the pill since she was fifteen. It seems her mother expected of Alecia what her own life experience had been.

We dressed and drove back to Tate via a car service that we shared with the other six severely hungover young adults. But, where I thought that now that we had sex our relationship would change, when I called Alecia to ask her out on a date, she told me baldly that she had too much to do in her preparations for going to Duke University in the fall. I accepted it with good grace and filed the prom night experience away in my mental folder of things that I would never, ever forget; until exactly six weeks and two days later.

On that day, I remember that I had been down to Lake Lanier, north of Atlanta for a day of boating, water-skiing, and beer with three of my football teammates. We just returned home, and I was feeling somewhat baked, both from the sun, but also from the amazingly mediocre pot that we had been smoking all day to dubious effect. I was putting up my slalom ski when my dad came into the garage and told me shortly to get my ass in the shower and dress nicely, "in long pants for god's sake" that Alecia and her parents were coming over and would be here in an hour.

I vaguely wondered what it was about, but, honestly, didn't give it much thought. I showered, dressed, and choked down a ham sandwich and half a family-sized bag of Lay's potato chips before they arrived.

When my mom greeted them at the door, there were smiles and polite hugs all around and that mood continued into the family room. They were taken into the family room because, my mother once explained, in the south if you receive someone in the living room, it's only because you don't consider them a close friend of the family.

Once we were all settled into comfy chairs, Alecia and I were herded onto a loveseat sort of out of the line of fire, and the summit began.

The bomb that exploded in my head, that Alecia was pregnant, and that I was the dad seemed to be only the subject of negotiation to all the others, but it rendered me completely speechless and devoid of the ability to think; even more than usual, that is. It was only somewhat later that I realized that was because I was the only one that didn't know the agenda of the meeting beforehand. In the calm way that the parents discussed it, and the blank, expressionless look on Alecia's face, the fix was in, and the path forward was firmly decided.

We were to be married as soon as a proper, suitable wedding could be planned and staged, the families would buy us a house in Kennesaw where I would attend school, and upon graduation, we would move back to Tate, where I would use my newly minted business management degree to the company's benefit in the management suite. Alecia would be a stay-at-home mom, we would have two children, and would live happily ever after.

I didn't say anything of import, only grunting when I was asked a question, either an affirmative or negative grunt, and that seemed to satisfy my designated part in the proceedings. Women hugged, the men shook hands, and Alecia and I stood, seemingly apart from the scenario, and one another; she was smooth, undemonstrative, and unreadable, while I, at least from the inside, was a rumpled, steamrolled cluck.

Afterward, as I lay in my room on my bed, trying to arrange things in my mind in some semblance of order and clarity, I realized that instead of feeling indignant, trapped, and pressured, I was, instead, being given the golden opportunity to marry the most beautiful woman I had ever personally seem, who was, by the way, a certified genius. I would also slide into a lifelong, guaranteed career culminating in half ownership of a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars. With those huge truths in mind, I posited, everything else would follow in perfect order. And so, it did; until it didn't.

We married, Alecia canceled her plans for Duke, relinquishing her scholarship, and in the fall, we moved into a brand-new three-bedroom 3500 sq ft home in northern Marietta. It was way more than we needed, but we were steamrolled by the parents' syndicate and finally just went along. I started school, and to everyone's surprise, so did Alecia. She had already arranged everything behind the moms' backs while they thought that she would loll around eating bonbons and await the birth of the baby while they fanned her and bought baby clothes. As I was still trying to find the English building, she had tested out of all the required core requirement courses and was starting her sophomore-year classes. I almost swallowed my tongue when she told me that she was double majoring in Biology and Biochemistry and minoring in Computer Sciences. And, while I thought that I would never see her because of her major study load, she simply read her textbooks and notes every evening, consuming only a couple of hours of her time, and then spent the rest of the time hard-assing me into absorbing what my teachers were trying to tell me. I couldn't take notes for beans, so she made it her business to find someone intelligent in each of my classes, and to hire them to share a complete set of notes with me every day. And so, she made me a solid B student; she of course sailed through her classes scattering As indiscriminately in her wake, and dazzling everyone with her brilliance and beauty - still hidden, incidentally, beneath baggy clothes increasingly stretched by the growing Tate inside her. Incidentally, no one ever did decide how she got pregnant while on the pill, except that sometimes it just doesn't work, and god knows that it wasn't her intent.

This raises another fact that I haven't mentioned, which is that when we were married, Alecia retained the Cahill name rather than becoming Tate. When she first raised the issue, I was curiously unfazed by her position, but her mother, strangely enough, was the one who raised the strongest opposition to the idea. She couldn't specifically speak to why she had such strong objections to Alecia's stance on the issue, but then neither did Alecia ever voice a specific reason for it. In the end, we all left the two of them to duke it out in private and the result was that she remained Alecia Cahill.

At the end of February our freshman year Alecia in her business-like, matter-of-fact way took two weeks' leave from school and delivered Richard Matthew Tate IV. In that curiously weird southern upper-class way, he almost immediately became known as "Four" and from the beginning was a good if slightly incurious baby.

For Alecia taking time away from classes was no problem at all, because she could have just not shown up and skipped exams and labs, and it probably wouldn't have changed her final grades by very much. But, since all her professors thought she was the second coming of Einstein and Galileo combined, they jumped through hoops to make sure that she missed nothing and that her grades remained as pristine as they had been.

At the end of two weeks, she threw Four into a sling and, back to classes she went. He was mostly tended by the growing band of acolytes that had begun to be attracted by her brilliance, and squabbles would break out among them concerning whose turn it was to watch the baby. Alecia was a great mom but had the good sense to let anyone who wanted to take over baby-tending duties do so for as long as they would put up with it.

Our sex life was more than I expected, considering the weird way that our marriage came about, but we continued to have relations up until a month or so before Alecia delivered. Our daily relationship as man and wife however was nothing that I could ever describe even to myself. As I said, our sex life was good, inventive, and adventurous, but the interpersonal relationship was more one of friends with benefits. All that being said, however, I began to learn things that I didn't even realize that I didn't know.

When we both had a little leisure time, and we weren't talking about school, Four, or just the minutiae of steering our lives, maybe over coffee on a Sunday morning, Alecia began idly talking about something that she had read in The New York Times, or Scientific American, or even, god forbid, The Annals of Biochemistry. It was a lot like our rides to school when we were sixteen. And the shocking thing was that not only did I now find most topics interesting, but, surprisingly, learned some things; she was a fabulous unintentional teacher. She taught me that when you read a poem, on the first cursory run-through you look for the words or groups of words that grab your intention and form an idea of how you understand them before going back and re-reading the whole thing again. We discussed why the Russian nation and people are mired in a national tradition of gloom and pining for lost glory; about whether humans can really maintain civil society in large gatherings such as countries or whether we are evolutionally better suited to the small communities typical of the hunter/gatherer groups from which we evolved; we wondered whether marriage and monogamy is a viable proposition rather than a device of control instituted by religious leaders. We talked, and I learned, even discovering that I would try to engage friends in more serious discussions only to be disappointed that all they wanted to discuss was the condition of the Georgia football team, or whether the fish were biting at Lake Lanier. In short, she made me a better informed, more interesting person.

As I mentioned, the sex was regular and we resumed with enthusiasm as soon as possible after the birth of Four; and within three months, Alecia was pregnant again. This time around we were blessed with a stunningly beautiful little girl whom we named after Alecia's grandmother, Charlene; we called her Charli.

Charli's birth caused as little disruption in Alecia's daily routine as Four did, and soon after the birth, she was hauling both of them to school with her, both partially raised by other students and the faculty of Kennesaw State. Of the two, Alecia paid more and closer attention to Charli, maybe because she saw, even then, Charli's similarity to her. The baby grew, spending many nap times in labs where Alecia was mixing reagents, and never stirring when assaulted by the noxious odors given off by the reacting chemicals. She seemed a quiet baby, but I eventually realized that she was instead, only soaking in her surroundings like a sponge. I've always said that babies cry because they're bored and unable to do anything to entertain themselves. Charli on the other hand, virtually never cried unless she was wet or hungry, and slept through the night from the very first night she was home.

Alecia, ever the voracious reader, read to both the kids, and inevitably, Four would toddle off to try and find something to break, or the corner of a table to bash his head against, while Chari listened, enraptured. By the time he was three years old, Four had been stitched up at least three times, and by the time she was three, Charli was reading.

The years went by, and I worked hard at school because Alecia made me, the kids grew into being their unique selves, and Alecia was the engine that drove it all, and herself. She graduated a semester ahead of me, even though I had assumed practically no part in the raising of the children, but at the time was too self-absorbed to realize it.

The very next semester after receiving her BS from Kennesaw, Alecia began an MS/Ph.D. program in Biochemistry, Cell, and Developmental Biology at Emory University in Atlanta. I had no idea that she even entertained such an idea, since the plan had always been for us to immediately move back to Tate upon graduation, and for me to begin work at the egg production facility.

But move we, did to my surprise, but Alecia, as always, took over the project and within a week, we were back in Tate in a McMansion that both sets of parents had invested in for our family. I soon immersed myself into work, involving ten and twelve-hour days, while Alecia, without a sign of complaint or pausing, ran our home, made sure that someone was watching Four, and, daily, with Charli in tow, made the one-and-a-half-hour one-way commute to Emory to work on her Ph.D. On the drive there and back, she would play either books on tape or copies of class lectures that she was committing to memory, as Charli listened in silent, intense concentration. We would find out later that she could recite long passages of esoteric text on, among other things, the permeability of the blood/brain barrier refusing inward absorption of toxins while allowing ready passage of beneficial therapeutics. In short, she was a little clone of Alecia.

We went on in this vein for a little over two years longer when Alecia, working on an accelerated schedule, completed her thesis on "The Existence of Streptococcus Aurei Resident in Glioblastoma Tumors". I, obviously have no idea whatsoever what it was about, but it, apparently caused quite a stir in the medical community, though Alecia just pooh-poohed it as "only the first step on a long road".

By this juncture, we had been married a little over six years and as well as I could understand from my limited perspective, everyone in the family expected Alecia to do something with her lofty education. My mom came to her and virtually guaranteed her a job teaching high school biology in the same high school that we had attended and was very offended and completely puzzled when Alecia only looked at her blankly and immediately responded "no thanks".

So, they all went back to waiting with bated breath to see what she was going to do...and she settled into being a mom and wife. She spent all the time that she had previously spent in class and research on the kids and the positive furtherance of my career, making me become more involved in local affairs and government, and forcing me to network and make contacts both in our County and also on the statewide level. All this she did in her uniquely Alecia fashion, never asking me, only telling me what we were going to be doing and when we would do it. At first, it drove me crazy for my twelve-hour workdays to be interrupted by dinners and fund-raising activities, but over time, she didn't so much teach me as put me into situations that would appeal most to my normal nature. And I found that I was a people person, concerned with others and with how the community and government functioned. I became more attentive to the children, to the underprivileged, to my parents, ...but to my eternal shame, not to Alecia. I was so certain of her strength, self-sufficiency, and drive that I didn't think to carry on the conversations that we used to have over a couple of drinks on the sundeck; or for her to read to me out of the incomprehensible science magazines that she read; and I no longer listened to her read poetry and no longer learned how to make words musical. I took her for granted.

Life went on, and my dad and grandfather were ecstatic with my progress at the company and promoted me to executive vice president of finance and Controller. Alecia's mom and dad moved back to the mid-west where he took over as the imminent heir-apparent of the grocery chain, and her grandmother died, vesting Alecia with full control of her trust fund which contained assets slightly less than $90 Million. I never asked or was interested in exactly how much because it wasn't my money, and I didn't care about it since I was going to eventually be one of two heirs to a company whose value would be in the hundreds of millions.

But we didn't live as if we had "big" money, and continued in the cooky-cutter McMansion, living on as good upper-middle-class citizens, and doing our duty to our kids and the community. Alecia though always managed to carve out time for reading the endless stream of esoteric and varied scientific books that arrived nearly every day. Sometimes I'd find her deeply involved in "The Physiology of the Neck", or another day, "Possible Negative Permutations of the Krebs Citric Acid Cycle" and knew better than to ask her whether it was entertaining. And as time went by, we all took her and her unique self more and more for granted.