“What do you mean by nice?” she asked. I simply waggled my eyebrows, and Marilyn laughed. “No, no, no! That’s only for the sake of procreation!”
“Are you trying to tell me your parents only did it thirteen times?”
“Exactly!”
“Well that explains it. Maybe if they had practiced a little more, they would have gotten some better results,” I remarked.
Marilyn gave me a raspberry and then said she was going to go change.
I turned on the oven to preheat and went back to cutting the head of broccoli apart. Timing is everything in cooking. Proper ingredients, too. Marilyn didn’t understand either concept. She was of the ‘just as good’ school of culinary delights. Ever read in a cookbook those emergency substitutions? If you don’t have butter you can use margarine, it’s just as good. If you don’t have cream you can use milk, it’s just as good. Well, if you do that a half dozen times in a meal, it’s just as good as cardboard!
Marilyn didn’t immediately return to the kitchen, so I figured she was taking a quick shower. With luck, she would return before dinner was ready, but not early enough to want to help.
I put the pork chops in the oven and started up a double boiler to steam the veggies in. Everything was under control by the time my wife returned. She must have decided some practice was in order, since she had changed into a very short button front denim skirt and had a sleeveless blouse on, but only tied together and not buttoned. She was barefoot, and looked very young and small.
I smiled at her. “I like the outfit.”
Marilyn grinned back. “I figured you might.”
I nodded and smiled. “I like how you wear the shirt.”
“Men! That’s all you ever think about!”
I moved over to her and backed her up against the kitchen table. I slipped my hands inside her open shirt and fondled her tits. “I was a bottle baby. I have issues!”
Marilyn moaned happily for a moment, and then pushed me away. “Issues!” She shrugged her shirt closed, but smiled at me.
I went back to cooking. “A businessman was hiring a secretary, and he had three choices. The first woman was a fantastic typist; she could type over a hundred words a minute! The second was incredibly organized, and could make a filing system sit up and beg. The third one was brilliant on the telephone and could talk anybody into anything. So, who did he hire?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The one with the big tits!”
Marilyn shrieked at that and threw a wet dishtowel at me. “You’re an awful person. I should never have married you!” Then she laughed and said, “I talked to your sister today. I bet she would agree with me.”
“Probably,” I nodded. “What’s the news from Lutherville?”
Marilyn told me as I opened the bottle of wine. Following the debacle with the wedding present, my mother had cut all ties with us. Only Suzie stayed in touch, and only when she was alone or off at college. She had even told us that in a bizarre touch, Mom had removed my pictures from the ‘Wall of Heroes’ and elsewhere in the house. It reminded me of the ancient Egyptian custom where a disgraced individual would have their name removed from everything public, although that’s a whole lot harder when the name is chiseled in stone! On the other hand, with Hamilton’s diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, it might make sense. If reminders of me set him off, removing those reminders might keep him under control. I wasn’t sure what to think of that.
We talked some more about Suzie’s nursing school experiences. Eventually all the timers went off and I served up the pork chops and the rolls and the broccoli. It only took me another few minutes to whip up the Hollandaise sauce, and then we sat down at the kitchen table together to eat.
“I was called over to battalion today. I got a job offer,” I said.
Marilyn looked over at me in confusion. “A job offer? But you already have a job in the Army?”
I nodded. “I was offered a new assignment. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Have you thought about this summer? My commitment was for four years, and that ends this summer.”
“And this new assignment would go past that?” she asked.
I nodded again. “It would be a different post, a different job, everything. I’d leave the division.” I told her about the assignment that had been offered to me at Fort Sill, and what would happen after that, at CGS.
“And you want to do this?” she asked.
“Yes, but not if you don’t want me to. I told both of the colonels that you knew I was going into the Army for four years, but you hadn’t signed on for a career, and I needed to talk to you about it.”
“Don’t make this all about me!” she said warningly.
“I’m not, but I do want your opinion. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Where’s this place, Fort Sims…”
“Sill,” I corrected her.
“Sill. That’s where you went to artillery school, right?”
“Right.” Marilyn was chewing, but she nodded and I went on. “It’s fairly quiet. Without the base the place would probably dry up and blow away. Lawton’s bigger than Utica, but it seemed quieter.”
“And after that? You said we’d move to Kansas?”
“Fort Leavenworth. It’s right outside of Kansas City. If I do well at Sill, and I know I can hack that in my sleep, I go to the Command and General Staff school at Leavenworth. After that I make major.”
“Fort Leavenworth? Isn’t that where they have that prison?”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t be there. The Army has their grad school there. I’ve never been there, but it’s supposed to be very nice.”
“Where would we live?”
I smiled at her and put down my fork and knife. “I’ll make you a promise. Whether we stay in or get out, after here, we’ll buy a house. Would you like that?”
Marilyn’s eyes lit up at the idea. She eagerly nodded. “Will we be able to afford a house?”
Marilyn if you only knew! I was worth a small fortune at that point. I had started 1979 with roughly $3.5 million in my brokerage accounts. Over the course of the spring I had invested it in silver, at an average price of around $7 per ounce. By the summer and the fall, the Hunt brothers in Texas tried to corner the market in silver. The price went to $50 per ounce before collapsing. The Hunts were bankrupted, and ended up going to convicted of market manipulation. I was a whole lot smarter and a lot less greedy. I rode it up and I rode it down, and now I was now worth about $34 million.
“We can afford it,” I assured her.
“Would you still be in the cycle?” she asked warily.
“No cycle. It will pretty much be nine to five, Monday to Friday. I’ll probably have to do some traveling, but nothing major.”
Marilyn let out a sigh of relief. The cycle could be very wearing on the wives. “Well, if you want to, I’m game. We can give it a few more years, right?”
I smiled at her and gave a sigh of relief, too. The idea of another promotion and advancement made me eager. I could leave the Army and live very well, but this was something I had earned all on my own, without any knowledge of the future. I had done this all on my own, and I found it very satisfying. I nodded, and said, “Thank you.”
“I don’t know why you like the Army so much, and I probably never will, but I want you to be happy,” she said, reaching across to me and taking my hand.
I leaned over and kissed her. “As long as you’re happy, I’m happy.”
I stood up from the table and set the dishes on the counter and in the sink. Marilyn helped, and then I grabbed the bottle of wine and my glass, and led her back to the living room. I sat down on the couch, and we started watching television, but not much was happening in the news, and not much seemed to be coming on later. To be fair about it, with Marilyn laying her head in my lap, and stretched out on the couch, she was practically laying naked there. Her tits were showing through the opening in her blouse, and her skirt had slid up around her waist. A nuclear alert on the television probably wasn’t going to make me concentrate on something else!