@Armoured, here's the curious story I promised I would tell you about how Suzanne and I met.
Story starts a bit over two years before I move to Colorado. I'm in Illinois, the owner of a small sales agency employing about a dozen people. A client contracts with me for some market research. He wants to sell screen printed flannel pajamas of all things, and he wants to know who to sell them to, what price to sell them at, etc.
So I start thumbing through apparel catalogs looking for information on flannel pjs. My wife's Victoria Secret's lingerie catalog arrives. On a long shot, I snatch it to include in my work.
When I get around to thumbing through it, I'm thumbing fast because all I'm looking for that day are pjs. Several pages in, I'm pulled up short, stopped in the midst of my tracks. What did I just see?
I thumb back a couple pages. There, on the left hand page of the catalog, is this gorgeous young woman, maybe 19 or so, I judge, but not really dressed up sexy. She's kneeling on a bed to be sure, and looking into the camera, but her bra and panties? Drab old cotton plain-cut beige. Then her eyes, her eyes
seize me!
I realize in an instant it was her eyes that stopped me in my tracks.
So then I'm staring into them, wondering why I have a sense or feeling I should recognize, should understand the peculiar expression in them. I stare intently into them and as I'm staring, I slip into a strange daze. An even stranger feeling comes over me, but nothing like anything I've experienced before, so I can't identify it.
After what must have been several minutes, I feel this ache in my chest, just as if she's someone I'd ache for. So strange! Then I think,. "I want to meet her. I don't care what happens when we we do, I don't care whether we like each other or not, I don't care what happens later, I want to meet her." Of course, just as soon as I think that, the ache gets a little sharper because I know there's no way I have any chance of meeting her.
I don't really recall now when I snapped out of that daze. but I did. It was then that I noticed at last, a tiny two or so inch high photo down in the corner of the page. There, again, same girl but this time in flannel pjs!
There wasn't at that point anything else that seemed rational to do beyond take down the pj information and finish up scanning the catalog.
Now fast forward a bit more than two years. Business gone. Wife gone. Most everything else gone. And I've moved to Colorado after some brief wandering around looking for a new home.
In fact, I have a tiny apartment in the center of Colorado Springs and I'm in the habit of frequenting a nearby coffee shop that happens to be the oldest and busiest coffee shop in the city.
One evening, a bit after dusk, I'm standing outside the shop with an overflow crowd of people, mostly high school kids at that hour. No room inside. Suddenly, this tiny white Miata convertible sports car swoops into a parking space a few yards away at a speed that is just under too fast for it to have stopped in time to avoid crashing into the car parked in front of it.
I think, "That was cutting it close! What cheek that driver!" Abruptly I observe the driver in question stand up in the car seat, turn towards the car door, and leap over the door onto the street. "My god, what a show off!" Then the driver struts right towards me. No better word for it than struts. "Oh god, just look at that walk! Is this some fool looking for trouble?"
At first, I can't tell boy or girl? "It" is dressed could be either right down to the jockey cap that hides "its" hair.
Twenty feet from me now, my god! It's the girl with the eyes!
I don't know what to do, so I do nothing. She struts directly up to me, more or less singling me out from the whole crowd on the sidewalk. "This where you get the coffee?" Deep voice for a twenty one, twenty two year old woman, little bit of throaty husk in it.
I say something to her about "Yeah, you go inside, go up to the cash register. That's where they serve it."
She abruptly turns, struts off disappearing out of sight in the crowd inside the shop. I don't recall what happened until she suddenly reappear right next to me. We got into some conversation then, but I don't remember any of it now. Yet, presently, a man named Jeff, who I'd met just a couple hours earlier that night, takes me aside, and in a voice she probably couldn't hear, asks me if she's my girl.
I say, "no, I just met her".
"Well, would you please introduce us? I'd be indebted to you. Really indebted to you."
I'm not too happy with that because Jeff has given me a wary feeling from the moment I met him. But I can't say anything is wrong with the man beyond that, so after a moment, "Sure."
Now fast forward maybe two months, maybe three. I start for no apparent reason to run into Suzanne more and more often at the shop. She and Jeff are a couple now. When he's with her, she's polite but distant towards me. But when he's not with her, she comes over, we chat. This gradually turns into our hanging out together nearly every weekday while Jeff is at work.
I learn some facts. She was barely 14 when she modeled for Victoria's. Her mother insisted she take the job, thinking Suzanne had a shot at a career. She's 16 now and drives a sports car that she doesn't make enough money to properly maintain, but which her absentee father gave her as a guilt gift for never having taken an interest in her.
Maybe because of him, she seems to have "daddy issues". She is strongly, almost hopelessly attracted to much older men like Jeff, who is my age. Some perhaps surprising men have taken advantage of her attraction too. Just a year earlier, at age 15, she's secretly dating and frequently having sex with a 54 year old sheriff from the county immediately to the south of ours.
And I learn more. She's smart, possibly smarter than Jeff, who it's clear to everyone who knows him that he's at least of superior intelligence. But she's even more troubled than she is smart, plenty indications of being some version of bi-polar. Beyond that, gifted with creativity. Yet during all of this getting to know each other I don't even so much as drop a hint to her where I first saw her, not a word about the catalog.
Finally, six months after we met, comes a day I am finally curious enough about how she'll react to tell her. But for some instinctive reason, I don't mention the eyes, "I saw you in Victoria's Secrets a couple years before we met. You were sporting some stylish flannel pajamas".
"That is so amazing", she says, "Six men have told me now that's where they saw me, but you, you amaze me. You're the only one who can remember the shot of me in my flannels."
And the eyes? What was that arresting look all about?
As it happens, I don't figure that out for years. When at last I do it's just about the biggest D'uh! moment of my life. It at last comes to me that Suzanne has the same peculiar look in her eyes as my now ex-wife, Tomoko. I don't even to this day have a clue why I didn't connect the two of them earlier.
Last, it soon enough became apparent what might have caused that wariness I felt from the start towards Jeff. Tragically, once Suzanne had fallen so hard in love with him that he was sure she no longer had a decent chance of bringing herself to leave him, he turn on her like a snake. Everything from verbal and emotional abuse to beatings. But each time he pushed her to the edge of leaving, he'd suddenly break out the charm again, do everything and anything to rope her back in.
But what then happened between those two, and Suzanne's ultimate victory over him, is a whole 'nother story.
Thanks for listening Armoured!
