Two Loves Pt. 02

The doctor glanced up from suturing Megan's episiotomy. She winced once and squeezed my hand tightly one more time. "Sorry," he exclaimed. "Almost done."

"Not quite," Megan quipped to the doctor in a sassy tone. "You need to snip my husband's tubes."

I made a gesture with my free hand to cover my pubic region from assault.

Dr. Charles Budray laughed. He said, "Megan, you bring him around the office someday soon and we'll take care of that. Today is all about you." The vasectomy was also part of our family plan.

The nurse had swaddled the baby and brought the small bundle over to us. She placed her in Megan's outstretched arms. The baby immediately started the instinctive motions of searching for a breast to suckle. Megan looked surprised.

Dr. Budray was not only our family doctor, and in this case the man we'd asked to deliver our two children, he was also Megan's boss. For the past five years, she'd been his Physician's Assistant; working in both his Wellesley office as well as a clinic he ran in Roxbury a day and a half a week.

After he completed his work on Megan, he reached for the baby. "Let's see what we've got here," He said. With great care he unwrapped the squirming baby atop Megan's stomach, examining every inch of her body and gently pushing and prodding here and there on the small torso. He made a few motions over her feet and back testing reflexes. In three quick moves he had swaddled the baby again and put her back in Megan's arms.

"I think this one is as perfect as Eleanor was," he announced. Megan and I both breathed a sigh of relief. "You guys make good, healthy babies." He paused and looked around at the nurses, who stood ready to attend to Megan. He told them, "Take good care of her; she's more valuable to me than my right hand." He turned to Megan and said, "I'm going to clean up and see a couple of other patients. I'll check in on you before I leave the hospital." With that he stretched to his full six-foot-six-inch height and left the operating room at a brisk walk.

One of the nurses finished covering Megan and adjusting the gurney she'd birthed on. "We'll keep you on this until you're back in your room. Right now, you go to post-delivery care for a couple of hours, just to be sure everything's all right – you know the drill." She turned to me and said, "You can get out of the scrubs, if you want and rejoin your wife." I nodded. We'd walked through all the stages of birth and recovery again only weeks before, even though this was our second child.

Before I left the room, I paused and looked back at Megan and the baby. She cosseted the sleeping newborn to her breast in a maternal and protective gesture. A wave of relief and gratitude swept through me. I was so glad Megan and Sarah Alice were unscathed by the birthing process. Beyond that, I felt lucky to have this family and the love we shared. I captured the moment in a mental snapshot to share with her later, or even share in four months time when we had our ninth anniversary. I went down the hall and changed out of the scrubs the hospital had provided me.

Before I went to Megan, I found a pay phone and made three calling card calls: first to Megan's mother, who waited anxiously with Eleanor at our home for word of the delivery. Second, I called my mother who was also pacing around my house waiting to hear about her new granddaughter. Lastly, I called Emma to let her know all had gone well. In her own way, each woman was excited about the birth and cheered us both on with sighs of relief that the birth was over and congratulations.

As I walked down the hospital corridor from the men's locker room to find Megan, I thought of the years we'd been together. Except for nine months after we got married, Megan was always immersed in her medical career: first, as a student for three years working towards her degree and certificate as Physician's Assistant, and then for the past five years as Dr. Budray's PA.

Megan was exceptional and the kind of person you'd want on your side. She constantly studied. Any undiagnosed patient bothered her. She sometimes kept unusual hours to cater to a patient, and she'd even made an occasional house call, particularly for pediatric cases she'd been asked to oversee.

Budray had given her more and more responsibility as she proved herself. He often told me she was better with patients than he was. Megan would laugh in self-derision, but we all knew he was right. She cared more for the patients and often was more emotionally involved in their outcomes than her aging boss.

I was proud of Megan and told her often. She basked in my praise as well as the comments of others. Given that she'd sought to separate herself from a life as a housewife, I thought she'd moved about as far in the other direction as she could go yet still have children.

With two robust incomes, Megan and I had bought a house in Wellesley about four years earlier. The sprawling contemporary was a block away from a local college in one of the nicer neighborhoods. The college proved to be a source of smart young women that were more than willing to babysit for a two year old. Most days, when she worked at Dr. Budray's Wellesley office, Megan was only about five minutes from home.

I rated our marriage 'average' in terms of our compatibility and disagreements. Our two-career marriage quickly ended the honeymoon period. Megan and I were initially wrapped up in our work or studies. Consequently, the growing intimacy between the two of us rapidly found a plateau and then slowly solidified around our professional lives. We both found fault with the hours the other put into their work or study. Getting in sync was a lot harder than talking about it.

Oddly enough, when I was traveling Megan never complained. I attributed this to the fact that she could then come and go as she pleased, with no issue about having to sync with my schedule. It was only when I was nearby, worked late, and was a few minutes from home, that she found fault with my schedule and attention.

From my point of view, Megan spent an inordinate amount of time at the college: taking classes, working in one of the labs, or doing practical work with patients at one of the clinics where she interned. Her studies spilled over into the evening, and more than once she found me asleep in bed by the time she got home. We tried to sync my long days to hers, but I'd no sooner learn her schedule well enough than it would change, and we'd have to start all over again.

After the arrival of Eleanor, I made more of an effort to be home at what Megan agreed was a reasonable hour. For her first year and half, I didn't know what to do with Eleanor, however, as she hit the two year old mark, she seemed to know 'Daddy' and sit still long enough for me to read a story to her sister and her at bedtime. At least at this stage, she was an easy child.

Megan's other complaints often stemmed from my inattention to a list of small projects around the new house. After the umpteenth time the issue came up, I found a home handyman that came by periodically to work on our home improvement and fix-it list. The young man's work seemed to mollify Megan and things went back to being peaceful again.

Megan and I struggled with intimacy. As an engineer and more recently a software designer, I knew I did not have the romantic gene in my body. Consequently, I became a student of techniques to foster our relationship, particularly in a romantic way. As promised, Emma was a valuable source of ideas and information in this arena. At her prompting, I learned where the local florist and greeting card stores were. I kept a calendar of 'special' dates, always trying to conjure up a new one when the time looked right. She'd also prompt me to do a 'date night' with Megan from time to time.

On the nights when I did get home at a reasonable hour and when Megan wasn't wrapped up in classes, a lab, or study group, we'd enjoy a few hours together in rich conversation. Mostly, we shared what was going at our work or studies, or we negotiated some balancing act between our two families, particularly in terms of the moms seeing and caring for our children Sarah and Eleanor. We both had siblings that provided a source of conversation as well, and Megan maintained her interest in the arts, albeit at a greatly reduced level due to her commitment to school.

Both our mothers decided that they wanted to spend at least an afternoon a week babysitting. Often, we slid the day around to fit my travel or Megan's academic schedule. In any case, they made it easier to work with other childcare arrangements, such as the college girls. I had started to lobby for us to get a more mature nanny or au pair on a full time basis. We could afford it, and we had the room in the house for another adult; any spontaneous lovemaking that might have suffered had long ago faded away as a pleasant memory.

Mark Dalton, one of my long time friends from work, knew Megan and me well enough to have watched the quelling of the romantic fire in the marriage, particularly after the kids came along. He was at the same stage of things with his wife and family. One day, he groused about life to me: "Don't you feel gypped? You find this hot babe and marry her, and then you destroy each other, the love disappears, the kids and house suck up all your attention, and the world feels like shit." Usually optimistic, I found his rhetorical question surprising.

Although I answered him with some platitudes, Mark's venting caught my attention. That afternoon and into the evening as I played alone with Sarah and Eleanor, I studied whether I felt 'gypped' as Mark had put it. Maybe I was the cockeyed optimist at that point; however, I saw where we were in our marriage as just one of many stages we'd already gone through or would go through in the coming years.

I already viewed our marriage like living entity – something that ebbed and flowed over time; Megan and I had even talked about how our tides shifted from year to year. If we were having a down time, I knew we'd have a good time sometime soon. I thought things were seldom in balance. Instead, we moved around in some crazy dance with each other and all the other things impacting our lives, shifting our attention to the places that needed it most. I acknowledged that our relationship was just one of those areas requiring attention. There were many other relationships to focus on: Megan's parents, my parents, her siblings, my siblings, her friends, my friends, our friends, her work, my work, and on and on – including Emma.

We could get dysfunctional about our marriage, and rant and rave about being 'gypped,' or we could choose to roll with the things buffeting us and not let them upset our relationship. Another friend had shared with me a quote by Otis Maxfield, 'Fate is what life deals you; destiny is what you do with it.' I could live with that. I resolved to share my thinking with Mark the next day.

When the two of us sat down for lunch and started to talk, Mark confessed to me of a recent fling he'd had with one of the admin assistants in the company. I was numb struck. Mark never struck me as the kind to play around. He confessed it was a sexual thing; there'd been no love or caring in the 'one-night stand.' He felt guilty about the deed, yet rationalizing it because so much of his family life sucked, as he put it.

For a brief instant I thought of telling Mark about Emma; however, I wisely paused and said nothing. Emma remained my private secret. As I listened to Mark talk, I realized how few similarities there were between his liaison and my ten-year relationship with Em. I had never gone to Em because I was mad at or had fallen out of love with Megan; to the contrary, I loved Megan. Emma and I deeply loved each other too; we were an event in an alternate reality called the west coast; I still felt no guilt over the affair – it was just something to be carefully managed so that no one got hurt; and lastly, there'd been no lying about the relationship – I just let it happen the way it did each time we met. Like Mark and the secretary, we had a sexual relationship; however, my relationship with Em went so much deeper than that.

As I thought about Em, my mind drifted three thousand miles away. I reflected a moment, until Mark snapped his fingers in front of my eyes. "Helloooooo!" He echoed. "Earth to Matt, earth to Matt. You in there?" He grinned at me. I shook my head and rejoined the discussion. If he thought anything of my reverie, he didn't mention it.

Three years prior, I'd pulled off a bit of coup at work. After several years of research and development on database technology, as well as becoming exceptionally well informed about this industry segment and its future, I orchestrated the sale of my entire group, including the computing center, to a recently formed company called Oracle Corporation. The company was named after their primary product, the Oracle Database – a product developed for the CIA while the founders were at Ampex Corporation.

Oracle was based in Redwood City, California, down the street from Ampex where they'd initially worked on the database. It's CEO was Larry Ellison, an entrepreneur I'd met many times in my work for Digital Devices. Oracle was at the leading edge of software technology, right where my group and I wanted to be. Instead of competing, we joined up.

By the time of my group's sale, I had a pile of stock options in Digital Devices. Because of the success of the sale for the firm, they honored the options. I made a lot of money overnight, enough to buy the Wellesley house outright, as well as some vacation property on a lake in Maine.

In the deal, I got myself named as head of the Boston area subsidiary with a sterling compensation package. Nominally, I reported to the CEO; in fact, I became my own business unit president. Megan was very proud of me. At thirty-two, I'd achieved a great deal.

My database group, including the computing center, moved out of the Digital Devices building shortly after the sale. We got our own offices in Burlington, Massachusetts, right along Route 128. We also started to hire. Six months later, I had about seventy people reporting to me. I was the youngest subsidiary head in Oracle. A year later, the number of staff in my subsidiary had risen to two hundred.

My travel schedule called for a trip a month to the west coast. Occasionally, there'd be some other conference or special meeting to attend, but usually those trips only involved a day or two rather than the five or six days I usually spent on the coast. Since I was such a regular out there, I decided to have the company rent a studio apartment for me; it worked out to be less expensive than staying at many of the acceptable motels. The condominum seemed like a piece of home to me after a while, and I could leave clothing and toiletries there. I gave Em a key.

Chapter 5

Emma and I sat at dinner in a little bistro near Stanford University. The place had a few students and professorial looking people in it. We both liked the collegiate atmosphere around the campus; so on many of my trips, we'd go to the campus area near her condominium and walk around. This small Italian restaurant had become a favorite of ours over the years. The owners even knew us by name and always greeted us with enthusiasm.

We traded stories about our day's work with each other. I'd been in meetings all day about the development of package software solutions atop the Oracle database that an increasing number of my customers in the New England area wanted. We had so many opportunities, I found it difficult to set priorities on which directions to go. My colleagues from other areas were having the same problems. More resources! We all wanted more people and product improvements.

Emma had gotten in on the ground floor at Verbatim twelve years prior. You could count the people in the world that knew more than she about magnetic digital storage media on one hand, and she was a best friend to all of them. Further, she distinguished herself as an R&D engineer, becoming a vice president in the young company.

Over the meal, Em had talked about Verbatim's acquisition by Eastman Kodak several months earlier. The company had been having a rough time in the highly competitive media market, not helped in the least by a continuing parade of manufacturing problems. Now, they had a different label; however, she told me, the quality control problems showed no sign of improvement.

Em had been working with her team on how to reliably manufacture three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks with twice the memory capacity. She toyed with a diskette as we lingered over dinner, almost as though she find some inspiration by contact with the product.

She said, "It's a chicken and egg situation again, and there are some bad hens out there. We've got to be manufacturing the disks before the companies like Seagate will start manufacturing the drives for computers. That's when the price breaks will make it worthwhile to upgrade. The worst thing right now; however, is that we've got to get our quality control in hand."

I asked, "But when can I get a disk with a hundred megabytes or a gigabyte capacity. Are we that far away?"

She responded, "In terms of a hard disk, you know you have a hundred megs in your computer now, it's just not removable media. The industry is on its own version of Moore's Law with this stuff. You'll have a hard drive with a gigabyte around a decade from now, and a hundred gigs a decade after that. We seem to be improving a hundred fold each decade, at least with magnetic media."

She spun the plastic floppy drive between her two hands. She said, "The days for these are numbered. The replacement will be compact disks or CDs, and probably some denser format beyond those. The music guys are getting a whole album on one CD; that's about a 600-megabyte capacity, but re-write capabilities are limited. We'll have our brand on the market soon, but the drives are the issue. The burners are pricy, but they'll get cheaper over time. Initially, they'll only allow you to burn once, but sometime in the '90s you'll be able to do read and write and re-write on CDs."

We kicked around the implications of the various technologies. As storage capacities exploded over time, so many limitations of computers would disappear, portability would increase dramatically, and data synchronization would become an issue, at least within businesses. I thought of being able to put some of the entire databases we worked with on one disk. Now, that would be an accomplishment.

We settled up dinner and then took a stroll through the campus. There was a natural competition between MIT and Stanford, so I launched into a length discourse to Emma about how I was a spy from the east coast sent here to learn all the secrets of the school so we could overtake then in the rankings. The rankings were a bit of a farce; yet I knew the schools drew great esteem if they were ahead of the other. In any case, Caltech remained atop all of the technical universities.

Em and I walked the two miles back to her condominium. She told me, "Management is talking about moving me over to manufacturing." After a long silence while I digested that point, she added, "It'd mean I'd have to move to Charlotte, North Carolina."

"Wow," I said trying to be enthusiastic about her move. "I've never been to Charlotte. I hear it's nice." My stomach had tightened into a knot. Not only had I never been to Charlotte, but I had no reason to be within several hundred miles of there. If Em moved there, it'd be tantamount to ending our comfortable relationship. I gave her a tentative smile, wondering if she'd thought about that aspect of a reassignment. A thousand other questions rushed through my head.