Empty Promises

partner.
    Nevertheless, in May 1990, Jami went along with buying a split-level house on Education Hill in Redmond. As agreed, with Jami’s Microsoft stock as collateral, Sherri loaned them the down payment and the closing costs on the house: $27,186.53. Since Steve’s employment was sporadic, Jami’s salary would be used for the monthly payments on the house. Two months later they moved in.
    “It was in awful shape,” Sherri recalled of the house they bought. “It was a fixer.” The previous owners had kept animals in the basement rec room, and they had urinated and defecated on the floor until the linoleum had practically melted and stuck to the floor. Jami and Steve bought a product called Kilz , applied it, and finally got rid of the odor. They found a carpenter who partitioned the basement into separate rooms, and Jami worked to fix up the rest of the house. It began to look better. It was a standard split-level plan, built in the seventies, but it was theirs.
    Steve made a few halfhearted attempts at landscaping the backyard, which adjoined a thick woods. There was a single tree in the yard, and Steve had a load of sand dumped near it for Chris to play in, although he never actually made a sandbox. The rest of the backyard was only gravel and some never-planted flower areas edged with untreated wood. Steve had no interest in gardening.
    Indeed, all of Steve Sherer’s interests lay in things that could bring him an instant high or instant excitement. The new house made no difference at all in his behavior—except that Steve could now throw private parties without having to worry about people in an apartment next door overhearing. Despite the new house, all the vacation homes he had access to, his powerboat, and his little boy who was not yet two years old, Steve Sherer was bored, still looking for new thrills, and still spending a lot of time gambling in card rooms and at the racetrack. He set up his own weekly gambling pool with friends who bet on NFL games and draft choices, but even that kept his interest for only a little while. Steve was an empty vessel that needed to be filled constantly.
    No longer satisfied by his sexual relations with Jami, Steve continually urged her to join him in “swinging.” He took out an ad in a swingers’ magazine without her knowledge. It was written from Jami’s point of view, as if she was the one who was seeking sexual excitement by adding another man to her life. Steve received several replies, with photographs of naked males enclosed, at the post office box address he listed. They wrote that they were anxious to join Jami in her fantasies. It was, of course, Steve who was interested in threesomes; for a long time, he had talked about watching Jami have sex with another man. She was disgusted by his constant nagging at her to acquiesce to his sick scenarios about inviting people into bed with them. He was often impotent, which was not surprising considering the quantity of drugs he ingested, and he needed something to spice up his jaded sex life.
    Whether Jami actually participated in threesomes with Steve is questionable—at least at that point. But something happened during that time that hurt Jami so badly that she wanted to go far away from him.
    Nothing in his marriage was sacred to Steve. At one of his jobs, he regaled fellow employees with intimate—and exaggerated—details of his sex life with Jami. A young woman recalled working in a warehouse where Steve was her foreman. “He told everyone around about his sex life, where he made love with his wife, all about her physical characteristics. He said all the guys at his wedding were excited over Jami because of her breasts. He was bragging about it. He liked to talk about what they did in hotel rooms—wherever. He put it all out there whether we wanted to hear it or not.”
    Steve regaled the warehouse workers with stories about, in his words, “people who shall be nameless” who came to orgies at his house. He would then describe what happened in lascivious detail. “He hinted to me that I should come over some night,” the woman said, embarrassed.
    Through sheer coincidence, one of Jami’s good friends since junior high school met Steve in the air freight building where she worked. She knew him only as a sales rep with a smooth pitch and a slightly skewed attitude. “He was giving away wine coolers once,” she recalled, “because he said he became a very ‘bad and evil person’ when he