Empty Promises

drank—so he had to give it away.”
    She noted that Steve talked a great deal about his sex life, and was surprised to find out that he was married to her old friend, Jami Hagel. But she was revolted to hear the way he talked about Jami.
    A number of women who worked with Steve soon learned that he slyly turned most conversations into sexual revelations. He often invited them to bring their boyfriends and come to parties at the Sherers’ house in Redmond. Most said no at once, but a few were trapped into accepting when they ran out of excuses. Steve never threw any real parties, however. He invariably gathered the men into the den, where he showed them pornographic videos. Jami, while polite, always seemed embarrassed and uneasy when they entertained like this.
    There was no question that Steve had the toys to attract people to his home or his mother’s vacation homes. He was able to persuade a few couples to go for boat rides on Lake Washington. Once he and Jami threw a Murder Mystery Game at their house in Redmond. But Steve most often turned people off by the way he treated his wife. All his joviality and energy were nullified by his cruelty toward Jami.
    “He had a controlling personality,” one of Jami’s Microsoft co-workers said. “He didn’t smile or talk nice to her. She was open and friendly at work, but around him she was full of apprehension, anxiety and fear.”
    Through it all, Jami stayed close to her mother and father. It was probably that connection that helped her survive emotionally. The things that mattered most to her were her son, Chris, her job, and the family she grew up with before Steve came along. By 1990, Jami realized that she couldn’t stay in her marriage much longer. She still had too much self-esteem, however deeply buried, to allow Steve to destroy her. The old problem loomed, of course: walking away from Steve might be impossible. He never let go of anything or anyone until he was done with them, and he would use a dozen or so manipulative devices to hold on to Jami.
    Another friend was Brenda Yamamoto, who had worked at Microsoft for eleven years. She and Jami had offices in the same building. There were other friends that Jami felt close enough to to confide her despair. Janet Gilman had been hired at Microsoft the same day Jami was, and Janet remembered all too well the disintegration of Jami’s marriage and the fear that gripped her.
    By mid-1990, Steve was apparently aware that Jami was inching away from him; he was jealous and suspicious. If it is possible to stalk one’s own wife while still living with her, that was what Steve did. He called Jami continually at Microsoft, and she sometimes hid out in Janet’s office to avoid his phone calls. They could hear the phone shrilling endlessly in Jami’s office.
    On occasion, Janet was in Jami’s office when Steve called, and he sounded like a rage-aholic, always furious about something. Even standing a few feet away, Janet could hear him yelling at Jami, who held the phone away from her ear and rolled her eyes at Janet.
    From those frequent calls, Steve progressed to dropping by Jami’s office. Other employees’ spouses came to their building only on special occasions. But not Steve. Most of Jami’s co-workers at Microsoft knew Steve only by sight, but he grew more and more familiar as he appeared in Jami’s office two or three times a day to check on her, just to be sure she was there. He called her even more often than before. It was difficult for her to get any work accomplished, and his calls and drop-ins interrupted her interviews with job applicants.
    Although Microsoft maintains a low-key atmosphere, this behavior wasn’t acceptable for long at any business complex. Jami was mortified by Steve’s constant visits, and the more he clung to her and spied on her, the more she pulled away.
    Sensing her withdrawal, Steve again began sending her flowers. One afternoon, Michael Sandberg, a mail clerk at Microsoft, delivered a long white box to Jami. She opened it, and he saw two dozen red roses nestled in the green tissue paper. “I said, ‘Hey, you’ve got flowers,’ ” Sandberg said, “and she said, ‘Yeah, they’re from my husband.’ She couldn’t have cared less.”
    Jami’s two worlds had collided. She sometimes came to work with dark circles and bags under her eyes, and the women she worked with noticed bruises on her arms. She seemed haunted. It was getting crazier. Jami had never sneaked