The Master’s Project

Book One (Ralph and Tanya)

by Robert Lubrican

zbookstore.com Edition

Copyright 2010 Robert Lubrican

Second Edition 2026

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Afterword

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Foreword

In the world of erotica, there have been hundreds, maybe thousands of stories written about "cheating." I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that the 'average' cheating story generally involves either a wimp husband, with a wife who prefers other men, or the domineering boss who blackmails his employee's wife into cheating. There are other plots, such as the wife/husband who gets drunk and strays, or the gambling situation where hubby loses a bet and wifey has to pay the debt with sex. The point is that in the vast majority of cheating stories, the cheating is destructive. The reader might be thinking "Well duh!" at this point. But wait. What I wanted to do was explore the concept that "cheating" might happen under circumstances that were not destructive ... under circumstances where there might be a rational reason for that behavior to take place. Is it ever possible for cheating to help a marriage?

It is when fiction is involved.

Bob

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

Have you ever noticed that a man and woman who have been married for forty or fifty years have very similar facial features?

It's true! Look in the paper at the people who are celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Look at pictures of your great grandparents, or grandparents, assuming they were only married to each other. They look like they might be brother and sister. They look alike.

But it only seems to be true for people who have been married for a really long time. Of course even though they look alike, they are probably as different from each other as it's possible to be. I know you've heard old couples arguing, right? I mean look at Frank and Marie on "Everybody Loves Raymond." Married forever and fight like cats and dogs.

Before you write and tell me that show was on decades ago and what a piss poor example they are, let me remind you; I know they aren't actually married to each other. That's why they don't look alike. They're just actors. But their lines come from real history. The writers are just remembering what their own parents and grandparents were like. Trust me on that.

Anyway, when I first noticed this phenomenon, I got sort of fascinated by it. And everywhere I looked it was the same. People who were together a long time looked alike.

I developed two possible hypotheses, or questions:

1. Are people who look alike attracted to each other, and because of that they stay together forever?

If true, you could hypothesize that, if two young people look like each other, they might be able to make a long lasting marriage.

2. Or, is it that they were they attracted by something else and ended up looking alike because they lived together for so long?

In this case, the looking alike part wouldn't mean anything, except that you could tell who had been married a long time just by looking. Big deal. It doesn't offer society any useful usable information.

So, when I was in college, working on a double Master's in Sociology and Psychology, and had to do a research project, I thought to myself: "Self ... why not do some research on that?" If I worked it right I could submit the same project to both review boards. I know it was an "iffy" thing to do ethically, but I was overworked and poor and ... well that's what I did.

That, of course, required that I have something I could research. I mean putting a bunch of pictures of married geezers together would be easy, but it wouldn't prove anything. So I thought about looking at a variety of groups of married people, including younger couples, to see if they looked similar or not when they got married, and then more like each other the longer they were married. Who knows, maybe there was a way to quantify whether or not a marriage was more or less likely to succeed, depending on the similarities of facial features. Stranger things have made a million dollars.

So I put an ad in the paper, asking for married volunteers to provide me with information about how they met, and who had photographic documentation of what they looked like when they met, as well as additional photographs taken since they had been married. I should have put more in the ad, but it cost per word, so I kept it to a minimum. It didn't actually explain in the ad what I was trying to do. That I could do in person, and it would be a lot cheaper.

And then I began doing interviews.

That's when it all went ... well ... different than I thought it would. What happened was that I got laid. I know that sounds weird, but it's what happened. And not just once either. I couldn't put that part in the paper, of course, but it's kind of interesting, and definitely says something about the culture in which we live.

So I thought people might be interested in how that came about.

But, let me start at the beginning. I know I already told you the beginning. I mean the beginning of actual work on:

"QUANTIFICATION AND ANALYSIS OF PROBABILITY PATTERNS BASED ON VISUAL CUES IN FACIAL ANATOMICAL SIMILARITIES OF MALES AND FEMALES IN LONG TERM RELATIONSHIPS"

That's the name of the paper. Impressive, huh? You have to have an impressive title to get the attention of the review committee. Or to confuse them so much that they don't know whether you actually did what you claim to have done or not.

In either case you hope for a good grade and mention in one of the journals.

I won't bore you with all the analytical stuff in the paper. But you might be interested in the interviews ... and what happened during some of them.

I know it blew my young mind away.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Ralph and Tanya

Tanya and Ralph were about as different looking as a couple could be. She was one of those dark redheads, with hair so richly burnished that it actually shone when light bounced off of it. It was cut in what used to be called a pageboy and it flipped and flew every time she moved her head, like it was trying to escape from her scalp and fly off somewhere. She moved her head a lot too. She was a very expressive woman, aged twenty-seven, and was the type of person who talks with their hands a lot. Whenever she talked her hands moved, swinging across her body, or jabbing out to make a point, bounding around and drawing the eye.

That was fortunate for me, because Tanya was also one of those women whose breasts are just small enough and very healthy, and didn't really need a bra. And she never wore one during any of our interviews. This was made obvious by sharply defined nipples that poked proudly through anything she wore, including sweatshirts if they weren't too loose. While she wasn't boyish by any stretch of the imagination, she had slim hips and looked like she might weigh a hundred pounds if she were carrying a box of books. Her eyebrows were darker than her hair, and she cut them or clipped them or whatever women do to eyebrows so that they started at her nose, curved up, then down and then up to a point at the outside. It made her look like she was always asking a question. She had dark green eyes, and the whole package was one that just shouted energy and vitality. She worked part time as something called a "wire puller" for a cable installation company.

Ralph, on the other hand, was at least six feet tall, a good foot taller than his wife. He probably wore size 48 shirts. But for his sandy colored hair and beard, and his pale blue eyes that looked like what I'd expect to see in a serial killer's face, he reminded me of a hulking gorilla that had learned to imitate a man. He unloaded trucks for a living and it showed. Whatever was on those trucks, there were a lot of them and they were heavy. His eyes looked sleepy a lot of the time, but he was a sharp cookie; believe you me.

Tanya and Ralph had been married for four years, and he was four years older than she was. They had no children, according to the application form they'd filled out.

I did all the interviews at the couple's residences, because I thought that might make them more comfortable. I had a list of questions, but they were designed more to break the ice and get people talking than to actually gather information for the study. I had been told by my advisor that if I could get people to trust me, they'd babble about anything in their lives.

Little did I know just how big the nail was that he had hit square on the head.

"So, how did you two meet?" was my first question.

Tanya's hands darted around. "He saved my life!" she said, excitedly, like it had just been a week ago. "My car slid on some ice and went into the river and he jumped in and pulled me out."

"Wow!" I said.

Ralph had a surprisingly soft voice for a big man.

"It wasn't anything," he said. "Anybody would have done it."

He got a slap on the arm from his wife.

"Saving my life wasn't some small thing!" she said. "It's not like you were just bending over to pick up some litter."

And just like that they were involved in an argument. It was obvious to me that it was a long running argument too, which had never been resolved for some reason.

The budding psychologist in me recognized that there were underlying stresses in this relationship. They couldn't still be arguing about something that happened four years ago ... and had gotten married after.

"Let's move on" I suggested. They were both a little huffy now, darting looks at each other. "What was it that attracted him to you?" I asked Tanya.

"It was cold, and I knew I was dying. It got all dark and I felt a hand grab my shoulder," she said.

I could tell she was reliving the experience. There was a kind of horror in her eyes.

"I woke up coughing and his face was right above mine, dripping water on me. There was something in his eyes ... hope or something."

"I had to do mouth-to-mouth on her," Ralph said, filling in the blank.

"And I knew he had saved me, but I was so cold and shivering so much that I couldn't talk," she finished. "And the ambulance came and he got in the back and went with me to the hospital and waited until they told him I was going to be okay. He was still in his wet clothes, with a blanket wrapped around him, but he waited," she said. "He even went out and got me new clothes so I wouldn't have to go home wet." Now her eyes had what could only be called devotion in them as she stared at her husband. "And I knew I wanted him in my life forever ... that I wanted him to father my babies." The light dimmed in her eyes and she looked away from him.

Ralph had slumped there at the last. Their reaction to the last part of the story was palpable.

I turned to Ralph. "And you?"

He leaned back in the chair. "She was so light, and beautiful ... even wet and muddy from where I had to pull her ashore. And when she coughed and started breathing again I felt like it was a miracle. I was going with another girl at the time, but it just seemed shallow and empty compared to what had just happened." He smiled. "She just stole my heart. I couldn't think of anything but her for days. So I called her, on the excuse of finding out how she was doing."

Tanya took over the story. "And he was so cute and shy on the phone, so I told him he had to let me cook him dinner ... to pay him back. And he came over and as soon as I saw him I forgot all about dinner. It burned ..." she blushed.

"We kind of got carried away," said Ralph.

"So it was love at first sight?" I asked.

"I guess you could call it that," said Tanya. "I was a virgin when I met him. Hadn't even thought about really trying to have a serious relationship - I was kind of shy."

"You weren't shy that night," said Ralph, grinning.

"All I did was give you a "thank you kiss", you beast," she said, waving her hands. "And the next thing I knew we were in bed and you were doing horrible things to me!"

"You tore three buttons off my shirt!" he objected. "I couldn't have fought you off if I had a battalion of Marines backing me up!"

I realized my mouth was open. Ralph could break his wife in two if he wanted to. But then, trying to imagine the scene they were describing, if I'd have been him, I wouldn't have struggled too hard. She was a good looking woman.

Tanya tossed her head and sniffed. She looked at me like she'd just remembered I was there.

"Anyway, after he had his way with me ..." She grinned sideways at him and slapped him lightly on the arm again, "I told him he had to marry me because my life was his. It's an old Chinese custom."

"You don't look Chinese" I commented, joking.

"You don't have to be Chinese to think it's a good custom," she replied tartly.

Ralph just looked up at the ceiling.

"So you proposed to him the second time you ever saw him," I prompted.

"No, I demanded that he propose to me the second time I saw him," she corrected me.

"And you did?" I said to Ralph.

"Definitely!" he said. "And it wasn't hard at all. Except when I had to tell Trudy we couldn't go out any more because I was engaged. She was my girlfriend ... well the girl I had been going out with ... you know what I mean."

Tanya looked smug.

I asked them some more questions and then gave them some questions to think about before the next interview. Then I asked them why they wanted to be in a study about married people who looked alike when they didn't actually look alike.

Tanya looked surprised. "I thought this study was about trying to see what your children would look like."

"Uh ... no," I said. I was caught off guard. "It's to see if people who get married look alike when they do that, and look more and more alike as the years go by."

"Oh." Tanya was obviously disappointed. Her head came up. "But we don't look anything alike!" she said. Maybe she missed my earlier statement.

"I would have to agree with that," I said, trying to be nice.

"Why would it matter if people looked alike?" she asked.

So I explained my theory about how I thought if people looked alike they were more likely to have really long marriages.

That just made them both look uncomfortable.

"Look," I said, "It's just a theory. There's no reason in the world why you two won't stay happily married for fifty years. I could be wrong about the whole thing."

"I told you this was a bad idea," said Ralph to his wife. "It's just going to make things harder."

That was a singularly odd thing for him to say, in my book. I mean why would being in a study that they thought would tell you what your kids might look like be such a terrible thing. The question must have shown on my face.

Ralph slumped again. "I can't give her any children," he said.

"We don't know that!" Tanya objected.

"Yes we do!" Ralph said emphatically. "We've been through all the tests. If my sperm count was any lower I'd start growing breasts," he said.

"Aha!" went my mind. Here was the underlying stress I had seen signs of during the interview.

Sometimes, when you're married, and there's a burr under the saddle, so to speak, it's difficult to honestly and openly discuss how you really feel about that burr. But, when a third party is handy, and you can talk to your mate through that third party, or at least in his presence, you feel free to say some things that you might not say in private.

That's how marriage counseling sometimes works.

I felt sorry for them. Their marriage had started on such a high note of emotion that it was a shame that one of the first things Tanya thought about - having this man's babies - couldn't come to fruition.

So I stayed and let them talk. Ralph had been involved in an accident when he was only twelve that had crushed one of his testicles and severely damaged the other one. He actually only had one ball in his sack, and it didn't work for beans. He'd had to take testosterone shots as a teenager. I think they must have overdone it just a tad, considering that he looked like the proverbial alpha male.

The rest of his equipment worked just fine though. And, in that first rush of passion that burned dinner that night, his earlier problem had just sort of slipped his mind.

Until they started trying to make all those babies that Tanya suddenly craved. Almost losing your life changes the way you look at what your legacy might be … or not be. She wanted to create life ... to leave behind when hers was over. That was when things got rough and they found out there were problems in the having babies department. The point is they really had tried everything. At least up to the point of high tech solutions that cost thousands. The prognosis for that was miserable ... and it cost thousands.

The result was that, while she was gloriously happy with the man who had saved her life - had given her life to that man in fact - she was miserable that her sudden dream of making babies had been run over by a tank and killed.

Adoption had been discussed, but it wasn't the same as having her own baby. Not to Tanya, anyway.

Ralph, for his part, was completely devoted to Tanya, but there wasn't anything he could do.

Now that, folks, is stress. And, it's the kind of stress that can end an otherwise happy marriage. They don't so much stop loving each other. It's more like a seed of resentment grows in each of them. She blames him for something he can't control. His seed is nourished by the thought that, if she weren't so stubborn about having a baby, they could be happy. And those seeds can sprout and grow bigger until you can't see the marriage for the trees, so to speak.

It's not the kind of thing that marriage counseling is really good at resolving. And while I had a lot of book knowledge on counseling, I didn't have much experience at it.

"What about a surrogate?" I asked, for lack of anything else to offer. "They can do in vitro with donated sperm, can't they?"

Tanya shuddered, visibly.

"The thought of some faceless donor's sperm being put into me makes me want to puke," she said. "And who knows what kind of men ... donate?"

OK, they'd thought of that before.

"You could choose the donor," I offered. "One of your friends?"

"I don't think that would work well either," said Tanya. "I mean there are all those stories about how people get into court battles and things over custody and all that. Besides, it would be just too weird knowing I have one of our friend's babies growing inside me."

"Maybe you could pick a donor from a list." I was trying to help. "You know, review the files of potential donors, so you'd know a little about them?"

"We looked into that too," said Ralph, speaking for the first time in a while. "The cost is prohibitive. You have to go with an agency to do that kind of thing, and it costs too much to do in vitro anyway."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In the end it was an unsolvable conundrum. One or the other of them had objections to every potential solution. Tanya finally called a halt to it, suggesting that it was time for dinner. I hadn't been aware that they intended to feed me, but as a starving graduate student I was always up for free food.

During dinner we talked about the questions I had given them to think about. It was things like what they liked to do before they got married, and how that compared to what they liked now, and what kinds of things they both liked to do together, and which things one liked that the other didn't like. We talked about the in-laws, and how they affected the relationship. Tanya's mother was itching for grandchildren and hadn't been told there was a problem. That added a lot of stress too. By the time dinner was over they had both decided they wanted to stay in the project anyway. They suggested that they could be compared to the people who looked alike and it might help somewhere along the way. I liked them both, and said it would be fine, though I doubted that it would actually mesh well with the original idea.

So we set up a follow-up appointment for another interview, a week later.

The following Tuesday my advisor, Ted, called me into his office.

"I've gotten a request to vet you for your project," he said.

"Vet me?" I asked. Why would anyone want an expert opinion on whether I was reliable or whatever? They did that when you applied for a job, but I hadn't applied for any jobs. "You sure it was about me?" I asked.

"Yes. The Hardwigs? They said you already talked to them?" he said.

"Yeah, we had the initial interview," I confirmed.

"Well they wanted to know if you were for real or not," he said. "Asked all kinds of questions about you," he added.

"Really?" I was baffled. I thought I had been very professional. I told my advisor that.

"Mr. Hardwig didn't sound upset or anything. He just asked a lot of questions. Some of them were ... odd."

"Like what?" I asked.

"He wanted to know if you were married or not," said Ted. "And if you used drugs or alcohol."

I stared at him.

"You want to tell me what happened?" he asked.

I was flummoxed. "We sat around and talked. She cooked dinner for us and we talked some more."

"You weren't drunk?" asked Ted.

"Of course not!" I yelped.

"You didn't fire up a joint or anything while you were talking, did you?" asked Ted with a straight face. He knew better. I didn't even grace his prod with an answer.

"What do I do now?" I asked him.

"Well, the guy said you had another appointment, and he didn't mention anything about telling you not to go to it. I guess it's up to you. I just figured you did something strange ... You didn't make a pass at this guy's wife did you?"

I looked at him with as dark a look as I could manage. He held up his hands, palms outward and grinned.

"What did you tell them?" I asked.

"I told them you were a bonafide graduate student, in good standing, and that you were one of the best," he said. "That's really all I could tell them. Except that I did tell them you weren't married. You're not … are you?" he asked.

"In the last six years that you've known me, when did you see me with a wife?" I asked acidly.

"I haven't even seen you with a girl," said Ted. "I thought about asking if you were gay, but we're not allowed to ask those kinds of questions."

"Ask your daughter if I'm gay or not!" I retorted. It was a good barb, except that I didn't actually know if he had a daughter or not. I knew he had a wife. I also knew that nobody who wasn't legally blind would suggest that they found her attractive, so I couldn't use her. They were in the process of getting a divorce too, which was another reason I couldn't use her for that line.

He laughed.

You know, I never found out if he had a daughter or not.

Anyway, it was with no little trepidation that I approached Tanya and Ralph's front door the following Friday night, right on time for our appointment. I expected Ralph to open the door, but it was Tanya. She looked delicious in terrycloth shorts and a tank top. I could see the dark circles of her areolas through the cloth and her nipples poked at me like bullets.

Thinking of bullets made me wonder if Ralph owned guns.

"Hi" I said nervously. "I'm here." Like she was blind or something.

"Good, come on in. Supper's almost ready."

Food again. Only this time I wondered if there would be poison in it or something. I mean if you looked at it one way, they'd basically asked if anybody would miss me or not.

I followed bouncing dark red hair through the hallway. That bouncing dark red hair was perched over bouncing buttocks too, which that terrycloth just hugged like it was a teddy bear in there. I didn't really need that. Ralph was around here somewhere and I didn't think he'd appreciate it if I walked in with a big boner poking out the front of my pants.

Ralph was in the living room, kicked back in a recliner with a beer in one hand and a remote control in the other for the TV he was watching.

"Hey Bob," he said, lowering the volume on the TV. He was watching High School football on public TV. He didn't act like somebody who was suspicious of me. "Want a beer?" he asked.

"Uh ... no thanks," I said. I wondered if I should make noise about how I never touched the stuff or something, though why he'd have thought I'd been drinking before our last interview I had no idea.

"Cop a squat," he said, pointing at the couch with the remote, like he was creating a seat for me there. "Tanya said dinner will be ready soon. She was wondering where you were."

I looked at my watch. It was six thirty-two. I might have been a whole minute late, depending on the clocks they owned. I could hear Tanya humming in the kitchen. She sounded happy.

It was quiet for a while, except for the announcer. There were no crowd sounds, probably because there was no crowd at a high school game. There was a decided dearth of conversation coming from Ralph, whose attention was on the game.

"I played for them in High School," he commented finally. "Linebacker."

Was this a warning of some kind?

"That's nice," I said. "I never got into violent sports. I'm a lover ... not a fighter." I tried to make a joke.

"When you're built like me, you can't help but play football," he said. "The coach actually begged me."

I was saved from having to think up more things to say by Tanya, who stuck her lovely head in the doorway and announced that dinner was served.

The easy informal atmosphere of the last dinner was nowhere to be found this time. Tanya and Ralph looked at each other repeatedly, like each expected the other to carry on some conversation. It was so quiet you could hear people chewing.

At one point Tanya looked meaningfully at Ralph.

He shrugged his shoulders and took another bite of really good lasagna.

Tanya took a deep breath. It did wonderful things to her breasts. I made myself look up at her face and she was staring right at me.

"Remember what we were talking about last time?" she asked.

Of course I did. I was the researcher. But then we'd talked about a lot of things, so I didn't know exactly what she was referring to. I nodded, rather than ask dramatically, "What do you mean?"

"We talked about it. Ralph and me, I mean," she added unnecessarily.