My Irina Ch. 02

"I can do a lot for you," she said. "There is one scar across your cheek that I think will always be slightly visible, at least up close--say, from less than a foot away.

"But I can restore your eye to its normal appearance and rebuild your nose. And the other scars will not be a problem.

"That's the good news. The bad news is, this will be a long and complex process. Three operations at least, and possibly four, with some skin grafting from your thigh. There will be a lot of pain, although we can control that with medication. And it would take at least seven months. It would be fastest if you could move to Geneva--but if that's not possible you could travel back and forth. But under those conditions the work might take up to a year.

"Oh, and finally, I will want you to provide all the pictures you can find of Irina before her accident--these will guide me in the reconstruction. Do you have any questions?"

We stayed in Geneva two more days, meeting with Dr. Mühlhausen and talking to one another. In the end we decided to move to Geneva. The kids were still in nursery school, and there was a fantastic international school there. Our nanny Elaine was unmarried and enthusiastic about the chance to live in Europe for several months--she had already expressed interest in moving to California when we went.

So in August 2006 the Lawrence family, plus Elaine, moved into a large apartment in the nice part of Geneva, overlooking the lake, and Irina started her treatment.

The operations went well but the suffering poor Irina went through was painful for both of us. She was remarkably brave, doing no more than quietly asking for more pain medication from time to time. There were times when the children had to be kept away, for fear of infection, and she missed them terribly. And her appearance during the initial stages of the work was sometimes just as alarming as it had been before she began.

But by early March of 2007, when Dr. Mühlhausen pronounced herself satisfied and told us we could return to the US, she had done something miraculous.

Irina didn't just look "normal," whatever that means--she was absolutely stunning. She already had a great figure, and now her face was that of a European supermodel. She was Irina, recognizably the pretty girl I'd known back in Indiana, but she was now a total, jaw-dropping knockout.

I was delighted, and so very happy for my wife. But Irina herself was stunned. She couldn't avoid gazing at herself in the mirror for long periods of time, turning this way and that, unable to believe the transformation.

And when we strolled together through Geneva she was utterly bewildered by the attention she received. So used to ducking her head and avoiding the shocked stares, she was nonplussed by the open admiration, the smiles, the bows and whistles from gentlemen, and the envious glances from the well-dressed women on the avenues of the city.

We would come back to the apartment and she'd be almost shell-shocked by the reactions she had received.

"I can't believe it, Tom!" she said over and over. "After so many years..."

I insisted that we stay another two weeks in Geneva and go out every day, either for a walk or to a restaurant or the theater, so that Irina could start to get used to the effect her beauty had on people. And we talked several times about her being ready for the responses from our friends and acquaintances back in Wisconsin.

The first people we got together with back home were Rick and Lisa Torgerson. When they came into our house and saw Irina their jaws dropped open. There was a stunned silence, and then Lisa ran to embrace Irina. "Oh my God, you're so beautiful!" she cried out, and Rick was quick to echo her admiration.

My eyes filled with tears to see their unselfish pleasure at Irina's transformation, and her joy at their reaction. It was a very special moment for all of us.

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

In June 2007 we said our goodbyes to all our Madison friends and made the move to our new place in Malibu. Rick and Lisa, who were now also rich enough to live anywhere they wanted, had decided to stay in Madison. They'd both grown up in Wisconsin and wanted to be near their families. Rick was just getting a new software start-up off the ground and was having fun working with the young hotshots he'd hired. We promised to visit one another often.

I arranged for our realtor, Angela Simon, to meet us at the house when we arrived in Malibu. She was blown away by Irina's beauty, and kept saying that she couldn't wait to start introducing us around. That was exactly what I'd had in mind. Angela was well connected with the ritzy crowd in LA, and I thought she'd be an excellent person for us to have as a contact.

I was not exactly unknown, of course. Ever since the sale of our work to Google Rick and I had become minor celebrities in the tech world. Our faces had appeared in an article in Newsweek and on the covers of several computer-industry magazines, and there was even a short profile of us in the Wall Street Journal. It was called, "The Young Lions--A Threat to Google?" and it made us sound much more like geniuses than we actually were.

But Irina, not surprisingly, had absolutely refused to appear in any photographs--all that attention had come back before her surgeries. Now she was eager to go out and meet people, especially the some of the high-society types Angela knew, but she was also terrified.

"How will I talk to those people?" she asked me again and again. "I don't know anything about movies, or fashion--or computer software," she added, laughing a little.

I pulled her close and said, "you are the sanest, kindest, most well-balanced person I know. Plus you are staggeringly beautiful. You will have these people at your feet inside two minutes--especially the men!"

She giggled, looking delighted, and I added, "just promise me you won't let any of these movie-star types drag you off behind a bush, okay?"

To my surprise Irina turned utterly serious, all in an instant. She looked at me steadily and said, "no, Tom, never. There is just no way I could..."

She paused, still looking into my face. Then she flung her arms around me and pulled me tightly against her. Her mouth near my ear, she murmured, "you and the kids are my life--my everything. I would NEVER risk that!"

Pulling back a little to look into my eyes she said, "you believe me, don't you?"

"Of course, baby," I said, smiling at her. And then, "but you know, we have an hour or so until Elaine comes back with the twins--do you think that's enough time for you to reassure me a little?"

Smiling, never taking her eyes off me, she bent down and pulled off her sneakers, then her jeans and tee-shirt (we'd been sorting through boxes in the living room). When she was naked she pulled me over to the couch, saying, "right here--right here and right now, Tom."

We necked furiously while she helped me get my clothes off, and then she pushed me back on the couch and rode me vigorously, our mouths locked together, tongues pushing back and forth. Her eagerness excited me and I didn't last very long before I exploded inside her.

We lay together, panting a little, and I said, "sorry that was so quick."

She kissed me hard, looking at me with shining eyes. "Don't apologize, Tom. It's so exciting to me that you still want me so much, after all these years."

She hugged me tight, and rested her head on my chest. "I love you so much," she whispered. We dozed off, only to awake with a start when we heard the sound of Elaine's car returning. Jumping up, we grinned at each other as we hurried back into our clothes.

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

It was our third week in California when Angela had a poolside party at her place to introduce us around. I can't begin to tell you what an impression Irina made!

The crowd was a mixture: movie people, some financial and business types whom Angela had bought or sold houses for, plus a couple of people in the news business. We saw more than a dozen faces we recognized from movies or TV--Benjamin Bratt, Anne Hathaway, Larry David, the guy who plays the District Attorney on "Medium", and a few others.

Irina was beside herself, equal parts thrilled and intimidated. She stuck very close to me, keeping her hand locked tight on my arm as we circulated, drinks in hand. "I can't believe we're here with these people!" she whispered to me several times.

Angela came up to us, and Irina nearly fell over when she saw the couple right behind her. "Irina, Tom, welcome! I'm so glad you could make it.

"Let me introduce two dear friends of mine. Catherine, Michael, this is Tom and Irina Lawrence. Tom is that software genius you've no doubt read about in the papers. They've just moved into a marvelous house up in the canyon."

Irina's hand clutched my arm convulsively. We were looking into the smiling faces of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, shaking their hands, hearing them tell us how nice it was to meet us.

We stood chatting amiably for a few minutes. Catherine was far more beautiful in person than in the movies, almost frighteningly so. But I managed to make conversation about where we were living, how we liked LA so far, and so on. And I couldn't help watching Michael's face--he was simply bowled-over by Irina's beauty.

He and Irina seemed to be trading the same sort of chit-chat, but the look on his face was very intent. Even living where he lived, and working in the movie business, and married to the woman he was married to, you could tell he was strongly attracted to Irina.

After a few minutes they wandered off to get a drink, and Irina said, "oh my God, Tom, I can barely stand up--my knees are shaking! Did that really happen?"

As we strolled around I said, "did you notice the way he looked at you?"

"Oh don't be silly, honey--he was just being polite."

"I'm telling you, Irina, he thought you were gorgeous. He was looking at you like there was no other woman here."

She blushed a little and told me I was silly. But as we circulated, the same thing kept happening. We met the news anchor for the KNBC station in LA; a producer for SearchLight Pictures; a stunning woman whom I recognized from a movie she'd been in with Robert Redford some years ago; and two or three of the heavy-hitters in the California banking industry, one of whom I'd just read about in Fortune.

All of them, or at least all the men, looked at Irina with extraordinary interest. She was asked at least four times if she was a model, or perhaps an actress, and her blushing denials were met with the suggestion that "by all means you should try it--you certainly have the looks for it," which made her blush even more.

One potbellied guy in his fifties, who insisted he was the leading modeling talent manager on the West Coast, absolutely insisted on pressing his business card into Irina's hand.

"I'm telling you, young lady," he said in a gruff voice, "I could make you a lotta, lotta money--you could be a household name inside three months." Then he looked intently into her eyes, as though to persuade her by the force of his gaze, before nodding to me and walking away.

On the way home from the party, after we'd thanked Angela and said goodbye to some of our new acquaintances, Irina was in a daze. She was not used to the kind of attention she was getting, above all from people she'd never even dreamed she would meet.

As I stopped the car in our driveway she put a hand on my arm and said seriously, "Tom, please tell me the truth. Am I really that beautiful?"

I smiled at her. "Baby, you are THAT beautiful. There wasn't a woman at the party lovelier than you--as I'm sure you could tell from the attention you were getting."

I walked towards our door, only to turn around and see Irina just standing by the car, looking pensively out towards the ocean. "I--I just don't know if I'm really ready for this, you know?

"I mean, I spent fifteen years of my life thinking of myself as a monster--hiding my face from everyone but you. And now...

"Now I'm supposed to see myself as a beauty?" She started to cry a little. "How am I supposed to deal with that?"

We went inside and talked together for a long time--about her beauty, about LA, about what we wanted our lives to be now that we had money and freedom. We agreed that we'd take things slow--no need to dive into the social scene, no need to pretend to be anything other than the people we were.

"Honey, we're a couple of Midwestern kids who got real lucky. We're not in the movies, we didn't grow up with the glamorous life. Let's just be ourselves. And after a while we'll find friends out here who like us the way we are."

Irina nodded, her head on my shoulder. We sat a little while longer, enjoying the quiet, until she said, "let's go up and check on the twins."

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

Our first few months in LA were full of adjustments. We had to learn a new city, figuring out where to shop and where to eat and so on. Lily and Earl began a new nursery school, to which Elaine or Irina or I would take them, depending on the day.

Our big house needed a full-time maid, so we had to get used to having another person around all day. Margarita Jimenez was a warm, perpetually smiling middle-aged woman; we liked her instantly, but we still weren't used to the lack of privacy. At first it greatly inhibited the spontaneity of our love life, but after a month or so we got more comfortable with just disappearing behind the locked door of our bedroom for a "nap" from time to time.

Irina was content to stay at home for the time being--with our newfound wealth she had absolutely no need to go to work, and she decided to wait at least until the twins started elementary school before deciding what she wanted to do.

I poked around in the software business for several months, doing short consulting gigs for a number of companies in California that wanted my input on projects they were developing. Irina and the kids got used to me being out of town once or twice a month, usually flying up to Silicon Valley and returning in a day or two.

At the suggestion of Angela and of Ted Friedman, our LA financial manager, I'd bought a time-share on a small private jet. I knew I didn't want the hassle of owning a plane, but the time-share meant that there would be one available at LAX pretty much whenever I needed one, complete with pilot and crew. We never needed to deal with the security and long lines of flying on a commercial flight.

Irina and I also hired Jayson Davidson to be our full-time driver, in a royal blue Escalade that Irina picked out. Jayson was a mellow guy in his late 40s, who came highly recommended by a number of celebrities he'd worked for over a nearly 20-year period. He was on call when we needed him, whether it was to take me to the airport, to take Irina shopping downtown, or to drive the whole family to Palm Springs for the weekend.

Jayson knew every street and highway in LA, it appeared, and he seemed to know all the celebrities too. He'd entertain us with funny stories about Ed McMahon or George Clooney or Steven Spielberg--and Irina never failed to be impressed that he'd actually met these people.

In January 2008, when we'd been in LA for about six months, Rick Torgerson flew in and stayed with us for a couple of days. It turned out, as he and I sat on the deck talking after dinner, that he had a proposition to make.

"Please let me finish before you say 'Hell no,' okay Tom? TSS is not going as well as I hoped it would, and I think I know the reason why."

Torgerson Software Systems was the name of Rick's start-up, a company he had put together in Madison after we both left our jobs.

"The guys I've hired are smart and eager, but there's nobody I can really work with. They're all terrified of me, for one thing; and none of them have the practical, pragmatic way of seeing through a problem that I always depended on you for. What's more, it's not been as easy raising the capital we need as I thought it would be.

"So, aside from the pleasure of seeing you and Irina and the twins, this is what I'm here for: I want you to join the business and be my co-principal."

He saw the look on my face and said, "whoa, hold on! I didn't say anything about moving back to Wisconsin. What I have in mind is a mostly long-distance collaboration. You know as well as I do how much we could get done via email and teleconferencing. I figure one or two trips a month would be enough, a couple of days each time; and some of those could be me coming out here."

I was reluctant and wary at first, but the more we talked about it the more sense it seemed to make. I'd never had a more satisfying work relationship than with Rick; our strengths and weaknesses fit perfectly together, and we'd successfully completed a number of projects, not just the big one we sold to Google.

Rick stayed another day and a half, talking with me and with Irina, whom I insisted in bringing into the conversation. By the time he left we'd agreed in principle on a new company: TLI (Torgerson Lawrence, Incorporated), which would take over Rick's existing firm. It would be based in Madison but we'd be equal partners, him as the "inside" managing director and me the "outside" director. I'd do some raising of venture capital in California--we were both confident that our combined names would make that easy to do.

And we agreed that I wouldn't have to come to Madison more than three days a month, with allowance made for emergencies or the run-up to an important deadline. All other work would be long-distance collaboration or Rick coming out to California.

We put it all in the hands of the lawyers, and within six weeks I was employed again, to my considerable pleasure. I had been getting a little bored in Malibu, even with the consulting, and working regularly with Rick again was stimulating and rewarding. I converted the lower level of our house into an office, so my daily commute was sixteen steps down the stairs. And I could come up every day for lunch with Irina and the kids, or even for a "nap" with my wife whenever we felt like it.

Our social life continued to astonish us. Irina's and my "debut" at Angela's party had led to a number of further invitations over the first couple of months. We must have been to nearly twenty parties, and met dozens of the most fashionable (and rich) people in LA.

Irina had begged for Angela's help in finding suitable dresses and outfits for all these occasions, and she'd quickly grown pretty comfortable shopping at the ritziest

stores in Beverly Hills. It helped that we were very rich; and it helped even more that she was so gorgeous it hardly mattered what she wore--she looked incredible in everything, with that face and that marvelous figure.

We'd made a number of friends and acquaintances. Among our closest friends, none were A-list celebrities, just people we liked and felt comfortable with. One couple were parents of a boy that Earl and Lily had made friends with at nursery school, and another were a family from Indiana who'd recently moved out to LA and bought a house with Angela's help. Being able to talk with them about the Midwest was sometimes a great way of unwinding and getting a little distance from the chic LA lifestyle.

But we'd also developed some friendships with the most glittering of LA's stars, people whose faces appeared on Glamour and GQ and People. They were TV actors or screenwriters or, in a few cases, genuine movie superstars.

Jamie Breland and Barbie Raynes were the hottest movie stars of the past few years. Jamie was talked about as the next Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise--he'd even taken the Cruise role in the last two "Mission Impossible" movies, and was People magazine's reigning "Sexiest Man Alive". Barbie was almost as famous, having opened big in several Meg Ryan-type romantic comedies. The two of them had been on the cover of People at least three times, and it appeared that the media was trying to make them into the next "Brangelina". Barbie joked that soon they'd be called "Jambie."