Sex Toy Story

They became friends, but Joanne kept her distance. After breaking up with her boyfriend, she began praying for a man with a passion for God. Chris kept coming to mind. He was so intelligent and funny. They could talk about anything.

Their first date was a Halloween costume party. By Thanksgiving they were engaged. They set a date for the following summer. But a lot of kids at the student union didn't think the match was made in heaven. "In the circles we were running in," Castro says, "everything you did was under scrutiny for how spiritual you were." Castro and others saw in Chris the warring of two natures: the spiritual and the sensual.

"A lot of people had problems with us as a couple," Joanne says. "I was too sweet, and he was too brash." And their ardor too blatant. At one point, the director of the student union pulled them aside and cautioned them: "I'm reminded of the marriage bed." They had no clue what he was talking about; they weren't sleeping together. Joanne had experienced only one sexual relationship, and Chris was still a virgin.

When Chris left for officer candidate school, friends confronted Joanne with their concerns. On the day Chris learned he'd scored high enough to receive an Army commission, he got two letters from Joanne. One was a love letter; the other was a Dear John. Chris went to his bunk and cried, he says. "It was the best and worst day of my life."

They stayed apart 30 days. "I'd dumped him six weeks before the wedding, and he was still telling everyone how much he loved me," Joanne says. "I realized at that point I would never find anyone who loved me as much as Chris."

On May 14, 1983, they got married. The next morning, Chris was commissioned a second lieutenant. They packed his pickup truck and drove to Georgia, spending their honeymoon in motels along the way. Finally they could have sex. No more need to burn.

For the next 10 years the Webbs moved from base to base. During the '80s, they had three children. But motherhood didn't mean matronly. With Chris' insistence, Joanne's skirt hems marched steadily upward, and her tops became more revealing.

Crushed that he wasn't sent to Kuwait during the first Gulf War, Chris became the Army liaison officer for postal and shipping services to the troops. Traveling all over the United States, Chris dropped in at Hooters restaurants, where he gave waitresses pins urging people to write to soldiers. He inadvertently became a traveling cupid, a Johnny Appleseed of love. "I've met three men who came back and married the Hooters waitresses who corresponded with them," he says.

After the war, Chris survived two RIFs (reductions in force), but a married officer with three children costs the Army a fortune. In 1993 Major Chris Webb reluctantly took early retirement, his 10-year Army career over. The Webbs were faced with deciding where to raise their family.

"I had driven through Burleson once," Chris says. Though his mother and several relatives lived in the area, the town seemed a dull backwater. "I've lived in all these beautiful places. I said, 'Thank God I don't have to live here.'"

Then Chris heard a whisper in his heart: "You're going to live in Burleson some day."

Chris told the voice, "Devil, get out of here."

Sex and Salvation

At first, Carol Curlee and others on the hiring committee thought the job applicant seemed straitlaced--long hair, to-the-calf dresses. "She almost looked like a holy roller," says Curlee, who was teaching at a Burleson elementary school. Curlee and the other fifth-grade teachers liked to go out for a drink on Fridays, and they didn't want to work with a prig. "We wanted someone who could laugh and cut up and have a good time."

Joanne needed the job. They'd used Chris' pension to build a house in Burleson. Selling insurance with little success, Chris says, he went to the mailbox every day praying the Army would call him back.

On the first day of school in 1993, the committee hired Joanne and soon discovered she was no prude. "She was wonderful," Curlee says. "She was funny and had a sense of humor. She would take the problems of the children to heart. Joanne was just a sweet person."

Curlee thought Chris was extremely intelligent but such a flirt that she figured he cheated on Joanne. "But as I got to know him, that's just Chris," she says. "He'd say, 'Carol, you look so pretty today.' I'm just a fat old woman."

She envied the Webbs' romance, but Curlee didn't like the way Joanne dressed. The holy-roller dress had long disappeared, replaced by miniskirts. If Curlee mentioned it, Joanne's comeback was always the same: Her husband liked her in short skirts.