Chapter 4

It's funny, I suppose. When you've changed so much, you don't expect anything else to remain the same. I drove around the town square and nothing had changed. Well, I had changed, quite a lot.

I had arrived in town the night before and stayed with Evie. Truth being stranger than fiction, we had spent the night in unsullied chastity, even if there was only one bed at her place and we had both slept in it. The spark between us that had flared up so brightly for that one evening had pretty much burned out.

The experience had left us friends again, thank goodness. Evie had been keeping tabs on the goings-on at the company, especially what Ivan and his little sweetie Lynn were up to. What she had found out didn't surprise me much.

I had spent the morning running errands and seeing certain people. The early afternoon had been spent with one person in particular. I had assembled all the information that I had collected, made some phone calls and visited the courthouse. I wanted to be sure I had all my ducks in a row.

I plastered a confident look on my face. I knew darn well I was pretty queasy about what was coming but I was determined not to let it show. I drove to my old house, parking down the street and walking back to sit on one of the two white painted chairs on the front porch. There I waited, trying to keep my mind resolute.

Finally Ivan's car pulled up. I had half expected him to park in the garage. That would have meant I would have had to ring the doorbell, but he simply stopped the car in the driveway and walked to the front door. His head was down and I had a moment to study him as he approached.

Damn, he looked awful. His face was drawn, he had lost weight and the lines etching his face made him look ten years older. Good.

For a second I thought he was going to trudge up the stairs and walk right past me without noticing I was there. He realized someone was sitting there and turned his head. It took a moment for reality to set in. He frowned for two seconds, as though he was trying to place me. Then his eyes opened and he turned a very nice shade of pale.

"Marie?" He tried, I'll give him that. He attempted to strike a balance between "long suffering injured husband" and "Thank God, you're alright" as he began to babble about how much he had missed me and how glad he was I was home and he thought he could forgive me but how dare I worry him and what possessed me to sign the divorce and..."

"Oh for God's sake, Ivan, shut up."

He sputtered. "What? You can't talk to me like that!"

"Oh the hell I can't. Maybe if I had talked to you like that long ago you wouldn't have had that affair with Lynn and then decide to set me up with a fake affair of my own."

Ivan kept trying. "I have no idea what you're talking about. Any so-called affair with Lynn only took place after what you did to me. I was ready to forgive you and you ran out on me."

"Damn, you do hang in there. Let's cut through the bullshit. I've talked to Evie, I've talked to Lynn, I've talked to David. My attorney, and yes I have one of my own, has been in touch with yours." I held up a file folder. "I've got copies of their statements, copies of the charge card bills and bank statements you hid from me that pretty well detail your little goings on with Miss Richardson, starting from your hotel rendezvous almost two months before that night. Now, do you want to go sit down and have our discussion or would you prefer I start yelling out here?"

Without another word he opened the door and I followed him into the house. I marched over to the easy chair in that same room where I had been so distraught nearly a year ago. I carefully placed my purse and the thick folder I had been holding onto the small table beside me and looked at Ivan.

He perched on the couch and I was struck by the irony of our reversed positions. Now it was Ivan who had to clear his throat before speaking.

"What do you want Marie?"

"I guess the first thing I want is some kind of explanation, if such a thing exists. Ivan, if you were that unhappy with me, why didn't you tell me? I knew we were drifting apart and I was trying as hard as I knew how to solve that. But if you didn't want that, why didn't you file for divorce? And for God's sake, why did you do to me what you did that night and then treat me like the slut I thought I had become when you knew the truth?"

"Marie, you have to believe me when the whole thing began I had no intentions of hurting you."

He stopped as I bounded to my feet. I actually took two steps towards him, my hand raised. "You didn't mean to hurt me? I don't have to believe any such nonsense." I managed to master myself and returned to my seat.

"Why did you start that affair?"

"For no good reason at all, Marie," he answered. "She flirted with me and I flirted back. I put the energy I should have put into our marriage into pursuing her. I was enjoying the feeling of being the 'man about town' again. I shoved you into the back corner of my mind. I made a conscious decision to cheat on you."

"But I didn't want to lose you," he went on. "I thought it would be a one-time shot and then I would find a way to make it all up to you without you ever knowing why. Then I found myself enthralled. The sneaking around, the knowledge that I was 'putting one over on you' became as exciting as the sex."

I needed answers. "But why the set-up? All that elaborate trickery, just to make me feel as though I was the worst excuse for a wife on the face of the earth? And then, the way you treated me. You KNEW I was innocent and yet you seemed to positively enjoy rubbing my face in the dirt."

"I thought you were catching on. I was sure that I had given myself away somehow. I knew I had left clues as to my behavior. Of course I was guilty so I saw them, even though now I realize that you didn't. So I concocted the scheme to make you think that you had cheated. Then I let that too get out of hand."

I nodded, almost sadly now. "I'll say you did."

He shook his head. "Unbelievably, I began to believe my own propaganda. I brooded on it. I managed to convince myself that maybe you really HAD cheated on me with David. I guess it was a case of thinking if I was cheating, then maybe you could have been also. It eased my guilt. As long as I could in some twisted way make myself the victim it was simple to go on with the affair."

I changed the subject. "Do you know why I left?"

"I thought you had taken all you could. I thought maybe you had run off for a little bit, that I had pushed things too far. But I thought you would be back. I was all set to 'forgive you' and hope that everything would somehow return to normal. You didn't come back and you didn't come back. Then I got the divorce decree." He snorted. "The clerk never even told anyone she had filed it. I had never even dreamed you would do that, I never thought to inquire. The whole thing was another stick to keep you from seeing what was really going on."

"By the way, when I realized what you had done I rushed to Lynn. I confessed the whole scheme to her. She didn't know all of what I had done. She might have the morals of an alley cat, but she was horrified by my actions. She threw me out of her house and has never spoken to me since. About me I'm sure. I'm avoided by the women as thought I have the plague. Not that I don't deserve it."

I said bitterly, "I can agree with that. But I didn't leave because I had taken all I could. I would have taken more, a lot more. I'm the old school 'stand by your man' woman. I left because I was pregnant." Ivan's jaw dropped. "Your set-up made me sure that David was the father. I know better now. I SHOULD have known better then. David is too much of the real 'man about town' that you wanted to be for him to be having sex with a passed out housewife. He never would have wanted me at all, at least not back then, anyway."

Ivan looked puzzled at my last comment before returning to the first revelation. "You mean, you mean we have a child?"

"I have a son," I retorted. "You, I don't know what you have. As far as I'm concerned your participation in Cliff's birth was that of a donor, no more than I could have accomplished with a tube of refrigerated sperm and a turkey baster."

Ivan was so excited that my words went right past him. "Don't you see, Marie? This changes everything. You can come home now. It will be just like it was before."

I looked at him, contempt oozing from every pore of my body. "You mean, now that Laura has dumped you, you want someone like me back? Well let me tell you something buster. If you think I'm still the woman that you set up, that you almost destroyed so that you could continue a sordid affair, well, you're wrong."