I Have Returned – In case anyone missed me. I’m still not typing great, and occasionally lose my train of thought.

I am Roger Cortt, an army veteran and I was 40, and married to Louise Fischer 36 when the excrement fell into to the oscillating air mover. She kept her maiden name as she felt it made us individuals and not a ‘paired unit’, I didn’t and don’t really care. Those ages were at the time of the crap hitting the air mover

We live in a university town, and that is where Louise and I met. I was a 28 year old newly tenured professor in English; Louise was a doctoral student doing independent studies when I crashed a rack of books onto her head putting a book back on the opposite side of the shelf at the school library.

As a way of apology, I invited her to a party I was hosting for my master’s students. She accepted. It was at the house my parents gave me for a reward on my receiving my doctorate.

The party went well, and we dated for several months when I asked her to marry me. She agreed, but as a fine upstanding member of the woman’s movement, insisted on total independent finances and an equal amount of money contributed to the marriage maintenance. I, seeing this as a possible bone of future contention had my family’s lawyer prepare a prenup that spelled out the specifics of the arrangement. It protected the individual savings, and protected any pre-marital assets. It also contained a clause about forfeitures of assets and child custody if one or the other of us cheated and caused a divorce. She signed without even looking at it.

We had been married for 14 years. We have two children, twins Andi (Andrea) and Sandi (Sandra), 12 years old. I did put my foot down when she wanted the kid’s birth certificates to have the last name of Cortt-Fischer. They are the Cortt twins. I think she is still rankled about that.

I am currently a writer by trade, mostly mysteries. I have recently begun to focus my stories on cheating spouses and the consequences of those actions. That will become an important part in this tale of woe.

Louise is not a big fan of my career choice. She is especially upset that I am writing my mysteries dealing with adultery. She is an associate professor at the local university, in Woman’s Studies. I was a full professor in the English department at the same university, teaching creative and business writing. I left that when my first novel was published and I got a contract for 3 more. Since I left academia, she has gradually gotten more bitter over my success. She is especially bitter over the fact that I was tenured and academically published and then quit. She has not been published, and has not been tenured after 10 years of teaching.

It probably doesn’t help that I tend to rub her nose in it when she complains. “You need to publish a text or at least a treatise on woman’s studies. You know the cliché ‘publish or perish’. It is a cliché because most universities subscribe to it. You must remember that until I was published with my treatise on the comparisons of fiction writing and business correspondence, I was not offered a full professorship. I only left teaching because my students were more interested in my books then my class content.”

She belittles my writing as ‘hack fiction that anybody could write’ at her faculty parties and has gotten especially loud and degrading about and to me personally over the last six months or so. It especially sets her off when I explain that my last advance was more than five times what I made as a full professor. We are still contributing half of our total household and marital expenses. That my savings accounts are large, and hers is almost non-existent rankles her also. That doesn’t stop her from spending though.

Now that you have the outline as to our background, I will bring you to the beginning of the real story. Louise has gotten to the point where she is demeaning in private as much as in public. The girls have noticed and ask why I put up with it.

I respond, “It hasn’t reached the drop dead point yet” then I said “When it does I will act.” Then I add, “It is getting close, and your mother won’t understand what it means when I act, but every one of our acquaintances will. It will not only cause her to lose friends, but will destroy her professional status as well.”

The real nastiness started last June when I needed to go on a 13 week book tour. Louise had agreed, under pressure from the administration, to teach a summer class. The girls, being only eleven at the time needed to have some adult supervision, and her parents wanted no part of two preteens for several hours a day. My parents, even though they live five hours away took them for my entire time away. When the girls returned for the school year they were gushing over the places they went with Grampa and Granma. They kept talking about Yosemite, The Grand Canyon, Boulder Dam and other places. My parents are long time teachers and both have doctorates themselves; so they have summers off.

Louise finally got so mad at the girls that one night she was screaming at them when I got back from a meeting with my business attorney. She was ranting about how they were spoiled little princesses and that if she had her way, they could live with their grandparents full time.

Well, that didn’t sit well with me, and I sent the girls to their room for a few minutes. I loudly lit into Louise, “You need to lighten up. If anyone in the house is a spoiled princess, it is you. You think your shit has no odor, but it is as rank as anyone else’s. You have become an absolute screaming bitch for past few months, and you are close to going over the cliff. There will come a point where I won’t put up with it and our marriage will then be destroyed.”

That shut her up for almost a month, but it also made the bedroom a freezer. I decide after more than a week of granny gowns and door closed undressing to move into my office, which was a guest bedroom originally.

Shortly after that I went to the local furniture store and bought a new bed and dresser and put them in there. I moved my clothes into that closet, and my shaving stuff and toothbrush into the en-suite. There was always a fully stocked linen closet in it.

Well, that started another torrent of rants. You did this, you didn’t do that. And so on. I just ignored it. I did move all of my savings out of our bank we use for household expenses. Louise was not a signatory to them, but the bank had, in the past, told her the balances. She also had a habit of opening my mail from the bank and the brokerage accounts that I have. I went to the local post office and rented a box. I used that as an address for the new bank and my investment accounts.

That really pissed her off. The screaming started when she saw the statement that showed the minimum amount to keep an account open. I held up both hands. She looked at me and fell silent.