Chapter 9

When it came to programming, John was thorough, attentive to detail, and fast. He was also imaginative, artistic, and a technological visionary. When all of his talents were brought to bear on a program, the results were spectacular. The business programming that had constituted the original basis of his business had bored him. As a result, he had taken the odd half hour here and there to write games for his kids. It was not blind luck that his games were successes.

He was a fiscal conservative, but not obsessive about it. He didn't like to spend money that he didn't have and wasn't motivated to show off his wealth. The sudden increase in income produced by the games had taken him by surprise. His reaction was to put the money aside for use in case of a rainy day. In fact, he was worth well over a million dollars before he purchased a flat screen television. He paid cash for his truck and SUV without changing half of the digits in his bank account balance. His banker had to call him in order to get him to invest money in CDs since his balance was well beyond that insured by the FDIC.

Anyone who knew John for any amount of time would describe him as casual. Other than the few times he actually had to meet customers, his attire consisted of blue jeans, tee shirts, and sneakers. He was one of those men who always looked as if they could use a haircut without ever looking absolutely shaggy.

He was laid back and easy going. He wasn't the type to push his beliefs on others. When others tried to push their beliefs on him, he would listen, then smile, and politely inform them that he disagreed. That would be the end of the matter.

No one who knew him as an adult had ever seen him angry, not even Vicki. Like everyone, there were times when he was a little irritable and snappy, but never angry or furious. It could be said that he avoided conflict, but he prefered to think of it as deflecting conflict. Some people who were critical of him might call him a wimp. Of course, that label assumes that he backed away from confrontation when the reality was that he side-stepped it. An aggressor would find himself arguing to a wall while wondering where the hell John had gone.

Some people tend to classify men as being either Alpha males or Beta males – leaders or followers. John was of that even rarer breed, an individual. He wasn't interested in giving or taking orders. He just went along doing his own thing. He had started his own business to avoid the corporate culture with its fixed hierarchy of social status.

John's Farm was an example of how these traits all fit together. Despite working in a high tech field, he enjoyed natural surroundings. Trees, grass, streams, and solitude gave him far more pleasure than light posts, concrete, streets, and crowds. The hustle and bustle of cities made him uneasy. Suburbs appeared to him to be filled with artificial and superficial people. The idea of good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods were meaningless abstractions to him. He felt that people needed to be grounded by surrounding themselves with the natural world.

It was easy to underestimate John and his depth of feelings for the things important to him. A conflict might have been avoided, but he carried with him a memory of it that weighed on his mind like a splinter in the fleshy part of his hand. Unfortunately, he had acquired a huge collection of splinters and the pain was reaching a point of being unbearable.

On this particular morning, Vicki had pushed him to tell her his feelings thinking that they would have a relaxed personable discussion while drinking coffee and snacking upon some apple crumb cake she had made. She believed he would calmly and rationally outline how he felt about a few key incidents of their marriage. She expected the discussion to last an hour or so and then all would be forgiven.

Things did not go as she planned. Now she cowered in her chair staring in terror at the raging angry monster into which John had somehow transformed. She had once told him to ravage her, yell at her, and beat her. She had told him that in expressing her desire to be punished, but had felt safe in doing so. She was confident that he wouldn't ever do it. Now she wasn't so confident. She didn't recognize the man standing in front of her.

With spittle flying from his lips, he unleashed a rage that would have frightened the strongest of men. It was a verbal assault that withheld nothing. His words were choppy and disorganized as he rambled from one subject to the next. He raised his fist in the air to make points. As soon as he would start to calm down, his rage returned with a renewed vigor.

He didn't need to be coherent for his message to be understood. In short, he told her that she was a selfish self-centered bitch who should have been kicked to the curb ten years ago. He recounted incident after incident in which she had failed to respect him, ignored his advice, and rejected his loving advances.

He shouted about how her flight from the house to make money had nearly cost him his business. She had forced him to be a full-time househusband while trying to run a full-time business. His business had suffered when he had lost money because of delayed deliveries. The family had suffered when he had to ignore them in order to prevent losing even more money.

He recounted how he had laid awake at night imagining that she was having an affair with her boss. He described the anguish and self-loathing he had felt when he broke down and hired a private detective to follow her on her business trips. He had taken it as a personal failure on his part that he had lost trust in her. The discovery of her boss's cancer had been as devastating that learning she was having an affair would have been. He felt she hadn't even cared enough about his feelings to provide the emotional reassurance that the knowledge would have brought him.

It wasn't until he turned to the subject of how his kids had lost respect for him that Vicki realized the full extent of the damage she had done. The kids had felt he was allowing her to sleep with her boss because he wasn't man enough to stop the affair. They ignored his protests that nothing was going on. The blame for his humiliation was hers, not his or the kids.

His words had same effect that pummeling her with fists to the stomach would have produced. She felt nauseous. The tears had flowed for so long and heavily that her eyes were starting to swell shut. Her sinuses had filled with mucus to the point where she could barely breath. Ignoring her physical condition, he had continued to hammer her with rage filled words.

Her breaking point was reached when he told her that he had divorce papers already filled out. Her terror of him was overcome by the need to flee. She ran from the room striving to make it to the toilet before losing her breakfast. She didn't make it. She lay on the floor in a puddle of vomit sobbing so hard that it looked like she was in the midst of an epileptic seizure.

John continued to rant for two full minutes before he realized the target of his anger had fled the room. The human body wasn't meant to release that much rage over such a long period of time. He fell back into a chair weak and exhausted. Then the tears started. He was filled with sorrow at what could have been and what hadn't been.

An indeterminate amount of time passed before Vicki was able to sit up. Her clothes were filthy. Disgusted by them, she took off her skirt and blouse. With nothing better at hand, she used her clothes to clean the mess on the floor. She carried them to the kitchen where she put them into a plastic trash bag before tossing them into the trash can.

After taking a deep breath, she stepped into the living room cringing in expectation of a continuation of his verbal assault. Instead of facing a furious monster, she found him curled into the fetal position on the love seat. He was sleeping. Rather than wake him, she headed to the bedroom to get clean and put on some clothes. She stumbled past the closet without grabbing any clothes and entered the bathroom.

In the bathroom she stared at the mirror. The woman reflected back at her was not attractive. Her hair hung limp, her eyes were red and puffy, snot ran from her nose, and her skin was blotchy. Disgusted, she turned away from the mirror. She turned on the water in the shower and adjusted it to be as hot as she could stand. She stepped into shower still wearing her bra and panties.

She stayed in the shower until the water ran cold. As much as she scrubbed she couldn't wash away the shame she felt. Her bra and panties lay ruined on the shower floor where she had dropped them after ripping them off her body. When the water became too cold to stand, she got out of the shower leaving a puddle on the floor. She toweled off and put on a bathrobe.

She went to the kitchen. The coffee pot was cold to the touch. She stared at it thinking it had been brewing when John had come over to the house. She had no idea how long ago that had been. Mechanically, she started the process of making a fresh pot. Even as she worked, she wondered if it would end up untouched like had been the case for the last batch.

"I'm sorry," John said from behind her.

"Don't be," Vicki said without turning to look at him.

She was afraid that if she turned to look at him that she would burst into tears. Crying would not solve any problems.

"I shouldn't have said all that," John said.

Stating what she believed to be the truth, Vicki said, "It needed to be said."

John said, "I didn't mean all of it."

"Yes you did," Vicki said.

John stood there quietly watching her pour water into the brewer. He wished that he could have told her his feelings without all of the anger.

For all of his adult life, John never displayed anger until this day. There was a time in his life, back when he was a teenager, when he regularly acted upon his anger without restraint. Then one day, he broke a kid's collar bone. The kid had made a stupid comment while walking past and John had grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him to the floor.

After the first flush of anger had passed, he had looked around at the kids staring him. They looked at him like he was dirt. He lowered his eyes to the kid writhing around on the floor in obvious pain knowing that he had caused it. He felt lower than an earthworm.

He had been suspended from school for three days. His parents had grounded him. Those punishments meant nothing. Whenever he thought of that incident, it was the expressions on the kids faces when they looked him that haunted him.

Since that day, John avoided conflict and situations where he would get angry. His anger had taken him by surprise and that bothered him. He was ashamed of his behavior with Vicki.

He said, "I'm so sorry."

Vicki spun around. Angrily she said, "Don't ever apologize to me for that again."

"I shouldn't have..."

"Damn it! You said what had to be said and you were honest about it. I deserved to hear every word that came out of your mouth!"

She turned around and, with shaking hands, fiddled with the brewer. She managed to get the pot in place and pushed the button to turn it on.

Still facing the coffee brewer, she said, "When we married, I vowed to love, honor, and cherish you. I violated all three of those vows. I wasn't very loving and I ended up using your love for me against you. I didn't treat you with the respect that you deserved. I didn't value my time with you and neglected you. I promised to obey, but by talking over you I wouldn't let you issue commands.

"In all ways that count, I am a horrible wife. The only marriage vow I kept was to remain faithful to you. I see now that if I had violated that one, you would have been rid of me a long time ago. I may have even known that and avoided men to keep from losing you."

"I don't know what to say," John said. "Do you love me?"

Vicki said, "I do love you. I have always loved you. I don't expect you to believe me based on my past treatment of you, but I really do love you. It is just that I forgot that for a while."

"I'm relieved to hear that," John said quietly.

"I had no idea how much I had hurt you," Vicki said.

John said, "To tell the truth, I didn't realize how much I hurt."

"I'm going to sound selfish, but I'm going to ask that you don't forgive me now. You aren't ready to forgive me and I'm not ready to be forgiven," Vicki said.

John wasn't going to say that he was ready to forgive her because he wasn't. He felt bad about how he had lost control. He had been shocked at how much anger he had carried around with him. It was going to take him some time to come to grips with it.

"You might be right that I'm not ready to forgive you," John said.