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.
Vicki turned to face him. With a sad little smile on her face, she said, "Earlier was the first time in our marriage when you were totally honest in expressing your displeasure at my behavior. Now, less than an hour later, you are already measuring your words to cushion their impact. You can tell me the truth. Sugar coating it only makes it worse."
"Okay," John said with irritation obvious in his voice, "I'm not ready to forgive you."
"That wasn't hard, was it?" Vicki asked.
"It was harder than you can imagine," John replied.
"I'm sorry. I don't mean to be critical," Vicki said.
The coffee pot gurgled announcing that it had finished brewing. She grabbed two cups and filled them. She carried them over to the kitchen table and then brought over the apple crumb cake. She wondered if now she would get that hour long conversation over coffee and cake.
"Where do we go from here?" Vicki asked.
"I don't know," John said while walking over to the table.
He felt tired and didn't really want to talk about it. He was ashamed of having lost his cool, but thankful that he hadn't resorted to violence. There were periods of time during his outburst that he wasn't even sure how close he had come to striking out. Uneasy and still uncertain of his ability to control his temper, he sat down and grabbed one of the cups of coffee.
Joining him at the table, Vicki said, "I bought a dozen sexy costumes thinking that I could win you back by wearing them."
"You did?" John asked surprised by her announcement.
"Yes," Vicki answered.
Thinking over their marriage, John said, "Other than your little black dress and heels, you've never worn a sexy outfit for me."
"I don't know what I was thinking when I bought them. Maybe I had been running away from being Vicki for so long that I wasn't ready to return to being her. I knew that you didn't like Victoria. I suppose I felt that by acting like someone else we could communicate more easily," Vicki said.
"I guess I can understand that," John said with a frown.
"What?" Vicki asked.
John asked, "Why did you hate being Vicki?"
"I didn't hate being Vicki. I just didn't want to be Vicki anymore."
John said, "I don't understand."
Vicki asked, "Did you ever do something and then wonder why you did it?"
"Sure," John answered.
"Forcing you to buy this house was the biggest mistake of my life," Vicki said. "I realized that two months after we moved in."
"I thought you loved this house," John said.
Vicki said, "I did until I went to pay the bills. That's when I discovered how far over our heads we were. I had to borrow money from my parents to buy diapers for Rose."
John said, "I didn't know you had borrowed money from your parents."
"I borrowed a lot of money from them," Vicki said.
The shock of not being able to spend money on entertainment had been bad. She had been devastated to learn that she couldn't even pay for the essentials. Who had been responsible for that? Vicki. She had been the one who wanted the large house with a bedroom for each child, the formal dining room, and the large yard in the perfect neighborhood. At the time, she wasn't going to take responsibility for it.
"I had wanted this house so much that I wasn't going to listen to any arguments against it. You told me that we couldn't afford it. I used every method of coercion to force you to buy it. I was not going to take no for an answer.
"Then after we got in the house, I discovered that you had been right. Instead of swallowing my pride and admitting that I was wrong, I blamed you for the fact that we couldn't afford it," Vicki said.
"You blamed me?" John asked incredulously.
"Yes, I did," Vicki replied, "Don't worry, I felt guilty for blaming you."
"I'm going to have to think about that."
She said, "I guess that was when I wanted to separate myself from being Vicki. I didn't like what I had become. I had been selfish and manipulative. Then I became dishonest to myself and to you."
John took a sip of his coffee thinking back to those early days in the house. He knew that she had been worried about money, but he wasn't aware that she was blaming him. He was too busy scrambling to earn enough money to make the house payment to worry about blame. On top of trying to get more programming jobs, there had been times that he had fixed other people's computers for a little under the table cash.
Vicki said, "I started to obsess about money. It seemed to me that you were charging as much as could be charged for the work you were doing. I didn't see anyway you could improve our financial situation without getting a regular job. You stuck with your contracting. If you couldn't make enough to pay for this house, then I would have to get a job and make up the shortfall.
"Unfortunately, I was stuck raising three kids and couldn't go to work. For four years I became increasingly more frustrated with being stuck in the house. My obsession shifted from having enough money to pay the bills to earning enough money to pay the bills. I couldn't wait for day when Rose entered first grade. I would then be free to work and all of my problems would be solved."
"I noticed your frustration, but I didn't know why you were so frustrated. You never said anything," John said.
Vicki said, "When I got the job, I flew out of here so fast that I must have left a dust cloud behind me. I never looked back to see what effect my departure had on you and the kids.
"That's when I adopted the Victoria persona. You might hate Victoria, but she was far more honest with you than Vicki had been. Five days a week, Victoria lived to earn money and take care of the bills. There was nothing more important to her than that."
The night when the kids had rebelled had been a real shock. She was still functioning like Victoria and in that persona the kids were supposed to be nicely behaved room ornaments. She had been totally oblivious to the tensions in the house that evening or any previous evening she had been home.
"I was surprised when you told me that you had a job. We had never discussed you returning to work," John said.
He had to scramble as a result of her absence from the house. He had to get the kids to school, he had to greet the kids upon returning from school and he had to make sure they did their homework before dinner. It tore his work day into little chunks that made long hours of focused concentration impossible. It got worse when he discovered that he was losing evenings on the occasions when she traveled. Suddenly he was cooking supper, washing clothes, and cleaning the house. That was more time taken away from his business.
"There was no way I was going to discuss it with you. My obsession with money didn't allow it. You might have told me no," Vicki said. "I couldn't risk that."
"I can't tell you how disappointed I am. You saw me in the role of an impediment to your plan rather than an enabler. We could have reached a compromise concerning time and earnings. I'm sure there were jobs around here that could have worked around the kid's school hours. The pay might not have been great, but it could have helped," John said with a sigh.
"You have every right to be disappointed in me," Vicki said. "Victoria was a rocket programmed to seek out the highest paying job possible. She lived to pay the house payment. Once Victoria was making enough money to pay the mortgage, I didn't care how much money you made. You showed me bank statements and I didn't even bother to look at them. Victoria was taking care of it."
John remembered the time when she had thrown a bank statement in the trashcan without even looking at it. He sighed. "What do we do now?"
"I don't know," Vicki answered.
"In the movies we would have make up sex right about now. The lights would dim, the music would start playing, and we would be translated instantaneously to a candlelit bedroom without our clothes. The problem is that I'm not in the mood," John said.
He wondered if he would ever feel in the mood again.
"You feel emotionally drained and physically weak," she said.
He replied, "I do."
"Same here. But if you wanted me, I'd grab a bottle of lube and do my best to make love to you," Vicki said.
"I wouldn't want a guilt fuck," John said. "It should be an act of love."
Vicki said, "Our sex life wasn't always filled with acts of love. There were times when we had hot monkey sex on the swing set just for the fun of it."
"I remember those days," John said with a small smile.
She pushed the plate towards him and asked, "Would you like some cake?"
"No. I probably ought to head back to John's Farm and take care of the kids," John said.
Vicki said, "What exactly is John's Farm?"
"I bought forty acres four years ago. During the summer when the kids are out of school, we go out there and do outdoor kinds of things. You know, we fish, ride dirt bikes, garden, and just enjoy nature. I might earn a living writing computer games, but I didn't want the kids doing nothing except play them," John answered.
"I didn't know you had done that," Vicki said although she realized that she should have known it. He had effectively told her in a hundred different ways.
John said, "I tried to get you out to see the place before I bought it, but you just kept blowing me off."
"That's another example of my stupidity. I was furious at the idea of buying a farm. After all, I wasn't working to pay the mortgage so that you could get a playground," Vicki said. "I bet you paid cash for it."
"I did," John said.
"How could I have been so stupid not to even listen to you?"
John took another sip of his coffee. There was no way that he was going to suggest an answer to that question.
Seing the expression on his face, she said, "You don't have to answer that."
John rose from his chair. "I really need to go."
"I understand," Vicki said accepting that nothing was going to resolved that day.
She could see that he wasn't ready to talk. Without saying a word, she got up and walked with him to the front door. He kissed her and then left. His kiss had about the same passion as a simple peck on the cheek.
Feeling empty inside, Vicki stared out the window and watched him drive away. She watched the end of the street long after his truck had disappeared. She wondered if things would ever be right between them again. When Reverend Billings had told her that John hadn't forgiven her yet, she had not believed him. Once again she had been proven wrong.
She returned to the chair where she had listened to John rant and replayed his words in her memory. It was just as hard the second time as it had been the first. With the fear of getting hit gone, she could concentrate on each and every word he said. His words were filled with venom. He hadn't produced the venom, she had created it long ago.
Everyone in a crowd witnessing a single event differs in his or her memory it. Wondering if he exaggerated or embellished things wouldn't solve anything. It wasn't what actually happened that was important, it was what he believed happened and the consequences of what he experienced. She accepted every word he said as gospel.
She tried to remember each and every interaction with him from after they had first seen the house until the present time. With eyes open to facts she had discounted or disbelieved earlier, she saw that he had been extremely patient with her. He had told her about his income increasing. He had asked to consider the impact her job would have on him and the kids. There couldn't have been many surprises for him because he had predicted everything that had happened. She was just too self-involved to see it.
Her behavior have been less than admirable. When he said they had enough money to get by, she had denied it and called him a liar. She had totally ignored any proof he offered. She had even accused him of wanting to lose the house. In hindsight, she recognized that she had not trusted him. She wondered how he could have trusted her not to cheat on him.
The present situation was untenable. She knew that something had to change, but she wasn't sure what could be done. She realized that her presence in the house was making life difficult for everyone. John wasn't able to work in peace without having to deal with her. She had to keep leaving the house when the children came over. She couldn't go shopping every day. Something needed to change.
She went to her briefcase and removed a pad of paper. She went to work laying out all of her options. When she finished there was only one option that made sense. She stared at it feeling sick to her stomach.