Hands on the Wheel Ch. 02

"I found a bottle of 100 tablets of something called Levonorgestrel 1.5 milligrams, which turns out to be the active ingredient in morning-after pills like Plan B. That puzzled me. Why would you need a morning after pill, let alone 100 of them? But then it dawned on me that even though you stopped taking birth control pills, a morning-after pill would let you avoid pregnancy no matter who you had sex with—including me. So you obviously never intended to have a baby, you never intended to let me have a family."

He couldn't resist bragging about his cleverness. "After a bit more help from Dr. Google, I found a tablet that's a pretty good likeness of Plan B. Didn't take long to zip over to Walgreen's and back, do some slick surgery on the bottom of the bottle, replace the tablets, close up the bottle, then reseal the package.

"So I'm sure you'll be pleased to learn that you've been getting several thousand percent of your minimum daily requirement of vitamin C. No worries, you flush out the unneeded extra in your tattletale tinkle. So I'm afraid your stone fox tummy and tits may have a few stretch marks in their future, Jean."

His curiosity got the best of him. "How could you afford to buy a hundred of them? They're $30 or $40 apiece in the drug stores."

"I don't have to pay for them, a devoted cousin works for Guajarat Biosciences." Ivan figured he knew what the cousin was devoted to.

He cut her off before she could launch into another tirade. "Oh, and you'll have to figure out which one of your endorphin-squirting buddies is the daddy, of course. I haven't planted any seed in your fecund fucking vagina for almost two months. You haven't even noticed."

The change in her expression was more entertaining than frightening. The confident, if not contrite spouse morphed into something harder. Her voice was flat, almost menacing. "You shouldn't have done that, Ivan, that was probably a felony. But this is why a woman's choice is so important. It's still first trimester and the procedure's pretty simple."

Although she was obviously cavalier about the wedding vows, Ivan was startled by how carelessly she talked about ignoring a fundamental teaching of the Catholic Church. "An abortion. Does the faith of your family mean so little to you, even though you don't share it?"

"That's between me and God and Planned Parenthood. There's no need for my family to know about it. If you tell them, I'll deny it; it'll be your word against mine. Who do you think they'll believe? A fallen Baptist or their dear Catholic daughter?"

He stood staring at her for a minute, let his shoulders sag as if he were defeated, then turned without a word and went up to his office. He looked back at the top of the stairs and shuddered at her sneering smile of success. He saw no sign of the woman he married or the love she still claimed to feel.

He closed and locked the office door. It took just a few minutes to open the captured video file and edit it down to a greatest-hits version that showed her revealing her infidelity, her self-serving justifications, and her intent to get an abortion. For safekeeping, he emailed the raw file and edited version to his lawyer, then copied them to the cloud and three USB drives; he hid one USB drive in his office and put the other two in his pocket.

Pausing the edited version on his laptop, he opened the distro widget he had written earlier. Now with one tap he could email her manifesto to her parents, siblings, parish priest in Connecticut, the tribunal office of the Archdiocese of Hartford, and the office of the Archbishop himself. There was no point in sending it to their friends or co-workers; they either already knew, or shared her values and wouldn't care.

He went back downstairs just as Jean was getting ready to go out the kitchen door. "You might want to wait just a few minutes, Jean." She started to open the door, then closed it when he put his laptop on the table and pressed Play. He watched her watching herself as she admitted that she had been serially unfaithful, justified it, and announced her intention to get an abortion. She was angry when it started, but when she saw herself declaring that she was going to get an abortion, she looked more uncertain, even nervous.

"What do you think you're going to do with that?" She was trying to sound imperious, but it came out worried. He tapped the Distro icon and told her where he had just sent it. She sat down hard on a kitchen chair. "You wouldn't...you did! You asshole! You're a..." Words almost failed her. "...a fucking coward!"

"Temper, temper, Jean. Save your energy for finding a good lawyer, because I've got a junkyard dog preparing the divorce papers. I've already moved most of my stuff out, I'll be out of your life in an hour or so." He went back up to his office, locking the door behind him. He didn't want to talk with her, not now, not ever.

He moved to his apartment, told his lawyer to serve the papers, and Jean went ballistic. She wanted revenge for sharing the video of her rant and tried to fight it, but really didn't have anything to fight with. The next few months passed in a hazy blur of process servers (she countersued for mental cruelty and invasion of privacy), recriminations (he had to endure six court-ordered sessions with a marriage counselor), and ever-mounting lawyer bills. She got the abortion; Ivan had no idea what she told her family.

He kept going to work, doing his best not to care that almost everyone knew that Jean had been serially unfaithful. He was convinced—mistakenly, he later learned—that they thought of him as not just a cuckold, but the world's biggest schlemiel. Brian proved to be the true friend Ivan needed, though: he just piled on more and more work and told terrible zombie jokes.

When the divorce was final a few months later, Ivan responded the way any red-blooded American male would: he got drunk and stayed drunk for almost a year.