Smoke and Mirrors

Ann's car was in the parking lot of the company when I drove by at 9 o'clock that morning. I went on to the store for a bit, then called her office around 11. She was still there, so I was beginning to wonder if my instincts had misled me.

But when I asked her if she'd like to meet me for lunch, she hemmed and hawed then told me she had too much work to do. That got my antennae to twitching, so I left the store in a borrowed pickup and found a spot across the street from her office where I could watch.

An hour passed, then another 30 minutes, and again, I was wondering if I had it all wrong. I was starting to think that maybe I was just paranoid and that my marriage wasn't in trouble, as I had thought.

At 12:30, however, I saw Ann leave the office and my heart sank, all the more so when she drove around for a half-hour on a circuitous rote that ended up across town at the Best Western Motel out by the interstate.

She drove around to the back and I found a spot in the parking lot of a large sporting goods store, where I could watch. Ann walked up to one of the rooms, knocked on the door and I was thoroughly unsurprised to see Jack Spradling open the door and let her in.

So it was Spradling. I sat there thinking up all sorts of devious methods of revenge when things took an unexpected turn.

About 2 o'clock, an hour after Ann's arrival, another vehicle pulled in, a well-dressed man got out, walked to the door they were in, he was admitted, while Jack walked out and left.

I was stunned. What the fuck was going on? Was my wife turning tricks on Wednesdays, or what?

It sure seemed that way, especially when an hour passed and a third man showed up, while the second man left, adjusting his tie as he walked to his car.

I was actually getting nauseous at the thought of what was going on behind the closed doors of that motel room.

It got worse.

Right at 4 p.m., Spradling returned in the company of yet another man, and they were admitted to the room, and this time the man who had been in there stayed in there.

Jesus H. Christ! My rage was going through the roof, and it was all I could do to keep from barreling in there and breaking up my wife's little party.

But the party was about ready to break up anyway. At 4:30, the other two men who had been in the room walked out and got in the third man's car, then 15 minutes later, right at the time she'd normally get off work, Ann walked out looking like nothing had happened.

I was too far away to see her face, so I couldn't get a read on what she might be feeling, but it didn't matter at that point. My wife – make that my soon-to-be ex-wife – had just spent almost four hours in a motel room entertaining four men, including what appeared to be several at once.

I could feel the sting of tears in my eyes, but I fought them off as I followed Ann to her health club, where she got out and went in for her usual workout.

I'd seen enough. I drove back to the store, to relieve Bill and close up. He took one look at my face and he knew. My brother just nodded, we embraced and I let it all out. I cried on Bill's shoulder for the first time in a long, long time.

After I'd let my emotions run for awhile, though, I shook myself and made a vow I've stuck to ever since.

"She's not worth all this emotion," I said.

"No, but it was good for you to let it out," Bill said. "So what are you going to do?"

"Oh, we're done," I said. "After what I saw today, there's no chance I'll forgive her."

Bill was shocked when I told him what had gone on at the Best Western. Even though he'd never much liked Ann, he never expected that kind of behavior.

"There's something going on here that we're not seeing," he said. "Has to be. That just doesn't sound like Ann. I mean, I know she's a bitch, but this... No, something's not kosher about this. I'd be willing to lay odds she didn't do all of this on her own volition. I've heard some vague rumors about Spradling from people who've gotten to know him. I'll be very shocked if he's not pushing this on her, and probably not too willingly, either."

"That may well be, bro," I said. "But it doesn't change the fact that she just spent four hours in a motel room almost certainly spreading her legs and letting four men fuck her. No way I can get past that."

"Look, Jimmy, I don't think it would be a good idea for you to go straight home tonight," Bill said. "I don't think you'd do anything to Ann, but you're in a pretty raw state right now, and you need time to clear your head and get a grip on what you need to do. Why don't you come home with me and have dinner, then we'll go to Duffy's and watch the Cards' game, have a few brews and map out a plan."

The Cardinals were going to be playing in the first round of the playoffs that night, and that would afford me an excuse to not see Ann that night. Bill was right. I'm not a violent person by nature, but I am Irish and I do occasionally flash an Irish temper. And my emotions were still very much on edge.

Ann wasn't home yet, so I called and left a message on her answering machine, then turned off my cell phone. I didn't want to talk to her until I was good and ready.

Bill and I talked that night about what I needed to do. I was definitely going to see Tommy Boyle the next day, first thing. Tommy's our lawyer, and his firm has handled the store's business going back to when my grandfather had it. We both played ball with Tommy in high school and trust him implicitly.

It was Bill who suggested that I would need concrete evidence of what was going on in that room.

"I mean, it's a 99 percent certainty she's fucking in there," he said. "But there is always that remote possibility that there's a legitimate reason for her to be there. You need to know without a doubt that she's taking on other men in there."

"So what you're saying then is I can't let on to her that I know?" I said. "That's gonna be awfully hard for me to do. Ann can usually read me like a book, and she's going to know something's not right."

"You may have to do an Oscar-winning acting job, but it will pay off if you do," Bill said.

We stayed at Duffy's until 11:30, although we quit drinking beer about 10 o'clock and switched to coffee. I didn't need to risk a DUI now when I had so much to do the next day.

When I got in my car, I retrieved my cell phone, turned it on and discovered that Ann had called a half-dozen times. At first she was pissed, then she got more and more desperate with each call.

She was sitting in the kitchen waiting on me when I walked in, right at midnight. There was definitely frost in the air.

"Where were you?" she said. "You could have at least let me know where you'd be."

I told her where we'd been, and that I'd just wanted to spend a night out with my brother for a change. Ann wasn't buying it.

"You spend almost all day five days a week with your brother," she said.

I wasn't in the mood to argue with her and I told her so, then went upstairs to get ready for bed. I noticed the candles were out again, and I wondered what sort of sexual extravaganza she'd had planned for me that night that I had missed.

I was already down when Ann came in and crawled in her side of the bed. I felt her staring at my back.

"Jimmy, what's the problem?" she asked softly. "You've been out of sorts all week."

I rolled over and just looked at her. In spite of my need to keep her in the dark about what I knew, I couldn't help myself.

"I think you and I both know what the problem is," I said, then I rolled over and tried to go to sleep.

I pretended to be sleeping, and presently I heard a stifled sob coming from Ann's side of the bed. I think in that moment we both knew it was over.

I finally heard Ann softly snoring, so I knew she'd cried herself to sleep. But for me, sleep proved elusive. My anger had returned, unbidden and unwanted. I lay there the better part of the night thinking up all sorts of outlandish revenge schemes, up to and including murder.

One plan I gave serious consideration to was a plan to set up a phony bust, to have TV cameras rolling when police arrested her, Spradling and anyone else who happened to be in the room for running a prostitution ring with my wife as the hooker.

I even had a contact in mind, a cousin who's a cop with a reputation for pushing the boundaries of legality in the interests of justice.

But I eventually discarded that idea as impractical. That could cost Andy his career, and land me in jail, because it would likely come out that the arrest was bogus.

As my anger waned again, I realized that as badly as I was hurting, I didn't want to destroy Ann. Punish her, yes. And I decided that making her move from our nice big house, divorcing her and taking her children from her would be punishment enough.

Oh yes, I was going for primary custody of Bethany and Will. I was not going to let someone who had slutted around like I was certain Ann had slutted around the previous day be the primary care-giver for my children.

That's why I needed hard evidence of her actions. We live in a no-fault state, so adultery wouldn't be a factor in the divorce. It would be a matter of simply dividing our personal assets. But her moral character would be a key element in any custody hearing, should it come to that.

It was in that frame of mind that I finally drifted off to sleep.

Nothing was said the next morning about our nocturnal exchange, and after I got the kids to school, I paid my lawyer a visit.

I told him the only two things in any divorce settlement that were absolutely non-negotiable were the business and custody. Under no circumstances did I want Ann to have even a whiff of control over the business, and I was adamant about custody, although I agreed that she would be allowed liberal visitation rights.

Tommy also put me onto his investigator, who suggested that we bug the motel room – and take whatever steps were necessary to make sure they got the room we had wired – and bug Spradling's office, to see what information might come from that end.

I never knew how he did it, but Tommy called me a couple of days later and said the investigator had gotten bugs in place and was recording everything that was said in Spradling's office, and the one in the motel room would begin recording at noon on Wednesday.

Actually, I wasn't 100 percent certain Ann would go through with another Wednesday tryst, since I was pretty sure she knew I knew what was going on.

I tried to put up a front that week, but it was tough. Ann did manage to coax me into sex that Thursday night, but it was hollow and emotionless on my part, and I knew when we finished that it would be the last time we would have sex together. I spent the rest of the week faking an illness so I'd have an excuse not to fuck her again

In the end, it turned out that the hold Spradling had on her, and her unleashed sexual appetite, were too strong to overcome, and she showed up at the Best Western, right on time at 1 p.m., in the room we'd wired for sound.

I'll give her some credit, though. She tried to get out of it, and the exchanges she and Spradling had over those few days proved very useful, since we got all of them on tape.

I picked up the kids at school that afternoon, instead of having them get on the little bus that usually took them to their after-school day care, and took them to Bill and Gretchen's to spend the night.

At 6 o'clock, the investigator arrived at the store with a manila envelope containing two memory cards of photographs of her and her "friends" entering and leaving the motel room. He'd made printouts of the best, and he also had tapes of what had gone on in the room and in Spradling's office.

Also in the envelope were the divorce papers and the custody petition.

I think Ann knew what was coming when she discovered the kids weren't at the day care, because she was sitting at the kitchen table still in her work clothes, with a glass of whiskey in front of her. She looked like she'd been crying.

She looked up at me with a haunted expression as I walked in the door with a passive look on my face.

"Where are the kids?" she asked softly.

"They're at Bill's," I said, as I fished in the refrigerator for a beer. "We need to be alone to discuss our future."

"Our future?" Ann said

I got right to the point.

"You asked me last week what the problem was," I said. "And I told you we both knew what it was. So, tell me. Is there something going on in your life that I need to know about, something that affects our relationship, something that involves Room 118 at the Best Western?"

Ann burst into tears at that. Gone was the sexy, sassy woman I'd met 14 years earlier, and gone too was the confident, strong-willed person who always got her way. The smoke-and-mirrors routine had blown up in her face, and she knew it.

I wanted to hold her, to comfort her, like I always had, but I didn't. She'd made this mess of our lives, and she was going to have to deal with the emotional fallout by herself. We were going our separate ways, and we each needed to deal with this on our own.

After she got calmed down, I asked her why she'd done it, and as Bill had suspected, it was mostly Spradling's doing.

It seemed that somehow he'd found out about Ann's earlier dalliance with cocaine. I don't know if he somehow got a hold of the psychologists's records, or how he found out.

But he'd used that to threaten her with termination, and exposure, if she didn't meet him at the motel room for sex.

Ann claimed that he'd told her she'd only have to sleep with him the one time, but it had been a setup. A friend of Spradling's was already in the room and filmed the whole thing with a small camera. Then he had shown her the tape, and threatened to tell me if she didn't put out for him and his friends on a regular basis.

"Why didn't you trust me enough to tell me about all of this?" I said. "Was it because you secretly wanted to be a slut?"

"No! Well, not really," she said. "But I did get into it after awhile. That's why I wanted to fuck you so bad when I got finished on those days, because I was so... I don't know, open to that kind of thing when they were done with me. It was addicting, and I wanted to share it with you. I know, it was wrong, but I was hooked. Jimmy, I do still love you."

"But you didn't love me enough to stop being Spradling's whore," I said bitterly. "You didn't love me enough to come clean with what was going on in the beginning, when it possibly could have been stopped, and you didn't love me enough to stop even when you knew I knew what was going on. That's a funny kind of love, Ann."

"So what's going to happen?" she said in a teary voice.

"You are going to walk upstairs and pack a couple of bags, and you're leaving," I said as I pulled the divorce papers and the custody petition from the packet and dropped them on the table in front of her. "We're finished, Ann. If you had simply been having an affair, I might could have seen my way clear to forgive you and save our marriage. It would have been hard, and there's no guarantee we'd have succeeded. But what you did was way beyond anything I could accept. You had sex, unprotected sex I'll bet, with how many men? You willfully put me in danger, and I, like a fool, went along with it even when I knew what was happening. I can't forgive that. I'm sorry, Ann, but it's over, and I'm keeping the kids."

"What? No! They're my babies," she wailed. "You can't take them away from me!"

"Ann, I'm only going to say this once," I said in a low, ominous tone of voice. "You forfeited your right to their care when you became Spradling's slut. I don't want to ruin you or publicly humiliate you. But if you fight me for custody, I'll drag your name through the mud to the point where you'll never get clean."

"But what will people say, what will they think?" Ann said.

"Look, I have no control over what people say about our breakup, but I do have control over what they know," I said. "There's a difference between suspecting something as a rumor and knowing something as a fact. And if you don't agree with the settlement I'm offering, everyone in town will know what you were doing at the Best Western on Wednesdays. I don't think you want that."

"Are you going to keep me from my children?" she blubbered.

"Ann, I'm not that cruel," I said. "You will be able to see the kids on a regular basis, and I'll be generous in any settlement. You're their mother, and you've been a good one. But I'm their father, and I'm not the one to blame for this debacle. You are, and you don't deserve to be the primary care-giver to my children. It's just that simple."

And that was it. Ann dried her tears then, went up and packed her things. She gave me a long look at the door, then turned and pretty much walked out of my life.

Ann got her own lawyer, and while they tweaked the settlement a bit, she basically agreed with everything I had offered, and 60 days later we were divorced.

I kept the house, while Ann got an apartment in town. We split what we had in savings and any other investments in half, and I got a little bit of child support. It was more symbolic than anything, a legal signal that I was the custodial parent.

She quit her job, found some place else to work, then hit Jack Spradling with a lawsuit for sexual harassment and blackmail. She got a six-figure settlement out of it, and he lost his job, ended up being convicted on the blackmail charge and was sent up for a five-year prison stretch.

I discovered that being single father is no picnic, and I've been forced to remain on friendly terms with Ann, for the kids' sake. The tradeoff is that I've developed a closer relationship with them. I've taken to bringing them to the store and letting them help out, as much as they can, and they've actually become a bit of an asset to the business.

Ann did go for counseling to try to determine why she so easily fell under Spradling's power like she did and how he was able to get her to do some of the things she did for him. I'm not sure if she's resolved anything or not, but I know she isn't dating, so she may still have issues.

I have been dating a few women lately, and some of those dates have turned into sexual encounters. But I haven't met anyone yet that I'm ready to settle down with. I'm not desperate, if that's what you're wondering.

And I also don't pine and carry on about the demise of my marriage. Sure, I miss being married, and I still have a measure of affection for Ann. It was tough for awhile adjusting to sleeping in an empty bed at night.

But she cheated on me, flagrantly, and I wasn't going to tolerate what she did. I took care of the problem and moved on with my life.

Perhaps if Ann hadn't pulled her smoke-and-mirrors routine with me, she might have gotten away with it. Although based on what she was doing, it probably wouldn't have stopped until I caught her.

Too bad. She threw away a perfectly good marriage because she wasn't smart enough or brave enough to tell a king asshole where to stick his threats, and she paid a mighty steep price for that mistake.

Oh well, it's her loss.