As I sat in the courtroom beside my lawyer, I had this
sudden sinking feeling that my entire future was resting on what would happen
in the next few minutes. My lawyer had prepared me well though, all the while
telling me that my testimony regarding my ex-husband-to-be was a good thing,
maybe the only way I could finally get my freedom. I waited on tenterhooks for
the judge to call my name and bid me to the witness stand. After what seemed
like an eternity, he called upon me to testify in my divorce hearing.
Quietly
and with as much dignity as I could muster, I walked to the witness stand. The
bailiff swore me in and then I sat. This was the moment I was dreading, yet I
knew that if I changed my mind now, I would never get the divorce I wanted. The
fact that my husband needed it was immaterial. He was more interested in
looking good to his girlfriend than he was in how I would appear to my family
and friends after my testimony.
It
had all begun one day last January when my soon-to-be-ex-husband phoned me and
asked if we could meet to talk over some issues. I asked him, “What issues,
Paul? We have been separated for more than a year and you want to talk to me
now? How come you could never seem to find the time to do that when we lived
together?”
“Jan,
I was so busy running my auto shop business that I was just too tired to
contemplate a heavy conversation at the end of my workday. You know how it is: you
work full time too, so why are you so surprised that I finally managed to find
the time to talk to you about something very important to me?”
“Oh,
well, you should have said it was
important! I’ll just go ahead and drop everything I have going on right now so
that you can finally vent your frustrations on me, okay?” I shot back
sarcastically at him.
“All
right, I guess I had that coming. I’m sorry for making it uncomfortable for you
to make time for me. I haven’t really been part of your life for some time now.
But believe me when I say this is important; I am not kidding. We need to talk.”
We
decided to meet for lunch at a public place of my choosing so that we could
hash out our “issues.” I thought it must have something to do with our pending
divorce. My lawyer had advised me not to talk to him unless I knew what he was
going to say beforehand, but by this time I was curious, in a detached sort of
way. All I knew for sure was that I was never going back to him. After this
divorce was final, I would quite happily be forever known as his first wife. Somehow
I never thought I’d feel that way after my divorce. Wasn’t divorce supposed to
be nasty and undignified? In my mind, however, it was not, and that was simply
because remaining married to someone who’d fallen out of love with me was
untenable.
At
the Tim Horton’s coffee shop where we’d agree to meet, I was about to find out
what he needed from me. Apparently, during his early college days in his radio
and television arts program, he had wanted to train and work as a film director
and had racked up a number of credits at night school over the past five years
or so. I thought he had a lot of talent as a director. He’d made some short
films over time that had aired on local television and had gotten rave reviews.
Now he wanted to take his films down to the United
States and market himself as a director in New York City
“Jan,”
he said, “I need your consent to change my name to a Canadianized version of
Smirnoff, which is way too Russian-sounding. If I want to make my name in the
film industry in Canada or
the United States
"Paul,
I hate to burst your bubble, but we are getting a divorce. Once the divorce
becomes final, you can do whatever your little heart desires. Change your full
name to Tim Horton if you want—I don’t care.”
“I
know what you’re saying, but I need to get a divorce right now. I have some big
opportunities coming down the pipes to both produce and direct some short films
in the States and I don’t want to give the credit to someone named Paul
Smirnoff. People are going to think I’m making foreign films, which is far from
true. Not only that, I’ve met a special woman whose name is Marina
“Okay,
assuming I go along with you on this, what do I get out of it?”
“You
get an uncontested divorce from me; you get to keep all the nice furniture we’ve
accumulated together over the years, as well as a nice settlement when I decide
to sell my auto shop business. Marina
“How
do you expect me to get a divorce from you? You’re the one who started this
process, suing me for divorce. Too bad you don’t have any grounds though. How
do you realistically expect to get a divorce from me without any real evidence
of infidelity or of mental or physical cruelty? You know that I was never a bad
wife. We just grew apart. I don’t have anything in common with you anymore. You’ve
gone one way and I’ve gone another. So how shall we resolve this ‘issue’? Shouldn’t
we just go for a no-fault divorce? I have no problem with that approach. After
all, we’ve been legally separated for more than a year now. I don’t think we’re
going to get back together again.”
“My
idea,” he replied, “is for you to testify that you slept with your ex-boyfriend
(whom you’d run into accidentally again) during a friend’s party in her
bedroom. In a moment of deep guilt, you decided later to admit to me that you
slept with someone else and were now regretting having done so. Later, I decide
to use this information to get a much-desired divorce from you on grounds of
infidelity.”
“Are
you absolutely out of your mind? Why should I publicly admit to infidelity that
you can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, just so you can get married to your
new girlfriend? Is she a Roman Catholic? Maybe that’s really why you’re making
this outrageous suggestion! Is it true that you can’t get married in a Roman
Catholic church unless you divorce me, not the other way around? Am I
right? In fact, don’t Roman Catholic priests frown on marrying any couple when
one of the parties has been previously divorced?” I looked at him with a question
in my eyes, deeply suspicious of his motives for meeting
with me and asking me for such a favour. It was incredible to me that he would
even contemplate such a thing.
What do I do now? I thought. I want a divorce from him and he knows it. He also wants a divorce from
me and I know it. The trouble is, he wants me to look like I was the sole cause
of the breakdown, but I wasn’t and he knows that too.
When I finally got up to take my oath and
sit down in the witness stand, I still wasn’t sure what I was going to say to
the judge. I only knew that if my husband got what he wanted at my expense, he
would win and I would look like some kind of schmuck to anyone who meant
anything to me. However, I was now sworn to tell the truth and nothing but the
truth and I wanted to hold myself to that standard.
“So,
young lady,” the judge asked me, “did you do anything to violate your marital
vows to your husband? If so, what was it? Remember, you must tell me the truth
here and now.”
“Yes,
Your Honour,” I replied. “I made love to someone who was not legally my partner,
and he consented to this intimate act, thinking I was going to tell the court someday
about having slept with another man in order to get my divorce.”
“Who
was it that you made love to?” the judge asked me.
“I
had a brief fling with my ex-boyfriend, which my husband, Paul, found out about,
and now he wants me to tell you about
it so that he can divorce me and get married to another woman. What
he doesn’t want me to tell you is that this ex-boyfriend of mine is actually
Paul himself, from whom I have been legally separated for at least one year. I’m
telling you this now because even though I do want a divorce from Paul, I don’t
want him to get his divorce from me at the expense of my reputation in the community.
I had suggested a no-fault divorce to him as an alternative, but he doesn’t see
the issue in the same way I do. He wants me to take the fall and bear the full
responsibility for the breakdown of our marriage. This doesn’t seem fair to me
at all. However, if you need me to do so, I may be able to testify to something
that you can accept legally. What do
you want me to do now?”
“Well,
young lady,” the judge said after pondering the matter for a moment or two, “your
husband should not be able to obtain
a divorce from you without evidence of your illicit behaviour. Clearly he doesn’t
have that evidence. That means that if you still want a divorce from him, you
can be granted one today, but it will not be based on your deemed infidelity. It
will be granted because you want it and without your being judged at fault. Do
you want a no-fault divorce from your husband, Paul?”
“Yes,
Your Honour! I do! Thank you so much for listening to my side of this story and
choosing to believe me.”
“In
that case, Janice Smirnoff, you are now granted a no-fault divorce from your
husband, Paul Smirnoff. Court is now adjourned.”
When
I went home later that day, I called some of my closest friends and asked them
to come over to celebrate my new-found freedom. I was going to have to start all
over again from scratch, and that was just fine with me. I was now the first
wife, and that was exactly the way I wanted it to be.
copyright - Anne Shier, 2013, all rights reserved, published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
No comments:
Post a Comment