The Seducer

by Claudia Moscovici

  Generally speaking, however, Michael focused on the positive. After all, his girlfriend had done him the favor of expanding his taste palate. Before dating Ana he used to go only for the tall athletic blondes like Amy, but now he also enjoyed a taste of shrimp cocktail. Petite brunettes had become his newest fetish. Plus, he was glad to get back into the swing of things, after a hiatus of near­monogamy. Seducing a woman to the point where she was itching to sleep with him. Man, what a rush! Then, the sex itself, since nothing compares to a good lay, with no strings attached. And now that Karen wasn’t around to cramp his style, he could afford to be pickier. He stuck around longer at the clubs and chose only the hotter chicks. Dumping them once he was through didn’t feel too shabby either. He had become such a pro at the letdown phase that he didn’t even need to be explicit anymore. All he had to do is say in a neutral tone “See you around sometime” and even airheads like Hallyie usually got the picture. His schedule now overflowing once again with women, Michael felt in control of his life, like an orchestra conductor directing an orgasmic symphony. Schedule this woman here, that one there. Squeeze the third one between the date with Mireille and the phone call to Karen. Make some women feel used while giving others false hope. Michael always remained the one in charge.

  The only thing that was missing from this picture was ending it with Ana the right way, on his terms. But, he consoled himself, at least she hadn’t even made a dent in my good disposition. He recalled the visceral pang of pain he felt one afternoon, very early into their relationship, when he and Ana had shared a chair at the library while looking up art galleries on the computer, since there were no other empty seats available. When someone left the adjacent cubicle, she moved to it to have her own chair. He felt as if a piece of his flesh, the part of his thigh that had touched her leg, was torn away from him. He wanted her so badly on that day, more than he’d ever wanted anyone before. But by the time Ana left him, Michael was no longer infatuated with her. Their breakup didn’t hurt him one tenth as much as on the day when she moved only a few feet away. The thin layer of passion having been scraped off by exposure to reality, all that was left of Michael’s emotions for his girlfriend was what he felt for everybody else: layers upon layers of contempt that went to the very core of his being, the hole around which revolved in a dizzying vortex all of his insatiable hunger for pleasure and control. Sometimes he surprised his own self with his immunity to loss, nostalgia and pain. Whatever material other human beings were made of, Michael knew one thing for sure: he was much stronger than them.

  Chapter 17

  “I got you a little something,” Ana announced with a coy smile, extending her husband a greeting card.

  Rob looked quizzingly into her eyes as he tore open the envelope. “What’s the occasion?”

  She shrugged. “There isn’t one. It’s just because you’re so sweet.”

  Rob didn’t know whether to be grateful or weary as he peered down at the card. It had a picture of a little kitten and a sleepy puppy with its floppy ear over the kitten’s head, protecting her underneath it like a cozy cover. The caption read, “And yet it works.... ” He smiled at her. “Thanks.”

  Ana approached him to give him a hug, then a peck on the cheek. “You really are a good person,” she said and this time she meant it, unlike during the days she was planning to leave him for another man, when her husband’s good character was just an abstraction to her. Rob sensed the difference. He heard in Ana’s voice a sense of conviction, which perhaps accompanied the freshness of a new discovery, of falling in love all over again with the person you have ignored for too long.

  As Rob reciprocated, wrapping his arms around Ana, he felt her soft breast upon his chest and sensed her rapid heartbeat through the thin texture of their shirts. When she looked up at him gratefully with her lively brown eyes, he bent down to kiss her. He explored her mouth with his tongue, as if she were simultaneously distant and familiar, a stranger and his wife, the new woman he desired and the one he had always loved. Rob led Ana by the hand to the bedroom and locked the door. She leaned back on the bed and he pulled her towards him by the feet and dove into her body, which had a clingy, viscous sweetness of honey that, at the moment, could make him forget the past. The rhythm of her quickened breathing merged with his accelerated movements, as her moist lips periodically met his cheek, his lips, and his ear. “I love you,” he said, letting go of the hurt, releasing the betrayal, allowing it to flow back into her and become re-assimilated into their love.

  That night, the aura of distance that had separated them even during sleep melted away. They lay side by side, spooning each other, his arm crossed over her naked waist, as he cradled her body protectively into his own. Ana couldn’t even close her eyes, she felt so excited. The man she thought could never desire her again had made her feel both wanted and loved. Unlike the other one, who, she now realized through the contrast between her lover and her husband, had made her feel so intensely wanted that she had confused lust with love.

  Ana recalled the feral look in Michael’s eyes whenever they made love, especially when he twisted her into a position that hurt or asked her to try something new to reignite his senses, never satisfied with the same, always needing more. She closed her eyes to make those images disappear. Go to sleep, forget about him, she advised herself. But the fugue of memories persisted, paradoxically reignited by the renewed intimacy with her husband, which made her see her experiences with her lover in a new light.

  Ana recalled how once, when they had stopped by a hotel, she had noticed a stain on the bedspread and commented to Michael that she’d remove the blanket, since there was no telling who had done what on that bed. Before she even had a chance to pull away the dirty cover, he gently pushed her body into it, face down, lifted her skirt and took her from behind. At the time, she had interpreted his gesture as a sign of his arousal. But later, as he coaxed his way into getting her to accept unacceptable acts, she realized that what excited Michael most was bending her to his will and pushing the envelope.

  Where would it have stopped? she now wondered. “Please try this for me, Baby. I promise it won’t hurt,” he had once told her as he slipped a smooth, anointed finger into her, then quickly removed it and attempted to inch his way in. But he had lied, as usual. Because it did hurt, as much as when Nicu took her against her will the first time and almost as much as when she was giving birth, only without the reward. “Stop it!” she kept crying out until the searing pain drowned out both her own protests and his inducements. Through tear-stained eyes she could see that Michael’s expression was disgruntled.

  “It wasn’t too much to ask of you,” he said to her afterwards. “Lots of women get into it.”

  “Well I don’t,” she countered, still aching. “It hurts.”

  “Only at first, Baby. Just like when you first made love. But with proper lubrication, it doesn’t hurt anymore. I promise.”

  “I don’t want to do that again.”

  Michael looked her in the eyes and said, “Karen said no to me. I don’t want to hear you talk like her. We’re too much in love to deny each other these little pleasures. We’ll take it nice and slow next time.”

  Even back then, Ana began to suspect that her lover’s desire to engage in a given act grew in direct proportion to the vehemence of her refusal. “There won’t be a next time,” she maintained.

  It looked as if Michael was about to get angry, but then he changed his mind. “You say that now. But you’ll see. One eventually gets used to everything in life.”

  “There are some things that I don’t want to get used to,” she had replied. Ana vaguely imagined her lover asking her to do more and more painful acts just to please him. She dismissed those disturbing visions, since after all, she wanted to believe that Michael loved her and wouldn’t want to harm her. “If something you enjoy causes me pain why would you want to do it at my expense? Why would you want to hurt me?” she asked him.

  Michael approached stealthi
ly and whisked her into his arms. His mouth was pressed to her ear when he said, “Because I like to feel your tightness against my shaft.” As he spoke, she felt the heat of his breath through the strands of her hair.

  “But is your pleasure worth my pain?” she backed away to look probingly into his eyes.

  And then Michael had smiled with a disarming air of boyish innocence and replied, “Of course not, Baby. You’re my frail little doll. I’d never want to break my little Papusica.” Afterwards, they made love the way she liked it, softly and tenderly, with the unbearable sensuality that made caresses feel like kisses and kisses feel like the cool gentleness of an evening breeze against naked warm skin. But now she understood that Michael had misled her once again on that afternoon. Because, in his eyes, even his slightest pleasure would be worth her greatest pain.

  Poor Karen! Ana whispered to herself, thinking that her lover’s perversion would now become her rival’s misfortune. “You two deserve each other,” Michael had told her that Karen had commented when she had discovered Ana’s lingerie in his drawer. That may very well be, Ana now felt like answering her, but once we saw the real Michael, I’m the one who left him and you’re the one who kept him, honey. Because in spite of everything he had done to her, Karen still colluded with him, Ana thought, her sympathy diluted by bitterness. She filled his head with warnings and criticisms of me. And he, in turn, filled hers with false promises framed as conditionals—if only you had done this, that or the other thing, we’d have never found ourselves in this situation—so that she’d be there in reserve for him, a safety net to his spills and a slave to his wishes.

  They’d never let go of each other, it dawned upon Ana. She feels incomplete without him and he never fully releases a willing target. I’d be caught between them like in a vice. A cold shiver traveled down the curve of her spine. “A vice in both senses of the term,” she said under her breath, almost forgetting that she lay safely in her own bed, beside a loving husband, with her children sleeping peacefully next door. “What?” Rob mumbled, awakened by the sound of her voice. “Nothing. I love you,” Ana nestled into him, seeking his body’s protection against the nightmare she would have endured.

  Chapter 18

  The bedroom door was shut, but Karen could still hear her giggles, her half-hearted protests, his tender inducements and his grunts. They kept her up at night, like a mocking echo in her brain, making her wish that Michael would do something more drastic, something overtly brutal, so that she’d hate his guts and find the strength to leave him. Karen didn’t even know who was with him in the bedroom. She hadn’t seen the woman go in and hoped to God that she wouldn’t have to watch her leave. The less she saw and heard and felt, the more numb and deaf and blind she became, the lesser the pain. But sometimes it was impossible to ignore all the new ways he found to hurt her. During those moments, she was almost ready to cut the perverse umbilical cord that bound her to Michael in a mixture of pleasure and pain that kept her constantly hovering on the edge of despair. Just when she thought she had enough and could take no more, Michael would back off temporarily. He’d take her out to a fancy restaurant, or make love to her tenderly again, or tell her in that sweet melodious voice of his that he loved her more than ever and that those sluts meant nothing to him. Sometimes he’d promise her that he’d join her soon in Phoenix. There they’d live out her dream of a happy life together, which had originally been his dream, if she recalled. That’s when the unbearable would become bearable again. Until the next time she discovered traces of another woman in his in his life, in his house, in their bed. Then the whole cycle of pleasure in pain would start anew.

  “You’re the one who wants to come visit me here all the time,” Michael retorted when Karen objected to his out of control cheating. But she was only sticking to their initial agreement, of coming to visit him every other weekend, since she found herself unable to weather the distance between them and he almost never visited her in Phoenix anymore. Given that Arizona was Michael’s idea of heaven on Earth, she knew exactly what was keeping him so busy in Michigan. Short of begging him to come see her, which she knew in advance wouldn’t work anyway, Karen learned to become more creative about earning the right to see him regularly. Each time she was obliged to invent a new excuse for why she needed to return to Michigan, which she presented from his perspective, having understood long ago that her desirability to him was measured in terms of utility rather than pleasure. “Your house needs painting,” was the comment that had bought her one weekend with him. “It looks like you have a termite problem. I can take care of it,” had gotten her another weekend together. When she ran out of things to do for him, she had to resort to more neutral and generally less effective justifications, to the effect of “I’ll drop by since I’m visiting my mother anyway.” But in her heart of hearts, it greatly pained her that Michael didn’t want to see her just for herself, without expecting her to offer additional inducements. She was no longer welcome in his house. It was no longer their home. It was his alone and she was only a reluctantly accepted guest.

  Whenever Karen complained about their current arrangement, Michael would kindly remind her that she was the one who had proposed it in the first place. “You gave me no choice,” she’d try to defend her largely involuntary decision. “What could I do? I found myself between a rock and a hard place. It was either Ana or other women. I chose the lesser of two evils. You didn’t really give me the option of an exclusive relationship.”

  “You never asked for it,” Michael countered.

  Karen felt that was sheer sophistry on his part. He knew full well that was exactly what she wanted. A simple, normal, exclusive relationship with him where she’d be once again the center of his life, like during the days when he had courted her so romantically in the beginning. She wanted the whole shebang. Commitment. Trust. Marriage. Maybe even children. Everything that still seemed possible until that woman came along and destroyed everything between us, Karen thought with bitterness. “Ana’s husband chose Ana. And so did you,” she reminded Michael a few days after the break-up with his girlfriend.

  “I said I was sorry. She seduced me. How long will you harp on this? It’s over,” he replied with an air of impatience.

  “You’re not really sorry. You’re just offering excuses.”

  “Excuses? Hell no!” he said.

  By now enough time had elapsed since the end of the affair. It was time. Was he ready? “How much more time do you need to get over that woman?” Karen would ask him periodically. She avoided using Ana’s name, not wishing to personalize her memory.

  Michael’s answer was usually vague, non-committal: “I don’t know,” or “I can’t predict the future,” which was his way of avoiding dealing with the whole gangrenous issue.

  Why do I still want him so much? Karen wondered, perplexed by her own tenacity. As she beat the pavement walking around for hours to keep her body toned and trim, there was not a single day when she didn’t ask herself this very question. Because I love him, was the only answer she could offer. Then she turned the question around, putting the onus on him. Why does this man hurt me constantly? The obvious answer boomeranged back to her. Because I let him. I love him more than anything in the world, she kept repeating, as if this basic truth could somehow justify all her pain.

  Each day she hoped it couldn’t get much worse, yet it always did and she got used to the new mistreatment. What she had found appalling only a week earlier, she eventually came to accept. She began to see Michael’s compulsive womanizing as a sign of his immense desirability. In a weird twist that reversed the poles of pleasure and pain in her brain, his philandering made her feel that being with a man that so many other women wanted was a reward, not a punishment. Karen recalled the anger she felt on the day she found Ana’s lingerie in his drawers. Now, barely a month later, she witnessed Michael luring other women into their house without even batting an eyelid, as if that were normal behavior. How did this happen? Karen tried to recall
the downward spiral which made her head spin with a disorienting mixture of hope and shame. She recalled the withering remark which made her fear that he’d throw her out for good if she objected too much, “You’re always free to leave, you know,” he said coolly. “Nobody’s tying you down here.”

  But in point of fact, Michael did, on a couple of occasions, since he was always exploring new fetishes when the old ones began to bore him. They had already gone through all the “non-negotiable” positions he had practiced with Ana. They had made love in every room of their house and even up on the roof. They made out in parking lots, behind trash dumpsters, in the changing rooms of stores, at the cinema and in men’s restrooms. He had already penetrated every orifice except maybe for her ears. Karen passively submitted to everything, hoping that if she pleased him he wouldn’t need all those other women. But Michael’s appetite for sex was insatiable. Each time they crossed a new boundary, he’d get this flicker of a smile, a moment of triumphant glee. She’d feel encouraged by the sign of approval, as if this time was it, he loved and wanted her the way he had wanted his girlfriend, if not more so, since he’d have to be blind not to see that she loved him far more than Ana ever did.

  If only she did everything he asked her, however painful or humiliating, then she’d eventually get the prize he constantly dangled before her eyes and that prize was his love. But after they had engaged in a certain activity a couple of times, Michael would become dissatisfied again. He’d look at Karen’s naked body as if it were nothing more than a sack of potatoes and tell her in a dispassionate tone that he wasn’t in the mood anymore and that, at any rate, he had a few “errands” to run later on that evening. She knew exactly what he meant since his code was crudely transparent. Once she even insisted that she join him on a so-called “errand,” just to observe his reaction. He wasn’t phased at all. “I thought you weren’t into threesomes,” he taunted her.