The Seducer
Page 44
My worst regret is that I stayed with you in spite of everything. I told myself that each and every sacrifice you demanded of me would be worth it, because it was for you and our relationship. I asked myself: can I live without any faith in my partner’s fidelity? Can I live without any kind of trust in him? Can I live apart from him, sequestered somewhere in Arizona, just to save our relationship? Can I live without spending money on myself? Can I live without my family, thousands of miles away from them? Can I live without my job? Can I live with all the humiliations he’s making me endure, just to compete with whatever perverse acts the sleazy women he hangs out with are doing with him? Can I accept the assumption that my ‘no’ means ‘yes’ to him? To each of these questions I answered “Yes, I can” because I loved you. But each time I made a sacrifice, the rewards got smaller, not bigger as I hoped. Each time I gave in, you were less affectionate, less attentive, less interested and kept demanding more and more out of me, as if I owed it to you. And each time I gave in to you, my strength was cut in half and I became less capable of resisting you the next time you trampled all over me. Our whole relationship became a one-way street. Which makes me wonder why I stayed with you for as long as I did; why I accepted such unfair conditions and kept jumping through all those hoops that never got me anywhere.
I stayed with you at first because I believed the illusion you created for me by using other women for sex while appearing to treat me differently. I was convinced that you lusted after them, but that you loved and respected only me. I thought that I was somehow special in your eyes. But when I found out about Ana, it burst that bubble. Afterwards, I stayed with you mostly because I no longer had the strength to leave. I stayed because I feared ending up all alone, without a man who loved me. I stayed because seeing the truth about our relationship would have meant having to face up to the truth about myself: that I needed you to feel like I was someone worth loving.
But the thing is, Michael, I never really felt safe or happy with you. In the back of my mind, I always felt anxious and insecure. I was suspicious of what you might be doing with other women behind my back. I felt inferior to you and, in some respects, to all those women you seemed to want so much more than you ever wanted me. I felt that, somehow, I deserved the mistreatment or, at any rate, that I didn’t deserve anything better. In other words, I stayed with you mostly because I didn’t love myself enough rather than because of how much I loved you. But that chapter of my Life is finally over. Unlike the poor caterpillar eaten by the wasp, I’m still very much alive and ready to move on. I’m no longer the insecure, incomplete person you once knew. I’m not afraid to be alone and I’m not afraid to love again someone real: someone who promises me nothing but acts in a way that’s respectful and honest. I no longer blame only myself for the way you treated me. No one will abuse you unless you allow them to. But, by the same token, no one will abuse you unless they choose to do it. And you did, Michael. You chose to use me.
In moving on from our unloving relationship, I feel like I’ve survived a war. The toughest battle wasn’t the one against you. It was the one against my own insecurities, which bonded me to you in the first place. It’s taken me a long time to come to this realization. Now that I finally have, I’m able to let you go in peace, without hating you, without wishing you any harm. I only hope that other women will be wiser and stronger than I was and more fortunate than Ana. I also pray that you won’t prey upon others, even though I don’t have much hope. Because I don’t believe you want to change. You’re very happy with who you are. But that’s no longer my problem. Being bitter or resentful towards you would prevent me from focusing on myself Just know that I’ll never cover for you again. Don’t count on me anymore. You’re entirely on your own as, in fact, you’ve always been. Because, in your heart of hearts, you’re a Lone wolf Karen
A few days later, Michael lay on his bed, with one arm folded underneath his head since the pillow was too small and thin, the other holding up Karen’s letter. He could hardly believe his eyes. As he was looking over the note, several spasms of anger passed through him. The dark, oblong letters of her careful, feminine handwriting danced upon the yellow page. Once he was done reading, he crumpled up the pieces of paper and threw them diagonally, to the furthest corner of his jail cell. For a few minutes, he couldn’t even think straight, he felt so furious. But after a few minutes, he decided to take care of business by eliminating all traces of that hysterical note, so that it wouldn’t bug him anymore. He crossed the room with a deliberate gait, picked up the crumpled paper, tore it up into tiny little pieces, then tossed them by the handful like confetti into the latrine, to flush Karen and all of her delusional crap down the toilet, where they belonged. He urinated on those bits of paper before they swirled down into the liquid abyss. I don’t need you bitch anyway, he muttered to himself.
Having taken care of this unpleasant business, Michael’s disposition instantly improved. Let’s see, he calmly reviewed the situation. His parents and some of his former professors and colleagues would write letters attesting to his good character to the parole board. The prison psychologist was absolutely nuts about him. He had her wrapped around his little finger and, he was obliged to admit, he kind of had the hots for her too, a little bit. If everything goes according to plan, within a month or two I’ll be out of this dump, he mused, reclining on the bed again.
Michael stretched out his arms above his head and wiggled his body. He enjoyed the cool smoothness of the sheets against his warm back. It made him feel as if he were already back at home, the king of his castle. He could almost see, with his mind’s eye, the two large pine trees in his front yard that shielded him from the prying eyes of neighbors. Michael was overcome by the familiar sense that all was well with the world. His bubble had protected him yet again from the malevolent lies of those two-faced women whom he never loved in the first place. Pretty soon, he’d be enjoying life to the fullest again. Michael looked forward to tracking down Tanya and luring her to sunny Arizona. Or maybe even moving to California, to see if he could rekindle the unfinished romance with Amy, his old flame. A wave of glee passed through him as he thought, “Ladies, fasten your seatbelts cause pretty soon it will be SHOW TIME!” in bold capital letters of a flashing neon sign, like at his favorite strip club, Foxy Lady.
About the Author
Claudia Moscovici is the author of Velvet Totalitarianism, a critically acclaimed novel about a Romanian family’s survival in an oppressive communist regime due to the strength of their love. This novel was republished in translation in her native country, Romania, under the title Intre Doua Lumi (Curtea Veche Publishing, 2011). In 2002, she co-founded with Mexican sculptor Leonardo Pereznieto the international aesthetic movement called “postromanticism” (see postromanticism.com), devoted to celebrating beauty, passion and sensuality in contemporary art. She wrote a book on Romanticism and its postromantic survival called Romanticism and Postromanticism, (Lexington Books, 2007) and taught philosophy, literature and arts and ideas at Boston University and at the University of Michigan. Most recently, she published a nonfiction book on psychopathic seduction, called Dangerous Liaisons (Hamilton Books, 2011).