The Seducer (15 page)

“For some strange reason, I still prefer the foods I had as a child in Romania. My grandmother used to make this amazing eggplant dish. It's called
salata de vinete
.”

“That's some kind of salad, right?”

“Eggplant salad,” she confirmed. “Would you like to try it?”

“Sure, I'd love to.”

Ana went into the kitchen to get him an extra plate, glass and set of silverware.

“Actually, I've had this before with pita bread,” Michael said as soon as he saw the dish. As Ana busied herself placing some of the eggplant salad upon his plate, the young man scooted his chair closer to her. “Do you miss Romania?” he asked her, meticulously spreading some of the eggplant salad on a slice of bread.

“I'm kind of ambivalent about it. I've had some good experiences there and some very bad ones as well.” She sliced a tomato on his plate.

“You mean because of the Ceausescu regime?”

Ana put the knife down on the table. “That plus the revolution, which led to my parents' death. But even afterwards, I went through a difficult time.”

He saw she looked uncomfortable. “I didn't mean to pry.”

To change the subject, Ana suggested a different way of eating the dish. “You can also try putting some of the eggplant on a slice of tomato. Or, better yet, dip the tomato into the eggplant. That's how peasants used to eat it in my country.”

Michael followed her lead. “Mmm, it's pretty good like this.” He covered another slice with eggplant dip and offered it to Ana. She closed her eyes to better savor the flavor. Then it was his turn again. Ana slipped a slice of tomato into his mouth. She had almost forgotten how such simple acts could bring so much delight.

“What about the baba ghanoush?” he reminded her.

“Oops, I forgot!” But the next time she didn't. To show him just how attentive she was, she even wiped a few tomato seeds from his chin with a paper napkin. He noticed that she was examining his face with curiosity. “Why are you looking at me like that? Do I still have food on my chin?”

“No, I was just wondering ...” she began, but didn't finish her sentence. Everything about Michael—his forwardness, his sensuality, his gestures, even his good looks—struck her as, somehow, too slick and smooth, which simultaneously repelled and attracted her. In both high school and college, Ana thought with a hint of pride, I managed to avoid men like him.

“About what?” Michael prodded her.

“I'm not sure it's polite to ask.”

“You can ask me anything you like.”

“Are you a seducer?” Ana asked him point-blank. Polite or not, it's better to let him know that I've got him figured out, she told herself.

Michael couldn't help but laugh at the bluntness of her question. “What makes you say that?”

“I don't know. The way you look. The way you act. The way you look at me. You strike me as the seducer type.”

Michael shifted in his seat, deciding how much information to disclose. “I was before, but I'm not anymore,” he replied, his tone ambiguously suspended between the repentance Karen expected of him and the boasting manner he assumed with his buddies.

“When was that? Yesterday?” Ana quipped, coming much closer to the truth than she realized.

Michael acted wounded by her comment. “I went through a period when I had something to prove,” he explained, assuming an introspective demeanor.

“To whom?” she leaned slightly forward, intrigued by his apparent honesty.

“Mostly to myself.” He noticed a blend of sympathy and curiosity in her expression.

“You wanted to prove your virility?”

The way Ana had pronounced the word “virility,” slightly rolling the r, triggered his desire. “I suppose. But mostly, I just wanted to prove to myself that I could get over someone.”

“Who? Your fiancée?”

“No. This girl I dated back in college. Her name is Amy. She was my first love, I guess.”

“You guess? You mean you don't know?”

Michael looked away, then back at Ana, as if about to reveal something still painful to him. “She left me for another guy.” After a brief pause, he added, “She's the one who cheated on me yet she called me a snake. It took me months to get over her. But once I did, I kind of went overboard and started dating dozens of women.”

“Dozens?” Ana repeated with alarm. Then she recalled how many of her acquaintances in college played the field, as people tend to say. If you don't date a lot during college, when can you enjoy your youth and have some fun? And how are you supposed to know that you found the right person, without comparing? she asked herself, becoming aware once again of her growing dissatisfaction with her marriage. I've only dated seriously one man and we got married young. Maybe that was a mistake, she now speculated. But what in the world motivated Michael to go to the opposite extreme? “Was that the only way you could get over the rejection?” She was intrigued by the tension between the young man's sensitive demeanor and the cavalier behavior he had just described.

“Maybe so. Some people drown out their sorrow with drink. I drowned out mine with women.”

Ana considered for a moment the comparison. “This sounds like some kind of addiction,” she observed. Do people ever overcome those? she wondered, recalling the popular saying that once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. “When did you stop doing that?” She hoped he'd reply years ago.

“When I met you,” Michael said instead, thinking that she'd feel flattered.

Ana, however, focused on a different angle. “So you've been cheating on your fiancée all along?” she leaned back in her seat, repelled by his confession.

“I had a lot of pent-up anger inside,” he tried to explain.

“You mean because of what your first girlfriend did to you?” she asked, puzzled.

“At first, I cheated partly out of vengeance. And maybe also to overcome the rejection. But then I started having fun with it,” he replied, knowing from experience that sporadic admissions of misbehavior were often confused with total honesty.

“But why couldn't you be faithful to Karen? After all, she wasn't the one who cheated on you. Or was she?” Ana pursued, feeling that Michael's behavior didn't speak well of his character yet also hoping that his explanation would resolve all the apparent contradictions in his story.

“No, she wasn't.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“I don't know. I mean, clearly I'm to blame. I've been a jerk to her,” Michael sounded genuinely contrite. “The truth of the matter is that Karen was never the right woman for me,” he added, gazing steadily into Ana's eyes, as if to hint that she, herself, might be the one he had been looking for all along. “It's tough to explain,” he went on. “Karen's nice, don't get me wrong. But she's very cold in temperament. I tried for almost two years to get her to warm up to me. I did everything I could to make her be affectionate. Unfortunately, it was a thankless task. For the longest time, she didn't even want to live with me, even though we were already engaged. She decided to live with her parents.”

Ana didn't say anything, but looked unsympathetic. So what? she asked herself. Some people prefer to move in with their partners after getting married. That doesn't warrant cheating on them. It occurred to her that Michael was offering intimate details about his relationship with Karen to impress her and awaken her sympathy. I sure wouldn't want to be in his fiancée's shoes! she said to herself. What woman would appreciate being used as a pick-up line for another woman?

Reading disapproval in her expression, Michael continued his narrative. “Plus Karen's often in a bad mood. Come to think of it, I've rarely seen that woman happy. Her own nephew prefers me to her,” he boasted with an obvious sense of satisfaction. “Whenever I show up at her sister's house, he lights up. Even though I tend to play rough with him. You know, to make him into a more manly man. I toss him up into the air and catch him, then throw him over my shoulder. We like to horse around, the way dads do with their sons,” he added with a faraway look in his eyes, to hint that he was secretly yearning for a family of his own.

In spite of her reservations, Ana had a quick mental image of Michael tossing her own son into the air, playfully, just as he had described. Then she came back to Earth again. “But then, why didn't you break up with Karen? I mean, once you figured out that the two of you aren't compatible?”

“I guess because I always hoped, and maybe still do, that by being nice and warm and loving to her, I can get her to reciprocate.”

“One of the first things we're told as adolescents is that you shouldn't go into a relationship hoping to change the person you love. It's a futile task,” Ana pointed out.

Michael peered into her eyes: “Did you remember that advice when you married your husband?”

Ana felt his gaze drill straight through her, exposing her insecurities and dissatisfactions. “I suppose not,” she conceded.

“What makes you say that?” he probed further.

“Rob's very busy with his work,” she replied, wanting to open up to him without getting too personal. “It doesn't leave him much free time for our family.”

“Don't I wish I had that problem!” Michael exclaimed. “Karen's just the opposite. Always on my back. Very clingy. Without me, she's a lost soul.”

“Maybe that's because you cheated on her, so she doesn't trust you anymore,” Ana speculated.

“No doubt that's got something to do with it,” he sheepishly agreed. “Although she doesn't even know the full extent of it. She's only caught me twice.” He tried to repress a mischievous grin, but it twitched at the corners of his mouth.

I knew he was a player! Ana told herself. Yet she remained intrigued by the titillating possibility of a life of pleasure, with no responsibilities and moral boundaries; the very opposite of the life she led. “Just how many other women have there been?” she asked him.

“Too many,” Michael replied with deliberate vagueness. “But I assure you that if Karen had been warm and loving to me, there would have been
zero
,” he emphasized. “I did my best to improve our relationship. As they say, a tiger doesn't change its stripes.”

What about your stripes? Ana thought looking at him. Could you ever be faithful if you fell in love? But she couldn't really ask him such a question, since he might interpret it as an overture. “How come none of your efforts to improve your relationship helped the situation?” she inquired instead.

Michael shrugged. “How do you reinvest value in a relationship that has pretty much lost its value?”

“By working on it,” Ana fell back upon common wisdom.

“Yeah, but you need to have something to work with.”

“And you didn't?”

Michael shook his head. “I guess not enough. If there's anything I've learned from this whole experience with Karen is that if a relationship requires work, it's not worth saving.”

Thinking of her own marriage, Ana identified with Michael's sentiment. But then another explanation occurred to her. “Are you afraid of being alone?”

“What do you mean?”

“Without a girlfriend.”

“I can have any woman I want!” he boasted defensively. “I haven't been single since the age of fifteen.”

“Which kind of confirms what I said,” Ana insisted, looking into his eyes with gentleness. “Solitude must frighten you.”

“It's hard to tell,” Michael decided to go with the flow of her sympathetic explanation. “Because, like I said, I've never been alone. I've had so many women that I lost count,” he said in a neutral tone, this time not bragging, just making a factual observation.

“But you still seem to want to hold on to Karen,” Ana emphasized, thinking to herself, why would a man need a steady girlfriend, if all he wants to do is cheat on her? The answer to this question seemed obvious to her. “Which means that you need a level of intimacy in your life that isn't possible with one night stands. Otherwise, casual relationships would suffice, wouldn't they? You wouldn't need to work so hard on your relationship with Karen.”

Michael saw her observation as a perfect opening. “To tell you the truth, Ana, for so many years I've been waiting for the real deal. I want the whole package. Love, lust and friendship, all rolled up into one.”

“Then how come you didn't get attached to any of the other women you dated?”

He smiled at her naiveté. “It's just like a woman to ask such a question. For men, sexual intimacy doesn't imply emotional attachment.”

“I know that, of course,” Ana agreed, embarrassed to show her inexperience. “But still, what I find a bit unusual, is that out of so many women you were dating, none of them attracted you in particular. I mean as human beings, not just physically.”

“It's not what I wanted at the time. I wasn't looking for love. For that, I already had Karen.”

Ana contemplated his answer in silence, attempting to grasp his curious mix of detachment and attachment to his fiancée.

“What women don't realize,” Michael pursued, moving away from the domain of ethics and emotion, which made him viscerally uncomfortable, to that of erotic pleasure, with which he was completely at ease, “is that for men, each woman's body is different. They all have the same basic parts, or at least one hopes they do. But each woman has a unique shape and feel and ways of touching and kissing and all that's very exciting.” Ana stared fixedly at him, entranced. “I mean, this may seem trivial because it's so obviously true, but in a way it's not, because it's part of why men fool around. You see,” Michael continued in a confidential manner, “each woman has different kinds of breasts, some pear shaped, some round, some very small like little peaches, others elongated and ripe like bananas,” he said, making light of his own hedonistic sensuality. “The same thing applies to other parts of the body. The hips, the legs,” he suggestively lowered his gaze to her knees, since Ana's legs were covered by her skirt.