The Seducer (37 page)

“Which ones?” Michael perked up at the intrigue.

“Well, like the one where she wrote you a chatty note about everything she did on a given day and whom she talked to. Then, when you wrote her back a brief, disinterested comment, she shot back another email, with the heading, ‘email: Michael style,' and five succinct bullet points of her daily activities.”

Michael smiled, simultaneously flattered and amused. “Oh, yeah, I remember now. You've got a pretty good memory.”

“I paid attention to everything you said about Karen.”

“Why? Because she's your competition?” he arched an eyebrow.

“Not only that,” Ana looked straight into his eyes. “Because she's my precursor. I want to avoid being treated by you the same way that she was. Whatever she did, it didn't work. And I think that's because she showed you how vulnerable she is. How much she needs you. You saw that as a weakness and took advantage of her.”

“So now you're saying she's weak?” Michael asked, entertained by this indirect catfight. Up to recently, Ana had refrained from overtly criticizing Karen while Karen didn't even know of Ana's existence. Now that both women were identifying each other's faults and fighting over him, all he had to do was sit back and enjoy the show.

“I'm saying that she acts like your puppet,” Ana pursued. “She's an egoless egocentric, if you will.”

“I won't, since I have no clue what that means,” Michael said dismissively.

“It means that pretty much all she thinks about is herself. She needs your approval to have a sense of identity,” Ana clarified, not backing down.

“Dang! We're feeling feisty today, aren't we?”

Indeed, I am! How dare that woman, that spineless jellyfish, call me a slut to people I hope to impress? Ana thought, indignant. She was going to give Michael a piece of her mind, quite confident that he'd go back and relay her kind compliments to Karen. “I think in some ways, though, she feels superior to all the other women you've been with. Superior by association,” she continued her analysis.

“How so?”

“Well, it's pretty clear to me that Karen worships the ground you walk on and thinks you're the most special man on Earth. The fact you stuck with her longer than with any other woman must make her feel special too. Like, somehow, she's better than the rest of us just because you, God's gift to womankind, loved her longer and, she assumes, deeper than you've loved anybody else,” she concluded her statement in a mocking tone.

“Great observation, Dr. Ana. But how's that so different from how you feel?” Michael served her criticism back to her. He felt like he had both women right where they belonged, wriggling in the palm of his hand. Pitted against one another, each saw only the other's faults and predicament. Which was all right with him. After all, the more they focused on criticizing each other, the less they noticed his maneuvers.

Ana smiled, being fully prepared with an answer that, she hoped, would keep Michael on his toes. “I can tell you this much: if you ever cheated on me, I definitely wouldn't grovel to get you back.”

“What would you do?” he asked, titillated by the knowledge that he had already cheated on her.

Ana gazed at him coolly. “If I found out about it, I'd kick you to the curb.”

Michael's mouth curled into an ironic smile. “And if you didn't find out?” he brazenly carried the game a move further.

“It would soon become apparent,” she replied with confidence. “You're not that good at faking interest.”

“But how would you know for sure that it's because I cheated? What would you do? Spy on me?”

“I doubt it. Because if it came down to that, there'd be nothing worth saving.” She placed one hand upon her stomach. “My gut instinct would tell me that you don't really love me anymore. And then I'd stop loving you too.”

“That's what we always tell ourselves before the fact,” Michael replied, unfazed. “But when it comes right down to it, when we love someone, we love them for life, no matter what they do.”

Ana examined his tranquil features. “Funny. This is the first time I've heard you speak of unconditional love.” She then thought for a moment and changed her mind. “But then again, it's not that surprising after all.”

“Why not?”

“Because you said it in the context of expecting it from me. When it comes to you, everything's conditional. I bet if I cheated on you; you'd drop me in an instant.”

“You're damn right about that!” he replied. “But I'd still love you and cherish our memories together, the way I do those with Amy and Karen. I just wouldn't be your partner anymore.”

“Spoken like a man who thinks he'll be the cheater, not the cheated,” Ana remarked.

Michael didn't like this formulation. “I don't trust you either, if that's what you mean,” he responded, put on the defensive. “But it doesn't really matter. If you cheat, I leave. It's as simple as that.”

“So much for cherishing our memories!” she pounced on the contradiction.

“Hey, you know me. I prefer to enjoy life rather than dwell on what could of, would of, or should have been,” he boasted, confident that he could rebound from any failed relationship with great ease.

Ana thought about her past. “Unfortunately, my memories aren't so easy to erase. When I fall in love, I love with all my heart. And when I'm mistreated, I hate for life, the way I do Nicu. I'll never cherish a shred of memory with him for as long as I live. We probably had some happy moments together. But for me, the bad always erases the good.”

“That's because you're a pessimist while I'm an optimist. You see the glass as half empty when I see it as half full,” Michael pointed out.

Ana shook her head. “It's not a matter of optimism or pessimism. When people abuse you physically or emotionally, like Nicu did me, it erases everything good they ever did. It makes all the positive seem phony,” she delivered a warning with her gaze as well as her words. “At any rate, what I'm trying to tell you is that if you ever cheat on me, I'll never act like Karen.”

“She just loves me.”

“You have way too much power over her, Michael!” Ana gestured with both hands, becoming heated once again against her rival. “She needs you so much that she's giving you the reins to her life. All you have to do is tug at her strings,” she mimicked the motion, “and she reacts in whatever way she thinks will please you. You're walking all over her.”

“And you're caricaturizing her,” Michael retorted.

“I'm afraid you're the one who has turned her into a caricature,” Ana countered.

“It's not my fault. Karen is who she is. That's her personality. She's clingy and dependent. We've known this for a long time,” Michael exculpated himself.

“Sure, but you encourage her dependency. So, somewhere in there, you must enjoy it. Otherwise you'd have broken up with her once we fell in love.”

“Let's not go over that again,” he said in a tired voice, growing weary of the whole conversation. “We're going round and round in circles. We've already covered the argument of symmetry.”

“Alright then,” Ana conceded, eager to get a satisfactory answer for her more pressing concern. “Now we have symmetry. I'm divorcing Rob to marry you. So then why are you still encouraging Karen to spend a few more weeks at your house, in our current circumstances?”

Michael fidgeted with impatience, feeling backed into a corner. “I already told you. I'm trying to minimize the damage. For your sake and ours. I don't want Karen to freak out and criticize us to my parents.”

“Even though she's done that already.”

“I've hurt her enough, alright? I'm not going to be even more of an asshole to her just to please you!” Michael lost his cool.

Ana gazed at him. She noticed that his regular features were distorted by anger. “Whatever you say ...” she responded, unwilling to pursue their altercation any further. She saw no point in it. Whenever Michael had made up his mind about something, nobody could dissuade him. Ana gazed at his small, fragile hands with unusually rough nails, which had dingy brown crescents underneath: peasant nails, her grandmother would have said. It occurred to her that Michael never really showed his hand. The only thing you could do is play the game to the very end, like Karen did, and risk losing everything or cut your losses and fold. Lately, Ana had been often tempted to fold. But she didn't have the heart to go through with it. She recalled her father explaining to her, a long time ago, Newton's first law of motion. A body in motion tends to stay in motion unless an external force is applied to it. By now, inertia was the main force that still kept her moving, within her lover's orbit. The unbridled attraction that had them gravitating around each other for almost a year had all but disappeared. Yet after having gone so far already, Ana felt like she had to pursue with courage the path she had chosen.

Karen recalled that she had left one of her favorite sweaters in Michael's drawers. She especially missed the one he had given her on her last birthday, a tiny white angora sweater that went down to her navel. He said it reminded him of something Audrey Hepburn might have worn. She opened the second shelf on the left. When she spotted it, she experienced a sense of delight, like someone reuniting with an old friend. There it was, bright white and speckled with touches of silver. It lay neatly folded into four, just as she left it almost a year earlier. Karen lifted it gently and placed it next to her cheek. She breathed in, allowing its softness to embrace her face. Its scent haunted her with the aroma of days gone by, when she and Michael were happy and in love, or so she thought, because she was. She recalled that Michael had handed her a golden bag with a silver bow. “Put it on for me,” he had told her. When she reemerged from the bathroom wearing her black skirt with the white angora sweater, his glance radiated admiration. He approached her slowly and removed it with one swift motion, pulling it with both hands over her head, effortlessly. The memory of the last time she wore that sweater became almost too painful to bear. She placed it back into the drawer, to bury it in their past, where it belonged.

Karen noticed a sliver of white lace. She peered more closely and spotted a pair of white lacy thigh highs that were still attached to a matching garter belt. She pulled out a red bustier with a shoelace design in the front, whose hook was accidentally caught on the fabric of a black dress made of stretchy fabric. Underneath them lay a red and black plaid miniskirt, completing the picture of the kind of gifts her fiancé must have purchased for his girlfriend while he refused to spend any money on her. Karen crammed the lingerie back into the drawer and slammed it shut. The flash of anger took her by surprise. Before this moment, Ana had been more or less an abstraction to her. Now, however, the other woman became tangible and real, embodied by these fetish objects. The air in the room stifled her, redolent with the perfume that another woman wore, with memories that weren't hers. Enough is enough! Karen decided. She walked resolutely towards the door.

As she was stepping out, Michael walked in. He seemed surprised to see her going out this late. “It's past ten o'clock,” he observed, then added, since old habits die hard, “Sorry I'm late. I had a meeting.”

Karen glared at him. “I know all about your meetings. I'm surprised that you didn't bring her over. That way we can have an even bigger meeting together. Maybe your
darling
would entertain us with a fashion show.”

“What the heck are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about all the stuff you bought her! The thigh-highs. The bustier. The miniskirt. The black dress,” she listed each item emphatically, like a prosecutor enumerating evidence in court. “What kind of a person would leave all this stuff behind for me to see?”

Michael said nothing in response. He waited calmly for her anger to subside.

“You two deserve each other!”

“That much is true,” he agreed with an insolent smile.

“I'm going out,” Karen announced, heading for the door.

“Wait. It's really cold outside,” he grabbed her arm. “Where are you gonna go at this hour, in the dark?”

“It's not like you care,” Karen pulled her arm away and left.

Michael sighed. Women. They're so jealous, he thought, as if he had never experienced that emotion before. He opened the refrigerator and removed the tuna casserole. This will have to do, he decided to settle for leftovers. He warmed up the dish in the microwave. For dessert, he treated himself to a scoop of fat free vanilla ice cream that Karen had purchased for herself but hadn't even opened yet.

The phone rang. “Hello?” It was Ana again. Didn't I just see her? Michael asked himself, annoyed. He was hoping to finish correcting the last of the student essays before Karen returned for round two of their altercation. “Hey,” he said flatly.

“What happened to ‘Hey, Baby'?” Ana asked him, her tone between playfulness and reproach.

“Karen just had a fit,” he told her, to justify his sour mood.

“What happened?”

“She found some of your stuff in my drawers.”

“Why was she looking in there?” Ana asked, unsympathetic. “Is she from the
Securitate
?”

Of course. The mandatory reference to communist Romania, Michael thought. By now, he could predict Ana's comments. Does she read from a script? he wondered, all of a sudden aware that he was becoming as bored with his new girlfriend as he had been with his former fiancée. “Well, the Romanian Secret Police sure could have used her. She conducts very thorough inspections,” he commented blandly. “Honestly, I don't know what the hell she was doing rummaging through my drawers. Maybe she was looking for her clothes, since she left some over here. She prefers to pack lightly,” he said by way of explanation, hoping to conclude the cross-examination.