The Seducer (39 page)

As if confirming her charges, Michael didn't rush to console her. Instead, he observed her coldly, with undisguised disdain. Even Karen doesn't lose it like this, he observed. And she certainly has more class than to do it in public. Looking at Ana now, with her features distorted by tears, Michael couldn't help but see her as a defeated woman. He could hardly believe that he had wanted her so badly for all those months. “Get a hold of yourself, alright?” he said in the patronizing tone with which one chastises a volatile child in the midst of a temper tantrum. “I don't know what lines Rob's been feeding you lately or where all these stupid accusations are coming from. But I'll go ahead and refute them one by one, just
to make you happy
,” he deliberately mimicked her phrase. “First of all, you wanted this affair as much as I did. So don't play Little Ms. Innocent with me cause I ain't buying it. Second, you enjoy the sex as much as I do. So cut the crap and don't play the prude either. It's not a role that suits you. Third, you, yourself made the decision to tell Rob about us and ask him for a divorce. I didn't even know you were going to do it when you did. Personally, I think it was a bit rash. We didn't get the chance to work out all the practical details first. Finally, as far as my own behavior's concerned, I'm a little more stressed nowadays because of our circumstances. That's all there is to it. As usual, you're making a mountain out of a molehill,” Michael was about to conclude, but he noticed Ana's skeptical expression and decided to pursue his argument further. “And while we're still on the subject, I certainly don't find your behavior the same as before either. There's always something with you lately. You're worried or stressed or hysterical or cranky or, more often than not, all of the above. I realize that it's tough to divorce a man you've been with for so long. But I can't have much sympathy for you when you bring most of the stress upon yourself. Like all of the crazy things you're accusing me of. They're all in your head. None of them are real. I wanted to find a solution to your worries, a way to prove to you my commitment. I thought that starting our own family would bring us closer than ever. Remind me never to make any constructive suggestions again, okay?”

Ana glared at him. All of her former gushing feelings of love that had over­flowed into their relationship condensed into an all-pervasive sense of resentment that bordered on hatred. “Michelle told me you'd do this. She warned me that you'd ask me to replace my own children.”

“You're completely nuts! How the hell did the two of you geniuses come up with such a crazy idea?” Michael exploded. “I can understand how an immature kid might say something that preposterous. But you, Ana? How could you possibly think that I'd want you to replace your kids? I've never heard of anything so absurd in my whole life!”

Thinking that she might have overstated her case, Ana attempted to calm down. “I'm not saying that I'd ever abandon my kids. Nobody and nothing could make me do that. I'm just saying that they, themselves, would feel replaced if we had a baby. Think about it. Put yourself in their shoes,” she pursued, more reasonably. “Even as things are, since Rob and I will share custody, I'll be with Michelle and Allan only half the time. If on top of that my time's taken by our new baby, my kids will feel like I'm not giving them the love and attention they deserve. And could you really blame them?”

“Bogus!” Michael retorted. “Many couples divorce and start their own families. That's very common. It doesn't mean that you're replacing the kids you had from a previous marriage. That's got nothing to do with it.”

“That may very well be, but that's how Michelle, and to some degree Allen too, would see it. And given how much I've hurt them already, I don't want to risk doing anything to damage our relationship further,” Ana explained, appealing to his sympathy.

“Children are malleable and their perceptions can change. Parents have influence over them,” Michael countered in the staccato tone he generally assumed whenever his innermost desires were frustrated. “I'm not going to let your kids rule our lives. We're the adults here. We'll make decisions for them.”

“You used the plural form, ‘parents,”' Ana coolly observed. “That obviously means that your Royal Highness acknowledges that I, too, have some say in whether or not we have a baby together. Especially since, presumably, I'd be the one getting pregnant. And I say NO. I don't want to have a child with you.”

Well then, the rules of the game have just changed little lady, Michael decided, telling himself that if Ana wouldn't always put him first, then he no longer owed her anything at all. Through her obvious disregard for his wishes, she had removed whatever trace of good will he had left. “If that's the way you want it, then that's how it will be,” he said in a deeper voice, coming from his chest and the back of his throat. This statement, uttered as a concession but delivered as a threat, rang ominously in Ana's ears.

That morning, as Rob was about to leave for work, Ana glanced at his wrist. She noticed that his watch looked dingy and old. The dial was slightly cracked and the watchband appeared worn. By reflex, she made a mental note to buy him a new watch that day, as she'd have done if they were still a couple. She made sure that the new watch had a small round dial and a smooth black leather band, as her husband preferred. When Rob arrived home that afternoon, she offered him the gift. “It looked like you needed it.”

Rob looked down at the watch, then up at Ana. He could hardly believe the normalcy of her gesture. A rush of emotion overcame him. The gift reminded him of their ordinary life together. He turned away, not wishing to betray his feelings. Michelle silently observed the exchange between her parents. She had become very attuned to their interaction lately. As her father moved away, the girl approached Ana. “This is the first time I've seen Daddy cry. How could you do this to him, Mama?” she hissed under her breath. She was unwilling to accept that her mother would ever want to hurt her father for some stupid man she despised that she'd never in a million years accept as her stepfather. She already had a father. She wouldn't even speak to that dude, the girl resolved from the moment she heard of Michael.

Ana's heart sank upon witnessing her husband's reaction. A few days earlier, they had met with a lawyer to draft the divorce settlement. As Rob had promised, it stipulated joint custody and a fair division of their marital assets. They didn't quibble over any of the details. All of their tension centered on the decision to divorce in the first place, not on the terms of the settlement itself. Rob's fairness, his reliability and all of his other good qualities, which he manifested even during this period of great tension, only emphasized in Ana's eyes the sharp contrast between her husband's good character and her lover's increasingly transparent selfishness.

To distract herself from her mounting anxiety, Ana turned to her son, to help him with his homework, as she usually did before dinner. She rummaged through Allen's overcrowded backpack and removed, as if from a magician's bottomless bag of tricks, a seemingly endless supply of crumpled papers, worksheets, graded assignments, PTA announcements, candy, smashed pop tarts and pencils and pens. After scrimmaging in that messy pile, she finally found his last homework assignment. She recalled that particular essay, whose subject was, ironically, “My Family.” The students had to select a theme—something that defined their family life—and develop it into an essay that included descriptive adjectives, illustrative examples and a main message. Ana read over the second grader's childlike print, with its uneven characters and predictable misspellings:

“My family. By Allen B. Have you ever wondered what will happen next in life? I have come to know it is impossible because everybody gets surprised. Once on vacation, I was in Louisiana and I saw someone was celebrating there birthday. I was so excited for my birthday to come! And I said ‘too bad it's not even my half birthday. ‘ Then my dad said ‘it's your half birthday' and he was serious. That was a good surprise for me!

But a few days ago I also had a bad surprise. My parents told me they want to divorce. They were mad at each other. That makes me sad because they are nice to me. Both love me very much. They don't even ground me or scream at me. They only yell at each other. That's why there getting a divorce. Lots of my friends have stepmothers or stepfathers. But I'm still sad about it. I want to keep my real parents.

I think if you're nice to people, people will be nice to you! When you care for your friends, they will care for you. If you be nice to people, they will like you. If you share your toys with them, they will share there toys with you. I think it's great to make friends and the only way to do that is to be nice. Being nice is an important life skill to have. Because if you don't be nice, you will never make any friends. If you be nice, people will want to hang out with you and you will be able to learn more and more things about that person. If you be nice to people, you are a great person. I wish everybody could be nice to each other. My parents also. I wish them to get along and not fight and not get a divorce. Then there would be lots of love and happiness in our family. Being nice to each other is very important. There would be no more war and weapons if people were nice. Everything would be great in our family and in the world. We would all live peaceful, happy lives.”

Ana raised her eyes from the essay, which contained such untainted wisdom, to look at her son. With his closely cropped hair and a lopsided mustache of chocolate ice cream, the boy looked like the picture of innocence. “I'll always love you and take care of you. We'll do homework together after school, as usual. Nothing will change between us, ” she said reassuringly. Ana then took Allen by his slim little hand, still sticky with traces of ice cream, and enfolded him in a maternal embrace. She felt his warmth and rapid heartbeat. The closeness of this somatic bond filled her with renewed hope. Maybe she could escape Michael's grasp. Maybe her marriage was still salvageable. Maybe the damage done by her affair was not unfixable. She rushed to her husband's office and knocked on the door.

When Rob opened it, she could hardly recognize him anymore. Her usually calm, rational husband had the feral look of a wounded animal. She glanced at his computer screen and saw pictures of women, in neat little squares. “What are you doing?” she asked him, stunned.

“You've made it perfectly clear to me that it's all over between us,” Rob coolly replied. “I need to move on with my life. At first, I didn't want you to leave me. I was devastated by your decision. But now I don't want you to stay anymore. I've seen too much in you that I don't like.”

“So what are you doing?” Ana repeated.

“I'm looking on a dating website. I don't want to suffer anymore. I look forward to falling in love again, with someone who'll treat me right.”

“
Before
I even left our house?”

“
After
you cheated on me and asked for divorce,” he emphasized.

“I thought we were getting along pretty well, under the circumstances,” she alluded to her gift.

Instead of being appeased by this reminder, Rob became flushed with anger. “You can't hold me in reserve. I'm not some damn library book!”

Ana retreated to her room. She told herself that she should have expected that her husband would try to rebuild his life without her. But she was completely unprepared for it happening so soon. The flash of jealousy hit her hard, sneaking up on her like a fist punch from the side. I still love Rob! she belatedly realized.

“Yup!” Michael answered the phone in a flat and uninviting manner that sounded disturbingly familiar to Ana. She had heard him answer that way when he was expecting a call from his fiancée. Only Karen was already there, so Ana deduced, with a sense of disappointment attenuated only by the viscosity of denial, that this time he was expecting her call.

“It's me,” she said.

“Hey, you! What's up?” he attempted to sound chipper.

But Ana noticed traces of anxiety in his tone. She suspected that Karen must have been working on him again. “What's the matter? Did I catch you at a bad time? Were you in the middle of another one of those ‘us conversation' with her?”

“We had a tough day,” Michael confirmed. “We went through our photo albums and split up the pictures. She's letting me have most of them. She doesn't want to be reminded of our past. It's too painful for her.”

“Is she trying to persuade you to stay with her?” Ana asked, threatened by Karen's unshakable attachment to her lover.

“Nope. She's just upset. She's been crying so much that the whole area around her nose is red, like she has the flu or something.”

Ana detected a note of pride, but no sadness whatsoever, in Michael's voice. “She must really love you,” Ana articulated the logical conclusion to his statements.

“Yup. She keeps on telling me that she wishes she could fall out of love with me or love me less.”

Once again, Ana was struck by Michael's smugness. She reminded herself that his emotionless reaction to Karen's pain was the result of his having fallen out of love with his fiancée long ago. Yet part of her refused to believe that her lover could experience such utter indifference towards a woman that he used to love. Perhaps he was hiding something ... “Did you try to comfort her?”

“Of course. I'm not an ogre you know,” Michael ignored her innuendo. “There were a couple of times when I was in tears myself and had to look away.”

“Why did you have to look away?”

“So as not to be inconsiderate, of course,” he calmly informed her. “I mean, we're the ones who caused this whole mess. Our pain's nothing compared to theirs. The least we can do is not rub it in their face.”