The Seducer (44 page)

“How come these concerns didn't prevent you from having the affair and asking for a divorce in the first place?” Dr. Emmert pursued.

“That's what I'd like to know,” Rob chimed in.

“Because I didn't have them at the time,” Ana replied in all honesty. “When I first started seeing Michael, I focused mostly on what was lacking in our marriage,” she launched into the main topic of discussion she had been having with her husband. “For many years, I've been feeling that our marriage was sterile.” She noticed that the psychiatrist didn't seem particularly sympathetic to her characterization. “Don't get me wrong, Rob's a good man and a great father,” she qualified, not wishing to seem unfair. “But as a couple, we didn't have that much intimacy left in our marriage. I mean, for a number of years, we haven't even slept in the same bed anymore. We also didn't talk much, except about practical matters and the kids. For quite some time, Rob and I have been estranged. And I, for one, felt pretty hopeless about it.”

“That didn't justify you cheating on me and leaving me for another man!” Rob interjected, his anger aroused all over again by what sounded to him like a self-serving rationalization. “Our estrangement was mutual, but I didn't deal with it as selfishly and dishonestly as you did.”

Ana nodded. “I realize that,” she said calmly. “And I'm not trying to justify my actions. I'm just answering Dr. Emmert's question by explaining why I was susceptible to Michael's advances.” She hoped the psychiatrist would see that every marital crisis had two sides, even if they weren't always equal. “For almost a year, Michael showered me with attention and affection. I mean, it's rare to find someone who cares about you, your dreams and frustrations to the point where he
wants
to hear about them,” she emphasized, leaning slightly forward in her chair. Then she relaxed again, feeling deflated. “With Rob, I often had the impression that telling him about what's on my mind was kind of like pulling teeth. And when he does communicate with me, it's mostly out of duty. He rarely seems to enjoy it.”

“I think Ana's exaggerating,” Rob objected, also addressing Dr. Emmert, as if they found themselves before a judge in court. “We don't have such horrible communication, as she claims. We do talk. But I have a full time job so I can support my wife and kids. Ana has the luxury of focusing full-time on her art. When I come home tired from work, I prefer to unwind on the computer or watch a game. I don't feel like engaging in some heavy duty conversation about her frustrated ambitions or our marital problems or God knows what.”

“... or about movies or literature or art or anything at all,” Ana supplemented his sentence.

“What leads you to believe that such ample communication would have lasted with Michael once the two of you moved in together?” Dr. Emmert asked Ana.

Ana had a flashback to the fight she and Michael had had at the Chinese restaurant, recalling how little they had to say to one another during the last few weeks of their relationship. But she felt put on the defensive by both her husband and the psychiatrist, as if they were ganging up against her and her former lover. “Because we
genuinely
shared the same interests—in art, movies and literature—and didn't have to force ourselves to communicate. Everything came effortlessly with Michael,” she focused on everything except the end.

Upon hearing this, Rob got up. “Listen, I didn't come here to listen to you sing praises to your lover!”

“Come on, Rob! I'm just trying to explain,” Ana tugged at his hand, attempting to get him to sit down again.

Rob pulled his hand away. “Of course you are!” he said, but sat down anyway, determined to find in the therapy session a resolution to his ambivalence. “She talks as if this guy walked on water,” he addressed the psychiatrist. “If you only knew how devious and selfish he is! I haven't personally met him, yet from everything Ana's told me about him, even when she tries to praise him, he sounds like a horrible human being. The lowest of the low.”

Dr. Emmert nodded to him sympathetically. “It would be interesting to know how his fiancée would describe him,” he sought another angle to reach Ana, since the direct approach didn't seem to work. “Would she describe him in negative terms, like Rob just did, or glowing terms, the way you did?' he asked Ana.

“You're referring to Karen, his fiancée?” Ana corrected him. “Probably not. But they didn't have as much in common as we did.”

“Or so he told you ...” the therapist said skeptically.

“She bought into everything that guy told her to get laid!” Rob heatedly declared.

“There's no need to be crass ...“ Ana replied.

“I'm being crass? What about your actions?”

“My actions were wrong,” she admitted. “But my motivations weren't what you think they were.”

“Sure they were. They were completely selfish.”

“And perhaps also based upon false assumptions,” Dr. Emmert added. “Apparently, you assumed that the honeymoon phase with Michael could have continued forever.”

“Are you saying that my relationship with him would have eventually turned into his relationship with Karen?” Ana asked him.

“I don't know,” the therapist replied in a detached, nonjudgmental manner. “But it seems to me like it wasn't just your love for your husband and children that made you change your mind,” he looked probingly into Ana's eyes. She averted her gaze, uncomfortable with the scrutiny. “I'm sure that had a lot to do with it,” he added, to put her at ease. “I certainly don't wish to minimize that. But I suspect you had other compelling reasons. I'm a big believer in the unconscious. Somewhere in the back of your mind you must have realized that the honeymoon period with this man would be pretty short-lived. Something must have scared you away from him.” He observed closely her reaction, as she nervously fidgeted with her bracelet.

Ana felt obliged to nuance her claim: “I hoped that Michael and I wouldn't tire of one another,” she said quietly. “Because our relationship wasn't just about mutual pleasure, as Rob and Karen seemed to think. Our compatibility was on all levels—intellectual, emotional and psychological—not just sexual.”

“For you maybe. Not for him,” Rob emphasized.

“Do you think that mutual pleasure and compatibility are sufficient to form a lasting bond between two people?” Dr. Emmert came to his aid by reverting to the Socratic approach, which had brought some of Ana's misgivings to the surface.

“No. You also need principles,” she responded.

“And where do you believe principles come from?” the psychiatrist pursued his line of questioning.

“Ethics,” Ana replied tautologically, feeling confused.

“I suspect that empathy might also have something to do with it,” Dr. Emmert suggested. “Scruples are inseparable from love. They depend on caring enough about another person to put yourself in their shoes. Given his attitude and behavior, do you think Michael would have been capable of empathy? I mean, over time?”

“Not a chance!” Rob answered on his wife's behalf.

“Well, up until the last few weeks together, Michael was very supportive of me,” Ana found her husband's statement too harsh. “How can I put it? At first, he showered me with love and attention. When I was upset about getting thrown out of my gallery, unlike Rob,” she directed her husband a reproachful glance, “he comforted me and helped me find other galleries.”

Rob turned to his wife. “Are you completely blind? He didn't live with you, Ana. He wasn't supporting you and the kids. It didn't cost him much energy or time to
sound
supportive to you. But the point is that I actually
was
supporting you, in every way that counts! Because of me you could afford to be an artist, full-time, and do what you wished.”

“That's true,” Ana was obliged to acknowledge. She would have liked to add that Michael had promised to support her too, without ever reproaching her for being an artist, even when the market for art waned. But it occurred to her that any defense of Michael was pointless in this context. It only incensed Rob, while the psychiatrist deliberately asked her leading questions that went against the grain of her replies.

As if confirming her impression, Dr. Emmert inquired: “And when did Michael express interest in making a serious commitment to you?”

Ana paused for a moment, thinking that his question was somewhat of a non sequitur. “Almost immediately,” she said. “We fell in love pretty fast. But it wasn't love at first sight. It went deeper than that. A total compatibility. ‘The whole package,' as Michael liked to say.”

Rob felt like getting up to leave again. “The only package that guy cared about was the one in his pants,” he commented.

“How soon did he want the package in question delivered to his front door by wrapping up the divorce?” Dr. Emmert indulged in a little play on words of his own.

“Within a few weeks, a month at most,” Ana estimated, thinking that the therapist was evidently on Rob's side, as the wronged spouse. But, in spite of that, she liked him. At least he hadn't told Rob that she's a lost cause, even if he may have thought it. “Michael tried to persuade me that our love was special and that we belonged together. He argued that our passion couldn't be shared. He wanted us to become a normal couple. By that he meant living together, not hiding ‘like prisoners,' as he put it.”

“Did you agree with him?”

“In principle, yes. If I hadn't already been married with kids. But our circumstances, particularly mine, changed everything.”

“It didn't change much at all!” Rob objected. “You jumped into bed with him anyway and destroyed our marriage.”

“Did you find it strange that Michael was pushing for commitment so soon? I mean, given that the two of you barely knew each other?” Dr. Emmert asked her, more diplomatically.

Ana hesitated. “Yes and no. No, because, like I said, we fell madly in love from the start. I suppose I did find it a little strange that he didn't want to wait for our compatibility to be confirmed over time. But I interpreted it a sign of love, which is how he presented the whole thing to me.”

“How could you possibly imagine that a guy who pressures you to destroy your family would want what's good for you, Ana?” her husband asked her. “And don't you think that a guy who wants to have sex with you right away is likely to behave that way with other women too?” he pursued.

“I think Rob's right about that. It seems to me that Michael's impatience should have been a warning signal,” the therapist concurred. “Because normal, healthy relationships take some time to develop,” he elaborated. Most people don't make such a serious commitment right off the bat, when there's so much at stake. Especially given the fact that, as you pointed out to him, you're a married woman with kids. Such a decision would have impacted the lives of your entire family.”

“But why would falling madly in love be a warning signal?” Ana objected. “Sometimes it can be a positive sign. It means that you're right for each other.”

“It makes me sick to hear the phrase ‘madly in love' applied to that jerk,” Rob said.

“Sometimes relationships that begin with love at first sight, as they say, end up with a less exciting but deeper attachment,” Dr. Emmert sought to remain objective. “But based on my clinical experience, a rapid warm up, coupled with the demand for instant commitment, tends to be a very bad sign. It usually means that the person has shallow emotions. So they're likely to detach from you as quickly as they attached.”

Ana wasn't prepared to accept such a negative conclusion. In her mind, that was like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Clearly, she told herself, Dr. Emmert, like Rob, didn't understand much about the mysterious workings of passion. But she decided to focus on finding common ground rather than engaging in a futile debate about the nature of love. “I didn‘t want to commit in the way Michael asked me to because I felt attached to my family. He and I argued quite a bit about this issue.”

Rob shook his head. “You proved to us that your attachment to your family was trivial, if you left us for him.”

“I wasn't going to abandon my kids!” Ana objected.

“But you abandoned me.”

Ana didn't know what to say in response. Rob was right. She was planning to leave him, despite her ambivalence.

“So why did you give in to Michael's pressure?” Dr. Emmert asked her.

She didn't reply immediately. This was a question she had asked herself repeatedly during the course of her affair. She still didn‘t have a clear answer to it. “It's not that Michael ever forced me to do things I didn't want to do. I mean, he didn't order me around or give me any ultimatums,” she gestured, struggling with the vagueness of the information she was trying to convey. “He could have easily blackmailed me about moving to Phoenix with his fiancée. But he never did that, at least not explicitly. Yet, somehow, it was an undercurrent between us, like an implicit threat or something. Whenever I didn't go along with his wishes, I sensed that he withdrew from me. It was as if our mutual affection and all the good times we shared were instantly erased from his mind, like they never existed,” she recalled the emotional vacuum she felt whenever she and her former lover disagreed.

“And how did that make you feel?”

“Horrible,” Ana began unburdening herself of some of the negative recollections. “I mean, with a more normal man, the difference between closeness and detachment doesn't feel that big. In most relationships, you just go from lukewarm to cool,” she measured a miniscule distance between her thumb and index finger. “But with Michael, the difference was staggering,” she extended her arms wide open. “Whenever we disagreed, we'd go from boiling hot to ice cold within a matter of seconds. And I dreaded the coldness. So I almost always gave in to his wishes. Because I didn't want to lose him.”