The Seducer (51 page)

Ana pondered this question. First things first. At the moment, she didn't even feel confident in her reply concerning this one, let alone “the next one.” Her lover's smoothness, persistence and passion had profoundly shaken the foundations of her being and her life. Her conscience had been leveled by largely uncontrollable emotions, impulses and desires. Her marriage would have to be reborn from the ashes, like a phoenix bird. Her children had just been taken for an emotional roller-coaster ride that might have scarred them for life.

Ana was interrupted from her thoughts by a loud knock on the door. She went to see who it was, surmising that it was probably the mail carrier delivering the package of books she had recently ordered online.

Instead of the mailman, however, she was faced on the other side of the glass panel by the door with Michael's friendly smile, as if they hadn't had an altercation less than an hour ago.

“Come on, Baby, open the door,” he urged her in such a lighthearted manner that he seemed to be laughing off their earlier lovers' quarrel. “I'm more in love with you than ever after the stunt you just pulled on me. That only proves we're meant for one another, you spunky little girl!”

Ana hesitated. Every rational fiber in her being told her to resist all of Michael's advances henceforth. Yet part of her remained drawn to her lover's familiar charm as well as their former complicity, welded by months of intense passion, forbidden pleasures and—she thought—friendship. Ana's whole being trembled with the ambivalence that the prey must feel when it's caught in the mesmerizing gaze of its predator, as it absurdly hesitates between life and death, between capitulation and escape.

“I can't talk to you anymore,” Ana said, without opening the door. She felt a tingling sensation, shortness of breath and a rush of adrenaline as her body kicked into combat mode.

“So all those times you said you loved me meant nothing to you? So much for living for passion and art!” Michael said with a note of reproach.

Through the rectangular glass panel on the side of the door, she could see him make a theatrical, sad face; an inverted smile like a masked figure in an ancient play. He may have wanted to appear sincere, but he looked grotesque. “What about you?” she challenged him. “Would a passionate man ask the love of his life to sign a prenup?”

“I was only trying to protect our assets. Yours too, not just mine.”

“Yeah, right! Your paws would have been all over my money while you kept the house in your name alone. Would a passionate man become stingy all of a sudden?” she continued. “I said ‘yes' to my generous lover only to end up with Karen's stingy fiancé!”

“Hey, it cuts both ways. You became petty too.”

“Did I also require you to wear a certain uniform for me?” Ana let out some of the bile that had been building up inside. “I didn't appreciate being told to only wear skirts around you or how I should wait for you when you came home from school. Even my daughter has been choosing her own clothes since the age of seven. You need to buy yourself a Barbie doll if you want to play dress-up!”

Michael seemed amused by her anger. He was tempted to kindly inform her that he had had plenty of real-life Barbies, only he preferred to play dress-off rather than dress-up with them. “All you had to do is say ‘no.' I always listened to your wishes and did exactly what you wanted,” he answered instead.

His seemingly conciliatory statement only incensed Ana further. “Always, of course! Like when I told you that I didn't want to have a baby with you and you decided to look for someone else on a dating website?”

Michael's calm demeanor changed. He became agitated and started to gesticulate, marking each phrase with abrupt, vertical hand beats. “You're completely nuts!” he exclaimed. “I've explained all of this to you before. I never intended to replace you. I just wanted to prove to you, since you're so goddamn stubborn, that even those silly websites would match us up.”

Upon hearing this absurd explanation again, Ana became downright furious, picking up steam as she vented her anger. “Like you ever cared about what others thought! You must think that I'm a total idiot. You're lying through your teeth and it's obvious. The gig's up!”

Michael looked up, as if appealing for divine intervention: “I give up! I've refuted your paranoid charges before. What's my incentive to go over all that crap again?”

“You've got none since you won't get anything out of me anymore,” she concurred. “What hurts so much is the fact that you're still lying to me,” she said. “You promised that you'd never lie to me the way you did to Karen. You said that no matter what happened, we'd never poison our relationship with deceit. I always hoped that even if things didn't work out between us, we'd let each other go honestly.”

Despite the anger in her tone, Michael viewed the emotions behind it as the beginning of Ana's capitulation to him. “I haven't lied to you, Baby,” he said gently, glad to see that he still kept her guessing, on her toes, her thoughts and emotions wrapped up around him. “Your worries are the product of your own imagination and all the pressure we've been under lately. They have nothing to do with my actions. Haven't I shown you how
passionately
I love you, Ana? Haven't I?” He gazed tenderly into her eyes, as if the anger and irritation had already washed over him, having barely touched the surface of his being.

Ana nodded in mock agreement. “Yes you have. You've shown exactly how
passionately
you love me by looking for my replacement a few days before we were supposed to move in together. I'm very touched by your passion, indeed!”

“What the hell?” he cried out. “I didn't come all the way out here to conduct yet another postmortem of our relationship! Nothing happened, alright? Since we met, I never wanted any woman but you. You're imagining things.”

Ana looked away, to indicate that she didn't want to listen to his futile denials. All of his mind games wore her out, but they couldn't wear her down anymore.

“Baby, listen to me,” he continued. “This is mostly Rob and Karen's doing. They manipulated us, to turn us against each other. Karen constantly nagged me about how you'd spend all my money, how I couldn't trust you, how you'd leave me for another man just like you did your husband. No doubt, Rob worked on you in the same way. We played right into their hands.”

Instead of ranting against Karen as before, Ana just smiled at him. “Nice try. But it won't work this time.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Setting me against Karen. Blaming her and Rob for all our problems. You're doing it to distract me from my real enemy,” she glared meaningfully into his eyes.

“How the hell am I your enemy?”

Ana allowed her deep-seated resentment to seep out, like puss from an infected wound. “You tried to do me what you did to Karen. To isolate me from my family. To make me emotionally dependent on you. To erode my boundaries and my values. To destroy my self-confidence, so that I'd be at your mercy, doing your bidding and buying into your lies, the way she did. But I can't do that anymore. You duped me for awhile, but you'll never fool me again.”

Michael didn't feel like listening yet again to Ana's hysterical diatribes. When he was in love with her, he liked her feisty, Latin temperament. Now, however, she just struck him as a drama queen. Let's turn the tables on her and see how she likes it, he decided. “Listen, instead of only looking into what I did wrong and whether I wanted to replace you, you should start considering why I might have wanted to do that. You always put the blame on me. But, as they say, it takes two to tango. When a couple runs into problems, both partners are at fault,” he explained in the calm, deliberate manner he assumed whenever he wanted to appear reasonable and fair.

Ana was amazed by his talent for deflecting blame away from himself and displacing it unto those he was hurting. Michael seemed able to modify the past just as easily as he changed his future plans. She approached the glass panel on the side of the door and placed her open palm on it, in a last appeal to their mutual vow of honesty. “Would a passionate man lose interest in the love of his life the instant she was about to become his partner in life?” she asked him. “Please admit this much, Michael. Admit it's the taboo of our affair that excited you. Not me, not our relationship.” She hoped that he'd finally tell the truth, to release her forever from the last traces of doubt she might experience in those moments of weakness when she still believed in the illusion that he once loved her.

Michael placed his open palm on top of hers, so that only a sliver of glass separated them. “Would a passionate woman become hysterical over divorce once she agreed to it and chicken out at the last moment?” he retorted, in the same vein.

Ana smiled at the absurdity of the situation. Their dialogue had become a volley of rhetorical questions; a mirror of mutual blame for their aborted relationship. This was the closest thing she had experienced to what the French called a
dialogue de sourds
. But she knew it was much too late to listen to one another. Reproaches were futile and explanations fell on deaf ears. As Michael stood there, only a few inches away from her, Ana's gaze lingered on his dark almond shaped eyes shaded by long eyelashes, his delicate nose and his full lips. She saw the angelic face of a man with a diabolical soul that almost made her forget the best interests of her children, who truly were innocent. As impossible to resist as her lover had been at the beginning of their relationship, so impossible to love he had become by the end. “I just no longer felt any human warmth from you,” she said quietly.

“What?” Michael asked. Ana had spoken so softly that he couldn't make out the words through the glass panel.

She removed her hand from it, allowing her arm to fall limply by her side. “I lost faith in our love,” she repeated louder.

“Did you really, Ana?” He recalled the fire in her eyes on the day they met; the abandoned look of longing whenever they made love. “You used to say that you adore me. You told me that your life was in my hands. What happened to that trust? What happened to your love?”

“They were misguided and misplaced,” she answered as honestly as she could. “When you had the chance to show me that you cared about me and my kids, you chose instead to look out for number one. As always.”

His eyes narrowed. “And you didn't?” he countered. “Who bailed out on us? You or I?”

“I did,” she admitted, straightening out her back, now taking pride in that decision. “Because it became quite obvious to me that you wanted a slave, not a partner,” she declared, approaching the glass panel until the warmth of her breath left a circular haze upon its clear surface. “You know what I think? You act like a hero, but, in fact, you're really a coward. Because if you had any balls at all, you wouldn't stab people in the back the way you do.”

Michael's eyes were completely devoid of emotion. Then Ana heard a shrill, older voice, as if he were channeling another creature from within. “Shut the fuck up, woman! I'm tired of listening to all your goddamn accusations!” he shouted at her, with clenched fists at his side.

She laughed in his face. “You think I'm scared of you? There's nothing to you, Michael. You're a trivial human being who can't even love. You're empty to the core.”

“Yeah, well, if by love you mean the way you treated your husband, no thanks! I can do without it. By the way, good luck with your new chastity belt!” he sneered. “Let me know if you need any help putting it on.”

Ana's eyes narrowed. “You know the only thing that's bothering you now? The fact that I dumped you, not you me. If it had been the other way around, I wouldn't have seen trace of you anymore. But you're a control freak and you always want to be the one in charge.”

Instead of exploding, as she expected, Michael's tense features relaxed into a silly grin. “Hubba, hubba! Aren't we feeling feisty? I know how we can fix that little problem,” he directed her a salacious glance. He then paused for a moment, not willing to accept that Ana meant half the words she said. This must be just another one of her emotional tirades. “You're saying all these nasty things about me so that you can convince yourself to get over our love,” he said. “Because, in your heart of hearts, you're still in love with me the way you'll never be with Rob.”

Ana was even more disturbed by his cavalier attitude than she had been by his earlier displays of anger. She began retreating backwards, to indicate that their discussion was finished. “You're wrong about that. Because there's nothing and nobody to get over. I don't like you, I don't respect you and I don't love you anymore, Michael. I'll never look back fondly upon you or any of our memories.”

Time stood still as they glared at each other. Ana's gut instinct told her to walk away. At the moment when her body pivoted on her left heel to turn around, Michael leaned back and kicked in the glass panel with his foot, with a powerful, swift movement. She watched him break the glass as if in slow motion. She saw it shatter into bits and pieces right in front of her eyes, so fast that she barely had time to shield her face with her hand. He slipped his arm through the jagged hole and unlocked the door from within. Her heart pounded as she confusedly considered what to do next. She thought of running to the phone. But before she got the chance to take a single step, Michael was already in the foyer, his gaze alert and furious. He grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back, both of her hands fitting uncomfortably, with the fingers pressed tightly together, into one of his. He placed his free hand around her throat, strangely enough, reminding Ana of one of their first intimate encounters, of his unbearable tenderness on that day, of how he had cradled her neck in his hand and convinced her that he enjoyed feeling the smoothness of her skin against the roughness of his palm, so that she began abandoning herself to him, seduced by the lightness of his touch. Whereas now, the veins in her throat pounded as she awaited like a sacrificial lamb the constricting motion of his fingers, the sense of suffocation, possibly even death, although she couldn't imagine it just yet.