The Seducer (52 page)

“We'll see who's so tough now, Powderpuff,” Michael hissed into her ear. Yet he remained patient, not yet tightening his grip, enjoying her fear and the sense that her life was once again in his hands, where it belonged.

Panicked ideas flurried in her mind as she stood there in his grasp. She glanced sideways towards the door to see if any of the neighbors would be close enough to come save her in case she screamed for help. That's when she saw them: her saviors, a scene right out of a dark comedy. The navy blue van with flowery pink letters “
Dolly Maid Service
” had parked in her driveway. Two women, dressed in navy uniforms, made their way to the door, one armed with a vacuum cleaner, the other with a mop and bucket.

Michael promptly released his prey. He walked towards the door and courteously opened it for them, like an old-fashioned gentleman. “Sorry about the mess. The kids were playing ball earlier,” he said in a friendly tone, nodding apologetically towards the shattered glass. The maids smiled, grasping only his tone, not the meaning of words since they only spoke Spanish. “See ya later, Babe!” Michael turned to his former girlfriend with a meaningful, though no longer menacing, glance.

To Ana's ears, those were ominous words uttered in the lightest of manners. She had asked Michael to remove her last glimmer of hope that he might be a decent human being. He gladly obliged, by attacking her. Now she knew that there was no point in trying to sort out the truth from the lies. Michael himself was the lie. From beginning to end, from love to indifference, from tenderness to violence, from “You're the woman of my life” to “See ya later, Babe!” their whole relationship was a sham. A single word seemed to capture what she felt, after all those months of passion, followed by the weeks of torment:
disenchantment
.

When she recovered from the initial shock, Ana's first impulse was to call her husband. She tried Rob's cell phone, knowing that would be the easiest way to reach him at work.

“What's the matter?” he asked her. He could tell from her faint voice and strange tone that something was wrong.

“Michael showed up at our house today. He attacked me.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“I'm fine. The cleaning ladies came by so, thank God, nothing really happened. He just frightened me.”

“What did he do? And how did he get in?”

She heard the suspicion in her husband's voice. “He kicked in the glass panel on the side of the door with his foot. Then he shoved his hand through it and opened the door himself, from within.”

Rob tried to imagine this scene. It occurred to him that the first thing he'd do in such circumstances is run to the phone and dial 911. “Did you call the police?”

“I didn't get the chance. It all happened so fast.”

“What about after he left?”

“No, not yet.”

Rob had the impression that his wife's behavior didn't make any sense, given everything they had learned about Michael. “Why didn't you call the police as soon as you saw that creep at the door? Before he even kicked in the glass panel?”

“Because at first we were just talking calmly. Only at the end he attacked me all of sudden. The whole thing took me by surprise.”

The phrase “talking calmly” triggered Rob's recurring doubts. “But you just told me that you didn't open the door for him,” he pointed out what seemed to be an inconsistency in her story. He was afraid of catching his wife in a lie yet at the same time wanted to get to the bottom of things, once and for all.

“I didn't. Like I said, he kicked in the panel. But before that, we talked through the glass. He seemed pretty calm, overall. I mean, there was nothing unusual about his behavior. He was just telling me that he wanted us to get back together.”

“You had
a conversation
with him?” Rob asked, incensed that his wife would engage in such reckless behavior. “After Dr. Emmert explained to you how dangerous this guy could be?” She's far from being cured of her sick love for that loser, he thought, feeling simultaneously angry and discouraged.

It struck Ana that her husband seemed to be blaming her for Michael's attack. They always blame the victim, she thought. “It's not like we were having a pleasant discussion. In fact, I told him that I wanted nothing more to do with him. I didn't think he'd freak out all of a sudden, break into our house and try to strangle me!”

Rob couldn't believe his ears. “He tried to
strangle
you? My God, Ana ... I'm calling the police. This guy should be arrested.”

“Maybe it's not necessary to go that far,” Ana hesitated, having heard that in many cases police intervention only eggs bullies on.

“It certainly
is
necessary!” Rob countered, becoming increasingly alarmed as the information his wife relayed to him started sinking in. “I'm not going to stand idly by while this creep harms you or any member of my family! Ana, listen to me. Get out of the house ... now! And meet me at the police station.”

“Why?”

“Listen to what I tell you, for once in your life! Meet me at the police station,” he repeated emphatically.

Before she could respond, Ana heard a click and the dial tone. She felt ambivalent about filing a report about the attack. What could the police do? Issue a restraining order? Could that piece of paper really protect her? She had seen this situation before. They'd label the incident a “domestic dispute.” Since she had no visible marks on her body, it would be his word against hers. Besides, even if arrested, Michael would be out of jail in a matter of days and even more incensed against her. The whole cycle of hatred would go on and on, indefinitely. Ana saw no easy solution to the problems a chance encounter in a church had created. Life would be so much simpler, she thought, if Michael would move far away, preferably across the globe, or somehow magically disappear from her life—him and every shred of memory of him—as if they had never met.

When she stepped into his office, Dr. Emmert could tell that Ana was unusually agitated. They had scheduled an emergency session the day before, following Michael's attack. Somehow, Ana thought, looking around her therapist's familiar office, the restraining order she filed against Michael didn't seem as much of a protection as processing this event in her own mind. She didn't sit down as usual. Instead, she paced back and forth across the room, filled to the brim with nervous energy.

“Why don't you take a seat?” the psychiatrist suggested.

But Ana acted like she hadn't heard him. She turned to him and announced abruptly, “I hate Michael. Last night, I dreamt of killing him.”

Dr. Emmert gazed at her without any show of surprise. “You had this dream after his last visit?”

“Yes.”

“Why don't you tell me about it,” he motioned towards the empty chair.

Ana plopped herself down, tossing her purse on the ground with uncharacteristic carelessness. She forced a smile. “It was funny. In a sad kind of way. It would have been comical, if it weren't so tragical, as my daughter would say. I feel so angry.”

“Was it his last visit in particular that makes you feel this way?”

Ana paused to think for a moment before answering him. “Not really. It just pushed me over the edge. But I've been feeling angry ever since I began to realize I was this close,” she pinched a few millimeters of air between her thumb and index finger, “to destroying my life and compromising my children's lives for a man who isn't even worth a second glance. His last visit sealed the deal. Now I definitely hate him.”

There was something feral in Ana's demeanor that made the psychiatrist believe her statement. It came from the gut, from the spleen. “Passion often turns to hate. Just as love turns to indifference,” he remarked, used to dealing with broken relationships. “What did Michael do in particular to make you feel so angry with him?”

Ana snorted with disdain. “He attacked me. But I wasn't intimidated,” she said defiantly, almost believing her own words. She had already forgotten the visceral panic she felt when Michael wrapped his hand around her throat. She only recalled the resentment that followed.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“He came and knocked on my front door two days ago, in the early afternoon,” Ana said, becoming slightly calmer now that she focused on facts rather than feelings. “I didn't open it, of course, since I'm not that stupid. I just communicated with him through the glass panel next to our door,” she sketched a rectangle into the air. “At first, he was nice, like the old Michael I used to know. Baby this, Baby that, Baby the other. But I'm not his Baby anymore so I refused to open for him.”

“Good for you,” the therapist approved.

“That's not what bothered him. What really got under his skin was that I no longer believed him. I couldn't be brainwashed and bamboozled anymore.”

“What was he trying to sell you? I mean, tell you?”

Ana ignored the pun. “Oh, you know, the usual lies. That he loved me. That I'm the woman of his life. And it made me really angry.”

“What did?”

“The fact that Michael was still trying to dupe me even after he'd been so thoroughly unmasked.”

“Perhaps he didn't think he was unmasked,” the therapist speculated. “Because, in his own mind, he never wore a mask to begin with. In fact, he probably feels betrayed.”

“
He
feels betrayed? What about Rob? What about Karen? What about me?”

Dr. Emmert shrugged. “When it comes right down to it, Michael doesn't care about any of you. He only sees things from his own point of view. From his perspective, you wronged him. After all, he was prepared to leave his fiancée for you.”

“How can he feel betrayed when he doesn't care about anybody but himself?” Ana asked, perplexed.

“Well, it's not the kind of betrayal you, Rob or Karen feel,” Dr. Emmert explained. “For most people, betrayal means a violation of trust in the context of a close, interpersonal relationship. For psychopaths, however, it means something entirely different. Since they don't have the ability to form genuine emotional bonds with others, they don't feel any violation of real trust. To trust someone, you have to be close to them. Psychopaths never get close to anyone to begin with. Instead, they experience betrayal as a violation of their control over certain individuals, especially those who had previously admired them. Since you escaped his control, from his distorted perspective, Michael doesn't think that he mistreated you. Most likely, he believes that you mistreated him.”

Ana recalled how contemptuously Michael had spoken of his parents when they had dared engage in the slightest criticism of him. He seemed particularly stunned by his mother's disapproval. After all, she was the one who idolized him most. “But that's just it. He did mistreat me and everyone close to him,” she replied, arguing against Michael in her own mind. “Everything about him was a sham. Everything.” She began counting by her fingers: “The fact that he can love. The fact that he can care about another human being. The fact that he can be faithful or honest. The fact that he would have been good to me and my kids. He's incapable of being good to anyone. He's a psychopath.”

“Yes, but he doesn't know it,” Dr. Emmert emphasized. “Just as he has no real connection to others, Michael has only a tenuous rapport with his own self. He lacks the self-awareness to see the workings of his own disorder.”

Ana's hand trembled upon her lap. “He never loved me.”

“No, he didn't,” Dr. Emmert agreed. “He temporarily saw in you the fulfillment of his sexual fantasies. What psychologists call the fantasy of the ‘omniavailable woman.' A woman who's always aroused, always available to fulfill a man's desires, always pliable to his will.”

“I was just being myself,” Ana responded, feeling far from a fantasy woman. “I was always real with him.”

“Sure,” the therapist agreed. “But once you told your partners about the affair, you showed him another part of you. One that was just as real, but that he didn't like quite as much. You reacted normally to the trauma you were causing yourself and your family. You became difficult and depressed. And once you became a real woman, Michael's interest in you diminished. Because a cranky and depressed woman is much less fun. And if a woman's going to be less fun, then he might as well get his supply of pleasure elsewhere.”

“During the last few weeks together,” Ana recounted, “Michael started behaving really bossy with me. When he cooed and cajoled and gave me gifts, I didn't realize just how controlling he could be.”

Dr. Emmert smiled. “It's funny that you didn't see him as bossy during our first session together. When your husband described him that way, you became defensive and took Michael's side. What changed your mind?”

Ana looked at him with frankness: “I stopped defending him to others only once I stopped defending him to myself. Then I started to see Michael for what he is. A bully, a control freak and a pervert,” she added. “Once our relationship started to unravel under pressure, it struck me how much Michael talked about sex. Everything revolved around sex for him. And I took that as a bad sign.”

“Good. Because it was,” the therapist confirmed. “It meant that he was oblivious to other dimensions of life. That wouldn't have been a solid foundation for marriage or any real life partnership. More importantly, it meant that the person,” he gestured towards Ana, “was far less important than the act. Because the act, you can do it with anybody.”

Ana absentmindedly twirled her wedding ring, which she had placed back upon her finger a few days earlier. “You know,” she said very quietly, as if speaking mostly to herself, “being lovers masked Michael's sexual addiction. Because it's normal for lovers to focus upon sex, romance and pleasure. It goes with the territory, so to speak. But once we began planning our future together, I expected to see other sides of him.”