The Seducer

by Claudia Moscovici

  “Thanks,” Ana forced a smile.

  They put on their coats and walked hand in hand to the restaurant in silence. As of late, they had little left to say to each other. Most of the substantive topics of conversation—their relationship, the kids, money, the divorce, their current partners, their future activities together, the pain they were causing or felt—had become subjects of contention. Michael opened the door for his girlfriend. As Ana stepped into the familiar restaurant, it occurred to her that, in this instance, her lover was right. Its atmosphere was redolent with the smell of sauce wafting up to the sticky ceiling. The dim light of the Chinese lanterns oozed a sense of cheapness. Ana had never noticed any of this before. But then again, she told herself, when we were happy together, even a greasy joint like this became a place where you flirted and fed each other with chopsticks bits of chicken and rice. She marveled at how her concept of time had become so elastic. They had told their partners about the affair only two weeks earlier, which now felt to her more like two months, or even two years. From that moment on, everything between them changed dramatically for the worse.

  When is she finally going to get over it and stop bitching about the breakup with Rob? Michael wondered, noticing Ana’s sullen expression. He was annoyed that the woman he fell in Jove with, his doting and sensual girlfriend, had been replaced by a depressed neurotic who drove him daily to the end of his rope. Seeking a welcome diversion from Ana’s company, his gaze surveyed the restaurant. It lingered upon a cute little blonde with the loveliest blue eyes who sat across from a plain looking boyfriend who’d certainly be no rival for him, Michael speculated. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Ana looking at him reproachfully. “That girl’s so annoying. She’s got the most irritating giggle,” he remarked in a conspiratorial whisper, moving his head in the direction of the blond who had caught his attention.

  “I didn’t hear her laugh even once,” Ana commented dryly. “I guess I’m not as observant as you are.”

  Michael wondered where this ever-present sourness he had never noticed in her before came from. It reminded him of Karen, when she was in one of her passive aggressive moods. He wasn’t too thrilled that his girlfriend was turning into his fiancée.

  A family of four, the mother being a petite brunette about Ana’s age, the father somewhat older, and two small kids, one a toddler, the other still a baby, sat down at an adjacent table. The mother struggled to situate the baby in a high­chair. When the latter began complaining, the mother quickly removed a pacifier from a napkin in her pocket and swiftly placed it into the baby’s mouth, which quieted her down.

  “That’s what I should do to you when you get fussy. Only not with a pacifier,” Michael said suggestively. Suddenly, he was overcome by a rush of new­found hope. “That’s what we need!” he exclaimed, excited by the epiphany.

  “What? A pacifier?”

  “No. A baby. Our baby,” he emphasized. “That way we can create our own family.” His eyes glimmered as he looked at his girlfriend as his future wife, with complicity and affection again.

  Ana winced as if Michael had mentioned the unmentionable, what she had feared all along. “You want me to have a baby with you to separate me from my own children!”

  “Our baby would be your child too,” Michael pointed out, irritated by her defensive attitude. He was sick and tired of women telling him what to do, of women saying ‘no’ to him and frustrating his desires. He was sick and tired of having freaking jokes of imaginary animals instead of real children, his own kids. “I decide if and when we have a baby,” he said under his breath.

  But Ana barely heard his statement. Preoccupied with her own thoughts, she nervously twirled a napkin between her thumb and forefinger. “When will the waitress take our order? We’ve been waiting for fifteen minutes already,” she commented with impatience.

  “What’s really bugging you?”

  She hesitated.

  “Come on. Out with it!” Michael urged.

  “Lately I’ve been filled with doubt,” Ana obliged, not one to contain her emotions for long. “And not just about the divorce. About our relationship too. Ever since we told our partners about our affair, everything between us has changed. Haven’t you noticed? Before, pretty much everything I said and did used to please you. You were so ecstatic about me, it was almost embarrassing since, God knows, I’m far from perfect.” She paused to regain her breath, then went on. “But now you’re so cold and aloof that I can hardly recognize you anymore. Every night I go to sleep worried about my family and about whether or not you still want me or love me.”

  “That’s your fault, not mine,” Michael commented dryly, unmoved. “You choose to focus on the negative. You create all this drama over nothing.”

  “It’s not over nothing, Michael!” Ana protested. “It’s over everything. Because if we’re going to leave our partners and traumatize my kids, it better be for a damn good reason!”

  “Don’t raise your voice at me,” he said sternly.

  “And that’s another thing,” she continued, undaunted. “Your tone with me is different too. You don’t ask me sweetly anymore. You command me. And I don’t like it one bit,” she tapped her foot on the floor, for emphasis.

  This Latin gesture used to remind Michael of his favorite opera, Carmen. Now it just annoyed him. “Yeah, well, right now you’re the one who’s screaming at me.”

  Ana sighed, feeling exasperated. “Thanks for the reminder. You just brought up another excellent point,” she went on, on a roll. “You don’t listen to my issues anymore. You automatically dismiss them. It’s as if my feelings were completely irrelevant to you. Meanwhile, I wake up every morning worried about what you might want from me and about how to make you happy. I’m starting to feel like Karen, bending over backwards for you. What in the world’s happened to us, Michael?” By the end of her statement, which cascaded out of her unstoppably, Ana was downright hysterical. She cried into her napkin, her shoulders heaving with irregular convulsions.

  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.

  Chapter 9

  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 op
ened 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.

  Chapter 10

  “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.