“What was?”
“Our fight over the baby issue. It started the whole domino effect.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The moment I refused to have a baby with you, I was history. You began looking for my replacement,” Ana stated calmly.
Michael breathed in, a little impatient sniff, like a hound following a trail of trouble. “How the sound of your voice turns me on, Baby,” he reached out to stroke her shoulder, hoping to distract her.
Ana backed away from him with a self-protective gesture, as if he were about to deliver a blow, not a caress. “It’s very important that we settle this right now,” she said with a sense of urgency.
“Alright,” he relented, stung by her withdrawal. “But don’t be so defensive. It’s not like I was going to bite you.”
Even the way he said this, with a flash of a smile and a malicious glimmer in his eyes, reminded Ana of all the kisses Michael had planted on the softest and most vulnerable part of her neck, leaving bluish green spots, like a vampire. She no longer recalled the pleasure of those kisses, the tingles of desire she had felt when he pressed her skin between his tongue, teeth and lips. She only remembered the fierce, possessive look in Michael’s eyes afterwards, when he gazed with satisfaction at the bluish patches that spread like a rash all over her neck. “Come on, admit this much at least. You’re much too selfish and much too poor to want to take care of a newborn baby, on top of my two kids. You wanted to make sure that I’m completely tied to you. The bonds of love weren’t enough for you. You wanted to create bonds of blood between us.”
“Yeah, so? What the hell’s wrong with that?” Michael asked with a dismissive shrug. “Many couples become even closer after they have a baby together. The fact I wanted a kid with you rather than Karen should flatter you. It only proves I love you more.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Ana vehemently contradicted him. “Because I suspect that if I had really wanted a child with you, you’d feel trapped, like you did with Karen, and you wouldn’t want it anymore. You want to have a child with me only because I don’t want one with you.” As she was saying this, a sound bite echoed in her mind, when Michael had snapped at her “Don’t you ever say ‘no’ to me!” when she had refused to climb up on the roof of his house with him. “If I say ‘no’ to something you want,” she articulated her intuitions, “you see it as an act of defiance and you feel unloved. Because for you, love means getting everything you want from someone. And even then, when you get a really compliant person like Karen, you’re still not satisfied. You still want better and you still want more. That’s why our fight about having a baby turned out to be so important. You want to control me completely, if possible, even more so than you did Karen. If I’m not under your thumb, then I’m totally worthless to you. But if I am under your thumb, like Karen obviously was, then I’m disposable too, the way she is. There’s no way to win with you. I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”
“You’re completely paranoid!” Michael exclaimed.
Part of her wanted to back down, to dissipate the tension and restore their precarious harmony, as so often before. But a dominant part of her told her to allow her fears to rise to the surface, pushing them to their logical conclusion. “Am I? Or is it that I’m finally starting to open my eyes and see the truth about you? All those castles in the air you promised me, about lifelong faithfulness and happiness together, were nothing but a house of cards,” she said, placing her hands together in the form of a triangle. “Flat and easy to topple,” Ana folded one hand upon the other. “All it took is me saying ‘no’ to you once and our whole relationship crumbled.”
“You’re quite a magician yourself, I must say, since you’re amazingly good at creating drama out of nothing!” Michael became animated, as if engaged in a game that finally got interesting, with a real opponent. “I’ve noticed this for quite some time now. You’re constantly provoking Rob, provoking me and provoking your kids. You’ve been doing everything in your powers to alienate everyone around you. It’s like you’re looking for excuses to destroy our love. Hey, let’s face it. When it comes right down to it, you’re too much of a coward to take a leap of faith and live with me the passion you’ve always wanted.”
Ana contemplated Michael’s features. Initially, they seemed expressive and alive. But by the end of his statement, they became incongruously calm, given the intensity of their exchange. It was as if his voice came from behind a mask. “You know what I think? I think that pursuing me was just a game for you. Now that you won the match against Rob, you’ve grown tired of me and are eager to move on to your next conquest,” she continued baiting him.
“Oh yeah? You think if all I wanted was some piece of ass, I couldn’t have gone after easier targets?”
“I didn’t say all you wanted was sex,” Ana corrected him, trying to contain her raw emotions. “I said you viewed me as a challenge. I was a prize to be won. Just like you saw Karen, at first. She was a challenge to you because she was colder and more virtuous than the other women you pursued. You viewed making her enjoy romance and sex like a game. But you didn’t succeed, so you went on the prowl for a more hot-blooded woman. That’s when you found me. But now that you finally have me, you’ve stopped wanting me as well. You’ve come to the conclusion that I’m too much of a headache, especially under the circumstances. Now you’re ready to move on and play the field again, as you did before we met.”
Ana half-expected Michael to refute her narrative, which seemed to emerge out of her with the automatism of an unwitting revelation rather than the clarity of a logically thought-out conclusion. She waited for him to deny her charges and declare, as before, how deeply he loved her; how special she was in his eyes; how engaging in loveless sex with loose women was the furthest thing from his mind now that they were finally about to marry, as he had wanted all along.
But Michael didn’t deny anything at all. Instead, he just smiled at her with the silly grin of a naughty child caught in the middle of a harmless prank. There was no trace of anger, irritation or even mild embarrassment reflected in his tranquil features. The former show of emotion, when he was furiously tapping on the dashboard in response to a much milder challenge from his girlfriend, magically disappeared once he was faced with this more serious accusation. “I didn’t expect it would happen so soon,” he said quietly, as if speaking mostly to himself.
“You didn’t expect what would happen so soon?”
“Any of this,” he gestured vaguely.
“You mean you expected us to break up?”
Michael didn’t reply.
“But then,” Ana pursued, becoming increasingly perturbed by the implications of his silence, “why did you pressure me to get a divorce in the first place? Why put me, my husband and my children through all that pain?”
“Like I told you from the start, I don’t share.”
“Why did you ask me to make such huge sacrifices for you?” Ana insisted with a sense of desperation, hoping against hope that sooner or later her lover would offer some kind of a satisfactory explanation for his inexplicable behavior. “What comparable sacrifices are you making for me?”
As if she had pushed a hot button, Michael suddenly switched from passive to active mode: “Cut the crap! You can’t tell me I wasn’t doing anything for you when I was going to do my best to support you and to be a decent stepfather to your kids.”
Ana shook her head, unconvinced. “You’re comparing my real life sacrifices to your mere promises. You were promising me that you’d support me or try to be a good stepfather to my kids,” she emphasized. “But in divorcing my husband and seeing my children only half the time, I was making a real sacrifice for you. The moment I told Rob about our affair and asked him for a divorce I began making that sacrifice for you, for the sake of our relationship,” she insisted upon their underlying asymmetry.
“Noblesse oblige!” Michael replied cheerfully. “I guess you’re a much nobler creature than
I am. I bend down to kiss your little feet, princess. Hey! I hope you cut those toenails!”
Ana looked at her lover in utter disbelief. She was stunned by Michael’s playful insolence, when her whole life and the lives of her children were at stake. She felt anger slowly rising into her throat, then something snapped inside her brain: “You never loved me at all. You never loved any woman in your life because you’re utterly incapable of love. To you, love’s only a weakness that you can exploit in others. You’re a selfish, heartless bastard and I never want to see you again!”
In response, Michael continued to smile at her, with an impudent Cheshire cat grin. “Then get the hell out,” he said coolly, opening the car door in anything but the gentlemanly manner he usually assumed with her. “If you can’t keep up, get out of the way!” he added louder. Ana lunged out of his car, overcome by the mixture of confusion, anger and dread that a small critter must feel after having just been swallowed whole and regurgitated alive by a snake.
Chapter 12
“When are you planning to move in with Michael?” Rob asked his wife, perturbed by the fact that their separation was dragging on in no-man’s land, neither still married nor clearly heading for divorce.
“Never,” Ana replied.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I broke up with him,” she announced.
Oh God, this can’t be happening to me! Rob thought. I had just gotten over the hump, used to the idea of divorce. “Why in the world would you do that now?”
Ana noticed that her husband sounded anything but pleased with the news. “Something’s gone terribly wrong. I don’t know what’s come over Michael. He’s like a whole different person from the man I fell in love with.”
“Not really,” Rob disagreed. “He’s the same person who cheated on, lied to, manipulated and then dumped his fiancée once he got tired of her and got a hold of you. The love of your life. Everything you’ve ever wanted in a man. Ideal lover ... right... You were so blind, it made me sick! This guy gets more ass than a freaking toilet seat!”
“Please. You don’t need to launch into a character assassination of him.”
“There’s nothing to assassinate since he’s got no character,” Rob retorted.
“Just remember that Michael’s also been under a lot of pressure lately,” she reminded him.
I can’t believe she’s still defending that jerk! Rob fumed. “The poor guy ... After he deceived and manipulated everyone. Now I’m supposed to feel sorry for him?”
“Nobody’s asking you to feel sorry for anybody.” The moment didn’t feel right. But when would it feel better? After a slight hesitation, she gathered the nerve to ask him: “Do you still want me to leave?”
“I’m not going to throw you out into the street,” he circumvented her real question. He wished he had the strength to tell her that it was too late; that they had reached the point of no return. But would it be true? he wondered, still feeling divided.
“Would you like me to rent an apartment?” she reformulated her question, sensing ambivalence.
Rob didn’t know how to respond. He knew that probably any other man, any normal man, would tell her to go ahead and leave, as she had originally intended. But something inside of him prevented him from closing the door on their relationship. My worst fears have been confirmed, he reflected, considering his love for Ana as a terrible, self-defeating weakness. Now I’ll be stuck in a hopeless marriage for the rest of my life, with a woman who needs me but can’t love me. What did I ever do to deserve this? he asked himself, filled with selfpity. “You do what you want. You always do what you want,” he finally said, unwilling to be the one responsible for the break up of their family.
This wasn’t the reaction Ana hoped for, but it was the one she expected. “I want to give our marriage another chance,” she said quietly.
“You want to give me another chance?” Rob asked, disturbed by her ambiguous formulation.
“I didn’t say that.” Ana breathed in and out to gather the courage to tell him what was really on her mind. “I want to work on our relationship. To make it what it should have been in the first place. For us to have our meals together, sleep together, be mutually faithful and be more loving and appreciative of each other than we were. I want a fresh start,” she pleaded with her dark eyes.
Is this another ruse? Rob wondered. “How do you expect me to believe any of this when you’re still defending him?”
“I won’t defend him if you don’t attack him anymore.”
“So now it’s my fault,” Rob observed under his breath, incensed again. A sordid idea occurred to him. “You’re just as sadistic as he is! You want to give me and the kids hope that we can be a happy family and once we begin to believe you, you’ll turn around and go to him anyway.”
Ana had been prepared for a downright refusal, but not for this accusation. “What? No! I’d never do something like that. I’m telling you, it’s all over between us.”
Rob didn’t know what to believe anymore. “And I’m telling you that I don’t trust you,” he said, to test her reaction and gather more evidence, for or against her.
“How can I make you trust me again?”
“By not praising him anymore, for starters. By not comparing us at all. By being faithful to me. By loving me,” he said, exasperated. “You should already know this. I shouldn’t have to tell you!”
“Okay,” Ana agreed, eager to pacify him.
Okay? That’s it? If only things were so easy to fix in real life. “We’ll need some serious counseling to even begin to undo some of the damage to our marriage,” he said, feeling drained.
Rob retreated into the bedroom to contemplate this new development. He threw himself on top of the bed, his arms behind his head, his heart slowing down to the tempo of discouragement, of a profound sense of hopelessness. She won’t let me move on in peace, he disconsolately observed. Then it occurred to him that Ana would probably reconcile with her lover if he rejected her at this point. His blood boiled when he imagined his children raised by such a conscienceless man. This is a guy who has admitted to his own girlfriend that he slept with dozens of women, Rob recalled. Strangely enough, Ana sees no problem with this fact. Could he hide his sexual addiction from my children? Would he convince her that it would be “for the good of the children” to initiate them into the ways of sex? He wouldn’t be the first stepfather to do so. What would there be to stop him? Certainly not his conscience, since he’s got no scruples. Would Ana be capable of standing up to him to protect our kids when she’s yielded to everything he wanted so far?
His thoughts reverted to his wife. Ana had stated that she wanted to work on their marriage. She had told him from the very beginning that she didn’t want to leave him; that Michael had pressured her into divorce. But the problem remains, Rob thought, how can I ever trust her again? One thing’s become transparently clear to me: Michael would be sheer destruction for her. If she moves in with him, all of her previous pining for him would become pining for the wholesome family she left behind. His so-called charm would turn into domination. Eventually this would become sheer torture for her, since she’s so willful and proud. It probably already has and that’s why she broke up with him. But I wanted Ana to choose me rather than to reject him! Rob thought with a sinking feeling.
Yet a decision has to be made, since we’ve already had several weeks of limbo, he continued reasoning. I’ll take her up on her offer to work on our marriage, for the sake of our children and because I still see potential in it, he resolved. But his heart wasn’t really into it. Everything will stay in balance for as long as Ana remains under his spell, Rob qualified. And I don’t want to be strung along anymore if divorce is inevitable. Oh, God ... What a shitty existence! We’ve got to see a marriage counselor right away, he concluded.
Chapter 13
Michael parked the car in the garage. Within a few leaps, he was inside the house. “Hey,” he greeted Karen. She was sitting at
the kitchen table, licking the last traces of fat free yogurt from her spoon. “Still eating only fruit and yogurt?”
“I don’t have much of an appetite lately. I might as well take advantage of that for my diet,” she got up to place the spoon into the sink.
Michael followed her tall figure with his eyes, weighing in his mind the pros and cons of what he were about to propose to her. When she turned around to face him, he saw that the area around her nose was rosy, as if she had been crying again. “Do you have a cold or something?”
Karen looked at him reproachfully. “It must be my allergies.”
Michael breathed in, as he often did when he was about to raise a point he considered particularly important. “Do you want to stop by Andrea’s?”
Karen winced at the suggestion. That was their favorite restaurant, where they used to celebrate special occasions. “Why go there now?”
“I have a surprise for you.” He looked around slyly. “But I prefer to reveal it somewhere special.”
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