The Seducer (30 page)

“I don't want her to help me!” Allen objected, now feeling provoked by his sister in addition to being distracted from a very important game of Nintendo by the homework in question.

“Michelle, would you mind working on your own homework?” Rob suggested in a tired voice.

“I already finished it. All I had was reading.” Michelle said, scooting her chair closer to her brother's, to be able to peer over his shoulder.

“Daddy, tell her to go away!” Allen screeched.

At this point, Rob noticed that his wife had returned. “Where were you?”

“I went shopping,” she replied, then thought her answer must sound implausible.

“I could have used a little help with the kids,” Rob responded, resenting the fact that after a full day's work, he had to spend the rest of the evening tending to the children on his own. “Sometimes I feel like a single dad around here.”

“Usually, I pick up the kids from school, make them dinner and help them with their homework,” Ana pointed out in her own defense.

“Yeah but while I'm at work, you get to relax in your studio all day long,” Rob commented irately.

Ana felt her cup overflow. Enough was enough. Without saying a word, she ran up the stairs to her bedroom, taking two steps at a time.

The first thing that caught her eye was the neon light of the alarm clock, indicating that it was 9:34 p.m. After washing her face with cold water in the bathroom, Ana changed into the animal print teddy that Michael had given her and slipped under the covers. The softness of the down blanket soothed her weary body, enveloping her in a physical comfort that felt almost maternal. Her head sunk into the pillow. She closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind of all worries. As she was beginning to relax and drift off to sleep, the room suddenly turned bright red through her closed eyelids. Ana opened her eyes. The overhead light blinded her at first, but after a few blinks she discerned her husband's approaching figure.

“Sorry if I was so hard on you earlier. I had a tough day at work myself,” Rob said apologetically. He got under the covers and touched Ana's shoulder, hoping to make peace with her.

“I'm really tired tonight,” she assumed the cold manner that had become a constant source of humiliation to him.

He took the hint but didn't leave the room. If only out of principle, Rob decided to reclaim his bed: the rightful place he had relinquished for years. For the next few minutes, husband and wife lay quietly side by side. Neither of them could fall asleep.

Rob stared blankly at the ceiling, contemplating the sad state of their marriage. Ana's hardly a wife to me anymore, he thought. I'm not even welcome in the same bed with her. She doesn't have a reliable career, yet still leaves too much of the childcare upon my shoulders. And what about her constant meetings? If she has so many clients for her paintings, then how come she got kicked out of Tracy's gallery? Rob began nursing his suspicions, which had grown in direct proportion to the frequency of his wife's absences.

Lying on her side, her back turned to her husband, Ana was considering the reverse side of the coin. He doesn't love me anymore. Instead of being supportive like Michael, he blames me for my failures even when I do my best. We've grown too far apart to stay together, she concluded.

“Where were you
really
this evening?” Rob asked her.

Ana's nerves were stretched to the maximum. “I have something to tell you,” she turned to him, ready to disburden herself, out of an incongruous mixture of guilt and contempt. “I fell in love with someone else. I've been seeing him for months. I was with him this evening.”

Her confession was greeted with silence. Rob felt too stunned to respond. Although the thought that his wife might be having an affair did occur to him, he had always dismissed the idea. He told himself that a frigid woman wouldn't take a lover. But now the clues began falling into place. His chest felt constricted and his thoughts were a blur.

“Who is he?” he asked after a few moments, seeking clarity.

“He's a grad student in the French department at the university.”

“Do you love him?” Rob's voice sounded faint and strained.

“Yes.” Everything that had been so muddled in her mind became, all of a sudden, crystal clear. “Rob, I want a divorce,” Ana stated resolutely.

Rob stared up at the ceiling, which even in the darkness of the night seemed ghostly pale. He placed one hand upon his heart, as if to monitor its slow, irregular beats. To Ana, who looked at him out of the corner of her eye, her husband appeared still as a corpse.

“Why are you doing this to us?” he asked her, feeling nauseous. His mind struggled to absorb the information that his body viscerally rejected.

“We weren't much of a couple anymore ...” she started to explain.

But, in Rob's mind, that familiar refrain didn't justify anything. “If you thought our marriage was that bad, then why couldn't you talk to me about it before throwing yourself into the arms of another man?”

“I tried to, several times. But you just thought I was nagging you.”

Rob looked at his wife. Even with her disheveled hair and tired eyes, he still wanted her. In that instant, he felt ready to do anything to save their marriage. “Oh, God. I never thought it was that bad ...” he responded, trying to recall if he had ever taken seriously any of Ana's warning signals. A sinking feeling seemed to tum his body to mush. He couldn't believe that his wife of ten years would pick up and leave him one day in such a backhanded and cowardly fashion, for another man. It occurred to him that he didn't know anything about this stranger yet, presumably, Ana would expect him to trust him with their children. “How long have you known this guy?”

“For almost a year.”

“And you've been cheating on me with him this whole time?”

“Yes.”

Rob felt the heat of anger rise to the surface. “Why didn't you tell me about it earlier? I can understand falling in love with someone else. I can understand being unhappy with our marriage. But I can't understand all the lies. Why did you have to deceive me for so long?”

Ana looked away, to avoid seeing the pain in his eyes. “I didn't want to lose you or to hurt anybody,” she tried to convey her initial ostrich policy towards her affair. “Michael pressured me to do this.”

“What do you mean?”

“He kept telling me how hard it was to keep up the intensity of our relationship in these difficult circumstances. He complained that we're hiding like prisoners. Basically, he made me feel like our relationship might not last unless we moved in together.”

“And you didn't find his behavior in the least bit manipulative?” Rob prompted her, already starting to cultivate a negative impression of his rival.

“Not really. I could understand his perspective. He said that he loved me much too much to share me with another man.”

All Rob heard in her words was a selfish justification revolving around the pronouns “me” and “he.” “What about me? Where did I fit into your sordid scheme?” he demanded. “Did you ever stop to consider my feelings? Would you want to be deceived for a year? Or would you prefer to know right away?”

Ana remained silent.

“In depriving me of knowledge,” Rob pursued, “you've deprived me of the power of choice that both you and your boyfriend had.”

“I didn't want to hurt you or the kids,” Ana said. “For the longest time, I thought I could handle the situation. I wanted to keep everything with Michael under control and our family intact.”

“Then why did you tell me tonight?”

She finally turned to him. The whites of his eyes glistened in the semi­darkness. “Because everything spun out of control. The pressure became too much. I wasn't even planning to tell you tonight. It just came out.”

“It just came out? So you were planning to lead me on indefinitely?” For the first time since he could remember, Rob became conscious of an impulse towards physical violence, which he curbed by looking away from Ana.

Her temples pounded, like a heartbeat. “I don't know. I felt pressure from all sides. In fact, I was torn from the start.”

Rob felt not only deceived, but also unjustly abandoned. I've wasted my entire life with a woman who doesn't love me, he thought, regretting ever having met his wife. “All these years I've been a decent husband to you, Ana. I've provided for you and the kids. I've never once cheated on you. I could easily have done to you what you did to me. But I made a deliberate choice to build my life around our family.” He placed his hand to his forehead in a futile effort to stop a splitting headache, which emanated from the inner schism he felt: the sense that he had done the right thing but maybe he shouldn't have. “That turned out to be the biggest mistake of my life,” he concluded out loud.

“No it wasn't. You should be proud of your choices. You're a better person for them. Besides, nothing that happens between us should ever make you regret your love for the kids. You've been an excellent father.”

“And husband!” Rob added, stung by her omission. This woman has never appreciated anything I've done for her. All these years, all my efforts to make her happy, were all for nothing. Wasted on a faithless ... he had to struggle to repress the hateful word that was on the tip of his tongue. What would be the point of resorting to insults? They wouldn't fix and they couldn't heal anything. “Yes, but we've neglected our marriage for several years,” she returned to the leitmotif that made her actions seem more justifiable in her own mind.

Rob looked at her with disgust. How easily she rationalizes her vicious actions! he marveled, incredulous that this was the woman he had loved for so long. “What makes you so sure that he'll treat you better than I have?” he asked her.

Her demeanor became wistful. “Because he loves me. He always listens to me. He's extremely affectionate and attentive. And he accepts me for who I am, flaws and all.”

Rob felt sick to his stomach upon hearing her words of praise. His anger veered off from Ana to her lover. “Is he also married?”

“No, but he's been engaged for several years to a woman he doesn't love.”

This formulation struck Rob as bizarre. “Then why did he stay with her?”

Ana shrugged. “Convenience, I guess. Plus, she really clings to him.”

What makes you so sure that he won't do the same thing to you, once you move in with him? “ Rob countered. “He might very well tell the next woman he falls in love with that he's been with you just out of
convenience
. It's a very convenient excuse.”

Ana felt more confident about her reply this time. “Michael never felt for Karen what he feels for me. Our bond's
special
,” she emphasized. “We're much more compatible than he ever was with her. We have similar interests in art and literature.” She noticed that her husband looked skeptical. “It's not that he criticized her to me or anything,” she hastened to add. “Actually, he told me that she's a nice person. It's just that Karen's personality's way too cold for him. She's distant and not all that attractive.”

“Is that what you told him about me?” Rob asked her, recognizing in his wife's answer the classic excuses people generally offer for cheating.

“No, of course not. Because that wouldn't be true about you.”

Rob struggled for a moment to adjust to the new truth he had discovered about his wife. She's a cheater and a liar, he reminded himself. “Since when has the truth stopped you from lying?”

Ana looked at him reproachfully, as if this allegation were somehow unfair. “I told him that we've grown apart. I also said that you're a decent man and a great father and that I don't want to divorce you. But he insisted. He said a love like ours couldn't be shared.”

How disgusting! Rob thought, embittered. “Well then the two of you deserve each other!” I'm not going to give up until I open her eyes about that bastard, he nevertheless told himself, not sure why he remained invested in having Ana see the truth about her lover. “But you're naïve to assume that he'll treat you better in the long run just because you're
special
to him at this moment,” he added, since his wife's reasoning struck him as simultaneously self-serving and self-defeating.

Of course Rob would say something like that since he never saw anything special in me to begin with, Ana told herself.

“Has he told his fiancée about you?”

“Not yet. He was waiting for me to make the first move with you.”

“How considerate of him!” Rob exclaimed. Then he paused, still bewildered by Ana's choice of partner. “You trust a man who's been deceiving another woman and leaving her over you?”

“Karen's not right for him, but she's very clingy. She's doing everything within her powers to make sure that Michael doesn't leave her. He's just trying to let her down easy.”

“It sounds to me like he's stringing her along.”

“You're interpreting everything I say so negatively,” Ana protested.”

That's because it
is
negative!” It occurred to Rob that a guy who was so manipulative towards both his fiancée and his girlfriend could be stringing other women along as well. “Just how many girlfriends does this guy have?”

“He
had
lots. If you can even call them girlfriends,” she placed emphasis upon the past tense. “He was a bit of a player before we met. But he was totally upfront about it. He told me from the start that he had one-night stands and flings with dozens of women. About two hundred in all.”

“You mean twenty,” he corrected her math.

“No, it was hundreds,” Ana stuck to her original estimate. “He kind of over­reacted when his first girlfriend, Amy, left him for another man.” Ana read the disapproval in her husband's expression. “But ever since we met, he's been completely faithful to me,” she hastened to add.