To ward off the evil eye, he’d told me, a strange light in his eyes that I hadn’t really understood at the time. In fact, I’d convinced myself it was just joy at gifting me something that I’d been so appreciative of.
“It took a long time for me to realize that he’d thought of it as a joke of sorts. Since he was the evil in my life. And no little amulet was going to keep him away from me,” I told Cary, sighing.
I didn’t tell Cary, because it was just a bit too humiliating to admit, that I would curl up on my side in bed at night and stroke the pad of my thumb over the eye while I thought about the man who’d given it to me.
“It wasn’t long before he started to lay it on thick. So many compliments. So much interest.”
“Love-bombing,” Cary cut in.
“Yeah, exactly.” I hadn’t known the word at the time, or what it meant, or that abusers almost always did it at the beginning to get you hooked, and then often after each abusive episode, to keep you with them.
But it was the perfect way to describe it.
Love-bombing.
If you had asked me then, I would have told you that I was pretty sure no man had ever been as infatuated with a woman as Raúl had been with me.
So much so that I threw all of my upbringing and personal traumas and insecurities out the window one night on a blanket under the stars and let him undress me, let him be intimate with me.
It hadn’t been like it had with my ex-husband. Yes, there was insecurity. And, yes, uncertainty. But for the first time ever, my body had warmed and grown ready. There hadn’t been pain or even discomfort. There hadn’t been any sort of fireworks, either. Raúl proved just as quick a partner as my ex had been.
Despite that, though, it had been a sort of revelation for me, despite the fact that I hadn’t experienced that so-called pleasure that they claimed a woman could feel with a man.
It didn’t matter. It hadn’t felt bad. And it had felt intense and intimate.
That had been enough for me.
I was pretty sure I fell head-over-heels for him when he rolled off to my side, curled me into him, then stroked a hand through my hair as he murmured things to me in Spanish that I only half-understood. But I knew enough to know they were sweet words, ones of praise and adoration.
I’d eaten it up.
“I moved in with him not more than two weeks later,” I admitted to Cary, feeling the food lose its taste in my mouth.
Had I just been a little more careful, a little more patient. Maybe all that happened after could have been avoided. Maybe he would have shown me his true colors before it was too late for me to get away.
“Hey,” Cary said, waiting for my gaze to lift to his. “You can’t blame your past self for not knowing any better. You didn’t have those kinds of tools then.”
That was fair.
But I wasn’t quite as forgiving of myself as he was willing to be of me.
“I should have seen the signs.”
“Love, maybe there weren’t any signs,” Cary suggested. “Serial abusers get to that point because they are good at it. They’re master liars. They know all the right things to say and do. To their victims, they would just come off as a man in love. And to a woman who hadn’t really known that, can you really blame a much younger version of yourself for wanting to believe it?”
“You’re right,” I said, exhaling hard.
No one had given me a relationship common sense toolkit. Because, to my family, my future was always going to involve me settling down with a man they approved of. And then nothing that happened to me at that man’s hands was any of their business, was well within his rights as my husband. Up to and involving mental, physical, and sexual abuse.
That was just how it was, how it had been for generations.
No one taught their daughters to be on the lookout for a good man. Our fathers would do that for us.
“To be kind to that version of myself,” I went on, “things were good at the beginning. Raúl, as it turned out, had a massive home and sprawling grounds, had everything that money could buy.”
“Fuck,” Cary hissed, reaching up to rub a hand over his beard. “I think I know where this is going.”
“Well, I didn’t,” I admitted. “To me, he was just a successful businessman. I didn’t even second-guess all the bodyguards around with guns. I figured that if you were a man of so much wealth, of course people would want to come for what you had, would be a threat to your safety.”
In the beginning, I’d been vain enough to think it was a sign of my own worth, to be attached to a man like Raúl.
“Did you ever ask what he did for a living?” Cary asked.
“Of course. He’d told me distribution,” I admitted with a little snort. “That had just gone over my head. I was more than a little taken with all the lovely things around, all the fancy dinners, the nice clothes he got for me. It didn’t even faze me that he slowly but surely started to choose all of my clothes, and tell me which ones to wear.”
It didn’t even occur to me, either, that he also took control over my diet. I think, at the time, I figured the chef at his home just made what he made, and that was what we all ate. It took me months to realize everyone else was getting eggs and meat and potatoes for breakfast. While I had nonfat yogurt and fruit. Maybe, if I was really lucky, a little granola to go with that.
“The weight started to fall off within three months of moving in there. And I didn’t want to rock the boat, so I never complained about being hungry.” Though, yeah, a part of me knew there was no way he didn’t hear my stomach growling all the time.
“Why do you think he starved you? Just for control?”
“I’m sure that was part of it. But I think it was more than that. He liked small and delicate-looking women. Maybe it made him feel more manly. I don’t know. But I also think, to an extent, keeping me thin and frail and weak made it easier to control me, made it harder for me to get away if I ever decided to.”
A muscle in Cary’s jaw started to tick at that as his gaze slipped away for a moment. “When did it take a turn for the worse? As if starving you wasn’t bad enough.”
“That’s hard. I think it was little things peppered in over a long period of time. He spent less and less time with me. He found more and more faults in me. But not so much that I immediately thought he was a jerk.”
“Just enough to start wearing down your self-esteem.”
“Exactly. And I didn’t have a whole lot of that to begin with. Really, most of what I had originally had come from the love-bombing stage with him. So I associated all my good with him. Which made it harder to think of him as the one at fault. I blamed myself for not looking or acting a certain way. I bowed and kowtowed to all his wants and needs and demands. And that went on until we hit the year mark.”
“What happened then?”
“Honestly, I don’t know what the turning point was. I don’t know if the milestone somehow made him think he’d finally ‘gotten’ me or what, but it was right after that when he hit me the first time. It was over something stupid, too. I’d questioned the dress he’d picked out for me. It was really revealing and I didn’t feel comfortable wearing it in front of his business associates. He’d backhanded me across the face for questioning him, then told me to Put the fucking dress on.”