Part 13………Jealousy is the Emotional Vampire’s Weakness.

“She has been through hell, so believe me when I say, fear her when she looks into the fire and smiles” – Unknown

Soon after Lestat began his financial “training” with me, which were nothing but long winded lectures about how I mismanaged my money and how bad my credit score was, I mean literally he’d lecture me about that shit.  I began to think to myself that I need to get my shit together financially so that when we get married, I’ll be financially stable and my credit score would be good enough that it wouldn’t hurt him adversely.  Now, I realize that someone’s financial credit score is important and it may cause some discomfort for some, but it was NOT the center of the universe in our relationship.  Or at least I thought it wasn’t, then after yet another argument about how he thought I mismanaged my money he made a comment that sent me into a fireball rage.  He said to me “How can you actually expect me to marry someone whose credit score is this bad?  I mean that is the kiss of death for someone like me!”  I thought someone like him?  Who the fuck did this asshole think he was Alan Greenspan?  Being Miyagied was maybe more cruel in my eyes because when he would still talk about getting married he would reference how he was so good at taking care of his credit score and how his wife didn’t and it affected him negatively in his business life.  That’s when I told him maybe he should teach her that lesson and not me.

But after our fight about my credit score I yelled at him “Then why don’t you go and fuck your credit score instead because I’m outta here mofo.”  I stormed out of his office that day hell bent on proving him wrong.  And yes, my credit score was shit because of my carelessness and my ex-husband (he and his new girlfriend/wife did everything in their power to fuck up my life while we were getting a divorce, but that’s an entire different story altogether) I own how and why my credit was shit and will for the rest of my life.  It took me a long time to get financially healthy and responsible and I will NEVER go through that again.  Even though the method I chose to get my finances together may have been the kiss of death for some people, it helped me more than anyone will ever know.  I was forced to file for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, not one of the proudest moments in my life but I learned a very hard, cold lesson because of it.  This happened during the time I was with that half-wit Waldo and when I reconciled with Lestat he was not pleased that I filed for bankruptcy which sparked another argument.  But I fought that battle by telling him that I did what I had to do, and no one had gotten me into this mess but myself and I would get myself out.  And I also mentioned that if he mentioned my finances and their negative state again, I would slap the taste out of his mouth.

I felt determined to prove myself worthy of his impending (albeit delusional) marriage proposal.  But his lessons came at a price, for him I mean, for me it was an epiphany.  The aversion that was beginning to build would one day come to a head.  But being Miyagied was probably the best thing that could have happened to me to be honest. I mean the best thing for me, the worst thing for Lestat because I needed him less and less as time went by, not that he helped me financially.  Maybe he unwittingly did this because he didn’t want me to be dependent on anyone to do everything for me (not that I would) like that useless wife of his.  Maybe he did this so that I would be prepared for when I would eventually leave, not that he thought I was going to.

Now I know he believed I would stay his mistress forever and he would have been happy with that because he’s a selfish self-centered vampire and add to that narcissistically confident as well.   In the movies when a couple decides to break it off, it’s always because one of the parties does so.  It’s not necessarily mutual, like in the Notebook (yes another movie reference) it was always Allie that walked away from Noah for whatever reason.  This movie too perpetuated that “love lasts forever” myth, and I’m not saying it doesn’t exist for some people.  It just doesn’t for about 85% of people, with divorce rates hitting an all-time high it’s hard to imagine that kind of love being real.

Of course it was definitely true for Lestat and Fiona because for the better part of their thirty year marriage, I was with him for twenty of those (imagine that?).  He had a mistress for twenty years and yes his idiot wife had no clue and like I mentioned before it was probably that she didn’t care enough about him to sense that something was going on behind her back.  Or, she really is that stupid I mean I saw and heard it for myself so we’ll go with that.  But he refused to leave even after both of his kids left high school and went off to college.  Our arguments about this became increasingly cruel and the emotional stabs became deeper and deeper.  He said to me one day during a fight we were having about this “So what?  When we come back from dropping my daughter off you want me to turn around and tell my wife, oh by the way I’m divorcing you and I’m moving out?”

I looked at him and said “uh yeah pretty much!  I mean you’ve made me wait this long, why I am I the only one paying the price for this?  Make her suffer some why not?”  Well that fight ended with me walking out and leaving yet again.  I also mentioned that if he remembered he told me that he had moved back to “raise” their kids together, not work on their broken marriage because that is why they had separated in the first place.  I guess that idea dissipated during the course of the getting back for the sake of the kids and turned into working on their marriage.  Somewhere during all of this I was the one that got lost in the shuffle of lives and emotions and became his dirty little secret.  Which I didn’t like but I endured because I was convinced that I was in love with him (yes still….).

The Vampire’s Weakness, JEALOUSY 

At the tail end of my twenty year affair with Lestat I had evolved into someone he hardly recognized, his words not mine.  Because he actually wanted me to stay exactly like who I was when we first met.  First of all, I was twenty-nine years old and naïve and I listened to everything he said, EVERYTHING.   His manipulation was a lot stronger when I was younger but as I grew older, wiser and more educated his emotional grip became weaker and weaker.  The ideas he once dictated as law were now met with rebuttals and inquiries about why he believed these ideas to be true.  But that was evident by the “Don’t buy a Car without the Person you’re buying it for” input conversation.

We rarely saw eye to eye on anything anymore, because we had agreed on everything for the most part prior to this stage in our relationship.  When we first met I was enamored by his very presence.  I saw him, well like a devastatingly handsome vampire, black cape and all, with his killer dimples and vampiric smile, rough hands and his worldly knowledge.  That image began to fade as I got older and he got older as well and more tiresome in his ideas and philosophies.  I knew that my evolution was not only eminent but it had happened when I or he wasn’t looking.  I had gone from a girl in her late twenties to an educated woman with knowledge and experience and able to think for myself in every aspect of my life.  I learned lessons and at first most of the time failing, falling, skinning my knees then getting back up again and making it to the end of the line of each struggle.  He, on the other hand had stayed exactly where he was when we first met.  He was no longer thirty-six, pulling off wearing tight Wranglers, button-downs and cowboy boots with his beautifully wavy muddy brown hair.  Now he was fifty-four, still wearing Wranglers only now his man muffin-top hung over the top of his pants with his short-sleeve button downs and the same old cowboy boots.  Oh and somehow, somewhere he lost his great ass and charming grip over me.

In his case personal evolution was being fought back by this vampire who refused to change and/or adapt with the world around him and still dressed like he did in high school.  Any attempt to try and update his ideas, thinking and fashion sense were stifled by his refusal as well as his mantra “this is who I am and if you don’t like it, too bad.”  He remained stuck in 1999 which was when we first met, and although the world was vastly different, his vampiric nature remained the same.  He had begun going through his midlife crisis when he was forty-eight and bought himself a brand new Black Chevy Corvette, this thing was beautiful and it drove like a dream.  High gloss black paint, red and black leather interior with heated seats and Bluetooth capabilities.  I mean if a vampire was going to have a car this was it.  When he brought it by my house I was in awe of this wonderful piece of American made muscle (did I mention that this car cost about half of what he could have given me for a house?  Or that his monthly payment was about as much as a mortgage payment?)

A couple of weeks later I was driving to work and passed a white Corvette about the same make and model as Lestat’s, and inside was a middle aged man with slicked back salt and pepper hair balding on top and a pony tail down the back, Ray Ban sunglasses and he turned to me and smiled.  I was not impressed, and that’s when I realized that the only men who drive these cars are the only ones that can afford them, middle aged, mid-life crisis, balding, aging, fat men who believe the car they’re in is going to make them look younger and more attractive to younger women.  My assessment might be off but just to be fair, I saw a charcoal gray Corvette on the road two weeks after and the woman that was driving it was also older, bleach blonde hair wearing sunglasses and the wrinkles in her face and her batwing arms were flapping in the wind (she had a sun roof).  I’ve made my point, one rarely sees a young attractive man or woman in a nice expensive sports car.  And if you do, it probably belongs to their parents.

Lestat became increasingly insecure and would constantly ask me if I still loved him, which at the time I did.  I realized that we were reversing roles and although I hadn’t become as cruel as he was to me, I was becoming indifferent to him, his needs and wants.  This is when he began to tell me he’d slept with different women of all ages during many of the times we were apart.  Why he thought he needed to tell me instead of keeping it to himself became evident as time went on.  At first I believed him and the jealousy I thought I had buried deep down in the depths of indifference would come bubbling up again.  His attempts at trying to make me jealous worked in the beginning that is, but then a wise friend of mine, whom we’ll call Carmen said to me, “Are you serious, you actually think he can go out and pick up a young, beautiful twenty-five year old to go and fuck her? He’s only telling you that because he has to. The only way that is even possible is if he was able to drive his Corvette into the bar and sit there until a younger woman noticed him and even then it would be a gold-digging money hungry younger woman who thinks they can get anything they want out of men like him.  And you know he’s not about to become anyone’s fucking sugar daddy when he can’t even give you money for food or help you with rent. Snap out of it, he’s lying to you so he can make himself feel and look good.”

Carmen rarely had moments of clarity but when she did they were awesome! And she was right, it might have happened but not as often as he said it did and that is when I saw him for the sad, middle aged emotional vampire that he really was.  Nevertheless I allowed him to keep telling me this, don’t ask me why.  I just did but I didn’t feel the overbearing jealousy or anger when he did and that is what I think bothered him the most.  Once when we got back together he began to tell me yet another story about his sexual exploits and I let him finish.  We were at my house one Saturday morning watching a movie and I didn’t say anything or react, then he made the mistake of asking me what I had done during our time apart.  And I turned to him while taking a sip of my coffee and said “Yeah, pretty much the same” and then he looked at me and said “The same?  What do you mean?”  And I knew I had him, I had baited him and he took it and I had him dangling on my emotional deep sea fishing rod.

I said, I met someone too and yes I slept with him (well because we dated for almost three months) and as much as he tried NOT to ask he couldn’t help himself.  He asked me to elaborate (something I didn’t do when he told me about this fictional sexual encounters while we were apart).  I just sat there and calmly told him about this man (actually a Major in the Army, and a doctor no less) that I had met at work and he had asked me out.  Not only did he ask me out he (we’ll call him Kyle) invited me over to his house because he was going to cook me dinner.  He was stunned silent and whether or not he believed me (I suspect he did) didn’t matter.  I had him, and the curiosity he was emanating my way was fucking killing him, I could feel it.  He asked me how I had met him I told him, he was an audiologist at William Beaumont Army Medical Center and he went he gave a lecture at the university where I worked and we began talking and one thing lead to another and he asked me out.

Then Lestat the middle aged vampire asked me more about him so I decided to take the emotional wooden stake and pull a Van Helsing and stick it right through his cold dark heart.  I told him that Kyle was a Major in the Army and he was a physician, he was divorced, had two kids and lived on Sharondale Drive on the mountains off of Stanton on the west side, those are million dollar houses we’re talking about (I thought I’d throw that in there).  He looked down at his cup of coffee as if trying to find a safety net in the dark creamy brew swirling in his cup.  He stayed quiet, then as I had the emotional wooden stake three quarters of the way in he asked me how old he was.  Now before I go on I need to make one thing clear, I have never been attracted to younger men.  I have always been a sucker for older, more refined men. But that doesn’t mean I actually found any, also I have always found myself attracted to white guys as well.  Kyle, he was not only younger than me, he was an accomplished officer in the Army with a prestigious medical career.  So as I sat there watching the movie Casino for the fourteenth hundred time, without looking over at him I said “Kyle? Oh, he’s seven years younger than I am.”  And the emotional wooden stake began to sink through to his bleeding heart.  Stay tuned for part 14….…