Confessions of a Sociopath (29 page)

They were their own species and I was a scientist embarking on a mission to discover their secrets. The most beautiful people were always the ones who seemed happiest and most satisfied with their lives. And the most attractive ones were the ones who carried around with them a cushion of humor and goodwill, so that the particles in the air around them floated a little lighter and danced with a little more joy than anywhere else. I wanted to be like this.

I understood so much, and I practiced a lot. I was in a place filled with people I would never have to see again, so I could do whatever I wanted without any real consequences. It’s why American students abroad are often so well liked (girls) and so despised (boys). I could hardly be blamed. In the
cultura de ficar
, I was young and unattached and therefore expected to share my body with other young people as part of a communion of bodies, a celebration of sexuality and sensuality and intimacy. At the end of the night, individuals would become couples locked in deep, exploring kisses, and I was one of them. I learned all kinds of things in these experiments—how to suck on a person’s tongue, how to let your own tongue be licked and sucked, how to tickle the roof of a person’s mouth so that it is almost irresistible for them not to lap up more of you. I came to understand kissing as a conversation. Sometimes, it can be small talk or playful banter between goodwilled strangers. Other times, it feels like you are forging an intimate connection with another human being, reaching as far as you can inside them.

I treated love like it was something to be mastered, like
becoming fluent in Portuguese. Just as I developed my language skills, I devised milestones and challenges for seduction. I would go to clubs with goals in mind, testing how close I could get to a person without saying a single word, or how frustrated I could make them without touching. I practiced on sweet high school boys and jaded exchange students, old men and transvestites.

The first person I kissed was a man in drag. He was magnificent, his body bronze from glitter and paint. He wore a golden, ornate breastplate and thong, and there were vibrantly colored feathers and gemstones in his long, black hair. It was natural for me to want to touch his red-stained lips with mine, to be attracted by his peacock confidence because it made me want to take possession of him. It was like winning a prize or a trophy, and an uncommon one, like me.

In my short life I had not met a man so magnificently adorned. I imagined him in a tiny, run-down apartment, carefully orchestrating his appearance by placing each rhinestone just so, applying each shade of eye shadow to complement the others. My attraction had nothing to do with his masculinity or femininity—it was his attention to beauty that screamed for appreciation. There was a kind of seamless courage in him that I admired and a trembling vulnerability that I wanted to exploit.

Perhaps in some way, I envied his ability to embrace his strangeness and to display it to the world, or even to know what and who he was in order to do so. I did not have this ownership of myself, not yet. Outwardly I was all confidence and openness; inwardly I was spiteful and lonely and unaware of how to relate to the world. I wanted so much to be good but only knew how to appear that way by being bad. I knew no other way to live but to dissemble and to violate. So in kissing him,
I momentarily captured his earnest effort, his honest beauty, the phantasmagoria made human by his mere existence in the world. All that good intention and energy cast out into the world—I wanted to taste it in my mouth and swallow as much as I could.

It wasn’t the kind of possession that needed to be enduring. I only wanted a moment with him, to gain the feeling that I could understand or comprehend him in a certain physical way. It would not have mattered to me in the slightest if he had dropped dead the moment we stopped kissing. If a gang of teenagers had appeared that night to kick in his organs and slash his throat, I would have stood by to watch in order to enjoy the enthralling violence of it. If I had not been a young girl with a future to lose, I might have joined them so that I too could feel the satisfaction of his bones cracking and muscles bruising from my blows, these human parts I had caressed only moments ago.

After that first drag queen, I moved on to others, practicing physical affection with strangers so that I could use what I learned to cultivate emotional love with my few acquaintances. I could not even experience a kiss without making it contribute to some kind of agenda I formulated having to do with gaining power over other people. I was a calculating, ruthless animal, after all.

I now realized that love and sex had everything to do with the kinetic energy that I had admired and tried to understand in my drag queen. All I had ever read or heard or saw (not least of which were the soap operas and movies I watched day in and day out) told me that love could not be bad, that it made everything worthwhile, that it was the greatest thing in the world. And sex, though it had so long been stained in my mind with the bad, I now understood was
a vital part of love. It wasn’t just the stuff of perverts and male oppression, but a means of singular connection. And all of this, wonderfully, was a means to awesome, delicious, euphoric power—for which I had a knack. Formulated in this way, the pleasure I had in the manipulation and exploitation of others—the principal stuff that made my life worthwhile—could be described in a narrative of love. What could be more redemptive and human than this?

It was such an amazing discovery. I found that I had spent almost two decades overlooking a vital entry point into the inner worlds of other people—the universal Achilles’ heel. I finally understood what it meant to kill people with kindness. People are so hungry for love; they die a little every day for want of it—for want of touch and acceptance. And to become someone’s narcotic I found immensely satisfying.

Love was an addiction for me too. I loved being adored; I loved to admire. I did not understand why people didn’t rip their hearts out and shout declarations of love in the streets, why they did not write pages and pages of love letters every day. It was so easy. It cost me nothing and gave me such thrilling satisfaction. The deeper I went with my love interests, the more they relied on me for their daily happiness, and the drunker I became with power. I generated their smiles and sighs, as if fashioning their moods from clay—I did this to them! The ecstasy of that thought was incredible.

I discovered that you could love almost anyone, really, and make them your reason for living at least for a time—whether it is an evening or a week or a few weeks. It wasn’t just that you could have more power over someone through love than through any other means, but you could have access to more parts of them. There were more levers to pull and buttons to push, endless modalities. I could bring relief to pain of which
I was the direct and sole cause. I thought nothing of deceiving or manipulating them.

My love interests disappeared from my thoughts immediately upon my return to the United States. Back home, I had to do a few things. I didn’t want to have what I learned in Brazil corrupted by contrary American sensibilities. I wanted to expand and deepen my Brazilian operations, including trying to form relationships with real people in my life.

I realized I had thus far been blind. I had unknowingly denied myself the pleasures of really leaping into and consuming the emotional inner worlds of others. Why did I ever think that it was sufficient simply to make people do things for me when I could make them
want
to do things for me? Now that my eyes and mind were opened, I wanted to keep them open forever. Love was the newest thing to add to the long list of things I wanted to be so good at that people would cry.

I did become pretty good at it. But when you are back in your home country, you can’t start shoving your tongue into the mouth of every person you come across, especially when you attend a religious university with strict rules about that kind of stuff. On the flip side, however, because everyone around me was starved for sex, people were almost too easy to snare, especially the boys.

I remember a date with one especially innocent boy. He had all-American quarterback good looks—a dimpled wide smile showing straight rows of white teeth and fluffy blond hair bleached by the sun. After a movie, we sat in my car for a long time, because he wanted an invitation into my apartment and for access to my body (in particular, my breasts). It was long past the university-imposed curfew and against several
moral code rules, and I had no real interest in him. About fifteen minutes into the date, I’d known that I had him, so I was really only going along for the ride, taking the opportunity to observe him and therefore collect information for later use. I was in it more for the chase, and he was too sick a gazelle to provide any real challenge.

As he sat there across from me, I wondered what he fantasized about in the shower and what kinds of girls he’d kissed. He was almost too generic, like he was acting out youthful boyish nervousness for a television show. With people like that, you’ve got to wonder if they have inner lives at all, or if the extent of their consciousness ends when the television writers shut off the office lights and go home.

I unsettled him. He couldn’t understand why I was so confident or why he was so attracted to me. On the surface of things, I was nothing special. I wasn’t particularly striking, nor did I have any real popularity to speak of; I in fact was odd enough that I could see flits of doubt flutter across the surface of his skin as he tried to decide if he even regarded me as a worthwhile person. With his traditional good looks, he could have attracted the attention and affections of many a blond coed, his female counterparts, so the fact that he felt so disarmed by me bred a lot of insecurity in him.

Just like the junior associate version of me had Jane, the nineteen-year-old me could have had the all-American quarterback if I’d wanted him. I could have made him do my homework, buy me things, and marry me. But I didn’t want him. That night outside my apartment, after a long while of patiently humoring him, I began to wish he would get out of my car so that I could go home to sleep. He tried to contact me many times after that date, but it was too late for him. He had already vanished from my thoughts halfway through the night.

That’s the trouble with seduction as a game played for the thrill of it. You can innocently go about seducing people, even enjoy the attention and affection for a time, and then suddenly, when you’re ready to move on, you’re left with this dependent besotted person who can hardly stand to live without you.

Typically when I set out to seduce someone, I cut the target loose as soon as I know I have won. My rationale is to treat it like sport fishing: the fun is in catching the fish, not in gutting, cleaning, and cooking the fish afterward, so why not throw the fish back to be caught another day?

I try to cultivate a persona that makes seduction easy. People are attracted to my confidence, but the thing that really hooks people is how I don’t seem like anyone else they’ve ever met, and in deliciously exotic ways. My accent is unplaceable. I am darker than most white people, but not in a way that would clearly indicate “other.” My natural style is androgynous, but I don’t care to have my clothing reflect my personality too closely so I rarely choose it myself. Consequently I frequently wear the soft, flowing dresses and structured heels that are more my friend’s taste, a fashion-forward woman who is happy to select most of my clothing. Underneath the lush material, it’s clear that I am firm, even muscular. I have remarkably beautiful breasts. But I have always been acutely sensitive to the beauty of things—in bodies and faces, and in numbers and landscapes and logic, too. Pleasure to me is paramount and I am always looking for new sources of it. The pleasure of a seduction conquest lies in both the physical satisfaction and the mental challenge of completely occupying a space in a person’s mind until it’s yours, like a squatter. The one caveat is, you may find that the space you’re occupying is more trouble than it’s worth.

When I met Morgan, I didn’t know she would be so much trouble. She had the same name as me, which constituted 90 percent of my interest in her at the beginning. It amused me to think that I could be making love with myself. She was a senior trial attorney in an office in which I was very junior, and her apparent abilities, as viewed from a casual distance, were pretty sexy.

The first time we actually had a conversation was when we ran into each other leaving the office early on a Friday afternoon, like being caught red-handed by someone you know could never tell on you without revealing her own misdeed. I knew we would take the elevator together, then walk through our building’s maze of halls for at least five minutes more, and then walk in the same direction toward the parking garage. Because I had already begun to admire her, I was a little nervous making so much small talk. I had nothing to worry about, because she instantly shared her life story with me in the time it took to get to our cars. I just listened. It’s amazing how much more effective listening is in seduction than anything else. It helped that her life had been tantalizing in a way that fed into my desire to know people’s vulnerabilities—abusive relationships, crimes, gender identity disorder, and so on.

The infatuation between us quickly became mutual. Mine was firmly rooted in my own narcissism and a desire to exploit the weaknesses in someone I had initially admired, hers in an apparent attraction to people who enjoyed hurting her. I’ve never had someone react so strongly to me as Morgan. Her growing attachment to me even warped her appearance. Her once-firm jaw began to appear weakly skeletal, and her steady brown eyes now flitted about in avoidance of mine, hesitant to rest on any one thing. I think her hair even began to fall out.

It was puzzling because she had seemed such a strong and confident person in doing her job, facing judges, juries, and some pretty tough lawyers with self-possession. Morgan had a social power at work of which I wanted to have a piece, and in particular, an outsider’s hard-won respect that I in many ways wanted to emulate. At first, I really relished the power I had over her. I got sick from enjoyment every time I noticed a crack in her voice or a nonsensical sentence escape from her lips. In those moments my breath would catch, my eyes half-lidded. My pleasure in her discomfort was very visceral, my tongue instinctively running over the jagged edges of my teeth the same way one might salivate and even become overwhelmed a little at the smell of a succulent slab of meat. I think I ran away with it a little.