Introduction. I Meet Lars

Posted On November 13, 2021

I could never have known that over 36 years later that the man I met in July of 1985 in the bar at the Anthony’s Homeport restaurant on Shilshole Bay in Seattle, Lars, would turn out to be a narcissistic nightmare. He hid that persona from me for over 34 years.

I had gone to Anthony’s for a drink with my best friend Maureen McCausland, her married name then was Moore. She was a good 20 years older than me, she had four teenage boys, was recently divorced, had been a true suburban housewife when I met her.

At the time Maureen was living with her husband and four boys in a split-level tract home in an upscale neighborhood in Kirkland, a small town directly east of and across Lake Washington from Seattle. I was newly single, 33 years old. I was going through one of those radical changes in my life that occurred from time to time.

This time it involved me coming into the prime of my life, a blonde, good-looking gal with a great body, not looking for a man, just feeling my oats and palling around with Maureen. She was always funny, had a lot of great stories, a ballsy outlook on life, she was a bit of my opposite in style.

Maureen was always great to go out with. For after-work drinks, or for just some drinks or after-hours partying. And Maureen was a great foil to my personality. I literally was the shy retiring type. I felt for sure I had no gift for gab – I was quiet and serious. When we were out Maureen would break the ice when there were guys around – they always laughed and joked around with her when she showed up. She knew all about sports, had a bead on what ”guys” wanted to talk about, what is now considered old school talk, she was a master of gay repartee and was a bit of a raconteur type. I sometimes was envious of her ease around men and in social situations in general. I wished that I could talk so easily to men.

But that wasn’t me. I was the quiet one that ultimately some guy would break away from the jocularity routine Maureen was putting on, and come and talk to me. They would ask who I was, what I was about, join me at my level of calm and seriousness, and pass some time with me, sharing a drink or two with me. And that was how Maureen’s and my evenings out on the town went. They were fun and pleasant.

Things went pretty much down the same way that fateful summer evening at Anthony’s. Maureen and I ordered our drinks, sat at the bar, chit-chatted, and she entertained me with her smart and sharp sense of humor. Inevitably she started talking to these two unprepossessing fellows sitting several stools away from us at the bar. They were younger than Maureen but not that much older than I. Maureen zero’d in on them and started chatting them up. Once she heard their accents and found out they were Danish, that set Maureen off, quizzing them about where they were from, what they were up to, why they were here, and how funny and fun they seemed!

They returned the conversational jabs with her and offered up to her and me some charming compliments that especially seemed charming because they were spoken with an accent! In Danish, meget sextet. Indeed, 36 years later I still am drawn to Lars’ when he talks – there is just something about his accent that both attracts me and excites me, lures me on.

And just like that, before I knew it, that evening Lars was so warm and cuddly, his strong arms around me, holding me on his lap by the edge of Shilshole Bay as the sun went down on a warm summer evening. He had sat down on a log at Golden Gardens park and pulled me down towards him, onto his lap. He wrapped his arms around me, hugged me tight, it was quite delicious I thought. Lars’ whole demeanor and how he talked to me were frankly just nice, not entirely sexy, it was just an easy connection between us – like we’d know each other as warm friends for years. It was the kind of connection with a man that deep yearnings and dreams are made of.

Well, I have to admit – I don’t remember everything about that late afternoon, soulful merge with Lars now, the dust of ages has dropped a little veil over some things from so long ago. But I clearly remember this about Lars – he seemed so nice. Like bumbling, shy, and cute nice. And that’s how he remained for me all the ensuing decades later. Always a little inept, always a little out of the loop with a multiple of things, including sex. It’s stunning to look back now after the experiences of the last two years and with the very hard won knowledge I have today, that was the Lars I knew, and then that man vanished bit by bit starting in December of 2019, and I came to know the Lars I know now, The Heartbreaker.

I question myself now. I wonder, it’s not possible I know, but how could I have known then that apparently Lars’ chief goal in life, second only to being, according to him, a master of the art of the deal – in true Trumpian fashion I might add, how could I have known then that his chief pursuits were and are trying to convince women to have sex with him? A the lying. The deceiving. And being very selfish.

How could I know at the moment I met him that I was going to fall for this guy (as he said he had for me, clear through to December of 2021), become thoroughly enchanted with Lars, who I believed he was over time, the person he presented himself as, that he was an honest, open, strong, happy, financially adept, self-assured, certainly as sexually attuned and adept as I? Right then and there he and I had a meeting of the heart and minds that was to carry on, build, and come to a crescendo 36 years later. We were crazy about each other and he went crazy over the top with me including the sex games. That’s the Lars I knew for 34 years.

And then he turned the corner with me when I finally agreed to go to the next level of our relationship with him – he assured me and gave me enough proof of his good intentions towards me that I relented to go all in – he was getting a divorce from the Brazilian immigrant woman – so I decided to go all the way with him, no reservations, I gave my heart and soul away to Lars. I had no reason not to – I trusted Lars implicitly. He had faithfully pursued me for over thirty years, he had never deviated in his resolve to have me, Lars was like an institution to me, my rock that had been there for by then over half of my life.

What a shock when bit by bit Lars dropped what I now know was a pretense, what a shock when I came to find out about what I believe were the rounds of endless lies that Lars told to me. And how horribly disappointed I came to be in Lars as he turned out to be truly inept, not self-assured, not open, not strong, not financially adept, not anywhere close to the loving and faithful man he had presented himself to me as all those years.

And how could I have known, at least I feel it has turned out this way, that Lars is maybe the least trustworthy person I would ever meet in my life and have a long term relationship with and, that his life I have come to believe, was, is, predicated on first determining how a person can be useful to him, and then working out how to gain the benefit or benefits from the person – at the least cost to Lars.

Wow, breathtaking to think about how disparate the Lars of then and the Lars of now I feel it has turned out to be. I’ve come to sum up Lars this way – Who hasn’t Lars screwed or tried to screw, and what hasn’t Lars lied about?

But I didn’t go off into the proverbial sunset with Lars right away – certainly, we were at the beach at sunset those many years ago. Lars had many things he was telling me about that evening, and the evenings, days, months, and years, and most of it was catnip for a woman – Lars shared with me his vulnerable side. He told me about his uncertainty in life. He lured me or lulled me in, telling me about what a very sexy and desirable woman I was. And the clincher – the stumbling English, that darn Danish accent of his mixed with a certain bumbling manner – this guy was, I now know, playing the poor immigrant who is floundering before your eyes, helpless in word and deed, and needing you to save him!

Lars had me right there, and apparently I him. Lars went on and chased me for thirty three years after that. Through the decades I would come towards him, twist away when things got too hot, he would beckon to me again and again, “Should I stay or should I go?” I would ask myself. Then he got married, I got married, widowed, and partnered up again, and then he would by turns plead with me, draw me in with his neediness, inveigle me to meet him for steamy, white hot sexual encounters, and there we were, inexorably drawn to one another, over and over.

And the magnetic attraction has always there for thirty six years, fueled over the years by the midnight international calls to me, the after hours bedtime talks between us, the phone sex, the hours on the phone spent telling each other our dreams, and especially telling each other our secrets.

The secrets were part of it. Lars was especially good at the latter – massaging and milking me like an expert, attentive lover, “Tell me your secrets” he would say quietly to me in his dead sexy, low come hither voice, ”Let me please you. Tell me your secrets. I want to know more…”

And so I did, I let him please me and I told Lars my secrets, for all of our 36 years. To me Lars was the greatest secret repository that ever was. He created such a safe space for me to confide in him. No subject was taboo between him and I. Talk about safe spaces. Lars was always non-judgmental with me.

And I loved his curiosity about things. He always seemed so genuinely surprised when I told him something I thought, knew, or had done. Conversely, at other times I just felt like there was this Old World, practical European stoicism about him – yes, he knew how things were, he always seemed so world-wise when I talked to him.

And when he told me his secrets, about his longing for me, about his sexual fantasies about me, about his fantasies in general, and when he told me through those years about how he wanted us to spend the final years of our lives together, things between us got deeper and deeper between us.

But there were still more secrets to go even after 33 years.

So I took the plunge with him for three more years, agreeing in January of 2019 to enter into a full-on relationship with Lars. After telling me of the firm efforts he was taking to finally divorce his wife Brazilian Yara Silva, after he detailed to me his latests plans for how he was going to sell his business and retire, the things I had always told him needed to be in place before I could commit to him, I trusted him and committed myself fully to him.

With Lars’ assurances of his intentions and of the possibilities to really explore all that I thought life with Lars would be before me, I dropped my often enough porous boundaries with Lars, gave myself up to him along with the rest of my secrets that he hadn’t yet gleaned from me the three previous decades.

As we entered this new phase of emotional and sexual intensity I also had finally figured it out, turning it around on Lars, I told him and now have asked him more often these last two years, ”Tell me your secrets.” “What is it you want?” “How do you like it?” “Who is the real Lars?” And slowly and sometimes too breathtakingly and heartbreakingly fast he gave me the answers including he showed me exactly who he is, the one and only man to break my heart.

”Tell me your secrets.” I told him. He told me. I found Lars, and then in finding Lars I found myself. The saying is, ”Be careful what you ask for….” I now know to my utter heartbreak that axiom is true. Be careful what you ask for. I have gotten answers but in the process, I have lost the man I loved most of all of the men in my life – Lars, the one I thought was my best friend, the man I could implicitly trust, the man that I told all my secrets to. Except for this one last one.

And that is the secret that will shock Lars to his core.