The Game

rejection.
    In the course of my seduction research, I’d read Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. And I remembered how much work and persistence it had taken the aristocratic dandy Rodolphe Boulanger de la Huchette to get just a kiss from the unhappily married Madame Bovary. But once he persuaded her to submit the first time, it was all over. She was obsessed.
    One of the tragedies of modern life is that women as a whole do not hold a lot of power in society, despite all the advances made in the last century. Sexual choice, however, is one of the only areas where women are indisputably in control. It’s not until they’ve made a choice, and submitted to it, that the relationship is inverted—and the man is generally back in a position of power over her. Perhaps that is why women, to the frustration of men everywhere, are so cautious about saying yes.
    In order to excel at anything, there are always hurdles, obstacles, or challenges one must get past. It’s what bodybuilders call the pain period. Those who push themselves, and are willing to face pain, exhaustion, humiliation, rejection, or worse, are the ones who become champions. The rest are left on the sidelines. To seduce a woman successfully, to inspire her to take the risk of saying yes, I would have to grow some balls and be willing to leave my comfort zone. And it was by watching Mystery win over Natalija that I learned this lesson.
    “I just got a haircut,” he told her as they left the cafe. “I have itchy hairs on my neck. I want to take a bath. Come wash me.”
    Natalija, predictably, said that seemed like a bad idea. “Oh, okay,” he told her. “I gotta get going, because I need to take a bath. Bye.”
    As he walked away, her face fell. The thought that she might never see him again seemed to flash through her mind. This is what Mystery calls a false takeaway. He wasn’t really leaving; he was just letting her think he was.
    Mystery took five steps—counting as he went—then turned around and said, “I’ve been living in a shitty apartment for the past week. I’m going to get a hotel room right there and take a bath.” He pointed to the Hotel Moskva down the street. “You can come with me or just get an e-mail from me in two weeks when I return to Canada.”
    Natalija hesitated for a moment, then followed him.
    And that’s when I realized the mistake I’d been making my whole life: to get a woman, you have to be willing to risk losing her.
    When I returned to the house, Marko was packing.
    “I’m in shock,” Marko said. “I tried to do everything right. Goca was my last hope for all women.”
    “So what are you doing? Moving to a monastery?”
    “No, I’m driving to Moldova.”
    “Moldova?”
    “Yeah, all the most beautiful girls in Eastern Europe come from Moldova.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “It’s a tiny country that used to be part of Russia. Everything there is dirt-cheap. Just being American is enough to get you laid.”
    My philosophy is, if someone wants to go to a country I’ve never heardof and there’s not a bloody revolution in progress there, I’m game. Life is short and the world is large.
    Between us, we didn’t know a single person who’d ever been to Moldova or could even pronounce the name of its capital, Chisinau. So I couldn’t think of a better reason to drive there. I like the idea of filling in a colored shape on a map with real fact, feeling, and experience. And traveling with Mystery would be a perk. We would have adventures everywhere, the kind I’d always dreamed about.

There are few moments in life as shot through with potential as that of having a car, a full tank of gas, a map of an entire continent spread out in front of you, and the best pickup artist in the world in your back seat. You feel like you can go anywhere you want. What are borders, after all, but checkpoints letting you know that you’ve reached a new stage in your adventure?
    Well, all this may be true most of the time, but let’s say you’re working at Rand McNally, finishing the latest edition of your map of Eastern Europe. And let’s say there’s a tiny country bordering Moldova—perhaps a renegade Communist state—but no other government recognizes this country diplomatically, or in pretty much any other way. What do you do? Do you include the country on your map or not?
    A magician, a faux aristocrat, and I were driving across Eastern Europe when we quite accidentally discovered the answer to this question. It