Seduction Theory

by Emily Adrian

He wanted to divorce her so they could meet by chance ten years from now and do everything they’d ever done a second time.

one of the profound comforts of personhood was never having to answer a question no one had asked.

The first time he watched his wife attempt to play, Ethan understood Simone had never been a child but a patient passenger of her youth.

“Sometimes fiction feels true to life, and sometimes it feels truer than life, and in rare instances it’s both.”

What he most wanted from writing was that feeling of immersion. The process always felt like self-effacement—though the end result, he knew, was indecent exposure.

What he didn’t know was how aggressively, how specifically, a woman as sidelined as Abigail wants to defeat a woman as celebrated as Simone. What he never could have guessed was the extent to which this was all my fault. (It’s ten p.m.: do you know where your grad students are?)

In general, the suffering of women struck him as deeply erotic. Simone’s total unwillingness to be battered by life was, in his view, a missed opportunity. If he were a woman, he would luxuriate in his imperilment a little. Ethan didn’t know he thought any of this.

Knowing another person better than yourself was a myth. You could live to be a hundred, spend eighty of those years with the same woman, and never be privy to all her white lies or dirty dreams. Two people could agree to find that beautiful, couldn’t they? Two people could accept each other as disgraceful, dishonest, capable of immense harm to themselves and to others—and that could be beautiful.

He had mistaken love for something that could be tenured. Years ago, he had forgotten he could lose her, and she’d failed to remind him. They had so enjoyed what they took to be their freedom.

“Sometimes people confuse the person who solves their problem with the person who created it,”

Simone said, “Putting aside all that, is it possible for a self-respecting woman to stay with a man who stuck his penis in someone else?” “A self-respecting woman?” The elderly professor’s lip curled with disdain. Simone wondered if she could retroactively fail her dissertation defense. “A self-respecting woman does what she wants.”

When you’re young, you think you’re having sex when really sex is having you. Desire for a coed from ENG 304 sweeps over you like weather. Furiously, you try to satisfy it. Sex is consequence, not action. Then with middle age comes tragedy, comes terror, comes some colossal error in judgement. Middle age is when you have sex for the first time. Sex is now action; the consequence is the rest of your life. To perpetuate your autobiography, you must fuck. From this determination comes the phrase make love, an abbreviation of make a love story.

Last summer, Simone fell for me. She took it back, as people do. But I was unwilling to submit to a history in which the falling didn’t take place.

The two of them put a Band-Aid on a bullet hole. Who could blame me for ripping it off?

My joy was shame-flavored. My shame seasoned with so much joy.