Excuse Me, May I Seduce You, Please?
“Only beginnings are truly beautiful” - Annie Ernaux
To seduce is to walk the tightrope between deceit and honesty. It is a slippery, double-edged word. On one hand seduction is attracting, charming and alluring. But on the other, more mischievous hand, it is manipulating, corrupting and misleading. And if you’re a proficient seducer, you could try your luck at playing both hands at once. A bit of mischief there, a bit of sincerity there. What is true, is that when we seduce, we all become a little two-faced, a little devilish.
G and I were walking back from the shop with some eggs, mushrooms and pain au chocolat. We had just slept together for the first time. Casually, as we turned the corner to come into my house, he told me he was French. I recoiled. Not because of his new-found Frenchness, but because I thought he was Portuguese. I stopped in my tracks and turned to him. Thick, black eyebrows. Leathery skin. Dyed blonde hair. Under a French microscope all these qualities acquired a political hue. I think I preferred him when I thought him Portuguese—it seemed rougher, more street-savvy, more dangerous somehow. I questioned him. “Really? Where in France are you from?” He quickly buckled. “I’m only joking. I’m Portuguese. Would you like me more if I were French though?”
To seduce is to pretend. It is to be, for a moment, who you think that person wants you to be. It is to project in that blank space between you and the other (a space yet uncharted and unknown), an image of yourself so tantalizing, so alluring, that they can’t help but nod along. They lose themselves in the projection and cease to imagine a life without you, you who fit so well in their life.
It is only natural, when seducing, to put your best foot forward, while wearing your best set of shoes. And if you like someone enough, you’ll go that extra mile—transform, shift skin like a snake and give them the picture you think they want to see—you’ll wear the shoes that will catch their eye, from your strappiest sandals to your flashiest sneakers.
I went to all of D’s gigs and made sure to be the coolest girl in the room: spikiest hair, tightest outfits, cattiest makeup. I listened to all the songs he sent me, on repeat, paying close attention to the lyrics and making comments about them to him. I tried to send him songs I liked that I thought he might like too. I smoked less, got a new tattoo, went to a lot of art shows to prove how tuned in I was to the city and its potential. My online presence was monopolized by my transformation: quotes from movies I had seen half a lifetime ago that he was just starting to get into, all my attempts at serendipitous street photography, a newfound appreciation for the natural world. When he liked any of my stories, no chemical substance could ever replicate the rush. I thought about naming my new personality, something that would go well with his name. Every time I took a glance in the mirror, I could almost see him hovering behind me, hands on my shoulders, a look of pride lodged in between his eyes.
“If I change, will you love me?” Judy asks Scottie in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Scottie, bereft of Madeline, whom he had been in love with, sees in Judy a striking resemblance to his past lover and sets out to stretch the likeness to its logical extreme. He asks Judy to dress like her, dye her hair so it’s like Madeline’s shock of blonde, insists she tie it up instead of letting it hang at her shoulders. Judy agrees, against her better judgment, eager to please Scottie and have him love her, whatever it takes.
“You’re the one that I want” croons Danny Zuko, quite literally on his knees, to a leatherfied Sandy at the end of Grease. Failing to seduce the T-Bird greaser as her preppy, cutesy self, Sandy resorts to teasing her hair, learning how to properly smoke a cigarette, and lathering her lips in red lipstick to capture the heart and soul of the glinting boy dressed tightly in all-black that she’d loved one steamy summer. Seeing her stub out a cigarette with her stilettos is all Mr.Zuko needs to drive off happily into the sunset with his newly made-up doll.
After all this, all this self-sacrifice and performance of tailored goodness, I still couldn’t get D to like me. I wanted to fit him like a glove and at best I was like an uncomfortable shoe. He replied to my texts days later, with a haphazard apology and never offered to reschedule our plans. He jetted out of the city with his friends every weekend, uploaded pictures of himself tanning on a lounge chair with a beer in his hand and the silhouette of another girl in the background. I needed complete submission. What was I missing? Who, or what, did I have to be? A hat, a scarf, a necktie, a shoestring? I could try be any of those things if he only let me. One day, as I rolled out of my bed all on my own and opened one eye just enough to check my phone, I saw a message from D, “hey, I don’t think this is going to work. we’re too alike, it feels like we’re bros instead of lovers.” I groaned, shut my phone, and turned over to the other side of the bed.
There is a risk in deceiving too hard, pretending too much. The other person could see through your act, mistrust you, even start to dislike you. After all, if you’re projecting a chimera onto the blank space and they start to smell the smoke and mirrors, some alarm bells could be going off. Are they just pretending to like The Smiths? If they are, who is this person really? Why are they lying to me? What are they hiding? Criminal records? Complete incompatibility? A small rat under their hat directing their every move? Deceit hinges on the other not knowing better, not knowing enough. It follows the absence of knowledge, the unknown.
Of course, you don’t have to deceive with the unknown. The unknown can be used for good, too. In fact, the unknown can be real sexy. It leaves space to imagine, to fantasize, to daydream, to drift off. In the game of seduction, which is the game of the unknown, you can imagine meeting someone who completes you. Instead of imagining who you could be, you can imagine who they could be; someone who likes to smoke one or two cigarettes after 7 p.m. but no more and no less; someone who’s a cat person; someone who doesn’t mind you’re only horny in the mornings and not so much in the afternoons. You start to imagine all the ways your pleasures could be satiated. What they could do to you, how they could make you feel. Your mouth waters at the thought.
I start to like Q after I hear him recite one of his poems. It’s so great I think he could make me great. I want to suckle on the proverbial teat of his talent. Meeting him sends me into a frenzy. I pile books on him because if he reads the books I like, he’ll understand me better and being understood is all that matters. He’s weird, sort of off-putting, like curdled milk, and that’s good because that means he’ll be weird in bed which is what I need above all. I write verses and poems about the greatness of our virgin love affair, the force of it, the sexiness of it. I think of everything we’ll write, side by side, while the sun streams in through the windows of my room. At dinner at my friend’s, eating homemade fried chicken, I think just how much he’d enjoy the crispness of its skin, how he’d bite into the tender flesh and guzzle it all down with a fresh gulp of his favorite soda pop—just how well he’d fit in. With every day that passes he grows an inch taller, gets handsomer, smarter, kinder. By the end of the week, he’s almost too good to be true.
Sara Torres wrote La Seducción in 2023 (there is no translation of this book yet so all following quotes will be translated by me, the title ‘Seduction’). In it, a young photographer arrives at a writer’s house, twenty years her senior and attempts to photograph her while she works on her next book. The email exchanges leading up to that moment seem to the photographer to have been suggestive, flirtatious, seductive in tone. However writing, like seduction, is easily misconstrued.
When the photographer arrives at her house on the Catalan coast, she feels disappointed as the writer shows herself distant: this is not what she was expecting. There she was, ready for passion and domestic bliss, yet the distance between them, the uncharted territory, the unknown, becomes a tangible thing between them, a surface on which the photographer sees herself reflected, all her insecurities, all her insidious thoughts. It’s a cruel awakening. She writes, “The gaze of desire gazes so much it doesn’t see; it suspends judgment because it looks through fantasy; it hallucinates.” And a hallucination can be a wicked thing. The pedestal is a tough seat to fill but it’s equally strenuous to mount someone on it.
Torres, astutely, keenly, dissects the vicissitudes of seduction throughout the book. Early on, she writes, “To be an object of someone’s gaze is, in this world, to be exposed to the risk of arousing desire, repulsion or rejection. Even if we get an immediate high from it when it’s desire that we arouse, isn’t it too high a price to accept the privilege when its reverse awaits us at any turn? The same gaze that chose us, a second before or a second after, could discard us, with the same passion.”
Not my first rodeo, I think, after Q tells me he doesn’t feel our intensities match. Not my first rodeo. Not my first rodeo. I ask what happened and he says he doesn’t know; he woke up one day and the feeling had gone. How terrifying. Just as he came into my life, so suddenly, he was about to leave. The signs were there, from that very first poem, ‘The Irony of the Leash’. He rejected the leash as a metaphor, he resented its tightness around his neck, how it burned his collar. He sought the smell of gasoline instead, the tease of combustion, he pined for consumption and prayed for explosion. Truth is, he says, I’m just too rotten; no matter how much goodness you spray over me, like holy water, I’m not going to change. Not my first rodeo, I repeat as he leaves. Not my first rodeo. His t-shirts spill from my drawers. I clamp the pages of my notebook shut in one firm gesture. What could have been would have to wait for another time.
La Seducción opens with, “To me, the story of desire is fundamentally the story of failure, everything I wanted and couldn’t be, all the times I trembled in the distance between myself and what I loved.” The game of seduction is not for the weak. There’s a lot of picking yourself up from your bootstraps. The risk of failure in the game of seduction is always there; the risk of not being seen; of the unknown remaining unknown. That is the gamble you take; pleasure or pain; allure or deceit.
Torres continues, “To arrive at her desire, I must be capable too, of writing a story. Of playing with stories. Stories are full of roles, of past, of tension. I’m not intimidated by writing. Isn’t it something we do all the time? Imagine, build scenarios?” No matter the outcome, whether the seduction will be a story of failure or not, imagination is always there, playing a starring role. In those spaces between you and the other, those distances “between myself and what I loved”, the imagination runs rampant, stories flourish. You reinvent yourself; you shape others. Entire personhoods become moldable. It is up to you how much discretion to use, how much moderation and how much sense. There is romance in change, allowing someone to filter in and cater to their needs, but the violence, the risk of contamination—there is a gamble.
What happens when we tell stories of ourselves through writing then? Are we seducing our reader? A writer is nothing if not chameleonic, able to shift skins and embody feelings, places and people they’ve not really met. A good writer should be able to seduce their reader, which means writing is an act of seduction. To write is to deceive, to make readers believe what they’re reading is what they’ve always wanted, what they never even realized they wanted before.
Torres describes seduction as a space—the space that results from the movement from one person to another, a third entity, a composite entity. Couldn’t that entity be the imagination, fantasy, story-making?
To write, to seduce, is to assert the freedom to keep on imagining.
G and I spend hours and hours and hours in bed. It’s like we can’t stop being naked with each other. We ask and tell each other our pleasures. We repeat them back and forth, whisper them like secrets, his mouth pressed to mine, passing them like water through our lips, like strings of saliva. When he’s gone, I brush my teeth with the toothbrush he’s left at my house and rub the bristles all over my gums. He smells like no one else. We’ve sailed the seas of seduction victoriously: we know how the other likes to lie so we see each other for who we truly are. Together we float, there are no blues, only the brightest hues. In bed we like to spin stories of other ways we could have met, other tricks we could have played, other, other, other—all the ways we could have arrived here to be together on this bed.
