The Seduction

From "The Dreaming Woman"

I thought that falling in love would be like a film, a movie, with music behind it. Everything musical, melodious. I thought my face would be transformed to something bright and splendid, blinding. But instead the very air is heavy. There is a demand to it, this tension. My strained smile has become permanent . . . . I don't want to hear, I want to hear, about his wife and their past together, the past I can never undo, I don't want to hear about his life, which is private, permanent, secret in him, I want to be free of him, I want to love him, I want to hear his every thought . . . . I want to pronounce sentence and stop everything, I want to lie forever in his arms as if the two of us were drowned lovers, safe and rotting in a bank of seaweed.