To my father s body I say it, still propped up on it s pillows, before the men from the funeral home arrive to put him in their horrid zippered green bag to take him away, before his night table is cleared of the empty bottles he wolfed down when he d finally been allowed to end the indignity of his suffering, and had found the means to do it. Before my mother comes in to lie down beside him. He can t stop thinking it. Seduction is often thought of as a dance between men and women, full of secrets and disguises. A series of chess moves really, where someone gets trounced, and reemerges, only to be gotten again.
Children welcome seduction, they believe in it.
It promises the impossible, the improbable, a world they take stock in. They are constantly jumping over boundaries that existed only moments before, like the bike they can suddenly ride, or the roller-blades that transform walking forever. We d know then that our audience with that agreeable part of him had come to an end, and so, carefully, warily, hardly daring to look back, we d leave. As a young man, his father s erratic fluctuations in temperament upset and irritated him. As a child, perhaps he would just pretend his father had disappeared.