An acquaintance of mine claims that married women are quite funny. And predictable, too. He has stumbled upon and then developed an unfailing strategy to win them over for a couple of days, and especially during seminars, symposia, or conferences, which have become such an important part of the normal working life of a Yugoslav employee. The object of these gatherings is tourism. As it is often impossible to decide democratically whom to send on such occasions, the established practice is to send a couple of people from each enterprise supposedly interested in the topic under discussion. The topics are invariably vague and all-encompassing for the same reason. Everyone gets a chance to go somewhere. The exchange of information and experience usually takes place in the numerous tourist centers along the coast during the off-season months, when the enormous hotels are idle. Dubrovnik is reserved for the most learned of such gatherings. All this is undoubtedly good for the tourist industry, and thus for the country.

Now then, according to my acquaintance, after the eye contact has been established, and you have had an opportunity to say blah-blah-blah to the woman of your choice during an intermission, it is more than easy to get her to dance with you in the evening. The mood of all the participants is likely to be festive in the evening, and nobody, including her colleagues, will take this amiss. Late at night, tired and tipsy, she will let you kiss her freely on the way back to the hotel. Once you are alone in one of the long and dimly lighted corridors or staircases, you must resolutely and passionately stop her, press her against the wall, and let your hands go wild for a couple of minutes, kissing her and making compliments to her all the while. When she will finally realize how far you have already gone, she will stop you, become squeamish, modest, repentant, and simply worried about the whole affair. She will more or less firmly demand to be escorted to her room, but she will not be angry with you. It just happened.

This is the crucial moment, though, my acquaintance claims. You must behave as though you have been surprised by your behavior yourself, and you must follow her wishes without any hesitation. You must show sympathy and understanding, although there is no reason to talk about what has happened. But you must be very careful not to exaggerate in this, as the woman must not get an impression that your change of heart is stemming from confusion or a lack of purpose. When you finally reach her door, kiss her goodnight, tenderly and warmly and intimately, and then depart with an earnest and almost concerned expression on your face. Most likely she will not be able to fall asleep for a few hours. Alone in her bed, she will reflect upon the real dimensions of her unfaithfulness to her husband.

By tomorrow evening, the second day of a four-day learned gathering, after many a pompous speech ideal for daydreaming, she will have realized that she has already committed a minor crime, and that it will make no difference whatsoever what will happen next. It would be senseless not to consummate this unexpected and thrilling possibility. The only thing you have to do now is to behave as though nothing has happened. That night she will be yours, without your having to lift a finger. She will seek you out, she will find you, she will have another drink with you, she will dance with you, etc. You will immediately notice her determination in every move and in every word. It just happened. In short, by curbing your instincts for a short while, you will obtain a willing and even eager accomplice with a brief delay of no longer than a single working day. Still more, she will never blame you for what has happened, and that is especially important if she is from the same enterprise.

Liberated or not, they all follow the same pattern, my acquaintance insists. And I believe him to some extent, of course. But I still wonder about this device of his. It appears that it requires that you do not feel anything for your willing victim. How could you otherwise execute so many complex steps, including the crucial one in the corridor, without a blunder or an honest mistake? This is clearly a serious flaw.

Addendum (September 19, 1994)

Elise immediately recognized me in this piece, in spite of my feeble literary ruse. Although I must have shared these thoughts with Mišo Jezernik, my friend and accomplice in many a debauchery, the seduction technique described in this piece was entirely my own. More important, I used it on a few occasions even after Elise and I got back together, following a year or so of separation in Ljubljana. Elise did not appear to mind it, though. In July 1982 we were very much in love, but she still had nothing in principle against my sexual excursions. In fact, chances are that I wrote this piece in order to excite Elise into another orgy-for-two characteristic of this period. The previous piece, written on the very same day, suggests that we were both quite horny at the time.

The woman’s name was Brankica. She was from Belgrade. We met at a planning conference in Dubrovnik, where I was one of the few star performers. Mišo was another. She was a colleague of mine—a planner. Quite pretty and self-confident, she appeared unassailable at first. She was married, too, and she loved her husband. But there was no doubt about her interest. From the very first moment our eyes met there was no doubt whatsoever about Brankica’s interest. One of the impediments was that her mother was in Dubrovnik with her. Even though her mother had a room of her own, the two rooms were not far from each other in the same corridor.

I finally pinned her down in the afternoon of the second conference day, when we could slip out of the conference hall without attracting much attention, and when her mother was at the beach. Brankica was determined to go all the way, but she was nevertheless terrified of her impending infidelity. Her vagina was thus deliciously dry and tight when I entered her. I remember kneeling on the bed in front of her, spreading her legs wide, lifting her by her thighs onto my prick, and inserting it slowly into that baffled cunt. I remember her dry labia moving in and out with the shaft of my prick. It was divine fucking her like that, in plain daylight, spread wide open. I went slowly, slowly. I relished every inch of the way in and out, in and out. Reclining on the pillows, she was beautiful in her dumb resolve. Her eyes were huge, incredulous, bewildered. She was getting ravished in plain daylight by a man other than her beloved husband. She must have had hard time believing her own eyes.

She called me in Ljubljana on a few occasions, telling me that she wanted to divorce her husband. She wanted to live with me. Apparently believing that our lovemaking was equally as transforming for me as it was for her, she expected me to welcome her enthusiastically. After a while she got the picture, though. I have never seen her again.