Orin and Hal on the phone (p. 1008)

Orin walks Hal through "Speedy Seduction Strategy Number 7": wear a fake wedding ring, rhapsodize to the target about the wife you adore, then break down and beg her to reassure you that being drawn to her doesn't make you a bad husband — and the target, ideally, "just happens to be married herself, often with small children." Hal names it exactly: inventing a beloved in order to recruit an accomplice in her betrayal, "suborning somebody into helping you desecrate a tomb they don't know is empty." The empty-tomb figure is the whole diagnosis in one image — Orin's serial seduction of young married mothers is a rite performed over an absence, an empty grave, and the beloved he's really betraying and the target he selects are the same maternal figure in two masks. The compulsion is a funeral for someone who won't stay buried.