Letters

But she was, as (almost) always, patient, and I herewith honour her request, up to the farthest point that I myself could see as of, say, 4 August: the date of that final letter to Yours Truly and the end, as I saw and see it, of my life’s first cycle and the career of “A. M. King.”

The mistake, my love, was not in your arithmetic, but in your understandable choice of divisor. Hexaphile I am; but 7, not 6—so I saw when I outlined my life for old Yours Truly — is the number that finally rules us. Thus our wedding time: 24 hours — =- 7 periods = 3.4285714 hours per period x 5 periods gives us a 6th period commencing at 17.142856 hours, i.e., about 5:08 P.M. Happy hour! A 7th then runs from about 8:34 P.M. to midnight: but in it we hexaphiles take no interest, nor have we foresight of it.

Think me mad, Germaine (I do; Art won’t); revoke if you will my Honorary Membership in Humanity (not yet): here are the 6’s I saw — they are, you guessed it, 6 in number, the last three in outline only — in a moment of clairvoyance that August Monday at the brink of Horseshoe Falls, as I bid adieu with you to Y.T.:

1. That our love affair, Q.E.D., is the 6th and climactic of my life, its predecessors being each of a certain character, and with certain partners, not necessary here to re-rehearse. Call these love affairs Series One.

(Check.)

2. That — as I began to realise round about May of this year, you will recall — our connexion itself, at first by chance and then at my intrigued (obsessed) direction, recapitulated in its development its predecessors, as ontogeny repeats phylogeny. No need to outline that; we’ve lived (& suffered) it through, to when — Monday, 4 August, 1969—we were done with amorous gestation and born to ourselves: this happy 6th Stage, which you have been pleased to dub, and rightly, Mutuality. Call these stages of our love affair Series Two.

(Check, check.)

3. That, however (uh oh), this 6th Stage itself, no doubt by this time from mere reflex, has week by week echoed, more or less, that ontogeny that recapitulated that phylogeny. August 4-10 was not unlike our early courtship of February-March, our “1st Magda” Stage, excuse the expression. August 11–17 echoed our horny April, itself, etc. Etc. Thus we are just done for good and all with “Marsha,” in more ways than one; and today we commence Week 5, i.e. Stage 5, i.e. etc.(Entendu.) Thus too our thought to marry in Week 6, Sept. 8-14. Call these several weeks of our 6th Stage Series Three.

(Check, check, check. But.)

4. But all this implies, to you as well as to me and for better or worse, further concentric series: e.g., your immediate suggestion that we wed on the Saturday of that week: its 6th, climactic, “ourmost” day. Call these days Series Four.

(Check X 4. But that’s not all it implies, Ambrose.)

5. You foresaw further, though reasonably mistaken in your divisor, that a late-afternoon or early-evening hour might be more appropriate than some other to the fine print of this programme; that in any case our “ourmost” day of our ourmost week of our ditto stage of our love affair might have so to speak an ourmost hour, or period, fittest for nuptials. Call these periods Series Five.

(Check etc.; but screw Art, Ambrose: get to it!)

6. Let’s not trifle around with minutes and seconds, but rather imagine that upcoming 6th week as a honeymoon week, our wedding-Saturday its climactic day, itself climaxed by our wedding. Come, Germaine: let’s imagine the 6th 6 to be, not some minute of some hour, but the climax of that climax: our first coming together as wife and husband. (I like that, Ambrose.) Eros, Hymen: give us strength! If we’re to have a Series Six, let it be the stages of our day’s sixth sex together, that initial legal lovemaking, and its 6th point our first connubial climax. Betcha we can, Milady — and be damned if I can think of any fitter way to peak, vindicate, purge, and be done with this obsession for reenactment!

For your patience wherewith, Art and Germaine, once again my thanks.

A.