Entendu? Quietly and without fuss, by all hands, everyone’s needs and wants have been being more or less attended. Now: today begins, for G. & me, Week 5 of our affair-within-our-affair, duly echoing Phase 5 (July) of the original, itself an echo of sweet painful 1967/68, when, here in the Menschhaus…

(Entendu. But this letter…)

With all this circumambient love — and let’s speak no more of it — has gone a sort of reticent candour, wherewith certain sore history has been resurrected (by Peter) in order to be laid to final rest before he is: Magda’s old “infidelities” to him, with me, in the excavation of this house; Peter’s single adultery years later, with score-settling Marsha; Magda’s mighty extramarital but intramural passion of ’67/68. Matters all of them quietly broached, quickly acknowledged entre nous quatre, and dismissed forever with a touch, a kiss.

Then why rementioned here? (Art’s very question.) Why, in order to explain the fizzle of what we take to have been meant to be a bombshell, in the post of Saturday last. Germaine and I were hosting a family cook-in (too sultry outdoors to leave the air conditioning) — steamed hard crabs and champagne to celebrate Peter’s furlough from hospital and the passage of another full moon (the Sturgeon, 27 August, penumbrally eclipsed) without Milady’s menses — when there arrived, amid the bills and ads and medical-insurance matters, a first-class to me from Fort Erie, Ontario, in a hand I knew. My heart winced in the old way, equal parts resentment and apprehension, at sight of that stenographic penmanship, still recognisable though as strung out from its erstwhile tightness as was the penwoman at our last encounter (Fort Erie Assault & 2nd Conception scene). Why would Marsha not leave off, that indefatigable exacter of penalties? I fished her letter from the pile and pocketed it, not to becloud the feast; but Magda had recognised it too, and smiled at my exasperation (even G. sensed something was up, luv), and my feast was beclouded anyhow. I stepped down into the camera obscura room — the party was upstairs — and read it. Germaine followed promptly; Magda soon after; no way for Peter to manage the stairs, or he’d’ve been there too.

A declaration: Angela is not your daughter, ha ha. Full and plausible description: the circumstances of her engenderment on a certain night fifteen years since, in a period when, over and above my limited fertility, my then considerable potency was in relative abeyance by reason of marital quarrels. Graphic and sarcastic account of Marsha’s rousing to adultery my fertile but indifferently potent brother. Et cetera. No occasion given for the writer’s tendering this news now, which I passed on to Germaine, and she to Magda, without comment.

Peter wondered merrily from the kitchen what we were up to: the champagne was losing its cool. Magda kissed first me, then Germaine, and took the liberty of shredding the letter. “Poor bitch,” she said, and left us. Angie squealed at her Uncle Peter’s popping of the cork. Milady wondered, with a sigh, Must we really reenact this stage? I suggested we wed without waiting for either further tidings from her uterus or clearer economic weather; (she agreed, Art, right readily, and) we went upstairs to announce the news. Angie hugged us all noisily, her wont, and was noisily hugged back. Embraces and the bubbly all around.

There remained the matter of date. Germaine herself proposed Saturday, 13 September, as being by her reckoning the 6th day of what would be the 6th week of the 6th Stage of our affair. I concurred. As to the hour, she was less certain: ought it to be 6 A.M.? 6 P.M.? Or (dividing the 24 hours into half a dozen equal periods) sometime between 8 P.M. and midnight?

About 10:17 A.M., said I. Or about 5:08 P.M. Your choice.

(About?!)

Let’s say tennish that morning or fivish that afternoon.

Um. She didn’t get it. (Doesn’t yet, at this point in her transcription.)

Depending, you see, on whether our wedding should commence the fourth or the sixth period of that day: i.e., the “Marsha/Marriage” Period or the “We-Ourselves” Period.

Oh, the We-Ourselves, definitely (said Germaine). Sixes all the way, luv.

Done, then: 13 Sept., fivish.

But, um.

Um?

Yes. When Germaine elle-même divides 24 hours by 6 (went on Germaine), she gets a day whose 6th Period commences at 8 P.M sharp

Aye.

Is her arithmetic wrong (she wants to know)?

Not her arithmetic.

Well. She had been patient, had she not, my fiancée asked, with my exasperating schedules and programmes? Patient and more than patient? And it was, was it not, in a spirit of loving accommodation thereto that she (right readily) put by whatever qualms the probably and delicately pregnant might, if even slightly superstitious, entertain about marrying on the 13th?

Aye.

Then she lovingly requests of her hopeful impregnator (you understand, Art; we’ve not seen Dr Rosen yet) and willful fiancé a full farking outline of what we’re up to, that she may judge for herself whether certain tacit understandings have all along been tacit misunderstandings, e.g., her betrothed’s hexaphilia. Call it an engagement gift.

Okay. Up to a point.

What point?

The sixth point.

O shit, Ambrose! (Aye! Aye!)

Leave a double space here in the transcript, Germaine: we come now to the business of this letter.

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.