(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.
(Pause. Now I am not pleased, love, as I was some sentences since. Au contraire: I am frightened to the heart as I push the Pause on your machine. Each and every of those six sixes implies a seven; that parade of climaxes a ditto of dénouements. Even a Seventh Series, it would seem, is pending: seven several strokes, must one presume, of that connubial climax? Now, betrothed sir: though I love you despite all this, very possibly carry your child, and brim with joy at the prospect of wifing you whatever our economic and other woes, you are as it happens not the first formalist I ever fucked. You say you could see, at Niagara-Fallsbrink, but 6/7ths through our story. What I see is, at the end of Series Seven, detumescence, say, and postorgasmic release. Dandy! At the end of Series Six, postcoital lassitude. Who cares? In the 7th period of Series Five, last hours of our wedding day, a weary, blissful 7th coupling. Fatigued joy! In the 7th day of Series Four (I review the transcript), the Sunday of our “honeymoon” week, a similarly lazy spell, let us imagine, of loving rest.
(So far, so good. But the 7th week of this honeymoony Mutuality, the close of your Series Three — am I to look not only for a week-long falling-off from loving vows so freshly vowed, but (chilling prospect!) for the end of Honeymoon before even the Sturgeon Moon is followed by the Harvest? And then (cold hand upon my womb!) a 7th Stage of our affair — commencing, let’s see, 22 September, Yom Kippur on my calendar, and ending God knows when — characterised, on the level of Series Two, by the fin d’orgasme of Series Seven, the postcoital blah of Six, the final fuck of Five, the day of rest of Four, the week’s falling-off of Three…?
(!
(And then — O January in the heart! O ice! — in Series One…
(I can see, Ambrose, but cannot say! O love, love: posttranscript me when I unpush this Pause!)
P.S.: Adieu, Art. Now: Will you, dear Germaine, circa 5 P.M. Saturday, 13 September 1969, take me Ambrose as your lawful wedded husband, in dénouements as in climaxes, in sevens as in sixes, till death do us et cet.?
(Pause!
(Hm!
(Well…
(I will. Yes. I will.)
AM/ggp(a)
cc: JB
A: Ambrose Mensch to Whom It May Concern (in particular the Author). Water message #2 received. His reply. A postscript to the Author.
The Lighthouse
Erdmann’s Cornlot
“Dorset,” Maryland
Monday, September 22, 1969
TO:
Whom it may concern
FROM:
Yours truly, Ambrose Mensch
RE:
A new letter to me of yesternoon, “washed up” in an otherwise almost empty, barnacled, sea-grown magnum of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge upon the beach before Mensch’s Castle during the refilming of the “Water Message sequence” of the motion picture FRAMES, duly discovered by yours truly, and found to consist this time wholly of body, without return address, date, salutation, close, or signature. To which the late “Arthur Morton King’s” reply would doubtless be the inverse, like Yours Truly’s to me of May 12, 1940. But I have commenced the second cycle of my life; I am striving through, in order to reach beyond, such games.
Dear Madam, Sir, or both:
A, in traditional letter-symbolism, = the conjoining of 2 into 1. Ad-mi-ra-ti-on, Be-ne-fi-ci-al, Con-so-la-ti-on, De-cla-ra-ti-on, Ex-hor-ta-ti-on, For-ni-ca-ti-on, Ge-ne-ra-ti-on, followed by Ha-bi-ta-ti-on, In-vi-ta-ti-on, & cet.: another bloody cycle of awakening, adventure, atonement at the Axis Mundi, apotheosis, and apocalypse.
All those sevens and sevenths seen together, in an instant, as if in a vision in Angie’s egg, on the 7th stroke of the 6th stage of the 6th lovemaking, etc., etc., on G’s & my wedding day: I.e., (a) that 7th stroke itself; (b) the postcoital embrace to follow it; then (c) the final lovemaking of that loveful day; then (d) the final day of that honeymoon week; then (e) the final week of that fine seven weeks of our Mutuality; then (f) this final stage — may it last long! — of our relation, wherein I am devotedly in love with my bride and she is serene, serene; then (g)…
Alphabetical Priority, yes: as if to discipline, even if only by artifice, as in formal poetry, our real priorities; Example follows.
Angie, at age not-quite-fifteen, is, so Magda’s gynecologist reports this morning, pregnant! Appointment made some weeks ago by M., without our knowing it, and kept secret since — through Mother’s dying, Peter’s dying, my remarrying, our own efforts at impregnation, etc. — “not to bother us prematurely” with her suspicions of my daughter’s skipped menses and recent morning nausea. Abortion, all hands agree, to be arranged.
Anniversary View of History: one Saturnian Revolution ago today, when I was eleven and she twelve or thirteen, Magda Giulianova introduced me, in the toolshed behind the old Menschhaus, to my sexuality — green then, still far from gray, but mightily toned down by this new news, by recent events, and by that seventh seven.
An old-time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers, each of which imagines himself actual.
Author, old comrade and contrary, funhouse fashioner and guide: how’s that for your next and seventh?
B = mother of letters: birth, bones, blood & breast: the Feeder.
Birthmark itches like an old bee-sting; my turn to confront the family nemesis?
Bottled message: TOWER OF TRUTH 0700 9/26/69, plus some dark, grainy odd-odored solid, like freeze-dried coffee spoilt by moisture: not exactly a bombshell letter!
Break-in at M. M. Co. remains unsolved; Todd Andrews confides suspicions and reasons therefor, but has neither grounds nor inclination to prosecute; we neither.
Bray (with a rush of red rage I now recall his never-quite-explained tête-à-tête with Angela down by the Original Floating Theatre II in mid-July, which I broke up at cost of concussion from mike-boom blow; could he, of all the hair-raisingly creepish male animals upon this planet…)?!