To say that this is a story, finally, of two inquiries or conversations, two types or typologies, two interlocking hands, would be to tell the part of the story that can be told in this way while leaving out the part that can be told only by slowing down time, or by stopping it—long enough for the shock of misfortune to fade and for the people around the table (readers and syllabus-makers all, you remember, and as a consequence accustomed to one way in which time gets rearranged) to stop sorting each other into sides: Love, Anti-.

To say that E sat at the head of the table and S at the foot would be to forget that the reverse was equally true—no matter. What matters is that they faced each other for the first time in public, after the months of serious play and playful seriousness, after the postcards and the dreams (lucid and otherwise), now beneath the cloud of a set of circumstances they could no more control than they could have created them, that they could no more ignore than they could swat them away with a totemic book from one of their overlapping lists.

“Loves,” said E, then took a sip from her mug. “Comrades.” She put the mug down. “Let’s everyone introduce ourselves.”

&

But before this, before the table and the assembly around it, there has to be the first time.

There was always going to be a first time. E knows this; you know it. S knew it, though we don’t have much access to S, not yet, which means we don’t yet know what knowing feels like for S. This is, of course, always the case—the not-knowing, the lack of access, the delay, or what we kid ourselves is a delay but what is, more accurately or at least much more commonly, an infinite deferral. “You can’t know what I feel,” said the husband, back in Part One (off-stage; not everything gets written down). “But I have to tell you anyway, and your job is to suffer from the not-knowing, as I have suffered, am suffering, from the feeling.”