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our way of saying Thank-You and how important you’re letter has been to us. Cordjally, Jethro Bodine

Assistant Mailroom Technician

And c.

‘Mmyellow.’

‘Presenting Speedy Seduction Strategy Number 7.’

‘Orin. Happy Inter-Day Eve. E Unibus Pluram and so on. Still dodging the disabled?’

‘A proviso up-front, Hallie: Number 7 never misses.’

‘And not every Dickinson poem is singable to ‘Yellow Rose,’ O. Sorry to disappoint you. For instance like “Ample make this bed — Make this bed with awe” isn’t even iambic, much less quatrameter/trimeter.’

‘Just a theory. Just tossing it out for the machine’s consideration.’

‘A practice to be encouraged. This particular theory’s unfortunately a dink. Plus I don’t think you quite meant proviso.’’

‘Number 7 remains a no-miss proposal, though. Picture this. Obtain a ring. As in a wedding band. So you present yourself to the Subject as visibly married.’

‘You know I hate these Strategy calls.’

‘Also of course works if you really do happen to be married. In which case you’ve got a ring already.’

Tm sitting here soaking my ankle, O.’

‘The object being, to present yourself to the Subject as married, as in happily married, and you engage her in a conversation in which you make a big deal of how head-over-heels in love you are with your wife, how wonderful she is, the wife, how blue and clean the pilot-light of passion still burns in the central heating system of your love for her, your wife, even after all these several years you’ve been hitched.’

Tm sitting here looking through an old box of letters to kill just a very few minutes before a bunch of us climb in the tow truck for Pemulis’s annual I.-Day-Eve town-painting.’

‘But as you’re saying all this to the Subject, your manner is nevertheless indicating that you’re attracted to her.’

‘It’s poignant somehow that you always use the word Subject when you mean the exact obverse.’

‘But it’s not like flirtatious or salivious, your manner. More like just strongly involuntarily attracted. Almost as if hypnotized against your will. Your manner can indicate this just by following the Subject’s conversational movements and changes of posture or facial expression in that sort of vacant intense way a hungry person watches somebody eating. Following the movements of the fork as if memerized. With, of course now, the occasional flicker of pain and conflict in your eyes, at the fact that here you are involuntarily memerized by somebody other than your serapic wife, which the point —’

‘Time. Yo. I think you mean seraphic. I also think you meant lascivious and mesmerized.’

‘You know what your problem is, Hallie?’

‘I have just one problem?’

‘But hang on until you see that 7’s worth not making me digress away from, though. Because the point being to get across how it’s an incredible tribute to the Subject’s overwhelming female charms that you can even really even see her, the Subject, since you’re so in love with your wife you barely even see most women as even female anymore, much less be involuntarily attracted to the Subject, much less have maybe the thought of infidelity skitter no matter how involuntarily across your devoted mind. And it’s not like you’ll have to volunteer any of this directly. The Subject’ll draw the observations on her own. That’s the point of the conflicted flickers in your memerized eyes, or at the most an involuntary tortured groan, a quick bite of the knuckle of the forefinger.’