But this book will not write itself, nor will anyone come along and write it for me. So I have done this much, to properly set the stage (while neatly splitting an infinitive, damn it) for the unfolding of the tale.

Things I don’t believe we voiced, but that we probably all of us know:

That the book is not primarily to make us wealthy, or to fill up idle hours, but to help us know some things about how we happened to each other, and the forms this happening took, and what it all means to all of us.

That the book is probably not entirely about sex, and that we ourselves are probably not entirely about sex, or are we?

What I would like to do now, I think, is end this prologue or preface or whatever the hell it is and go get another cup of coffee. Or maybe a drink. It’s almost four o’clock-it is a sort of house rule here not to take a drink before four o’clock, or to refuse one after. And my kidneys are floating already from all of the rotten coffee.

A drink, then.

Oh, first one thing. Priss wanted to know how long the chapters had to be. Long enough, Harry told her, to reach from the preceding chapter to the succeeding one. Like Abraham Lincoln’s legs.

A good answer, I think. And I think this chapter is long enough by those rules. I certainly hope it is, because it is unlikely to get any longer.

PRISS

Our house is in Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, at the crest of what we prefer to call a hill. The house itself was designed by an architect who had been overexposed to Swiss chalets. Everyone who ever visits us says that the house is charming. Harry has said (more than once) that if everyone says something is charming, then it isn’t.

I like where the house is more than I like the house. The countryside just rolls off away from one. Our landscaping has been largely a matter of letting Nature do what She wants.