STRICTLY PRIVATE: THE SEVEN LIVES OF HELEN H.

ONE
Behold the woman who understands exactly the poetic quality her life requires and who can reproduce the same emotion both physically and aesthetically in her garden arrangements. This may seem far-fetched, or perhaps just besides the point, but in either case, and within either of its boundaries, the pressing and immediate are lost...

THE SECOND LIFE
Although I cannot here replicate a precise
reconstruction of the private ventures that make him the true upholder of traditional American values, such as a healthy disrespect for authority, liking Bourbon, cool white jazz and possibly a little dope at weekends, I can see that your husband, nevertheless, has been conquered - only up to a point. Nor is Mrs H easily outdone. Indeed, it is hard to imagine two people with greater
contrasting personalities. To know him one must know - really know - rivers,
mountains, and wuthering heights. To know Helen one must know the eternally
feminine...She will always be Vixen with all her alluring and mystifying
characteristics - a mystification of too much and never quite enough...

THE THIRD LIFE
But even if a sensuous woman in need of worship is not the kind of challenge that Mr H would easily ignore, there are a number of issues yet to be resolved. Seductive women on a mission are apt to be
determined. And if you have a plan, it is to be provocative to those who ignore
you...

About infidelity I find there is nothing to say...

As for sex, you are adamantly opposed to any form of repression. You
tend to ignore your partner’s sense of convention and explore new ideas and concepts for the sheer joy of acquisition - even if that means you have to fake experience in order to attain it. In other words, you do not see yourself as a woman forced to kneel, a perennially thwarted female struggling to make do with lesser surrogates. Instinctively, if you lose interest in sex, you know something is wrong. Indeed, no judgement on your person or your role in life can avoid references to your sense of intuition, or accuse you of overestimating the conscious components of the human personality at the expense of the instincts. In the same way that I experience this knowledge indirectly, you find (or have found) yourself courted by men for whom the threat of personal (or sexual?) inadequacy gave leave to strange uncertainties.

LIFE THE FOURTH
As a rule, you avoid uncertainties of any kind. You are a cool, intelligent
young woman, a student of life, intellectual in your tastes, who has a not
unpleasant air of upper-middle class calm in moments of emergency. In truth, the
central theme of all your life has been the fight against control, albeit dealt
with in an immensely subtle fashion. It always has a logical, purposive meaning,
and may strictly be called a motive force. An outside observer might even say
you exercised free will. But at the very least, you have a shrewd sense of life
and the living of it, which embraces reality, and a steadfast way of thinking
and acting. And yet, your self-fulfilment lacks a very important component. In
fact, there is a link between these two poles, if I could just put my finger on
it...(and if there is a link, Mr H cannot claim to have solved it).But your
vocational life, and one of which you might not even have thought of in those
terms, seems to lack adequate, let alone total, fulfilment.

LIFE THE FIFTH
One thing, above all, is beyond argument: I see a great life in the making.
Whether it’s your own or someone else’s - becoming the repository of your hopes
- that for me is hard to tell. Am I hallucinating? I promise you I'm not. I’ve
checked it very precisely, and the stars don’t lie. Every full moon, can bring
changing circumstances and your own anticipations to a head. You may wonder why
this is relevant. Whether stars are formed by gravitational condensation of gas
nebulae or by some other conceptual process is not yet entirely clear, but it
seems fairly well established that whatever one’s feelings about the application
of the term “ovulate” to invoke the image of the Full Moon, it all adds up to
one of those providential moments when the planets are in exactly the right
alignment for a truly productive conclusion.

THE SIXTH LIFE
It has been said of Helen H. that she was Veronica Lake in a previous life.
An established star who took pride in the quality of her production. But the
facts underlying this sort of regression are far from transparent, other perhaps
than that you have enough real or apparent similarities to justify the claim.
The stars are vague on sources, and ambivalent, even misleading, in their use of
connotation. So that to divine things is to crack a hidden code...or, to put it
differently, to explain the synchronicities of nature which are altogether
unintelligible within the commonly accepted hypotheses of cause and effect, but
which involve the freeing and revitalisation of precisely those atavistic
instincts whose chaining and restraint has been the work of some three thousand
years of domestication. Incidentally, everything I have experienced in my own
life tends to underline the truth of this perception. Nor do I lack the
self-confidence to draw active conclusions from the spirit that has been keeping
me awake at night - though, at the end of the day, you cannot foretell a person
anything; you can only help them to discover it for themselves...

LIFE THE SEVENTH...
...about which there is no knowing. Anything is possible, if you will allow
me this generalisation. But I can see a gym, a film-script, or a play perhaps,
the numbers 3, 15, 19 and 72, Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, Hunter S. Thompson, an
optician, an academic ã, and probably an obstetrician too. All our acts have
consequences, and no doubt, one can infer anything or nothing from that
enigmatic inventory. Either way, it would be fey to claim that I was being
directed from beyond the stars after the manner of the angels who have fallen, but I'll let
you into a little secret, over time they have come to seem familiar...

Dreamy