Threesome Read online

  A little later I checked into the hotel and called Peggy from my room. We went through the but-it’s-only-Monday routine and I asked if she had any money for me. She did, and I went over to her office and picked up a check and went over to her bank and cashed it.

  Then I called a call girl (that’s how they named them) and went over to her apartment and got laid. To prove I could do it, I guess. I did it. Hurrah for me.

  Oh, the hell with this. What I did, where I went, who I saw. None of this matters. I’ve spent most of my time doing nothing, as a matter of fact. I see movies. I pick up paperback novels and I seem to read them because eventually I get to the last page without any particular recollection of what was on the first page, or any of the intervening pages.

  I draw cartoons. Nothing seems funny, but the work gets done just the same, which is idiotic but true. And the work seems to come out about the same. Peggy, who tells me if things stink, looked the other morning at what I’ve done since I’ve been in town, and pronounced everything up to my usual standard.

  “But nothing seems funny to me,” I told her.

  “That’s because you’re depressed.”

  “I know I’m depressed, but the cartoons-”

  “Are funny. I’m not depressed, and neither am I manic, Harry, so take my word for it.”

  I took her word for it.

  What else do I do? Think about you two, endlessly, over and over. I don’t call Marcia, or the call girl, or any other call girls, or any other Marcias, or anyone, because when all is said and done I do not want any of those people. I sit here and I think about you two and I just run it all through my mind over and over again.

  I want to come home.

  Because I belong to both of you, and you to me, and you to each other, and everything. And this is true, or at least I perceive it to be true, in a way that it wasn’t, or I didn’t perceive it, before.

  (Rhoda, when you type this letter into a chapter, you have my full permission to translate that last sentence into something more readily comprehensible.)

  This part of the letter will be awkward, and perhaps as difficult to understand as it is to write, which is very difficult indeed. I sort of know what I mean, but that in itself is a lot like my W.C. Fields impression-if no one else gets the message, then I have somehow failed.

  I want the kids. Both of the kids, because they will, after all, both be ours. They’ll both be mine, as far as that goes. When I think about it, when I really sit down and think it all the way through, I have trouble understanding why I was so completely shook up by the fact that Priss went out and got herself laid and relayed and parlayed by the four young nonentities. Why should it matter? We are all of us very complicated people, reacting in unusual ways to unusual stresses. If Priss is right and God did mean people to sleep in threes-and I think she may well be right-the fact remains that it takes rather unusual and atypical people to perceive this Divine Plan, and to act forcefully upon it. And if complicated people occasionally slip off the track and do a little sleeping around, why should other complicated people-people given to occasional sleeping around of their own-react as I did?

  Of course it was the fact of pregnancy that made the difference. I was bubbling in a special way, you know, the goddam king of the virility mountain, sitting high and mighty in my pseudo-chalet waiting for you both to bear my children. And I can see now that over the years I was very carefully repressing very real disappointment over the fact that Priss and I seemed incapable of reproducing ourselves.

  I always wanted kids. I like kids, they laugh at jokes that grownups know aren’t funny, they listen to silly stories with big eyes, they provide a person with the ultimate ego trip. But I decided, well, all right, we can’t have any, the hell with it, if we can’t have them then I don’t want them. The grapes must be sour, right? Out-of-reach grapes might as well be sour, the fox was right.

  Harry, I told myself over the years, told myself in a voice I learned not to listen to, forget what the doctors say, forget the idea that there’s nothing really wrong with either of you, that your mutual infertility is some sort of allergy. Harry, bubbeleh, anybody who is anything of a stud can get his wife pregnant. There’s something wrong with your seed, Harry. It doesn’t move fast enough, Harry, it doesn’t seek out and attack, it’s not sufficiently aggressive. It, Harry, like you yourself, Harry, lacks balls.

  So I wouldn’t even let myself think about adopting kids. Stupid, right? Neurotic, no?

  All right. Obviously I can father children, and have proved as much with you, Rhoda. And Priscilla can bear them, and has proved as much herself. And in a very real sense we could think of Priss’ baby as the product of artificial insemination, except that we’ll be getting a better kid than we would if a doctor and a hypodermic needle served as the inoculating medium. A cock, after all, whoever is attached to it, is simply a more natural impregnating device than a hypodermic needle. It gives the sperm a chance to swim upstream like salmon, and for the best sperm to win.

  Did you know, for example, that artificial insemination isn’t used for racehorses anymore? They found out that although it was easy and economical and everything, it did not produce fast horses.

  I’m getting way off the track, like a slow horse. What I mean is that it has taken me a circuitous route to reach this conclusion, but that when all is said and done you are both of you my wives, and you are both bearing my children, and whatever happened in some fucking Holiday Inn-and I use the adjective for descriptive purposes-that whatever happened, the hell with it, and if anything I’m glad it happened. I was shook at the time, but that’s my problem, and the hell with it.

  I want to come home.

  But first I wanted to get all of this written out, and put in a letter, and send you the letter and let you receive it and ponder it before I leave this place. For one thing, in the past two days I seem to have tapped a vast underground pool of creative energy. I’m doing some cartoons unlike anything I’ve done before, some very weird and bittersweet stuff, not my usual sort of thing at all either in theme or mood or drawing style. They aren’t funny in the usual sense, nor are they supposed to be. I haven’t shown them to anyone. I’ll show them to you when I get home. God knows what I’ll do with them, whether they’ll turn out to be commercial or not, but they do seem to represent some sort of creative growth for me, and I’m finding this very exciting. I had leveled off a long time ago, as people do sooner or later, and it’s a great surprise for me to find out that I still have the capacity to find new ways of seeing things and translate them into new forms of work.

  I just took a lunch break at the health food restaurant around the corner. I had a vegetarian lamb chop. It tasted just like the vegetarian pork chop I had yesterday. I also had a pint of carrot juice, and now I’m topping it all off with a cigarette. There’s a limit to this health shit.

  I want to finish this now and get it in the mail. And then I’ll wait, I guess, until one of you calls or writes and says that it’s okay to come home.

  I miss you both.

  How special we all are, and in such a special way. The separation helps me realize this. So much of the specialness masqueraded at first as sheer sex, the almost infinite expansion of possibilities for variety, the exhilaration of interacting as three rather than two. So much of it, too, derived I think from the sense that all of this was forbidden.

  But there is far more to us than that, isn’t there?

  I must end this. I will go downstairs and purchase a stamp and entrust this to the mercies of the U.S. mails. What an act of faith that is, incidentally! One drops an envelope into a metal box and takes it for granted that it will get where it is supposed to.

  Enough. I love you and you. I love our babies to be. Our babies.

  God bless us every one, as Small Timothy put it. My sentiments exactly.

  Love and love,

  Harry

  PRISS

  I didn’t know he had left. I slept late that Monday and finally dragged my
self out of bed. I had perspired a great deal during the night, always a sign for me that sleep was less untroubled than I might remember it. My skin felt clammy. I went and stood under the shower and got out technically clean but still clammy somehow. Then I huddled over the toilet and threw up.

  I examined myself in the mirror and put the palms of my hands over my stomach. I am so thin to start with that I began to show almost from the moment of conception, or so it seemed. According to the best medical information, I would at any time now begin to feel life. A new life moving inside me. A new life having the misfortune to be born to me.

  There was fresh coffee in the kitchen. On the kitchen table was the typewriter and the pile of manuscript. I went over to see if Harry had written anything, but the last page was of Rhoda’s plaintive chapter. Nothing had changed. I poured myself a cup of coffee and drank about half of it and poured the rest down the sink. Then I went to the bathroom, feeling nauseous, but nothing came of it. Just a brief attack of dry heaves.

  I went outside and checked the shed, but Harry wasn’t there. I went inside and couldn’t find Rhoda. I went outside again and pulled a few weeds out of the garden, and while I was doing this Rhoda came out from the woods and approached.

  “Where’s Harry?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Isn’t he working?”

  “No. He’s not around the house, either.”

  “I thought he was working.”

  The old Chevy was gone. I got into the new car and drove it to the station, and the Chevy was parked there. I came back and told Rhoda.

  “He’s gone to New York,” I said.

  “It’s only Monday.”

  “I know. I guess he had to get away.”

  “He’ll be back.”

  “Will he?”

  “Maybe something came up, business or something.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “We’ll hear from him.”

  “Rho, I ruined everything.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not being silly. Everything was perfect. I guess I couldn’t stand everything being perfect and I had to find a way to fuck it up.”

  “It’s not fucked up.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  I put my hands on my stomach. “I always wanted to get pregnant. You can’t believe how much I wanted it. I finally got myself to the point of believing that I didn’t really want to. You know the excuses you invent for yourself.”

  “Not me. I never wanted to be pregnant.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “Well, I did. Desperately. And invented excuses, that I wouldn’t be capable of being a good mother, that a baby would just get in the way, that what Harry and I had was complete by itself and a baby would interfere. The excuses that people always make for themselves. And then I had to, I had to go and pick up those idiots-”

  “That was the first time you were ever unfaithful, wasn’t it?”

  “Unless I count you.”

  “But the first time with a man.”

  “They weren’t men. They were boys.”

  “The first time.”

  “The first and only time.”

  “These things happen, Priss.”

  “Yes, they do, don’t they? But why did I have to tell him? Why couldn’t I keep it to myself?”

  “And eat your heart out for the rest of your life?”

  “I could stand it.”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m not sure you could, love. I’m not sure of that at all. If you could have stood it, you wouldn’t have blurted it all out on paper. That wasn’t a confession, Priss, that was a scream.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I do. That was an emotional abscess. All that poison in your system coming to a head. You had to get it all out of you.”

  “Why couldn’t I just go to a priest? Or a psychiatrist? Why dump all that garbage on Harry?”

  “Because we don’t use priests or psychiatrists. We use each other.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “Priss-”

  “What if he doesn’t come back?”

  “He will.”

  “But what if he doesn’t? Rhoda, I cut his balls off, don’t you see that? I did the one unforgivable thing to him and I’ll never see him again. I ought to leave.”

  “You?”

  “I ought to go away from here.”

  “Stop it.”

  I didn’t stop it. I stopped saying it, but I didn’t stop it inside my head. It kept on going around and around inside me. I was the excess baggage. I was the overweight. I was the nigger in the ointment. I mean in the woodpile. What is it that you have in the ointment? Flies. A fly in the ointment.

  I went inside and took another shower. Lady Macbeth, except with me it wasn’t the hands, it was the body. “Here’s the smell of the come still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little snatch.”

  Days went by and there was no Harry. My mind invented fates for him. He had met some other girl and had hied himself off to Acapulco with her. He had walked in front of a bus, or leaped in front of a subway, or hanged himself in a closet. He was drunk, lying somewhere in a gutter. He was-he was anywhere but at home where he belonged, and no matter how many showers I took I still felt dirty.

  “It’s too late for an abortion, isn’t it?”

  “By a couple of months. What kind of talk is that, anyway? You don’t want an abortion.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “Of course not, Priss. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I don’t want the baby, either.”

  “You’ll change your mind.”

  “Will I? I don’t think so. What happens if a person has an abortion after it’s too late to have an abortion?”

  “She misses her train.”

  “Huh?”

  “Christ, stop it. I don’t know what happens. Probably the mother dies.”

  “Oh.”

  “Stop this shit, will you? Do you have any idea what that would do to Harry?”

  “How would he find out? I’ll never see him again.”

  “You don’t believe that crap yourself.”

  “Maybe not. Rhoda-”

  “What?”

  “I could go somewhere else and have the baby.”

  “What’s wrong with the local hospital?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean but I’m damned if I’ll dignify it by taking it seriously.”

  “I could just go away.”

  “Why?”

  “And live somewhere by myself with my baby.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “It might be best all around.”

  “Uh-huh. Harry’ll be somewhere in New York or Acapulco or wherever you’ve decided he is now, and you’ll be somewhere with your baby-where, by the way?”

  “I don’t know. Boston. I don’t know.”

  “Sensational. You’ll be in Boston with your baby, and I’ll be here with my baby. That’s just what I always wanted, Priss. I mean, I love it here, the woods and the hills and the birds and the flowers, don’t get me wrong. I love it, but the idea of living here all by my lonesome doesn’t appeal to me. I’m not the type.”

  “You won’t be alone.”

  “Right, I’ll have the kid.”

  “And Harry.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ll have Harry. Once I’m out of your lives the two of you can be together again and-”

  “If you weren’t knocked up I think I might just kick you in the stomach.”

  “I can’t help it, Rhoda.”

  “Well, you’ve got to help it. You’re being ridiculous and you know it.”

  “Maybe, but-”

  “Cut it out, huh?”

  Somewhere along the line I called Marcia Goldsmith. I don’t know why.

  “Miss Goldsmith? You don’t know me, but my name is Priscilla Kapp.”

&nbs
p; “Oh?”

  “Harry’s wife.”

  “Of course, Harry’s wife. How do you do?”

  “I wondered if Harry happened to be there, or if you happened to know where he is.”

  “He’s not with you? No, I don’t suppose he is, or this conversation wouldn’t be happening. No, I don’t know where he is. I occasionally see him on Wednesdays when he comes to town, if we happen to be working on a book together, but-”

  “Uh, Marcia, that is, is it all right to call you Marcia?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “Because I know that you and Harry, that he sleeps with you on Wednesdays. Pardon me?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I mean, I’m not calling up to do the jealous wife bit or anything. I’m not even calling up to be civilized about it as far as that goes. It’s just that-”

  “There’s not really anything to be civilized about, Priscilla. I trust it’s all right to call you Priscilla?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean, Harry and I are not in the same league with Heloise and Abelard, you know. It’s just a way of carrying the collaborative process to its logical conclusion.”

  “I know all that. Harry told me.”

  “Did he really.”

  “Yes. The thing is I don’t know where he is, and I just want to make sure that, well, that everything’s all right, and all that.”

  “I haven’t seen him since Monday.”

  “Oh, you did see him Monday?”

  “Yes. He had a suitcase. He didn’t stay long, and I don’t know where he went. I had the feeling that he went back home to Connecticut.”

  “Massachusetts.”

  “Of course, Massachusetts. I wish I could be more help to you, but I don’t really know anything.”

  “I see. If he should happen to get in touch with you-”

  “I’ll tell him you called.”

  “Yes, I guess that would be best. Tell him I called.”

  “Uh-huh. I’ll tell him you called. Any messages?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, then, Priscilla, I’ll just tell him you called.”