Threesome Read online

  Django, by the Modern Jazz Quartet. The smells of cigarette smoke and wine and unwashed clothes. Going to the bed, head buzzing with a feel of unreality, weird, weird. Her eyes draw me as light draws insects. Depths and intricacies. Kissing, her mouth under mine, warm, yielding, and then her arms flung convulsively around me, holding me. Her breasts under my breasts.

  Voices in my brain. One, slightly hysterical, shouting that I was kissing my roommate, for Christ’s sake, that I was kissing a girl, for Christ’s sake, that I must be out of my mind or hopelessly perverted. A voice of soft reason saying Be careful, go slow, be careful, this is deep water. And another voice, light and free as myself, saying airily that nothing could feel this good and have anything bad about it.

  “Did you think of Paul Newman?”

  “I thought of you.”

  “This is dynamite. Go lock the door.”

  “Do you think-”

  “Yes. And take off your clothes.”

  “I feel embarrassed.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “I do. I feel completely strange.”

  “So do I. Oh, you’re so beautiful, Priss. Come in here with me. Oh, Jesus. How we feel together. Oh, God, kiss me.”

  “Rho-”

  “Sweet Prissy.”

  “Do you know what to do? Have you ever-”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I. Is one of us supposed to be the boy or something?”

  “No, I think we can both be the girl.”

  “But-”

  “Love, there’s nobody watching. There is only us. And no masks. We can just do whatever we want. Oh, I love you, I want to kiss you and hold you and touch you. Do you like this? I love your breasts.”

  “They’re so small.”

  “Like fine porcelain teacups. I shall sip tea from them. How nice you taste.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Ha, look what I found. A pwetty wittow pussy cat! Such a nice little pussy and it’s all wet. It must like this.”

  “Oh, God, it does.”

  “I’m wet too, Priss. Touch me. Oh, yes, Christ, yes, touch me forever. Oh, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop. Oh!”

  And, after a moment, “Who would have believed it? It happened so quickly. I’ve never had anything like that feeling, the most powerful orgasm just exploding all over me. So quickly!”

  “I felt it happening for you. I was like there with you, in it. Do you know?”

  “I want to do you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is so weird. There’s no teacher, do you know what I mean? It’s new for both of us. We discover it all together. Oh, the things we’re going to think of to do with each other, oh, Priss, I love you. You know something else? I love us. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I love us, too.”

  “I love the whole idea of us. This fucking stupid school and all these boring girls and the stupid Yalies, and in the middle of all this shit there’s us, being together and loving each other, and I think it’s great. Oh, kiss me, let’s be together again, let me kiss you, let me touch you.”

  We had about a year and a half of each other. During that time we never had any contact with any other girls. There were platoons of lesbians on that campus, and I thought that some of them might have their suspicions about us, but if so they kept it to themselves, just as we kept ourselves to ourselves.

  We joked about telling the housing office to take one of the beds out of our room. We didn’t need them both. We always slept together after that first night. We didn’t always make love, but we always slept together, and shared warmth if not sex.

  We went on dating Yale boys and Harvard boys and other boys, and by October of our junior year we had both been officially deflowered. There was never any idea that either of us should be jealous of the other. It was simply not that sort of love.

  We talked now and then of being together forever, and I still wonder whether we really believed at the time that we wanted to do this. We may have thought we did, but I think we knew better deep down inside ourselves. Because, after all, we were what Rhoda called devoutly middle-class. For all our free thought and rebellion we found it impossible not to take it for granted that we would someday each of us grow up to be our mothers all over again, buying a sufficiency of the American dream to cut ourselves off from what the dream would not encompass.

  (Rhoda, you may have to translate that last paragraph into something closer to English. You do know what I mean, don’t you?)

  Well. We were not together forever. Just a year and a half. At the end of our junior year Rhoda left school, got involved with some evil people, almost died during an abortion, then had a very heavy affair with a married man. I stayed in school, had several oddly tedious affairs with unmarried men, had a quite pleasant and wholly successful abortion all my own, and ultimately graduated and went to New York and got a job on a magazine and dated this cartoonist, and subsequently married him, and got at last to where I am now.

  Enough. However long a chapter should be, I’ve made my set of Abraham Lincoln’s legs precisely twice as long as Rhoda’s prologue or preface or whatever.

  Your turn, Harry.

  HARRY

  Hi there, sex nuts! Porn freaks! This is your old pal, Harry Kapp, ne Kapelner, renowned cartoonist and raconteur, set to lay aside pen and sketch pad and do his thing at the old typewriter.

  Jesus, how do you get started with this sort of thing? I wrote that first paragraph half an hour ago and ever since then I’ve been sitting here looking at it, and it doesn’t get any longer or anything. It just sits there and looks back at me. I don’t know where writers get it from. How they can just sit down and zip, the words are there. With drawing, the mechanics of pen and ink makes things happen. You start to draw something and your fingers do things your mind hasn’t even thought of, and good or bad things get onto the page. But this writing dodge strikes me as a hard way to make a living.

  I do want to write this, though. If only to get a look at the two chapters which will follow it, but which won’t follow it if I don’t write this one. (A lit’ry version of the carrot and the stick. Or was it the tortoise and the hare? Once upon a time there was a carrot and a stick, you see, and they decided to have a race…)

  Ah, but vy else do you vish to write zis, Herr Harry? Hmmm. For self-discovery or self-uncovery? Or merely to boast? One does feel boastful now and then, sitting at once on top of a mountain (all right, hill) and on top of the world, the proud owner of two fucking mythical shicksas (those are Israeli taxicabs). Harry, boychik, you’ve come a long way from Pelham Parkway.

  Let us not probe motives too closely. Too much attention to vy anyvun does anyzing gives rise to nausea and despair, usually in that order.

  I don’t remember just when Priss told me about the thing she and Rhoda had going in college. I remember the conversation well enough but not its location in time. We were going through a mutual confession trip, one of those here’s-some-of-the-crazy-things-I-did-before-I-met-you-things. Not to purge ourselves, but because that sort of thing turns one on.

  A perhaps uncomfortable truth-once the fresh gloss is gone from a marriage, once two people cease to be so madly new to one another, the marriage inevitably gets refreshed from the outside. If it gets refreshed at all. Not that people necessarily cheat, or enlarge their family circle in some such manner. But that each, at least in mind, starts filling that bed with other people. You turn on with forbidden thoughts and work them out on each other’s bodies. When a marriage relationship goes stale, all that means is that there has been a failure of imagination.

  “Say, I was wondering. Did you ever make it with a girl?”

  “What made you ask that?”

  “Ah, hah! I think you just answered it, lotus blossom.”

  “Oh, did I?”

  “You can talk about it.”

  “But you’ll despise me, won’t you? ‘Damned blonde dyke bitch.’ You’ll hate me.”

  “Oh, com
e on. Do I know the girl?”

  “Girl? How do you know there weren’t dozens?”

  “There was just one. Am I right?”

  “As a matter of fact, you are.”

  “Rhoda Whatchamacallit. Muir.”

  “You just flashed into that one? Or did you find some old letters of mine, and is this an elaborate Talmudic con game?”

  “No, I psyched it. Tell me.”

  “What is there to tell? We, oh, you could say we experimented with sex. The way kids experiment with drugs?”

  “They do like hell ex-fucking-periment with drugs. They blow grass and drop acid because it gets them high. That’s not an experiment. It’s a pleasure.”

  “Well, it was a pleasure, all right.”

  “What happened?”

  “What do you think? We made love.”

  “I mean what did you do?”

  “Locked the door first. Played records. Sometimes left the lights on and sometimes turned them out. Do we really have to have this conversation?”

  “No, liebchen, not if it’s too painful for you to talk about it.”

  “Devious sheenie bastard.”

  “Devious, yes. Sheenie, yes. Bastard, no. What did you used to do in bed?”

  “Oh, this is so silly, Harry. We didn’t do anything that you and I haven’t done like maybe a thousand times.”

  “Was it better with her?”

  “Now you’re not going to be jealous of something that happened in college, for Christ’s sake.”

  “It’s not jealousy, it’s fascination.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think lesbians are great.”

  “I’m not a lesbian!”

  “Don’t shout, I’m right here in front of you. I think it’s adorable, two girls in bed together. I’m serious, goddammit, I’m not being sarcastic, nor am I putting you on. I think it’s sweet.”

  “Sweet?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess it was sweet.”

  “It’s a whole fantasy of mine, as a matter of fact. A whole fetish thing.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I never knew that. Why didn’t you ever say anything? I could start wearing neckties to bed and pitching my voice lower and cursing like a state trooper. What’s so funny?”

  “Like a trooper.”

  “So?”

  “Not like a state trooper. Oh, you’re a delight. No, it doesn’t matter, forget it. Hey, let’s go upstairs.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  “Put your hand here and you’ll see if I’m kidding.”

  “Well, what do you know about that? It’s got a great big cock on it.”

  “Christ!”

  So it turned me on, the whole idea of the two of them together turned me on. So who knows why?

  Because I’m some kind of a latent faggot? Better latent than ever, I suppose, but if I ever had the desire I never knew it. The closest I ever came to a homosexual experience was in the men’s room of the New Amsterdam Theater when a beery old fart made a grab for my schlong. I swung a roundhouse right at him. He didn’t bother to duck, but I nevertheless missed him completely and lost my footing and fell in the urinal.

  Because I’ve always wanted to make it with my sister? I don’t think so, and neither would anybody who knew my sister. My sister is three years older than I am (and always has been) and she passed Gene Fullmer’s fighting weight before she passed seventh grade. And hasn’t quit yet. It’s not glandular, it’s that she eats ten or twelve meals a day. At the present time she is living in a middle-income cooperative apartment building in Queens and wearing all of Sidney Greenstreet’s old clothes. Her husband is a public accountant with hopes of one day becoming a certified public accountant. I’d say he’s certifiable, all right.

  Of course Edith is the family success story. Her accountant is, after all, a nice Jewish boy (he married her under the assumption that she was a Zim Line cruise ship) and they live within subway distance of Mama Kaplan and have produced four children. That these four little bastards are the most singly obnoxious children in recorded time doesn’t seem to matter to anyone, except perhaps me.

  I, on the other hand, am this bum who changed his name and married, oy, a blonde shicksa and lives God knows where, you couldn’t even get there on a train, not that you’d want to, oy, and has not produced a single grandchild, not that anyone would want him to, because what kind of a child would you have, a mongrel, that’s what kind of a child you would have.

  They should, by all rights, drop dead.

  But forget all this Jewish family shit. It was Tuesday when Rhoda’s letter came, and I wanted to drag Priss to the bedroom, and made an effort, toward which she chose to be purposely obtuse. All right, fair enough. I couldn’t blame her. I was trying to use her to shake something that she hadn’t inspired, and while everyone does this, it ought to be done more subtly. Fair enough.

  I kept thinking about Rhoda. Wondering if there would be anything between them, either in the mind or in fact. Wondering how I would feel about it. Weaving, in spite of myself, weird, three-in-a-bed fantasies.

  And what would happen, I wondered, if I should happen to loft a pass Rhoda’s way. The uncertain divorcee, her wedding ring gone, her maiden name hers once again-folklore marks them as easy game, like widows and betrayed wives. Did I want Rhoda? Yes, dammit. Did I want her right there in Prissy’s house, Prissy’s ex-roommate and ex-lover in Prissy’s house?

  Indeed I did.

  Or perhaps she would want to come into the city on a Wednesday. I go to New York just about every Wednesday, getting up early enough to drive the old Chevy to the station and catch the first train. Sometimes but not always Priss comes along and shops while I make the rounds of editors and collaborators and agents. Sometimes we then do something in the evening, like catch a play or a movie. When we first moved up here she came in almost every week, but now it’s more like once a month. We have told each other various reasons for this-that it’s a long trip, that she has things to do that are more important to her than shopping. We both know better. When people are together all the time, alone with each other as much as we are, they need a break from each other. I prefer the Wednesdays when I make the trip alone.

  I went in alone the day after Rhoda’s letter came. I hit the half dozen magazine offices I generally hit, showed the new work I’d done in the past week, and peddled most of it, which was gratifying. I dropped in on my agent, told her about the sales I had made and dropped off the unsold work for her to send around. She would try the major markets and what remained unsold would be returned to me to try on my own if I wanted. She doesn’t like to bother with cartoon submissions to minor markets; it’s unprofitable for her, but by stubbornly keeping all of those old chestnuts in motion I generally add a couple thousand a year to my income, which pays for a lot of stamps and envelopes.

  Around two in the afternoon I cabbed up to 83rd Street to see Marcia.

  Marcia is Marcia Goldsmith, a long-legged low-voiced brittle brilliant young lady slightly reminiscent of Elaine May, but a little less overpowering, thank God. She and I have collaborated on several non-books, she doing text and I providing pictures. A non-book is the sort that sits next to the cash register on the way out of the store, and it’s just sixty-four pages of one-line gags and art work, and you could read it in ten minutes flat and never want to look at it again, but what the hell, it’s only a buck and there are few enough laughs in this world, so you buy it.

  The non-book on which we were presently working was called The World is Coming to An End Because Book. That was the working title, which we thought we might amend to Chicken Little Was Right, which I have seen on buttons but not as a title. The premise was that we would have about thirty or forty ways in which the world was coming to an end, all of them ostensibly humorous, and that the increasing public consciousness of pollution and the environment question and all that would make people welcome the book as a sort of tra
gic relief.

  I wasn’t that crazy about the idea myself, but Marcia was coming up with some good lines, and the theme did suit my drawing style. The world is coming to an end because pretty soon there won‘t be any place left to throw old razor blades -and a view of the Grand Canyon filled to the top, and a little guy standing there with razor in one hand and blade in the other.

  Well, can’t every line be a boffo, you know.

  So I went up to Marcia’s place and she poured me a drink the size of Lake Erie, but purer, and I showed her what artwork I’d come up with during the week, plus a few gag ideas I had thought of-some she loved, most she hated-and she gave me a batch of new ideas which I would take back to Massachusetts, see which ones I liked in graphic terms, and work up some roughs.

  This much we probably could have done on the phone. But then I took her face between my hands and kissed her wide mouth, and she laughed throatily and gave me a lot of tongue and thrust with her hips and wiped her loins across mine.

  Surprise, Priss!

  Or is it? Did you know, or take for granted? Well, surprise, anyway. What you wrote held surprises for me. Sauce for the goose and all that. When one gets on one of these truth trips, it’s like going to a hotel in Paris. You have to take the bidet with the suite.

  It was the best sort of casual shtupping. We both liked each other a lot, but in the deeper sense neither of us really gave a double damn about the other, and we only balled each other because it felt good. No jealousy, no intrigue, no hang-ups. Just some friendly fucking. And in this chill dreary world, where the fucking you get is never worth the fucking you give, friendly fucking is treasure enough.

  In bed, after we had spent some minutes handling and nibbling at various portions of one another, I said, “Hey, may I ask a personal question, Marsh?”

  “Do we know each other well enough for that? Mmm, I like your body, I groove on you. What do you want to know?”

  “Ever make it with a girl?”

  “Well, I like that. Just because I’m an aggressive castrating bitch, you figure I’ve got to be a dyke as well. You’re full of compliments.”