Lawrence Block - Threesome

“Beautiful.”

“But I’ll never do it. I would have to be awake for hours before I could bring myself to squeeze an orange, and who in the hell wants to drink orange juice at five in the afternoon?”

“You used to like screwdrivers at school.”

“Some of the things I liked then I’ve lost my taste for.”

“But not all of them.”

“Yes, too true. Don’t look at me like that.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Damn you, Rho, you can get me hot with your eyes. It’s the most fantastic thing. I feel absolutely naked.”

“Well, you absolutely are. Do you think that might have something to do with it?”

“Maybe. Just think, in six more days it’ll be Wednesday again.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’re not going to wait, are we?”

“Noway.”

“I suppose Harry’s Out Back?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He just about never comes in before noon.”

“I know.”

“What time is it?”

“About nine.”

“He could come in, though.”

I took off my robe.

“Oh, you devil. Why did you have to do that?”

“I was beginning to feel overdressed.”

“We agreed to wait until Wednesday.”

“I could die of frustration by then. I heard you fucking last night.”

“Oh, you actually heard us?”

“Of course I heard you. I was alive and in Massachusetts. Which means I heard you.”

“I guess I may have gotten carried away.”

“You should have been carried away. By white-coated men. I want to get in bed with you.”

“Not in this bed.”

“Why not?”

“This is the bed Harry and I sleep together in.”

“I figured that out all by myself, doll.”

“Well, uh, I don’t know.”

“Actually that part of it appeals to me.”

“Really? For God’s sake, why?”

“I’m strange. Oh, how nice, there’s dried come all over the sheet. Not entirely dried, either. This is really turning me on. Come here.”

“Oh.”

“Wow.”

“I guess we’re not going to wait until Wednesday.”

“It’s always Wednesday. In the hot pants of the soul it is always three o’clock in the Wednesday.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know.”

“I love you, Rhoda. Oh, God.”

“Ah, Priss.”

“But we can’t be in this bed. No, serious.”

“Why?”

“If Harry does come into the house he could walk in here.”

“But he doesn’t come in before noon.”

“Who knows that he never will? Once in a great while he gets hung-up or runs out of cigarettes or decides he’ll die if he doesn’t have another cup of coffee. But if he comes into the house and we’re in your room with the door shut he won’t know we’re both in there, he’ll just think I’m on the toilet somewhere or in the basement feeding clothes to the washing machine.”

“So that it doesn’t starve?”

“Of course. Sometimes I think of every household appliance as just another mouth to feed. Another thing-”

“Shut up and kiss me.”

“Mmmm. I always thought I hated making love in the morning but it seems I was wrong. Another thing is I’m sure if you stay here you’ll shed like a puppy dog. Curly auburn hairs in our bed might be something of a tip-off.”

“Uh-huh. So if I should flutter my lashes at you and say, ‘My place or yours, dahhhling?’ the answer would be-”

“Your place, dahhhling.”

“Right on.”

At lunch I knew something was up. Of course the speculative glances I was getting from Harry didn’t necessarily mean he knew anything. They might simply be his way of telling me that he still couldn’t wait to get me in bed.

I couldn’t wait either. But I was a little afraid of what one relationship might do to the other.

All of this damned concealment! That morning we had worked to make sure that Harry wouldn’t find out about what we were doing, and I was already thinking about what I would do with Harry and how I would keep it from Priss. In retrospect, it’s hard to believe we cared so much about such stupid secrecy, especially since in a chamber of our minds each of us wanted it out in the open, needed it to be out in the open.

After lunch, perhaps an hour or two after lunch, I drifted back into my room. I think to change a garment or something. I don’t entirely remember why. Whatever it was, I know that I did it and was on the way out without noticing the bit of art work Harry had left for me, when some vibration caught me at the door and something made me look back and see, out of the corner of my eye, a piece of paper on top of my pillow.

(Parenthetical observation: Once I saw a movie called The Counterfeit Traitor, with William Holden and Lilli Palmer. World War Twice, and he’s a Swede spying for the allies, and she’s his German girlfriend, a Good German, and she’s helping the allied cause too, and she sees the damage done to her city by an allied air raid, which she feels she helped bring about, and she’s consumed with guilt and everything, and she’s also a Catholic, so she carries her guilt to the nearest church and dumps it onto some poor priest. And when she’s finished her confession and waiting to hear what her penance is, the curtain is drawn and the “priest” is revealed in an SS uniform.

(The look on Lilli Palmer’s face must have been identical to the look on mine when I picked up that fucking piece of paper.

(End of parenthetical observation.)

The drawing, which I still own, and would not part with for the world, was far more precisely detailed than Harry’s work generally is, yet the style was unmistakably his. There was a girl who was a slight caricature of Priss, the teeth a bit more prominent than hers, the eyes somewhat more hyperthyroid. There was another girl who was a slight caricature of me, the breasts oversized, mouth fuller, and so on. The girl who looked like me had a tongue shaped like a penis, and was in the process of inserting it into the girl who looked like Priss, and while all of this was going on, a man’s face, a slight caricature of the artist as a young voyeur, loomed in a window over the bed and leered down at the two girls.

The caption read, “What do they know about love uptown?” That’s an old and not very funny joke, and if you don’t already know it you’re not going to read it here, because it’s a bore. But it does fit the circumstances well enough.

I stood there looking at this and trembling, literally trembling, and then after I don’t know how long I realized that not only was I trembling, which was understandable enough, but that my underpants were sopping, and not because I had peed in them, which would have also been understandable enough, but because I was flowing like a river, my cunt was swimming, and that, it seemed to me, was not understandable at all.

Priss invited me shopping that afternoon. I said I was in the middle of a book and I thought I would stretch out and finish it. She went shopping. I smoked three cigarettes one after the other. Then I went out to the shed.

Harry was working on a cartoon. He looked up and our eyes locked.

I said, “I got your picture.”

“And?”

“You made my breasts too large.”

“God made your breasts too large. But I’m not complaining and neither should you.”

“You made them larger than He did.”

“Well, I paint what I see.”

“You were watching.”

“Yes.”

“For very long?”

“No.”

“There’s something I have to do,” I said. “Just stay right there, don’t move, there’s this thing that I have to do.”

Utter compulsion. One does what one must do. I walked toward him, taking off clothes as I walked, dropping them along the way. I went to him and got on my knees in front of his chair. I unzipped his pants and put my hand in and found his cock and took it out.