Lawrence Block - Threesome

I turned.

“Where you goin’?”

“Nowhere. Go back to sleep.”

“Come back to bed.”

“Later.”

“Mmmnnn. Timezit?”

“Early. Go back to-”

“S’Harry?”

“Out Back.”

“Where you goin’?”

“For a walk.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“Go back to sleep, Priss.”

She said something but it came out in a total mumble, and I waited until she had slipped off to sleep again. I went to the kitchen and hurried through breakfast, making do with instant coffee in spite of strong feelings against it, and then let myself out of the house and started for the woods in back.

Of course Harry had picked that moment to decide that he couldn’t stand looking at his sketch pad. He was having a cigarette break in the garden, pacing back and forth, smoking furiously, and examining flowers.

“Hello, there,” he said, too heartily. “You’re up early, aren’t you?”

He was as unfortunately wide awake as Priss was sleepy. This morning both of them seemed to me to be carrying things to extremes. The nervousness, which I now knew was more than a matter of a hangover, did not seem to be going away.

“Thought I’d go for a walk,” I said.

“Oh?”

“In the woods.”

The property backs up on some woods, which constitutes a barrier of no little size between our place (our place?) and the estate to our rear. (Estate is perfectly justified in this context. The owner made several million dollars in scrap metals during the Second World War, multiplied this a few times over in other fields, and then retired to a couple of hundred acres in the Berkshires, where he maintains racing horses and fattens Black Angus cattle.)

“You’re not supposed to walk in his woods,” Harry said.

“I’m not?”

“Well, not you personally. Nobody’s not. He has signs up. No hunting, trespassing, or spitting. Violators will be torn apart by mad Alsatians. Incidentally, what is an Alsatian?”

“A native of Alsace.”

“No, it’s some kind of a dog I always encounter in English novels. They’re always guarding property. Just the right sort of a dog for it, one gathers, but I’ve never heard of the breed outside of English novels.”

“They’re German shepherds.”

“They sound sort of similar, but they always-”

“Not similar. They are German shepherds.”

“Then why not call them that?”

“For a long time, if you called anything German in England, nobody bought it.”

“Oh. So they just-”

“Changed the name.”

“Fantastic,” he said. He flicked ashes at an azalea. “How come you know all these things?”

How come you don’t,, I very nearly said. Why, I wondered, am I so fucking hostile this morning?

Instead I said, “I think I’ll chance the slavering Alsatians. That’s probably just to keep hunters off his property, wouldn’t you think?”

“Probably.”

“And I feel in the mood for a walk in the woods.”

“Maybe I’ll lock up my pen and come along.”

“No, don’t do that,” I said. It was absolutely maddening-all I wanted to do was go for a walk and now everybody on earth wanted to keep me company. I felt like a character in a Gothic novel whom nobody wants to let out of the forbidding old manse.

“To protect you from the mad Alsatians.”

“Oh, I’ll manage,” I said. “I’ll insist I lost my way. That I am a stranger in these parts, kind sir-”

“Some kind sir. Bloody old robber baron.”

“A stranger in these parts, kind baron-”

“You want to go for a walk by yourself.”

“Yeah, kind of. A walk by myself, she explained, lowering her eyelashes bashfully at the handsome young cartoonist. Yeah, that’s it, I guess.”

“You vhant to be alone,” he said, not too much like Greta Garbo. And he looked at me oddly, but just for a moment, and then he laughed it all away.

“Take care, kitten,” he said. “I’ll get back to the serious business of mining salt. Watch out for bear traps.”

“Oh, I will, kind sir.”

“For that matter, watch out for bears.”

“They prevent forest fires.”

“They also eat Boy Scouts. Where else do you think they get those hats?”

“Well, fella, I ain’t no Boy Scout.”

“Don’t worry, honey. Somebody’ll eatcha.”

“I can hardly wait.”

“Well-”

I laughed and he laughed, and I was only laughing to get to the end of the scene, and so was he, and he went back to the shed while I walked on to the back line of the property and climbed over a couple strands of barbed wire that were strung from tree to tree at the property line.

I trespassed, but benignly. I didn’t pick any wildflowers or leave any litter behind. I just walked around in the silence, enjoying the loneliness, and wondering if I would ever stop being lonely, in or out of the woods. And wondered, for that matter, if I would ever really be out of the woods, so to speak.

Because it seemed to me, on that otherwise unimpeachable morning, that this was not my house, or my family, or indeed my life. That I had slipped it on as easily as I slipped on Prissy’s loafers, and that it was comfortable in about the same way, but that it was not mine and that sooner or later I would have to give it back. I had not been made for it, I did not own it, and it was not mine.

I sat down on a fallen tree and looked at mushrooms, wishing I knew how to tell the poisonous ones from the edible ones. It struck me as though it would be great fun to gather one’s own mushrooms and take them back and cook them, but that the delight of this form of amusement would be seriously muted if one were by no means certain of surviving the meal. There would have to be books on the subject, I decided, and perhaps I could read up on it and learn something about it. God knows I had the time.

And nothing better to do with it.

Yes, it kept coming back to that, didn’t it?

I spent quite a bit of time in those woods, and found myself returning to them several times that week and the next, when I needed a few minutes or an hour of peace and quiet. They did the job rather well, I must say. Sometimes I walked around, sometimes I sat quite still and listened to birds, sometimes I tried to coax a squirrel to my side-he knew better-and once or perhaps twice I sat on my fallen tree and cried. If a tree falls in the middle of the forest where there is no human ear to hear it, has it in fact really fallen? This one did, for otherwise how could I have been sitting upon it?

And if a girl weeps in the middle of the forest with no human ear to hear her, are her tears real?

Oh yes. Yes, they are.

My moods faded in and out, in and out. What Harry has taken to calling the Magic Days were largely over now. The same intense triangular love still very definitely existed, and moved us all deeply, but now it was more a sometime thing, not a preoccupation that dominated every waking moment.

Well, this has to happen. In any form of activity, not merely sex. But when it happens, it is almost impossible not to worry about it.

I remember, early in my marriage, the first time that Robert Keith made genuinely unsuccessful love to me. It took less than a month of marriage for this to happen. It was night, and time for bed, and we went to bed, and he rolled over and took me in his arms, which was his usual subtle way of telling me that it was time we got down to the serious business of screwing.

And for the tiniest moment I stiffened in his arms-and he did not seem to notice, subtlety truly not being his long suit-and even as I did so I realized what I was doing, and why. I did not want to make love to him.

Now what’s so remarkable about that, really? One cannot be always in the mood for sex unless one is so mindless as to be never in the mood for anything else. At that particular point in time I was deeply involved with private thoughts all my own. What the thoughts were doesn’t matter, and I certainly don’t remember anyway, but in any case what I wanted was to be let alone while I explored the insides of my head, and then to slip off into an alone kind of sleep. But RKD wanted to make love, a wholly legitimate aspiration for a husband of less than a month, and of course it didn’t even occur to me to ask him if he’d as soon take a rain check.