Lawrence Block - Threesome

Partly, I guess, because I rightly expected this would dismay him to hell and gone. Partly too because I was bitterly ashamed of myself, convinced that my failure to want him every moment of every day meant I was making a botch of the marriage. And finally because it seemed to indicate to me that I did not really love him (which I didn’t, but there were other better signposts than this one.)

So we made something easily distinguishable from love, and just as I had not wanted it to begin with, so did I find it impossible to get into the swing of it. So of course I pretended to. (I’m sure who the first woman was to do that: Eve.) I faked passion, and I faked enthusiasm, and ultimately I faked orgasm, timing my fake to coincide with his real coming. Then he went to sleep and I didn’t, and the pattern of our marital relationship was firmly (?) established.

When Harry and Priss and I made love, and one of us had other things on his or her or her mind, it was a different matter. For one thing, one of the three of us could drop out of the game without destroying the game altogether. One less player still left two, which is, let us face it, a perfectly adequate number for most amorous activity. Whereas if one partner in a two-person sex relationship drops out for the evening, all the other one can do is masturbate-which may be fun or may not, but which isn’t what people get married for.

I remember a Wednesday late in May. It is mid-morning, Harry is in New York, and I am outside with Priss, watching her doing something agricultural with a trowel. I am smoking, and coughing every second or third puff, which marries guilt to discomfort. I threw the cigarette away and went on coughing, and Priss took the opportunity to tell me I was smoking too much, and I got even with her, clever me, by lighting another cigarette and getting my throat in an uproar all over again.

“Well, I guess Harry must be in the city by now,” I said.

“I’m sure he is.”

“That’s a long trip to make every week.”

“Well, it’s important for him to keep up personal contacts. With editors and other cartoonists and people in other areas of the business.”

“Uh-huh. Think he’ll see a girl today?”

She dropped the trowel, spun around to look at me. “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. Just making conversation.”

“No, I’m serious. Why on earth would he want to start something with a girl in the city?”

“The usual reasons, I guess. Because it feels good, because it’s fun, because-”

“But he’s got us, silly.”

I felt like rewinding the tape and recording a better conversation in this one’s place. Instead I pushed doggedly onward. (I had a dog once who used to push humanly onward.)

I said, “You told me a couple of times that you were convinced Harry had a woman in the city. Or a variety of girls that he used to see.”

She raised her eyebrows and squinted, her Puzzled Priscilla expression. “So?”

“Did you mean it?”

“I suppose so, sure. So what?”

“So why should he have purged himself of the habit of capping off a New York Wednesday by getting laid? If he’s enjoyed it over the years, why quit now?”

“Because he’s got us.”

“He had you and that didn’t stop him.”

“That was different.”

“What’s the difference? As far as I’m concerned, you’re a really yummy fuck.”

“But I’m only one person. He needs more than I’ve got for him, I told you that. Oh, shit, Rhoda, I think you’re just being purposely argumentative.”

“Well, if I am, I’m sorry.”

“We all of us need more than we can get from one person, isn’t that the point of this relationship?”

“I thought the point was that we loved each other.”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“Is it?”

“Rho, you’re not making sense.”

“I’m sorry, then.”

“Rho?”

“What?”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, why?”

“I don’t know. Would it bother you if Harry did have sex with a girl in New York this afternoon?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

“Well, you must have. You brought it up.”

“I mean, what right would I have to be bothered?”

“The same right I have.”

“Do I? For Christ’s sake, you’re his wife, Priss.”

“So? That doesn’t make me any closer to him that you are.”

“Oh, I think it has to.”

“Oh, do you really? Is that really what you think, Rhoda? Is it?”

“What’s the matter?”

She stood up. She was not sobbing, she was in control of herself that way, but tears were of their own accord welling up in her eyes and spilling out and trickling down her cheeks. Her long blonde hair was in her eyes and she brushed it impatiently out of the way.

“Priss, tell me what’s the matter.”

“Nothing.”

“Priss, baby, I was in a bad mood and I took it out on you. God knows why. God knows what I was in a bad mood about, what I’ve got to be in a bad mood about. You know me, Priss-puss, I’m an idiot. Give me something good for once in my life and I keep looking to see what the catch is. Baby, come here.”

She leaned toward me, started to fall. I caught her and held her head to my breast and stroked her hair. She tilted up her head and we kissed with a clinging urgency that contained a feeling of need which was in its own way far more erotic than our recent combinations and permutations of bedroom athletics.

We made love in the garden.

And afterward I smoked a cigarette and held her in my arms, and she said, “I’m so afraid sometimes.”

“Of what?”

“You and Harry.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I guess I can’t talk about it.”

“Tell me.”

“You’ll laugh at me.”

“I won’t.”

“Well, I just have the feeling that, that you and Harry, that the two of you are close in a way that I’ll always be shut out of because I’m not like you two. I’m not clever the way you are, I don’t have that kind of mind, and I think, sometimes I think, well, I think that if he had met you first, you know, or that if I quietly dropped out of the picture, and maybe that’s what I ought to do except that I need you so very much, both of you, I need you, you’re all I’ve ever had, both of you, and-”

“Priss!”

She stopped, broke off the long string of words, and looked at me, eyes round and vacant, and sighed.

“Priss, it’s not like that.”

“I’m wrong, I guess.”

“Priss, I never saw a man more in love with a woman than Harry is with you.”

“Then why-”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Then why does he also want you? was what she decided not to say. And I guess you could say that different forms of that question were on everybody’s mind. We were all terrified of perfection, suspicious of happiness. While some people can step in shit and shout out joyously that there must be a pony, people like us wake up in Paradise and look around apprehensively for the snake. Why is this, I wonder? Have we been in that many Paradises, and seduced by quite that many snakes?

There were certain statements and questions that came to me from time to time, and one or another of them would prey on my mind for a while, and then I would get over it, and finally some other doubt or fear would turn up to take its place.

Some of them:

I am in the way. They have a marriage, they have their home, they have the mutual shared experience of eight years or so, and I am simply in their way, the perennial house guest and bed guest. Guests like fish spoil on the third day, and the third day is long past, and sooner or later they will wake up to the fact that they got along without me before they met me and can get along without me now. And then where will I be?