Lawrence Block - Threesome

What am I doing with these disgusting people? These people are perverts, because a marriage is supposed to involve two people with no room for a third person, and they are using me sexually, dragging me into their marriage bed, using me in an essentially exploitative way, using me to prop up their own sagging marriage, and Christ, they must be perverts or they wouldn’t enjoy doing the things I like to do in bed, would they?

Why am I corrupting these fine sensitive people? These people had a perfectly satisfactory marriage until I came along, and I seduced them both, and got them into a lot of kinky things, and sooner or later they will realize what has happened to them and their marriage will be ruined, and everything everywhere will all come apart at the seams, and what on earth will any of us do then?

I think I would have found myself periodically obsessed by these several doubts and fears, and others which I cannot recall now, and do not want to be bothered with-I think they would have nibbled away at my mind no matter what. This was, you must realize, a very unorthodox relationship to have evolved between three basically orthodox individuals. If we had never been much at bowing down to idols, neither had we spent much time smashing them. So it was inevitably hard to live full time with such a far-out situation. We might embrace it wholeheartedly for the most part, but there had to be headaches and night sweats and heart pounding from time to time.

But what made it a little worse for me, I think, is that there was really not much of anything for me to do. The bit about the idle hands doing the Devil’s work has a lot to it, and while the Devil didn’t seem to be giving me any assignments, my idle hands were kept busy picking scabs off my own wounds.

(That’s a revolting metaphor. Sorry I mentioned it.)

Harry had his cartooning, and his trips to New York, and all of that. Priss had the handling of the family finances-however scatterbrained she might appear, she was a wizard at checkbook balancing and food budgeting and money planning and all those things that Harry and I could not have done to save our souls. She also made the house stay together, kept it clean and neat, made the meals, all of that.

I, on the other hand, didn’t do much of anything.

A couple of times I would set up the typewriter and try writing, and once or twice I would get a reasonably decent start on something, but nothing ever came of it. I would start things knowing full well that I was not going to finish them, and that what I was producing was essentially busy work, something to keep Rhoda Muir off the streets and out of trouble, something as vitally creative as the potholders they weave in occupational therapy at lunatic asylums.

Once, long ago, a lover took me with him while visiting his mother at one such Bide-a-Wee home-she was an alcoholic, in for her annual desiccation-and while he went to hold her hand I wandered around, identifying more closely with the ambulatory patients than I really wanted to, and ultimately finding my way into a shop where the patients’ O.T. work was offered for sale. Hundreds of little trivets ornamented with tiny ceramic tiles, thousands of those fucking potholders, no end of baskets and spoonholders and other triangular things which must have had some function-God knows they weren’t decorative-but which served no purpose I could fathom. I asked someone what they were for but couldn’t make out his answer and was too put off by his rolling eyes and slack mouth to ask him again.

But the point, if I’ve not lost it forever, is that no one would make that crap if there was anything else to do with his time. Worthwhile projects are those worth doing for themselves, not for their effect upon the psyche, not because they help pass the time, and my writing thus was in the same category as the potholders and the baskets and the trivets, of subjective therapeutic value only, and blessed little of that.

So I wrote things, and then tore them up, and put the typewriter away and went for a walk in the woods. Sooner or later, I knew, there would have to be something that I would discover and that would be right for me. But it did no good to keep trying things on until something fit.

Meanwhile, I began to play more of a role in the functioning of the house itself. I had to do this or feel like a sponge, a parasite, and it did pass time as well. I helped with the cleaning, I guided the power mower over those parts of the lawn that were level enough for that sort of thing. I appointed myself official morning coffee maker, and instant coffee ceased to play a role in our lives, to the relief of everybody but its manufacturer. I took over some of the cooking. I had never enjoyed cooking while I was married, and was none too good at it, with the result that we ate out most of the time. But now I was surprised to discover that I seemed to be capable of enjoying it after all, and that I could, when I took the time and trouble, produce a dish that everyone seemed to agree was quite edible. I was a very different sort of cook than Priss, who was rarely enormously inspired but who was able to prepare reasonably successful meals seven days a week without minding the routine or making an occasional mess out of an occasional meal. I, on the other hand, tended to get wildly creative, going in for some major production numbers and now and then ruining a meal completely. And I could only cook once in a while. If it had become a regular thing, I would have hated it.

I wonder how well I’ve conveyed the various changes we went through after the month of magic ran its course and left all three of us to find out just where we were going. There is one way of looking at things which I don’t seem to have mentioned, and that is simply this: When our orientation was planted firmly in present time, everything was great. As long as we lived as much as possible in the Now, there were no worries, no cares, no paranoia, no anxiety. It was only when we turned from Where are we now? to Where the hell are we going? that things became less than idyllic.

We all found ways, didn’t we, to run away from us?

You in the woods, Rhoda, and you to New York, Harry. But more than that we ran off to our secret selves and shut the rest of the world out.

As well as we have come to know each other, I keep finding out things about both of you that I did not know until I read what you have written. And I’m sure the reverse is equally true, because I find myself revealing things here that I kept to myself until now. This typewriter is like an analyst’s couch, it really is.

I don’t know if I should tell you this.

Probably not.

But I guess I will, anyway. I suppose I could always tear up what I’ve written if I decide that it is something I would rather hold within myself a little longer.

I could do that.

And write some other chapter in this one’s place.

If things had gone together in any other way, if any of I don’t know how many variables had not been just so, then it never would have happened. But that’s always the way, isn’t it? Everything that occurs in life is an extraordinary coincidence, and life itself is such a flaunting of the odds that it’s a miracle any of us exist at all.

This one afternoon, you see, I was in the grip of my Priscilla’s-Just-In-The-Way delusion.

Well, see, it’s a particularly natural delusion. Almost inescapable when one sees how well Rhoda and Harry get along together, and how much more they seem to have in common than either one has with me. When I look at the subject sanely, however, I realize that one of the things they have in common is that they’re both in love with me, and I realize further that in a very special way we exist as a trio and would not exist ever so well any other way.