Lawrence Block - Threesome

“We’ll be two old dykes with our children. It will work out fine.”

“It will?”

I stayed in bed until she feel asleep. Then I got up and wanted to take another shower but didn’t. I took the jug of wine with me and went into the living room. I drank quite a lot of it, I guess.

I thought about Glory. I wondered if there was any way at all to get in touch with her. I decided that there wasn’t, and that it was probably just as well.

Then I took all the sleeping pills and went to bed.

Rrrring!

“Hotel Royalton, good morning.”

“Mr. Harry Kapp, please.”

“One moment please.”

Rrrring!

“Hello?”

“Harry?”

“Rhoda?”

“Yes. I just got your letter, Harry.”

“Oh. Uh, how is everybody?”

“I’m fine.”

“And Priss?”

“Priss is going to be all right.”

“What?”

“Priss had an accident, Harry.”

“Ohmigod. What happened?”

“She was very depressed.”

“For Christ’s sake, what happened?”

“She took some sleeping pills.”

“She’s not-“

She’s all right.”

“And the baby?”

“She vomited up the pills in her sleep. She took enough to kill her but she threw them up. It looked as though it might be bad for the baby, but I took her to a doctor and he checked everything and he says the baby is going to be all right, too. I wanted to get in touch with you but there was no way until I got your letter. I called everywhere. I called Marcia, and for that matter Priss had already spoken to Marcia-”

“She did?”

“She wanted to find out where you were, Harry. But Marcia didn’t know.”

“No, nobody knew.”

“Well, I called again to make sure, and then I called your agent but she only knew that you were in New York.”

“I didn’t tell anybody where I was staying.”

“Yes, I know that now. When your letter came I read it, and then I thought I had better call you right away. I think you ought to come home.”

“I’ll get the next train out there. Is Priss-?”

“She’s really going to be all right.”

“And the baby?”

“Both babies are going to be all right. I can feel mine moving. You can put your hand on my stomach and feel him kicking.”

“I’ll be right out.”

“Shall I meet you at the station?”

“No, the Chevy’s there.”

“Will it start? It’s been just sitting there.”

“It always starts. Stay with Priss. Is she there now? Can I talk to her?”

“She’s sleeping. I could wake her.”

“Don’t do that. I’ll be there as soon as I can. And Rhoda?”

“Yes?”

“Tell her I love her.”

“She knows that now.”

“So do I.”

I typed up the phone conversation while waiting for Harry’s train to get here. I had already typed his letter and added it to the growing stack of manuscript, and I figured I might say something to bring things up to date, but after a few false starts I gave up attempting a formal or even informal narrative and decided to put down as much as I could remember of the telephone conversation. It seems cheating, in a way. I suppose I should have written up the whole scene of discovering Priss sprawled in her bed with a little pool of vomit at the side of the bed, and traces of half-dissolved pills in the vomit, and the whole panic, and calling the doctor, and pouring coffee into Priss and walking her around the room, all of that crap, but the memory of it was painful enough and I did not want to bother with it, so it was enough to carry that part of the plot forward by typing up the phone conversation.

And then of course Harry came back, and we all three talked, and he felt my stomach and couldn’t feel the baby kicking, although I felt it plainly enough, it evidently being easier to feel on the inside than on the outside.

Priss felt life a few days later, which reassured her greatly. The doctor had told her the baby was alive, he was able to detect its heartbeat, but Priss was convinced she had killed the child with pills and it took the kid’s kicking to make her believe otherwise.

And after that somehow nobody ever got back to work on the book.

There didn’t seem to be any need anymore. The typewriter and the manuscript remained in a prominent position for quite a long time, with the sort of idea in the air that sooner or later one of us would sit down and carry the story a little further along, but this didn’t happen. And finally someone-I forget who-took the typewriter and put it in its case and packed it off in a closet, and I put the manuscript in a dresser drawer, and we more or less forgot about it.

The general feeling seemed to be that we didn’t need it anymore. That it had served its several purposes, and that we were past that situation now, and thus no longer required whatever precisely it may have been that it gave us. We had all written things and made discoveries. I had taken my walks in the woods, and Priss had orgied with her college kids, and Harry had slept with Marcia and run off to New York, and we were past all of that now, and that was all.

Today I came across the manuscript, and started reading it, and put it down while I changed and nursed Judith Elizabeth Kapp, and then returned to it. Then Priss came in carrying James Oliver Kapp and began reading the part I was done with while James Oliver gobbled his lunch from her.

“I forgot parts of it,” she said.

“Parts of what happened or parts of the book?”

“Both. Seems a long time.”

“It does.”

“Hard to believe we ever felt quite that way.”

“Yes.”

“Why did we stop writing?”

And I harked back (how often, after all, can one really hark back?) to the very first chapter, the mildly drunken night when we three decided to write a bestseller and become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. We had wondered then how we would know when the book was done, and I had said that we would keep going until it was long enough to publish, and until we had run out of story.

And that, it seems to me, is why we all stopped writing. Not because the book was long enough to publish, although I suppose it is, if in fact it’s publishable in the first place.

But because we really had run out of story. The story of the three of us had a beginning and a middle and an ending, and all of these elements are covered well enough, I think, in what we have written. After Harry came home the story had come to a conclusion.

And now we live happily ever after.

Which is how books ought to end, isn’t it?

Except that one does want loose ends tied together. One’s sense of neatness demands it, and there are certain things that ought to be put down in black and white on the off-chance that some eye other than our six eyes will someday scan this material.

First of all, Harry and I are married. It was Priss’ idea, interestingly enough. She felt that there was something artificial in the fact that she was married to Harry and I was not, that either both of us or neither of us should be his lawful wedded wife.

“But we can’t both be,” I said.

“Why not?”

“There are laws against bigamy.”

“There are laws against cocksucking,” she pointed out. “There are laws against opening a pack of cigarettes without tearing the tax stamp.”

“Where have you been? They stopped using those tax stamps on cigarettes years ago.”

“You know what I mean.”

“But bigamy-”

“Is what we’re involved in, in fact. Why not in name as well?”

“Wouldn’t it be easier for you and Harry to get divorced?”

“Why on earth would we want to do that?”