Lawrence Block - Threesome

We both drank too much-no one had more than heard of grass, but all of us drank as a regular thing. And studied too little, until exams came up or papers came suddenly due and we dropped Dexedrine and worked the clock around. And we leaped constantly back and forth between exhilaration and despair. Yes, despair-they really were desperate times.

One night, then, wintry (I remember the ultra-long Yale blue-and-white scarf I wore then, wrapped endlessly around my neck) and bleak, and I came back from the library where I had gone to study and had instead dozed over some unreadable swill. Rhoda was sitting up in bed with a half-gallon of California wine. There were stains of spilled wine on the bedsheets.

I can see her now, the top sheet just covering the tops of her breasts, her rich auburn hair flowing to her shoulders. (Who else had long hair in those days? Hardly anyone. I should have, had I had any sense. I have at my best moments a sort of ethereal quality, which my blondish hair, now worn long, rather enhances, I would say. But then I couldn’t conceive of it.)

She was so beautiful, Rhoda was. I hated my own looks in those days and would have prayed, had prayer occurred to me as a logical means to any sort of end, to look less like myself and more like Rhoda. No one else there looked remotely like her. In a school full of girls, she looked like a young woman.

“Wine,” she said, extending the jug.

“We’re not using glasses?”

“We are getting in tune with more basic things. Wine straight from the jug. You crook your finger in the handle and let the jug rest on your upper arm, like so-”

I put a stack of records on. The Modern Jazz Quartet, J.J. and Kai, George Shearing. (Whatever happened to all those people?) We talked. I don’t remember what about. Rhoda was in a depression and trying to laugh and drink her way out of it. I was keeping her company, but not doing the world’s best job of it.

“Prissy?”

“Hmmm?”

“Everything’s so alone, isn’t it?”

“Everything’s a pain in the ass.”

“I think you’ve broken new philosophical ground. Everything’s a pain in the ass.”

“It really is.”

“I’ll tell you something, most people are a pain in the ass.”

“An unqualified pain in the ass.”

“How do you qualify one?”

“You have to pass an examination. On the state level, I think. What would I do if you didn’t exist?”

“It’s like God. You would have to invent me.”

“God would have to invent you?”

“No, I mean-”

“I know what you mean. I always know what you mean. We always know what we mean. Rho, I couldn’t study, I fell asleep over the book.”

“Do you think we’ll ever fall in love?”

“With our books?”

“With men. Boys. Whatever.”

“I don’t know. They’re all-”

“I know.”

“Sometimes I think I’m too selfish to fall in love. I mean too much involved with myself, actually.”

“I don’t think you’re a selfish person at all. Not even in that sense.”

“I don’t think I’m lovable.”

“Hell, pudding, I love you.”

“And I love you, but-”

“That’s the solution, then. We’ll become lesbians. This wine isn’t so bad once you get used to it.”

“When will that happen? I don’t seem to be getting used to it.”

“It takes time, that’s all. You know, we really could become lesbians.”

“I wish they had courses in it.”

“What would be more natural, Prissy, than for two people who love each other to become lovers?”

“Exactly.”

“You’re very beautiful.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“What would you do if I kissed you?”

“Close my eyes and think of Paul Newman.”

“Come here and try it.”

“Huh?”

Sitting upright, the bedsheet falling away from her full breasts: “Get over here and kiss me.”

Django, by the Modern Jazz Quartet. The smells of cigarette smoke and wine and unwashed clothes. Going to the bed, head buzzing with a feel of unreality, weird, weird. Her eyes draw me as light draws insects. Depths and intricacies. Kissing, her mouth under mine, warm, yielding, and then her arms flung convulsively around me, holding me. Her breasts under my breasts.

Voices in my brain. One, slightly hysterical, shouting that I was kissing my roommate, for Christ’s sake, that I was kissing a girl, for Christ’s sake, that I must be out of my mind or hopelessly perverted. A voice of soft reason saying Be careful, go slow, be careful, this is deep water. And another voice, light and free as myself, saying airily that nothing could feel this good and have anything bad about it.

“Did you think of Paul Newman?”

“I thought of you.”

“This is dynamite. Go lock the door.”

“Do you think-”

“Yes. And take off your clothes.”

“I feel embarrassed.”

“Oh, please.”

“I do. I feel completely strange.”

“So do I. Oh, you’re so beautiful, Priss. Come in here with me. Oh, Jesus. How we feel together. Oh, God, kiss me.”

“Rho-”

“Sweet Prissy.”

“Do you know what to do? Have you ever-”

“No.”

“Neither have I. Is one of us supposed to be the boy or something?”

“No, I think we can both be the girl.”

“But-”

“Love, there’s nobody watching. There is only us. And no masks. We can just do whatever we want. Oh, I love you, I want to kiss you and hold you and touch you. Do you like this? I love your breasts.”

“They’re so small.”

“Like fine porcelain teacups. I shall sip tea from them. How nice you taste.”

“Oh, my God!”

“Ha, look what I found. A pwetty wittow pussy cat! Such a nice little pussy and it’s all wet. It must like this.”

“Oh, God, it does.”

“I’m wet too, Priss. Touch me. Oh, yes, Christ, yes, touch me forever. Oh, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop. Oh!”

And, after a moment, “Who would have believed it? It happened so quickly. I’ve never had anything like that feeling, the most powerful orgasm just exploding all over me. So quickly!”

“I felt it happening for you. I was like there with you, in it. Do you know?”

“I want to do you.”

“Yes.”

“And this is so weird. There’s no teacher, do you know what I mean? It’s new for both of us. We discover it all together. Oh, the things we’re going to think of to do with each other, oh, Priss, I love you. You know something else? I love us. Do you know what I mean?”

“I love us, too.”

“I love the whole idea of us. This fucking stupid school and all these boring girls and the stupid Yalies, and in the middle of all this shit there’s us, being together and loving each other, and I think it’s great. Oh, kiss me, let’s be together again, let me kiss you, let me touch you.”

We had about a year and a half of each other. During that time we never had any contact with any other girls. There were platoons of lesbians on that campus, and I thought that some of them might have their suspicions about us, but if so they kept it to themselves, just as we kept ourselves to ourselves.

We joked about telling the housing office to take one of the beds out of our room. We didn’t need them both. We always slept together after that first night. We didn’t always make love, but we always slept together, and shared warmth if not sex.

We went on dating Yale boys and Harvard boys and other boys, and by October of our junior year we had both been officially deflowered. There was never any idea that either of us should be jealous of the other. It was simply not that sort of love.

We talked now and then of being together forever, and I still wonder whether we really believed at the time that we wanted to do this. We may have thought we did, but I think we knew better deep down inside ourselves. Because, after all, we were what Rhoda called devoutly middle-class. For all our free thought and rebellion we found it impossible not to take it for granted that we would someday each of us grow up to be our mothers all over again, buying a sufficiency of the American dream to cut ourselves off from what the dream would not encompass.