Lawrence Block - Threesome

(Rhoda, you may have to translate that last paragraph into something closer to English. You do know what I mean, don’t you?)

Well. We were not together forever. Just a year and a half. At the end of our junior year Rhoda left school, got involved with some evil people, almost died during an abortion, then had a very heavy affair with a married man. I stayed in school, had several oddly tedious affairs with unmarried men, had a quite pleasant and wholly successful abortion all my own, and ultimately graduated and went to New York and got a job on a magazine and dated this cartoonist, and subsequently married him, and got at last to where I am now.

Enough. However long a chapter should be, I’ve made my set of Abraham Lincoln’s legs precisely twice as long as Rhoda’s prologue or preface or whatever.

Your turn, Harry.

Hi there, sex nuts! Porn freaks! This is your old pal, Harry Kapp, ne Kapelner, renowned cartoonist and raconteur, set to lay aside pen and sketch pad and do his thing at the old typewriter.

Jesus, how do you get started with this sort of thing? I wrote that first paragraph half an hour ago and ever since then I’ve been sitting here looking at it, and it doesn’t get any longer or anything. It just sits there and looks back at me. I don’t know where writers get it from. How they can just sit down and zip, the words are there. With drawing, the mechanics of pen and ink makes things happen. You start to draw something and your fingers do things your mind hasn’t even thought of, and good or bad things get onto the page. But this writing dodge strikes me as a hard way to make a living.

I do want to write this, though. If only to get a look at the two chapters which will follow it, but which won’t follow it if I don’t write this one. (A lit’ry version of the carrot and the stick. Or was it the tortoise and the hare? Once upon a time there was a carrot and a stick, you see, and they decided to have a race…)

Ah, but vy else do you vish to write zis, Herr Harry? Hmmm. For self-discovery or self-uncovery? Or merely to boast? One does feel boastful now and then, sitting at once on top of a mountain (all right, hill) and on top of the world, the proud owner of two fucking mythical shicksas (those are Israeli taxicabs). Harry, boychik, you’ve come a long way from Pelham Parkway.

Let us not probe motives too closely. Too much attention to vy anyvun does anyzing gives rise to nausea and despair, usually in that order.

I don’t remember just when Priss told me about the thing she and Rhoda had going in college. I remember the conversation well enough but not its location in time. We were going through a mutual confession trip, one of those here’s-some-of-the-crazy-things-I-did-before-I-met-you-things. Not to purge ourselves, but because that sort of thing turns one on.

A perhaps uncomfortable truth-once the fresh gloss is gone from a marriage, once two people cease to be so madly new to one another, the marriage inevitably gets refreshed from the outside. If it gets refreshed at all. Not that people necessarily cheat, or enlarge their family circle in some such manner. But that each, at least in mind, starts filling that bed with other people. You turn on with forbidden thoughts and work them out on each other’s bodies. When a marriage relationship goes stale, all that means is that there has been a failure of imagination.

“Say, I was wondering. Did you ever make it with a girl?”

“What made you ask that?”

“Ah, hah! I think you just answered it, lotus blossom.”

“Oh, did I?”

“You can talk about it.”

“But you’ll despise me, won’t you? ‘Damned blonde dyke bitch.’ You’ll hate me.”

“Oh, come on. Do I know the girl?”

“Girl? How do you know there weren’t dozens?”

“There was just one. Am I right?”

“As a matter of fact, you are.”

“Rhoda Whatchamacallit. Muir.”

“You just flashed into that one? Or did you find some old letters of mine, and is this an elaborate Talmudic con game?”

“No, I psyched it. Tell me.”

“What is there to tell? We, oh, you could say we experimented with sex. The way kids experiment with drugs?”

“They do like hell ex-fucking-periment with drugs. They blow grass and drop acid because it gets them high. That’s not an experiment. It’s a pleasure.”

“Well, it was a pleasure, all right.”

“What happened?”

“What do you think? We made love.”

“I mean what did you do?”

“Locked the door first. Played records. Sometimes left the lights on and sometimes turned them out. Do we really have to have this conversation?”

“No, liebchen, not if it’s too painful for you to talk about it.”

“Devious sheenie bastard.”

“Devious, yes. Sheenie, yes. Bastard, no. What did you used to do in bed?”

“Oh, this is so silly, Harry. We didn’t do anything that you and I haven’t done like maybe a thousand times.”

“Was it better with her?”

“Now you’re not going to be jealous of something that happened in college, for Christ’s sake.”

“It’s not jealousy, it’s fascination.”

“Why?”

“Because I think lesbians are great.”

“I’m not a lesbian!”

“Don’t shout, I’m right here in front of you. I think it’s adorable, two girls in bed together. I’m serious, goddammit, I’m not being sarcastic, nor am I putting you on. I think it’s sweet.”

“Sweet?”

“Yes.”

“I guess it was sweet.”

“It’s a whole fantasy of mine, as a matter of fact. A whole fetish thing.”

“Honestly?”

“Absolutely.”

“I never knew that. Why didn’t you ever say anything? I could start wearing neckties to bed and pitching my voice lower and cursing like a state trooper. What’s so funny?”

“Like a trooper.”

“So?”

“Not like a state trooper. Oh, you’re a delight. No, it doesn’t matter, forget it. Hey, let’s go upstairs.”

“You’re not kidding.”

“Put your hand here and you’ll see if I’m kidding.”

“Well, what do you know about that? It’s got a great big cock on it.”

“Christ!”

So it turned me on, the whole idea of the two of them together turned me on. So who knows why?

Because I’m some kind of a latent faggot? Better latent than ever, I suppose, but if I ever had the desire I never knew it. The closest I ever came to a homosexual experience was in the men’s room of the New Amsterdam Theater when a beery old fart made a grab for my schlong. I swung a roundhouse right at him. He didn’t bother to duck, but I nevertheless missed him completely and lost my footing and fell in the urinal.

Because I’ve always wanted to make it with my sister? I don’t think so, and neither would anybody who knew my sister. My sister is three years older than I am (and always has been) and she passed Gene Fullmer’s fighting weight before she passed seventh grade. And hasn’t quit yet. It’s not glandular, it’s that she eats ten or twelve meals a day. At the present time she is living in a middle-income cooperative apartment building in Queens and wearing all of Sidney Greenstreet’s old clothes. Her husband is a public accountant with hopes of one day becoming a certified public accountant. I’d say he’s certifiable, all right.

Of course Edith is the family success story. Her accountant is, after all, a nice Jewish boy (he married her under the assumption that she was a Zim Line cruise ship) and they live within subway distance of Mama Kaplan and have produced four children. That these four little bastards are the most singly obnoxious children in recorded time doesn’t seem to matter to anyone, except perhaps me.