Threesome

PROLOGUE, PREFACE, OR WHAT YOU WILL…

Once upon a time, twenty-four Long Island newpapermen decided to find out if they could write a worse book than Jacqueline What’s-Her-Name. Each sat down and wrote a chapter, either all at once or one at a time, and while the result of all of this self-indulgence may not have been worse than Valley of the Whatsits, it certainly belonged in the same ballpark. The twenty-four Long Island newspapermen then took a moderately attractive Long Island housewife and put her face on the back cover. Next they took a ravishing model and put her bare behind on the front cover.

Then they published the book, and it at once began to sell like pussy at a Rotary convention. And just as sales threatened to peak, word of their great coup circulated, and the public whooped with glee and hurried to find out what a purposely bad book would be like. What it was like, of course, was all the unintentionally bad books, but by the time Constant Reader found this out, he already owned the book and couldn’t very well return it.

So what does this All-American success story have to do with us?

Everything.

It was this very literary hoax which we three sat discussing a couple of nights ago. We three are Harry and Priss and Rhoda. Harry is Harold Kapp. You’ve seen his cartoons everywhere, but you don’t know who he is because nobody remembers cartoonists, except for the one or two everybody remembers. This is one of the banes of Harry’s existence.

Priss is Priscilla Rountree Kapp. She is Harry’s wife, and another of the banes of his existence.

Rhoda is Rhoda Muir, which is me. Sitting here, at this kitchen table, typing this. Typing it far more slowly, I might add, than you are reading it, and that holds even if you’re a lip-mover. This is harder work than I expected. Anyway, this is me, Rhoda Muir, divorcee and dilettante-of-all-trades, and I suppose another bane of Harry’s etc… You could put me down as a friend of the family.

We were sitting in the cozy Kapp living room, watching a fire die in the fireplace and each of us waiting for someone else to abandon his or her drink long enough to throw a log on it-on the fire, dummy, not on the drink. And after we had discussed and condemned the Long Island newspapermen, the housewife on the back cover, the publisher, the reading public, and in fact everything connected with the aforementioned book except the demurely dimpled behind on its front cover, and after the conversation had died down rather like the fire and each of us had gone off in a huddle with private thoughts, I said, “You know, we could do something like that.”

“Like what?”

“Naked Came the Clyde. A bestseller.”

Priss made one of her faces at me, at once narrowing her eyes and raising her eyebrows. I think the operative adjective is querulous. Harry gazed off into the middle distance, either exploring the possibilities or gathering wool.

Priss said, “We’re not writers, love.”

“Neither were those twenty-four guys.”

“They were newspapermen.”

“Doesn’t count,” Harry said. “A newspaperman is just a schmuck who covers high school track meets and then spells everybody’s name wrong.”

“That off the top of your head?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s not bad,” Priss said. “Actually, one of us sort of is a writer. Rho wrote tons of things at school. And you’ve written things since then, haven’t you?”

“I’ve begun things.”

“Well begun,” said Harry, “is half done.”

“I think the line about the newspapermen has more of a feeling of originality to it,” I told him. “Anyway, nothing I’ve started has been well begun. Or at least not well enough begun so as to ever be finished. Though some of them were promising. But that’s the whole point, don’t you see?”

They didn’t see.

“I think you would have to be really a writer or else very damned dogged to write a whole book. Books are long. You can’t just dash them off in odd moments like greeting card verse.”

“Or like cartoons,” Harry put in.

I ignored this. “But almost anyone,” I went on, “could write a chapter.”

“So?”

“And when you’ve got enough chapters,” I continued, “you’ve got yourself a book.”

“There are three of us,” Priss said.

“So?”

“So we would need twenty-one more newspapermen. Or cartoonists, or writers, or six-day bike racers or anything.”

“Not if we each write enough chapters.”

“You mean we each write a third of a book?”

“Well, yes, but a chapter at a time.”

“Of course it would be a chapter at a time, Rho. It would also be a page at a time, a sentence at a time, a word at a-”

I said, “No, you’re missing the point. One of us writes a chapter, then another writes one, then the third, and back and forth like that until a book results. That way nobody gets bogged down in the middle of a long lonely stretch of monotony.”

“Except the poor reader,” said Harry.

I ignored this, too. I finished my drink and rattled its ice cubes until Harry grunted to his feet and poured Scotch all over them. (The ice cubes, not his feet. Why do I keep doing that? Not even at the end of the first chapter and already I’m clicking along like the Bad Examples section of an eighth-grade grammar text.) I sipped my drink. Harry poured more for himself, and for Priss. Priss suggested that while he was up he throw a log on the fire. He said something inaudible, which was probably just as well, and threw a log on the fire.

I said, “I think it would be a lot of fun, actually. Not to say interesting and absorbing. Not to say potentially profitable, if we can find some clown to publish it.”

“And promote the hell out of it,” Harry suggested.

Priss gazed into the fire. “I don’t know which I would rather not have,” she said thoughtfully. “My face on the back cover or my bottom on the front.”

“Toss a coin,” Harry said. “It’s a question of-”

“I know, I know.”

“-heads or tails,” Harry said, unnecessarily. Sometimes it’s hard stopping him.

We went on, in this weathered vein, joking about autograph parties and guest spots on the Carson show. It was reasonably amusing conversation and went well with the drinks and the fire and the music. Mozart, if I remember correctly. And if you care.

And then, after another round of drinks had been poured and another log sentenced to immolation, Priss finally said, “Hey, wait a minute.”

We waited part of a minute.

“What is it going to be about?”

“Huh?”

“Our book,” she said. “A book has to be about something. What’s it going to be about?”

“It is going to be about sixty-five thousand words long,” Harry said.

“I’m serious,” Priss said.

“Well, don’t look at me,” Harry said, looking at me.

“Us,” I said.

Priss widened her eyes. Harry squinted.

“Us,” I said again. “We three.”

“ We three,” sang Harry, sounding less like Ted Lewis than he hoped, we’re not a crowd, we’re not even com-pa-ny-”

“The three of us,” I said. “How this all happened. How everything got started and got complicated and worked itself out.”

“ My echo -”

“With each of us keeping the story going from our own point of view, you see, so that what we would wind up with is this ongoing story of a relationship developed from three directions-”

“- and me ” Harry finished. And looked long and deep at me. “This,” he said, “is not something that just occurred to you sitting here in front of the fucking fireplace.”

“Not exactly. It’s an idea that’s been germinating. But I didn’t really see the whole picture until we started talking about Naked Came the Doorknob.”

“That cleared out your tubes, huh?”

Priss said, “Damn it, it might work. Before it was just talk, Rho, but it might work. I couldn’t see myself trying, you know, to make up a story. Invention and description, no, not my bag. I don’t think. But putting down what happened-”

“Yes. It wouldn’t be hard.”

“We would have to change our names and things if we were really going to get it published.”

“We can worry about that when it’s done. In the meantime we can write it absolutely straight. You can always change things around later on.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to start, honestly.”

“At the beginning,” Harry said. “I was born in a trunk,” he sang, not much like Judy, God rest her soul. Harry is the worst sort of impressionist, incapable of either doing them well or refraining from doing them entirely. (That sounds rather nasty, doesn’t it? I do love Harry very much, and trust he knows it.)

“We would start about the time all of this got started,” I said. “When I first moved in on you.”

“And stopping when?”

“When the manuscript’s long enough to publish.”

“No, seriously.”

“Seriously. When it’s long enough and when we run out of story.”

“And we keep taking turns with the chapters? You and you and me and over and over again?”

“Uh-huh. Not that we have to have cardiac arrest if the order gets reversed somewhere along the way.”

“You and you and me,” I said, “and over and over again.”

Priss said, “Do we have to type it?”

“Longhand takes forever,” I said. “And nobody can read it. You type well enough, don’t you?”

“I was thinking about a tape recorder. Did you ever read a book called Talk? A girl wrote it, Linda, her last name was either Rosenkrantz or Guildenstern and I’ll never know which. Anyway, she was with some people out at Fire Island-”

“I’ll bet she was,” Harry said.

“Some art world types, I guess-”

“They’re the worst kind.”

“-and what she did was keep this tape recorder around and periodically during a conversation people would turn the recorder on and talk at it. A sort of prose version of cinema verite.”

I said it sounded terrible. Harry said it sounded like a good way to get the feel of spending a summer on Fire Island without getting sand in your navel or catching the clap. Priss said it actually worked out better than one might have thought. Priss is a little scatterbrained, but less so than she seems, praise God. (I do love Priss very much, and trust she knows it.)

“I think we should write it,” I said. “Type it, that is.”

“With a tape recorder,” Harry said, “we could probably do the whole thing in an evening.”

“We couldn’t do it at all.”

“Why?”

“Because we couldn’t open up. Inhibitions. I think I could type out things about our relationship-”

“I hate that fucking word, relationship.”

“What word do you prefer?”

“That’s the worst thing about it,” he said. “It makes itself indispensable. Everything else sounds like a euphemism, and why in the hell anybody needs a euphemism for relationship is beyond me. It’s infuriating.”

“-that I would be uptight about saying aloud, even to a tape recorder. Let alone to the two of you in person.”

“But we’ll read what each other writes, won’t we?”

“Not the same thing.”

“What’s the difference?”

“There’s a remove involved,” Harry told her. “Like fucking over the telephone.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever done that.”

“It’s fun, but if you get caught they take your phone out. And of course if the conversation crosses a state line it’s a federal offense.”

“The Mann Act, isn’t it?”

“Something like that.”

So with bright conversation of that sort we settled it. The book would be written. It would be in the form of a novel. We would take turns writing chapters, each of us writing in the first person from our own points of view. Of course, we would make up some conversation, because no one but Truman Capote remembers everything said to him word for bloody word (and I don’t believe he does, either, for that matter).

“And,” Harry emphasized, “we make it sexy.”

“It would be hard not to,” Priss said. “After all, sex is what it’s about, isn’t it?”

“Sex is what we’re about, love.”

“Sex,” Harry said, “is what sells.”

“Hear, hear.”

“Let’s all go upstairs,” Priss said, through an embryonic yawn, “and go to bed-”

“Hear, hear!”

“-and do unspeakable things to one another, and tomorrow you can start writing about them.”

“Who can?”

“You can,” Priss said, to me.

“I think we should draw lots,” I said. “I’m not entirely certain that I want to-what are you doing? Oh.”

This last was directed to Harry, who had taken up pad and pencil and who was sketching a suburban development. In other words, drawing lots.

“You go first,” Priss said, firmly. “You’re the writer.”

“Well, not exactly that.”

“And it was your idea.”

“Oh.”

So we went upstairs, and to bed, and whether the things we did to one another were speakable or not depends on your point of view, I would say.

And that was longer ago than yesterday, though not by much. I didn’t get directly to work on this. I tend to procrastinate. What you put off until tomorrow, I have found over the years, you frequently don’t ever have to do at all. Occasionally someone comes along and does it for you. Occasionally a problem you have been avoiding goes and solves itself.

But this book will not write itself, nor will anyone come along and write it for me. So I have done this much, to properly set the stage (while neatly splitting an infinitive, damn it) for the unfolding of the tale.

Things I don’t believe we voiced, but that we probably all of us know:

That the book is not primarily to make us wealthy, or to fill up idle hours, but to help us know some things about how we happened to each other, and the forms this happening took, and what it all means to all of us.

That the book is probably not entirely about sex, and that we ourselves are probably not entirely about sex, or are we?

What I would like to do now, I think, is end this prologue or preface or whatever the hell it is and go get another cup of coffee. Or maybe a drink. It’s almost four o’clock-it is a sort of house rule here not to take a drink before four o’clock, or to refuse one after. And my kidneys are floating already from all of the rotten coffee.

A drink, then.

Oh, first one thing. Priss wanted to know how long the chapters had to be. Long enough, Harry told her, to reach from the preceding chapter to the succeeding one. Like Abraham Lincoln’s legs.

A good answer, I think. And I think this chapter is long enough by those rules. I certainly hope it is, because it is unlikely to get any longer.