Threesome

RHODA

I think we all knew what was going on. I think we all knew that we knew. It was all in the air, like static electricity in a dry room, and we were shuffling our feet on the carpet and getting ready to touch each other.

That morning, while Harry was doing his Watchbird number sheltered by the pussy willow, Priss and I were conscientiously doing precisely what we had decided a day ago not to do. We were Taking Risks. We were Being Less Than Cool. We were making it, not on a Wednesday with Harry in New York, but on a Thursday with Harry Out Back in his shed.

Hard to say just whose idea it was. Probably mine. I had heard them screwing, and while they were normally noisy enough about it, that night they were truly loud; I got the impression that they had moved to the country because their sex life was too high in volume to be conducted within city limits. I lay there listening to the two of them and wanting them both, and woke up no longer listening to them but still wanting them.

I got up after Harry and before Priss. I wrapped up in a robe of hers-my bathrobes were all still somewhere out West, none had found its way into the one suitcase I brought along. I went into the kitchen and had breakfast and made a pot of real coffee. Priss always made real coffee sooner or later, but had instant coffee first at breakfast. Quel dreary-the only time I really care about coffee is first thing in the morning, and that’s the one time it’s hard to get a cup around here that tastes half decent. (Other than that, it’s a great hotel.) So I fixed my own coffee, I did, and I magnanimously poured a cup of it and carried it and a glass of orange juice to Priss’ room. I held the coffee cup so that the fumes wafted under her nose.

She opened her eyes and said, “Owr worgle breel.”

I handed her the cup, but she didn’t reach for it. I held it and she sipped at it.

“Rowrbazzle,” she said.

“Good morning.”

“Erghh.” She sipped more coffee, yawned, reached out and fumbled at the bedside table. She was reaching for her cigarettes, but in the process of getting them she knocked the alarm clock onto the floor.

“I always do that,” she said. “You would think I would learn but I don’t seem to.”

“Your one imperfection.”

“That and my excess of modesty. This is the best coffee I’ve had in ages. Did you make it extra strength or something, or is it just the delight of breakfast in bed?”

“It’s real coffee.”

“At this hour? That’s almost sinful. Oh, orange juice, too. You know, some day I’m going to start buying oranges and having freshly squeezed juice every morning.”

“Beautiful.”

“But I’ll never do it. I would have to be awake for hours before I could bring myself to squeeze an orange, and who in the hell wants to drink orange juice at five in the afternoon?”

“You used to like screwdrivers at school.”

“Some of the things I liked then I’ve lost my taste for.”

“But not all of them.”

“Yes, too true. Don’t look at me like that.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Damn you, Rho, you can get me hot with your eyes. It’s the most fantastic thing. I feel absolutely naked.”

“Well, you absolutely are. Do you think that might have something to do with it?”

“Maybe. Just think, in six more days it’ll be Wednesday again.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’re not going to wait, are we?”

“Noway.”

“I suppose Harry’s Out Back?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He just about never comes in before noon.”

“I know.”

“What time is it?”

“About nine.”

“He could come in, though.”

I took off my robe.

“Oh, you devil. Why did you have to do that?”

“I was beginning to feel overdressed.”

“We agreed to wait until Wednesday.”

“I could die of frustration by then. I heard you fucking last night.”

“Oh, you actually heard us?”

“Of course I heard you. I was alive and in Massachusetts. Which means I heard you.”

“I guess I may have gotten carried away.”

“You should have been carried away. By white-coated men. I want to get in bed with you.”

“Not in this bed.”

“Why not?”

“This is the bed Harry and I sleep together in.”

“I figured that out all by myself, doll.”

“Well, uh, I don’t know.”

“Actually that part of it appeals to me.”

“Really? For God’s sake, why?”

“I’m strange. Oh, how nice, there’s dried come all over the sheet. Not entirely dried, either. This is really turning me on. Come here.”

“Oh.”

“Wow.”

“I guess we’re not going to wait until Wednesday.”

“It’s always Wednesday. In the hot pants of the soul it is always three o’clock in the Wednesday.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know.”

“I love you, Rhoda. Oh, God.”

“Ah, Priss.”

“But we can’t be in this bed. No, serious.”

“Why?”

“If Harry does come into the house he could walk in here.”

“But he doesn’t come in before noon.”

“Who knows that he never will? Once in a great while he gets hung-up or runs out of cigarettes or decides he’ll die if he doesn’t have another cup of coffee. But if he comes into the house and we’re in your room with the door shut he won’t know we’re both in there, he’ll just think I’m on the toilet somewhere or in the basement feeding clothes to the washing machine.”

“So that it doesn’t starve?”

“Of course. Sometimes I think of every household appliance as just another mouth to feed. Another thing-”

“Shut up and kiss me.”

“Mmmm. I always thought I hated making love in the morning but it seems I was wrong. Another thing is I’m sure if you stay here you’ll shed like a puppy dog. Curly auburn hairs in our bed might be something of a tip-off.”

“Uh-huh. So if I should flutter my lashes at you and say, ‘My place or yours, dahhhling?’ the answer would be-”

“Your place, dahhhling.”

“Right on.”

At lunch I knew something was up. Of course the speculative glances I was getting from Harry didn’t necessarily mean he knew anything. They might simply be his way of telling me that he still couldn’t wait to get me in bed.

I couldn’t wait either. But I was a little afraid of what one relationship might do to the other.

All of this damned concealment! That morning we had worked to make sure that Harry wouldn’t find out about what we were doing, and I was already thinking about what I would do with Harry and how I would keep it from Priss. In retrospect, it’s hard to believe we cared so much about such stupid secrecy, especially since in a chamber of our minds each of us wanted it out in the open, needed it to be out in the open.

After lunch, perhaps an hour or two after lunch, I drifted back into my room. I think to change a garment or something. I don’t entirely remember why. Whatever it was, I know that I did it and was on the way out without noticing the bit of art work Harry had left for me, when some vibration caught me at the door and something made me look back and see, out of the corner of my eye, a piece of paper on top of my pillow.

(Parenthetical observation: Once I saw a movie called The Counterfeit Traitor, with William Holden and Lilli Palmer. World War Twice, and he’s a Swede spying for the allies, and she’s his German girlfriend, a Good German, and she’s helping the allied cause too, and she sees the damage done to her city by an allied air raid, which she feels she helped bring about, and she’s consumed with guilt and everything, and she’s also a Catholic, so she carries her guilt to the nearest church and dumps it onto some poor priest. And when she’s finished her confession and waiting to hear what her penance is, the curtain is drawn and the “priest” is revealed in an SS uniform.

(The look on Lilli Palmer’s face must have been identical to the look on mine when I picked up that fucking piece of paper.

(End of parenthetical observation.)

The drawing, which I still own, and would not part with for the world, was far more precisely detailed than Harry’s work generally is, yet the style was unmistakably his. There was a girl who was a slight caricature of Priss, the teeth a bit more prominent than hers, the eyes somewhat more hyperthyroid. There was another girl who was a slight caricature of me, the breasts oversized, mouth fuller, and so on. The girl who looked like me had a tongue shaped like a penis, and was in the process of inserting it into the girl who looked like Priss, and while all of this was going on, a man’s face, a slight caricature of the artist as a young voyeur, loomed in a window over the bed and leered down at the two girls.

The caption read, “What do they know about love uptown?” That’s an old and not very funny joke, and if you don’t already know it you’re not going to read it here, because it’s a bore. But it does fit the circumstances well enough.

I stood there looking at this and trembling, literally trembling, and then after I don’t know how long I realized that not only was I trembling, which was understandable enough, but that my underpants were sopping, and not because I had peed in them, which would have also been understandable enough, but because I was flowing like a river, my cunt was swimming, and that, it seemed to me, was not understandable at all.

Priss invited me shopping that afternoon. I said I was in the middle of a book and I thought I would stretch out and finish it. She went shopping. I smoked three cigarettes one after the other. Then I went out to the shed.

Harry was working on a cartoon. He looked up and our eyes locked.

I said, “I got your picture.”

“And?”

“You made my breasts too large.”

“God made your breasts too large. But I’m not complaining and neither should you.”

“You made them larger than He did.”

“Well, I paint what I see.”

“You were watching.”

“Yes.”

“For very long?”

“No.”

“There’s something I have to do,” I said. “Just stay right there, don’t move, there’s this thing that I have to do.”

Utter compulsion. One does what one must do. I walked toward him, taking off clothes as I walked, dropping them along the way. I went to him and got on my knees in front of his chair. I unzipped his pants and put my hand in and found his cock and took it out.

“You have a beautiful cock.”

I took it in both hands and felt its heat. I put my lips to its head and kissed it.

“I haven’t really liked a cock in such a long time,” I said. I didn’t know what I was saying, I never talked like this, but the words flowed out of my mouth as the juices had flowed out of my pussy, uncontrollably, automatically, involuntarily. “I love your cock,” I went on. “Last night I heard you putting it in Priss, and this morning I ate her where it went in, and now I’m going to eat you. I love you and I love Priss and I love your beautiful cock.”

My mouth felt empty. I opened my mouth and took his cock in it and my mouth didn’t feel empty any more. He had grown hard the minute I took him in my hands and now he was hard as a rock and very large and there seemed to be a pulse working in his cock, I could feel it with my tongue. I slid my mouth as far down his cock as I could so that the head of it was touching the back of my throat. Usually when I did this I wanted to gag. Not this time. I just wanted more.

I let it slide out again until I had only the tip of it between my lips. Back, forth, back, forth, and the nerve endings in my mouth were tingling like crazy. Real physical excitement, not just the thrill of doing this to him, of doing this to Prissy’s man, of doing this, but the thrill of a contact that was thrilling in and of itself, my mouth responding, my mouth getting fucked, my mouth, cuntlike, receiving him and digging it.

He was wearing dungarees. I put my hands on his thighs and felt the good coarse denim under my fingertips. I dug my fingers into his thighs and plunged up and down on his prick.

It seemed to me that I could taste Prissy on him. Impossible of course, I had heard him in the shower, he took a shower every morning, it was just in my imagination, but I thought I could, and I thought of him plunging simultaneously into my mouth and into Prissy’s cunt, as if his cock could magically be in two places at one time, in two people at one time, and I sucked him, I sucked him.

Robert Keith Dandridge always wanted to be sucked, and I was not that bad a wife, obliging him in that respect most of the time whether I wanted to do it or not. I almost never wanted to do it, and I almost always did it, but one thing I did was that I always made him indicate he wanted it. I never of my own accord dove down upon his prick. Not that it never occurred to me, but that I never had wanted to let him get the idea that this was something I wanted to do for its own sake, because it frankly wasn’t.

I was supposed to be reasonable good at it, I had in fact been told by boys and men who seemed in a position to know that I was reasonably good at it, and I was obviously good enough at it so that Robert Keith Dandridge never tired of that aspect of our life together, however tiresome he (like I) may have found the rest of it. But however good I might be at it, I did not like it with Robert Keith. Not even a little. The only thing I almost liked about it was that when I really did not feel in the mood for his weight on top of me I could give him a quick sucking and make him come that way and be spared a regular screwing. So it was now and then the lesser of two evils, and that was the best that could ever be said for it.

Not so with Harry. With him it was my idea, all my idea, and I really wanted to do it, and I did it, and had some hard-to-understand oral orgasm just as he had an easy-to-discern penile orgasm, and my throat muscles worked out of their own accord and I swallowed every drop, which again was something R.K.D. used to beg me to do (why should he care, the idiot?) and which I had never once done.

God knows why I had never done it before. For you readers who have never considered the problem at length, be advised that it solves the age-old question of how to dispose of a mouthful of love without soiling the carpet or running tediously for the toilet. Also it’s almost all protein, and good for you. Also it is a very loving thing to do, and men seem to appreciate it, and you for it.

I swallowed, and I sighed, and sighed again, and kept his now-softening penis in my mouth, unwilling to let it leave me. I began to be conscious once again of more than his penis and my mouth. I felt the hard earthen floor under my knees, and his hands in my long hair, and the cool air on my face and the backs of my hands.

I sensed something. A presence.

Rather neatly, I thought, without letting the now completely soft penis slip out of my mouth, I tilted my head slightly back and raised my eyes slightly up.

And saw my lover Harry’s handsome face.

Ah, yes. My lover Harry’s handsome face was turned to the side, and my lover Harry’s sensual mouth was fastened to the breast of (surprise!) my lover Priscilla, who had taken off all her clothes, and who was cradling Harry’s head in one hand and had the other hand in my auburn tresses.

I looked at her, too numb to think or feel anything, and she smiled, she beamed, she glowed.

“I knew you would be together,” she said. “I drove a half mile and then came back. I left the car down on the road. I looked in the house, and you weren’t there, and I knew you would be back here.”

I started to say something, God knows what, but there was this cock in my mouth, and it seemed to be hardening again.

“Let’s go inside now,” Priss said. “There’s more room. And we can all be together now. I think that would be very nice, to be all together, all of us.”