Threesome

RHODA

One morning I awoke fairly early. Harry had already left the bed. Priss was still asleep.

I came awake slowly, being torn from a dream which I can no longer remember, although it did stay in my mind beyond the point of making the transition from sleep to wakefulness. I remember that it was Kafkaesque, and involved my being imprisoned by some monolithic authority. I don’t recall much beyond that. Not important. I don’t suppose.

I groped for cigarettes, lit one, and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Priss was breathing noisily through her mouth. Sometimes she looks quite beautiful when she sleeps, but this was not one of those times; we had all had far too much to drink the night before, gaily drinking while we gaily chattered and as gaily made love, and the drinking had left Priss’ face puffy and blotchy. There seemed to be a pimple forming upon her chin, too.

(Poor Priss-how unfair in the extreme of me even to have noticed this, much less to have carried the memory around and now to commit it to paper. Our sleeping selves should not be subjected to this sort of treatment, should they?)

I smoked the cigarette all the way down. I felt possessed by an excess of nervous energy, part of it no doubt a matter of having a hangover, but more to it, it seemed, than just that. I stubbed out my cigarette, got up, put clothes on. A pair of skintight dungarees, a sloppy flannel shirt.

I felt-it took me a moment to know how I felt, and then I realized that this house was imprisoning me just now, that I had to be out and away, free of it for long enough so that the feeling could go away. I tucked my feet into a pair of Priss’ loafers-our shoe size is the same, which annoyed me no end in college, as it would have been handy to be able to exchange other clothes occasionally, whereas who in hell wants to wear somebody else’s shoes?

I lit a second cigarette. Smoking is a great cure for depression, reassuring one that, however unpleasant life may be, one is doing something to shorten it. I took a few drags on the cigarette, then started to leave the bedroom.

“Rho?”

I turned.

“Where you goin’?”

“Nowhere. Go back to sleep.”

“Come back to bed.”

“Later.”

“Mmmnnn. Timezit?”

“Early. Go back to-”

“S’Harry?”

“Out Back.”

“Where you goin’?”

“For a walk.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“Go back to sleep, Priss.”

She said something but it came out in a total mumble, and I waited until she had slipped off to sleep again. I went to the kitchen and hurried through breakfast, making do with instant coffee in spite of strong feelings against it, and then let myself out of the house and started for the woods in back.

Of course Harry had picked that moment to decide that he couldn’t stand looking at his sketch pad. He was having a cigarette break in the garden, pacing back and forth, smoking furiously, and examining flowers.

“Hello, there,” he said, too heartily. “You’re up early, aren’t you?”

He was as unfortunately wide awake as Priss was sleepy. This morning both of them seemed to me to be carrying things to extremes. The nervousness, which I now knew was more than a matter of a hangover, did not seem to be going away.

“Thought I’d go for a walk,” I said.

“Oh?”

“In the woods.”

The property backs up on some woods, which constitutes a barrier of no little size between our place (our place?) and the estate to our rear. (Estate is perfectly justified in this context. The owner made several million dollars in scrap metals during the Second World War, multiplied this a few times over in other fields, and then retired to a couple of hundred acres in the Berkshires, where he maintains racing horses and fattens Black Angus cattle.)

“You’re not supposed to walk in his woods,” Harry said.

“I’m not?”

“Well, not you personally. Nobody’s not. He has signs up. No hunting, trespassing, or spitting. Violators will be torn apart by mad Alsatians. Incidentally, what is an Alsatian?”

“A native of Alsace.”

“No, it’s some kind of a dog I always encounter in English novels. They’re always guarding property. Just the right sort of a dog for it, one gathers, but I’ve never heard of the breed outside of English novels.”

“They’re German shepherds.”

“They sound sort of similar, but they always-”

“Not similar. They are German shepherds.”

“Then why not call them that?”

“For a long time, if you called anything German in England, nobody bought it.”

“Oh. So they just-”

“Changed the name.”

“Fantastic,” he said. He flicked ashes at an azalea. “How come you know all these things?”

How come you don’t,, I very nearly said. Why, I wondered, am I so fucking hostile this morning?

Instead I said, “I think I’ll chance the slavering Alsatians. That’s probably just to keep hunters off his property, wouldn’t you think?”

“Probably.”

“And I feel in the mood for a walk in the woods.”

“Maybe I’ll lock up my pen and come along.”

“No, don’t do that,” I said. It was absolutely maddening-all I wanted to do was go for a walk and now everybody on earth wanted to keep me company. I felt like a character in a Gothic novel whom nobody wants to let out of the forbidding old manse.

“To protect you from the mad Alsatians.”

“Oh, I’ll manage,” I said. “I’ll insist I lost my way. That I am a stranger in these parts, kind sir-”

“Some kind sir. Bloody old robber baron.”

“A stranger in these parts, kind baron-”

“You want to go for a walk by yourself.”

“Yeah, kind of. A walk by myself, she explained, lowering her eyelashes bashfully at the handsome young cartoonist. Yeah, that’s it, I guess.”

“You vhant to be alone,” he said, not too much like Greta Garbo. And he looked at me oddly, but just for a moment, and then he laughed it all away.

“Take care, kitten,” he said. “I’ll get back to the serious business of mining salt. Watch out for bear traps.”

“Oh, I will, kind sir.”

“For that matter, watch out for bears.”

“They prevent forest fires.”

“They also eat Boy Scouts. Where else do you think they get those hats?”

“Well, fella, I ain’t no Boy Scout.”

“Don’t worry, honey. Somebody’ll eatcha.”

“I can hardly wait.”

“Well-”

I laughed and he laughed, and I was only laughing to get to the end of the scene, and so was he, and he went back to the shed while I walked on to the back line of the property and climbed over a couple strands of barbed wire that were strung from tree to tree at the property line.

I trespassed, but benignly. I didn’t pick any wildflowers or leave any litter behind. I just walked around in the silence, enjoying the loneliness, and wondering if I would ever stop being lonely, in or out of the woods. And wondered, for that matter, if I would ever really be out of the woods, so to speak.

Because it seemed to me, on that otherwise unimpeachable morning, that this was not my house, or my family, or indeed my life. That I had slipped it on as easily as I slipped on Prissy’s loafers, and that it was comfortable in about the same way, but that it was not mine and that sooner or later I would have to give it back. I had not been made for it, I did not own it, and it was not mine.

I sat down on a fallen tree and looked at mushrooms, wishing I knew how to tell the poisonous ones from the edible ones. It struck me as though it would be great fun to gather one’s own mushrooms and take them back and cook them, but that the delight of this form of amusement would be seriously muted if one were by no means certain of surviving the meal. There would have to be books on the subject, I decided, and perhaps I could read up on it and learn something about it. God knows I had the time.

And nothing better to do with it.

Yes, it kept coming back to that, didn’t it?

I spent quite a bit of time in those woods, and found myself returning to them several times that week and the next, when I needed a few minutes or an hour of peace and quiet. They did the job rather well, I must say. Sometimes I walked around, sometimes I sat quite still and listened to birds, sometimes I tried to coax a squirrel to my side-he knew better-and once or perhaps twice I sat on my fallen tree and cried. If a tree falls in the middle of the forest where there is no human ear to hear it, has it in fact really fallen? This one did, for otherwise how could I have been sitting upon it?

And if a girl weeps in the middle of the forest with no human ear to hear her, are her tears real?

Oh yes. Yes, they are.

My moods faded in and out, in and out. What Harry has taken to calling the Magic Days were largely over now. The same intense triangular love still very definitely existed, and moved us all deeply, but now it was more a sometime thing, not a preoccupation that dominated every waking moment.

Well, this has to happen. In any form of activity, not merely sex. But when it happens, it is almost impossible not to worry about it.

I remember, early in my marriage, the first time that Robert Keith made genuinely unsuccessful love to me. It took less than a month of marriage for this to happen. It was night, and time for bed, and we went to bed, and he rolled over and took me in his arms, which was his usual subtle way of telling me that it was time we got down to the serious business of screwing.

And for the tiniest moment I stiffened in his arms-and he did not seem to notice, subtlety truly not being his long suit-and even as I did so I realized what I was doing, and why. I did not want to make love to him.

Now what’s so remarkable about that, really? One cannot be always in the mood for sex unless one is so mindless as to be never in the mood for anything else. At that particular point in time I was deeply involved with private thoughts all my own. What the thoughts were doesn’t matter, and I certainly don’t remember anyway, but in any case what I wanted was to be let alone while I explored the insides of my head, and then to slip off into an alone kind of sleep. But RKD wanted to make love, a wholly legitimate aspiration for a husband of less than a month, and of course it didn’t even occur to me to ask him if he’d as soon take a rain check.

Partly, I guess, because I rightly expected this would dismay him to hell and gone. Partly too because I was bitterly ashamed of myself, convinced that my failure to want him every moment of every day meant I was making a botch of the marriage. And finally because it seemed to indicate to me that I did not really love him (which I didn’t, but there were other better signposts than this one.)

So we made something easily distinguishable from love, and just as I had not wanted it to begin with, so did I find it impossible to get into the swing of it. So of course I pretended to. (I’m sure who the first woman was to do that: Eve.) I faked passion, and I faked enthusiasm, and ultimately I faked orgasm, timing my fake to coincide with his real coming. Then he went to sleep and I didn’t, and the pattern of our marital relationship was firmly (?) established.

When Harry and Priss and I made love, and one of us had other things on his or her or her mind, it was a different matter. For one thing, one of the three of us could drop out of the game without destroying the game altogether. One less player still left two, which is, let us face it, a perfectly adequate number for most amorous activity. Whereas if one partner in a two-person sex relationship drops out for the evening, all the other one can do is masturbate-which may be fun or may not, but which isn’t what people get married for.

I remember a Wednesday late in May. It is mid-morning, Harry is in New York, and I am outside with Priss, watching her doing something agricultural with a trowel. I am smoking, and coughing every second or third puff, which marries guilt to discomfort. I threw the cigarette away and went on coughing, and Priss took the opportunity to tell me I was smoking too much, and I got even with her, clever me, by lighting another cigarette and getting my throat in an uproar all over again.

“Well, I guess Harry must be in the city by now,” I said.

“I’m sure he is.”

“That’s a long trip to make every week.”

“Well, it’s important for him to keep up personal contacts. With editors and other cartoonists and people in other areas of the business.”

“Uh-huh. Think he’ll see a girl today?”

She dropped the trowel, spun around to look at me. “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. Just making conversation.”

“No, I’m serious. Why on earth would he want to start something with a girl in the city?”

“The usual reasons, I guess. Because it feels good, because it’s fun, because-”

“But he’s got us, silly.”

I felt like rewinding the tape and recording a better conversation in this one’s place. Instead I pushed doggedly onward. (I had a dog once who used to push humanly onward.)

I said, “You told me a couple of times that you were convinced Harry had a woman in the city. Or a variety of girls that he used to see.”

She raised her eyebrows and squinted, her Puzzled Priscilla expression. “So?”

“Did you mean it?”

“I suppose so, sure. So what?”

“So why should he have purged himself of the habit of capping off a New York Wednesday by getting laid? If he’s enjoyed it over the years, why quit now?”

“Because he’s got us.”

“He had you and that didn’t stop him.”

“That was different.”

“What’s the difference? As far as I’m concerned, you’re a really yummy fuck.”

“But I’m only one person. He needs more than I’ve got for him, I told you that. Oh, shit, Rhoda, I think you’re just being purposely argumentative.”

“Well, if I am, I’m sorry.”

“We all of us need more than we can get from one person, isn’t that the point of this relationship?”

“I thought the point was that we loved each other.”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“Is it?”

“Rho, you’re not making sense.”

“I’m sorry, then.”

“Rho?”

“What?”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, why?”

“I don’t know. Would it bother you if Harry did have sex with a girl in New York this afternoon?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

“Well, you must have. You brought it up.”

“I mean, what right would I have to be bothered?”

“The same right I have.”

“Do I? For Christ’s sake, you’re his wife, Priss.”

“So? That doesn’t make me any closer to him that you are.”

“Oh, I think it has to.”

“Oh, do you really? Is that really what you think, Rhoda? Is it?”

“What’s the matter?”

She stood up. She was not sobbing, she was in control of herself that way, but tears were of their own accord welling up in her eyes and spilling out and trickling down her cheeks. Her long blonde hair was in her eyes and she brushed it impatiently out of the way.

“Priss, tell me what’s the matter.”

“Nothing.”

“Priss, baby, I was in a bad mood and I took it out on you. God knows why. God knows what I was in a bad mood about, what I’ve got to be in a bad mood about. You know me, Priss-puss, I’m an idiot. Give me something good for once in my life and I keep looking to see what the catch is. Baby, come here.”

She leaned toward me, started to fall. I caught her and held her head to my breast and stroked her hair. She tilted up her head and we kissed with a clinging urgency that contained a feeling of need which was in its own way far more erotic than our recent combinations and permutations of bedroom athletics.

We made love in the garden.

And afterward I smoked a cigarette and held her in my arms, and she said, “I’m so afraid sometimes.”

“Of what?”

“You and Harry.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I guess I can’t talk about it.”

“Tell me.”

“You’ll laugh at me.”

“I won’t.”

“Well, I just have the feeling that, that you and Harry, that the two of you are close in a way that I’ll always be shut out of because I’m not like you two. I’m not clever the way you are, I don’t have that kind of mind, and I think, sometimes I think, well, I think that if he had met you first, you know, or that if I quietly dropped out of the picture, and maybe that’s what I ought to do except that I need you so very much, both of you, I need you, you’re all I’ve ever had, both of you, and-”

“Priss!”

She stopped, broke off the long string of words, and looked at me, eyes round and vacant, and sighed.

“Priss, it’s not like that.”

“I’m wrong, I guess.”

“Priss, I never saw a man more in love with a woman than Harry is with you.”

“Then why-”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Then why does he also want you? was what she decided not to say. And I guess you could say that different forms of that question were on everybody’s mind. We were all terrified of perfection, suspicious of happiness. While some people can step in shit and shout out joyously that there must be a pony, people like us wake up in Paradise and look around apprehensively for the snake. Why is this, I wonder? Have we been in that many Paradises, and seduced by quite that many snakes?

There were certain statements and questions that came to me from time to time, and one or another of them would prey on my mind for a while, and then I would get over it, and finally some other doubt or fear would turn up to take its place.

Some of them:

I am in the way. They have a marriage, they have their home, they have the mutual shared experience of eight years or so, and I am simply in their way, the perennial house guest and bed guest. Guests like fish spoil on the third day, and the third day is long past, and sooner or later they will wake up to the fact that they got along without me before they met me and can get along without me now. And then where will I be?

What am I doing with these disgusting people? These people are perverts, because a marriage is supposed to involve two people with no room for a third person, and they are using me sexually, dragging me into their marriage bed, using me in an essentially exploitative way, using me to prop up their own sagging marriage, and Christ, they must be perverts or they wouldn’t enjoy doing the things I like to do in bed, would they?

Why am I corrupting these fine sensitive people? These people had a perfectly satisfactory marriage until I came along, and I seduced them both, and got them into a lot of kinky things, and sooner or later they will realize what has happened to them and their marriage will be ruined, and everything everywhere will all come apart at the seams, and what on earth will any of us do then?

I think I would have found myself periodically obsessed by these several doubts and fears, and others which I cannot recall now, and do not want to be bothered with-I think they would have nibbled away at my mind no matter what. This was, you must realize, a very unorthodox relationship to have evolved between three basically orthodox individuals. If we had never been much at bowing down to idols, neither had we spent much time smashing them. So it was inevitably hard to live full time with such a far-out situation. We might embrace it wholeheartedly for the most part, but there had to be headaches and night sweats and heart pounding from time to time.

But what made it a little worse for me, I think, is that there was really not much of anything for me to do. The bit about the idle hands doing the Devil’s work has a lot to it, and while the Devil didn’t seem to be giving me any assignments, my idle hands were kept busy picking scabs off my own wounds.

(That’s a revolting metaphor. Sorry I mentioned it.)

Harry had his cartooning, and his trips to New York, and all of that. Priss had the handling of the family finances-however scatterbrained she might appear, she was a wizard at checkbook balancing and food budgeting and money planning and all those things that Harry and I could not have done to save our souls. She also made the house stay together, kept it clean and neat, made the meals, all of that.

I, on the other hand, didn’t do much of anything.

A couple of times I would set up the typewriter and try writing, and once or twice I would get a reasonably decent start on something, but nothing ever came of it. I would start things knowing full well that I was not going to finish them, and that what I was producing was essentially busy work, something to keep Rhoda Muir off the streets and out of trouble, something as vitally creative as the potholders they weave in occupational therapy at lunatic asylums.

Once, long ago, a lover took me with him while visiting his mother at one such Bide-a-Wee home-she was an alcoholic, in for her annual desiccation-and while he went to hold her hand I wandered around, identifying more closely with the ambulatory patients than I really wanted to, and ultimately finding my way into a shop where the patients’ O.T. work was offered for sale. Hundreds of little trivets ornamented with tiny ceramic tiles, thousands of those fucking potholders, no end of baskets and spoonholders and other triangular things which must have had some function-God knows they weren’t decorative-but which served no purpose I could fathom. I asked someone what they were for but couldn’t make out his answer and was too put off by his rolling eyes and slack mouth to ask him again.

But the point, if I’ve not lost it forever, is that no one would make that crap if there was anything else to do with his time. Worthwhile projects are those worth doing for themselves, not for their effect upon the psyche, not because they help pass the time, and my writing thus was in the same category as the potholders and the baskets and the trivets, of subjective therapeutic value only, and blessed little of that.

So I wrote things, and then tore them up, and put the typewriter away and went for a walk in the woods. Sooner or later, I knew, there would have to be something that I would discover and that would be right for me. But it did no good to keep trying things on until something fit.

Meanwhile, I began to play more of a role in the functioning of the house itself. I had to do this or feel like a sponge, a parasite, and it did pass time as well. I helped with the cleaning, I guided the power mower over those parts of the lawn that were level enough for that sort of thing. I appointed myself official morning coffee maker, and instant coffee ceased to play a role in our lives, to the relief of everybody but its manufacturer. I took over some of the cooking. I had never enjoyed cooking while I was married, and was none too good at it, with the result that we ate out most of the time. But now I was surprised to discover that I seemed to be capable of enjoying it after all, and that I could, when I took the time and trouble, produce a dish that everyone seemed to agree was quite edible. I was a very different sort of cook than Priss, who was rarely enormously inspired but who was able to prepare reasonably successful meals seven days a week without minding the routine or making an occasional mess out of an occasional meal. I, on the other hand, tended to get wildly creative, going in for some major production numbers and now and then ruining a meal completely. And I could only cook once in a while. If it had become a regular thing, I would have hated it.

I wonder how well I’ve conveyed the various changes we went through after the month of magic ran its course and left all three of us to find out just where we were going. There is one way of looking at things which I don’t seem to have mentioned, and that is simply this: When our orientation was planted firmly in present time, everything was great. As long as we lived as much as possible in the Now, there were no worries, no cares, no paranoia, no anxiety. It was only when we turned from Where are we now? to Where the hell are we going? that things became less than idyllic.