Threesome

PRISS

Our house is in Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, at the crest of what we prefer to call a hill. The house itself was designed by an architect who had been overexposed to Swiss chalets. Everyone who ever visits us says that the house is charming. Harry has said (more than once) that if everyone says something is charming, then it isn’t.

I like where the house is more than I like the house. The countryside just rolls off away from one. Our landscaping has been largely a matter of letting Nature do what She wants. (Nature should be capitalized, just like God; They are, after all, the same thing, aren’t They?) Now and then Harry gets ambitious and buys a tree and plants it, and generally it lives, and each spring I tend to buy what nurserymen call bedding plants and bed them down hither and yon. These are annuals, which is as well, so that when they die, as they rather often do, I can comfort myself with the thought that they would have died anyway, come fall. I also, each fall, plant some bulbs. Never as many as I buy, though. And come spring fewer come up than I ’ve planted.

That morning, in middle March, I was especially conscious of Nature and all Her works. The winter had been a harsh one, and a lingering one, and in the country we feel weather and seasonal change far more acutely than we ever did in the city. Now the weather had bite to it yet, but was softening, warming. Crocuses were up, and snowdrops, and other cheery things whose names I never knew. The forsythia-we have acres of forsythia-were blindingly gold all over the place. Forsythia is so boring eleven months out of the year, and every March it makes my heart stop.

And so I walked, down the long flagstone path (between the stones of which I each year resolve to plant creeping thyme, and each year don’t) to the road below, where our mailbox keeps its lonely sentinel watch. I do not mean to be arch; it was the sort of crisp morning when one would think in such soaring phrases.

It was a Tuesday, I remember. We get little mail on Tuesdays. Most letters, whether local junk mail or correspondence from New York, takes either two or three days to reach us, so Tuesdays typically bring those letters mailed on Saturdays or Sundays, and few are. There was a supermarket slinger, and some drivel from the nonentity who represents us in Congress. And there was an envelope postmarked Las Vegas, the stationery of some unfamiliar hotel, with my name and address neatly typed on it.

I knew at once that it was from Rhoda.

I had heard nothing beyond a Christmas card from her in at least two years, and more likely three. So why did I know the letter was from her? Perhaps in part because she used my full name, Priscilla Rountree Kapp, as if she had started to address me as Priscilla Rountree and then remembered, and added the Kapp afterward rather than trouble to tear up the envelope and start over. So like her. Perhaps because, in answer to the automatic if unconscious question, “Now who on earth would be writing to me from a hotel in Las Vegas?” the immediate answer was Rhoda Muir.

Perhaps ESP. Perhaps I had lately been thinking of her. Perhaps anything. It doesn’t matter.

The letter, like the envelope, was typed. Rhoda has always typed her letters. I have always written mine by hand, partly out of a vestigial sense of decorum, I guess. (And I wish I were hand writing this, however much longer it might take, because I feel so much more comfortable that way, so much more personal, so much more alone with myself, hunched over a desk scribbling furtively. But I shall accustom myself to this, I think.)

I read:

Beloved Priss-Puss As you see, I am in Las Vegas. Not to gamble, however, but to cut my losses.

I don’t know how much of this you may have sensed-we’ve had so little contact lately-but my marriage to Robert Keith Dandridge went downhill from the wedding night on-har har-and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t make the pieces fit. We have spent the last two years or so not quite getting divorced, and that got boring after a while, so I hied myself to this city, than which there is no place quite so chrome-and-steel-and-plastic-and-yuk revolting, take my word for it-and I got a piece of paper entitling me to throw my wedding ring away, which I in fact did. Literally. Down the fucking sewer.

Fantastic sense of immediate liberation. Visions of Ancient Mariner with albatross gone. Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation. (Q: Did Lincoln actually read the Emancipation Proclamation? And if so, to whom? Another Q: Can you, to save your soul, imagine Nixon on nationwide TV reading the Emancipation Proclamation to the American public? Though come to think of it, the rat bastard would be more likely to repeal it.)

Oh, shit, Prissy, I can’t even be funny. I can’t think funny. The fantastic sense of immediate liberation is a short-time thing. It yields place to who-am-I-where-am-I-going-what-do-I-do-next?

I am going to impose on you. Frost, God love him: Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. You are as close to home as I’ve got, pudding pie. And I have a very real need to put points on my compass. God knows I cannot be in this hellhole another day. All of these totally transient people. Last night, for God knows what reason or combination thereof, I let myself get picked up by this off-duty blackjack dealer. We went to his room and had the first wholly impersonal sex I have ever had, and may I never have it again. I woke up around four in the morning with clammy skin and feeling sickish and went back to my room and threw up and thought dark suicidal thoughts.

Stop it, Muir. All right, she said, I’ll just do that. Look. I’m dropping in on you, and fairly soon. I’ll stay a few days, long enough to let things hang out a little, as the children say. Or to get myself together. Is it all the same thing? I don’t know anymore.

I am Rhoda Muir again, by the way. I may have gotten the divorce mainly to recoup my maiden name. I could never stand being Rhoda Dandridge. It sounded like some fucking broad-leafed evergreen.

My deepest love to Harry. Tell him, pliz, that I saw his skier cartoon and completely broke up. See, some of us do look to see who did the cartoon.

I’ll try not to get in his way. Or in yours, for that matter. Or to be too much of a drag. Actually I feel buoyant a great deal of the time. It’s the up-and-downness of the whole thing that bothers me more than anything else. I have this whelming (which is to say not quite overwhelming) need for stability and have just hauled my last anchor.

Make of that as you will.

My love, truly and eternally, to both of you, along with my apologies for past and future rudeness, not to say present ones. I won’t expect any red carpets, but pour me a drink; I’ll need one.

Rhoda

I felt as though I needed a drink myself, but it wasn’t even noon yet. I started across the road, then stopped, suddenly dizzy. I rested for a moment or two, leaning my weight against our mailbox, looking up at the house and the grounds. Rhoda had been here just once, five years ago, a year after we moved in, a year before she married Bob Dandridge and moved out to the West Coast. That one visit was a brief one. She drove up from New York with some anonymous young man who did something ostensibly creative for an advertising agency. We had two other couples for dinner. Rhoda and her young man stayed the night, the other couples did not. I remember feeling annoyingly married, envying her the delight of sleeping with a non-spouse, and being uncomfortable with my own role. Annoyed, too, to find myself slipping too far into that role and almost having the gall to disapprove of her sleeping with her advertising man.

How much of the disapproval was jealousy?

How much of all disapproval is jealousy?

Questions, questions. I steadied myself and headed up the flagstone path, wishing it had creeping thyme between the stones, remembering the smell of the thyme underfoot on the flagstone path of my grandmother’s garden, remembering this and thinking of that and trying not to think about Rhoda’s letter, because, you see, I did not know, really, how I felt about it. Her visit. Or how I was supposed to feel. Or how I wanted to feel.

Harry was Out Back. There is the remains of a stable behind the house which he converted into a rudimentary studio, and where he works every morning from whenever he gets up (somewhere between four-thirty and six-thirty, and always well before me) until noon, when he comes in to read the mail and have lunch. If one of his rough drawings gets okayed in the morning mail, he generally works up the finished artwork during the afternoon. If nothing like that happens, he takes the afternoon off. He never opens letters from gag-writers at noon but holds them until the following morning. When he wakes up, things are funny, his sense of humor is on, his visual humor functions. I can’t understand this myself. When I wake up I want to pour coffee over my head and go back to sleep. Well, not exactly that, but along those lines. I can’t imagine anything being funny at daybreak.

We are oddly matched, Harry and I. This thin-wristed insipid blonde Mayflower child, whom one praises as being not quite so scatterbrained as she looks, and this starker, this Jewish oak tree with bitter wit and crackling laughter.

When it became apparent that we were not going to have any children, we discussed our differences and Harry hypothesized that our chromosomes might simply be allergic to one another. “Maybe it’s just as well,” I said. “We’re so different that any children we might have would be absolutely inconceivable.”

He laughed for twenty minutes before I figured out what I said. This always happens.

But I am wobbling all over the place. I hope Rhoda does eventually edit all of this into a cohesive mass. If that’s possible.

Let me see, I went back to the house with the letter. If this were a movie, we could just cut to the next scene. I suppose we could do that here just by leaving a space between this paragraph and the next one.

He read through the letter, tts-ing and chuckling, then looked at me over the top of it. “Well, that’s interesting,” he said. “She’s coming. Unless I missed something, it doesn’t say when.”

“You didn’t miss anything.”

“Why I never do, do I, Priss-puss? What cartoon is she talking about, do you have the faintest idea? Skier, I must have done twenty skier cartoons that came out last winter.”

“What difference does it make?”

“None. Just that it might provide worthwhile ego food for the struggling young cartoonist, and Lord knows he needs all of that he can get. Do we have any English muffins left?”

“No.”

“Funny, we didn’t have any at breakfast time either. Or yesterday. It’s fucking amazing how long a lack of English muffins can continue around here. You’d think we could use of this absence of muffins, pour anti-matter over it or something.”

“I forgot to buy them. I’ll get some this afternoon.”

“Promises, promises.”

“No, Thomas’s, Thomas’s.”

“That’s awful, Priss. I’m not disapproving. I just want you to know it’s awful. A woman should know these things. She sounds terrible.”

“Rhoda?”

“No, Jackie Kennedy. She has laryngitis.”

“Send her a card. Yes, I know she sounds terrible. Rhoda. She’s always been a very moody person, though. And she can convey this very well-her moods-which may make them come across heavier in a letter than otherwise. She’s very-verbally she’s-I forget the word for it, dammit-”

He began hitting himself in the center of the forehead with the heel of his hand and laughing throatily. “Articulate,” he said. “That’s the word you’re looking for, pudding-pie. She’s very articulate. You, just for the record, aren’t.”

Priss-puss, pudding-pie. He was purposely picking up things from her letter and heaving them at me. I didn’t very awfully love this.

“I suppose we’re lucky the letter got here before she did,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“She doesn’t leave us much of an out. Unless we close the house and go away and pretend we never got her letter.”

He looked at me. “Why would we want to do that?”

“I was just making conversation.”

“You cover all bets with that line, don’t you? Whenever you don’t want to explain some dumb thing you’ve said, you say you were just making conversation.”

“The work didn’t go well this morning, huh?”

“Cut the shit, Priss, will you?”

“I guess I thought you might not welcome her visit, that’s all. And that you wouldn’t say anything to that effect, so I would say it for you.”

“Not welcome it? I’ve always liked Rhoda.”

“I know.”

“Of course, I never had the chance to know her as well as you did, pudding-pie.”

“You know, you’re a real son of a bitch.”

“Hey, don’t!” My eyes were misting, and a lump forming in my throat. He took my arm. “I’m sorry, baby. I never thought you’d be so uptight about it.”

“I never should have told you.”

“But it doesn’t bother me, for Christ’s sake. You were kiddies, right? Groping toward awareness of self. Nothing unnatural about it.”

I didn’t say anything.

He was putting his arms around me and giving me awkward ursine brotherly hugs. I did not much feel like being touched, but endured it. I looked at my wedding ring and had the sudden and blindingly graphic image of myself dropping it gaily into a Las Vegas sewer. Twenty-nine, and eight years married, and happily so, and all at once longing for divorce? For Heaven’s sake, what is going on here?

I said, “You’re not going to say anything to Rho?”

“Honey, what do you think I am?”

“Because I couldn’t bear it, I don’t think.”

“You’re not ashamed of it, are you, baby?”

“No. I don’t know.”

“Because you sound like it. Look. You used to ball your college roommate. You liked her, she liked you-”

“Loved.”

“Huh?”

“We loved each other.”

“All right, whatever you want to call it. Anyway, you tried each other in bed and found out it was more fun than sleeping alone. So you were bisexual. So women are supposed to be bisexual at that age, it’s a stage they go through. You went through it, and before too very long you met me, Superjew, the ultimate male sex symbol, and you put away childish things.”

“I suppose so.”

“Look, when you were a kid, like a teenager and all, you used to masturbate, right?”

“And?”

“Well, everybody does, no? But afterward, when you outgrow it, you don’t have to look back on those days and feel consumed by guilt. You just wash your hands and carry on.”

I didn’t say anything. Outgrow it? Harry, I carefully did not say, I don’t seem to have outgrown it yet. There are nights, Harry, when we make love, and I can’t get no satisfaction, like the song says, and while you sleep the sleep of the sated male, I dip my little fingers in the honeypot.

Oh, Rhoda, how I have missed you.

But there is supposed to be sex in this book, isn’t there? I suppose I could write a chapter without having anybody do anything to anybody, just talking and thinking, but it seems a bad idea for the very first chapter of the book. The reader might get discouraged. It seems, oh, very egoish to feel that total strangers will be that interested in what one says or thinks, but everybody is always interested in what everyone else does or has done in bed, so there ought to be some sex here before this chapter is over.

(I don’t honestly see why it was a stupid question to ask how long a chapter should be. Smartass answers notwithstanding.)

Sex. I was going to have Harry talk me out of my foul mood and take me upstairs and to bed, but that isn’t what happened. It would be a nice way to get some sex into the chapter, and I guess it was a way that occurred to Harry too, not for the book but as a way to spend the afternoon, because he did make a medium-to-heavy pass, and I dropped the ball rather deliberately.

Sex. Rhoda, then, and what happened something like-ten years ago?

Ten years ago.

Ah, how weird this it! I sit here trying to remember, trying to recapture just exactly what it was like. It is hard, even, to remember the person one was that long ago, let alone the actual feel of an incident, the texture of a relationship.

It was at college, a girl’s college not more than forty miles nor less than five hundred years from the house I live in now. Rhoda and I were sophomores, and roommates. The previous year we had been freshmen and friends, and now we roomed together.

Those were desperate times, now that I think back on them. We were both dating furiously, and not quite getting slept with by Yale boys, most of whom seemed secretly more interested in strong drink than in us. And we tended to date the same boys, which has about it an air of incest, I think. Oh, you were out with Garrett tonight? Did he give you the sneaky hand-on-thigh routine? I think hes sort of sexy but just so obvious, wouldn’t you say? A bit much, all in all.

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.

(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.