Threesome - Lawrence Block [1]
“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