Threesome - Lawrence Block [19]
“No, there isn’t. Not for me. I don’t think there ever really was, my darling.”
“Are you sure you know what we’re getting into?”
“No. I’m not sure of anything. Except that this is what I want and need.”
“I don’t want to wreck anything. You and Harry have a good thing going.”
“He’ll be in New York.”
“Yes, I know.”
“He goes early in the morning and stays the whole day. He sometimes doesn’t get back until late at night.”
“I know.”
“Don’t get out of bed in the morning.”
“I won’t.”
“After he leaves I’ll come to you. Stay in bed and I’ll come to you. Will you do that? Will you wait for me?”
“Yes.”
“I was so afraid to say all this. To let you know. I sensed that you wanted me as I want you but I thought that it might be wishful thinking, that I was seeing what I wanted to see. But it’s not that at all, is it?”
“No, it isn’t. I don’t think I ever stopped wanting you, Priss. During school, after school, during my marriage, I wasn’t always aware of it, but it was always there. I never did get over you.”
“We’ll never get over each other,” she said. “Never never never.”
And that is where this chapter is going to have to stop. I have written things before, longer things than this, some of them personal and some of them not so personal, but I have never written anything that so thoroughly exhausted me. This is hard work.
I thought this chapter would carry the story further, to include the Wednesday morning scene between Priss and me. But I seem to have come closer to total recall of the two foregoing scenes than I had thought likely.
Which is perhaps just as well. Because the hardest part of this for me is to get across the way I was attracted to both of these people at once, with each attraction reinforcing the other. I wanted Harry and I wanted Priss, and I also wanted him because he was hers and her because she was his. I wanted her for my sister and him for my brother and I wanted the two of them to be my parents and my children.
I could not kiss either of them without thinking of—and yearning for—the other.
So you can do the sex part, Priss. In the morning, after Harry left, as I lay curled fetally in my little bed and waited breathlessly for you to come to me.
PRISS
Rhoda, you asked me if I knew what I was getting into.
Rhoda, we never know what we are getting into. Never. We didn’t know what we were getting into when we started writing this book. It started off as a lark. We knew what you wrote in the first chapter, that we had an unstated purpose of some deep sort, but we could not have known we would open up in quite this fashion, or that so many unknown things would come to light.
Every day or so one of us writes a chapter, and the other two read it, and no one says anything whatsoever. There seems to be an unvoiced agreement that the disclosures and conjectures and revelations of our writings can only be commented upon in subsequent writings. And this is necessary, I think, because if any of this were voiced—
Harry, I knew that you made something of a point of getting laid on Wednesday. On any Wednesday. I knew it partly because I am intuitive, and know you well, and partly too because one notices things, keeps unconscious track. You always seemed to avoid making love to me on Tuesday nights before a solo trip to New York, as if saving up your passion for whoever you hoped to see. And so often on Wednesday nights you would throw me a duty fuck. And I could tell, or thought I could tell, the difference between those heroic duty fucks on days when Marcia or some other lucky girl had taken you to bed, and the therapeutic fucks on days when there was no one in New York to ball and you came home genuinely horny.
I also knew, though I didn’t ever dwell on it, that you were probably fucking Marcia.
But to read about it, even now, even in view of our three-way lack of jealousy, our open attitudes, tore the shit out of me. And literally so. It turned my stomach inside out, and I kept running to the bathroom while