Threesome - Lawrence Block [20]
It’s the intimacy that is so painful. The conversation, the two of you playing back and forth to each other. I hate Marcia for being able to fill this need of yours. And hate you for being a person, a functioning person, while away from me.
Do we all do that? Do we expect the people in our lives to exist only when they are in our presence? To have no hidden thoughts, to keep their lives entirely above the surface? Perhaps I tend to do this, perhaps everybody does it.
You know what else, damn it? I can almost come just reading that scene with you and Marcia. It bothered me, it still bothers the hell out of me, but it also turns me on in a way that I do not normally get turned on by written things.
Do you still see Marcia? You don’t have to tell me. I wish I knew how I really and truly feel about her.
I would like to suck her cunt and scratch her eyes out.
HARRY
Why not scratch her cunt and suck her eyes out?
PRISS
God damn it, please don’t do that again. It’s like that Henny Youngman joke. That his wife is so neat that he gets up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and when he comes back, the bed’s made.
I stopped at the end of a paragraph to go fix myself a cup of coffee, and you went in and read what I wrote and wrote a cute little line of your own, and it’s funny, there’s no argument there, but I don’t like it. I really don’t. This isn’t a conversation where you can make fun of me and put me down and get laughs that way. I don’t mind being Gracie Allen some of the time, but I want to write my chapter and get it the way I want it without having my thoughts pushed out of place.
I’m really pissed off. (Which is a ridiculous expression. What does it mean? Pissed off. The opposite of pissed on, I suppose. Next question?)
I’ve lost track of what I was going to say—about Marcia, about people existing independently. Whatever it was probably wasn’t all that important. Priscilla, who is not as scatterbrained as she seems, is still the most scatterbrained of our company, isn’t she? So it’s unlikely that she would have anything truly deep to contribute. She can advance the plot line a little, she’s good enough for that, but we wouldn’t want to waste anything thought-provoking on her, would we?
Sorry. I’m being bitchy, and I don’t like it either.
I am by inclination a late sleeper, and usually do not even know when Harry gets out of bed. Somewhere along the line I’ll roll over and know that I’m alone in bed, and will roll over again and pull the blanket of sleep back over me, and emerge yawning a couple of hours later.
This particular Wednesday morning I was awake before he was, which was as frustrating as it was unheard of. He never set alarms but slept until some inner alarm woke him, and this could happen any time at all in those hours before dawn. I opened my eyes and looked at the clock, and it was a quarter to five. He might wake up at any moment, or he might sleep another hour and a half, and until he did get up and get out I had to lie there in agonizing anticipation.
(I keep overwriting. I have these purple expressions. How does one avoid that? Agonizing anticipation, for Christ’s sake. I don’t talk like that. Why do I write like that?)
After ten endless minutes of agonizing anticipation, I decided to hurry things along. I grunted in my sleep, making a variety of unpleasant noises. Hairy slept through them. I rolled over then, and bumped into him, jostling him a good one. Then I rolled back again and returned to mock-sleep while he yawned and stretched and bestirred himself.
I listened to the shower, then heard him dressing. It is interesting to watch someone who does not know he is being observed. I watched Harry get dressed, peeping carefully at him from the bed. He had a tie on and knotted before infuriatingly deciding that it was not at all the tie he wanted to wear. I wanted him to hurry—he was spending minutes tying his tie that I could be spending in Rhoda’s bed.
But at the same time, and I remember this very well, although I don’t think I’ve thought