Threesome - Lawrence Block [26]
I work much better if I don’t say word one to anyone from the moment I get out of bed until I stop for the day. Human contact rips out the circuits. If I had enough groovy people around me constantly, I’d never do any work at all. Conversely, if I lived on a mountaintop (a real mountaintop) with no one for company but the trees and the flowers, I would also kill myself, which is why the present work-and-life pattern is about the best compromise available.
That morning the work started well enough. First I got after some cartoons which had been approved in rough form, a few of them okays that had come in yesterday’s mail, the rest ones I had gotten from Peggy when I saw her. Turning a rough into a finished piece of work is just craftsmanship and demands less in the way of creative energy than doing the rough in the first place, which is why I normally leave such chores for the later hours of the morning, or even tackle them after lunch. But this time I had a lot of them and wanted to get them out of the way and get paid for them. Getting paid for them is ultimately the most rewarding part of the game. I like to see my work in print, but if I miss out on this now and then I don’t fall down on the floor and gnaw the carpet. But if I don’t get paid, that’s something else again. Then I go berserk.
So, I turned out a lot of roughs into smooths, so to speak, and then I did some new work, including a couple of my own ideas, a few things that gag-writers sent and that I liked well enough to try out, and a couple of tentative treatments of some of Marcia’s lines for My Shrink Says.
Somewhere between nine and ten I realized that I had been sitting in one position, utterly motionless, my mind quite blank, for a good ten minutes. (Or a bad ten minutes, if you prefer.) I decided that this was either incipient catatonia or I was blocking. I put my pen down and walked out of the shed and into the fresh air. The sun was out and the day beautiful enough for me to notice how beautiful it was, and I don’t ordinarily notice. I said good morning to a couple of birds. Don’t ask what kind. We have bird books all over the house, bought them when we moved in, and I can look at any picture in any of the books and tell you without hesitation what kind of bird it is. I can even tell the warblers apart that way. But once those fucking birds are out of the book and sitting on a tree limb ten yards away, they all become utterly unrecognizable to me. I divide them mentally into four classes. All small ones are sparrows, all medium ones are robins, and all big ones flying high overhead are hawks. That comes to three classes. I had another one in mind when I started this shtick. What? Oh. All of the ones that sing all night long are mockingbirds. That’s it.
So I said good morning to the birds—robins, all of them, whether they knew it or not—and I filled my lungs with fresh air, and I decided that at that very moment my wife and her roomie were in bed together. Call it a psychic flash.
I turned toward the shed, and then I turned away from the shed, and then I said the hell with the shed. I started toward the back door of the overly charming Alpine hut, and then I said the hell with that as well, and I walked along the far side of the house until I came to Rhoda’s room.
When your nearest neighbor is Smoky the Bear, you don’t go berserk about drawing shades. Rhoda’s window shade was not all the way up, but neither was it all the way down. I stood between a wisteria vine and a pussy willow bush (yes, honestly) and looked in the window, and was not at all surprised to see them both there.
They were sort of between acts, I guess. Priss was lying on her back with her head on a pillow. Rhoda was sitting upright smoking a cigarette, one leg curled under her, the other extended. There is a Picasso blue period painting, I think of two acrobats, in which exactly the same positions and attitudes