Threesome - Lawrence Block [29]
I couldn’t wait either. But I was a little afraid of what one relationship might do to the other.
All of this damned concealment! That morning we had worked to make sure that Harry wouldn’t find out about what we were doing, and I was already thinking about what I would do with Harry and how I would keep it from Priss. In retrospect, it’s hard to believe we cared so much about such stupid secrecy, especially since in a chamber of our minds each of us wanted it out in the open, needed it to be out in the open.
After lunch, perhaps an hour or two after lunch, I drifted back into my room. I think to change a garment or something. I don’t entirely remember why. Whatever it was, I know that I did it and was on the way out without noticing the bit of art work Harry had left for me, when some vibration caught me at the door and something made me look back and see, out of the corner of my eye, a piece of paper on top of my pillow.
(Parenthetical observation: Once I saw a movie called The Counterfeit Traitor, with William Holden and Lilli Palmer. World War Twice, and he’s a Swede spying for the allies, and she’s his German girlfriend, a Good German, and she’s helping the allied cause too, and she sees the damage done to her city by an allied air raid, which she feels she helped bring about, and she’s consumed with guilt and everything, and she’s also a Catholic, so she carries her guilt to the nearest church and dumps it onto some poor priest. And when she’s finished her confession and waiting to hear what her penance is, the curtain is drawn and the “priest” is revealed in an SS uniform.
(The look on Lilli Palmer’s face must have been identical to the look on mine when I picked up that fucking piece of paper.
(End of parenthetical observation.)
The drawing, which I still own, and would not part with for the world, was far more precisely detailed than Harry’s work generally is, yet the style was unmistakably his. There was a girl who was a slight caricature of Priss, the teeth a bit more prominent than hers, the eyes somewhat more hyperthyroid. There was another girl who was a slight caricature of me, the breasts oversized, mouth fuller, and so on. The girl who looked like me had a tongue shaped like a penis, and was in the process of inserting it into the girl who looked like Priss, and while all of this was going on, a man’s face, a slight caricature of the artist as a young voyeur, loomed in a window over the bed and leered down at the two girls.
The caption read, “What do they know about love uptown?” That’s an old and not very funny joke, and if you don’t already know it you’re not going to read it here, because it’s a bore. But it does fit the circumstances well enough.
I stood there looking at this and trembling, literally trembling, and then after I don’t know how long I realized that not only was I trembling, which was understandable enough, but that my underpants were sopping, and not because I had peed in them, which would have also been understandable enough, but because I was flowing like a river, my cunt was swimming, and that, it seemed to me, was not understandable at all.
Priss invited me shopping that afternoon. I said I was in the middle of a book and I thought I would stretch out and finish it. She went shopping. I smoked three cigarettes one after the other. Then I went out to the shed.
Harry was working on a cartoon. He looked up and our eyes locked.
I said, “I got your picture.”
“And?”
“You made my breasts too large.”
“God made your breasts too large. But I’m not complaining and neither should you.”
“You made them larger than He did.”
“Well, I paint what I see.”
“You were watching.”
“Yes.”
“For very long?”
“No.”
“There’s something I have to do,” I said. “Just stay right there, don’t move, there’s this thing that I have to do.”
Utter compulsion. One does what one must do. I