Threesome - Lawrence Block [3]
“You go first,” Priss said, firmly. “You’re the writer.”
“Well, not exactly that.”
“And it was your idea.”
“Oh.”
So we went upstairs, and to bed, and whether the things we did to one another were speakable or not depends on your point of view, I would say.
And that was longer ago than yesterday, though not by much. I didn’t get directly to work on this. I tend to procrastinate. What you put off until tomorrow, I have found over the years, you frequently don’t ever have to do at all. Occasionally someone comes along and does it for you. Occasionally a problem you have been avoiding goes and solves itself.
But this book will not write itself, nor will anyone come along and write it for me. So I have done this much, to properly set the stage (while neatly splitting an infinitive, damn it) for the unfolding of the tale.
Things I don’t believe we voiced, but that we probably all of us know:
That the book is not primarily to make us wealthy, or to fill up idle hours, but to help us know some things about how we happened to each other, and the forms this happening took, and what it all means to all of us.
That the book is probably not entirely about sex, and that we ourselves are probably not entirely about sex, or are we?
What I would like to do now, I think, is end this prologue or preface or whatever the hell it is and go get another cup of coffee. Or maybe a drink. It’s almost four o’clock—it is a sort of house rule here not to take a drink before four o’clock, or to refuse one after. And my kidneys are floating already from all of the rotten coffee.
A drink, then.
Oh, first one thing. Priss wanted to know how long the chapters had to be. Long enough, Harry told her, to reach from the preceding chapter to the succeeding one. Like Abraham Lincoln’s legs.
A good answer, I think. And I think this chapter is long enough by those rules. I certainly hope it is, because it is unlikely to get any longer.
PRISS
Our house is in Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, at the crest of what we prefer to call a hill. The house itself was designed by an architect who had been overexposed to Swiss chalets. Everyone who ever visits us says that the house is charming. Harry has said (more than once) that if everyone says something is charming, then it isn’t.
I like where the house is more than I like the house. The countryside just rolls off away from one. Our landscaping has been largely a matter of letting Nature do what She wants. (Nature should be capitalized, just like God; They are, after all, the same thing, aren’t They?) Now and then Harry gets ambitious and buys a tree and plants it, and generally it lives, and each spring I tend to buy what nurserymen call bedding plants and bed them down hither and yon. These are annuals, which is as well, so that when they die, as they rather often do, I can comfort myself with the thought that they would have died anyway, come fall. I also, each fall, plant some bulbs. Never as many as I buy, though. And come spring fewer come up than I’ve planted.
That morning, in middle March, I was especially conscious of Nature and all Her works. The winter had been a harsh one, and a lingering one, and in the country we feel weather and seasonal change far more acutely than we ever did in the city. Now the weather had bite to it yet, but was softening, warming. Crocuses were up, and snowdrops, and other cheery things whose names I never knew. The forsythia—we have acres of forsythia—were blindingly gold all over the place. Forsythia is so boring eleven months out of the year, and every March it makes my heart stop.
And so I walked, down the long flagstone path (between the stones of which I each year resolve to plant creeping thyme, and each year don’t) to the road below, where our mailbox keeps its lonely sentinel watch. I do not mean to be arch; it was the sort of crisp morning when one would think in such soaring phrases.
It was a Tuesday, I remember. We get little