Threesome - Lawrence Block [32]
(I feel more than a little giddy. Rhoda began writing the last chapter early in the afternoon and was still at it at dinner time. She wouldn’t stop, took the typewriter into the other room while Harry and I sat down to one of my less successful shots at stuffing a veal breast.
(She finished typing shortly after we finished dinner. We were drinking brandy when she sauntered into the kitchen, face flushed, eyes glassy. She said, “Do you suppose either or both of you might feel like taking me to bed?”
(I said, “You’ve written yourself into a state.” She agreed that she had. Harry said that there ought to be a cure for that sort of thing. We went upstairs, the brandy bottle in tow, and we drank and petted and drank and foreplayed and drank and balled, and somewhere along the way I lost touch with what was going on, which may have been apparent to the other two, or may not have been.
(I felt shut out. I felt as though all of the interaction was happening between Rho and Harry, and as though I was a party to it all in the same way and to about the same extent as the bed we happened to be balling on. My role was thingish rather than personal. I didn’t resent this, I don’t think, nor did I feel that I was being shut out by anyone but that it was an effect on my own inner mood.
(This is not really rare when the three of us are together. One person may be less in the mood than the others, less sexy, and may thus get less involved. There’s nothing really wrong with this, I don’t think. Whoever is in that kind of a set can simply go through the motions, or play Watchbird, or even leave the room.
(But I digress from the digression itself. I did feel out of things, and sexually inert, and when with whoops and hollers the two of them reached their climax—and is anything in the abstract as pleasantly absurd as other people’s passion? I think not—they subsided at once into a deep relaxed sleep, and I didn’t. Didn’t subside, didn’t relax, and didn’t sleep.
(Instead I came out here and read the chapter that had inflamed Rhoda. This, perversely, excited me. I could have gone off to awaken one or both of them, but that seemed a bad idea, and instead I sit here, in the kitchen once more, the typewriter returned to its habitual location, a fresh pot of coffee working, a cigarette burning. Call it sublimation, but here I am, writing this.)
Where was I? Scheming? Bleeding and gushing?
Doesn’t matter.
I told Rhoda I wanted to go shopping, made the suggestion purposely vague—“Some things I thought I would look at, actually I just want to get out of the house for a little while, come along if you happen to feel like it.” It was easy for her to stay behind, and she did.
I drove away. I drove about half a mile down the road and pulled off onto the shoulder. I remember pulling off the road and falling into a clinch with Rhoda. When had that been?
That was Tuesday. This was Thursday.
Incroyable!
Mais vrai, ma cherie.
I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke rise from it. They say that if you can’t see the smoke you don’t get anything out of smoking (except cancer and emphysema, that is.) I watched the smoke rise and still didn’t get very much out of it, and after a while I threw the cigarette out the window, rolled the window up again, drove far enough on down the road to find a place to turn around, turned around, and drove back home.
I parked out in front. I even cut the motor some fifty yards down the road and coasted in the rest of the way, which becomes more ridiculous the more I think about it. Priscilla the great conspirator.
I got out of the car. The sun warmed me. I looked up at the house at the top of the more or less hill, and the phrase Mistress of all I survey popped into my head. Mistress of all and of everyone I thought. And in my mind I saw myself standing at the apex of the triangle (that’s the word, of course, not ajax, Christ!) in flowing robes, arms extended, with Harry and Rhoda crouched at my feet. One at either foot. And I could hear myself saying to them, in matriarchal