Threesome - Lawrence Block [33]
I have a strange mind. I am aware of this.
I lit another cigarette with the idea of forcing myself to linger there until I had finished it. I took two puffs and threw it away like one of those malcontents in the Viceroy commercials. “Hey, didn’t you just light that cigarette?” “Oh, these fucking cigarettes have lost their taste.” “Here, try one of mine.” “Say, this cigarette really tastes good.” “Of course it does, schmuck. It’s grass. It’ll get you stoned, too.”
I walked up the winding path, thinking of primrose paths, primrose paths paved with good intentions, with creeping thyme between the flagstones. Creeping time, I thought. Time to creep, time to fog in on little cat feet.
I thought of taking off my shoes to make my approach soundless, and laughed inwardly at myself, and when I reached the door of the house I did take off my shoes, and did pad around from room to room as quietly as possible. When a room-by-room search failed to disclose their whereabouts, I experienced an irrational moment of profound panic. Obviously they had run off and left me and I would never see them again.
Paranoia is never all that far from the surface, is it? Just a silly millimeter away....
Out Back, I thought almost at once, and knew they would be there, knew it for certain. But first I went into Rhoda’s room again and found the drawing. She had tucked it underneath her pillow. I picked it up and looked at it very carefully. I put it back under the pillow and lay down on Rhoda’s bed for a few seconds, snuggling my head on her pillow, curling up with thoughts and memories.
I left the room and the house, and was well on my way through the garden to the shed before realizing that I had not put my shoes back on. This was no problem; it wasn’t that cold, and there was grass to walk on. But as I walked I began talking off other things, idly, dreamily, pulling my sweater over my head and tossing it away, unclasping and shrugging off my bra, taking off everything as I walked, until as I reached the doorway of the shed I had my panties, my damp panties, in my hand, and I tossed them gaily over my shoulder as I stepped onto the threshold.
And I saw, as you know from Rhoda’s last chapter, a profile view of Harry sitting in his swivel chair and Rhoda kneeling in front of him like a slave girl. I watched her going down on him, the tender bobbing motions of her head, her hands gripping his thighs, and all I could think was that I had never seen anything so insanely beautiful in all my life.
I was never much on watching people. Never that much opportunity to find out if I was interested. Other children managed to watch their parents screw. I never did, nor did I ever overhear them, nor in fact did I have any evidence beyond the fact of my own existence to prove that they ever screwed in their lives.
Sometimes Harry had brought home pornographic photographs and showed them to me, and I looked at them both to find out just what people did look like when they made love and also to assess my own reaction to this phenomenon (Rountree, for Christ’s sake, talk English) but I always thought of the models as plastic people with plastic smiles and grimaces and not real at all. What they were doing, in those funny poses, was something that had nothing to do with sex at all, nothing certainly to do with sex as I knew it. I could get hot from the whole illicit idea of lying in bed with my husband and looking at these dirty pictures, but I couldn’t get even lukewarm from the pictures themselves. They were just props.
This was entirely different.
In the first place, these were people. And they were not performing mechanically for the camera but were completely wrapped up in what they were doing.
But more than that, they were two people I loved. And to see them giving pleasure to each other this way, and connecting with each other as both of them had been connected with me, was very moving.
I don’t mean arousing. I don’t mean sex, really. This was the most completely sexual moment of my life, I would