Threesome - Lawrence Block [34]
I kept thinking: Now we all belong to each other.
I couldn’t have been standing there even a minute before Harry’s head turned and his eyes met mine. He was startled, but I guess my nakedness let him know right away that I hadn’t come here to raise hell in the traditional Woman Scorned position. I smiled softly, and put my finger shushingly to my lips, and then took my fingertip inside my mouth and sucked at it as Rho was sucking at him. Then I grinned quickly, and coming around from an angle that made it less likely Rhoda might see me out of the corner of her eye, I tiptoed over to them.
I felt so light and airy. As if I could have flapped my arms and soared into flight.
I put an arm around Harry’s shoulder. He turned toward me, and I guided his head to my breast. His lips fastened around my nipple and he suckled like a baby. I stroked the back of his neck, and with my other hand I stroked Rhoda’s hair.
Now we all belong to each other.
HARRY
Funny thing.
Just realized something that was going through my mind from the moment all of this began to get itself in motion, and that has been in and out of mind ever since.
The wish that I had someone to tell all this to.
I get the feeling that this is a very male-type thing. It is men, after all, who kiss and tell, and who do so largely because the telling is as essential a part of the game as the kissing. It’s partly a matter of celebrating a triumph, sure, but it’s also a way of making the experience real, a way of keeping it alive in your own mind.
Now women are different. Women will also tell each other sex things, but in a very different way. They’ll tell each other things about their relationships with their husbands, personal details that not one man in a thousand would tell another man about his wife. And men, on the other hand, will talk to each other about the screwing they do outside of their marriage, while the women who play around keep their mouths shut about it.
I know it’s a sweeping generalization. But what’s the point in objecting to a sweeping generalization if it also happens to be true?
There is, impossible as it may seem, a point to all this. And that is that this book of ours is serving different functions for each of us. Of course it’s everybody’s psychoanalyst, that goes without saying, but for me it is also a male ear into which I can whisper all the sex stories I want.
You may recall a Jules Feiffer cartoon—you may recall a hundred Feiffer cartoons, he’s so fucking great I could cheerfully strangle him—in which Bernard, his favorite alter ego, is distraught because his best friend is getting married. The last frame is something like, “Look, there are women all over the place. But at the age of thirty where am I going to find a buddy?”
Too true. One has passed the point of forming those intense friendships, and if one lives on a hill surrounded by woods and farms, one never talks to anybody, let alone develops a buddy.
What was it like? There’s a question a buddy would ask, an envious expression on his face (I Am Curious—Green) and a catch in his throat.
What was it like?
Well, let me tell you, buddy, it was great. It was Ace-high all the way, it was king of the mountain, top dog, the whole schmear.
That doesn’t say diddly-do, does it?
Well, let’s back up and start over. Let’s see. First of all, what we’re talking about right here is what it was like right at the beginning, from the time we three walked from the shed to the house and got into bed together for the first time. For about the next, let me see, I guess two weeks, or maybe even a month, there was a freshness, a newness to the whole thing. So that’s what I’m talking about now, that first month.
How to describe it?
To begin by saying that we were entirely involved in one another. There was a war going on, the economy was in a state of chassis, the world was going to hell in a hand car, the Mets were doing surprisingly well in spring training, and in all other spheres of human