Threesome - Lawrence Block [41]
“Priss!”
She stopped, broke off the long string of words, and looked at me, eyes round and vacant, and sighed.
“Priss, it’s not like that.”
“I’m wrong, I guess.”
“Priss, I never saw a man more in love with a woman than Harry is with you.”
“Then why—”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Then why does he also want you? was what she decided not to say. And I guess you could say that different forms of that question were on everybody’s mind. We were all terrified of perfection, suspicious of happiness. While some people can step in shit and shout out joyously that there must be a pony, people like us wake up in Paradise and look around apprehensively for the snake. Why is this, I wonder? Have we been in that many Paradises, and seduced by quite that many snakes?
There were certain statements and questions that came to me from time to time, and one or another of them would prey on my mind for a while, and then I would get over it, and finally some other doubt or fear would turn up to take its place.
Some of them:
I am in the way. They have a marriage, they have their home, they have the mutual shared experience of eight years or so, and I am simply in their way, the perennial house guest and bed guest. Guests like fish spoil on the third day, and the third day is long past, and sooner or later they will wake up to the fact that they got along without me before they met me and can get along without me now. And then where will I be?
What am I doing with these disgusting people? These people are perverts, because a marriage is supposed to involve two people with no room for a third person, and they are using me sexually, dragging me into their marriage bed, using me in an essentially exploitative way, using me to prop up their own sagging marriage, and Christ, they must be perverts or they wouldn’t enjoy doing the things I like to do in bed, would they?
Why am I corrupting these fine sensitive people? These people had a perfectly satisfactory marriage until I came along, and I seduced them both, and got them into a lot of kinky things, and sooner or later they will realize what has happened to them and their marriage will be ruined, and everything everywhere will all come apart at the seams, and what on earth will any of us do then?
I think I would have found myself periodically obsessed by these several doubts and fears, and others which I cannot recall now, and do not want to be bothered with—I think they would have nibbled away at my mind no matter what. This was, you must realize, a very unorthodox relationship to have evolved between three basically orthodox individuals. If we had never been much at bowing down to idols, neither had we spent much time smashing them. So it was inevitably hard to live full time with such a far-out situation. We might embrace it wholeheartedly for the most part, but there had to be headaches and night sweats and heart pounding from time to time.
But what made it a little worse for me, I think, is that there was really not much of anything for me to do. The bit about the idle hands doing the Devil’s work has a lot to it, and while the Devil didn’t seem to be giving me any assignments, my idle hands were kept busy picking scabs off my own wounds.
(That’s a revolting metaphor. Sorry I mentioned it.)
Harry had his cartooning, and his trips to New York, and all of that. Priss had the handling of the family finances—however scatterbrained she might appear, she was a wizard at checkbook balancing and food budgeting and money planning and all those things that Harry and I could not have done to save our souls. She also made the house stay together, kept it clean and neat, made the meals, all of that.
I, on the other hand, didn’t do much of anything.