Threesome - Lawrence Block [42]
A couple of times I would set up the typewriter and try writing, and once or twice I would get a reasonably decent start on something, but nothing ever came of it. I would start things knowing full well that I was not going to finish them, and that what I was producing was essentially busy work, something to keep Rhoda Muir off the streets and out of trouble, something as vitally creative as the potholders they weave in occupational therapy at lunatic asylums.
Once, long ago, a lover took me with him while visiting his mother at one such Bide-a-Wee home—she was an alcoholic, in for her annual desiccation—and while he went to hold her hand I wandered around, identifying more closely with the ambulatory patients than I really wanted to, and ultimately finding my way into a shop where the patients’ O.T. work was offered for sale. Hundreds of little trivets ornamented with tiny ceramic tiles, thousands of those fucking potholders, no end of baskets and spoonholders and other triangular things which must have had some function—God knows they weren’t decorative—but which served no purpose I could fathom. I asked someone what they were for but couldn’t make out his answer and was too put off by his rolling eyes and slack mouth to ask him again.
But the point, if I’ve not lost it forever, is that no one would make that crap if there was anything else to do with his time. Worthwhile projects are those worth doing for themselves, not for their effect upon the psyche, not because they help pass the time, and my writing thus was in the same category as the potholders and the baskets and the trivets, of subjective therapeutic value only, and blessed little of that.
So I wrote things, and then tore them up, and put the typewriter away and went for a walk in the woods. Sooner or later, I knew, there would have to be something that I would discover and that would be right for me. But it did no good to keep trying things on until something fit.
Meanwhile, I began to play more of a role in the functioning of the house itself. I had to do this or feel like a sponge, a parasite, and it did pass time as well. I helped with the cleaning, I guided the power mower over those parts of the lawn that were level enough for that sort of thing. I appointed myself official morning coffee maker, and instant coffee ceased to play a role in our lives, to the relief of everybody but its manufacturer. I took over some of the cooking. I had never enjoyed cooking while I was married, and was none too good at it, with the result that we ate out most of the time. But now I was surprised to discover that I seemed to be capable of enjoying it after all, and that I could, when I took the time and trouble, produce a dish that everyone seemed to agree was quite edible. I was a very different sort of cook than Priss, who was rarely enormously inspired but who was able to prepare reasonably successful meals seven days a week without minding the routine or making an occasional mess out of an occasional meal. I, on the other hand, tended to get wildly creative, going in for some major production numbers and now and then ruining a meal completely. And I could only cook once in a while. If it had become a regular thing, I would have hated it.
I wonder how well I’ve conveyed the various changes we went through after the month of magic ran its course and left all three of us to find out just where we were going. There is one way of looking at things which I don’t seem to have mentioned, and that is simply this: When our orientation was planted firmly in present time, everything was great. As long as we lived as much as possible in the Now, there were no worries, no cares, no paranoia, no anxiety. It was only when we turned from Where are we now? to Where the hell are we going? that things became less than idyllic.
PRISS
We all found ways, didn’t we, to run away from us?
You in the woods, Rhoda, and you to New York, Harry. But more than that we ran off to our secret selves and shut the rest of the world out.
As well as we have come to know each other, I keep