Threesome - Lawrence Block [43]
I don’t know if I should tell you this.
Probably not.
But I guess I will, anyway. I suppose I could always tear up what I’ve written if I decide that it is something I would rather hold within myself a little longer.
I could do that.
And write some other chapter in this one’s place.
If things had gone together in any other way, if any of I don’t know how many variables had not been just so, then it never would have happened. But that’s always the way, isn’t it? Everything that occurs in life is an extraordinary coincidence, and life itself is such a flaunting of the odds that it’s a miracle any of us exist at all.
This one afternoon, you see, I was in the grip of my Priscilla’s-Just-In-The-Way delusion.
Well, see, it’s a particularly natural delusion. Almost inescapable when one sees how well Rhoda and Harry get along together, and how much more they seem to have in common than either one has with me. When I look at the subject sanely, however, I realize that one of the things they have in common is that they’re both in love with me, and I realize further that in a very special way we exist as a trio and would not exist ever so well any other way.
I honestly believe God meant for people to sleep in threes. If He didn’t, it’s just because He didn’t think things through logically. It wouldn’t absolutely have to be our sort of trio. It could be the other sort, two men and a girl, and that would be nice, although not as nice for me, I don’t think, as this. But nicer than sleeping with just one person. Definitely nicer than that.
More than three would not be good.
More than three ....
There were other things wrong with that afternoon. It was the end of June, when our weather is usually particularly good, but for the past week we had been having chilly air and more rain than we had any use for, and at the moment we were having both. I might have just tried walking around in the garden to shake my mood but the garden was only fit for walking if you had webbed feet, and I didn’t. (It’s just my two heads that made me odd.) So I said something about going shopping, dashed for the car, navigated the length of the driveway, and then drove aimlessly along.
I didn’t plan on going to any particular supermarket, but that’s one of the comforting things about life in America. If you drive in any distance for a little while you will come to a supermarket, indistinguishable to all intents and purposes from any other supermarket, and then you can buy something and take it home with you, whether you need it or not. So I didn’t have to drive toward a supermarket, or rather there was no way I could drive that wasn’t toward at least one of them, so all I had to do was sit back and enjoy the ride. It would have been more enjoyable if the windshield wipers had worked better, or if I hadn’t kept crying like an idiot for no good reason at all.
I never pick up hitchhikers.
Never in my life. Not because I’ve been afraid—most of the time around here the kids who try to hitch rides are around twelve years old, and don’t particularly scare me. But because it just never occurred to me, it never seemed to me to be the sort of thing I would be inclined to do.
Then why did I stop for these kids?
God alone knows. I certainly don’t. There’s a certain temptation that makes me want to say that I had the final outcome in mind, somewhere in mind, when I first took my foot off the gas pedal and eased it onto the brake. But I’ve been over it in my mind a thousand times since then and I just can’t believe it was the case. I saw them out there at the roadside getting wet, and there was something youthful and appealing about them as a group, the way they stood, their casual attitudes.
Let’s make a scene out of it. I want to get my own mind out of the way and put it down the way it happened.