Threesome - Lawrence Block [49]
But.
Yeah, but. I don’t know what to say. But you thought it was great, Harry, that your wife and your mistress-in-residence were both infanticipating simultaneously, and how could I tell you that, while your mistress was having your child, your beloved faithful wife was having someone else’s?
I should never have written this chapter, and now having written it I should tear it up.
But I won’t.
HARRY
Either the last chapter was a far more brilliant joke than I ever thought you capable of, Priscilla, or it was the truth.
Which?
PRISS
Both.
An unintentional joke, and a joke on all of us. Not a brilliant one, I don’t think.
Also the truth.
RHODA
Priss, honey, when you make a mistake, it’s a beaut.
Properly speaking, it’s not my turn to write a chapter. It’s Harry’s turn, and one of these days he’s going to write one, as soon as he bestirs himself. But in the meantime I want to write a few lines if only because it seems as though this is the only way we are presently able to communicate. No one is speaking to any appreciable extent. We pass each other in the halls and nod and grunt and stare vacantly past one another, and we seem to be using the typewriter for conversational purposes, which may be better than not communicating at all, but I’m not absolutely sure of that.
Nothing to be done about it. The moving finger wrote, and having writ, etc.
I’m not entirely certain, Priss, that it was wholly wise of you to go into your mea culpa number. (If Mia Farrow married Robert Culp, it wouldn’t be my fault.) Not that I entirely blame you, either. For doing it, or for telling, or even for telling in such a novel way.
But I’m sorry, all things considered, that we had to get involved in writing this stupid book in the first place. I had the idea and sold the two of you on it, and we all found out more than we wanted to learn and disclosed more than we wanted to give out, and I’m not happy about it and neither is anybody else. I think one problem here is the universal delusion that people are better off knowing unpleasant truths, however unpleasant they may be. I think this derives from the same frame of mind which believes that medicine must taste bad to accomplish anything.
And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
Bullshit.
The truth will make you split up, that’s what the truth will do.
But when you think of it objectively (as if that were remotely possible) what is so desperate about the situation? It is not that Priss went out and did these things with these boys and this girl that is so disturbing, but that she seems to have come home with more than she set out with. Is that so terrible? We don’t really know, Harry, that the baby isn’t yours. I’m inclined to suspect that it might be. In any case, it’s Priss’, and my baby is yours, and—
I have a feeling I’m not helping things.
But I for one don’t think I can handle too much more of this moping, and I’m less affected by it than either of you two. Priss walks around constantly consumed by guilt and seems to have given up food entirely, which can’t be having the best possible effect on her unborn child. Harry gets up early each morning and spends twelve or fourteen hours Out Back, then comes inside and drinks himself into a stupor, finally falling asleep on the living room couch. Priss starves herself and chain-smokes and vomits a lot, gagging over the toilet far into the night, and ultimately cries herself to sleep in the bed the three of us used to share. And I am once again in the guest room, feeling like the least wanted of guests, and sleeping alone, since no one seems very much interested in me.
I mean, let’s cut the shit, huh? It’s just not that bad, nothing’s this bad. We’ve got a good thing going, team. We love each other.
Aw, gee, fellas—
HARRY
Hotel Royalton
44 West 44th Street
New York, New York 10036
Mrs. and Mrs. Harry Kapp
Elysium Fields, Massachusetts
Dear Girls:
Sorry to disappear like that, doing my thief in the night routine, folding my tent like an Arab