Threesome - Lawrence Block [5]
My deepest love to Harry. Tell him, pliz, that I saw his skier cartoon and completely broke up. See, some of us do look to see who did the cartoon.
I’ll try not to get in his way. Or in yours, for that matter. Or to be too much of a drag. Actually I feel buoyant a great deal of the time. It’s the up-and-downness of the whole thing that bothers me more than anything else. I have this whelming (which is to say not quite overwhelming) need for stability and have just hauled my last anchor.
Make of that as you will.
My love, truly and eternally, to both of you, along with my apologies for past and future rudeness, not to say present ones. I won’t expect any red carpets, but pour me a drink; I’ll need one.
Rhoda
I felt as though I needed a drink myself, but it wasn’t even noon yet. I started across the road, then stopped, suddenly dizzy. I rested for a moment or two, leaning my weight against our mailbox, looking up at the house and the grounds. Rhoda had been here just once, five years ago, a year after we moved in, a year before she married Bob Dandridge and moved out to the West Coast. That one visit was a brief one. She drove up from New York with some anonymous young man who did something ostensibly creative for an advertising agency. We had two other couples for dinner. Rhoda and her young man stayed the night, the other couples did not. I remember feeling annoyingly married, envying her the delight of sleeping with a non-spouse, and being uncomfortable with my own role. Annoyed, too, to find myself slipping too far into that role and almost having the gall to disapprove of her sleeping with her advertising man.
How much of the disapproval was jealousy?
How much of all disapproval is jealousy?
Questions, questions. I steadied myself and headed up the flagstone path, wishing it had creeping thyme between the stones, remembering the smell of the thyme underfoot on the flagstone path of my grandmother’s garden, remembering this and thinking of that and trying not to think about Rhoda’s letter, because, you see, I did not know, really, how I felt about it. Her visit. Or how I was supposed to feel. Or how I wanted to feel.
Harry was Out Back. There is the remains of a stable behind the house which he converted into a rudimentary studio, and where he works every morning from whenever he gets up (somewhere between four-thirty and six-thirty, and always well before me) until noon, when he comes in to read the mail and have lunch. If one of his rough drawings gets okayed in the morning mail, he generally works up the finished artwork during the afternoon. If nothing like that happens, he takes the afternoon off. He never opens letters from gag-writers at noon but holds them until the following morning. When he wakes up, things are funny, his sense of humor is on, his visual humor functions. I can’t understand this myself. When I wake up I want to pour coffee over my head and go back to sleep. Well, not exactly that, but along those lines. I can’t imagine anything being funny at daybreak.
We are oddly matched, Harry and I. This thin-wristed insipid blonde Mayflower child, whom one praises as being not quite so scatterbrained as she looks, and this starker, this Jewish oak tree with bitter wit and crackling laughter.
When it became apparent that we were not going to have any children, we discussed our differences and Harry hypothesized that our chromosomes might simply be allergic to one another. “Maybe it’s just as well,” I said. “We’re so different that any children we might have would be absolutely inconceivable.”
He laughed for twenty minutes before I figured out what I said. This always happens.
But I am wobbling all over the place. I hope Rhoda does eventually edit all of this into a cohesive mass. If that’s possible.
Let me see, I went back to the house with the letter. If this were a movie, we could just cut to the next scene. I suppose we could do that here just by leaving a space between this paragraph and the next one.
He read through the letter, tts-ing and chuckling, then looked at me over the top of it.