Threesome - Lawrence Block [51]
“Nothing. Just seeing new sides to your lifestyle, that’s all. First Monday of every month? No more and no less?”
“Right. I like schedules.”
“You have many arrangements like this?”
“Every Rosh Hashanah,” she said, “I blow the chauffeur.”
I think, somewhere in the back of my mind, had been an idea of settling in with Marcia for a time. I had never precisely fitted lyrics to this particular tune, but I suspect I would have had to have had it in mind (have had to have had?) in order to schlep my suitcase over there.
I believe it was you, Priss, who said something about resenting the idea that people have lives of their own when away from one. I didn’t resent this of Marcia, I didn’t even in my mind have that type of claim on her, or want to, but the revelation that her life did hold other interests besides my Wednesday visits shook off any thought I may have had of locating there.
We smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of coffee and threw a lot of brittle humor back and forth before we finally wound up in the feathers, and the preliminaries for a change turned out to be way out in front of the main event. I just couldn’t get with it. We wrestled around for quite a while to no particular purpose, until finally she looked up at me and tried to touch her eyebrows to her hairline.
“All in all,” she said, “I have the feeling that I do not have one hundred percent of your attention.”
“All in all,” I said, sounding like W.C. Fields, “I would rather be in Philadelphia.”
“Who’s in Philadelphia?”
The hippest of ladies have their insecurities.
“Nobody’s in Philadelphia,” I said. “That’s what he had on his tombstone. That was his whatchamacallit, his epitaph.”
“Then that’s the right place for it. A man has an epitaph, his tombstone is where you should put it. Who?”
“Huh?”
“The corpse in Philly. Who are we talking about?”
I did the imitation again.
“Who’s it supposed to be?”
“Oh, shit.”
“I’m supposed to recognize it?”
I wanted to die. “W.C. Fields.”
“Doesn’t sound at all like him.”
“Goddam aggressive castrating bitch.”
She cupped me in a gentle hand, gazed ruefully down. “Don’t blame it on me, baby,” she said. “Either you’ve only got it on Wednesdays, or else somebody did the job on you before you got anywhere near here.”
A little later I checked into the hotel and called Peggy from my room. We went through the but-it’s-only-Monday routine and I asked if she had any money for me. She did, and I went over to her office and picked up a check and went over to her bank and cashed it.
Then I called a call girl (that’s how they named them) and went over to her apartment and got laid. To prove I could do it, I guess. I did it. Hurrah for me.
Oh, the hell with this. What I did, where I went, who I saw. None of this matters. I’ve spent most of my time doing nothing, as a matter of fact. I see movies. I pick up paperback novels and I seem to read them because eventually I get to the last page without any particular recollection of what was on the first page, or any of the intervening pages.
I draw cartoons. Nothing seems funny, but the work gets done just the same, which is idiotic but true. And the work seems to come out about the same. Peggy, who tells me if things stink, looked the other morning at what I’ve done since I’ve been in town, and pronounced everything up to my usual standard.
“But nothing seems funny to me,” I told her.
“That’s because you’re depressed.”
“I know I’m depressed, but the cartoons—”
“Are funny. I’m not depressed, and neither am I manic, Harry, so take my word for it.”
I took her word for it.
What else do I do? Think about you two, endlessly, over and over. I don’t call Marcia, or the call girl, or any other call girls, or any other Marcias, or anyone, because when all is said and done I do not want any of those people. I sit here and I think about you two and I just run it all through my mind over and