Threesome - Lawrence Block [52]
I want to come home.
Because I belong to both of you, and you to me, and you to each other, and everything. And this is true, or at least I perceive it to be true, in a way that it wasn’t, or I didn’t perceive it, before.
(Rhoda, when you type this letter into a chapter, you have my full permission to translate that last sentence into something more readily comprehensible.)
This part of the letter will be awkward, and perhaps as difficult to understand as it is to write, which is very difficult indeed. I sort of know what I mean, but that in itself is a lot like my W.C. Fields impression—if no one else gets the message, then I have somehow failed.
I want the kids. Both of the kids, because they will, after all, both be ours. They’ll both be mine, as far as that goes. When I think about it, when I really sit down and think it all the way through, I have trouble understanding why I was so completely shook up by the fact that Priss went out and got herself laid and relayed and parlayed by the four young nonentities. Why should it matter? We are all of us very complicated people, reacting in unusual ways to unusual stresses. If Priss is right and God did mean people to sleep in threes—and I think she may well be right—the fact remains that it takes rather unusual and atypical people to perceive this Divine Plan, and to act forcefully upon it. And if complicated people occasionally slip off the track and do a little sleeping around, why should other complicated people—people given to occasional sleeping around of their own—react as I did?
Of course it was the fact of pregnancy that made the difference. I was bubbling in a special way, you know, the goddam king of the virility mountain, sitting high and mighty in my pseudo-chalet waiting for you both to bear my children. And I can see now that over the years I was very carefully repressing very real disappointment over the fact that Priss and I seemed incapable of reproducing ourselves.
I always wanted kids. I like kids, they laugh at jokes that grownups know aren’t funny, they listen to silly stories with big eyes, they provide a person with the ultimate ego trip. But I decided, well, all right, we can’t have any, the hell with it, if we can’t have them then I don’t want them. The grapes must be sour, right? Out-of-reach grapes might as well be sour, the fox was right.
Harry, I told myself over the years, told myself in a voice I learned not to listen to, forget what the doctors say, forget the idea that there’s nothing really wrong with either of you, that your mutual infertility is some sort of allergy. Harry, bubbeleh, anybody who is anything of a stud can get his wife pregnant. There’s something wrong with your seed, Harry. It doesn’t move fast enough, Harry, it doesn’t seek out and attack, it’s not sufficiently aggressive. It, Harry, like you yourself, Harry, lacks balls.
So I wouldn’t even let myself think about adopting kids. Stupid, right? Neurotic, no?
All right. Obviously I can father children, and have proved as much with you, Rhoda. And Priscilla can bear them, and has proved as much herself. And in a very real sense we could think of Priss’ baby as the product of artificial insemination, except that we’ll be getting a better kid than we would if a doctor and a hypodermic needle served as the inoculating medium. A cock, after all, whoever is attached to it, is simply a more natural impregnating device than a hypodermic needle. It gives the sperm a chance to swim upstream like salmon, and for the best sperm to win.
Did you know, for example, that artificial insemination isn’t used for racehorses anymore? They found out that although it was easy and economical and everything, it did not produce fast horses.
I’m getting way off the track, like a slow horse. What I mean is that it has taken me a circuitous route to reach this conclusion, but that when all is said and done you are both of you my wives, and you are both bearing my children, and whatever happened in some fucking Holiday Inn—and I use the adjective for descriptive purposes—that whatever