Threesome - Lawrence Block [53]
I want to come home.
But first I wanted to get all of this written out, and put in a letter, and send you the letter and let you receive it and ponder it before I leave this place. For one thing, in the past two days I seem to have tapped a vast underground pool of creative energy. I’m doing some cartoons unlike anything I’ve done before, some very weird and bittersweet stuff, not my usual sort of thing at all either in theme or mood or drawing style. They aren’t funny in the usual sense, nor are they supposed to be. I haven’t shown them to anyone. I’ll show them to you when I get home. God knows what I’ll do with them, whether they’ll turn out to be commercial or not, but they do seem to represent some sort of creative growth for me, and I’m finding this very exciting. I had leveled off a long time ago, as people do sooner or later, and it’s a great surprise for me to find out that I still have the capacity to find new ways of seeing things and translate them into new forms of work.
I just took a lunch break at the health food restaurant around the corner. I had a vegetarian lamb chop. It tasted just like the vegetarian pork chop I had yesterday. I also had a pint of carrot juice, and now I’m topping it all off with a cigarette. There’s a limit to this health shit.
I want to finish this now and get it in the mail. And then I’ll wait, I guess, until one of you calls or writes and says that it’s okay to come home.
I miss you both.
How special we all are, and in such a special way. The separation helps me realize this. So much of the specialness masqueraded at first as sheer sex, the almost infinite expansion of possibilities for variety, the exhilaration of interacting as three rather than two. So much of it, too, derived I think from the sense that all of this was forbidden.
But there is far more to us than that, isn’t there?
I must end this. I will go downstairs and purchase a stamp and entrust this to the mercies of the U.S. mails. What an act of faith that is, incidentally! One drops an envelope into a metal box and takes it for granted that it will get where it is supposed to.
Enough. I love you and you. I love our babies to be. Our babies.
God bless us every one, as Small Timothy put it. My sentiments exactly.
Love and love,
Harry
PRISS
I didn’t know he had left. I slept late that Monday and finally dragged myself out of bed. I had perspired a great deal during the night, always a sign for me that sleep was less untroubled than I might remember it. My skin felt clammy. I went and stood under the shower and got out technically clean but still clammy somehow. Then I huddled over the toilet and threw up.
I examined myself in the mirror and put the palms of my hands over my stomach. I am so thin to start with that I began to show almost from the moment of conception, or so it seemed. According to the best medical information, I would at any time now begin to feel life. A new life moving inside me. A new life having the misfortune to be born to me.
There was fresh coffee in the kitchen. On the kitchen table was the typewriter and the pile of manuscript. I went over to see if Harry had written anything, but the last page was of Rhoda’s plaintive chapter. Nothing had changed. I poured myself a cup of coffee and drank about half of it and poured the rest down the sink. Then I went to the bathroom, feeling nauseous, but nothing came of it. Just a brief attack of dry heaves.
I went outside and checked the shed, but Harry wasn’t there. I went inside and couldn’t find Rhoda. I went outside again and pulled a few weeds out of the garden, and while I was doing this Rhoda came out from the woods and approached.
“Where’s Harry?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Isn’t he working?”
“No. He’s not around the house, either.”
“I thought he was working.”
The old Chevy was gone. I got into the new car and drove it to the station, and the Chevy was parked there. I came back and told Rhoda.