I remembered kissing Harry, and kissed Priss.
We held each other for what seemed a very long time. There was no urgency to this. There wasn’t, truth to tell, a hell of a lot of sex to it. I was closer to tears than passion, and closer to wordless joy than either.
We didn’t talk again until the car was again rolling down the highway. Then I said, “There’s still time to stop.”
“No, there isn’t. Not for me. I don’t think there ever really was, my darling.”
“Are you sure you know what we’re getting into?”
“No. I’m not sure of anything. Except that this is what I want and need.”
“I don’t want to wreck anything. You and Harry have a good thing going.”
“He’ll be in New York.”
“Yes, I know.”
“He goes early in the morning and stays the whole day. He sometimes doesn’t get back until late at night.”
“I know.”
“Don’t get out of bed in the morning.”
“I won’t.”
“After he leaves I’ll come to you. Stay in bed and I’ll come to you. Will you do that? Will you wait for me?”
“Yes.”
“I was so afraid to say all this. To let you know. I sensed that you wanted me as I want you but I thought that it might be wishful thinking, that I was seeing what I wanted to see. But it’s not that at all, is it?”
“No, it isn’t. I don’t think I ever stopped wanting you, Priss. During school, after school, during my marriage, I wasn’t always aware of it, but it was always there. I never did get over you.”
“We’ll never get over each other,” she said. “Never never never.”
And that is where this chapter is going to have to stop. I have written things before, longer things than this, some of them personal and some of them not so personal, but I have never written anything that so thoroughly exhausted me. This is hard work.
I thought this chapter would carry the story further, to include the Wednesday morning scene between Priss and me. But I seem to have come closer to total recall of the two foregoing scenes than I had thought likely.
Which is perhaps just as well. Because the hardest part of this for me is to get across the way I was attracted to both of these people at once, with each attraction reinforcing the other. I wanted Harry and I wanted Priss, and I also wanted him because he was hers and her because she was his. I wanted her for my sister and him for my brother and I wanted the two of them to be my parents and my children.
I could not kiss either of them without thinking of-and yearning for-the other.
So you can do the sex part, Priss. In the morning, after Harry left, as I lay curled fetally in my little bed and waited breathlessly for you to come to me.
PRISS
Rhoda, you asked me if I knew what I was getting into.
Rhoda, we never know what we are getting into. Never. We didn’t know what we were getting into when we started writing this book. It started off as a lark. We knew what you wrote in the first chapter, that we had an unstated purpose of some deep sort, but we could not have known we would open up in quite this fashion, or that so many unknown things would come to light.
Every day or so one of us writes a chapter, and the other two read it, and no one says anything whatsoever. There seems to be an unvoiced agreement that the disclosures and conjectures and revelations of our writings can only be commented upon in subsequent writings. And this is necessary, I think, because if any of this were voiced Harry, I knew that you made something of a point of getting laid on Wednesday. On any Wednesday. I knew it partly because I am intuitive, and know you well, and partly too because one notices things, keeps unconscious track. You always seemed to avoid making love to me on Tuesday nights before a solo trip to New York, as if saving up your passion for whoever you hoped to see. And so often on Wednesday nights you would throw me a duty fuck. And I could tell, or thought I could tell, the difference between those heroic duty fucks on days when Marcia or some other lucky girl had taken you to bed, and the therapeutic fucks on days when there was no one in New York to ball and you came home genuinely horny.
I also knew, though I didn’t ever dwell on it, that you were probably fucking Marcia.
But to read about it, even now, even in view of our three-way lack of jealousy, our open attitudes, tore the shit out of me. And literally so. It turned my stomach inside out, and I kept running to the bathroom while my intestines had spasms.
It’s the intimacy that is so painful. The conversation, the two of you playing back and forth to each other. I hate Marcia for being able to fill this need of yours. And hate you for being a person, a functioning person, while away from me.
Do we all do that? Do we expect the people in our lives to exist only when they are in our presence? To have no hidden thoughts, to keep their lives entirely above the surface? Perhaps I tend to do this, perhaps everybody does it.
You know what else, damn it? I can almost come just reading that scene with you and Marcia. It bothered me, it still bothers the hell out of me, but it also turns me on in a way that I do not normally get turned on by written things.
Do you still see Marcia? You don’t have to tell me. I wish I knew how I really and truly feel about her.
I would like to suck her cunt and scratch her eyes out.
HARRY
Why not scratch her cunt and suck her eyes out?
PRISS
God damn it, please don’t do that again. It’s like that Henny Youngman joke. That his wife is so neat that he gets up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and when he comes back, the bed’s made.
I stopped at the end of a paragraph to go fix myself a cup of coffee, and you went in and read what I wrote and wrote a cute little line of your own, and it’s funny, there’s no argument there, but I don’t like it. I really don’t. This isn’t a conversation where you can make fun of me and put me down and get laughs that way. I don’t mind being Gracie Allen some of the time, but I want to write my chapter and get it the way I want it without having my thoughts pushed out of place.
I’m really pissed off. (Which is a ridiculous expression. What does it mean? Pissed off. The opposite of pissed on, I suppose. Next question?)
I’ve lost track of what I was going to say-about Marcia, about people existing independently. Whatever it was probably wasn’t all that important. Priscilla, who is not as scatterbrained as she seems, is still the most scatterbrained of our company, isn’t she? So it’s unlikely that she would have anything truly deep to contribute. She can advance the plot line a little, she’s good enough for that, but we wouldn’t want to waste anything thought-provoking on her, would we?
Sorry. I’m being bitchy, and I don’t like it either.
I am by inclination a late sleeper, and usually do not even know when Harry gets out of bed. Somewhere along the line I’ll roll over and know that I’m alone in bed, and will roll over again and pull the blanket of sleep back over me, and emerge yawning a couple of hours later.
This particular Wednesday morning I was awake before he was, which was as frustrating as it was unheard of. He never set alarms but slept until some inner alarm woke him, and this could happen any time at all in those hours before dawn. I opened my eyes and looked at the clock, and it was a quarter to five. He might wake up at any moment, or he might sleep another hour and a half, and until he did get up and get out I had to lie there in agonizing anticipation.
(I keep overwriting. I have these purple expressions. How does one avoid that? Agonizing anticipation, for Christ’s sake. I don’t talk like that. Why do I write like that?)
After ten endless minutes of agonizing anticipation, I decided to hurry things along. I grunted in my sleep, making a variety of unpleasant noises. Hairy slept through them. I rolled over then, and bumped into him, jostling him a good one. Then I rolled back again and returned to mock-sleep while he yawned and stretched and bestirred himself.