(But I digress from the digression itself. I did feel out of things, and sexually inert, and when with whoops and hollers the two of them reached their climax-and is anything in the abstract as pleasantly absurd as other people’s passion? I think not-they subsided at once into a deep relaxed sleep, and I didn’t. Didn’t subside, didn’t relax, and didn’t sleep.
(Instead I came out here and read the chapter that had inflamed Rhoda. This, perversely, excited me. I could have gone off to awaken one or both of them, but that seemed a bad idea, and instead I sit here, in the kitchen once more, the typewriter returned to its habitual location, a fresh pot of coffee working, a cigarette burning. Call it sublimation, but here I am, writing this.)
Where was I? Scheming? Bleeding and gushing?
Doesn’t matter.
I told Rhoda I wanted to go shopping, made the suggestion purposely vague-“Some things I thought I would look at, actually I just want to get out of the house for a little while, come along if you happen to feel like it.” It was easy for her to stay behind, and she did.
I drove away. I drove about half a mile down the road and pulled off onto the shoulder. I remember pulling off the road and falling into a clinch with Rhoda. When had that been?
That was Tuesday. This was Thursday.
Incroyable!
Mais vrai, ma cherie.
I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke rise from it. They say that if you can’t see the smoke you don’t get anything out of smoking (except cancer and emphysema, that is.) I watched the smoke rise and still didn’t get very much out of it, and after a while I threw the cigarette out the window, rolled the window up again, drove far enough on down the road to find a place to turn around, turned around, and drove back home.
I parked out in front. I even cut the motor some fifty yards down the road and coasted in the rest of the way, which becomes more ridiculous the more I think about it. Priscilla the great conspirator.
I got out of the car. The sun warmed me. I looked up at the house at the top of the more or less hill, and the phrase Mistress of all I survey popped into my head. Mistress of all and of everyone I thought. And in my mind I saw myself standing at the apex of the triangle (that’s the word, of course, not ajax, Christ!) in flowing robes, arms extended, with Harry and Rhoda crouched at my feet. One at either foot. And I could hear myself saying to them, in matriarchal tones, “My children, I give unto you the gift of love.”
I have a strange mind. I am aware of this.
I lit another cigarette with the idea of forcing myself to linger there until I had finished it. I took two puffs and threw it away like one of those malcontents in the Viceroy commercials. “Hey, didn’t you just light that cigarette?” “Oh, these fucking cigarettes have lost their taste.” “Here, try one of mine.” “Say, this cigarette really tastes good.” “Of course it does, schmuck. It’s grass. It’ll get you stoned, too.”
I walked up the winding path, thinking of primrose paths, primrose paths paved with good intentions, with creeping thyme between the flagstones. Creeping time, I thought. Time to creep, time to fog in on little cat feet.
I thought of taking off my shoes to make my approach soundless, and laughed inwardly at myself, and when I reached the door of the house I did take off my shoes, and did pad around from room to room as quietly as possible. When a room-by-room search failed to disclose their whereabouts, I experienced an irrational moment of profound panic. Obviously they had run off and left me and I would never see them again.
Paranoia is never all that far from the surface, is it? Just a silly millimeter away…
Out Back, I thought almost at once, and knew they would be there, knew it for certain. But first I went into Rhoda’s room again and found the drawing. She had tucked it underneath her pillow. I picked it up and looked at it very carefully. I put it back under the pillow and lay down on Rhoda’s bed for a few seconds, snuggling my head on her pillow, curling up with thoughts and memories.
I left the room and the house, and was well on my way through the garden to the shed before realizing that I had not put my shoes back on. This was no problem; it wasn’t that cold, and there was grass to walk on. But as I walked I began talking off other things, idly, dreamily, pulling my sweater over my head and tossing it away, unclasping and shrugging off my bra, taking off everything as I walked, until as I reached the doorway of the shed I had my panties, my damp panties, in my hand, and I tossed them gaily over my shoulder as I stepped onto the threshold.
And I saw, as you know from Rhoda’s last chapter, a profile view of Harry sitting in his swivel chair and Rhoda kneeling in front of him like a slave girl. I watched her going down on him, the tender bobbing motions of her head, her hands gripping his thighs, and all I could think was that I had never seen anything so insanely beautiful in all my life.
I was never much on watching people. Never that much opportunity to find out if I was interested. Other children managed to watch their parents screw. I never did, nor did I ever overhear them, nor in fact did I have any evidence beyond the fact of my own existence to prove that they ever screwed in their lives.
Sometimes Harry had brought home pornographic photographs and showed them to me, and I looked at them both to find out just what people did look like when they made love and also to assess my own reaction to this phenomenon (Rountree, for Christ’s sake, talk English) but I always thought of the models as plastic people with plastic smiles and grimaces and not real at all. What they were doing, in those funny poses, was something that had nothing to do with sex at all, nothing certainly to do with sex as I knew it. I could get hot from the whole illicit idea of lying in bed with my husband and looking at these dirty pictures, but I couldn’t get even lukewarm from the pictures themselves. They were just props.
This was entirely different.
In the first place, these were people. And they were not performing mechanically for the camera but were completely wrapped up in what they were doing.
But more than that, they were two people I loved. And to see them giving pleasure to each other this way, and connecting with each other as both of them had been connected with me, was very moving.
I don’t mean arousing. I don’t mean sex, really. This was the most completely sexual moment of my life, I would have to say, and yet I didn’t feel what I would have expected to feel-passion, hunger, horniness.
I kept thinking: Now we all belong to each other.
I couldn’t have been standing there even a minute before Harry’s head turned and his eyes met mine. He was startled, but I guess my nakedness let him know right away that I hadn’t come here to raise hell in the traditional Woman Scorned position. I smiled softly, and put my finger shushingly to my lips, and then took my fingertip inside my mouth and sucked at it as Rho was sucking at him. Then I grinned quickly, and coming around from an angle that made it less likely Rhoda might see me out of the corner of her eye, I tiptoed over to them.
I felt so light and airy. As if I could have flapped my arms and soared into flight.
I put an arm around Harry’s shoulder. He turned toward me, and I guided his head to my breast. His lips fastened around my nipple and he suckled like a baby. I stroked the back of his neck, and with my other hand I stroked Rhoda’s hair.
Now we all belong to each other.
HARRY
Funny thing.
Just realized something that was going through my mind from the moment all of this began to get itself in motion, and that has been in and out of mind ever since.
The wish that I had someone to tell all this to.
I get the feeling that this is a very male-type thing. It is men, after all, who kiss and tell, and who do so largely because the telling is as essential a part of the game as the kissing. It’s partly a matter of celebrating a triumph, sure, but it’s also a way of making the experience real, a way of keeping it alive in your own mind.