“Uh-huh. Think he’ll see a girl today?”
She dropped the trowel, spun around to look at me. “What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know. Just making conversation.”
“No, I’m serious. Why on earth would he want to start something with a girl in the city?”
“The usual reasons, I guess. Because it feels good, because it’s fun, because-”
“But he’s got us, silly.”
I felt like rewinding the tape and recording a better conversation in this one’s place. Instead I pushed doggedly onward. (I had a dog once who used to push humanly onward.)
I said, “You told me a couple of times that you were convinced Harry had a woman in the city. Or a variety of girls that he used to see.”
She raised her eyebrows and squinted, her Puzzled Priscilla expression. “So?”
“Did you mean it?”
“I suppose so, sure. So what?”
“So why should he have purged himself of the habit of capping off a New York Wednesday by getting laid? If he’s enjoyed it over the years, why quit now?”
“Because he’s got us.”
“He had you and that didn’t stop him.”
“That was different.”
“What’s the difference? As far as I’m concerned, you’re a really yummy fuck.”
“But I’m only one person. He needs more than I’ve got for him, I told you that. Oh, shit, Rhoda, I think you’re just being purposely argumentative.”
“Well, if I am, I’m sorry.”
“We all of us need more than we can get from one person, isn’t that the point of this relationship?”
“I thought the point was that we loved each other.”
“Isn’t that what I just said?”
“Is it?”
“Rho, you’re not making sense.”
“I’m sorry, then.”
“Rho?”
“What?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, why?”
“I don’t know. Would it bother you if Harry did have sex with a girl in New York this afternoon?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
“Well, you must have. You brought it up.”
“I mean, what right would I have to be bothered?”
“The same right I have.”
“Do I? For Christ’s sake, you’re his wife, Priss.”
“So? That doesn’t make me any closer to him that you are.”
“Oh, I think it has to.”
“Oh, do you really? Is that really what you think, Rhoda? Is it?”
“What’s the matter?”
She stood up. She was not sobbing, she was in control of herself that way, but tears were of their own accord welling up in her eyes and spilling out and trickling down her cheeks. Her long blonde hair was in her eyes and she brushed it impatiently out of the way.
“Priss, tell me what’s the matter.”
“Nothing.”
“Priss, baby, I was in a bad mood and I took it out on you. God knows why. God knows what I was in a bad mood about, what I’ve got to be in a bad mood about. You know me, Priss-puss, I’m an idiot. Give me something good for once in my life and I keep looking to see what the catch is. Baby, come here.”
She leaned toward me, started to fall. I caught her and held her head to my breast and stroked her hair. She tilted up her head and we kissed with a clinging urgency that contained a feeling of need which was in its own way far more erotic than our recent combinations and permutations of bedroom athletics.
We made love in the garden.
And afterward I smoked a cigarette and held her in my arms, and she said, “I’m so afraid sometimes.”
“Of what?”
“You and Harry.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I guess I can’t talk about it.”
“Tell me.”
“You’ll laugh at me.”
“I won’t.”
“Well, I just have the feeling that, that you and Harry, that the two of you are close in a way that I’ll always be shut out of because I’m not like you two. I’m not clever the way you are, I don’t have that kind of mind, and I think, sometimes I think, well, I think that if he had met you first, you know, or that if I quietly dropped out of the picture, and maybe that’s what I ought to do except that I need you so very much, both of you, I need you, you’re all I’ve ever had, both of you, and-”
“Priss!”
She stopped, broke off the long string of words, and looked at me, eyes round and vacant, and sighed.
“Priss, it’s not like that.”
“I’m wrong, I guess.”
“Priss, I never saw a man more in love with a woman than Harry is with you.”
“Then why-”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Then why does he also want you? was what she decided not to say. And I guess you could say that different forms of that question were on everybody’s mind. We were all terrified of perfection, suspicious of happiness. While some people can step in shit and shout out joyously that there must be a pony, people like us wake up in Paradise and look around apprehensively for the snake. Why is this, I wonder? Have we been in that many Paradises, and seduced by quite that many snakes?
There were certain statements and questions that came to me from time to time, and one or another of them would prey on my mind for a while, and then I would get over it, and finally some other doubt or fear would turn up to take its place.
Some of them:
I am in the way. They have a marriage, they have their home, they have the mutual shared experience of eight years or so, and I am simply in their way, the perennial house guest and bed guest. Guests like fish spoil on the third day, and the third day is long past, and sooner or later they will wake up to the fact that they got along without me before they met me and can get along without me now. And then where will I be?
What am I doing with these disgusting people? These people are perverts, because a marriage is supposed to involve two people with no room for a third person, and they are using me sexually, dragging me into their marriage bed, using me in an essentially exploitative way, using me to prop up their own sagging marriage, and Christ, they must be perverts or they wouldn’t enjoy doing the things I like to do in bed, would they?
Why am I corrupting these fine sensitive people? These people had a perfectly satisfactory marriage until I came along, and I seduced them both, and got them into a lot of kinky things, and sooner or later they will realize what has happened to them and their marriage will be ruined, and everything everywhere will all come apart at the seams, and what on earth will any of us do then?
I think I would have found myself periodically obsessed by these several doubts and fears, and others which I cannot recall now, and do not want to be bothered with-I think they would have nibbled away at my mind no matter what. This was, you must realize, a very unorthodox relationship to have evolved between three basically orthodox individuals. If we had never been much at bowing down to idols, neither had we spent much time smashing them. So it was inevitably hard to live full time with such a far-out situation. We might embrace it wholeheartedly for the most part, but there had to be headaches and night sweats and heart pounding from time to time.
But what made it a little worse for me, I think, is that there was really not much of anything for me to do. The bit about the idle hands doing the Devil’s work has a lot to it, and while the Devil didn’t seem to be giving me any assignments, my idle hands were kept busy picking scabs off my own wounds.
(That’s a revolting metaphor. Sorry I mentioned it.)
Harry had his cartooning, and his trips to New York, and all of that. Priss had the handling of the family finances-however scatterbrained she might appear, she was a wizard at checkbook balancing and food budgeting and money planning and all those things that Harry and I could not have done to save our souls. She also made the house stay together, kept it clean and neat, made the meals, all of that.
I, on the other hand, didn’t do much of anything.
A couple of times I would set up the typewriter and try writing, and once or twice I would get a reasonably decent start on something, but nothing ever came of it. I would start things knowing full well that I was not going to finish them, and that what I was producing was essentially busy work, something to keep Rhoda Muir off the streets and out of trouble, something as vitally creative as the potholders they weave in occupational therapy at lunatic asylums.