Perhaps ESP. Perhaps I had lately been thinking of her. Perhaps anything. It doesn’t matter.
The letter, like the envelope, was typed. Rhoda has always typed her letters. I have always written mine by hand, partly out of a vestigial sense of decorum, I guess. (And I wish I were hand writing this, however much longer it might take, because I feel so much more comfortable that way, so much more personal, so much more alone with myself, hunched over a desk scribbling furtively. But I shall accustom myself to this, I think.)
I read:
Beloved Priss-Puss As you see, I am in Las Vegas. Not to gamble, however, but to cut my losses.
I don’t know how much of this you may have sensed-we’ve had so little contact lately-but my marriage to Robert Keith Dandridge went downhill from the wedding night on-har har-and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t make the pieces fit. We have spent the last two years or so not quite getting divorced, and that got boring after a while, so I hied myself to this city, than which there is no place quite so chrome-and-steel-and-plastic-and-yuk revolting, take my word for it-and I got a piece of paper entitling me to throw my wedding ring away, which I in fact did. Literally. Down the fucking sewer.
Fantastic sense of immediate liberation. Visions of Ancient Mariner with albatross gone. Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation. (Q: Did Lincoln actually read the Emancipation Proclamation? And if so, to whom? Another Q: Can you, to save your soul, imagine Nixon on nationwide TV reading the Emancipation Proclamation to the American public? Though come to think of it, the rat bastard would be more likely to repeal it.)
Oh, shit, Prissy, I can’t even be funny. I can’t think funny. The fantastic sense of immediate liberation is a short-time thing. It yields place to who-am-I-where-am-I-going-what-do-I-do-next?
I am going to impose on you. Frost, God love him: Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. You are as close to home as I’ve got, pudding pie. And I have a very real need to put points on my compass. God knows I cannot be in this hellhole another day. All of these totally transient people. Last night, for God knows what reason or combination thereof, I let myself get picked up by this off-duty blackjack dealer. We went to his room and had the first wholly impersonal sex I have ever had, and may I never have it again. I woke up around four in the morning with clammy skin and feeling sickish and went back to my room and threw up and thought dark suicidal thoughts.
Stop it, Muir. All right, she said, I’ll just do that. Look. I’m dropping in on you, and fairly soon. I’ll stay a few days, long enough to let things hang out a little, as the children say. Or to get myself together. Is it all the same thing? I don’t know anymore.
I am Rhoda Muir again, by the way. I may have gotten the divorce mainly to recoup my maiden name. I could never stand being Rhoda Dandridge. It sounded like some fucking broad-leafed evergreen.
My deepest love to Harry. Tell him, pliz, that I saw his skier cartoon and completely broke up. See, some of us do look to see who did the cartoon.
I’ll try not to get in his way. Or in yours, for that matter. Or to be too much of a drag. Actually I feel buoyant a great deal of the time. It’s the up-and-downness of the whole thing that bothers me more than anything else. I have this whelming (which is to say not quite overwhelming) need for stability and have just hauled my last anchor.
Make of that as you will.
My love, truly and eternally, to both of you, along with my apologies for past and future rudeness, not to say present ones. I won’t expect any red carpets, but pour me a drink; I’ll need one.
Rhoda
I felt as though I needed a drink myself, but it wasn’t even noon yet. I started across the road, then stopped, suddenly dizzy. I rested for a moment or two, leaning my weight against our mailbox, looking up at the house and the grounds. Rhoda had been here just once, five years ago, a year after we moved in, a year before she married Bob Dandridge and moved out to the West Coast. That one visit was a brief one. She drove up from New York with some anonymous young man who did something ostensibly creative for an advertising agency. We had two other couples for dinner. Rhoda and her young man stayed the night, the other couples did not. I remember feeling annoyingly married, envying her the delight of sleeping with a non-spouse, and being uncomfortable with my own role. Annoyed, too, to find myself slipping too far into that role and almost having the gall to disapprove of her sleeping with her advertising man.
How much of the disapproval was jealousy?
How much of all disapproval is jealousy?
Questions, questions. I steadied myself and headed up the flagstone path, wishing it had creeping thyme between the stones, remembering the smell of the thyme underfoot on the flagstone path of my grandmother’s garden, remembering this and thinking of that and trying not to think about Rhoda’s letter, because, you see, I did not know, really, how I felt about it. Her visit. Or how I was supposed to feel. Or how I wanted to feel.
Harry was Out Back. There is the remains of a stable behind the house which he converted into a rudimentary studio, and where he works every morning from whenever he gets up (somewhere between four-thirty and six-thirty, and always well before me) until noon, when he comes in to read the mail and have lunch. If one of his rough drawings gets okayed in the morning mail, he generally works up the finished artwork during the afternoon. If nothing like that happens, he takes the afternoon off. He never opens letters from gag-writers at noon but holds them until the following morning. When he wakes up, things are funny, his sense of humor is on, his visual humor functions. I can’t understand this myself. When I wake up I want to pour coffee over my head and go back to sleep. Well, not exactly that, but along those lines. I can’t imagine anything being funny at daybreak.
We are oddly matched, Harry and I. This thin-wristed insipid blonde Mayflower child, whom one praises as being not quite so scatterbrained as she looks, and this starker, this Jewish oak tree with bitter wit and crackling laughter.
When it became apparent that we were not going to have any children, we discussed our differences and Harry hypothesized that our chromosomes might simply be allergic to one another. “Maybe it’s just as well,” I said. “We’re so different that any children we might have would be absolutely inconceivable.”
He laughed for twenty minutes before I figured out what I said. This always happens.
But I am wobbling all over the place. I hope Rhoda does eventually edit all of this into a cohesive mass. If that’s possible.
Let me see, I went back to the house with the letter. If this were a movie, we could just cut to the next scene. I suppose we could do that here just by leaving a space between this paragraph and the next one.
He read through the letter, tts-ing and chuckling, then looked at me over the top of it. “Well, that’s interesting,” he said. “She’s coming. Unless I missed something, it doesn’t say when.”
“You didn’t miss anything.”
“Why I never do, do I, Priss-puss? What cartoon is she talking about, do you have the faintest idea? Skier, I must have done twenty skier cartoons that came out last winter.”
“What difference does it make?”
“None. Just that it might provide worthwhile ego food for the struggling young cartoonist, and Lord knows he needs all of that he can get. Do we have any English muffins left?”
“No.”
“Funny, we didn’t have any at breakfast time either. Or yesterday. It’s fucking amazing how long a lack of English muffins can continue around here. You’d think we could use of this absence of muffins, pour anti-matter over it or something.”
“I forgot to buy them. I’ll get some this afternoon.”
“Promises, promises.”
“No, Thomas’s, Thomas’s.”
“That’s awful, Priss. I’m not disapproving. I just want you to know it’s awful. A woman should know these things. She sounds terrible.”
“Rhoda?”
“No, Jackie Kennedy
. She has laryngitis.”
“Send her a card. Yes, I know she sounds terrible. Rhoda. She’s always been a very moody person, though. And she can convey this very well-her moods-which may make them come across heavier in a letter than otherwise. She’s very-verbally she’s-I forget the word for it, dammit-”
He began hitting himself in the center of the forehead with the heel of his hand and laughing throatily. “Articulate,” he said. “That’s the word you’re looking for, pudding-pie. She’s very articulate. You, just for the record, aren’t.”
Priss-puss, pudding-pie. He was purposely picking up things from her letter and heaving them at me. I didn’t very awfully love this.
“I suppose we’re lucky the letter got here before she did,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“She doesn’t leave us much of an out. Unless we close the house and go away and pretend we never got her letter.”
He looked at me. “Why would we want to do that?”
“I was just making conversation.”
“You cover all bets with that line, don’t you? Whenever you don’t want to explain some dumb thing you’ve said, you say you were just making conversation.”
“The work didn’t go well this morning, huh?”
“Cut the shit, Priss, will you?”
“I guess I thought you might not welcome her visit, that’s all. And that you wouldn’t say anything to that effect, so I would say it for you.”
“Not welcome it? I’ve always liked Rhoda.”
“I know.”
“Of course, I never had the chance to know her as well as you did, pudding-pie.”
“You know, you’re a real son of a bitch.”
“Hey, don’t!” My eyes were misting, and a lump forming in my throat. He took my arm. “I’m sorry, baby. I never thought you’d be so uptight about it.”
“I never should have told you.”
“But it doesn’t bother me, for Christ’s sake. You were kiddies, right? Groping toward awareness of self. Nothing unnatural about it.”
I didn’t say anything.
He was putting his arms around me and giving me awkward ursine brotherly hugs. I did not much feel like being touched, but endured it. I looked at my wedding ring and had the sudden and blindingly graphic image of myself dropping it gaily into a Las Vegas sewer. Twenty-nine, and eight years married, and happily so, and all at once longing for divorce? For Heaven’s sake, what is going on here?
I said, “You’re not going to say anything to Rho?”
“Honey, what do you think I am?”
“Because I couldn’t bear it, I don’t think.”
“You’re not ashamed of it, are you, baby?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“Because you sound like it. Look. You used to ball your college roommate. You liked her, she liked you-”
“Loved.”
“Huh?”
“We loved each other.”
“All right, whatever you want to call it. Anyway, you tried each other in bed and found out it was more fun than sleeping alone. So you were bisexual. So women are supposed to be bisexual at that age, it’s a stage they go through. You went through it, and before too very long you met me, Superjew, the ultimate male sex symbol, and you put away childish things.”
“I suppose so.”
“Look, when you were a kid, like a teenager and all, you used to masturbate, right?”
“And?”
“Well, everybody does, no? But afterward, when you outgrow it, you don’t have to look back on those days and feel consumed by guilt. You just wash your hands and carry on.”
I didn’t say anything. Outgrow it? Harry, I carefully did not say, I don’t seem to have outgrown it yet. There are nights, Harry, when we make love, and I can’t get no satisfaction, like the song says, and while you sleep the sleep of the sated male, I dip my little fingers in the honeypot.
Oh, Rhoda, how I have missed you.
But there is supposed to be sex in this book, isn’t there? I suppose I could write a chapter without having anybody do anything to anybody, just talking and thinking, but it seems a bad idea for the very first chapter of the book. The reader might get discouraged. It seems, oh, very egoish to feel that total strangers will be that interested in what one says or thinks, but everybody is always interested in what everyone else does or has done in bed, so there ought to be some sex here before this chapter is over.
(I don’t honestly see why it was a stupid question to ask how long a chapter should be. Smartass answers notwithstanding.)
Sex. I was going to have Harry talk me out of my foul mood and take me upstairs and to bed, but that isn’t what happened. It would be a nice way to get some sex into the chapter, and I guess it was a way that occurred to Harry too, not for the book but as a way to spend the afternoon, because he did make a medium-to-heavy pass, and I dropped the ball rather deliberately.
Sex. Rhoda, then, and what happened something like-ten years ago?
Ten years ago.
Ah, how weird this it! I sit here trying to remember, trying to recapture just exactly what it was like. It is hard, even, to remember the person one was that long ago, let alone the actual feel of an incident, the texture of a relationship.
It was at college, a girl’s college not more than forty miles nor less than five hundred years from the house I live in now. Rhoda and I were sophomores, and roommates. The previous year we had been freshmen and friends, and now we roomed together.
Those were desperate times, now that I think back on them. We were both dating furiously, and not quite getting slept with by Yale boys, most of whom seemed secretly more interested in strong drink than in us. And we tended to date the same boys, which has about it an air of incest, I think. Oh, you were out with Garrett tonight? Did he give you the sneaky hand-on-thigh routine? I think hes sort of sexy but just so obvious, wouldn’t you say? A bit much, all in all.
We both drank too much-no one had more than heard of grass, but all of us drank as a regular thing. And studied too little, until exams came up or papers came suddenly due and we dropped Dexedrine and worked the clock around. And we leaped constantly back and forth between exhilaration and despair. Yes, despair-they really were desperate times.
One night, then, wintry (I remember the ultra-long Yale blue-and-white scarf I wore then, wrapped endlessly around my neck) and bleak, and I came back from the library where I had gone to study and had instead dozed over some unreadable swill. Rhoda was sitting up in bed with a half-gallon of California wine. There were stains of spilled wine on the bedsheets.
I can see her now, the top sheet just covering the tops of her breasts, her rich auburn hair flowing to her shoulders. (Who else had long hair in those days? Hardly anyone. I should have, had I had any sense. I have at my best moments a sort of ethereal quality, which my blondish hair, now worn long, rather enhances, I would say. But then I couldn’t conceive of it.)
She was so beautiful, Rhoda was. I hated my own looks in those days and would have prayed, had prayer occurred to me as a logical means to any sort of end, to look less like myself and more like Rhoda. No one else there looked remotely like her. In a school full of girls, she looked like a young woman.
“Wine,” she said, extending the jug.
“We’re not using glasses?”
“We are getting in tune with more basic things. Wine straight from the jug. You crook your finger in the handle and let the jug rest on your upper arm, like so-”
I put a stack of records on. The Modern Jazz Quartet, J.J. and Kai, George Shearing. (Whatever happened to all those people?) We talked. I don’t remember what about. Rhoda was in a depression and trying to laugh and drink her way out of it. I was keeping her company, but not doing the world’s best job of it.
“Prissy?”
“Hmmm?”
“Everything’s so alone, isn’t it?”
“Everything’s a pain in the ass.”
“I think you’ve broken new philo
sophical ground. Everything’s a pain in the ass.”
“It really is.”
“I’ll tell you something, most people are a pain in the ass.”
“An unqualified pain in the ass.”
“How do you qualify one?”
“You have to pass an examination. On the state level, I think. What would I do if you didn’t exist?”
“It’s like God. You would have to invent me.”
“God would have to invent you?”
“No, I mean-”
“I know what you mean. I always know what you mean. We always know what we mean. Rho, I couldn’t study, I fell asleep over the book.”
“Do you think we’ll ever fall in love?”
“With our books?”
“With men. Boys. Whatever.”
“I don’t know. They’re all-”
“I know.”
“Sometimes I think I’m too selfish to fall in love. I mean too much involved with myself, actually.”
“I don’t think you’re a selfish person at all. Not even in that sense.”
“I don’t think I’m lovable.”
“Hell, pudding, I love you.”
“And I love you, but-”
“That’s the solution, then. We’ll become lesbians. This wine isn’t so bad once you get used to it.”
“When will that happen? I don’t seem to be getting used to it.”
“It takes time, that’s all. You know, we really could become lesbians.”
“I wish they had courses in it.”
“What would be more natural, Prissy, than for two people who love each other to become lovers?”
“Exactly.”
“You’re very beautiful.”
“Oh, come off it.”
“What would you do if I kissed you?”
“Close my eyes and think of Paul Newman.”
“Come here and try it.”
“Huh?”
Sitting upright, the bedsheet falling away from her full breasts: “Get over here and kiss me.”
Threesome Page 2