“Yeah. That’s me. There’s something I know that you don’t know, I think.”
“There are probably many such things, pudding.”
“Harry knows about us.”
“ What? ”
“Oh, wait a minute. No, not about us now. About us then.”
“You mean in school.”
“Yes, of course. You didn’t think-”
“Right, I didn’t think, I absolutely did not think at all. What I very nearly did do, though, is have cardiac arrest.”
“I’m sorry.”
“When did you tell him? That’s what happened, right? You came out and told him?”
“Uh-huh. Maybe a year or two ago.”
“You told him the whole story?”
“I didn’t tell him any story, really. Just that you and I had been lovers. I think I probably gave him the impression that we were less important to each other than we really were.”
“How did he feel about it?”
“I don’t know. You know, it was history. It was before I met him. He knows I screwed other guys before I met him and that never seemed to bother him.”
“But it might bother him having them over to the house.”
“Oh, he would never stand for that.”
“Whereas here I am-”
“Yes, that’s different. If you were a former male lover of mine he couldn’t stand it, but he’s very keen on having you here. Keen-there’s another word we don’t get to hear much from these days. Time has really turned inside out, hasn’t it? Today, I mean. I just know we’re going to get out of bed and find out that Eisenhower is President of the United States again.”
“Then let’s not get out of bed. But to get back to what you were saying.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you think he has any idea-”
“That we’ve still got it for each other?”
“And that we’re doing something about it.”
“I don’t really know. I think, this may sound weird-”
“Go on.”
“Just that I think it turns him on. The idea of us. From what I’ve read, it’s not exactly rare for men to react that way to female homosexuality.”
“You know who you just sounded exactly like? Dr. Joyce Brothers.”
“That’s been my lifelong ambition. An inarticulate Dr. Joyce Brothers, that’s me.”
“But I can’t see why this would turn a man on. I mean, if you turn it around and imagine yourself watching two guys making it together-”
“Ugh.”
“Right. I’d rather watch ice melt. I’d rather watch flies fuck.”
“Do you want to finish that coffee?”
“No, it’s cold.”
“Want another cup?”
“Not now. I want a cigarette, though. Priss?”
“What?”
“I wonder if-no, nothing. Come here, Priss.”
I wonder what I thought. About our future. Even about our present.
I suppose I thought, among other things, that this could be how we would spend Wednesdays. Once a week Harry had a day to go into New York and do whatever it was that he did there, and that could be my day to be a lesbian.
I am positive the world is full of housewives who send their kids to school and their husbands to the city and then get together and suck each other silly. I suppose this is healthier than mah-jong and less wearying than bowling and more satisfying than charity work.
But did I really think that this could go on undiscovered for any length of time?
I guess it maybe comes down to this-that I was at that time in that bed so present-oriented that I couldn’t take the future seriously. I was living in present time, and the present was time enough.
HARRY
Life holds fewer surprises for the man with a penchant for fantasy. While he may not have actually expected its less likely developments to come to pass, he’s probably imagined most of them, just as he’s imagined no end of developments which never happened. If you’ve already conceived of something, you can’t call it inconceivable.
Harry’s thought for the day.
A thought which derived from some musing just now on the question of just when I knew Priss and Rhoda were going to make it together, and when I knew I was going to make it with Rhoda, and when it came to me that we were all going to get rather more involved with each other than, say, your average two gals and a guy.
Did I know, as I coaxed that broken-down car down our winding forty-degree slope of a driveway, that even as I went down the driveway Prissy was preparing to go down on Rhoda? Did I know, as my train entered a tunnel, that other trains were spelunking in other tunnels? Did I know, as I gave Marcia Goldsmith a quickie while she bent accommodatingly over her kitchen table (upon which was strewn artwork for Chicken Little Was Right and last week’s copy of Screw, the cover showing a girl with three breasts) that to our north at that very moment Ehhh.
No, of course I didn’t know all this crap, dummie. But I did envision it. And wanted it to happen. That little living room scene of ours you recorded, Rhoda, was pretty intense. I remember it a little differently than you do, which is not astonishing, but I would say that you got the mood right. I knew before we kissed what kind of a reaction we were going to get from it, and I knew afterward that nothing on earth short of the death of one or the other of us was going to keep us from making it sooner or later. And even that might not do it, because I had a hard-on for you, kiddo, that not even death would necessarily dismiss.
I caught a fairly early train that night and sat on it feeling shamefully horny. This time a couple of rounds with Marcia Goldsmith (the second, after we’d put her kitchen table back together again, took place on her beaver coat, spread out on her kitchen floor. Note all this kitchen crap-no doubt you understand the age-old Jewish equation of food and sex. Would it surprise you, then, to know that I inserted in Marcia’s yummy gobble-bowl first a gob of cream cheese, and then a taste of $2.25-a-quarter-pound Nova Scotia salmon? Or to know that Marcia, herself a victim of the same ethnic hang-up, decided that it looked so good that she ate it herself? Oh, you’ve heard that one before, have you? Well, the old jokes are the best ones.)
What do you do when you interrupt a sentence with a parenthetical remark which gets utterly out of hand? What I do is start over again:
This time a couple of rounds with Marcia Goldsmith were the equivalent of a couple of buckets of water slurped over a raging forest fire. Marcia had drained my scrotum, but as I sat on the train thinking of you two lovelies my penis seemed unaware of this fact, as though the two organs weren’t speaking. The ausgeshtupped balls ached with depletion while the optimistic cock looked forward to new frontiers of depravity. So go figure it out.
When I walked in the door of that gingerbread chalet, kiddies, your old Uncle Harry damn well knew. There was nothing he could put his finger on (heh heh) but nevertheless he just plain knew. You both were playing it very cool, almost ignoring each other. There were no secret glances, nothing like that. I think it was an aura you both had of sexual fulfillment. You both looked radiant, and very goddamned well-slept-with. Either you’d spent the day balling each other or the fleet was in and between the two of you, you’d satisfied an entire battleship.
