Threesome

I chose to believe the former. We are nowheres near the bloody ocean.

I think I ought to carry on in a different tone, once again addressing my remarks to that mythical reader out there instead of gossiping and kaffee-klatching with you two dizzy broads.

But one thing first, one last peripheral remark. That night, you may recall, Priss, you and I simultaneously grabbed for each other the minute we crawled into the sack. And screwed each other’s eyes out. It was, you ought to remember, a particularly satisfying piece of ass all around. Now the reasons for this are not hard to figure out- each of us was excited over what you and Rhoda had gotten started with.

But you didn’t know that I knew, Miss Mayflower. So how did you classify it at the time? One of my duty fucks to reimburse you for adultery in New York? Or one of my therapeutic fucks because I had done without all day?

I awakened the next morning with an erection the approximate size and shape of the Chrysler Building. Priss was sleeping on her side, facing away from me, which is to say bottoming toward me. I looked at her bottom and waited for my erection to go away, which shows that even a hearty early riser is not too bright the instant he opens his eyes, because looking at Prissy’s heart-shaped behind doesn’t get rid of erections, it inspires them. I had a great urge to wake Sleeping Beauty with something better than a kiss.

But I was a good boy, and controlled myself. Healthily impulsive sex is one thing and waking an habitual late riser at four-thirty in the ayem is another thing entirely. I went and took a quick shower-not even a cold shower, dig that for self-control-and swallowed reconstituted orange juice and infertile eggs and instant coffee-don’t we eat real anything any more?-and swallowed more instant coffee and smoked a couple of real cigarettes and went Out Back.

I work much better if I don’t say word one to anyone from the moment I get out of bed until I stop for the day. Human contact rips out the circuits. If I had enough groovy people around me constantly, I’d never do any work at all. Conversely, if I lived on a mountaintop (a real mountaintop) with no one for company but the trees and the flowers, I would also kill myself, which is why the present work-and-life pattern is about the best compromise available.

That morning the work started well enough. First I got after some cartoons which had been approved in rough form, a few of them okays that had come in yesterday’s mail, the rest ones I had gotten from Peggy when I saw her. Turning a rough into a finished piece of work is just craftsmanship and demands less in the way of creative energy than doing the rough in the first place, which is why I normally leave such chores for the later hours of the morning, or even tackle them after lunch. But this time I had a lot of them and wanted to get them out of the way and get paid for them. Getting paid for them is ultimately the most rewarding part of the game. I like to see my work in print, but if I miss out on this now and then I don’t fall down on the floor and gnaw the carpet. But if I don’t get paid, that’s something else again. Then I go berserk.

So, I turned out a lot of roughs into smooths, so to speak, and then I did some new work, including a couple of my own ideas, a few things that gag-writers sent and that I liked well enough to try out, and a couple of tentative treatments of some of Marcia’s lines for My Shrink Says.

Somewhere between nine and ten I realized that I had been sitting in one position, utterly motionless, my mind quite blank, for a good ten minutes. (Or a bad ten minutes, if you prefer.) I decided that this was either incipient catatonia or I was blocking. I put my pen down and walked out of the shed and into the fresh air. The sun was out and the day beautiful enough for me to notice how beautiful it was, and I don’t ordinarily notice. I said good morning to a couple of birds. Don’t ask what kind. We have bird books all over the house, bought them when we moved in, and I can look at any picture in any of the books and tell you without hesitation what kind of bird it is. I can even tell the warblers apart that way. But once those fucking birds are out of the book and sitting on a tree limb ten yards away, they all become utterly unrecognizable to me. I divide them mentally into four classes. All small ones are sparrows, all medium ones are robins, and all big ones flying high overhead are hawks. That comes to three classes. I had another one in mind when I started this shtick. What? Oh. All of the ones that sing all night long are mockingbirds. That’s it.

So I said good morning to the birds-robins, all of them, whether they knew it or not-and I filled my lungs with fresh air, and I decided that at that very moment my wife and her roomie were in bed together. Call it a psychic flash.

I turned toward the shed, and then I turned away from the shed, and then I said the hell with the shed. I started toward the back door of the overly charming Alpine hut, and then I said the hell with that as well, and I walked along the far side of the house until I came to Rhoda’s room.

When your nearest neighbor is Smoky the Bear, you don’t go berserk about drawing shades. Rhoda’s window shade was not all the way up, but neither was it all the way down. I stood between a wisteria vine and a pussy willow bush (yes, honestly) and looked in the window, and was not at all surprised to see them both there.

They were sort of between acts, I guess. Priss was lying on her back with her head on a pillow. Rhoda was sitting upright smoking a cigarette, one leg curled under her, the other extended. There is a Picasso blue period painting, I think of two acrobats, in which exactly the same positions and attitudes are held. I think it is interesting that I was aware of this, because in terms other than those of pure art this little tableau was driving me out of my tree.

Rhoda held her cigarette to Prissy’s lips. Prissy puffed on it. Rhoda took the cigarette back again, put it in her own mouth, and put her hand between Priss’ legs and put a finger or two up Prissy’s cunt. She fingered her idly in this fashion until Priss lifted her head enough to get her mouth on one of Rhoda’s tits. I don’t remember which one. You see one, you’ve seen ’em both.

And here I was, Munro Leaf’s watchbird. Here is a watchbird watching two lesbians. Here is a watchbird watching YOU. Were YOU a lesbian last month?

If not, what are you waiting for?

I don’t know what I was waiting for. I waited for it a long time, whatever it was, and I stood there watching them do divine things to each other with a feeling of excitement and delight that was not exclusively sexual. Or maybe it was. There is a way to put this, if I can find it, because I do know what I mean, but if no one else does, I will have failed to get the point across.

Let’s try again. I was very pleased with what I was seeing. I was very delighted with it, and in an altruistic way. I thought that this was a great thing the two of them were doing, sure to please them both, and I was happy for them and proud of them for thinking of it. And I was proud of each of them, too, for being able to attract and satisfy such a perfect partner.

It’s remarkable, I suppose, that neither of them happened to look up and catch a glimpse of me. It’s not only remarkable. It’s also a damned good thing, because we would have had an epidemic of coronary occlusion, I think. I don’t suppose I spent all that much time at the window. Five or ten minutes. Probably no more than that.

I stopped watching before they got to the end of that particular paragraph, turned from them in mid- sentence, brushed against the pussy willow bush-a great name for a girl, Pussy Willow-and went back Out Back to the shed.

I picked up a pen and started drawing. I did the sketch three times until I got it just the way I wanted it. Then I sat there listening to bird calls until noon-all bird calls sound alike-at which time I generally appeared for lunch. I did not want to appear for lunch until I was expected to appear for lunch, or I might interrupt them while they were having each other for breakfast.

During lunch I excused myself to go to the toilet, and on the way back from the toilet I let myself into Rhoda’s room and left the drawing on her pillow.

RHODA

I think we all knew what was going on. I think we all knew that we knew. It was all in the air, like static electricity in a dry room, and we were shuffling our feet on the carpet and getting ready to touch each other.

That morning, while Harry was doing his Watchbird number sheltered by the pussy willow, Priss and I were conscientiously doing precisely what we had decided a day ago not to do. We were Taking Risks. We were Being Less Than Cool. We were making it, not on a Wednesday with Harry in New York, but on a Thursday with Harry Out Back in his shed.

Hard to say just whose idea it was. Probably mine. I had heard them screwing, and while they were normally