“Well, don’t look at me,” Harry said, looking at me.
“Us,” I said.
Priss widened her eyes. Harry squinted.
“Us,” I said again. “We three.”
“ We three,” sang Harry, sounding less like Ted Lewis than he hoped, we’re not a crowd, we’re not even com-pa-ny-”
“The three of us,” I said. “How this all happened. How everything got started and got complicated and worked itself out.”
“ My echo -”
“With each of us keeping the story going from our own point of view, you see, so that what we would wind up with is this ongoing story of a relationship developed from three directions-”
“- and me ” Harry finished. And looked long and deep at me. “This,” he said, “is not something that just occurred to you sitting here in front of the fucking fireplace.”
“Not exactly. It’s an idea that’s been germinating. But I didn’t really see the whole picture until we started talking about Naked Came the Doorknob.”
“That cleared out your tubes, huh?”
Priss said, “Damn it, it might work. Before it was just talk, Rho, but it might work. I couldn’t see myself trying, you know, to make up a story. Invention and description, no, not my bag. I don’t think. But putting down what happened-”
“Yes. It wouldn’t be hard.”
“We would have to change our names and things if we were really going to get it published.”
“We can worry about that when it’s done. In the meantime we can write it absolutely straight. You can always change things around later on.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start, honestly.”
“At the beginning,” Harry said. “I was born in a trunk,” he sang, not much like Judy, God rest her soul. Harry is the worst sort of impressionist, incapable of either doing them well or refraining from doing them entirely. (That sounds rather nasty, doesn’t it? I do love Harry very much, and trust he knows it.)
“We would start about the time all of this got started,” I said. “When I first moved in on you.”
“And stopping when?”
“When the manuscript’s long enough to publish.”
“No, seriously.”
“Seriously. When it’s long enough and when we run out of story.”
“And we keep taking turns with the chapters? You and you and me and over and over again?”
“Uh-huh. Not that we have to have cardiac arrest if the order gets reversed somewhere along the way.”
“You and you and me,” I said, “and over and over again.”
Priss said, “Do we have to type it?”
“Longhand takes forever,” I said. “And nobody can read it. You type well enough, don’t you?”
“I was thinking about a tape recorder. Did you ever read a book called Talk? A girl wrote it, Linda, her last name was either Rosenkrantz or Guildenstern and I’ll never know which. Anyway, she was with some people out at Fire Island-”
“I’ll bet she was,” Harry said.
“Some art world types, I guess-”
“They’re the worst kind.”
“-and what she did was keep this tape recorder around and periodically during a conversation people would turn the recorder on and talk at it. A sort of prose version of cinema verite.”
I said it sounded terrible. Harry said it sounded like a good way to get the feel of spending a summer on Fire Island without getting sand in your navel or catching the clap. Priss said it actually worked out better than one might have thought. Priss is a little scatterbrained, but less so than she seems, praise God. (I do love Priss very much, and trust she knows it.)
“I think we should write it,” I said. “Type it, that is.”
“With a tape recorder,” Harry said, “we could probably do the whole thing in an evening.”
“We couldn’t do it at all.”
“Why?”
“Because we couldn’t open up. Inhibitions. I think I could type out things about our relationship-”
“I hate that fucking word, relationship.”
“What word do you prefer?”
“That’s the worst thing about it,” he said. “It makes itself indispensable. Everything else sounds like a euphemism, and why in the hell anybody needs a euphemism for relationship is beyond me. It’s infuriating.”
“-that I would be uptight about saying aloud, even to a tape recorder. Let alone to the two of you in person.”
“But we’ll read what each other writes, won’t we?”
“Not the same thing.”
“What’s the difference?”
“There’s a remove involved,” Harry told her. “Like fucking over the telephone.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever done that.”
“It’s fun, but if you get caught they take your phone out. And of course if the conversation crosses a state line it’s a federal offense.”
“The Mann Act, isn’t it?”
“Something like that.”
So with bright conversation of that sort we settled it. The book would be written. It would be in the form of a novel. We would take turns writing chapters, each of us writing in the first person from our own points of view. Of course, we would make up some conversation, because no one but Truman Capote remembers everything said to him word for bloody word (and I don’t believe he does, either, for that matter).
“And,” Harry emphasized, “we make it sexy.”
“It would be hard not to,” Priss said. “After all, sex is what it’s about, isn’t it?”
“Sex is what we’re about, love.”
“Sex,” Harry said, “is what sells.”
“Hear, hear.”
“Let’s all go upstairs,” Priss said, through an embryonic yawn, “and go to bed-”
“Hear, hear!”
“-and do unspeakable things to one another, and tomorrow you can start writing about them.”
“Who can?”
“You can,” Priss said, to me.
“I think we should draw lots,” I said. “I’m not entirely certain that I want to-what are you doing? Oh.”
This last was directed to Harry, who had taken up pad and pencil and who was sketching a suburban development. In other words, drawing lots.
“You go first,” Priss said, firmly. “You’re the writer.”
“Well, not exactly that.”
“And it was your idea.”
“Oh.”
So we went upstairs, and to bed, and whether the things we did to one another were speakable or not depends on your point of view, I would say.
And that was longer ago than yesterday, though not by much. I didn’t get directly to work on this. I tend to procrastinate. What you put off until tomorrow, I have found over the years, you frequently don’t ever have to do at all. Occasionally someone comes along and does it for you. Occasionally a problem you have been avoiding goes and solves itself.
But this book will not write itself, nor will anyone come along and write it for me. So I have done this much, to properly set the stage (while neatly splitting an infinitive, damn it) for the unfolding of the tale.
Things I don’t believe we voiced, but that we probably all of us know:
