her pillow, curling up with thoughts and memories.
I left the room and the house, and was well on my way through the garden to the shed before realizing that I had not put my shoes back on. This was no problem; it wasn’t that cold, and there was grass to walk on. But as I walked I began talking off other things, idly, dreamily, pulling my sweater over my head and tossing it away, unclasping and shrugging off my bra, taking off everything as I walked, until as I reached the doorway of the shed I had my panties, my damp panties, in my hand, and I tossed them gaily over my shoulder as I stepped onto the threshold.
And I saw, as you know from Rhoda’s last chapter, a profile view of Harry sitting in his swivel chair and Rhoda kneeling in front of him like a slave girl. I watched her going down on him, the tender bobbing motions of her head, her hands gripping his thighs, and all I could think was that I had never seen anything so insanely beautiful in all my life.
I was never much on watching people. Never that much opportunity to find out if I was interested. Other children managed to watch their parents screw. I never did, nor did I ever overhear them, nor in fact did I have any evidence beyond the fact of my own existence to prove that they ever screwed in their lives.
Sometimes Harry had brought home pornographic photographs and showed them to me, and I looked at them both to find out just what people did look like when they made love and also to assess my own reaction to this phenomenon (Rountree, for Christ’s sake, talk English) but I always thought of the models as plastic people with plastic smiles and grimaces and not real at all. What they were doing, in those funny poses, was something that had nothing to do with sex at all, nothing certainly to do with sex as I knew it. I could get hot from the whole illicit idea of lying in bed with my husband and looking at these dirty pictures, but I couldn’t get even lukewarm from the pictures themselves. They were just props.
This was entirely different.
In the first place, these were people. And they were not performing mechanically for the camera but were completely wrapped up in what they were doing.
But more than that, they were two people I loved. And to see them giving pleasure to each other this way, and connecting with each other as both of them had been connected with me, was very moving.
I don’t mean arousing. I don’t mean sex, really. This was the most completely sexual moment of my life, I would have to say, and yet I didn’t feel what I would have expected to feel-passion, hunger, horniness.
I kept thinking: Now we all belong to each other.
I couldn’t have been standing there even a minute before Harry’s head turned and his eyes met mine. He was startled, but I guess my nakedness let him know right away that I hadn’t come here to raise hell in the traditional Woman Scorned position. I smiled softly, and put my finger shushingly to my lips, and then took my fingertip inside my mouth and sucked at it as Rho was sucking at him. Then I grinned quickly, and coming around from an angle that made it less likely Rhoda might see me out of the corner of her eye, I tiptoed over to them.
I felt so light and airy. As if I could have flapped my arms and soared into flight.
I put an arm around Harry’s shoulder. He turned toward me, and I guided his head to my breast. His lips fastened around my nipple and he suckled like a baby. I stroked the back of his neck, and with my other hand I stroked Rhoda’s hair.
Now we all belong to each other.
HARRY
Funny thing.
Just realized something that was going through my mind from the moment all of this began to get itself in motion, and that has been in and out of mind ever since.
The wish that I had someone to tell all this to.
I get the feeling that this is a very male-type thing. It is men, after all, who kiss and tell, and who do so largely because the telling is as essential a part of the game as the kissing. It’s partly a matter of celebrating a triumph, sure, but it’s also a way of making the experience real, a way of keeping it alive in your own mind.
Now women are different. Women will also tell each other sex things, but in a very different way. They’ll tell each other things about their relationships with their husbands, personal details that not one man in a thousand would tell another man about his wife. And men, on the other hand, will talk to each other about the screwing they do outside of their marriage, while the women who play around keep their mouths shut about it.
I know it’s a sweeping generalization. But what’s the point in objecting to a sweeping generalization if it also happens to be true?
There is, impossible as it may seem, a point to all this. And that is that this book of ours is serving different functions for each of us. Of course it’s everybody’s psychoanalyst, that goes without saying, but for me it is also a male ear into which I can whisper all the sex stories I want.
You may recall a Jules Feiffer cartoon-you may recall a hundred Feiffer cartoons, he’s so fucking great I could cheerfully strangle him-in which Bernard, his favorite alter ego, is distraught because his best friend is getting married. The last frame is something like, “Look, there are women all over the place. But at the age of thirty where am I going to find a buddy?”
Too true. One has passed the point of forming those intense friendships, and if one lives on a hill surrounded by woods and farms, one never talks to anybody, let alone develops a buddy.
What was it like? There’s a question a buddy would ask, an envious expression on his face (I Am Curious- Green) and a catch in his throat.
What was it like?
Well, let me tell you, buddy, it was great. It was Ace-high all the way, it was king of the mountain, top dog, the whole schmear.
That doesn’t say diddly-do, does it?
Well, let’s back up and start over. Let’s see. First of all, what we’re talking about right here is what it was like right at the beginning, from the time we three walked from the shed to the house and got into bed together for the first time. For about the next, let me see, I guess two weeks, or maybe even a month, there was a freshness, a newness to the whole thing. So that’s what I’m talking about now, that first month.
How to describe it?
To begin by saying that we were entirely involved in one another. There was a war going on, the economy was in a state of chassis, the world was going to hell in a hand car, the Mets were doing surprisingly well in spring training, and in all other spheres of human and inhuman activity the world was doing any number of things, some good and some bad, and for all we were concerned none of this was happening at all.
You know, it’s hard now to remember exactly what that month was like. Not because things have changed radically but because the changes have been on the subtle side. We are still very much ingrown and self-contained, not much concerned either with other people or with cosmic events. But then the mutual self-absorption was total, all-encompassing. Nothing got through the shield.
It was not merely that we spent an astonishing amount of time in bed together. We did. It was not merely that we invented an incalculable number of ways for three people to make love. Again, we did.
But when we were not actually balling, either two of us or all three of us would be wrapped up in some verbal unfolding of self. We did not merely talk, but, as the children say, we rapped.
Magic days, old buddy. The years melted off like fat in a steam room. Overnight, we became young again. There was an innocence to us, an openness about us, that was probably in any objective view at least a little ridiculous. But, see, there was no one around to view us objectively. There was just our holiest of trinities, self- contained and utterly complete, and we did not find ourselves absurd in the least.
This is slow going, this chapter. The work went poorly this morning, and the girls left the house together after lunch, and I’m alone with the typewriter, addressing remarks to a mythical old friend. And trying to describe a mood, an ambiance, which I can barely get exactly right in my own mind, let alone render in words. This writing is easier, it seems, when one knows exactly what one wants to say.
Is a picture really worth a thousand words? That’s what it says in those tables on the backs of children’s notebooks. Twelve inches to a foot, sixteen ounces make a pound, and one thousand words equals one
