“Priss, tell me what’s the matter.”
“Nothing.”
“Priss, baby, I was in a bad mood and I took it out on you. God knows why. God knows what I was in a bad mood about, what I’ve got to be in a bad mood about. You know me, Priss-puss, I’m an idiot. Give me something good for once in my life and I keep looking to see what the catch is. Baby, come here.”
She leaned toward me, started to fall. I caught her and held her head to my breast and stroked her hair. She tilted up her head and we kissed with a clinging urgency that contained a feeling of need which was in its own way far more erotic than our recent combinations and permutations of bedroom athletics.
We made love in the garden.
And afterward I smoked a cigarette and held her in my arms, and she said, “I’m so afraid sometimes.”
“Of what?”
“You and Harry.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I guess I can’t talk about it.”
“Tell me.”
“You’ll laugh at me.”
“I won’t.”
“Well, I just have the feeling that, that you and Harry, that the two of you are close in a way that I’ll always be shut out of because I’m not like you two. I’m not clever the way you are, I don’t have that kind of mind, and I think, sometimes I think, well, I think that if he had met you first, you know, or that if I quietly dropped out of the picture, and maybe that’s what I ought to do except that I need you so very much, both of you, I need you, you’re all I’ve ever had, both of you, and-”
“Priss!”
She stopped, broke off the long string of words, and looked at me, eyes round and vacant, and sighed.
“Priss, it’s not like that.”
“I’m wrong, I guess.”
“Priss, I never saw a man more in love with a woman than Harry is with you.”
“Then why-”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Then why does he also want you? was what she decided not to say. And I guess you could say that different forms of that question were on everybody’s mind. We were all terrified of perfection, suspicious of happiness. While some people can step in shit and shout out joyously that there must be a pony, people like us wake up in Paradise and look around apprehensively for the snake. Why is this, I wonder? Have we been in that many Paradises, and seduced by quite that many snakes?
There were certain statements and questions that came to me from time to time, and one or another of them would prey on my mind for a while, and then I would get over it, and finally some other doubt or fear would turn up to take its place.
Some of them:
I am in the way. They have a marriage, they have their home, they have the mutual shared experience of eight years or so, and I am simply in their way, the perennial house guest and bed guest. Guests like fish spoil on the third day, and the third day is long past, and sooner or later they will wake up to the fact that they got along without me before they met me and can get along without me now. And then where will I be?
What am I doing with these disgusting people? These people are perverts, because a marriage is supposed to involve two people with no room for a third person, and they are using me sexually, dragging me into their marriage bed, using me in an essentially exploitative way, using me to prop up their own sagging marriage, and Christ, they must be perverts or they wouldn’t enjoy doing the things I like to do in bed, would they?
Why am I corrupting these fine sensitive people? These people had a perfectly satisfactory marriage until I came along, and I seduced them both, and got them into a lot of kinky things, and sooner or later they will realize what has happened to them and their marriage will be ruined, and everything everywhere will all come apart at the seams, and what on earth will any of us do then?
I think I would have found myself periodically obsessed by these several doubts and fears, and others which I cannot recall now, and do not want to be bothered with-I think they would have nibbled away at my mind no matter what. This was, you must realize, a very unorthodox relationship to have evolved between three basically orthodox individuals. If we had never been much at bowing down to idols, neither had we spent much time smashing them. So it was inevitably hard to live full time with such a far-out situation. We might embrace it wholeheartedly for the most part, but there had to be headaches and night sweats and heart pounding from time to time.
But what made it a little worse for me, I think, is that there was really not much of anything for me to do. The bit about the idle hands doing the Devil’s work has a lot to it, and while the Devil didn’t seem to be giving me any assignments, my idle hands were kept busy picking scabs off my own wounds.
(That’s a revolting metaphor. Sorry I mentioned it.)
Harry had his cartooning, and his trips to New York, and all of that. Priss had the handling of the family finances-however scatterbrained she might appear, she was a wizard at checkbook balancing and food budgeting and money planning and all those things that Harry and I could not have done to save our souls. She also made the house stay together, kept it clean and neat, made the meals, all of that.
I, on the other hand, didn’t do much of anything.
A couple of times I would set up the typewriter and try writing, and once or twice I would get a reasonably decent start on something, but nothing ever came of it. I would start things knowing full well that I was not going to finish them, and that what I was producing was essentially busy work, something to keep Rhoda Muir off the streets and out of trouble, something as vitally creative as the potholders they weave in occupational therapy at lunatic asylums.
Once, long ago, a lover took me with him while visiting his mother at one such Bide-a-Wee home-she was an alcoholic, in for her annual desiccation-and while he went to hold her hand I wandered around, identifying more closely with the ambulatory patients than I really wanted to, and ultimately finding my way into a shop where the patients’ O.T. work was offered for sale. Hundreds of little trivets ornamented with tiny ceramic tiles, thousands of those fucking potholders, no end of baskets and spoonholders and other triangular things which must have had some function-God knows they weren’t decorative-but which served no purpose I could fathom. I asked someone what they were for but couldn’t make out his answer and was too put off by his rolling eyes and slack mouth to ask him again.
But the point, if I’ve not lost it forever, is that no one would make that crap if there was anything else to do with his time. Worthwhile projects are those worth doing for themselves, not for their effect upon the psyche, not because they help pass the time, and my writing thus was in the same category as the potholders and the baskets and the trivets, of subjective therapeutic value only, and blessed little of that.
So I wrote things, and then tore them up, and put the typewriter away and went for a walk in the woods. Sooner or later, I knew, there would have to be something that I would discover and that would be right for me. But it did no good to keep trying things on until something fit.
Meanwhile, I began to play more of a role in the functioning of the house itself. I had to do this or feel like a sponge, a parasite, and it did pass time as well. I helped with the cleaning, I guided the power mower over those parts of the lawn that were level enough for that sort of thing. I appointed myself official morning coffee maker, and instant coffee ceased to play a role in our lives, to the relief of everybody but its manufacturer. I took over some of the cooking. I had never enjoyed cooking while I was married, and was none too good at it, with the result that we ate out most of the time. But now I was surprised to discover that I seemed to be capable of enjoying it after all, and that I could, when I took the time and trouble, produce a dish that everyone seemed to agree was quite edible. I was a very different sort of cook than Priss, who was rarely enormously inspired but who was able to prepare reasonably successful meals seven days a week without minding the routine or making an occasional mess out of an occasional meal. I, on the other hand, tended to get wildly creative, going in for some major production numbers and now and then ruining a meal completely. And I could only cook once in a while. If it had become a regular thing, I would have hated it.
I wonder how well I’ve conveyed the various changes we went through after the month of magic ran its
