That the book is not primarily to make us wealthy, or to fill up idle hours, but to help us know some things about how we happened to each other, and the forms this happening took, and what it all means to all of us.
That the book is probably not entirely about sex, and that we ourselves are probably not entirely about sex, or are we?
What I would like to do now, I think, is end this prologue or preface or whatever the hell it is and go get another cup of coffee. Or maybe a drink. It’s almost four o’clock-it is a sort of house rule here not to take a drink before four o’clock, or to refuse one after. And my kidneys are floating already from all of the rotten coffee.
A drink, then.
Oh, first one thing. Priss wanted to know how long the chapters had to be. Long enough, Harry told her, to reach from the preceding chapter to the succeeding one. Like Abraham Lincoln’s legs.
A good answer, I think. And I think this chapter is long enough by those rules. I certainly hope it is, because it is unlikely to get any longer.
PRISS
Our house is in Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, at the crest of what we prefer to call a hill. The house itself was designed by an architect who had been overexposed to Swiss chalets. Everyone who ever visits us says that the house is charming. Harry has said (more than once) that if everyone says something is charming, then it isn’t.
I like where the house is more than I like the house. The countryside just rolls off away from one. Our landscaping has been largely a matter of letting Nature do what She wants. (Nature should be capitalized, just like God; They are, after all, the same thing, aren’t They?) Now and then Harry gets ambitious and buys a tree and plants it, and generally it lives, and each spring I tend to buy what nurserymen call bedding plants and bed them down hither and yon. These are annuals, which is as well, so that when they die, as they rather often do, I can comfort myself with the thought that they would have died anyway, come fall. I also, each fall, plant some bulbs. Never as many as I buy, though. And come spring fewer come up than I ’ve planted.
That morning, in middle March, I was especially conscious of Nature and all Her works. The winter had been a harsh one, and a lingering one, and in the country we feel weather and seasonal change far more acutely than we ever did in the city. Now the weather had bite to it yet, but was softening, warming. Crocuses were up, and snowdrops, and other cheery things whose names I never knew. The forsythia-we have acres of forsythia-were blindingly gold all over the place. Forsythia is so boring eleven months out of the year, and every March it makes my heart stop.
And so I walked, down the long flagstone path (between the stones of which I each year resolve to plant creeping thyme, and each year don’t) to the road below, where our mailbox keeps its lonely sentinel watch. I do not mean to be arch; it was the sort of crisp morning when one would think in such soaring phrases.
It was a Tuesday, I remember. We get little mail on Tuesdays. Most letters, whether local junk mail or correspondence from New York, takes either two or three days to reach us, so Tuesdays typically bring those letters mailed on Saturdays or Sundays, and few are. There was a supermarket slinger, and some drivel from the nonentity who represents us in Congress. And there was an envelope postmarked Las Vegas, the stationery of some unfamiliar hotel, with my name and address neatly typed on it.
I knew at once that it was from Rhoda.
I had heard nothing beyond a Christmas card from her in at least two years, and more likely three. So why did I know the letter was from her? Perhaps in part because she used my full name, Priscilla Rountree Kapp, as if she had started to address me as Priscilla Rountree and then remembered, and added the Kapp afterward rather than trouble to tear up the envelope and start over. So like her. Perhaps because, in answer to the automatic if unconscious question, “Now who on earth would be writing to me from a hotel in Las Vegas?” the immediate answer was Rhoda Muir.
Perhaps ESP. Perhaps I had lately been thinking of her. Perhaps anything. It doesn’t matter.
The letter, like the envelope, was typed. Rhoda has always typed her letters. I have always written mine by hand, partly out of a vestigial sense of decorum, I guess. (And I wish I were hand writing this, however much longer it might take, because I feel so much more comfortable that way, so much more personal, so much more alone with myself, hunched over a desk scribbling furtively. But I shall accustom myself to this, I think.)
I read:
Beloved Priss-Puss As you see, I am in Las Vegas. Not to gamble, however, but to cut my losses.
I don’t know how much of this you may have sensed-we’ve had so little contact lately-but my marriage to Robert Keith Dandridge went downhill from the wedding night on-har har-and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t make the pieces fit. We have spent the last two years or so not quite getting divorced, and that got boring after a while, so I hied myself to this city, than which there is no place quite so chrome-and-steel-and- plastic-and-yuk revolting, take my word for it-and I got a piece of paper entitling me to throw my wedding ring away, which I in fact did. Literally. Down the fucking sewer.
Fantastic sense of immediate liberation. Visions of Ancient Mariner with albatross gone. Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation. (Q: Did Lincoln actually read the Emancipation Proclamation? And if so, to whom? Another Q: Can you, to save your soul, imagine Nixon on nationwide TV reading the Emancipation Proclamation to the American public? Though come to think of it, the rat bastard would be more likely to repeal it.)
Oh, shit, Prissy, I can’t even be funny. I can’t think funny. The fantastic sense of immediate liberation is a short-time thing. It yields place to who-am-I-where-am-I-going-what-do-I-do-next?
I am going to impose on you. Frost, God love him: Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. You are as close to home as I’ve got, pudding pie. And I have a very real need to put points on my compass. God knows I cannot be in this hellhole another day. All of these totally transient people. Last night, for God knows what reason or combination thereof, I let myself get picked up by this off-duty blackjack dealer. We went to his room and had the first wholly impersonal sex I have ever had, and may I never have it again. I woke up around four in the morning with clammy skin and feeling sickish and went back to my room and threw up and thought dark suicidal thoughts.
Stop it, Muir. All right, she said, I’ll just do that. Look. I’m dropping in on you, and fairly soon. I’ll stay a few days, long enough to let things hang out a little, as the children say. Or to get myself together. Is it all the same thing? I don’t know anymore.
I am Rhoda Muir again, by the way. I may have gotten the divorce mainly to recoup my maiden name. I could never stand being Rhoda Dandridge. It sounded like some fucking broad-leafed evergreen.
My deepest love to Harry. Tell him, pliz, that I saw his skier cartoon and completely broke up. See, some of us do look to see who did the cartoon.
I’ll try not to get in his way. Or in yours, for that matter. Or to be too much of a drag. Actually I feel buoyant a great deal of the time. It’s the up-and-downness of the whole thing that bothers me more than anything else. I have this whelming (which is to say not quite overwhelming) need for stability and have just hauled my last anchor.
Make of that as you will.
My love, truly and eternally, to both of you, along with my apologies for past and future rudeness, not to say present ones. I won’t expect any red carpets, but pour me a drink; I’ll need one.
Rhoda
I felt as though I needed a drink myself, but it wasn’t even noon yet. I started across the road, then stopped, suddenly dizzy. I rested for a moment or two, leaning my weight against our mailbox, looking up at the house and the grounds. Rhoda had been here just once, five years ago, a year after we moved in, a year before she married Bob Dandridge and moved out to the West Coast. That one visit was a brief one. She drove up from New York with some anonymous young man who did something ostensibly creative for an advertising agency. We had two other couples for dinner. Rhoda and her young man stayed the night, the other couples did not. I remember feeling annoyingly married, envying her the delight of sleeping with a non-spouse, and being uncomfortable with my own role. Annoyed, too, to find myself slipping too far into that role and almost having the gall to disapprove of her sleeping with her advertising man.
