time and my birthday.”
“When’s your birthday?”
“April.”
“You’re really telling me the truth?”
“Sure.” She stepped back and looked at me. “Baby, it’s a great apartment at a bearable rental and to keep it I’d fuck King Kong in Macy’s window, and anyway just because he’s a landlord doesn’t make him a drag. You have to be careful with labels. Suppose he called, and I told him no, it’s Wednesday, every Wednesday I have to ball my collaborator. My cartoonist, I have to throw it to him on Wednesdays. What’s the matter, baby?”
“Nothing. Just seeing new sides to your lifestyle, that’s all. First Monday of every month? No more and no less?”
“Right. I like schedules.”
“You have many arrangements like this?”
“Every Rosh Hashanah,” she said, “I blow the chauffeur.”
I think, somewhere in the back of my mind, had been an idea of settling in with Marcia for a time. I had never precisely fitted lyrics to this particular tune, but I suspect I would have had to have had it in mind (have had to have had?) in order to schlep my suitcase over there.
I believe it was you, Priss, who said something about resenting the idea that people have lives of their own when away from one. I didn’t resent this of Marcia, I didn’t even in my mind have that type of claim on her, or want to, but the revelation that her life did hold other interests besides my Wednesday visits shook off any thought I may have had of locating there.
We smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of coffee and threw a lot of brittle humor back and forth before we finally wound up in the feathers, and the preliminaries for a change turned out to be way out in front of the main event. I just couldn’t get with it. We wrestled around for quite a while to no particular purpose, until finally she looked up at me and tried to touch her eyebrows to her hairline.
“All in all,” she said, “I have the feeling that I do not have one hundred percent of your attention.”
“All in all,” I said, sounding like W.C. Fields, “I would rather be in Philadelphia.”
“Who’s in Philadelphia?”
The hippest of ladies have their insecurities.
“Nobody’s in Philadelphia,” I said. “That’s what he had on his tombstone. That was his whatchamacallit, his epitaph.”
“Then that’s the right place for it. A man has an epitaph, his tombstone is where you should put it. Who?”
“Huh?”
“The corpse in Philly. Who are we talking about?”
I did the imitation again.
“Who’s it supposed to be?”
“Oh, shit.”
“I’m supposed to recognize it?”
I wanted to die. “W.C. Fields.”
“Doesn’t sound at all like him.”
“Goddam aggressive castrating bitch.”
She cupped me in a gentle hand, gazed ruefully down. “Don’t blame it on me, baby,” she said. “Either you’ve only got it on Wednesdays, or else somebody did the job on you before you got anywhere near here.”
A little later I checked into the hotel and called Peggy from my room. We went through the but-it’s-only- Monday routine and I asked if she had any money for me. She did, and I went over to her office and picked up a check and went over to her bank and cashed it.
Then I called a call girl (that’s how they named them) and went over to her apartment and got laid. To prove I could do it, I guess. I did it. Hurrah for me.
Oh, the hell with this. What I did, where I went, who I saw. None of this matters. I’ve spent most of my time doing nothing, as a matter of fact. I see movies. I pick up paperback novels and I seem to read them because eventually I get to the last page without any particular recollection of what was on the first page, or any of the intervening pages.
I draw cartoons. Nothing seems funny, but the work gets done just the same, which is idiotic but true. And the work seems to come out about the same. Peggy, who tells me if things stink, looked the other morning at what I’ve done since I’ve been in town, and pronounced everything up to my usual standard.
“But nothing seems funny to me,” I told her.
“That’s because you’re depressed.”
“I know I’m depressed, but the cartoons-”
“Are funny. I’m not depressed, and neither am I manic, Harry, so take my word for it.”
I took her word for it.
What else do I do? Think about you two, endlessly, over and over. I don’t call Marcia, or the call girl, or any other call girls, or any other Marcias, or anyone, because when all is said and done I do not want any of those people. I sit here and I think about you two and I just run it all through my mind over and over again.
I want to come home.
Because I belong to both of you, and you to me, and you to each other, and everything. And this is true, or at least I perceive it to be true, in a way that it wasn’t, or I didn’t perceive it, before.
(Rhoda, when you type this letter into a chapter, you have my full permission to translate that last sentence into something more readily comprehensible.)
This part of the letter will be awkward, and perhaps as difficult to understand as it is to write, which is very difficult indeed. I sort of know what I mean, but that in itself is a lot like my W.C. Fields impression-if no one else gets the message, then I have somehow failed.
I want the kids. Both of the kids, because they will, after all, both be ours. They’ll both be mine, as far as that goes. When I think about it, when I really sit down and think it all the way through, I have trouble understanding why I was so completely shook up by the fact that Priss went out and got herself laid and relayed and parlayed by the four young nonentities. Why should it matter? We are all of us very complicated people, reacting in unusual ways to unusual stresses. If Priss is right and God did mean people to sleep in threes-and I think she may well be right-the fact remains that it takes rather unusual and atypical people to perceive this Divine Plan, and to act forcefully upon it. And if complicated people occasionally slip off the track and do a little sleeping around, why should other complicated people-people given to occasional sleeping around of their own-react as I did?
Of course it was the fact of pregnancy that made the difference. I was bubbling in a special way, you know, the goddam king of the virility mountain, sitting high and mighty in my pseudo-chalet waiting for you both to bear my children. And I can see now that over the years I was very carefully repressing very real disappointment over the fact that Priss and I seemed incapable of reproducing ourselves.
I always wanted kids. I like kids, they laugh at jokes that grownups know aren’t funny, they listen to silly stories with big eyes, they provide a person with the ultimate ego trip. But I decided, well, all right, we can’t have any, the hell with it, if we can’t have them then I don’t want them. The grapes must be sour, right? Out-of-reach grapes might as well be sour, the fox was right.
Harry, I told myself over the years, told myself in a voice I learned not to listen to, forget what the doctors say, forget the idea that there’s nothing really wrong with either of you, that your mutual infertility is some sort of allergy. Harry, bubbeleh, anybody who is anything of a stud can get his wife pregnant. There’s something wrong with your seed, Harry. It doesn’t move fast enough, Harry, it doesn’t seek out and attack, it’s not sufficiently aggressive. It, Harry, like you yourself, Harry, lacks balls.
So I wouldn’t even let myself think about adopting kids. Stupid, right? Neurotic, no?
All right. Obviously I can father children, and have proved as much with you, Rhoda. And Priscilla can bear them, and has proved as much herself. And in a very real sense we could think of Priss’ baby as the product of artificial insemination, except that we’ll be getting a better kid than we would if a doctor and a hypodermic needle served as the inoculating medium. A cock, after all, whoever is attached to it, is simply a more natural impregnating device than a hypodermic needle. It gives the sperm a chance to swim upstream like salmon, and for the best sperm to win.
