Did you know, for example, that artificial insemination isn’t used for racehorses anymore? They found out that although it was easy and economical and everything, it did not produce fast horses.
I’m getting way off the track, like a slow horse. What I mean is that it has taken me a circuitous route to reach this conclusion, but that when all is said and done you are both of you my wives, and you are both bearing my children, and whatever happened in some fucking Holiday Inn-and I use the adjective for descriptive purposes-that whatever happened, the hell with it, and if anything I’m glad it happened. I was shook at the time, but that’s my problem, and the hell with it.
I want to come home.
But first I wanted to get all of this written out, and put in a letter, and send you the letter and let you receive it and ponder it before I leave this place. For one thing, in the past two days I seem to have tapped a vast underground pool of creative energy. I’m doing some cartoons unlike anything I’ve done before, some very weird and bittersweet stuff, not my usual sort of thing at all either in theme or mood or drawing style. They aren’t funny in the usual sense, nor are they supposed to be. I haven’t shown them to anyone. I’ll show them to you when I get home. God knows what I’ll do with them, whether they’ll turn out to be commercial or not, but they do seem to represent some sort of creative growth for me, and I’m finding this very exciting. I had leveled off a long time ago, as people do sooner or later, and it’s a great surprise for me to find out that I still have the capacity to find new ways of seeing things and translate them into new forms of work.
I just took a lunch break at the health food restaurant around the corner. I had a vegetarian lamb chop. It tasted just like the vegetarian pork chop I had yesterday. I also had a pint of carrot juice, and now I’m topping it all off with a cigarette. There’s a limit to this health shit.
I want to finish this now and get it in the mail. And then I’ll wait, I guess, until one of you calls or writes and says that it’s okay to come home.
I miss you both.
How special we all are, and in such a special way. The separation helps me realize this. So much of the specialness masqueraded at first as sheer sex, the almost infinite expansion of possibilities for variety, the exhilaration of interacting as three rather than two. So much of it, too, derived I think from the sense that all of this was forbidden.
But there is far more to us than that, isn’t there?
I must end this. I will go downstairs and purchase a stamp and entrust this to the mercies of the U.S. mails. What an act of faith that is, incidentally! One drops an envelope into a metal box and takes it for granted that it will get where it is supposed to.
Enough. I love you and you. I love our babies to be. Our babies.
God bless us every one, as Small Timothy put it. My sentiments exactly.
Love and love,
Harry
PRISS
I didn’t know he had left. I slept late that Monday and finally dragged myself out of bed. I had perspired a great deal during the night, always a sign for me that sleep was less untroubled than I might remember it. My skin felt clammy. I went and stood under the shower and got out technically clean but still clammy somehow. Then I huddled over the toilet and threw up.
I examined myself in the mirror and put the palms of my hands over my stomach. I am so thin to start with that I began to show almost from the moment of conception, or so it seemed. According to the best medical information, I would at any time now begin to feel life. A new life moving inside me. A new life having the misfortune to be born to me.
There was fresh coffee in the kitchen. On the kitchen table was the typewriter and the pile of manuscript. I went over to see if Harry had written anything, but the last page was of Rhoda’s plaintive chapter. Nothing had changed. I poured myself a cup of coffee and drank about half of it and poured the rest down the sink. Then I went to the bathroom, feeling nauseous, but nothing came of it. Just a brief attack of dry heaves.
I went outside and checked the shed, but Harry wasn’t there. I went inside and couldn’t find Rhoda. I went outside again and pulled a few weeds out of the garden, and while I was doing this Rhoda came out from the woods and approached.
“Where’s Harry?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Isn’t he working?”
“No. He’s not around the house, either.”
“I thought he was working.”
The old Chevy was gone. I got into the new car and drove it to the station, and the Chevy was parked there. I came back and told Rhoda.
“He’s gone to New York,” I said.
“It’s only Monday.”
“I know. I guess he had to get away.”
“He’ll be back.”
“Will he?”
“Maybe something came up, business or something.”
“I don’t think so.”
“We’ll hear from him.”
“Rho, I ruined everything.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not being silly. Everything was perfect. I guess I couldn’t stand everything being perfect and I had to find a way to fuck it up.”
“It’s not fucked up.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.”
I put my hands on my stomach. “I always wanted to get pregnant. You can’t believe how much I wanted it. I finally got myself to the point of believing that I didn’t really want to. You know the excuses you invent for yourself.”
“Not me. I never wanted to be pregnant.”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“Well, I did. Desperately. And invented excuses, that I wouldn’t be capable of being a good mother, that a baby would just get in the way, that what Harry and I had was complete by itself and a baby would interfere. The excuses that people always make for themselves. And then I had to, I had to go and pick up those idiots-”
“That was the first time you were ever unfaithful, wasn’t it?”
“Unless I count you.”
“But the first time with a man.”
“They weren’t men. They were boys.”
“The first time.”
“The first and only time.”
“These things happen, Priss.”
“Yes, they do, don’t they? But why did I have to tell him? Why couldn’t I keep it to myself?”
“And eat your heart out for the rest of your life?”
“I could stand it.”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not sure you could, love. I’m not sure of that at all. If you could have stood it, you wouldn’t have blurted it all out on paper. That wasn’t a confession, Priss, that was a scream.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I do. That was an emotional abscess. All that poison in your system coming to a head. You had to get
