How much of the disapproval was jealousy?
How much of all disapproval is jealousy?
Questions, questions. I steadied myself and headed up the flagstone path, wishing it had creeping thyme between the stones, remembering the smell of the thyme underfoot on the flagstone path of my grandmother’s garden, remembering this and thinking of that and trying not to think about Rhoda’s letter, because, you see, I did not know, really, how I felt about it. Her visit. Or how I was supposed to feel. Or how I wanted to feel.
Harry was Out Back. There is the remains of a stable behind the house which he converted into a rudimentary studio, and where he works every morning from whenever he gets up (somewhere between four-thirty and six-thirty, and always well before me) until noon, when he comes in to read the mail and have lunch. If one of his rough drawings gets okayed in the morning mail, he generally works up the finished artwork during the afternoon. If nothing like that happens, he takes the afternoon off. He never opens letters from gag-writers at noon but holds them until the following morning. When he wakes up, things are funny, his sense of humor is on, his visual humor functions. I can’t understand this myself. When I wake up I want to pour coffee over my head and go back to sleep. Well, not exactly that, but along those lines. I can’t imagine anything being funny at daybreak.
We are oddly matched, Harry and I. This thin-wristed insipid blonde Mayflower child, whom one praises as being not quite so scatterbrained as she looks, and this starker, this Jewish oak tree with bitter wit and crackling laughter.
When it became apparent that we were not going to have any children, we discussed our differences and Harry hypothesized that our chromosomes might simply be allergic to one another. “Maybe it’s just as well,” I said. “We’re so different that any children we might have would be absolutely inconceivable.”
He laughed for twenty minutes before I figured out what I said. This always happens.
But I am wobbling all over the place. I hope Rhoda does eventually edit all of this into a cohesive mass. If that’s possible.
Let me see, I went back to the house with the letter. If this were a movie, we could just cut to the next scene. I suppose we could do that here just by leaving a space between this paragraph and the next one.
He read through the letter, tts-ing and chuckling, then looked at me over the top of it. “Well, that’s interesting,” he said. “She’s coming. Unless I missed something, it doesn’t say when.”
“You didn’t miss anything.”
“Why I never do, do I, Priss-puss? What cartoon is she talking about, do you have the faintest idea? Skier, I must have done twenty skier cartoons that came out last winter.”
“What difference does it make?”
“None. Just that it might provide worthwhile ego food for the struggling young cartoonist, and Lord knows he needs all of that he can get. Do we have any English muffins left?”
“No.”
“Funny, we didn’t have any at breakfast time either. Or yesterday. It’s fucking amazing how long a lack of English muffins can continue around here. You’d think we could use of this absence of muffins, pour anti-matter over it or something.”
“I forgot to buy them. I’ll get some this afternoon.”
“Promises, promises.”
“No, Thomas’s, Thomas’s.”
“That’s awful, Priss. I’m not disapproving. I just want you to know it’s awful. A woman should know these things. She sounds terrible.”
“Rhoda?”
“No, Jackie Kennedy. She has laryngitis.”
“Send her a card. Yes, I know she sounds terrible. Rhoda. She’s always been a very moody person, though. And she can convey this very well-her moods-which may make them come across heavier in a letter than otherwise. She’s very-verbally she’s-I forget the word for it, dammit-”
He began hitting himself in the center of the forehead with the heel of his hand and laughing throatily. “Articulate,” he said. “That’s the word you’re looking for, pudding-pie. She’s very articulate. You, just for the record, aren’t.”
Priss-puss, pudding-pie. He was purposely picking up things from her letter and heaving them at me. I didn’t very awfully love this.
“I suppose we’re lucky the letter got here before she did,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“She doesn’t leave us much of an out. Unless we close the house and go away and pretend we never got her letter.”
He looked at me. “Why would we want to do that?”
“I was just making conversation.”
“You cover all bets with that line, don’t you? Whenever you don’t want to explain some dumb thing you’ve said, you say you were just making conversation.”
“The work didn’t go well this morning, huh?”
“Cut the shit, Priss, will you?”
“I guess I thought you might not welcome her visit, that’s all. And that you wouldn’t say anything to that effect, so I would say it for you.”
“Not welcome it? I’ve always liked Rhoda.”
“I know.”
“Of course, I never had the chance to know her as well as you did, pudding-pie.”
“You know, you’re a real son of a bitch.”
“Hey, don’t!” My eyes were misting, and a lump forming in my throat. He took my arm. “I’m sorry, baby. I never thought you’d be so uptight about it.”
“I never should have told you.”
“But it doesn’t bother me, for Christ’s sake. You were kiddies, right? Groping toward awareness of self. Nothing unnatural about it.”
I didn’t say anything.
He was putting his arms around me and giving me awkward ursine brotherly hugs. I did not much feel like being touched, but endured it. I looked at my wedding ring and had the sudden and blindingly graphic image of myself dropping it gaily into a Las Vegas sewer. Twenty-nine, and eight years married, and happily so, and all at once longing for divorce? For Heaven’s sake, what is going on here?
I said, “You’re not going to say anything to Rho?”
“Honey, what do you think I am?”
“Because I couldn’t bear it, I don’t think.”
“You’re not ashamed of it, are you, baby?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“Because you sound like it. Look. You used to ball your college roommate. You liked her, she liked you-”
“Loved.”
“Huh?”
“We loved each other.”
“All right, whatever you want to call it. Anyway, you tried each other in bed and found out it was more fun than sleeping alone. So you were bisexual. So women are supposed to be bisexual at that age, it’s a stage they go through. You went through it, and before too very long you met me, Superjew, the ultimate male sex symbol, and you put away childish things.”
“I suppose so.”
“Look, when you were a kid, like a teenager and all, you used to masturbate, right?”
“And?”
“Well, everybody does, no? But afterward, when you outgrow it, you don’t have to look back on those days and feel consumed by guilt. You just wash your hands and carry on.”
I didn’t say anything. Outgrow it? Harry, I carefully did not say, I don’t seem to have outgrown it yet. There are nights, Harry, when we make love, and I can’t get no satisfaction, like the song says, and while you sleep the sleep of the sated male, I dip my little fingers in the honeypot.
