“Oh, please.”
“I do. I feel completely strange.”
“So do I. Oh, you’re so beautiful, Priss. Come in here with me. Oh, Jesus. How we feel together. Oh, God, kiss me.”
“Rho-”
“Sweet Prissy.”
“Do you know what to do? Have you ever-”
“No.”
“Neither have I. Is one of us supposed to be the boy or something?”
“No, I think we can both be the girl.”
“But-”
“Love, there’s nobody watching. There is only us. And no masks. We can just do whatever we want. Oh, I love you, I want to kiss you and hold you and touch you. Do you like this? I love your breasts.”
“They’re so small.”
“Like fine porcelain teacups. I shall sip tea from them. How nice you taste.”
“Oh, my God!”
“Ha, look what I found. A pwetty wittow pussy cat! Such a nice little pussy and it’s all wet. It must like this.”
“Oh, God, it does.”
“I’m wet too, Priss. Touch me. Oh, yes, Christ, yes, touch me forever. Oh, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop. Oh!”
And, after a moment, “Who would have believed it? It happened so quickly. I’ve never had anything like that feeling, the most powerful orgasm just exploding all over me. So quickly!”
“I felt it happening for you. I was like there with you, in it. Do you know?”
“I want to do you.”
“Yes.”
“And this is so weird. There’s no teacher, do you know what I mean? It’s new for both of us. We discover it all together. Oh, the things we’re going to think of to do with each other, oh, Priss, I love you. You know something else? I love us. Do you know what I mean?”
“I love us, too.”
“I love the whole idea of us. This fucking stupid school and all these boring girls and the stupid Yalies, and in the middle of all this shit there’s us, being together and loving each other, and I think it’s great. Oh, kiss me, let’s be together again, let me kiss you, let me touch you.”
We had about a year and a half of each other. During that time we never had any contact with any other girls. There were platoons of lesbians on that campus, and I thought that some of them might have their suspicions about us, but if so they kept it to themselves, just as we kept ourselves to ourselves.
We joked about telling the housing office to take one of the beds out of our room. We didn’t need them both. We always slept together after that first night. We didn’t always make love, but we always slept together, and shared warmth if not sex.
We went on dating Yale boys and Harvard boys and other boys, and by October of our junior year we had both been officially deflowered. There was never any idea that either of us should be jealous of the other. It was simply not that sort of love.
We talked now and then of being together forever, and I still wonder whether we really believed at the time that we wanted to do this. We may have thought we did, but I think we knew better deep down inside ourselves. Because, after all, we were what Rhoda called devoutly middle-class. For all our free thought and rebellion we found it impossible not to take it for granted that we would someday each of us grow up to be our mothers all over again, buying a sufficiency of the American dream to cut ourselves off from what the dream would not encompass.
(Rhoda, you may have to translate that last paragraph into something closer to English. You do know what I mean, don’t you?)
Well. We were not together forever. Just a year and a half. At the end of our junior year Rhoda left school, got involved with some evil people, almost died during an abortion, then had a very heavy affair with a married man. I stayed in school, had several oddly tedious affairs with unmarried men, had a quite pleasant and wholly successful abortion all my own, and ultimately graduated and went to New York and got a job on a magazine and dated this cartoonist, and subsequently married him, and got at last to where I am now.
Enough. However long a chapter should be, I’ve made my set of Abraham Lincoln’s legs precisely twice as long as Rhoda’s prologue or preface or whatever.
Your turn, Harry.
HARRY
Hi there, sex nuts! Porn freaks! This is your old pal, Harry Kapp, ne Kapelner, renowned cartoonist and raconteur, set to lay aside pen and sketch pad and do his thing at the old typewriter.
Jesus, how do you get started with this sort of thing? I wrote that first paragraph half an hour ago and ever since then I’ve been sitting here looking at it, and it doesn’t get any longer or anything. It just sits there and looks back at me. I don’t know where writers get it from. How they can just sit down and zip, the words are there. With drawing, the mechanics of pen and ink makes things happen. You start to draw something and your fingers do things your mind hasn’t even thought of, and good or bad things get onto the page. But this writing dodge strikes me as a hard way to make a living.
I do want to write this, though. If only to get a look at the two chapters which will follow it, but which won’t follow it if I don’t write this one. (A lit’ry version of the carrot and the stick. Or was it the tortoise and the hare? Once upon a time there was a carrot and a stick, you see, and they decided to have a race…)
Ah, but vy else do you vish to write zis, Herr Harry? Hmmm. For self-discovery or self-uncovery? Or merely to boast? One does feel boastful now and then, sitting at once on top of a mountain (all right, hill) and on top of the world, the proud owner of two fucking mythical shicksas (those are Israeli taxicabs). Harry, boychik, you’ve come a long way from Pelham Parkway.
Let us not probe motives too closely. Too much attention to vy anyvun does anyzing gives rise to nausea and despair, usually in that order.
I don’t remember just when Priss told me about the thing she and Rhoda had going in college. I remember the conversation well enough but not its location in time. We were going through a mutual confession trip, one of those here’s-some-of-the-crazy-things-I-did-before-I-met-you-things. Not to purge ourselves, but because that sort of thing turns one on.
A perhaps uncomfortable truth-once the fresh gloss is gone from a marriage, once two people cease to be so madly new to one another, the marriage inevitably gets refreshed from the outside. If it gets refreshed at all. Not that people necessarily cheat, or enlarge their family circle in some such manner. But that each, at least in mind, starts filling that bed with other people. You turn on with forbidden thoughts and work them out on each other’s bodies. When a marriage relationship goes stale, all that means is that there has been a failure of imagination.
“Say, I was wondering. Did you ever make it with a girl?”
“What made you ask that?”
“Ah, hah! I think you just answered it, lotus blossom.”
“Oh, did I?”
“You can talk about it.”
“But you’ll despise me, won’t you? ‘Damned blonde dyke bitch.’ You’ll hate me.”
“Oh, come on. Do I know the girl?”
“Girl? How do you know there weren’t dozens?”
“There was just one. Am I right?”
“As a matter of fact, you are.”
