“Rhoda Whatchamacallit. Muir.”
“You just flashed into that one? Or did you find some old letters of mine, and is this an elaborate Talmudic con game?”
“No, I psyched it. Tell me.”
“What is there to tell? We, oh, you could say we experimented with sex. The way kids experiment with drugs?”
“They do like hell ex-fucking-periment with drugs. They blow grass and drop acid because it gets them high. That’s not an experiment. It’s a pleasure.”
“Well, it was a pleasure, all right.”
“What happened?”
“What do you think? We made love.”
“I mean what did you do?”
“Locked the door first. Played records. Sometimes left the lights on and sometimes turned them out. Do we really have to have this conversation?”
“No, liebchen, not if it’s too painful for you to talk about it.”
“Devious sheenie bastard.”
“Devious, yes. Sheenie, yes. Bastard, no. What did you used to do in bed?”
“Oh, this is so silly, Harry. We didn’t do anything that you and I haven’t done like maybe a thousand times.”
“Was it better with her?”
“Now you’re not going to be jealous of something that happened in college, for Christ’s sake.”
“It’s not jealousy, it’s fascination.”
“Why?”
“Because I think lesbians are great.”
“I’m not a lesbian!”
“Don’t shout, I’m right here in front of you. I think it’s adorable, two girls in bed together. I’m serious, goddammit, I’m not being sarcastic, nor am I putting you on. I think it’s sweet.”
“Sweet?”
“Yes.”
“I guess it was sweet.”
“It’s a whole fantasy of mine, as a matter of fact. A whole fetish thing.”
“Honestly?”
“Absolutely.”
“I never knew that. Why didn’t you ever say anything? I could start wearing neckties to bed and pitching my voice lower and cursing like a state trooper. What’s so funny?”
“Like a trooper.”
“So?”
“Not like a state trooper. Oh, you’re a delight. No, it doesn’t matter, forget it. Hey, let’s go upstairs.”
“You’re not kidding.”
“Put your hand here and you’ll see if I’m kidding.”
“Well, what do you know about that? It’s got a great big cock on it.”
“Christ!”
So it turned me on, the whole idea of the two of them together turned me on. So who knows why?
Because I’m some kind of a latent faggot? Better latent than ever, I suppose, but if I ever had the desire I never knew it. The closest I ever came to a homosexual experience was in the men’s room of the New Amsterdam Theater when a beery old fart made a grab for my schlong. I swung a roundhouse right at him. He didn’t bother to duck, but I nevertheless missed him completely and lost my footing and fell in the urinal.
Because I’ve always wanted to make it with my sister? I don’t think so, and neither would anybody who knew my sister. My sister is three years older than I am (and always has been) and she passed Gene Fullmer’s fighting weight before she passed seventh grade. And hasn’t quit yet. It’s not glandular, it’s that she eats ten or twelve meals a day. At the present time she is living in a middle-income cooperative apartment building in Queens and wearing all of Sidney Greenstreet’s old clothes. Her husband is a public accountant with hopes of one day becoming a certified public accountant. I’d say he’s certifiable, all right.
Of course Edith is the family success story. Her accountant is, after all, a nice Jewish boy (he married her under the assumption that she was a Zim Line cruise ship) and they live within subway distance of Mama Kaplan and have produced four children. That these four little bastards are the most singly obnoxious children in recorded time doesn’t seem to matter to anyone, except perhaps me.
I, on the other hand, am this bum who changed his name and married, oy, a blonde shicksa and lives God knows where, you couldn’t even get there on a train, not that you’d want to, oy, and has not produced a single grandchild, not that anyone would want him to, because what kind of a child would you have, a mongrel, that’s what kind of a child you would have.
They should, by all rights, drop dead.
But forget all this Jewish family shit. It was Tuesday when Rhoda’s letter came, and I wanted to drag Priss to the bedroom, and made an effort, toward which she chose to be purposely obtuse. All right, fair enough. I couldn’t blame her. I was trying to use her to shake something that she hadn’t inspired, and while everyone does this, it ought to be done more subtly. Fair enough.
I kept thinking about Rhoda. Wondering if there would be anything between them, either in the mind or in fact. Wondering how I would feel about it. Weaving, in spite of myself, weird, three-in-a-bed fantasies.
And what would happen, I wondered, if I should happen to loft a pass Rhoda’s way. The uncertain divorcee, her wedding ring gone, her maiden name hers once again-folklore marks them as easy game, like widows and betrayed wives. Did I want Rhoda? Yes, dammit. Did I want her right there in Prissy’s house, Prissy’s ex-roommate and ex-lover in Prissy’s house?
Indeed I did.
Or perhaps she would want to come into the city on a Wednesday. I go to New York just about every Wednesday, getting up early enough to drive the old Chevy to the station and catch the first train. Sometimes but not always Priss comes along and shops while I make the rounds of editors and collaborators and agents. Sometimes we then do something in the evening, like catch a play or a movie. When we first moved up here she came in almost every week, but now it’s more like once a month. We have told each other various reasons for this- that it’s a long trip, that she has things to do that are more important to her than shopping. We both know better. When people are together all the time, alone with each other as much as we are, they need a break from each other. I prefer the Wednesdays when I make the trip alone.
I went in alone the day after Rhoda’s letter came. I hit the half dozen magazine offices I generally hit, showed the new work I’d done in the past week, and peddled most of it, which was gratifying. I dropped in on my agent, told her about the sales I had made and dropped off the unsold work for her to send around. She would try the major markets and what remained unsold would be returned to me to try on my own if I wanted. She doesn’t like to bother with cartoon submissions to minor markets; it’s unprofitable for her, but by stubbornly keeping all of those old chestnuts in motion I generally add a couple thousand a year to my income, which pays for a lot of stamps and envelopes.
Around two in the afternoon I cabbed up to 83rd Street to see Marcia.
Marcia is Marcia Goldsmith, a long-legged low-voiced brittle brilliant young lady slightly reminiscent of Elaine May, but a little less overpowering, thank God. She and I have collaborated on several non-books, she doing text and I providing pictures. A non-book is the sort that sits next to the cash register on the way out of the store, and it’s just sixty-four pages of one-line gags and art work, and you could read it in ten minutes flat and never want to look at it again, but what the hell, it’s only a buck and there are few enough laughs in this world, so you buy it.
The non-book on which we were presently working was called The World is Coming to An End Because Book. That was the working title, which we thought we might amend to Chicken Little Was Right, which I have seen on buttons but not as a title. The premise was that we would have about thirty or forty ways in which the world was coming to an end, all of them ostensibly humorous, and that the increasing public consciousness of pollution and the environment question and all that would make people welcome the book as a sort of tragic relief.
