“Damn right.”
“That was a gas.”
“Yeah, it kind of was, wasn’t it?”
“Absolutely. I don’t think I ever want to do it again, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
“Yeah.”
“Scary.”
“I’m a little bit shaky just now, to tell you the truth.”
“It’s a scary world.”
“Not for me. The only thing that scares me is me. I frighten the shit out of myself, Harry.”
“You okay?”
“I guess.”
There was something I was trying to remember. Oh, yes. “Incidentally, there’s a non-book in it.”
“Huh? Even with the new permissiveness, sweetie, there’s a limit.”
“No, something you said before. My Shrink Says. ”
She was instantly interested. “That’s the title? Hey, I think I dig it. Give me a handle on it.”
“I didn’t get that far.”
“ My shrink says. Uh. My shrink says kumquats make you horny. No, it doesn’t make it. My shrink says sometimes it’s only a cigar.”
“That’s sensational.”
“It’s also a steal. Freud said it.”
“Honestly? Let him sue, we’re using it. It’s too visual to pass up. A girl smoking a cigar with her eyes glassy and obviously what she’s doing is going down on that cigar, and that’s the tag line.”
“Brilliant.”
“What else did Freud say?”
“Oh, he said a million things. He said the paranoiac is never entirely mistaken.”
“You’re making these up.”
“God’s truth.”
“If there are enough of them, we could make it Freud Says. ”
“ Sigmund Says. ”
“Much, much better. Worlds better. Although I don’t know-”
“I think I like My Shrink Says better.”
“So do I.”
“More room to move around, too.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Who do you think would like it?”
“I was thinking of Jonathan. It’s his kind of thing.”
“Your agent or mine?”
I thought it over. “Better call Alex. I don’t think Peggy gets through to Jonathan very well.”
“All right.” She leaned over to grind out her cigarette. “If you want, I’ll fix some dinner. And then we could ball some more.”
“I ought to get on home.”
“Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.”
“Massachusetts. Say, did you hear about the guy who ran his boat aground in Gloucester Bay?”
“He didn’t know Mass. from a shoal in the sound.”
“Now how in hell did you know that one? I made it up.”
“You told me once before.”
“Oh.”
“And I always remember everything you tell me.”
“My shrink says nobody likes a smartass.”
“Does he really? My shrink says a bird in the hand is perfectly normal.”
“A prince of a man. My shrink says pimples cause masturbation.”
“Mine used to say that. Now he says sodomy is a pain in the ass.”
“My black shrink says every motherfucker has an Oedipus complex.”
“He should know. I wonder if we’ll come up with anything printable?”
“Call Alex.”
“I will.”
“And stay as sweet as you are.”
“My love to Priscilla.”
Did I give you her love, Priss? I can’t seem to remember. Jonathan was crazy about My Shrink Says. It was singularly easy to write and to illustrate, and seems to be selling, although figures will not be in for a while.
I am beginning to realize what writers do. Because as slow as this went at first, it picked up speed at a remarkable rate. Writers, I think, do the same thing everyone else does who makes something out of nothing. The typewriter is just another form of pen and sketch pad. The brain seeps down into the tips of the fingers, and one gets into synch and lets everything play itself through the medium of fingers and typewriter and onto the paper.
Listen to the idiot, drunk with triumph at having written a chapter. One chapter doesn’t make a book any more than one swallow makes a hangover.
And there’s also the question of whether or not the chapter’s relevant. Is it enough about the three of us or is it too much a matter of What I Did On My Wednesday Vacation? I think it’s pertinent.
I also think it’s impertinent, come to that. But it does bridge the gap to Rhoda’s arrival, and who is better equipped to tell you about Rhoda’s arrival than the lovely Rhoda herself?
That’s your cue, kid.
RHODA
After a bus and a plane and another plane and another bus, I found a taxi driver who seemed to understand how to get to the Kapp house. The fare, he told me, would be seven and a half dollars. When he pulled up in front I gave him ten and told him to keep the change. He seemed astonished, as if unaccustomed to being tipped at all, and never so lavishly, and wanted to carry my bag up the hill to the house. I said I’d rather do it myself, and probably sounded quite like that anguished young woman in the Anacin commercial.
Priss was out the door before I reached it. “Oh, Rho,” she said, and ran to meet me, and hugged me.
I was near tears. Throughout the endless flights and bus rides I had hovered on the brink of tears, and kept crying or nearly crying over absurd things-trashy sentimental crap novels, dumb tear-jerking images. It felt a little like the tail end of an amphetamine jag, the exhaustion of endless wakeful hours punctuated with semicolons of nervous unsatisfying half-sleep. Bitter cups of coffee, my life and my trip measured out like Prufrock’s in coffee spoons, clothes sweaty, smelly, bra strap digging into flesh, eyes reddened, gritty as if circled with sand, sour taste in mouth, intermittent heartburn and fleeting waves of nausea Getting there is sometimes less than half the fun.
Prissy was telling me that I should have called, that the cab rates were outrageous, that she could have picked me up at the station. I just kept nodding and not quite smiling. I had thought of calling but had deliberately decided not to, and for no rational reason, but as if covering every bit of the distance under my own power was somehow necessary, would somehow prove something which somehow had to be proved.
“Where are your things?”
“Here.”
“Just one suitcase?”
“Can we go inside?”
“Of course. Harry’s out back, I’ll get him-”
