Threesome

by Lawrence Block

  I said, “I got your picture.”

  “And?”

  “You made my breasts too large.”

  “God made your breasts too large. But I’m not complaining and neither should you.”

  “You made them larger than He did.”

  “Well, I paint what I see.”

  “You were watching.”

  “Yes.”

  “For very long?”

  “No.”

  “There’s something I have to do,” I said. “Just stay right there, don’t move, there’s this thing that I have to do.”

  Utter compulsion. One does what one must do. I walked toward him, taking off clothes as I walked, dropping them along the way. I went to him and got on my knees in front of his chair. I unzipped his pants and put my hand in and found his cock and took it out.

  “You have a beautiful cock.”

  I took it in both hands and felt its heat. I put my lips to its head and kissed it.

  “I haven’t really liked a cock in such a long time,” I said. I didn’t know what I was saying, I never talked like this, but the words flowed out of my mouth as the juices had flowed out of my pussy, uncontrollably, automatically, involuntarily. “I love your cock,” I went on. “Last night I heard you putting it in Priss, and this morning I ate her where it went in, and now I’m going to eat you. I love you and I love Priss and I love your beautiful cock.”

  My mouth felt empty. I opened my mouth and took his cock in it and my mouth didn’t feel empty any more. He had grown hard the minute I took him in my hands and now he was hard as a rock and very large and there seemed to be a pulse working in his cock, I could feel it with my tongue. I slid my mouth as far down his cock as I could so that the head of it was touching the back of my throat. Usually when I did this I wanted to gag. Not this time. I just wanted more.

  I let it slide out again until I had only the tip of it between my lips. Back, forth, back, forth, and the nerve endings in my mouth were tingling like crazy. Real physical excitement, not just the thrill of doing this to him, of doing this to Prissy’s man, of doing this, but the thrill of a contact that was thrilling in and of itself, my mouth responding, my mouth getting fucked, my mouth, cuntlike, receiving him and digging it.

  He was wearing dungarees. I put my hands on his thighs and felt the good coarse denim under my fingertips. I dug my fingers into his thighs and plunged up and down on his prick.

  It seemed to me that I could taste Prissy on him. Impossible of course, I had heard him in the shower, he took a shower every morning, it was just in my imagination, but I thought I could, and I thought of him plunging simultaneously into my mouth and into Prissy’s cunt, as if his cock could magically be in two places at one time, in two people at one time, and I sucked him, I sucked him.

  Robert Keith Dandridge always wanted to be sucked, and I was not that bad a wife, obliging him in that respect most of the time whether I wanted to do it or not. I almost never wanted to do it, and I almost always did it, but one thing I did was that I always made him indicate he wanted it. I never of my own accord dove down upon his prick. Not that it never occurred to me, but that I never had wanted to let him get the idea that this was something I wanted to do for its own sake, because it frankly wasn’t.

  I was supposed to be reasonable good at it, I had in fact been told by boys and men who seemed in a position to know that I was reasonably good at it, and I was obviously good enough at it so that Robert Keith Dandridge never tired of that aspect of our life together, however tiresome he (like I) may have found the rest of it. But however good I might be at it, I did not like it with Robert Keith. Not even a little. The only thing I almost liked about it was that when I really did not feel in the mood for his weight on top of me I could give him a quick sucking and make him come that way and be spared a regular screwing. So it was now and then the lesser of two evils, and that was the best that could ever be said for it.

  Not so with Harry. With him it was my idea, all my idea, and I really wanted to do it, and I did it, and had some hard-to-understand oral orgasm just as he had an easy-to-discern penile orgasm, and my throat muscles worked out of their own accord and I swallowed every drop, which again was something R.K.D. used to beg me to do (why should he care, the idiot?) and which I had never once done.

  God knows why I had never done it before. For you readers who have never considered the problem at length, be advised that it solves the age-old question of how to dispose of a mouthful of love without soiling the carpet or running tediously for the toilet. Also it’s almost all protein, and good for you. Also it is a very loving thing to do, and men seem to appreciate it, and you for it.

  I swallowed, and I sighed, and sighed again, and kept his now-softening penis in my mouth, unwilling to let it leave me. I began to be conscious once again of more than his penis and my mouth. I felt the hard earthen floor under my knees, and his hands in my long hair, and the cool air on my face and the backs of my hands.

  I sensed something. A presence.

  Rather neatly, I thought, without letting the now completely soft penis slip out of my mouth, I tilted my head slightly back and raised my eyes slightly up.

  And saw my lover Harry’s handsome face.

  Ah, yes. My lover Harry’s handsome face was turned to the side, and my lover Harry’s sensual mouth was fastened to the breast of (surprise!) my lover Priscilla, who had taken off all her clothes, and who was cradling Harry’s head in one hand and had the other hand in my auburn tresses.

  I looked at her, too numb to think or feel anything, and she smiled, she beamed, she glowed.

  “I knew you would be together,” she said. “I drove a half mile and then came back. I left the car down on the road. I looked in the house, and you weren’t there, and I knew you would be back here.”

  I started to say something, God knows what, but there was this cock in my mouth, and it seemed to be hardening again.

  “Let’s go inside now,” Priss said. “There’s more room. And we can all be together now. I think that would be very nice, to be all together, all of us.”

  PRISS

  I saw that cartoon. I knew.

  I never told you this, did I? Not wanting to seem too calculating. Better to heed Lady Macbeth’s advice: Look like the innocent serpent, but be the flower under it.

  Believe me, I did that one on purpose, Harry. It’s not always stupidity, you see. Sometimes it’s a playful attempt at humor.

  I saw that cartoon. I don’t know how Rhoda could have entered the room and almost left it without seeing it, because I noticed it while walking past the room, noticed it from the doorway, and went in at once to have a look at it.

  I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.

  And another thing I knew was that we all had to be together soon. That Harry and Rhoda had to have each other, and that I had to do what I could to facilitate this. And also that I then had to let them know that I did not object. Because in certain ways I was the crux of this matter. At the present time I was at the whatever-it-is of a triangle. The Ajax? Oh, fuck it. I was at the top of the triangle, the only one involved with both of the others. So it wasn’t really a complete triangle yet, it was like a tent, an Indian teepee, with Harry and Rhoda at either side and lines running from them to me, at the top. But there was no line across the base, no line from Harry to Rhoda, and that line had to be drawn so that the whole mass would have geometric stability.

  I find it convenient to think in these symbols, and only hope they are not too much a part of my private vocabulary to make sense to you two. Or to the others, the readers.

  Readers?

  So I decided to scheme, to put Harry and Rhoda together. I never mentioned this later. Maybe you both already knew. I don’t know. But if I have learned one thing from this book-writing experience it is that we are all of us more calculating than we have willingly let on up to now. Even in our most open moments there are aspects of motivation, thoughts, ideas, privatenesses, that we shiel
d from one another. I don’t doubt that this is emotionally essential. Otherwise one simply gushes and bleeds all over the place. Well, that’s what this is for, isn’t it? Not merely to make us all rich and famous, guest spots on television and our pictures in all the papers, but also and more truly to give us that chance to gush and bleed, but to do it on paper, neatly, antiseptically. Aseptically? I can never remember the difference, and can’t believe it’s too important. To gush and bleed, however. To bleed like the innocent flower, and gush like the serpent under it.

  (I feel more than a little giddy. Rhoda began writing the last chapter early in the afternoon and was still at it at dinner time. She wouldn’t stop, took the typewriter into the other room while Harry and I sat down to one of my less successful shots at stuffing a veal breast.

  (She finished typing shortly after we finished dinner. We were drinking brandy when she sauntered into the kitchen, face flushed, eyes glassy. She said, “Do you suppose either or both of you might feel like taking me to bed?”

  (I said, “You’ve written yourself into a state.” She agreed that she had. Harry said that there ought to be a cure for that sort of thing. We went upstairs, the brandy bottle in tow, and we drank and petted and drank and foreplayed and drank and balled, and somewhere along the way I lost touch with what was going on, which may have been apparent to the other two, or may not have been.

  (I felt shut out. I felt as though all of the interaction was happening between Rho and Harry, and as though I was a party to it all in the same way and to about the same extent as the bed we happened to be balling on. My role was thingish rather than personal. I didn’t resent this, I don’t think, nor did I feel that I was being shut out by anyone but that it was an effect on my own inner mood.

  (This is not really rare when the three of us are together. One person may be less in the mood than the others, less sexy, and may thus get less involved. There’s nothing really wrong with this, I don’t think. Whoever is in that kind of a set can simply go through the motions, or play Watchbird, or even leave the room.

  (But I digress from the digression itself. I did feel out of things, and sexually inert, and when with whoops and hollers the two of them reached their climax-and is anything in the abstract as pleasantly absurd as other people’s passion? I think not-they subsided at once into a deep relaxed sleep, and I didn’t. Didn’t subside, didn’t relax, and didn’t sleep.

  (Instead I came out here and read the chapter that had inflamed Rhoda. This, perversely, excited me. I could have gone off to awaken one or both of them, but that seemed a bad idea, and instead I sit here, in the kitchen once more, the typewriter returned to its habitual location, a fresh pot of coffee working, a cigarette burning. Call it sublimation, but here I am, writing this.)

  Where was I? Scheming? Bleeding and gushing?

  Doesn’t matter.

  I told Rhoda I wanted to go shopping, made the suggestion purposely vague-“Some things I thought I would look at, actually I just want to get out of the house for a little while, come along if you happen to feel like it.” It was easy for her to stay behind, and she did.

  I drove away. I drove about half a mile down the road and pulled off onto the shoulder. I remember pulling off the road and falling into a clinch with Rhoda. When had that been?

  That was Tuesday. This was Thursday.

  Incroyable!

  Mais vrai, ma cherie.

  I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke rise from it. They say that if you can’t see the smoke you don’t get anything out of smoking (except cancer and emphysema, that is.) I watched the smoke rise and still didn’t get very much out of it, and after a while I threw the cigarette out the window, rolled the window up again, drove far enough on down the road to find a place to turn around, turned around, and drove back home.

  I parked out in front. I even cut the motor some fifty yards down the road and coasted in the rest of the way, which becomes more ridiculous the more I think about it. Priscilla the great conspirator.

  I got out of the car. The sun warmed me. I looked up at the house at the top of the more or less hill, and the phrase Mistress of all I survey popped into my head. Mistress of all and of everyone I thought. And in my mind I saw myself standing at the apex of the triangle (that’s the word, of course, not ajax, Christ!) in flowing robes, arms extended, with Harry and Rhoda crouched at my feet. One at either foot. And I could hear myself saying to them, in matriarchal tones, “My children, I give unto you the gift of love.”

  I have a strange mind. I am aware of this.

  I lit another cigarette with the idea of forcing myself to linger there until I had finished it. I took two puffs and threw it away like one of those malcontents in the Viceroy commercials. “Hey, didn’t you just light that cigarette?” “Oh, these fucking cigarettes have lost their taste.” “Here, try one of mine.” “Say, this cigarette really tastes good.” “Of course it does, schmuck. It’s grass. It’ll get you stoned, too.”

  I walked up the winding path, thinking of primrose paths, primrose paths paved with good intentions, with creeping thyme between the flagstones. Creeping time, I thought. Time to creep, time to fog in on little cat feet.

  I thought of taking off my shoes to make my approach soundless, and laughed inwardly at myself, and when I reached the door of the house I did take off my shoes, and did pad around from room to room as quietly as possible. When a room-by-room search failed to disclose their whereabouts, I experienced an irrational moment of profound panic. Obviously they had run off and left me and I would never see them again.

  Paranoia is never all that far from the surface, is it? Just a silly millimeter away…

  Out Back, I thought almost at once, and knew they would be there, knew it for certain. But first I went into Rhoda’s room again and found the drawing. She had tucked it underneath her pillow. I picked it up and looked at it very carefully. I put it back under the pillow and lay down on Rhoda’s bed for a few seconds, snuggling my head on her pillow, curling up with thoughts and memories.

  I left the room and the house, and was well on my way through the garden to the shed before realizing that I had not put my shoes back on. This was no problem; it wasn’t that cold, and there was grass to walk on. But as I walked I began talking off other things, idly, dreamily, pulling my sweater over my head and tossing it away, unclasping and shrugging off my bra, taking off everything as I walked, until as I reached the doorway of the shed I had my panties, my damp panties, in my hand, and I tossed them gaily over my shoulder as I stepped onto the threshold.

  And I saw, as you know from Rhoda’s last chapter, a profile view of Harry sitting in his swivel chair and Rhoda kneeling in front of him like a slave girl. I watched her going down on him, the tender bobbing motions of her head, her hands gripping his thighs, and all I could think was that I had never seen anything so insanely beautiful in all my life.

  I was never much on watching people. Never that much opportunity to find out if I was interested. Other children managed to watch their parents screw. I never did, nor did I ever overhear them, nor in fact did I have any evidence beyond the fact of my own existence to prove that they ever screwed in their lives.

  Sometimes Harry had brought home pornographic photographs and showed them to me, and I looked at them both to find out just what people did look like when they made love and also to assess my own reaction to this phenomenon (Rountree, for Christ’s sake, talk English) but I always thought of the models as plastic people with plastic smiles and grimaces and not real at all. What they were doing, in those funny poses, was something that had nothing to do with sex at all, nothing certainly to do with sex as I knew it. I could get hot from the whole illicit idea of lying in bed with my husband and looking at these dirty pictures, but I couldn’t get even lukewarm from the pictures themselves. They were just props.

  This was entirely different.

  In the first place, these were people. And they were not performing mechanically for the camera but were completely wrap
ped up in what they were doing.

  But more than that, they were two people I loved. And to see them giving pleasure to each other this way, and connecting with each other as both of them had been connected with me, was very moving.

  I don’t mean arousing. I don’t mean sex, really. This was the most completely sexual moment of my life, I would have to say, and yet I didn’t feel what I would have expected to feel-passion, hunger, horniness.

  I kept thinking: Now we all belong to each other.

  I couldn’t have been standing there even a minute before Harry’s head turned and his eyes met mine. He was startled, but I guess my nakedness let him know right away that I hadn’t come here to raise hell in the traditional Woman Scorned position. I smiled softly, and put my finger shushingly to my lips, and then took my fingertip inside my mouth and sucked at it as Rho was sucking at him. Then I grinned quickly, and coming around from an angle that made it less likely Rhoda might see me out of the corner of her eye, I tiptoed over to them.

  I felt so light and airy. As if I could have flapped my arms and soared into flight.

  I put an arm around Harry’s shoulder. He turned toward me, and I guided his head to my breast. His lips fastened around my nipple and he suckled like a baby. I stroked the back of his neck, and with my other hand I stroked Rhoda’s hair.

  Now we all belong to each other.

  HARRY

  Funny thing.

  Just realized something that was going through my mind from the moment all of this began to get itself in motion, and that has been in and out of mind ever since.

  The wish that I had someone to tell all this to.

  I get the feeling that this is a very male-type thing. It is men, after all, who kiss and tell, and who do so largely because the telling is as essential a part of the game as the kissing. It’s partly a matter of celebrating a triumph, sure, but it’s also a way of making the experience real, a way of keeping it alive in your own mind.