“Tell him I love him.”
“Uh, sure. That you called, and that you love him. I’d better write this down. I was sleeping-”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s nothing, I had to get up anyway because the phone was ringing. No, I’d better make a note of this, though, because sometimes when I wake up I have trouble remembering whether something really happened or whether I dreamed it. And I have a feeling this might be one of those happenings I would tend to dismiss as a dream. ‘Harry’s wife Priscilla called and said that if I heard from him I should tell him she called, and that she loves him.’ That’s it?”
“I guess so.”
“It does have a dreamlike quality to it, doesn’t it? Well, if that’s all, Priscilla-”
“Yes, I guess that’s all.”
“It’s been very interesting talking to you.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, don’t thank me.”
“Maybe we’ll all get together sometime.”
“Maybe we will. Anything’s possible, isn’t it?”
“Good-bye, Marcia. And thank you again.”
“Oh, it’s nothing. Good-bye, Priscilla. Keep in touch.”
“Pardon me?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, good-bye, then.”
“Good-bye.”
I reported the conversation to Rhoda. “She seems very nice,” I said.
“I’m sure she is.”
“We should all get together.”
“Maybe,” she said, doubtfully. “Priss, let’s make love.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Please, let’s.”
“Maybe later.”
I was taking another shower-I always seemed to be in the shower-when the curtain was drawn back and Rhoda got in with me. “I thought I’d soap your back,” she said.
We washed each other.
“Remember doing this at school?”
“I remember.”
“We used to giggle.”
“Yes.”
We got out and dried off, and she led me to her room. She had evidently gone out earlier and come back with a jug of California burgundy.
“Remember?”
“Of course.”
“Let’s get a little drunk. Remember how I taught you how to hold the bottle and drink from that jug?”
We drank quite a bit of wine and we made love. It was very warm and tender. I kept wanting to cry, but didn’t.
“Priss? Even if it’s just us, just you and me, if he doesn’t come back, it’ll be all right.”
“It will?”
“We’ll be two old dykes with our children. It will work out fine.”
“It will?”
I stayed in bed until she feel asleep. Then I got up and wanted to take another shower but didn’t. I took the jug of wine with me and went into the living room. I drank quite a lot of it, I guess.
I thought about Glory. I wondered if there was any way at all to get in touch with her. I decided that there wasn’t, and that it was probably just as well.
Then I took all the sleeping pills and went to bed.
RHODA
Rrrring!
“Hotel Royalton, good morning.”
“Mr. Harry Kapp, please.”
“One moment please.”
Rrrring!
“Hello?”
“Harry?”
“Rhoda?”
“Yes. I just got your letter, Harry.”
“Oh. Uh, how is everybody?”
“I’m fine.”
“And Priss?”
“Priss is going to be all right.”
“What?”
“Priss had an accident, Harry.”
“Ohmigod. What happened?”
“She was very depressed.”
“For Christ’s sake, what happened?”
“She took some sleeping pills.”
“She’s not-“
She’s all right.”
“And the baby?”
“She vomited up the pills in her sleep. She took enough to kill her but she threw them up. It looked as though it might be bad for the baby, but I took her to a doctor and he checked everything and he says the baby is going to be all right, too. I wanted to get in touch with you but there was no way until I got your letter. I called everywhere. I called Marcia, and for that matter Priss had already spoken to Marcia-”
“She did?”
“She wanted to find out where you were, Harry. But Marcia didn’t know.”
“No, nobody knew.”
“Well, I called again to make sure, and then I called your agent but she only knew that you were in New York.”
“I didn’t tell anybody where I was staying.”
“Yes, I know that now. When your letter came I read it, and then I thought I had better call you right away. I think you ought to come home.”
“I’ll get the next train out there. Is Priss-?”
“She’s really going to be all right.”
“And the baby?”
“Both babies are going to be all right. I can feel mine moving. You can put your hand on my stomach and feel him kicking.”
“I’ll be right out.”
“Shall I meet you at the station?”
“No, the Chevy’s there.”
“Will it start? It’s been just sitting there.”
“It always starts. Stay with Priss. Is she there now? Can I talk to her?”
“She’s sleeping. I could wake her.”
“Don’t do that. I’ll be there as soon as I can. And Rhoda?”
“Yes?”
“Tell her I love her.”
“She knows that now.”
“So do I.”
EPILOGUE, OR AFTERWORD, OR CODA, OR SOME SUCH
I typed up the phone conversation while waiting for Harry’s train to get here. I had already typed his letter and added it to the growing stack of manuscript, and I figured I might say something to bring things up to date, but after a few false starts I gave up attempting a formal or even informal narrative and decided to put down as much as I could remember of the telephone conversation. It seems cheating, in a way. I suppose I should have written up the whole scene of discovering Priss sprawled in her bed with a little pool of vomit at the side of the bed, and traces of half-dissolved pills in the vomit, and the whole panic, and calling the doctor, and pouring coffee into Priss and walking her around the room, all of that crap, but the memory of it was painful enough and I did not want to bother with it, so it was enough to carry that part of the plot forward by typing up the phone conversation.
And then of course Harry came back, and we all three talked, and he felt my stomach and couldn’t feel the baby kicking, although I felt it plainly enough, it evidently being easier to feel on the inside than on the outside.
Priss felt life a few days later, which reassured her greatly. The doctor had told her the baby was alive, he was able to detect its heartbeat, but Priss was convinced she had killed the child with pills and it took the kid’s kicking to make her believe otherwise.
And after that somehow nobody ever got back to work on the book.
There didn’t seem to be any need anymore. The typewriter and the manuscript remained in a prominent position for quite a long time, with the sort of idea in the air that sooner or later one of us would sit down and carry the story a little further along, but this didn’t happen. And finally someone-I forget who-took the typewriter and put it in its case and packed it off in a closet, and I put the manuscript in a dresser drawer, and we more or less forgot about it.
The general feeling seemed to be that we didn’t need it anymore. That it had served its several purposes, and that we were past that situation now, and thus no longer required whatever precisely it may have been that it gave us. We had all written things and made discoveries. I had taken my walks in the woods, and Priss had orgied with her college kids, and Harry had slept with Marcia and run off to New York, and we were pa
st all of that now, and that was all.
Today I came across the manuscript, and started reading it, and put it down while I changed and nursed Judith Elizabeth Kapp, and then returned to it. Then Priss came in carrying James Oliver Kapp and began reading the part I was done with while James Oliver gobbled his lunch from her.
“I forgot parts of it,” she said.
“Parts of what happened or parts of the book?”
“Both. Seems a long time.”
“It does.”
“Hard to believe we ever felt quite that way.”
“Yes.”
“Why did we stop writing?”
And I harked back (how often, after all, can one really hark back?) to the very first chapter, the mildly drunken night when we three decided to write a bestseller and become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. We had wondered then how we would know when the book was done, and I had said that we would keep going until it was long enough to publish, and until we had run out of story.
And that, it seems to me, is why we all stopped writing. Not because the book was long enough to publish, although I suppose it is, if in fact it’s publishable in the first place.
But because we really had run out of story. The story of the three of us had a beginning and a middle and an ending, and all of these elements are covered well enough, I think, in what we have written. After Harry came home the story had come to a conclusion.
And now we live happily ever after.
Which is how books ought to end, isn’t it?
Except that one does want loose ends tied together. One’s sense of neatness demands it, and there are certain things that ought to be put down in black and white on the off-chance that some eye other than our six eyes will someday scan this material.
First of all, Harry and I are married. It was Priss’ idea, interestingly enough. She felt that there was something artificial in the fact that she was married to Harry and I was not, that either both of us or neither of us should be his lawful wedded wife.
“But we can’t both be,” I said.
“Why not?”
“There are laws against bigamy.”
“There are laws against cocksucking,” she pointed out. “There are laws against opening a pack of cigarettes without tearing the tax stamp.”
“Where have you been? They stopped using those tax stamps on cigarettes years ago.”
“You know what I mean.”
“But bigamy-”
“Is what we’re involved in, in fact. Why not in name as well?”
“Wouldn’t it be easier for you and Harry to get divorced?”
“Why on earth would we want to do that?”
“Well, if you’re obsessed with the idea of the two of us on an equal footing, that might be easier.”
“Actually, it isn’t. There’s tons of legal crap to go through to get divorced. To get married, you just need a license and a blood test and some clod to marry you.”
“But Harry’s already married.”
“You keep saying that. But if you don’t tell the clod, how is he to know? They don’t check these things out, you know. It’s not like getting a passport where they go and consult the records. All you do-”
“Is get married.”
“Right.”
“Are you sure you’re feeling all right, Priss?”
“I’m positive. And it’s especially a good idea with the baby coming. You don’t want him to be illegitimate, do you?”
“I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Well, think about it.”
I thought about it. “Actually,” I said, “the kid’s going to have trouble enough anyway wondering why he’s got two mothers.”
“Which is precisely why he should damn well have a father. And since your child is going to be Harry’s actual child and not a cuckoo’s gift, that’s all the more reason why he should have the Kapp name.”
Enough. I do not want to report more of this conversation, or of the similarly inane conversation that took place when the proposal was broached to Harry. (Broached?) Suffice it to say (suffice? Where am I finding all these words?) that he thought it was a fine idea, and that I found it sufficiently appealing to my own overdeveloped sense of the ridiculous, so that ultimately, in my eighth month, Harry and I were united in holy if unlikely matrimony by a Universalistic minister in a nearby town. He pretended not to notice my condition, which of course was so overwhelmingly noticeable that I felt this was almost a rudeness on his part, but I didn’t object noisily.
Priss gave the bride away.
And about seven weeks later I gave birth to Judith Elizabeth, who is one of the two most beautiful babies ever born on this or any other planet, the other of the two being James Oliver, who appeared two weeks and three days later.
And we live happily ever after.
Mr. and Mrs. and Mrs. Harry Kapp. And family.
There will someday be problems. We all realize this, although we dwell on it as little as possible. Children, after all, ask embarrassing questions, and keep asking them until they get answers. But here, I think, our isolation helps us. Eventually the kids will learn that other families are structured rather differently from ours. There will no doubt be a certain amount of culture shock involved. But we are so close, and love each other so much, that I don’t doubt for a moment that it will all work out for the best in this best of all possible worlds, amen.
Meanwhile we share child-raising chores as if this were a sexual kibbutz, which perhaps it is. I sometimes nurse James, and Priss sometimes nurses Judy. Tit for tat, Harry calls it.
One thing does come to mind from time to time. At the present it’s wildly premature, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it, and I have mentioned it to Priss and Harry, and we all agree it’s something that will ultimately come to pass.
Sooner or later, James Oliver and Judith Elizabeth are going to want to screw each other.
Well, the hell with them. Let them write their own book.
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