We all found ways, didn’t we, to run away from us?
You in the woods, Rhoda, and you to New York, Harry. But more than that we ran off to our secret selves and shut the rest of the world out.
As well as we have come to know each other, I keep finding out things about both of you that I did not know until I read what you have written. And I’m sure the reverse is equally true, because I find myself revealing things here that I kept to myself until now. This typewriter is like an analyst’s couch, it really is.
I don’t know if I should tell you this.
Probably not.
But I guess I will, anyway. I suppose I could always tear up what I’ve written if I decide that it is something I would rather hold within myself a little longer.
I could do that.
And write some other chapter in this one’s place.
If things had gone together in any other way, if any of I don’t know how many variables had not been just so, then it never would have happened. But that’s always the way, isn’t it? Everything that occurs in life is an extraordinary coincidence, and life itself is such a flaunting of the odds that it’s a miracle any of us exist at all.
This one afternoon, you see, I was in the grip of my Priscilla’s-Just-In-The-Way delusion.
Well, see, it’s a particularly natural delusion. Almost inescapable when one sees how well Rhoda and Harry get along together, and how much more they seem to have in common than either one has with me. When I look at the subject sanely, however, I realize that one of the things they have in common is that they’re both in love with me, and I realize further that in a very special way we exist as a trio and would not exist ever so well any other way.
I honestly believe God meant for people to sleep in threes. If He didn’t, it’s just because He didn’t think things through logically. It wouldn’t absolutely have to be our sort of trio. It could be the other sort, two men and a girl, and that would be nice, although not as nice for me, I don’t think, as this. But nicer than sleeping with just one person. Definitely nicer than that.
More than three would not be good.
More than three…
There were other things wrong with that afternoon. It was the end of June, when our weather is usually particularly good, but for the past week we had been having chilly air and more rain than we had any use for, and at the moment we were having both. I might have just tried walking around in the garden to shake my mood but the garden was only fit for walking if you had webbed feet, and I didn’t. (It’s just my two heads that made me odd.) So I said something about going shopping, dashed for the car, navigated the length of the driveway, and then drove aimlessly along.
I didn’t plan on going to any particular supermarket, but that’s one of the comforting things about life in America. If you drive in any distance for a little while you will come to a supermarket, indistinguishable to all intents and purposes from any other supermarket, and then you can buy something and take it home with you, whether you need it or not. So I didn’t have to drive toward a supermarket, or rather there was no way I could drive that wasn’t toward at least one of them, so all I had to do was sit back and enjoy the ride. It would have been more enjoyable if the windshield wipers had worked better, or if I hadn’t kept crying like an idiot for no good reason at all.
I never pick up hitchhikers.
Never in my life. Not because I’ve been afraid-most of the time around here the kids who try to hitch rides are around twelve years old, and don’t particularly scare me. But because it just never occurred to me, it never seemed to me to be the sort of thing I would be inclined to do.
Then why did I stop for these kids?
God alone knows. I certainly don’t. There’s a certain temptation that makes me want to say that I had the final outcome in mind, somewhere in mind, when I first took my foot off the gas pedal and eased it onto the brake. But I’ve been over it in my mind a thousand times since then and I just can’t believe it was the case. I saw them out there at the roadside getting wet, and there was something youthful and appealing about them as a group, the way they stood, their casual attitudes.
Let’s make a scene out of it. I want to get my own mind out of the way and put it down the way it happened. That should be easier.
Anything should be easier.
I saw them, five boys at the roadside, two of them thumbing valiantly at passing traffic, another bending over cupped hands to light a cigarette, two others reeling back playfully as if sideswiped by a passing car. I took my foot at once from the accelerator and applied the brake, thinking as I did so that the pavement was slippery, that today of all days was a bad time to risk stopping. But the car braked smoothly to a stop and the five of them ran up and pulled open the doors on the passenger side.
“How far are you going, ma’am?”
“Up the road a few miles. I don’t know exactly.”
An inane response, but it didn’t seem to bother them.
“Anything’s drier than out there,” one said, and they began to pile into the car. I watched them and was surprised to discover that one of them was a girl. They were all dressed alike in jeans and sweatshirts, and at a distance she had just looked like one of the boys. Now, with her long silky hair (soaked by the rain) and her pretty face, there was no mistaking her sex.
The girl and two of the boys got into the back seat. The other two boys sat in front.
“Certainly appreciate this, ma’am.”
“Nice car.”
“A lot drier in here than it is out there.”
“Hey, close the door, Mike.”
And off we went. How far were they going? As far as I was, they assured me. They went to college in New Hampshire and were on their way back to homes in Connecticut and Westchester County. They waited for me to pursue this conversationally, and I didn’t, not being overwhelmingly interested, and then their conversation started up again on its own, between them and excluding me, and I preferred it that way. I could listen to them talk about people and incidents that meant nothing to me, could let my ears take a bath in their conversation, absorbing the feel and texture of it as if it were being conducted in a foreign language, its meaning of no interest to me at all.
I found myself watching them.
In the rear-view mirror, first of all. The girl sat between the two boys, and seemed to be close to the one on her left; he had an arm around her, and periodically drew her over for a kiss. She kissed him in front of the others with no apparent embarrassment, which I thought was nice, and rather sweet and open.
Then the boy on her right said, “My turn, now, Glory,” and she giggled and leaned over and kissed him. It was not a little puppy kiss, either; I could see them in the mirror, and their mouths were open and it looked as though he had his hands on her breasts. They held the kiss for a few moments and then she relaxed again in the first boy’s embrace.
I looked at the two boys on the seat beside me. The one sitting next to the door had a long dark face with sharp features. His hair was dark and moderately shaggy, and he had a beard about two inches wide that swept down from his sideburns to his chin. His neck, cheekbones, and moustache were clean-shaven. The boy next to me had straight blonde hair halfway to his shoulders and no beard. His face was very open and he was cute rather than handsome; he looked like a hip version of David Eisenhower.
I glanced at them in the mirror, and at the boy beside me, and then with as little will and forethought as I had shown in stopping for them in the first place, and even less in the way of good judgment, I took my right hand from the steering wheel and put it in his lap.
He started as if an electric current had passed through his body. Perhaps it had. I put my hand right on his groin and watched him out of the corner of my eye. He turned his head and his eyes met mine. At first his expression was guarded, unsure, and then I turned slightly toward him and let a smile bloom on my lips, and his features relaxed and he smiled in return.
In the rear-view mirror I saw one of the boys petting with the girl while the other was idly patting her thighs and talking about his finals.
I let my fingers play on my new friend’s crotch. He began to rise to the occasion, and when I felt his penis growing in his pants I experienced an overpowering wave of excitement, almost driving the car off the road. He squirmed in his seat, and the next moment the boy on his right, next to the door, looked over and saw what was going on.
“Christ,” he said, quietly.
From the rear: “What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“What are you Christing about?”
“Jimmie’s got himself a girlfriend, that’s all.”
JIMMIE: “Will you for the love of God shut up?”
THE GIRL: “Oh, really? Oh, wow!”
I wanted to take my hand away. I wanted to think of a light way to pass all this off as a joke.
I kept my hand where it was.
The mood grew sexy in the extreme. The girl had gotten up from the back seat and was leaning over the front, commenting with interest on my manipulation of Jimmie. One of the boys had his arms around her from the back and was handling her breasts, and she kept giggling and telling the rest of us just what he was doing and just how it made her feel. I opened Jimmie’s zipper and put my hand inside, and he let me fumble around for a while and then extricated himself from his underwear and let me take hold of him. He had a good-sized penis, long and very slender, and I stroked him and moved my hand up and down on the shaft and was rewarded with an intake of breath from the back seat and a moan from Jimmie.
The girl said, “We’ve just got to call you something besides ma’am, ma’am.”
“Priss.”
“Is that short for something?”
“Priscilla.”
“Groovy. Well, I’m Gloria called Glory, and I’m presently being felt up by Ken and Robbo, and that’s Mike on the other side of the door, being left out, and that’s Jimmie that you’ve got your hand wrapped around, and I think he likes it. You’re absolutely out of sight, Priss.”
One of the boys in the back said, “Let’s have an orgy.”
“We’re having one, stupid.”
“I mean really.”
“Out of sight.”
“I wish the rain would stop. We could get high and ball in somebody’s field.”
“You dig to get high, Priss?”
“Yeah, Priss, do you dig grass?”
“Why not?”
“You hear it? Why not? Right on, Priss.”
“But this is like too cold and wet for fucking in cornfields.”
“I’ll bet you never fucked in a cornfield.”
“Would you believe a wheatfield?”
“No.”
“Would you believe a hayloft?”
“No.”
“Well, would you believe the locker room at half-time?”
“Wow!”
“Right on!”
There was a Holiday Inn coming up on the left. There always is. If you go off in any direction you’ll come to a Holiday Inn in the time it takes you to pass three supermarkets. I braked and swung the car around to the left with as little planning as I had taken in stopping for the five of them in the first place. I pulled the car to a stop and took my hand from Jimmie. I opened the door.
“Wait here,” I said. “I’ll get us a room.”
While I checked in at the desk, hoping that the room clerk wouldn’t find out what I was checking in with, it occurred to me that it might have been a sage move to take the car keys with me. All Jimmie had to do was tuck himself into his pants and turn the key in the ignition and I would be stuck at a Holiday Inn by myself, with no way to get home and no plausible explanation for my presence there.
Of course the car was still there, and the kids in it. Kids? They must have been nineteen or twenty, the same approximate age Rhoda and I had been when, in a sense, this entire story got started in the first place. Kids? I was no more than a decade older than them, and sometimes that seemed very much older indeed, and sometimes it did not.
The room was around the back on the first floor, and like all of the rooms at the better new models, it had a pair of double beds.
You wouldn’t believe what a great idea that is.
We smoked an impressive quantity of marijuana. I hadn’t had any in ages, but there are certain things you don’t forget once you learn them, like swimming or riding a bicycle or balling your roommate, and getting stoned is another of these. It came back to me easily enough. I drew smoke deep into my lungs and let myself tune in on myself, let everything spread out and get loose and easy.
I thought, suddenly, of Rhoda and Harry. How long would I be gone? Would anyone worry? Would they be upset?
If I happened to die in that motel room, I decided, then Rhoda and Harry would get married and live happily ever after. My eyes misted over at the thought, and then suddenly the mood was gone and I was laughing at my own sense of melodrama. Someone asked me what was so funny.
“Everything,” I said. “Everything is very groovy.”
“You’re stoned.”
“Right on!”
Artlessly, and charmingly, everyone began to take off clothing. There was no sense of striptease about this, nor was there the feeling that one should avoid watching the procedure. I watched as Glory and the boys got undressed, and I also got undressed, and someone passed me another joint and I took another drag on it, and I passed it on, knowing that I was already about as high as I had to be.
My mind was nicely compartmentalized. I was completely loose and open and at the same time felt wholly in control of myself. And I thought that what I really wanted to do was blow this control, get out past it, beyond it, so that I was no longer in control of myself and my body could do what it wanted to do. This never did quite happen, but I don’t suppose I was unduly handicapped by it all. I certainly didn’t feel repressed or anything of the sort. Not at all.
No.
I was very interested in Gloria’s body. Not in the sense that I wanted her, but that I felt the two of us to be in some sort of friendly competition, like the United States and Canada. She was a short girl, and quite slender, but with surprisingly large breasts for her slender frame. She seemed to be utterly unselfconscious about her body in a way that would have been miles beyond me at that age. She went from boy to boy, kissing each in turn, being enfolded in one set of arms after another, being touched now by two or three of them at a time, and throughout it all being absolutely at ease with them and with me and with herself.
One of the boys kissed me, and I closed my eyes and let him lead me over to the bed. I lay down with him and took his penis in my hands. I felt other hands on me, and another penis pressing against me.
I can’t quite describe what happened next.
Everything happened next.
Right now I can’t bear to think about it How long were we there? An hour, two hours. No more than that.
An hour, two hours.
I fucked all four of the boys, and most of them more than once. It was mostly a matter of turn-taking, one of them being with me while the others watched, but once or twice there were more than one with me at a time, one in my cunt and another in my mouth, different combinations.
I don’t really remember exactly what we did, nor do I remember any differences between the boys. I cannot picture their faces (or any other parts of them) very clearly now in my mind, and can relate them to their individual names and attitudes only by recalling their position in the car, not their roles in the bedroom.
When I wasn’t doing anything active, I sometimes watched them balling Glory. She seemed to get tremendous pleasure out of sex, and to be equally agreeable to whatever the boys had in mind for her, which led me to conclude that she could look forward to a lifetime of uninterrupted popularity. But the poor child seemed incapable of orgasm. She just didn’t come.
How sad.
I, on the other hand, seemed able to come at will.
When the boys had run out of equipment, it was somebody’s idea that Glory and I make love so that they all could watch. This was, let me admit it, an idea that had already occurred to me, although I would not have thought to suggest it. I found the idea very exciting. Her fine body, hostess like my own to all of these boys, as though thus far this afternoon she and I had used them as proxies to ball each other from a distance. Her body, stained with sweat and semen, seemed particularly desirable. And there must have been a small element of challenge there, too; she had not come all afternoon, and for all I knew had not come in all her life, and I felt capable of changing that.
“A fun idea,” I said.
Glory’s eyes turned wary. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
I took a step toward her, smiling.
“I’ve never done that,” she said.
“First times can be fun.”
“Have you ever?”
“Yes.”
“And you want to?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want to do, exactly? I mean-”
“Why don’t you just lie down and see what happens?”
“You want to, you know, to do me?”
“I want to eat you.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“Why not say it?”
“I-”
I was enjoying this perhaps more than I should have. It amused me to see the gloss of her exterior shattered by a network of doubt and indecision. It amused me, too, to sense the undercurrent of excitement that transfigured the four boys. I put my hands on Glory’s shoulders and gave her a gentle push. She rolled back on the bed. Pushover, I thought. Priscilla Roundheels Kapp and Glory Pushover.
“Because I wouldn’t, uh, do it to you, I don’t think,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think I could.”
“Who asked you to?”
“Just to put it on record, I mean. I don’t want to seem uptight or anything but I just-”
“Shhhh.”
She closed her mouth and lay down, still unbelievably tense and nervous about the whole thing. I lay down alongside her and lost myself in her flesh. The boys were there, breathing hard, tuned in with what was going on, but I closed my eyes and they faded from the picture. There was just this fine female body, this equivalent of my own self when Rhoda and I first found each other.
Memory trips.
I tried, God, I tried. And she came so very close, worked up to a feverish pitch, came indeed so close that missing it was frustrating for her in a way that her couplings with the boys had not been. There orgasm had never loomed on her horizon, so not getting there had not diminished her fun. But this time, when she finally and irretrievably missed it, when I looked up at her and read frustration in her eyes, I could see that she could not be left this way, that she had to make it, had to get where she was trying so hard to go.
There was a way.
There’s always a way.
“Your turn,” I said.
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes.”
“But I said.”
“I know what you said.”
“But-”
“Fuck what you said.”
The color drained from her lace. She looked at me, trying to see in my face some indication that I was kidding, and she didn’t see anything of the sort. Because I wasn’t. She opened her mouth to say something and had nothing to say, and just went on gaping at me.
To the four of them I said, “Glory is going to do me now. But you’ll have to help her.”
And they did.
She didn’t want to let them. They held her by the arms and positioned her over me, and one of them caught up her hair in his hand and pushed her face into position, and she said “No, no,” in a defeated little voice, and then she did what she was supposed to do.
I didn’t really feel a thing. It wasn’t for me, it was completely selfless, it was for her.
Of course it worked.
She came with a little shrill cry, shook and trembled and sighed. I think she may have lost consciousness for a moment but I can’t be sure. Then she looked up at me, her face one I had not seen before, her expression equal parts of fear and wonder and delight.
The boys did not say a word. They were lost, and were bright enough to know it. I told them to dress and wait for us in the car. They put on their clothes in silence and got out of the room.
She said, “I was afraid, Priss.”
“Of course.”
“I guess that must have been what I was afraid of.”
“I think so, yes.”
“Am I-?”
“Don’t look for labels.”
“But I screw every boy in the world and nothing happens, and now-”
“You’ll come with boys, too. It’s a matter of knowing how. Now you know how, and everything’ll work out.”
“Even if it doesn’t, at least I know something about myself.”
“Yes.”
“Will I see you again?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Probably not.”
I told her some other things, and stroked her hair, and she put her arms around me and kissed my mouth and told me she loved me, which I guess she did. And I told her I loved her, and I guess I did, too.
The boys were waiting in the car. I dropped them all at a place where they could conveniently hitch a ride. Then I drove home again. I never did stop at a supermarket, but no one seemed to notice.
That was the only time, the only straying from the straight and narrow primrose path. One might say that it was sufficient. But it was the only time.
I would have liked not to have mentioned it. Months have passed, and I have lived perfectly adequately without mentioning it, and would gladly leave it forever unmentioned. I have not seen any of them again, Glory or the four boys. I do not want to see them again. I have no idea what has become of any of them, and while I wish only the best for Glory, it would suit me perfectly well never to hear anything of or from her for the rest of my life.
So why bring this up?
Because.
Oh, shit, let us blurt this out and be done with it. Once upon a fine summer day, a very fine and very summery day, I stood mixing martinis when Rhoda appeared wearing a tentative smile upon her face.
“I have something to tell you,” she said, “and I don’t know how to begin.”
“Just plunge right in,” I said. “Here, have a drink.”
“I think I need one. Yes, indeed I do. All right, all I can do is jump right in and say it.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m pregnant.”
I looked at her. She looked at me, and away, and at me again.
“Harry’s,” she said.
“Of course.”
“There was no one else.”
“Of course not.”
“I know the two of you wanted to have children and couldn’t, and I don’t know how you’ll feel about this, and I haven’t said anything to Harry about it, and if you want I suppose I could get rid of this baby, if you hate the whole idea of it, I mean I could understand that, Priss, believe me I could-”
I poured myself another drink.
“-but I almost died last time I had an abortion, although of course I would find a better doctor this time around, but I probably never will get a chance to have a kid again, and I was always convinced I didn’t want one but now I think I would, in fact I know I would, and I don’t know what to say or what to do.”
“How long have you known?”
“A week. I’m about two months along. I had a rabbit test and killed the rabbit. There’s no question about it. All the signs, sore breasts, nausea in the mornings, the whole pregnancy trip. I’m enceinte, all right.”
“I thought you were taking pills.”
“I thought there was no need. Harry said-”
“He was convinced he was sterile in spite of the tests because he knew I got knocked up before we met.”
“I’m a damned fool.”
“It’s all right.”
“Priss? How do you feel about it?”
How did I feel about it? An inevitable question. Also an impossible question, for more reasons, Rhoda, than you knew at the time.
And for one more reason than you knew after I answered your question.
“I feel strange,” I said.
“Do you want me to have the abortion?”
“No.”
“If you wanted, I would let you and Harry adopt the child. You could bring it up as your own and I would go away. Or I would leave now and have the baby away from here, and Harry would never have to know about it. Or-”
“You couldn’t leave the baby with us.”
“Not if you don’t want it, but-”
“It’s not that.”
She looked at me. I felt lightheaded and thought I might faint at any moment.
“I couldn’t possibly take care of two of them,” I said.
She stared at me. And I at her.
“You don’t mean-”
“I do mean.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Yes, literally. But I’m telling the truth.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“Quite.”
“How far?”
“About the same as you.”
“God in Heaven.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Harry won’t believe this.”
“Probably not.”
Oh God, Harry, what can I say? I should have gone out without a word and had an abortion. I know that. But something wouldn’t let me, because I couldn’t really be absolutely sure that the cake in my oven was not baked by you. The odds are very strong the other way, certainly. All those years of fruitless effort, and then a tasteless gangbang with four faceless young men, and suddenly Guess Who’s Preggers?
Of course everybody knows couples who tried and tried and nothing happened, and then they adopted a baby and immediately the wife got pregnant. I mean, a change in the emotional climate can have that effect. And God knows that the emotional climate around here has been changing right and left.
But.
Yeah, but. I don’t know what to say. But you thought it was great, Harry, that your wife and your mistress-in-residence were both infanticipating simultaneously, and how could I tell you that, while your mistress was having your child, your beloved faithful wife was having someone else’s?
I should never have written this chapter, and now having written it I should tear it up.
But I won’t.