Priss, honey, when you make a mistake, it’s a beaut.
Properly speaking, it’s not my turn to write a chapter. It’s Harry’s turn, and one of these days he’s going to write one, as soon as he bestirs himself. But in the meantime I want to write a few lines if only because it seems as though this is the only way we are presently able to communicate. No one is speaking to any appreciable extent. We pass each other in the halls and nod and grunt and stare vacantly past one another, and we seem to be using the typewriter for conversational purposes, which may be better than not communicating at all, but I’m not absolutely sure of that.
Nothing to be done about it. The moving finger wrote, and having writ, etc.
I’m not entirely certain, Priss, that it was wholly wise of you to go into your mea culpa number. (If Mia Farrow married Robert Culp, it wouldn’t be my fault.) Not that I entirely blame you, either. For doing it, or for telling, or even for telling in such a novel way.
But I’m sorry, all things considered, that we had to get involved in writing this stupid book in the first place. I had the idea and sold the two of you on it, and we all found out more than we wanted to learn and disclosed more than we wanted to give out, and I’m not happy about it and neither is anybody else. I think one problem here is the universal delusion that people are better off knowing unpleasant truths, however unpleasant they may be. I think this derives from the same frame of mind which believes that medicine must taste bad to accomplish anything.
And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
Bullshit.
The truth will make you split up, that’s what the truth will do.
But when you think of it objectively (as if that were remotely possible) what is so desperate about the situation? It is not that Priss went out and did these things with these boys and this girl that is so disturbing, but that she seems to have come home with more than she set out with. Is that so terrible? We don’t really know, Harry, that the baby isn’t yours. I’m inclined to suspect that it might be. In any case, it’s Priss’, and my baby is yours, and I have a feeling I’m not helping things.
But I for one don’t think I can handle too much more of this moping, and I’m less affected by it than either of you two. Priss walks around constantly consumed by guilt and seems to have given up food entirely, which can’t be having the best possible effect on her unborn child. Harry gets up early each morning and spends twelve or fourteen hours Out Back, then comes inside and drinks himself into a stupor, finally falling asleep on the living room couch. Priss starves herself and chain-smokes and vomits a lot, gagging over the toilet far into the night, and ultimately cries herself to sleep in the bed the three of us used to share. And I am once again in the guest room, feeling like the least wanted of guests, and sleeping alone, since no one seems very much interested in me.
I mean, let’s cut the shit, huh? It’s just not that bad, nothing’s this bad. We’ve got a good thing going, team. We love each other.
Aw, gee, fellas HARRY
Hotel Royalton
44 West 44th Street
New York, New York 10036
Mrs. and Mrs. Harry Kapp
Elysium Fields, Massachusetts
Dear Girls:
Sorry to disappear like that, doing my thief in the night routine, folding my tent like an Arab (typecasting!) and stealing away. That was what? A week ago? Something like that.
I just couldn’t make it any longer, as the bishop said to the actress, and I just couldn’t take any more of it, as the actress said to the bishop. And so I had the feeling that it was incumbent upon me to remove myself from the fray before I myself became as frayed as a collar.
I called you a couple of times but managed to get the receiver back on the hook before anybody picked up the phone at your end. So in case you were worried that a telephone pervert had glommed onto our number, set your mind at ease. The only telephone pervert on the scene is your darling boy Harold.
I never did write my chapter, did I? I seem to remember that it was my turn, but somehow I wasn’t in the mood to hammer away at a typewriter. Nor, for that matter, did I have anything to say. I seemed to have run out of story, and the only thing that prevented me from typing something about all of us living happily ever after was my inability to believe that this was what would happen.
Ah, ye of little faith Use this as a chapter, if you wish. It’s being handwritten, because there’s no typewriter in this fairly sybaritic version of a monastic cell (catch all this goyische symbolism, do you believe it?) but I’m sure one of you clever ladies can type it up neatly enough. I’ve got a full supply of pens and the desk here is overflowing with this tacky but serviceable stationery, so let’s have at it, huh?
I got to the city around ten-thirty in the morning after I don’t know how many days of moping and drinking. I thought about getting out for a couple of days before I left, and decided finally that the only way to get everything together was to separate myself from you two for a while. So I came here, leaving the Chevy at the station. I had a suitcase filled with a few changes of socks and underwear, an extra suit, a couple of shirts, and the few things I need in order to get any work done.
I remember standing in Grand Central looking down at the suitcase and wondering where to go next. My mind was not at its absolute all-time sharpest, still aslosh with too much stale booze.
I went to a telephone and called Marcia Goldsmith.
“It’s Harry,” I said.
“Hello, Harry.”
“I’m in town. Can I come over?”
“It’s not Wednesday, is it?”
“No, but-”
“Because I set my calendar by you. You’re my one constant in a changing world. If I can’t count on you to appear on Wednesday and only on Wednesday, my Gawd, baby, what can I count on?”
“All you can count on are your fingers,” I sang, “unhappy Little Girl Blue.”
“They don’t write songs like that anymore.”
“They don’t.”
“I mean I dig the new music, but can you see them ten years from now cuddling on couches and getting misty-eyed listening to Blood, Sweat and Tears?”
“Never happen.”
“You know it. ‘All you can count on are the raindrops, falling on you, old girl you’re through-’”
“Okay to come up?”
“What day is it?”
“I think it’s Monday.”
“The first Monday of the month?”
“I don’t-no, as a matter of fact it’s the second Monday of this particular month. Why?”
“You may come up, baby.”
I carried my suitcase outside and got a cab up to her place. When she opened the door I said, “Why?”
“I give up. Why what?”
“Suppose it was the first Monday of the month.”
“Then you couldn’t come up.”
“Why not?”
“Because on the first Monday of every month I have to ball my landlord.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“Well, I don’t mean there’s a clause in the lease or anything, but we have this understanding.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“Not true.”
“A once-a-month arrangement. What do you get for it?”
“Fucked, usually. Sometimes eaten first. Also very respectful glances from the super. Presents at Christmas time and my birthday.”
“When’s your birthday?”
“April.”
“You’re really telling me the truth?”
“Sure.” She stepped back and looked at me. “Baby, it’s a great apartment at a bearable rental and to keep it I’d fuck King Kong in Macy’s window, and anyway just because he’s a landlord doesn’t make him a drag. You have to be careful with labels. Suppose he called, and I told him no, it’s Wednesday, every Wednesday I have to ball my collaborator. My cartoonist, I have to throw it to him on Wednesdays. What’s the matter, baby?”
“Nothing. Just seeing new sides to your lifestyle, that’s all. First Monday of every month? No more and no less?”
“Right. I like schedules.”
“You have many arrangements like this?”
“Every Rosh Hashanah,” she said, “I blow the chauffeur.”
I think, somewhere in the back of my mind, had been an idea of settling in with Marcia for a time. I had never precisely fitted lyrics to this particular tune, but I suspect I would have had to have had it in mind (have had to have had?) in order to schlep my suitcase over there.
I believe it was you, Priss, who said something about resenting the idea that people have lives of their own when away from one. I didn’t resent this of Marcia, I didn’t even in my mind have that type of claim on her, or want to, but the revelation that her life did hold other interests besides my Wednesday visits shook off any thought I may have had of locating there.
We smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of coffee and threw a lot of brittle humor back and forth before we finally wound up in the feathers, and the preliminaries for a change turned out to be way out in front of the main event. I just couldn’t get with it. We wrestled around for quite a while to no particular purpose, until finally she looked up at me and tried to touch her eyebrows to her hairline.
“All in all,” she said, “I have the feeling that I do not have one hundred percent of your attention.”
“All in all,” I said, sounding like W.C. Fields, “I would rather be in Philadelphia.”
“Who’s in Philadelphia?”
The hippest of ladies have their insecurities.
“Nobody’s in Philadelphia,” I said. “That’s what he had on his tombstone. That was his whatchamacallit, his epitaph.”
“Then that’s the right place for it. A man has an epitaph, his tombstone is where you should put it. Who?”
“Huh?”
“The corpse in Philly. Who are we talking about?”
I did the imitation again.
“Who’s it supposed to be?”
“Oh, shit.”
“I’m supposed to recognize it?”
I wanted to die. “W.C. Fields.”
“Doesn’t sound at all like him.”
“Goddam aggressive castrating bitch.”
She cupped me in a gentle hand, gazed ruefully down. “Don’t blame it on me, baby,” she said. “Either you’ve only got it on Wednesdays, or else somebody did the job on you before you got anywhere near here.”
A little later I checked into the hotel and called Peggy from my room. We went through the but-it’s-only-Monday routine and I asked if she had any money for me. She did, and I went over to her office and picked up a check and went over to her bank and cashed it.
Then I called a call girl (that’s how they named them) and went over to her apartment and got laid. To prove I could do it, I guess. I did it. Hurrah for me.
Oh, the hell with this. What I did, where I went, who I saw. None of this matters. I’ve spent most of my time doing nothing, as a matter of fact. I see movies. I pick up paperback novels and I seem to read them because eventually I get to the last page without any particular recollection of what was on the first page, or any of the intervening pages.
I draw cartoons. Nothing seems funny, but the work gets done just the same, which is idiotic but true. And the work seems to come out about the same. Peggy, who tells me if things stink, looked the other morning at what I’ve done since I’ve been in town, and pronounced everything up to my usual standard.
“But nothing seems funny to me,” I told her.
“That’s because you’re depressed.”
“I know I’m depressed, but the cartoons-”
“Are funny. I’m not depressed, and neither am I manic, Harry, so take my word for it.”
I took her word for it.
What else do I do? Think about you two, endlessly, over and over. I don’t call Marcia, or the call girl, or any other call girls, or any other Marcias, or anyone, because when all is said and done I do not want any of those people. I sit here and I think about you two and I just run it all through my mind over and over again.
I want to come home.
Because I belong to both of you, and you to me, and you to each other, and everything. And this is true, or at least I perceive it to be true, in a way that it wasn’t, or I didn’t perceive it, before.
(Rhoda, when you type this letter into a chapter, you have my full permission to translate that last sentence into something more readily comprehensible.)
This part of the letter will be awkward, and perhaps as difficult to understand as it is to write, which is very difficult indeed. I sort of know what I mean, but that in itself is a lot like my W.C. Fields impression-if no one else gets the message, then I have somehow failed.
I want the kids. Both of the kids, because they will, after all, both be ours. They’ll both be mine, as far as that goes. When I think about it, when I really sit down and think it all the way through, I have trouble understanding why I was so completely shook up by the fact that Priss went out and got herself laid and relayed and parlayed by the four young nonentities. Why should it matter? We are all of us very complicated people, reacting in unusual ways to unusual stresses. If Priss is right and God did mean people to sleep in threes-and I think she may well be right-the fact remains that it takes rather unusual and atypical people to perceive this Divine Plan, and to act forcefully upon it. And if complicated people occasionally slip off the track and do a little sleeping around, why should other complicated people-people given to occasional sleeping around of their own-react as I did?
Of course it was the fact of pregnancy that made the difference. I was bubbling in a special way, you know, the goddam king of the virility mountain, sitting high and mighty in my pseudo-chalet waiting for you both to bear my children. And I can see now that over the years I was very carefully repressing very real disappointment over the fact that Priss and I seemed incapable of reproducing ourselves.
I always wanted kids. I like kids, they laugh at jokes that grownups know aren’t funny, they listen to silly stories with big eyes, they provide a person with the ultimate ego trip. But I decided, well, all right, we can’t have any, the hell with it, if we can’t have them then I don’t want them. The grapes must be sour, right? Out-of-reach grapes might as well be sour, the fox was right.
Harry, I told myself over the years, told myself in a voice I learned not to listen to, forget what the doctors say, forget the idea that there’s nothing really wrong with either of you, that your mutual infertility is some sort of allergy. Harry, bubbeleh, anybody who is anything of a stud can get his wife pregnant. There’s something wrong with your seed, Harry. It doesn’t move fast enough, Harry, it doesn’t seek out and attack, it’s not sufficiently aggressive. It, Harry, like you yourself, Harry, lacks balls.
So I wouldn’t even let myself think about adopting kids. Stupid, right? Neurotic, no?
All right. Obviously I can father children, and have proved as much with you, Rhoda. And Priscilla can bear them, and has proved as much herself. And in a very real sense we could think of Priss’ baby as the product of artificial insemination, except that we’ll be getting a better kid than we would if a doctor and a hypodermic needle served as the inoculating medium. A cock, after all, whoever is attached to it, is simply a more natural impregnating device than a hypodermic needle. It gives the sperm a chance to swim upstream like salmon, and for the best sperm to win.
Did you know, for example, that artificial insemination isn’t used for racehorses anymore? They found out that although it was easy and economical and everything, it did not produce fast horses.
I’m getting way off the track, like a slow horse. What I mean is that it has taken me a circuitous route to reach this conclusion, but that when all is said and done you are both of you my wives, and you are both bearing my children, and whatever happened in some fucking Holiday Inn-and I use the adjective for descriptive purposes-that whatever happened, the hell with it, and if anything I’m glad it happened. I was shook at the time, but that’s my problem, and the hell with it.
I want to come home.
But first I wanted to get all of this written out, and put in a letter, and send you the letter and let you receive it and ponder it before I leave this place. For one thing, in the past two days I seem to have tapped a vast underground pool of creative energy. I’m doing some cartoons unlike anything I’ve done before, some very weird and bittersweet stuff, not my usual sort of thing at all either in theme or mood or drawing style. They aren’t funny in the usual sense, nor are they supposed to be. I haven’t shown them to anyone. I’ll show them to you when I get home. God knows what I’ll do with them, whether they’ll turn out to be commercial or not, but they do seem to represent some sort of creative growth for me, and I’m finding this very exciting. I had leveled off a long time ago, as people do sooner or later, and it’s a great surprise for me to find out that I still have the capacity to find new ways of seeing things and translate them into new forms of work.
I just took a lunch break at the health food restaurant around the corner. I had a vegetarian lamb chop. It tasted just like the vegetarian pork chop I had yesterday. I also had a pint of carrot juice, and now I’m topping it all off with a cigarette. There’s a limit to this health shit.
I want to finish this now and get it in the mail. And then I’ll wait, I guess, until one of you calls or writes and says that it’s okay to come home.
I miss you both.
How special we all are, and in such a special way. The separation helps me realize this. So much of the specialness masqueraded at first as sheer sex, the almost infinite expansion of possibilities for variety, the exhilaration of interacting as three rather than two. So much of it, too, derived I think from the sense that all of this was forbidden.
But there is far more to us than that, isn’t there?
I must end this. I will go downstairs and purchase a stamp and entrust this to the mercies of the U.S. mails. What an act of faith that is, incidentally! One drops an envelope into a metal box and takes it for granted that it will get where it is supposed to.
Enough. I love you and you. I love our babies to be. Our babies.
God bless us every one, as Small Timothy put it. My sentiments exactly.
Love and love,
Harry