“Yes. It wouldn’t be hard.”
“We would have to change our names and things if we were really going to get it published.”
“We can worry about that when it’s done. In the meantime we can write it absolutely straight. You can always change things around later on.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start, honestly.”
“At the beginning,” Harry said. “I was born in a trunk,” he sang, not much like Judy, God rest her soul. Harry is the worst sort of impressionist, incapable of either doing them well or refraining from doing them entirely. (That sounds rather nasty, doesn’t it? I do love Harry very much, and trust he knows it.)
“We would start about the time all of this got started,” I said. “When I first moved in on you.”
“And stopping when?”
“When the manuscript’s long enough to publish.”
“No, seriously.”
“Seriously. When it’s long enough and when we run out of story.”
“And we keep taking turns with the chapters? You and you and me and over and over again?”
“Uh-huh. Not that we have to have cardiac arrest if the order gets reversed somewhere along the way.”
“You and you and me,” I said, “and over and over again.”
Priss said, “Do we have to type it?”
“Longhand takes forever,” I said. “And nobody can read it. You type well enough, don’t you?”
“I was thinking about a tape recorder. Did you ever read a book called Talk? A girl wrote it, Linda, her last name was either Rosenkrantz or Guildenstern and I’ll never know which. Anyway, she was with some people out at Fire Island-”
“I’ll bet she was,” Harry said.
“Some art world types, I guess-”
“They’re the worst kind.”
“-and what she did was keep this tape recorder around and periodically during a conversation people would turn the recorder on and talk at it. A sort of prose version of cinema verite.”
I said it sounded terrible. Harry said it sounded like a good way to get the feel of spending a summer on Fire Island without getting sand in your navel or catching the clap. Priss said it actually worked out better than one might have thought. Priss is a little scatterbrained, but less so than she seems, praise God. (I do love Priss very much, and trust she knows it.)
“I think we should write it,” I said. “Type it, that is.”
“With a tape recorder,” Harry said, “we could probably do the whole thing in an evening.”
“We couldn’t do it at all.”
“Why?”
“Because we couldn’t open up. Inhibitions. I think I could type out things about our relationship-”
“I hate that fucking word, relationship.”
“What word do you prefer?”
“That’s the worst thing about it,” he said. “It makes itself indispensable. Everything else sounds like a euphemism, and why in the hell anybody needs a euphemism for relationship is beyond me. It’s infuriating.”
“-that I would be uptight about saying aloud, even to a tape recorder. Let alone to the two of you in person.”
“But we’ll read what each other writes, won’t we?”
“Not the same thing.”
“What’s the difference?”
“There’s a remove involved,” Harry told her. “Like fucking over the telephone.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever done that.”
“It’s fun, but if you get caught they take your phone out. And of course if the conversation crosses a state line it’s a federal offense.”
“The Mann Act, isn’t it?”
“Something like that.”
So with bright conversation of that sort we settled it. The book would be written. It would be in the form of a novel. We would take turns writing chapters, each of us writing in the first person from our own points of view. Of course, we would make up some conversation, because no one but Truman Capote remembers everything said to him word for bloody word (and I don’t believe he does, either, for that matter).
“And,” Harry emphasized, “we make it sexy.”
“It would be hard not to,” Priss said. “After all, sex is what it’s about, isn’t it?”
“Sex is what we’re about, love.”
“Sex,” Harry said, “is what sells.”
“Hear, hear.”
“Let’s all go upstairs,” Priss said, through an embryonic yawn, “and go to bed-”
“Hear, hear!”
“-and do unspeakable things to one another, and tomorrow you can start writing about them.”
“Who can?”
“You can,” Priss said, to me.
“I think we should draw lots,” I said. “I’m not entirely certain that I want to-what are you doing? Oh.”
This last was directed to Harry, who had taken up pad and pencil and who was sketching a suburban development. In other words, drawing lots.
“You go first,” Priss said, firmly. “You’re the writer.”
“Well, not exactly that.”
“And it was your idea.”
“Oh.”
So we went upstairs, and to bed, and whether the things we did to one another were speakable or not depends on your point of view, I would say.
And that was longer ago than yesterday, though not by much. I didn’t get directly to work on this. I tend to procrastinate. What you put off until tomorrow, I have found over the years, you frequently don’t ever have to do at all. Occasionally someone comes along and does it for you. Occasionally a problem you have been avoiding goes and solves itself.
But this book will not write itself, nor will anyone come along and write it for me. So I have done this much, to properly set the stage (while neatly splitting an infinitive, damn it) for the unfolding of the tale.
Things I don’t believe we voiced, but that we probably all of us know:
That the book is not primarily to make us wealthy, or to fill up idle hours, but to help us know some things about how we happened to each other, and the forms this happening took, and what it all means to all of us.
That the book is probably not entirely about sex, and that we ourselves are probably not entirely about sex, or are we?
What I would like to do now, I think, is end this prologue or preface or whatever the hell it is and go get another cup of coffee. Or maybe a drink. It’s almost four o’clock-it is a sort of house rule here not to take a drink before four o’clock, or to refuse one after. And my kidneys are floating already from all of the rotten coffee.
A drink, then.
Oh, first one thing. Priss wanted to know how long the chapters had to be. Long enough, Harry told her, to reach from the preceding chapter to the succeeding one. Like Abraham Lincoln’s legs.
A good answer, I think. And I think this chapter is long enough by those rules. I certainly hope it is, because it is unlikely to get any longer.
PRISS
Our house is in Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, at the crest of what we prefer to call a hill. The house itself was designed by an architect who had been overexposed to Swiss chalets. Everyone who ever visits us says that the house is charming. Harry has said (more than once) that if everyone says something is charming, then it isn’t.
I like where the house is more than I like the house. The countryside just rolls off away from one. Our landscaping has been largely a matter of letting Nature do what She wants. (Nature should be capitalized, just like God; They are, after all, the same thing, aren’t They?) Now and then Harry gets ambitious and buys a tree and plants it, and generally it lives, and each spring I tend to buy what nurserymen call bedding plants and bed them down hither and yon. These are annuals, which is as well, so that when they die, as they rather often do, I can comfort myself with the thought that they would have died anyway, come fall. I also, each fall, plant some bulbs. Never as many as I buy, though. And come spring fewer come up than I ’ve planted.
That morning, in middle March, I was especially conscious of Nature and all Her works. The winter had been a harsh one, and a lingering one, and in the country we feel weather and seasonal change far more acutely than we ever did in the city. Now the weather had bite to it yet, but was softening, warming. Crocuses were up, and snowdrops, and other cheery things whose names I never knew. The forsythia-we have acres of forsythia-were blindingly gold all over the place. Forsythia is so boring eleven months out of the year, and every March it makes my heart stop.