“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.