“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.”