by Doug Sanford
Then she said it, and everything clicked into place.
“Why not? Something really important occurred to me after he left last night: I’ve been sharing Bart with you all this time—even back in Tucson. I didn’t actually know that, but I have been, and it doesn’t seem to have affected how Bart and I feel about each other. It certainly doesn’t seem to have affected how you two feel about each other. At least if we live together, we save gas.”
I was stunned. I’d never thought about it that way.
“Marc,” she continued, “there are things Bart gets from you that I can’t give him. His snoring drives me crazy, and his need to be so close all the time just isn’t my style. I’m perfectly happy sitting next to him like this and feeling close, but I’m not the type to be always holding his hand or putting my arm on his shoulder, or squeezing his neck—the way I’ve seen you do with him tonight, without even thinking about it.”
She turned. “It’s not something I could give you, Bart, even though I do love you very much.”
“That reminds me of my mother, Les. She loves me, and I know it, but she’s not outwardly very affectionate. Damn, that sounds almost sick.”
“Oh, here we go,” I said. “Back to Earnest.”
Leslie finished my thought: “How does it go? All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”
“At least you had the good sense to fall in love with an English major, Bart. I think we have some interesting times ahead of us.”
“It’s more applicable than you know, Marc—I’m sorry, I just can’t get used to the idea of calling you old man. Bart’s mother and mine are pretty similar, from what Bart’s told me and from what I saw the couple of times we met. Neither his mom nor mine is very demonstrative, but while I take after my mother, Bart, you don’t take after yours at all. In fact, you’re pretty much the opposite.”
“Your mom did seem a bit formal, Les, when I met her and your dad at Christmas, but I thought it was just because she didn’t know me.”
“She’s that way pretty much all the time. Neither of our mothers needs or shows much overt affection. Unfortunately for you, I take after my mother. I love you, but I know I’m not as expressive as you want me to be. You don’t take after your mother. You express your feelings much more than I do, and you need to be shown affection in a way I couldn’t satisfy.
“In fact that’s something I’ve worried about almost since we first met—that I wouldn’t be able to give you what you need in that area. While we were just sleeping together and dating, it didn’t matter. But married? I think you’d find pretty quickly that you’d want what I couldn’t provide.
“But with Marc around, I don’t have to provide it. He gives you that and a lot more. Just the few times I’ve seen it this evening, Bart, when Marc touches you, it’s like you melt a bit. It might not be obvious to others, but I can see it in your face and your body. It’s so clear to me that you need having that physical contact, and it’s not something I do naturally. I’m probably not explaining this very well.”
“It always comes back to that, huh?” I said. “I’m the parent-substitute again.” I smiled.
“Hey, old man, I better not feel about my mother the way I feel about you,” he smiled. “That would be illegal.”
“This whole thing sounds really crazy and way too easy,” he said.
“Don’t delude yourself. It’s not going to be easy at all,” Leslie said, reverting to what sounded like a classroom voice. How odd that Bart, the son of two teachers, should end up with two lovers who were also teachers—well, one a former teacher.
“This is no Noel Coward comedy. It’s not Design for Living. It’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of understanding, but, like Gilda, I believe that if we want it badly enough, we could do it. Raise your hand if you want it to happen.”
Three hands went up.
Bart, sitting between us, with a big smile on his face, spun around on the sofa so his legs and feet were in my lap and his head was in hers.
“I’m liking this more and more,” he said.
It was a position in which the three of us were to find ourselves many, many times in the coming years. Different sofas, different houses, but Bart lying between the two of us, head in her lap, feet, appropriately enough, in mine.
The doorbell rang.
“Damn,” said Bart. “There’s dinner. Just as I was getting comfortable.”
He got up and answered the door.
Chapter 29
“I think I’m still hungry,” I said. “And I know I’m thirsty. More wine.”
“There’s no more food, and we’ve gone through two bottles already,” Bart said.
“To quote The Boys in the Band, ‘Two’s company; three’s a ménage.’ Bring on the ménage.”
“In all this time, I’ve never seen you drunk, old man. I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“Sure, I’ve had it in me, and it’s also been in Leslie, and I’ve been in you. But I haven’t been in Leslie. Hope you’ll excuse me, ma’am, if I decline. Who have you been in, Leslie?”
“Marc, stop that. Get hold of yourself.”
“I think he’s too far gone for that,” she said laughing.
“Miss Leslie, do you know how happy you’ve made me tonight? No more a long-lost stepbrother or an au-pair man.”
“What?” asked Leslie.
“I’ll explain later,” said Bart. “Come on, Marc. You’re going to bed.”
Who knows what else I might have said. That’s just pieced together from what I vaguely remember and some of what they told me the next day.
After a bit of a struggle requiring both of them, apparently, they got me into bed where I immediately passed out.
Bart didn’t take Leslie home that night. In fact, she never went home again—at least not to stay.
They sat up for a while talking and then went to bed in the guest room. Bart wasn’t willing to leave me alone in the house for fear I might get up in the middle of the night and hurt myself, and she agreed. At least that night, somehow, she managed to put up with his snoring.
The next morning my head hurt, but I had no other ill effects. I might have been drunk, but I was clearly able to remember why I had been drunk: pure joy.
A ménage à trois. The three of us in one household. The solution to our problem. I knew about ménages. They were often used as plot devices in plays and novels and maybe feasible for artists or actors or politicians, but I didn’t think things like that went on for regular people in everyday life. In all the silly scenarios that we’d devised for our future, we’d never considered something as obvious as that.
And Leslie brought it up as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
The best thing was that, just from the little time we’d spent together the previous night, I liked Leslie—just as Bart had predicted I would the night after their first date. I thought I could actually live with her. Part of it was because of what she meant to Bart, how she completed him in ways that I couldn’t. The other part was what Bart meant to her. She really did seem to love him enough to understand without resentment what he had with me.
Her comment about the fact that she’d been unknowingly sharing Bart with me ever since the beginning and that it hadn’t affected how we all felt about one another was possibly the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard said about our situation. She absolutely nailed it, as they say.
After I took some aspirin, shaved, and showered, I found them outside having coffee. They’d apparently heard me get up because Bart had a pot of tea ready along with some toast.
They both looked up at me, but before I could say a word, Bart said, “Yes, she’s sure.”
I smiled, kissed Bart on the lips, and after no more than a millisecond’s hesitation also gave Leslie a kiss on her cheek—for the first, but definitely not the last, time. I sat down, and poured out some tea.
“How are you guys?” I said.
�
��Not a guy,” said Leslie said with a smile.
“Get used to it,” Bart said. “He calls my parents and Robin and Doug the same thing.”
“Your parents,” I said. “We’ve got to call them this morning. It is still Sunday, right?”
“Relax, I already took care of it. I told them we had a late night last night, you were still sleeping, and that we’d call them tomorrow evening. I promised them some news, and they were their usual discreet selves and didn’t ask for any details. We’ll all three talk to them tomorrow and blow their minds.” Bart laughed in anticipation.
“Sorry about last night,” I said.
“You were pretty funny, old man. That was a first.”
I looked at Leslie. “I don’t lose control very often.”
“Never,” said Bart.
“Where do we go from here?” I asked.
“I proposed and got accepted,” Bart said, leaning over to kiss Leslie. “That’s a start, right?”
“I thought you did that Friday night.”
“Not officially, as Leslie pointed out to me when we were talking after we tucked you in. So I did it officially.”
“Did you make him get down on one knee?”
“He actually did it without coaching. I was very impressed,” said Leslie.
“He’s nothing if not impressive,” I replied, looking at him appreciatively.
“We’re going ring shopping this afternoon,” he said. “Want to come along?”
“No thanks. That’s between the two of you. I don’t have any expertise in that area anyhow,” I said. “While I was showering, I thought that if we’re serious about this, we’re going to need a bigger place.”
“There’s the real estate mindermast talking.”
“The what?” Leslie asked.
“Mindermast: Scotland Yard’s code word for mastermind,” I supplied. “It’s from an English comedy sketch, The Great Train Robbery—one of the first things I played Bart over the phone before we ever met in person. I’ll play it for you one day.”
“And he will too, Les. Whether you want to hear it or not. Part of his anality.”
“Anality? Mindermast? You two speak your own language.”
“Leslie, you’ll catch up real fast. Don’t worry,” I said reassuringly. “From now on, it’s going be we three, not you two. Anyhow, about a bigger place. You’re in an apartment, right?”
“It’s a condominium. I own it. It was a present from my parents when I got my doctorate.”
“Shit. Your parents. I’d forgotten. How are you going to get around them?”
“What do you mean get around? I’m a grown woman.”
“But still—”
“It won’t be a problem. Don’t worry.” I soon found out that when Leslie promised something, she delivered.
“Our house is free and clear,” said Bart, “thanks to the aforementioned mindermast. It’s handy living with a real estate agent who knows his stuff.”
“How big a place do we want?” I asked.
“Bedroom for us, bedroom for you, two bedrooms for the kids, guest room,” said Bart.
“You’ve already decided on the number of kids?” I asked him jokingly. “Does Leslie know about this?”
“Yes,” said Leslie. “Actually, we talked about that also last night.”
“I guess we’re really going to do this.”
“I do need office space,” said Leslie.
“Me, too,” I said. “So five bedrooms minimum plus office/work areas. What about a house with a guest house?”
“For guests,” Bart said. “Not for you. You’re no guest. You’ve got to live in the house.”
“We could always tell people I was staying in the guest house. You think things between us were difficult to explain up till now, Bart? How the hell are we going to account for this living arrangement?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t want to have to lie any more, Marc. It was hell lying to Les as long as I did.” He squeezed her hand, and she smiled at him.
“Bart’s right, Marc. We’re adults. We’re doing something pretty unusual, and we can be certain that very few people, other than our closest friends, will understand. But we can still be honest about it. Unfortunately, Bart, being in the public eye, has the most to lose, and we may have to be careful about that. But our living arrangement probably won’t have any economic effect on you or me. Our jobs won’t be endangered.”
“Economics,” I said. “Your favorite subject, Bart. How the hell are we going to handle money?”
“What do you mean?” asked Leslie.
“Our stuff is all together. Checking, savings, investments, the house. Pretty much all we have is in both names.”
“When we started out, mostly everything was Marc’s, and he put it in both our names in case anything happened to him. Then I got out of school and, with the soap, I started making serious money, but we decided to keep it that way.”
“It seems to me,” said Leslie, “that we’re going to need a lawyer.”
We did, and not one, but four. More about that later.
“Leslie,” I said, “would you be comfortable moving in here until we can find a place? I’m not sure how else we’re going to find out if this has even a remote chance of working out. If we can survive in this house, small as it is for three people, we can probably survive anywhere.”
Leslie looked at Bart and raised her eyebrows. “How did you manage that, Bart? You haven’t been out of my sight since you got up this morning. There’s no way you could have talked to him about it.”
Bart laughed. “I didn’t talk to him. We’ve never figured how we do it either.”
Leslie turned to me. “Bart said this morning, before you got up, that you’d probably suggest that I move in here so we could see whether this arrangement would really work.”
“Cross my heart, Leslie, Bart never said a word to me. It just seems like something we need to do.”
“I agree. Maybe we won’t make it through next week,” she said with a smile on her face. “But I do need a desk and work space here.”
“You can have my desk in the office, Les,” said Bart. “I don’t use it anymore. I can move my clothes out of the second bedroom into Marc’s closet which is plenty big, so you’ll have your own space. And the hall bathroom can be yours.”
“Can you two fit in both moving and ring shopping today?” I asked. “The sooner we do this, the better.”
“He said you’d say that too—the sooner the better,” Leslie laughed. “To quote a literary convention on which I have lectured, but which I never thought would apply to me,” she continued, “Little did I know that when I walked into this house last night that I’d be moving in today.”
“Are you upset about that?” I asked.
“No, I’m not upset. For the first time since Bart and I got back together,” said Leslie, “things finally make sense. I’d really been confused about Bart and me up until Friday night. I thought we had something special going on, but he was so evasive about his own life, except for work, that I was really bewildered.
“At one time I wondered if the whole story about you two living together was a lie—if he was actually married and only seeing me on the side. Well, it turned out he was kind of married—to you, but that was not what I’d been imagining. It’s such a relief to have everything out in the open, and as I said last night, it’s almost a perfect situation for us.”
“Bart and I often wondered where he was going to find an ideal wife. It looks like he found her,” I said raising my mug of tea in her direction.
Leslie was not only independent but exceptionally organized as well. By dinner time, they’d not only moved most of the essential stuff she would need for the first week, but they’d found a ring which was beautiful and tasteful—a diamond with two sapphires set in white gold—and Leslie had made a dinner date for the three of us the following Friday with her Uncle Buddy who was her favorite relative, a high-powered attorney according to her, a
nd also, coincidentally enough, gay.
Beginning that night, our sleeping routine changed forever. Bart would go to bed with Leslie. Sometimes they made love; sometimes they just spent time together. Then he came to sleep with me. Sometimes we made love; sometimes we just spent time together; sometimes we just slept.
This strangely odd arrangement wasn’t intentional—just the result of Bart’s snoring and Leslie’s need for her own space when she slept. Still, it turned out to be very beneficial for both relationships. It gave both couples time alone with each other at least once every day and in a way that was natural and not forced.
Monday morning wasn’t as chaotic as I’d feared it might be. Bart had to be at the studio at 7:00, and Leslie had an 8:00 class. Luckily I had no appointments until 10:00, so I stayed out of the way, fixing coffee and toast for them before they left.
After Bart took off and before she had to leave, Leslie and I had a few minutes alone together.
“Are you really ready for this setup, Leslie? I want to be sure you’re not having buyer’s remorse.”
“Bart is one of the most considerate, sensitive, and intelligent men I’ve met. I’d be out of my mind to let something that’s been going on for years ruin what we have. What is it Bart said you two say? Proposition two?”
“Rule number two,” I laughed.
“Then rule number two it is,” she said with finality.
After she left, I had a chance to reflect on what had happened. Bart was now officially engaged to be married; Leslie was moving in with us; I’d committed to finding us a new house so the three of us could live together on a permanent basis; and we were planning to meet with an attorney to finalize this new relationship.
Thanks mostly to the remarkable person Leslie was, we’d finally found an answer to the problem Bart and I had worried about almost from the beginning: our future—how we could remain together in the face of his need for a wife and a family. And it really seemed as if it would work. After eight years, all those decisions made in a single day. Unbelievable.
As Bart predicted, Jack and Ada were blown away by the news that evening but couldn’t have been more pleased. After all they’d heard from us over the years, the idea of a ménage must have seemed an eminently sane idea—much more so than some of the screwball ideas we’d had in the past. Ada, of course wanted to be sure Leslie, who was on the call with us, knew what she was getting into by telling her about all our bad habits.