3 is Not a Crowd (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  After we started having it regularly, you know, even then it came to me that we were fools for waiting so long, And I can say that I never felt guilty or anything of the sort. Now I would have felt guilty if I were a girl at the time, I suppose, but you have to remember that I was twenty-five years old at the time. You could say I was an old maid at the time the way they usually figure those things.

  GORDON: Oh, the hell you were an old maid.

  RITA: But that’s how it’s usually figured. Twenty-five and never married is an old maid. Whether I was an old maid or not, what I certainly wasn’t was a child, you know, and so I couldn’t feel I was doing anything wrong having sexual intercourse with Gordon. The only thing that bothered me was Junie or Pa finding out about it, and not knowing how they would feel about it.

  JUNE: Didn’t you worry about getting pregnant?

  GORDON: I did, somewhat. But what you do, you take precautions and let it go at that. Worrying about that isn’t enough to leave off doing it.

  RITA: Now this is funny, but I can’t really say I worried about that at all, about being pregnant. For one thing I knew Gordon was taking precautions, and I guess I was naive in that I thought if you took precautions that was all there was to it, that you were perfectly safe. What he used was rubbers, and of course I realize now that you can get pregnant through a rubber, that it can break or whatever happens, but at the time I thought they were a hundred percent. Another thing is that I wouldn’t have been that upset if I was pregnant. All it would mean is that we would have gotten married a little sooner than we figured, but that’s all, and if a girl is a little bit pregnant when she gets married, well, nobody’s particularly surprised or shocked at something like that.

  GORDON: The saying is that first babies take five or six months to be born, but all the ones after that take nine.

  RITA: And people just take that much for granted. And I wasn’t so much concerned that Pa or June would know we were having relations but that it would be thrown in their faces. Like if they were to walk in on us, because we would often do it on this very couch when they were upstairs, and you can get carried away and not notice somebody coming downstairs, and they could have walked in right while we were doing it, and that used to worry me. Sometimes I would get to thinking of that and it would keep me from letting go and enjoying myself completely—

  GORDON: But not often.

  RITA: No, I don’t guess. Or I thought we might be careless and leave one of those rubber things lying around, or something of that sort. But I don’t think Pa ever knew.

  JUNE: I did, though.

  RITA: You did, but not by anything you saw or heard, I don’t think.

  JUNE: No. I don’t know how I knew, but I guess I just did, that’s all.

  RITA: Well, that’s not the same as walking in on us.

  JUNE: Oh, I never would have come downstairs like that. I guess because I knew what I might walk in on.

  GORDON: And maybe your Pa never came downstairs for about the same reason.

  RITA: That could be. I suppose that could be.

  • • •

  JUNE: I was hit hard when they got married. I didn’t know how or why but I was. Here I had been looking forward to the wedding and all. I was maid of honor and had it all figured out in my mind that I would have a romance with Gordon’s brother, Roy, who came in to be the best man. I was dreaming about this, and thinking how Roy and I would be married and everything just like Gordon and Rita, and as it turned out Roy was nothing like Gordon at all. He’s a lot older and hardly talks at all, or at least he didn’t have more than two words to say to me. So the wedding itself didn’t go the way I had it in mind for it to go.

  After the wedding they went off for a week to Chicago, and then they came back for a visit, and then they moved to an apartment in Dayton so that Gordon could be near his work, and then all of a sudden I just felt so alone. Rita just about brought me up, and I was so glad she was marrying Gordon so that he could really be part of the family, and now all of a sudden they were both gone. Oh, we would see them most weekends, but it wasn’t the same. Now it was just me and Pa living out here by ourselves.

  What happened to me at this point, although it didn’t happen right away or all at once, was that I guess I got a little bit sex-happy. I guess it was part of being lonely and part of being jealous of Rita. Jealous that she had Gordon and jealous that she had a life of her own to live. I don’t know that I thought of it that way at the time. I just felt left out of things and figured that I needed to have a man of my own. I suppose it was the same thing that led me to make a big thing out of Roy, and then to be so disappointed when he was nothing at all like his brother.

  I had sort of lost interest in boys when Gordon and Rita started going together and he would be over to the house so much. The boys I had gone with before were younger, they were about my age, and they just seemed like kids compared to Gordon, and I got so I more or less stopped going out with them. And staying around the house night and day, and being out in the country, I didn’t meet anybody.

  What I wanted to do was get some kind of job in town, but I couldn’t do this because of having to keep house for Pa. Not that he said it in so many words because I never even asked him or said anything about it. It was just something I knew, that I had to do this, so I never did more than have thoughts about a job in town.

  But I took to going into town now and then. I would go in to do the shopping and instead of coming straight home I would hang around and maybe have coffee or something like that, or walk around looking in the windows, and I would meet people that way. Boys, I mean. They would generally be boys I had gone to school with so it wasn’t a matter of picking up total strangers but boys I had known and then lost touch with over the years. Some of them would be married and some not. And I would get offered a ride or asked to go to a movie, and I would go.

  You know, I would talk to those boys, and as often as not there would be no parking at all on the first date or two, and one of them, he was married, I guess he’d been married for four or five years, he got his girl pregnant in high school and they had to get married, and I must have seen him a dozen times or more, and he never so much as kissed me. He never even tried to. I would have kissed him, or just about anything, I guess, if he’d wanted, but he just liked to go for long rides with me and talk to me. We would talk about his wife and how they weren’t getting along so good, and how he was a fool to get married so young and be all locked up with a wife and kids. I guess he needed me for someone to talk to about these things.

  GORDON: He must have wanted to have sex with you.

  JUNE: I suppose he wanted it, I suppose he had sexual feelings for me, but he never even tried to do anything about them. He could have done something about it but he never tried. As a matter of fact he would let things drop from time to time about how if he were free he would really be interested in me, but he never took it any further than that.

  But what I was getting at is that it wasn’t just sex all the time, but when I think back on that time it seems that way to me, as though that was all I did and all I thought about. It wasn’t, really. You know how it is? As though—remembering it—the sex part is in color and the rest of it, what I did from day to day, is in black and white. That’s the only way I can think to explain it.

  RITA: But you were a virgin.

  JUNE: I know.

  RITA: That’s what is really strange about it.

  JUNE: Yes, it is. I guess even then I was saving myself for Gordon.

  RITA: Oh, how in the world can you say that? I mean how could you think of it that way at the time?

  JUNE: I didn’t think of it but that is what I was doing.

  RITA: You didn’t think this would happen, with the three of us.

  JUNE: I may have known it inside, without knowing what I knew. Or I may have wanted it inside.

  But all this time I was having sex and not having it. The one important thing was staying a virgin. I would I go with these boys
—you have to call them men, they were all ages from twenty-five to thirty-five. And I would do anything but go all the way. Anything but let them put it inside of me. That was the one thing I refused to do under any circumstances, and I never did do it.

  GORDON: Didn’t you ever want to?

  JUNE: No.

  GORDON: You must have gotten excited—

  JUNE: It wasn’t that kind of being excited. I would feel in two parts when I was with a boy, part of me acting and part of me sitting across the room watching, sort of not attached to what was happening. I was excited, but not the way I am now. It wasn’t complete.

  RITA: You would have orgasms.

  JUNE: Once in a while. But it was not the same, it was not complete.

  And what I generally did, it wasn’t so much a case of my getting excited. I would get excited in my mind more than my body because of what it was that we did. I mean, they might pet me some, but mostly it was what I would do for them . . .

  I don’t know exactly how to say this . . .

  Well, before this time I really didn’t know much about sex. I simply didn’t know very much, I was ignorant. And one boy finally had to explain to me that it was different for a man, that you couldn’t just expect them to stop, that a man has to have release when he’s excited or it’s physically bad for him. Frustrating. I didn’t know but that this might just be a line—

  GORDON: No, it’s the truth. But nine times out of ten a man will say it as much for a line as anything else.

  JUNE: Well, I decided it must be true, but at the same time I said that this was something I wasn’t going to do, to go all the way. I made this very clear. I put it right on the line, that I wasn’t going to do this and that was all there was to it, that I wouldn’t do it. The boy I first had this all out with, he was married, so he couldn’t try to convince me by giving me a big thing about loving me and how he would marry me if anything happened. He couldn’t say that because we both knew better and knew that there was no love involved, that we were both of us there for the pleasure of it, and for the company.

  GORDON: Did it bother you, that he was married?

  JUNE: It never bothered me at all.

  GORDON: That’s what you told me before, but it’s just hard to believe.

  JUNE: I never counted, but I think there was a lot more married than not. Especially the ones I would see again and again, they were for the most part married. When they weren’t married either they got tired of me because of not being willing to go all the way, or I lost interest in them. Because I didn’t want anything that would lead to me getting married to somebody, I suppose. I don’t know as I thought of it that way at the time, except that I would look at one of these fellows and I would say, now, do I want to marry this particular boy? And the answer was always that I didn’t.

  When they were married it was safe, see. They didn’t want to leave their wives and I didn’t want them to, so it was safe.

  This man I was talking about, that was married . . . this was another reason I believed him about being frustrated and having to have a release. Because he was married.

  Anyway, he came right back and said that there was something I could do without going all the way. Now this was something I honestly knew nothing about. It’s hard to believe how ignorant I was in this subject.

  RITA: It certainly is.

  JUNE: I thought anything I might do would just make it worse. But he showed me what to do. He opened his pants and showed me how to handle his penis in a certain way. I really didn’t know what I was doing—I mean I didn’t know how to go about it or anything, but I would pay attention to what excited him and what didn’t, and he got very excited, and I was sort of excited by his excitement, if that makes any sense, and then he had an orgasm. As a matter of fact he came all over my blouse. He offered to pay for having it cleaned but I told him not to be silly and I just took and washed it myself after I got home.

  After that I wouldn’t see him too often, but when I did it would always be the same. We would drive to a good place to park and then he would undress me and play with me. Once I knew that I could trust him I would take off all my clothes because I knew he wouldn’t try to force me. He would touch me, my breasts and elsewhere, and then I would jerk him off, pardon the expression.

  You know, I liked that part better than being touched. That other was more for his benefit than for mine because it excited him tremendously to touch me and finger me. I think it excited him especially that I was a virgin. He would keep talking about it, touching me and saying that no one had ever been inside me, as though this was something special. I let him do this and I won’t say I didn’t like it—

  RITA: No one would believe you if you did.

  JUNE: But no, the other part was what I really enjoyed. Making him have an orgasm. Getting him all excited and then giving him a climax.

  We tried some other ways, too. Like one time he put himself between my breasts and moved back and forth that way until he had an orgasm. Or against my leg. But I didn’t enjoy this as much as just having him sit there while I did it for him with my hands. I guess he didn’t, either, because he just wanted to do it the one time and then didn’t want to again.

  I was dating other boys, too, and I started doing the same with them as well. They didn’t even have to ask. I would go on and touch the front of their pants, and usually they would be hard by this time from the petting, and some of them would right away open their pants and others wouldn’t, so I would touch them some more and then open their pants and reach inside. I remember a boy said he really couldn’t figure me out, that I was so aggressive about going for his penis but that I still drew a line about having intercourse. “That’s the way I am,” I said, “and you may take me or leave me.”

  Now there was this other man, he was married and quite a bit older than most of the ones I dated, and actually you could say he picked me up. He was from Cincinnati and I met him at a coffee shop and we went for a ride, and then back to the motel where he was staying at. Now this was the first time I was ever in a motel room with a man, or any other kind of a room, for that matter, so as soon as we were inside I out and told him that I wouldn’t go all the way, that I was virgin and fixed to stay that way. He said I must be either a liar or the oldest living virgin in the state of Ohio. I said I would do something else to make sure he was satisfied, if that was all right with him, but otherwise we should just forget the whole thing, because I refused to have intercourse.

  He said that was all right with him and that I should stay there with him.

  To make a long story short, I was handling his penis, and he said, “Honey, why don’t you give it a kiss?”

  So I had never done this, but I thought, Why not? So I leaned over and gave it a little peck. I didn’t see what was such a big deal about that.

  “I mean really kiss it, honey,” he said.

  So I kissed it again a few times but that wasn’t what he meant, and I finally had to say, “Look, maybe I’m stupid, but I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean you should suck it,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”

  So he laughed and grabbed hold of my hand and had me point my finger, and he sucked on my finger the way he wanted me to do on him. He showed me just how he wanted me to do it, by doing it on my finger.

  Then he got the rest of his clothes off and laid out on his back and I did it for him. Now this was something I had honestly never heard of in all my life. I had heard expressions in school, “blow job” and “eat it,” but I never knew what it meant. I knew there was such a thing as fairies but I never guessed what it was they did with each other. I just had no idea. And I never knew anything about sucking a man’s penis. In school, the expression “eat it,” I thought it meant “eat shit.” A short way of saying it. And I just had no idea what “blow job” meant.

  But I did it, and I just couldn’t believe how excited it got him. He acted as though it was the most exciting thin
g in the world. I couldn’t really say whether I enjoyed it or not because it was so new to me and I had to concentrate so much on what I was doing.

  When I knew he was going to have an orgasm I took my mouth off him and he came, but not in my mouth. He really moaned a lot when he came.

  I asked him afterward how he liked it and if I did it good, and he said I did, that I was very good at it, which made me proud for some reason, but he asked why I took my mouth away at the end. I said I didn’t know. I asked if you weren’t supposed to or what. He said it was much better to come in a girl’s mouth than not. I said I didn’t know about that. He said some girls would swallow it and that was the best of all, which didn’t make any particular sense to me, because why should it feel any different for a man if you were to swallow it or spit it out? I didn’t understand it, but I knew immediately that I would no more swallow it than I would let a man have intercourse with me. I didn’t know why but I knew that this was something I would never do. As far as letting him come in my mouth, I wasn’t too sure about this one way or another. This was something I was going to have to think about.

  As it turned out I didn’t have to think about it for very long, because I saw this man again a few days later and we went to his room and again I sucked him off, and this time I let him come in my mouth without a second thought, and I was very surprised to discover that I liked it better this way. As a matter of fact I believe I had an orgasm. The kind of orgasm I was able to have at that time. Nothing like the sort of complete orgasm that I can have now, but at the time I didn’t know there was anything better. Like a radio before they discovered television, I suppose. I didn’t know there was anything else.

  This particular man would drive all the way from Cincinnati just to see me, and to have me suck him. Eventually he told me he could do the same thing for me, and he ate me there. I got terribly excited but I didn’t like it at the time. It’s hard to explain. I don’t know what it was about it that I didn’t like. Nothing about thinking it was dirty. For some reason I never thought of oral sex as dirty. I don’t know why, I guess most people do at one time or another, but I don’t recollect that I ever felt that way.