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

by Lawrence Block

  • • •

  GORDON: I went through with the deal anyway. I got a better price than I’d figured and made a better deal on the place here in town than I had figured, so even from the point of view of business it was the sensible thing to do. But it was a case more of we had to get out of Dayton and back where we belonged.

  RITA: And Junie was all alone in this big empty house. We couldn’t leave her like that. I suppose we could have had her move in with us in Dayton, but neither of us ever liked that place anyway. We didn’t make friends there, maybe for lack of trying. I’ve never been good at having a lot of friends. Just a few people that I like and see all the time, and I’d rather have it be family than friends.

  GORDON: It was important for Rita to have June close at that time.

  RITA: She was all I had left and I blamed myself for not being with Pa toward the end, and I wanted to be with Junie.

  GORDON: So I bought the place in town, but instead of looking for a place to live there of course we just moved in here with June. It’s on toward fifteen miles to the store but that’s nothing to drive once or twice a day. And when you get there it’s not the same pressure you have with a store in a city. It’s quiet and you’ll know everybody, you’ll have the same people coming into the store all the time, and it’s a more relaxing way to do business.

  Things were a little easier for the two of us, for Rita and me. Part of it came from moving, I guess, but that wasn’t all of it. Also I was running the store myself, which I could do without much trouble, just having Rita come down once or twice a week to help with cleaning and bookkeeping. That gave us some time away from each other, and we needed that. Also I had stopped seeing the waitress some months ago. And it helped having June around.

  RITA: Just another person around to talk to made a difference. Before it was either we were together, the two of us, or else I was by myself. Another thing, for me, was that I knew about this waitress although I didn’t know who she was, and I also knew that now he had stopped seeing her, and it seemed to me that we had gotten through something, that we had come through it. Like in a sickness when a fever will come to a peak and then start to go down again, and you know you’ll be all right now. We had come through this and we were still together and it would be better for us.

  GORDON: But it wasn’t good.

  RITA: No, it wasn’t good.

  GORDON: It was more a case of having a bad situation but of getting accustomed to it. You’ll see people who will stay married to each other for thirty or forty or fifty years, and they don’t love each other. Maybe they never loved each other. They don’t some of them even like each other. I know a case of a couple that is together and they haven’t spoken to one another for better than fifteen years.

  RITA: Not even to say “Pass the salt.” They leave notes for each other when they have to. Fifteen years and not a word from one of them to the other.

  GORDON: And yet they stay together. Now we were nothing like that. We stayed close and we stayed friendly but something had gone out of our lives. We were used to not having a baby and feeling tense about it, and the tension was there all the time like wallpaper in a boarding house, so that you got used to it and didn’t notice how ugly it was. We would have sex and it wasn’t bad and it wasn’t good, either. And we would talk, and it wasn’t as easy as it had been at first but better than it had been for a time. And the way I thought of it, I came to figure that maybe this was as much as you could expect. You know, the honeymoon being over, and that this was what happened when two people got used to each other and grew a little older. I knew I would rather be with Rita than anyone else in the world, and that I was living where I belonged now, and if anything I regretted that we ever went to Dayton in the first place, but of course we had to in order to get the capital to wind up back here.

  • • •

  JUNE: Of course I grieved for Pa. But the second attack was some months coming, and by the time he died it was a release, it was a mercy. He wasn’t himself toward the end and it was a mercy when he finally died.

  But beyond mourning him I was just feeling so fine that Rita and Gordon were back again, that we would all live together again. I felt very happy about this, and it was as though something that had been going on in my life just went away and everything was right again. After they were home I would think about the men and boys I had gone with. Now I hadn’t been with any of them for some time. But I thought about them, and about what I had done, and it was as if all of a sudden I couldn’t believe that I had done these things.

  I don’t mean that I felt bad about it. Guilty. I don’t think I felt guilty. I don’t think I felt I had done anything really wrong.

  But I couldn’t believe it was me who had done it. All those things, using my mouth on them, just doing it with no love or feeling at all.

  I couldn’t believe it was me. Somebody else wearing my clothes, wearing my body, but not me.

  And then Pa was gone and they were back, Gordon and Rita both, and I wasn’t that person any more.

  And I was so happy. It was like I was just seeing how lonely I had been now that I wasn’t lonely anymore. Now we were always sitting around and talking. With Rita during the day and with the both of them at night and sometimes late at night when she couldn’t sleep with Gordon. Rita would get tired early and Gordon and I would stay up drinking coffee and maybe watching television and maybe just talking, and I felt so close to him. I had always felt close to him but now I was really getting to know him and we would talk about everything.

  GORDON: I found myself talking to June the way I couldn’t talk to Rita any more. I had been shutting Rita out, we had both been shutting each other out, and now with June it was the way it had been with Rita.

  Around this time I guess we both started wanting each other.

  JUNE: We always wanted each other, I think, but now we were starting to know it. But it was a confused kind of wanting. We were all so many different things to each other. Gordon was first of all Rita’s husband, but then he was a man I wanted to make love to, and he was, oh, it was like he was my father, taking Pa’s place, and he had come just at the time I lost Pa, and I got that mixed in. And Rita was my sister but she was also like my mother, she had been like a mother ever since Ma died, and now she was my best girlfriend, too, my only girlfriend, the only girl I really opened up and talked to in years, and she was Gordon’s wife, and it was all tangled up together in so many ways.

  • • •

  JWW: This observation of confusion of familial roles cropped up frequently in June’s conversation, and was echoed occasionally by Gordon and Rita as well.

  • • •

  RITA: You would have thought I might have noticed what was going on. To look back on it there was something in the air like right before an electric storm. That kind of feeling. But all I thought was how good it was that they got along so well, and that I had my whole family together, my sister and my husband.

  GORDON: The current was in the air a long time before anything came of it.

  RITA: Oh, I know it.

  JUNE: I don’t know when it was that I knew just what I wanted with Gordon. I think when I learned how they were trying to have children and couldn’t. They both told me that. Not together. Rita told me one day, and then a few nights later Gordon brought it up, and I didn’t let on that Rita had already told me.

  And I found myself thinking, well, I wish I could give him a child.

  RITA: Looks as though you’re finally going to, doesn’t it?

  GORDON: Or else she swallowed a watermelon seed.

  JUNE: But I thought, oh, I don’t know. I had this idea that maybe Rita would agree to let me do it with Gordon once just to get pregnant, and then when I had the baby I would give it to her to bring up, and it would be their baby, it would be Gordon’s child and their baby to raise. It was just a crazy thought and it came to me that I must be crazy to think it.

  GORDON: I had had the same thought, but I don’t think it came
from a desire for a baby. I was beginning to want to go to bed with June and looking for a reason for it. I couldn’t just let myself think that wanting her was reason enough. I had to make up something else.

  RITA: Oh, now, as far as that goes I had the thought before either of you. In Dayton, even, before there was anything in the air at all. I would get depressed and think, well, if I can’t bear him a child, well, every man needs to be a father, and maybe he could have it with June.

  JUNE: But once I started with that thought, I knew what it was that I wanted, and that was that I wanted to have sexual intercourse with Gordon. And when I faced the thought I knew it was something I had wanted all my life. Then it came to me that I was very glad that I was a virgin. That I had never given myself to anyone, because now I knew that I had saved myself for a purpose. That I had all along been saving myself for Gordon so that he could be my lover.

  The night it happened. It was this warm summer night with all the humidity in the air, and that afternoon Rita had gotten the curse. She was more depressed when it happened than I ever saw her before. She was really feeling terrible about it, all down in the mouth and miserable.

  RITA: I thought I might be pregnant. Every month I would have the hope, and somehow this time I really thought I was, and then it turned out I wasn’t.

  JUNE: Rita went upstairs early, and Gordon went up with her and came down a little while later with a face like an old hound dog. My heart just went out to him. I was so sad for him, and I felt so much for him.

  We got to talking. I said how I knew Rita had the curse, and we talked about that, and about not being able to have children, and he asked me something about when was I going to get married and have a mess of kids. And I said I wanted to have kids maybe someday but I wasn’t looking to get married. He asked why not, and I said I couldn’t find a man I wanted, and he said maybe I wasn’t looking in the right places.

  And then I just knew he felt the same way about me that I did about him. It wasn’t what he said or even the way he said it. Maybe it was the spaces in the conversation. I don’t know what it was but I looked at him and I knew.

  I told him how I was a virgin. He didn’t even seem surprised. He just nodded as if everything was the way it should be.

  And I talked a little about the men I had been with. I didn’t say exactly what I did with them. It was just that I had been with a lot of men and felt nothing for them and all, but that I was still a virgin. And he talked some about the waitress, and we went on that way, and I looked at him, the way he was crossing one leg over the other, and I saw the way the front of his pants was bulging, and I knew he was excited, that he was hard.

  The rest of it just happened. I didn’t plan it or anything. I didn’t even think about it. It just happened and I found myself doing what I did.

  He was sitting on this couch. I went over to him and sat next to him on the couch. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking off across the room.

  I didn’t say anything and neither did he. I put my hand on the front of his pants and felt him. He just sat there and let me touch him. I kept touching him and he sat there and this wonderful feeling came over me. I loved him so much at that very moment.

  I opened his pants and took them down and his underpants too. I looked at his face and his eyes were closed. I took his penis in both my hands and just held it. I could feel a pulse beat in it.

  I got off the couch and got on my knees in front of him. I put my arms around his hips and took his penis right into my mouth. I took it in deep and just sucked on it and I felt so contented. I felt like a baby on the breast, I felt so completely contented and at peace with the world.

  And I thought, I’m doing this for him, I’m doing this for him, this is all for him. But it wasn’t. It was for me, too, because I wanted to do it so much.

  GORDON: I couldn’t believe what was happening. I would close my eyes and then I would have to open them to make sure this was really happening, and then I would close them again only to open them again later. I couldn’t believe this.

  Rita had never done this thing.

  RITA: You never asked for it.

  GORDON: I know. I never thought, I never thought of it as something a wife would do. I had had it from a whore in the service and also the waitress did it two times but that was all, and I had enjoyed it all three times because there is no sensation like it in the world, but afterward I would feel strange about it because I guess I always thought of it as dirty. I had known boys in the service who had gotten this done for them by queers, fairies, and I guess I always thought of this as a fairy thing, and although I had only had it done by girls I guess I thought it was a fairyish thing for a man to enjoy it even from a woman.

  But it wasn’t dirty when June did it. It was different, completely different. I never had the thought of it being dirty, not while she was doing it or ever afterward. I had some thoughts later about having relations with June, that this might be a wrong thing, a bad thing, but not that the act was wrong because of the way she did it. I never had the thought in that form.

  RITA: I would have done this at any time if I had known it was something you wanted. But I never even thought of it.

  GORDON: Neither did I. It was not something I thought of as something for us to do.

  JUNE: Now this was something I had done often before, sucking a man. As I have said. But it was never like this before because I had never felt about anyone as I felt about Gordon.

  My whole mouth was loving him. Loving him. My lips and my tongue.

  When he shot in my mouth I had an orgasm. I wasn’t even conscious of any feeling between my legs until then but the minute he shot I had the strongest orgasm of my life. It just like to picked me up and tore me apart. I didn’t know that was what an orgasm could be. I had had little orgasms before, and I thought that was all there was, and then this came along and I hadn’t even expected to have any kind of an orgasm, and now this came along and it almost killed me. I swallowed every drop. Not even thinking about it but just wanting to do it without even knowing that this was something I wanted to do.

  Swallowed every drop.

  RITA: You’re sure giving enough of a description of it.

  JUNE: It’s like it was happening now. I can remember it that clearly.

  RITA: You’ll have everybody coming if you keep talking like that.

  JUNE: I’m sorry.

  RITA: Oh, I was just teasing. It’s nothing to be sorry for.

  • • •

  GORDON: In the morning I got up and went to the store and kept thinking on what had happened and trying to figure out what to do next. I first off decided that we would have to act like this had never happened, and it would never happen again. And then I would think that I loved June and wanted to have intercourse with her. And I knew I loved Rita too, and how could we keep all of this a secret from her?

  I didn’t know what to do. I had never before in my life had a situation where I was so completely torn in different directions like this. I couldn’t go off with June because Rita was my wife and I loved her, June and I both loved her. I couldn’t move off with Rita, either, and I didn’t see how we could all go on living together without my having relations with June, because she and I both wanted each other so much. I didn’t see any solution whatsoever.

  At dinner we acted as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Rita was still down with the curse, still depressed from it, but not so bad as the night before. She didn’t take to her bed right off but sat watching television with us until around midnight, and sitting there I just couldn’t get it all straight in my mind. I would look over at June and remember what had happened the night before and I would look at Rita and wonder if she had any idea and I just couldn’t put it all together so it would make sense to me.

  I went upstairs with Rita when she said she was ready for bed. I wanted to stay up with June but I went up with Rita. Rita wanted me to hold her close, and I held her in my arms and petted her. It surprised me that I got har
d immediately and had a great desire to have intercourse with her, but of course she had the curse. She noticed I was excited and said, “Well, it’s a shame to waste it, and why don’t you go down and make Junie happy with it?” Joking, of course, but she had never made this kind of a joke before.

  When she went to sleep I fought with myself and decided I would have to go downstairs if only to talk things over with June. We had hardly talked at all after what happened the night before.

  She was on the couch with the television off and the radio on, and she had a blanket over her. I thought, maybe she was sleeping and wondered why she hadn’t gone to her room. Then she looked over at me and took the blanket off herself, and she was naked and waiting for me.

  We neither of us said a word. I went over to the couch and we had sexual intercourse. Of course it was her first time but it didn’t pain her too much and she was able to have a climax. When it was over I couldn’t stop holding her and touching her. It was like with Rita at the very beginning. I just kept holding her and touching her and telling her that I loved her.

  Then we talked about Rita. We didn’t either of us know what to do. June said maybe she should go away, and I said maybe Rita and I should go away, and we knew that nobody could go away and that we couldn’t stop what we were doing, either, but no more could we keep on carrying on behind Rita’s back. It looked as though there was no way out.

  JUNE: I was so filled with love for Gordon, but at the same time I loved my sister more than ever. And I felt closer to her than ever before because we shared this wonderful experience, we were both of us lovers of Gordon’s. And I thought, I’m taking something from her. But I didn’t want to take anything from her. I wanted to give love to her but instead I was taking something from her and I couldn’t do that, but no more could I give Gordon up.

  GORDON: We decided we would have to tell Rita. We talked it out and I said I would have to be the one to tell her. We didn’t go so far as to discuss just what it was we would say. What I would say. There was just no way to talk about it because I had no idea at the time how I would say it or how I wanted it all to work out.