Then we had intercourse again that night. I didn’t know but that we might never have each other again after that. First she used her mouth on me for a little time, and then I did the same for her. She had mentioned about this man doing it to her and her liking it and not liking it both at once, and I had never done this to any girl nor to Rita either and was interested in seeing what it would be like and how she would like my doing it to her. It was better than either of us thought it would be, and then after doing it for awhile I got on top of her again and we had sexual intercourse, and then I went upstairs. Rita was asleep. I got into bed and didn’t think I would be able to sleep, but I dropped off right away.
• • •
RITA: When he told me it was a hammer hitting me in the middle of the chest, a sledge hammer in the middle of my chest, and then there was just this numbness, and the first thought I remember having was that this thing had been a long time coming and at least now it had finally happened and was out in the open.
And I said, “Well, you’ve got her now and I guess you won’t be wanting me anymore. And I can’t blame you because she is younger and prettier than I am and maybe she can give you the children that I couldn’t give you.”
And he said, “No, I don’t ever want to leave you, I love you and want you always.”
I said, “But then do you mean you want to stop with June?”
“No,” he said, “`because I love you both.”
I said, “Well, you can’t love both of us.”
He said, “But I do. You love me and you love your sister. She loves me and she loves you. Why can’t it be that I love you both and you both love me?”
“Well,” I said, “that sort of thing cannot be because people are not like that. A man has one wife and a woman has one husband and that is all. I do not see how a man can have two wives. Is that what you want, for us both to be your wives?”
And he said yes, that was what he wanted, and he thought that was what we both wanted, what all three of us wanted, and I said I could not understand it.
GORDON: Of course I had been thinking about this all day, and it was the only way I could see for us to work it out.
RITA: I told him if he loved me he wouldn’t need anyone else, and he said that wasn’t true, that loving Junie made him love me more. I said how could that be and he said that was how it was.
And I said, “What would you do, sleep with me three nights a week and with her three nights, and on the seventh day you would rest?” And he laughed, but I didn’t mean it to be funny. I said, “You cannot have us both and you will have to choose.” And he said for me to think about it, and I said that I didn’t see as there was anything to think about.
I said, “Well, what would you want us to do? Maybe you would want for us to get one big bed and we would all sleep in it, with her on one side and me on the other side and you in the middle.” And he said that would be the best way to do it. “Well, you must be crazy,” I said, “to think that I would go along with something like that, or Junie, either, for that matter. You must be stark crazy to think we would put up with that.”
He said, “What do you mean, ‘to put up with it’? Because it would not be taking anything away from you, or making you do anything you wouldn’t want to do, so how is it something to have to put up with?” I asked him if he thought I could just lie there in bed with them and watch him making love to my sister. “I don’t see why not,” he said. And then he would expect me to make love to him while she was there. “I think it would be a beautiful thing,” he said.
Well, I could not understand any of this.
GORDON: I had not worked every bit of this out in my mind beforehand. A lot of it, a great part of it just came to me as I was talking to Rita. It was a matter of being able to see things clearly that I had not so much as thought of before. All at once I was seeing that we are all taught certain things about sex and love—we aren’t even taught them so much as we grow up with them taken for granted all around us—and for the first time I was looking at these things and seeing that they did not make any sense to me. I was seeing these things clearly and plainly as never before. I was seeing them the way a person will all at once come to see God at a revival meeting. It was that way, it was what you would call a revelation. Now I have been to revivals in the past and I have never had this sort of an experience, although I have seen others have it and have known what it is like. And it was that sort of a feeling that came over me, that I had found something great and beautiful and important. It was that kind of a feeling and I wanted to take Rita in my arms and make her see how beautiful it was, how beautiful and right it could be.
RITA: I said, “You just want more sex, that is all you want. You want two women instead of one and that is all.” He said if that was all he wanted there were easier ways to get it, and he wound up telling me all about the waitress in Dayton, which I knew about but we had never brought it up and I didn’t know who she was, just that there was a woman. Well, he discussed this, although at first I didn’t want to hear about it, and as he was talking a strange thing began to happen to me and that is that I began to be calm and began to see things differently. I do not know how to explain this so that it will make sense. This had all been going against the grain of me, and now it was becoming so that there was no grain and it was going smooth.
After a time he went and brought June in, and we talked and cried and Junie and I kissed and held each other. I held her at arm’s length and looked at her and at Gordon and said that now I suppose they would want to make love. And he said yes, he would like very much to make love to June, to have intercourse with her. And I said maybe he would like me to leave them alone, and he said I could leave them alone if I that was what they wanted, but that he would like it if I stayed with them so that we could all be close.
I said, “Junie, is that what you want?” Thinking that she would not want me with them at such a time. But she said yes, she would like that, and that I should stay.
It was like something happening in a dream. It just was not real. I watched him with her and it was like he was doing it to me, I saw myself in her, and I could not understand this. I watched them have intercourse.
Later I said, “Well, now, this doesn’t seem fair, because I would like to do it, too, and I cannot do anything because of having the curse. Here I am being left out of the fun.”
And Junie said, “Why don’t you suck him then, because having the curse will not stop you from doing that.”
I said, “What do you mean?” Because I didn’t know what she was talking about. And she explained, and I asked her if she had done this, and she said yes, she had done it with several men and she had done it with Gordon. “Well, I do not know anything about it,” I said. “I would not even know what to do because I have never even heard of this and do not know anything about it.”
“Well, then, I will show you,” she said.
Which she did for a few moments, and then told me how to do it, and I did it to him until he had an orgasm. And I enjoyed this. I was surprised that I enjoyed it, but I did.
• • •
JWW: From that night onward, the three have lived as man and wives with no discernible difficulty. They sleep, as Rita had sarcastically suggested, all three together in a king-size bed, with Gordon in the middle and a sister on either side. There is, however, no schedule to determine whether Gordon will embrace Rita or June. Often he will make love to them both more or less simultaneously, having coitus with one while fondling the other.
The sisters have never engaged in homosexual relations per se, although the latent homosexual basis of any troilistic relationship would seem obvious enough. Their caresses are bestowed solely upon Gordon, and never upon each other. When I asked about this, all seemed to be genuinely shocked at the suggestion.
All three mentioned more than once how infinitely more exciting and satisfying their sex lives had become since the day of revelation. While this seems undeniably to be the case, I doubt th
at the addition of June to the nuptial couch is the sole explanation for this increase in sexual bliss. Gordon’s revelation, his discovery of the god Eros, led them all to an openness and enthusiasm for sex which had not heretofore existed for any of them. Gordon and Rita had been married for years without discovering anything more complex than cursory foreplay and coitus in three basic positions. The introduction of oral sex, which all three are apt to praise with true evangelistic zeal, no doubt had a good deal to do with all of this. So, too, did the fact that sex, which had long been more labor than love, and labor more aimed at attaining pregnancy than satisfaction, now became the central feature of this new relationship.
• • •
GORDON: As far as other people are concerned, what other people would think, I suspect they would want to lynch us or ride us out of town on a rail. I don’t have to tell you how narrow people are about this sort of thing. The average person thinks anyone who lives different from him is bad and ought to go to Hell. I find myself having a lot more of an open mind toward other people than I used to. A boy that wears his hair long or has a beard . . . you don’t see many around here but there’s a few of them everywhere, and this used to bother me. It got under my skin just because it was different. Or in Dayton I might see white and black together. A white girl with a black boy. Now I have to say that this absolutely turned my stomach. I could not stand to see it. But if you think about it, why should this be so? Why should any person care what other people do if it is what they want to do and hurts nobody? So I can see this now, whereas before I couldn’t see it for the world. A boy wants to let his hair grow, he doesn’t want to shave, that’s his business. A white girl wants to go with a black boy, wants to sleep with him, wants to marry him, and he wants her, fine. They’ll have themselves a hell of a time in this world, but if that’s what they want, fine, God bless them.
JUNE: If they knew about us, we would have to move, that’s all.
RITA: Yes, we would have to leave. But the thing is that when you live out in the country you do not have other people around all the time and people do not know about you. There is no cause for anybody to know about us, how we live. It is only a question of being easy about it in our own minds.
I was not easy about it all of the time at first. The thing that made me easy about it is when lo and behold I didn’t get the curse one month, and didn’t even realize at the time that I hadn’t gotten it, because for some reason I had stopped even thinking about it, about having babies or anything of the sort, and lo and behold I was pregnant!
Now all that I can call this is a sign from God. I do not go to church or think particularly much about God and perhaps should not be free with His name, but then you could call it a sign from Nature. Because it had crossed my mind that the three of us living together might be unnatural; in fact I had used that word myself when talking of it. But after living this way the most truly natural thing of all happened, with me becoming pregnant, and that had to be a sign.
And now with Junie having a baby, and we are so happy about that, that we are both having Gordon’s children, well, it may be a question as to how to keep people from knowing. There could be a problem to this. We could let it be known that June was going with some married man from Dayton or Cincinnati who fathered the child, but we would want the child to know that Gordon is the father. We might move right after the baby is born to some other area and have the story that Junie is a widow. Or we might just stay here and let people make their own guesses and tell the children the truth when they know enough to understand.
But one way or another I know it will work out all right.
Jerry & Peggy & Kay
JWW: Jerry and Peggy Klein and Kay Jordan live in an architect-designed ranch house on a hillside in northwestern New Jersey, not far from the New York and Pennsylvania borders. None of them is a native of the area. Jerry was born in New York, Peggy in Connecticut, Kay in a suburb of Chicago.
Jerry, thirty-one, is a commercial artist. His work consists almost exclusively of paperback and magazine covers, primarily in the field of science fiction, where he has achieved some prominence. He is medium in height and build, with shaggy lank brown hair and a Mexican bandit moustache. There is occasionally a theatrical flair to his speech. He is extremely articulate, but tends to use the word “fucking” as more confined souls use commas. While his income is above average, a substantial inheritance of Peggy’s obviates the necessity of living within it. Thus the architect-designed house, the spectacular view, the frequent vacations for the three of them, and the option of undertaking only such artistic assignments as Jerry finds appealing.
Peggy and Kay are both twenty-eight, and less than two months apart in age. (My notes do not seem to indicate which one is older, nor does it seem to much matter.) Peggy is a lithe blonde, an avid gardener, a lover of animals. Her face is very expressive, changing considerably with her moods. Kay is quite bookish and less talkative. She is auburn-haired and possessed of a full-blown figure.
Jerry and Peggy make an extremely attractive and charming couple.
So do Jerry and Kay.
So do Peggy and Kay.
• • •
KAY: When you write this up, I hope you won’t make me look like the third wheel. The interloper. After all, I knew Peggy before Jerry did.
JERRY: And knew her well.
PEGGY: Biblically, one might say.
KAY: One, indeed, might.
PEGGY: You needn’t be smug about it. If memory serves—
JERRY: It also stands and waits.
PEGGY: —I was the one who seduced you.
KAY: You were the experienced one. I was young and innocent and wet behind the ears.
JERRY: Among other places.
PEGGY: I wasn’t all that experienced.
KAY: I wasn’t all that innocent. Or all that hard to seduce. I’m a notoriously easy lay.
JERRY: That’s why you’re so popular around here.
KAY: I knew there was a reason. And here I thought it was my personality.
JERRY: You have a notoriously easy personality.
KAY: You say the nicest things.
PEGGY: I’m enjoying this too, but John—
JWW: So am I, actually.
PEGGY: —John wants to write this up, God knows why, unless he’s just a lech or Allen Funt in disguise or—
JWW: No, this is for real.
PEGGY: So John wants to write this up, and here we are impressing him with our wit, which may or may not be impressive, but it won’t make a book.
JWW: A chapter in a book, actually.
JERRY: Just a fucking chapter?
KAY: We’re not worth a whole book?
JWW: You’re probably worth a trilogy, but the plan is for three or possibly four case histories on the one theme.
JERRY: Oh, the others are in the same bag? Triangle sets?
JWW: Uh-huh.
PEGGY: So we’re a third of a book or a quarter of a book or whatever. In any case, wouldn’t it be simpler if one of us talked and the other two cooled it for the time being, so that we can let a story develop instead of playing Three Characters in Search of a Bed?
KAY: So talk, lovey.
PEGGY: Who, me?
JERRY: Oh, Christ—
• • •
JWW: Obviously, these three particular individuals were not so constituted as to take turns delivering lengthy speeches. The cross-talk never stopped, nor did I see any reason to try to put a lid on it; I had an abundant supply of tape reels and more time than I knew what to do with. And I cannot recall an interview I enjoyed more. My editing has consisted largely of leaving the greater portion of the cross-talk on the cutting room floor. The result might have been more entertaining had everything been left precisely as it was, but space limitations ruled this out, for better or for worse.
• • •
PEGGY: Kay and I first got to know each other during our freshman year at college. At the time we were both majoring in English, alth
ough I later changed my major twice, first to psychology and then to biology, and she changed to history and then back to English again. We had a few classes together and got to know each other fairly well, although we were not enormously close. I had been planning to room the following year with another girl, but near the end of the spring she decided to transfer out, and I happened to mention to Kay that I didn’t have a roommate and neither did she, so we decided to room together.
KAY: And from such a small beginning bloomed love.
PEGGY: As far as sex was concerned, I had had a certain amount of experience. I had gone to a boarding prep school, and while it’s certainly possible to do this without having a sensitive homosexual experience, you wouldn’t really feel as though you had gotten the full benefit of such a costly education if you passed it up. I had had relations with four girls during prep school. Not big passionate love affairs, although we generally kept up a pretense of being in love with each other. We said the words, you know. And I’m sure a lot of the more neurotic girls took it very seriously, but I never did and I don’t think any of my partners did. I didn’t consider myself a lesbian, for example. Looking back on it, I think I had a marvelously healthy attitude. I decided that sleeping with another girl was more fun than sleeping alone and playing with another girl was more fun than playing with oneself.
KAY: And eating another girl was more fun than eating yourself, and with less wear and tear on the backbone.
PEGGY: The whole thing in prep school could have been a lot more traumatic if I hadn’t managed to get myself laid somewhere along the line. I think if my whole frame of reference had been affairs with other girls, it would have bothered me more. But as it happened I lost my virginity at fifteen, which was almost a full year before I put a finger into any vagina other than my own, and I made it with a couple of other boys while I was at that school.
I was the only girl from my class at the college I went to, so there was nothing connecting me to the past. Of course the place was crawling with dykes but I didn’t know any of them and didn’t feel in a mood to seek them out. As a matter of fact I was in a fairly withdrawn stage during my freshman year, very determined to do well academically and not too anxious to have sex with anybody, male or female. I had had a pregnancy scare that I was a long time recovering from, and I didn’t even feel like dating or even developing a close friendship, let alone like balling anybody.
3 is Not a Crowd (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 5