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

by Lawrence Block

  Things might have been different if someone had felt strongly enough to make a pass at me, but nobody did. The girl they had me rooming with was this maniacal Christer from one of those states you fly over. Nebraska, I think it was. She kept falling down and praying all the time. No exaggeration. We would be studying and all of a sudden she would drop the books and flop on her hands and knees and start praying out loud. I really didn’t know how to handle this. I got very abusive and would tell her to fuck off and shove her Bible up her ass. Ladylike things like that.

  And she used to fingerfuck herself every damn night. We would both pretend I didn’t know what she was doing, and toward the end of the year I got particularly bitchy. I would wait until I knew she was about three digits away from orgasm and then I would start talking to her and throw her off stride.

  I always knew when she came, because then she would start in again with the praying.

  Surprising as it may seem, I didn’t try to get into her pants. Oh, she also had pimples, and she used one of those deodorants that smells worse than body odor. My God, I wonder where she is now. That poor girl. And I was so cruel to her.

  I had a summer romance before my sophomore year. I went out to the Cape and wound up screwing a pre-law student from Northeastern. His main attraction was that he was there, and mine was that I would put out. It wasn’t sensational.

  KAY: I, on the other hand, went through four years of public school and emerged intact. I would pet but I wouldn’t put out. Do you remember those articles. Do you have to pet to be popular? God, that dates me. Imagine an article like that today! For that matter, imagine a girl who doesn’t get laid in high school. You’ve come a long way, baby—

  The answer to the question was yes, you had to pet to be popular, and I petted, and I was popular enough, but I didn’t put out. This wasn’t rare in my group. There were a couple of girls who did put out, but not too many. This was in my particular group, not in the whole school, where the percentage of virgins must have been much lower. But we were a very middle-class bunch. We might not be saving it for our husbands, but we were certainly saving it for our True Loves, and that meant wait until you’re in college and make sure he gives you his fraternity pin.

  So I didn’t go to a school where there were boys, let alone fraternity pins. But I had relations with seven boys during my freshman year.

  PEGGY: Eight.

  KAY: No, it was seven, wasn’t it? Maybe it was eight. Why the hell should you remember if I don’t?

  JERRY: Because she loves you, darling.

  KAY: Sweet. The point is that once I started I didn’t know how to stop. I really was a slut. The classic tramp pattern. I felt very out of it socially. My group in high school was very snobby, the cream of the social order there, and all of a sudden I was with all of these private school people and I was snob enough to care about it at the time. I also decided I was pretty ignorant and mousy compared to all these polished preppie cunts. Typical low-estimate-of-self shit. Typical reaction formation. So of course I fucked around, and of course I didn’t enjoy it much, and this convinced me I was a lousy lay, which I very likely was.

  JERRY: How you’ve changed!

  KAY: And I got knocked up. Inevitably I got knocked up. And had an abortion, and at least I had the sense to do that right. No knitting needles routine. A real live doctor in a clean office, a quick scrape and no postoperative complications, thank God. Is it proper to thank God for a successful abortion? I don’t see why not.

  The abortion put me off sex. I hit the old books just in time to save myself from flunking out. I spent the summer at home and dated the same crowd of boys I had dated during high school. Most of them had gone to schools like Michigan and Northwestern and pledged fraternities.

  I laid a couple of them. Two of them. One of them decided he was in love with me and tried to give me his pin. I told him I wasn’t that kind of a girl.

  When I went back to school and Peggy and I started rooming together, neither of us were particularly active socially. I had liked her well enough all along, but now we began to get really close. We talked quite a bit about men. Told each other what we had done sexually. Heterosexually, that is. She never said anything about fun and games at prep school.

  Nor did it occur to me to ask, and I had nothing to report in that area myself. I was a complete innocent on the subject. If I ever had any subliminal urgings in that direction they were too subliminal ever to let me know about them. I suppose there were girls in my high school who had crushes on the gym teacher. That’s the usual pattern, isn’t it? And I suppose the gym teacher must have been a dyke. I suppose all lady gym teachers are dykes, whether they know it or not.

  So here we were, the brainless tramp from the Midwest and the sexy two-way preppie, rooming together and spending more and more of our time with just each other for company, and discussing sex all the time, and telling each other how men were really a drag. And admiring each other’s bodies—I wished I were thin and long and lean and all like Miss Sophisticate here, and she had always wished she was like me, with a pair of tits that could qualify her as a stand-in for Elsie the Cow.

  I think if Peggy had been as innocent in these matters as I was, we still would have wound up in bed together, because all the conditions were certainly right for it. All systems go, you know. But to make things easier she had been down this street before, and she did me the supreme favor of turning me out.

  PEGGY: Actually I had a pretty hard time for a while that Kay didn’t know about. This big moral conflict thing. Like should I or should I not seduce my roomie? I wanted to a whole long time before I got around to doing anything about it. Kay was the first girl at college that I had felt this way about. The girl I had originally planned to room with that year, we were close, but in a completely sexless way. I would now and then see girls in a class or walking across campus and would say to myself that So-and-so would probably be fun to ball, but with no idea at all of doing anything about this. Pure window shopping and nothing but.

  Kay and I became extremely close, and at this time neither of us was at all close with anyone else. And I knew what she was going through, what a screwed-up sex life she had had during the past year, all the conflicts that had been messing her up. We would talk about all of these things. In addition I found her enormously attractive physically, which is something you shouldn’t find terribly hard to understand.

  JERRY: Hear, hear!

  PEGGY: I wasn’t doing anything with boys at the time. No interest. So all my impulses were directed toward Kay. I wanted more than anything to make love to her, but I had to keep cool about the whole thing because the last thing I wanted to do was ruin the really beautiful relationship we had going.

  KAY: I was just thinking. Suppose you never did make that pass.

  PEGGY: Oh, it had to happen sooner or later.

  KAY: Look what we might have missed.

  PEGGY: I don’t even want to think about it.

  The night it happened, Kay went out on a date with some yoyo from Williams. She had never met him but someone fixed her up and she wanted to turn the date down but decided the hell with it, she would go. I studied for a while and then just moped around the room wishing she hadn’t gone. I had a couple of drinks and put bluesy stuff on the record player and sat around feeling deliciously sorry for myself.

  When Kay came back she was in tears. Literally. She was pretty much hysterical. Her clothes were a mess and her face was all runny with tears. She opened her coat and said, “Look at this, the son of a bitch came all over my dress!”

  KAY: He really was a son of a bitch. He wrestled with me for half an hour trying to screw me, and I wouldn’t, and he slapped me and tried to stick it in my mouth, and I wouldn’t let him, and then he just pushed me down on the seat and got on top of me and jerked himself off all over the front of my dress, which I was wearing for, I think, the second time. “You can have it cleaned,” he said. “Listen, I’ll pay to have it cleaned. And it wouldn’t have go
tten like that if you were just sensible in the first place. You’re not a virgin, for Christ’s sake, so why make a fuss about it? Why not just put out?”

  He was a real charmer. I said something devastatingly witty like “Go fuck yourself” and went back to the room, crying every step of the way.

  It was the way he treated me. It was just so disgusting, so cheap. I felt like a wastebasket.

  PEGGY: I made her have a couple of drinks, and got her clothes off. We threw the dress out. She didn’t want to have it cleaned, didn’t want to look at it again. She went down the hall and showered until her skin was raw and then came back wrapped up in a terrycloth robe. A yellow robe. I can picture her in it so vividly even now, and I made us both fresh drinks, and we sat on her bed together and I knew tonight was the night. I just loved her so much at that moment and wanted to do something good for her.

  KAY: She suddenly leaned over and kissed me. On the mouth. I just sat there feeling stupid. Not reacting at all. Then she put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me again. And I didn’t think. I just responded. I kissed back, and my mouth opened, and she put her tongue in my mouth—

  JERRY: Oh, you sly devil, you.

  KAY: —and something happened. I just felt totally warm and passionate, but passionate without being at all tense. I knew something weird was happening but I just locked out thoughts and concentrated completely on what was happening. I stayed with the present and didn’t get involved with the future at all. I wanted it to go on forever, the kissing. Her arms around me and our breasts pressing together and our tongues working. I just wanted it to go on forever.

  We kissed for a very long time. It was such an unusual experience.

  Then we came up for air, and I reached for my cigarettes and lit one, and Peggy took a drag on it and gave it back to me, and I took a drag and put it down on the edge of the dresser and looked at her, and our eyes locked. I couldn’t speak right away. Then I said, “Well, what happens now?”

  PEGGY: I said, “Now I’m going to make love to you.”

  KAY: I said, “I don’t know anything about this.”

  She said, “Don’t worry, just let me love you, that’s all.”

  I said, “Do you know what you’re doing?” She said she did. I wanted to know if she had ever done this before. She said that she had. I was full of questions but she kissed me again and told me not to talk, and then she made love to me. She took off my robe and I lay down on the bed and she stretched out alongside me and kissed me. While we kissed she took off her own clothes and when she was naked and our bodies touched I just put my arms around her and held her close and felt contented in a wholly unfamiliar way. I had never had any feeling remotely like this. I was very frightened in a part of my mind, but I somehow knew that everything was going to be good.

  She kissed me and touched me for a very long time. It was fantastically exciting. I had never been aware of my body in this way before. Finally she curled up with her mouth on my breast and used her finger to bring me to orgasm. It was a sensational orgasm. It left me feeling utterly at peace. I had never felt like this after screwing.

  Also, whenever I was with a boy, as soon as the act was over I really couldn’t stand the sight of him. Whether I liked him or not, whether I planned to see him again or not, I just wanted to get away from him for the time being and be by myself. And I invariably had a compulsive desire to take a shower. Not a hard compulsion to interpret, is it? I always felt very dirty, and I had none of this feeling with Peggy, and no desire to be alone, away from her. I wanted her to be right there with me.

  I was filled with questions, overflowing with them. I had to know absolutely everything. When had she done this before and who with and what did it mean and were we both lesbians and what other things did lesbians do with each other? I must have been a dreadful bore.

  PEGGY: You were a delight. I couldn’t get over how sweet you were, and how beautiful it had been. I felt such complete love for you.

  KAY: I probably would never have run out of questions. But eventually Peggy grabbed me and kissed me again and I decided to shut up. I put my hands on her body and began to relate to her flesh in a sexual way. To regard her as desirable and to want to caress her.

  This, too, was new. I had never desired boys as such, had never found them physically desirable. I had wanted to screw them for one reason or another but their bodies were never love-objects for me.

  That first night, that was really incredible. Utterly incredible. We didn’t get any sleep at all. I really had no idea what I was supposed to do in bed. I had read novels with lesbian scenes in them but they were mostly rather vague as to who did what and with which and to whom. I more or less understood that lesbians went down on each other and rubbed their boxes together and used dildos on each other—

  PEGGY: Ugh.

  KAY: —but I was still very vague about it.

  We fooled around at the beginning, and touched each other, and kissed each other’s breasts, and then Peggy went down on me. Some boys had done this briefly as a prelude to intercourse. The word seemed to be that if you did this to a girl she would go out of her mind with delight and then you could throw her a fuck with no trouble at all. I had never gone out of my mind with pleasure because I guess they didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and didn’t much enjoy it, and all it ever amounted to was a lick and a promise, so to speak.

  When Peggy went down on me I thought I was going to die of pleasure. No joke. It was as different from what I had experienced as, I don’t know, night and day? Not a particularly original way to put it, but make up your own image, it hardly matters. It was just fantastic.

  The whole night was fantastic. We did everything to each other, everything we could think of. Some things Peggy had never done with her bosom buddies at school. We made up things. We were in this great rush to do everything there was, to play with this brand-new toy to the fullest before somebody came and took it away from us.

  • • •

  PEGGY: It was really a very wonderful relationship that we had. I think one very important thing was that it didn’t start out with sex. We were very close friends long before we became lovers, and I think this made a considerable difference. lf it had been a sexual thing from the beginning I think there would have been a great deal of guilt involved on both sides. And the whole thing would have been cheapened.

  KAY: Of course there was a certain amount of guilt anyway.

  PEGGY: Of course. Kay and I are both basically moody people. Introspective. She particularly tends to brood. There were times when one or both of us would worry that we were into something abnormal, and that what we were doing was wrong for one reason or another.

  KAY: But it felt so good—

  PEGGY: It was good that we had both had experience with boys beforehand. This kept us from being too quick to pin the lesbian label on ourselves. We knew we could make it with boys, and somewhere along the way we realized that it wasn’t heterosexuality per se which was a bore, but that the whole dating system conspired to make our relationships with boys basically superficial. I gather that kids nowadays are a lot cooler about this sort of scene, but when we were in college dating was very much an exploitive process. On both sides of the line. The girl wanted to make sure that she was properly treasured before she opened her legs. She would try to hold out for an engagement ring or a fraternity pin or a declaration of love or a batch of dates with the same boy before giving in to him, and the boy would try to get as much as he could for as little as he could.

  KAY: This wasn’t universal. There were certainly a lot of kids who had real relationships, but neither of us were that sensational at relating to boys at the time. I was especially unequipped for it, so the scenes we were in were always bad ones. The kids today seem to be a lot more honest. I don’t know if this is true at the cow colleges as well, but among the hipper kids it’s certainly the case. They’re able to admit honestly that they screw each other because they want to. The boys aren’t as obsess
ed with the idea of scoring and the girls are freer of the kind of hang-ups that most of our generation went through.

  PEGGY: I don’t know how clearly we saw all this at the time, but I do know that we grew to look on our love affair as something temporary. There were times when we would talk about being together forever, but most of the time we both knew very well that we were going to outgrow this, that we would grow apart, and that we would ultimately graduate and get married and live essentially traditional middle-class lives. We didn’t intend to get caught in the same binds our parents did, we wanted more out of life than the fucking Marjorie Morningstar trip, but we knew we also wanted the bit of a husband and children and stability and security.

  As a matter of fact, our relationship itself wasn’t exactly a love affair.

  KAY: We did love each other.

  PEGGY: Of course. But we weren’t particularly possessive or jealous or anything.

  KAY: I would have been jealous if you were with another girl. Insanely jealous.

  PEGGY: I never even considered going with another girl.

  KAY: I did, at the very first.

  PEGGY: I wasn’t enough for you?

  KAY: At the onset, I had this big urge to be a lesbian to the hilt.

  JERRY: I love the choice of words.

  KAY: What I mean is that this whole thing was very new to me, and I would think about not only making it with Peggy but with other girls as well. I would see girls on the campus and wonder if I would enjoy kissing them or eating them. I was thinking in those terms, but I never really planned to do anything about it, and before very long I realized that this was something between the two of us and that the last thing I wanted was to get anything going with anybody else. But I would have been jealous and hurt if you went with another girl, and I think you would have been the same way if I did.