PEGGY: No question about it.
KAY: And yet there was no jealousy on either side if one of us went out with a boy.
PEGGY: Because that was a different thing entirely. We did date boys, and we occasionally got laid, and oddly enough we found ourselves enjoying this more now than we had before we started sleeping together. When I would be with a boy I couldn’t wait to get home afterward and tell Kay everything about it, what he was like and what we did—all the gory details, absolutely everything. And then we would generally make love to each other.
KAY: If any of those boys had known—
PEGGY: They would have utterly flipped.
KAY: Absolutely.
PEGGY: You know, I think that was part of the fun. Part of the excitement. The whole secret nature of our affair, the feeling that we were putting something over on the world and on the boys we dated. Not only the ones we made it with but especially the ones we held out on. I remember taking a particularly sadistic delight in an evening I spent with this one clod, a blind date, and I let him do his damnedest to seduce me but wouldn’t let him get there. For some reason I disliked him intensely and used that as an excuse to do a total cockteasing number. I drove him up the wall. I wouldn’t even give him a hand job or a dry fuck or anything.
JERRY: I only married her because she’s such a class broad. You notice how every word out of her mouth smacks of an aristocratic heritage.
PEGGY: I just kept getting him hot and letting him down, I was really vicious, and then I made him drive me back to the dorm, and I rushed in so excited that Kay didn’t know what to make of me. And we made wild love, and I told her all about what had happened, and we made love some more.
JERRY: What an absolute ball-buster you must have been. I’m glad I didn’t know you then.
PEGGY: It’s just as well you didn’t. But that was by no means typical. As a matter of fact, if anything I became a lot better at relating to males during that time.
KAY: So did I. For one thing, the pressure was off. Also I learned to enjoy myself sexually through Peggy, and I developed a sense of what my body was and how it worked, and this knowledge stayed with me when I was with a boy. Masturbation is supposed to be very good training for girls, I’ve read. Girls who play with themselves are statistically more likely to be able to have good orgasms when they screw.
PEGGY: That could also be because the girls who masturbate are basically freer and sexier to begin with.
KAY: But it’s also that they learn how to let their bodies groove, and they stay with the same pattern later on.
PEGGY: Then that Christer from Nebraska must be the world’s greatest lay by now, because by the end of the year I knew her she was just about running out of fingers. She must be utter dynamite by now.
KAY: I’m not sure it applies in every case.
PEGGY: I hope not. I can’t imagine her being any good that way.
KAY: The point is that I think our relationship worked the same way. That it served as preparation for other things. Not that it wasn’t satisfying as an end in itself, but you know what I mean.
And I think too that one of the reasons we were able to continue having a steady sexual relationship for over two full years without getting big guilt hang-ups was that instead of finding ourselves cut off from men we found ourselves getting along much better with them.
Ultimately, shortly after the start of our senior years, I started going with a guy in a serious way. And that was the first time I began to feel any real conflict.
PEGGY: She came home one night and seemed far more reserved than I had seen her in a long time. Of course Kay and I were practically an old married couple by now and we didn’t have sex every night, but it had been awhile, and I gave her a kiss, and she went slightly tense in my arms. I asked her what was the matter and she said nothing was, and we made love, and something was wrong and I asked her about it again.
She said, “Well, I think maybe I’m in love with Ken. And all of a sudden I feel a little funny about us.”
I said, “Do you mean you don’t want us to make love any more?”
She said she didn’t know, she wanted to think about it. Then a day later she said maybe we shouldn’t make love any more, and she offered to move out and room elsewhere. I told her not to be ridiculous—
KAY: Well, I thought you might go crazy, seeing my fair white body and not being able to possess it.
PEGGY: —and that I would always be her best friend, in bed or out of it, and that there was no reason for her to move. So she kept on going with the guy, and married him after graduation.
KAY: Peggy was my maid of honor.
PEGGY: Not quite a maid, I’m afraid, and of bloody little honor. She got married and she and Ken moved to—San Francisco?
KAY: Berkeley.
PEGGY: Berkeley. And I was happy for her, and only missed her on alternate Thursdays. Not quite. I would miss her a great deal when things were going poorly for me, which was more often than I would have liked. But all in all I got along without you very well, baby.
KAY: And I without you.
PEGGY: To be honest, I think I was very glad you were on the other side of the continent. And I guess you must have felt about the same.
KAY: Yes.
PEGGY: I was a little afraid that if we were geographically close, if we saw quite a bit of each other, something might happen that we wouldn’t want to happen.
Let me see now. After graduation I went to New York and had a crap job with a social welfare agency, which I kept longer than I should have out of a conviction that I was Doing Good Work to Benefit Mankind. I was very alone. I didn’t know many people and didn’t care awfully for the ones I knew. I had had a particularly tacky affair with a girl at school a month or so after Kay and I wrote finis to our little fling. This girl was a sophomore and very much committed to homosexuality. And a trifle crazy, I think. She was into the dyke scene heavily and was a virgin heterosexually and couldn’t understand how I could go with men as well, she thought I was horribly immoral in that respect. I slept with her three times and didn’t enjoy it at all. I just hated the whole thing. I had had this highly emotional relationship with Kay and felt nothing at all for this poor girl, and without the love part it was really a big nothing. I had trouble breaking it off with her. She had managed to convince herself that she was in love with me, and the more I tried to get loose the deeper in love she got. She was some sort of emotional loser, she could only really love someone who did not love her. Hardly uncommon, but this was the first time I had ever been involved in this kind of scene and I couldn’t get out of it fast enough.
In New York I eventually decided to find out whether or not I wanted homosexual relations, and I went to a gay bar on the West Side and got picked up. Just one time. It wasn’t any good and I told myself I was glad because it meant I had outgrown all of this and I didn’t have to be afraid to meet a guy and marry him, because the fling with Kay was a part of the past and I was beyond all that now.
KAY: I believed that myself. I was sure I could see you and nothing would happen, and that I would never be drawn to another girl.
PEGGY: I had been in New York for about a year when I met Jerry. I had had a couple affairs, nothing very serious, and I had spent more time completely alone than I had ever spent in my life. I was unemployed when we met, and happy about that because I really hated my job toward the end. My mother had died recently and I had an independent income—
JERRY: Why do you think I married you?
PEGGY: —and I was ready to fall in love with someone about then, and when I met Jerry it was magic. Absolute magic, something fresh out of a fucking Doris Day movie. We were so perfect together on every level that I was terrified to go to bed with him.
JERRY: Thanks.
PEGGY: Terrified that it would be lousy, and it was very important to me that it not be lousy, because I knew this could be the one, the start of something big, all those good things. So I wound up playing harder to get
than I usually would do if I was attracted to a man, but I wasn’t all that hard to get, and he got me . . . well, I think we stayed in bed for an entire weekend. And around the end of the weekend he said, “You know, we’ll have to get married sooner or later, because this is too good to ever hang up on.” And two weeks later we got married.
JERRY: And lived happily ever after.
PEGGY: More or less.
• • •
JERRY: I met Kay for the first time not too long after Peggy and I were married. We were living in the city at the time and she and her husband were in town for a week. I liked her right away. I could have done without him, but I liked Kay. Bright, hip, attractive—it was fun having her around.
Now at the time I had absolutely no idea that the two of them had been anything more than good friends.
PEGGY: The best of friends.
JERRY: I knew Peggy had screwed around a lot. This didn’t bother me at all. I can say that quite honestly, it’s never bothered me. My own attitude had always been that I would screw a snake if somebody would hold its head, and I’ve never bought the notion of a double-standard. It never made sense to me. I didn’t want Peggy fucking anybody else after we were married, but as for what went on before, I couldn’t have cared less about it.
Not long after that we heard from Kay. We had just moved out here and she called to say she had just gotten a divorce and was remarried to another guy. I didn’t talk to her. Peggy did and said she sounded very strange, very different from her usual self.
KAY: That’s what happens when you lose your mind. The thing with Ken had gone wrong almost from the beginning, and I couldn’t just pick up and get out of it, so I wound up having an affair with a really terrible man. He was a minor politician involved with organized crime in the Bay area, and I managed to sell myself on the idea that I was madly in love with him, and I divorced Ken and married him. It was a rotten marriage from the beginning and I think I knew myself that it would he a miracle if it lasted two years.
Twenty-one months later I had my second divorce.
JERRY: After the phone call, Peggy got very moody and wanted to talk about Kay. She was very worried about her. I said something to the effect that Kay was a big girl and could take care of herself, and I think I added that a girl like Kay would very likely have this sort of trouble for most of her life because she was so sexily female and would always attract men very strongly.
This got Peggy going. She said there was something I didn’t know about Kay, or about her, either, for that matter, and she felt like talking about it.
PEGGY: I told him the whole story. I don’t know why I felt compelled to, but I did. I really was worried about Kay that night. She didn’t sound right at all and I had the feeling she was screwing up her life and getting involved in something she couldn’t handle.
KAY: That’s what she was doing, all right.
JERRY: I think I was supposed to disapprove, or be very sympathetic and understanding, or something. I’m afraid my reaction wasn’t what it was supposed to be.
What happened was that I got very fucking turned on by the whole thing. I listened to Peggy and I pictured the two of them in the hay together and I thought it was the most exciting thing ever.
I’ve always found lesbianism appealing. Exciting. I gather this isn’t especially unusual. I used to do a lot of fuck book covers—titles like Sin Slut and Passion Cunt, high type literature of that sort—and I don’t remember one that didn’t have a heavy lesbian component in it. This was standard. And it was common for editors to request a dyke scene on the cover if there was justification for it in terms of content. Of course the fuck book covers these days are all print, no art work at all. That’s a shame, because a lot of good men got their start in the business that way, and now that whole market is gone. The money stank and the quality was usually pretty bad, but it paid the rent for a lot of artists.
Once, a couple of years before I met Peggy, a buddy of mine and I picked up a couple of semipro hookers at a bar over on York Avenue. They had an apartment together and we went there and smoked some hash. I was just getting into grass at the time and had never had hashish, and we all got beautifully high. The girls asked if we wanted to see a show, and we said sure, and they got undressed and one of them made love to the other one. Kissed her, felt her up, ate her out, then strapped on a dildo and socked it to her.
I suppose the hash must have had something to do with it, but it was the most wildly exciting time I ever had. I wanted desperately to screw them, I wanted to grow an extra cock so I could screw them both at once, but at the same time I wanted it to go on forever, to watch them forever.
Finally they were done, and my buddy grabbed one of them and I grabbed the other, and we screwed them, and then we switched girls and screwed some more, and then we got the girls to do their thing some more, and we just kept switching back and forth and screwing them all night.
I never ran into either of them again. I went back to that bar a couple of times but never saw them. I couldn’t go to the apartment because I wasn’t sure where the hell it was. As I said, we all got pretty well stoned.
When Peggy did her confession number, of course I immediately thought of that evening, which I don’t think I had told her about before—
PEGGY: You hadn’t.
JERRY: That’s what I thought. My mind went back to it, and I imagined her and Kay doing what the two whores had done, and I got very excited. I wanted to hear everything, wanted to know all the details.
PEGGY: His interest was damn near clinical.
JERRY: We wound up in bed, of course. We were never lousy in bed, but this particular time was better than usual. Quite sensational.
Afterward, when the glow wore off, she was convinced she had made a mistake telling me about it. That whether or not it excited me, I would lose respect for her because of what I knew about her. This just wasn’t so, and I think I made her realize it. I told her I thought lesbians were a groove. I said I had to admit that I found faggots generally off-putting, and that might be because of hang-ups of my own, but that I frankly dug lesbians and felt that a girl didn’t lose any of her femininity by having that kind of an experience. I think this is true in a way that it isn’t for male homosexuals. I think they give up masculinity. But if anything, I find a girl more desirable as a result of lesbian experiences.
KAY: That could be one of your hang-ups, too.
JERRY: No doubt about it. Remember, our neuroses are the only thing that separates us from the apes.
But ever after that night my wife was just a little more exciting to me. She was exciting enough to begin with—
PEGGY: Thanks.
JERRY: —but this was icing on the cake. I do a lot of my living in fantasy—I think a majority of creative people do—and I would have fantasies in which Kay and Peggy and I would romp together. And of course I was seeing Kay in a new light now. I remembered being attracted to her the one time I met her, and now I was including her in a variety of fantasies.
PEGGY: You were doing more than having fantasies.
JERRY: What do you mean?
PEGGY: You wanted to go into the city and pick up a whore and bring her out here and have us both make love to her.
JERRY: Oh, I was joking.
PEGGY: You pretended you were joking, and I pretended that I knew you were joking, and you were like hell joking. You were trying it on, love.
JERRY: Well, if you had gone along with it, I certainly would have had no objection.
PEGGY: That’s not joking, then.
JERRY: Maybe not.
PEGGY: You also told me that if I ever wanted to see a girl on my own you would have no objection.
JERRY: Well, I was just being decent.
PEGGY: I’m not sure that’s the word for it.
JERRY: Oh, cut the shit. That was altruistic, as a matter of fact. I just wanted you to know that if you ever got the yen you shouldn’t hold yourself back out of concern for how I might feel about it,
that you didn’t have to tell me and could do what you wanted with a clear conscience. You can’t make me the heavy for that.
PEGGY: I know. It’s just that something like that, some idiot Village pickup or some orgy with a hired whore, I mean that was the last thing I could possibly want and I was a little disgusted that you thought I might want it.
JERRY: Didn’t you ever want it?
PEGGY: No.
JERRY: You never wanted a girl after we were married?
PEGGY: No.
JERRY: You must have thought about it.
PEGGY: Of course I thought about it. When we went to a party and some men made a pass at me I thought about that, too, but that didn’t mean I had the slightest interest in having an affair. I didn’t, whether with a man or a woman. I was perfectly happy with just you, hard as it may be for you to believe it.
• • •
KAY: My second marriage made my first marriage look peachy by comparison. I don’t really see any point in talking about it now. If you were a psychiatrist instead of a writer, or if we were into some version of group therapy, maybe. But let’s just say that it was rotten, and he screwed around, and I screwed around, and for a while I became something of a pillhead, Dexedrine in the morning and Preludin around noon and Librium at martini time and Seconal before bed.
I don’t want to talk about that part.
After I got the second divorce I didn’t know just where to go or who to see or what to do. I was done with the pills and beginning to put myself together. I had spent some time with a shrink, and maybe if I had stayed with him it might have done me some good, but it seemed to me that he was just screwing me up more. I know I always felt worse after I saw him than before, so I really couldn’t see the point in it.
I called Ken, which couldn’t have thrilled him too much. He had remarried and has a kid, and I said something about coming to stay with him and his wife, as if they would welcome me with open arms while I got myself back together. At first he seemed to think I was putting him on and then he decided I was out of my mind, which wasn’t that far from the truth, and finally he lost his patience, a commodity he never had in abundant supply, and told me to fuck off. And then he hung up on me. I called him right back and as soon as he picked up the phone I said something along the lines of “I’m sorry, honey, we were disconnected, and I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to take your advice and fuck off, and thanks very much,” and I hung up on him this time.
3 is Not a Crowd (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 7