JERRY: And then she went and fucked off.
KAY: Shut up.
PEGGY: Then you called us.
KAY: Then I got drunk, actually, and then the next day I called you.
PEGGY: She said, “Two marriages and two divorces. I’m the kid who batted a thousand.”
KAY: I hadn’t planned on inviting myself for a visit. Not consciously. Unconsciously I must have, because it would seem to be consistent enough. I was obviously looking for a home, which was the one thing I obviously didn’t have. And I was somehow obsessed with the idea of visiting a married couple. I mean, I had even invited myself to visit Ken and his second wife, and while that notion was perhaps not the notion of a tremendously sane person, it seems to fit the pattern, no?
PEGGY: I’ve always thought you attach too much significance to that.
KAY: Perhaps. I don’t know.
At any rate, I called and delivered my line, and said I just wanted to keep them up to date on me, and Peggy asked what I was going to do next. I said I didn’t know, which was nothing if it wasn’t the truth. Well, was I going to stay out on the Coast? No, I said, the vibrations were not all that good for me there, and the memories were even worse, and I thought I would probably come back East, but I didn’t know where or when, and I didn’t really have any place to go or anything to do, and I might just sign myself into a sanitarium and let the good doctors and nurses try to make the pieces fit again.
Peggy told me I was crazy—which I already knew—and to come and stay with them for a while, which I’m sure I wanted all along because I felt this overwhelming feeling of relief flood over me when she said it.
PEGGY: Then why the hell did you make me talk you into it?
KAY: Misplaced pride, maybe. Or maybe I wanted to be assured that you really wanted me. I guess at the time I really felt a need to be wanted.
JERRY: You were wanted all right. Once you got here, you were about as wanted as it’s possible to be.
KAY: Uh-huh. By both of you.
• • •
JERRY: There was a certain amount of awkwardness when Kay first arrived. I was glad she was coming, and I don’t think this had anything to do with the idea that something might happen sexually. This may even have been in the back of my mind somewhere but I never honestly expected anything to occur. But I did know that Peggy had been pretty lonely out here. This is country out here, and country people are the salt of earth, but we don’t generally have a whole lot to say to them or them to us. The few close friends we had were people we knew in New York and as the years went by we tended to get into town less and less frequently. I would go in now and then to see editors and publishers, but we were getting out of the habit of driving in for a social evening. Also, most of our friends had moved into suburbs or country places of their own, and New York in general, the whole scene, has had progressively less appeal for us. You can’t breathe the air, you can drink the water, and frankly the whole town gives me a pain in the ass.
So I was glad Peggy would have company, and glad I would have the opportunity to know Kay better, since l had liked her when we met and she wouldn’t have that bore of a husband along this time.
At the same time, I think Peggy and I were both a little apprehensive. Ever since the confession number, I had been teasing Peggy off and on about her notorious lesbian past. This was just a game, but it wasn’t one she always enjoyed. I think she was worried that Kay’s presence might increase the tension in our own relationship.
For my part, I was a little concerned that Kay might drive the two of us farther apart. l don’t know if anybody mentioned it, but Peggy and I were not exactly in the throes of the honeymoon any longer. It was more a case of seven-year itch. I had had a girl in New York for a while, I would see her when I was in town, and Peggy more or less realized this, and she and I were by no means going on the rocks, but at the same time the whole relationship was cooling slightly and going quietly stale, and we didn’t seem to know what to do about it. It was still good for the most part, but we were having more and more days that were less than terrific.
There was the further complication that I knew about Kay and Peggy, and Peggy knew that I knew obviously, but Kay didn’t know, and we had decided it would be foolish to tell her.
When she got here, though, all the worries we might have felt took a back seat to the immediate problem at hand, which was to help Kay put her head together again.
KAY: I was rather a mess.
JERRY: The lady was a wreck. An emotional basket case. Her hands shook, she had a nervous tic in the temple, her appetite was shot, and during occasional lulls in the conversation she would excuse herself and go into the bathroom and cry for ten or fifteen minutes.
KAY: The perfect house guest.
JERRY: Gradually she began to work herself out of this, at least to a degree. She liked taking long walks in the woods, alone or with one or the other of us. At night we would all sit around sipping brandy and talking, and happily we all got along very well. Kay and Peggy discovered, once the initial unfamiliarity wore off, that they were close in the same way they had been close at college.
PEGGY: Emotionally close, that is. There was no quick rediscovery of the fact that we were hot for each other.
KAY: But we were.
PEGGY: Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? And I think each of us made the discovery privately but kept it to herself. I know I fought for the longest time admitting it to myself. I kept telling myself that we had a lovely thing going in college but that it was over forever, and that perhaps the best thing about it was that now, some years later, we could live together and be really close friends without having sex get in the way. I don’t know why I was dumb enough to think this. The fact that we could still have such emotional rapport should have led me to suspect that the physical rapport—oh, hell, the love, that’s what it is—
KAY: Amen.
PEGGY: —was still there as much as ever.
I kept fighting this, but I was too honest with myself to be able to believe it for long. I found myself wanting to make love to Kay. We would be talking, just the two of us, and I would feel this rush of sympathy for her, I would sense how hurt she was, and I would think how I could make her feel better, how if we were in bed together and I could make love to her all the pain and tension would go away and she would be happy.
JERRY: How supremely unselfish of you.
PEGGY: Don’t be bitchy. It was partly unselfish. Of course I wanted Kay, I wanted the pleasure I would have with her, the thought wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t wanted her, but I also did feel that this was something she needed and that it would be good for her.
KAY: I wanted you, too. For a variety of reasons. One of them being simply that I found myself remembering those days more and more and contrasting them with what had come later. It seemed to me that we were secure and happy then and that I had never really been happy since.
But I was terrified of this. Because you were this wonderful warm family that I had sought out, and I could see myself driving a wedge between you, and I actually told myself more than once that before I ought to let myself do such a thing, break up the good thing that you two had . . . that I ought to go and kill myself. I never got to the point of figuring out how to go about it, but I felt suicide was a noble alternative to getting in your pants again.
PEGGY: Kind of an extreme solution, no?
KAY: A final one, certainly.
The other thing, and this really began to convince me that I was crazy, was that I began to want Jerry.
JERRY: Thanks.
KAY: Huh?
JERRY: You’re overfucking flowing with compliments. If you wanted me, then you must be crazy. That’s what you just said. Thanks a bunch.
KAY: Oh, Christ, you know what I meant. I liked you. I found you disturbingly attractive.
JERRY: Now you’re talking.
KAY: And I had a great urge to ball you. Happy?
JERRY: You betcha.
KAY: But I tried to figure out why, and what seemed like the obvious answer was that I wanted to drive the two of you apart. That I wanted to spoil what I couldn’t have. That I wanted to compete with Peggy and take her man away from her. I kept finding different motivations, and I didn’t like what any of them told me about myself.
PEGGY: That shrink on the Coast really fucked you up, didn’t he?
KAY: I guess he did.
PEGGY: When you start analyzing that way, you can really get messed up. I think those schmucks do more harm than good, I really do.
KAY: Well, I didn’t go to him that long. Maybe I would have turned a corner somewhere along the way and maybe he would have started to do me good, but in the amount of time I went to him I would tend to agree that he hurt more than he helped.
JERRY: Meanwhile, while these two were hot for each other and keeping it to themselves, and while Kay was beginning to go for me, I was finding it just about impossible to keep from making a pass at her. Now I hadn’t expected this. I had anticipated that something might get started between the two of them, and I had privately decided that I wouldn’t object to this at all, that if they wanted to do a little private mutual gobbling, that was their business and none of mine. I probably wanted this to happen, I liked the idea, but in any case I had no objection to it.
But I didn’t think I would fall in love with Kay.
Which of course is what happened. It started off with sympathy and a strong sexual attraction, and it got enhanced by the sheer sexual stimulation that grew out of the fact that the two of them had been lovers, and then it turned a big corner as I got to know Kay better and better and developed tremendous feeling for her as a person. I don’t know if I recognized it as love at the time. We’re all so conditioned, you know. So totally fucking programmed by the crap they drill into us as children. I had always considered myself more liberal and open-minded than most. I knew that a person could and would normally want more than one person sexually. I found it wholly unremarkable that I loved Peggy and dug Peggy sexually and nevertheless wanted to make it with Kay. But I didn’t take the thought a step further and admit I was in love with Kay, because of this monogamy hang-up that makes people think it’s only possible to love one person at a time.
This is a lot of shit. Of course it’s possible to love more than one person at a time, but we all have this concept of love, that it’s exclusive.
If we had all had a more mature outlook, if our minds had been a little more open, we would have saved a couple of very uncomfortable weeks. But if you look at it from another angle, if our minds had been just a little less open, the scene we have now would never have come about at all. We would have locked each other out permanently.
• • •
JWW: The three of them talked at some length about the period of several weeks during which each was attracted to the other without anyone’s doing anything about it. The innuendoes and hints, the subtle emotional changes, were analyzed by all three at some length.
To summarize, the general tone of the total relationship at this stage seems to have been one of frustration interwoven with excitement. Each had sexual desires which were not being satisfied, yet each had the feeling that something was coming, that during the next day or the next week or the next month something extraordinary was going to happen.
• • •
JERRY: Peggy was out shopping, and I was showing Kay some preliminary sketches for a cover I was working on. This was for a science fiction magazine, and she had read the script of the story I was supposed to use for the cover illo, and I had done some line drawings based on it for the inside pages and some rough sketches for the cover. And she was looking them over, and commenting on them, and as usual I was impressed with her comments, and impressed with other things about her as well, and by this time I had sensed that the attraction was mutual. So I took her by the shoulders and kissed her.
KAY: I was unprepared for this, and I just felt myself responding immediately. My reaction was almost one of relief. Finally something was happening. Anything is better than waiting after a point, you know.
The kiss went on for a while and I got slightly lost in it. Then I felt his hand under my skirt, reaching for me, and I just managed to break the kiss and draw away. I wanted him desperately but I also wanted this not to happen. I said, “God, this is crazy, we can’t.” He said that we both wanted each other and it was ridiculous to fight it. I said I couldn’t do something like that to Peggy. It would kill her, I said. He said he wouldn’t tell her if I didn’t.
I said, “She’ll be home any minute,” which was a cop-out of the worst sort. But it was also true, and I figured if we managed to postpone this, I could try to figure out what I was going to do about all this.
He went along with this. But he said, “Honey, we’re going to make it sooner or later. There’s no way around it. Why kill ourselves putting it off?”
All through dinner and the rest of the evening I kept thinking about this. I wondered if it was true. I had already sensed that Jerry wanted me, and I knew I wanted him, but the kiss, the electricity of it all, just had more impact. It made it clear that the magic was there and that it worked both ways, and I knew the two of us could be very good together.
I couldn’t look at either of them that night. It was really strange. I couldn’t look at Peggy without feeling guilty as all hell and I couldn’t look at Jerry without the two of us exchanging little messages.
That night we all went to bed fairly early. And I could hear them making love. My room wasn’t that close to theirs but I could still hear them.
It really got to me. It drove me up the wall.
JERRY: Actually, it was the worst kind of cheating. I was making love to my wife to use up some of the hunger I had for Kay, and I was balling Peggy and picturing Kay in my mind. I was fantastically passionate, but the passion wasn’t for what was going on, it was for where I was living in my imagination. So while anybody watching would have thought it was particularly satisfying, it wasn’t. You could call it a form of masturbation, I think.
PEGGY: I don’t read minds, so I couldn’t know whether Jerry was screwing me or Jane Fonda. I don’t know whether it was his attitude that did it or my own problems, but we had a really passionate time, and it must have gone on for half an hour, and I couldn’t come. I wound up faking it.
And he fell asleep, and I crawled inside my mind and decided that I had been unable to make it because I was all strung out with wanting Kay.
So I waited until I was sure he was sleeping soundly, and then I got up and went to the bathroom and douched and showered and put perfume all over my fair white body, and then I went down the hall to Kay’s room.
KAY: I was just starting to fall asleep. Just on the point of dropping off. It had driven me crazy listening to them fucking. Maybe it was only a half hour, but it seemed like hours. I tried to ease the tension by playing with myself. This didn’t work particularly well.
Then the door opened and Peggy was in my room, and I thought Jerry might have said something to her and she wanted to talk, and I thought, Christ, what am I going to say, what am I going to do?
But she got out of her robe and got into bed with me before I could say a word, and she put her arms around me and kissed me and said, “I love you, I never stopped loving you,” and I just let go of everything and we had each other.
It was such a feeling of total relief. I turned my mind off entirely and just let myself enjoy it, and all of the years fell away from me like the albatross from the neck of the ancient mariner. That must have been how he felt. All the emotional garbage of all those years fell off and we were two kids in college just kissing and touching and eating each other, just rolling in each other’s arms and having sweet loving orgasms. God, I don’t think I had ever needed anything so much in my life.
Afterward we lit cigarettes and she looked at me and said something like, “I almost had forgotten how sweet you taste,” or something like that. And I just started
to cry, and she held me, and we held onto each other. “I thought this was over years ago,” she said, “but it was never over and it will never be over. We’re a thing.”
I said, “But what are we going to do?”
“All the things we used to do.”
“But if Jerry finds out—”
“He doesn’t have to find anything out,” she said. “And maybe he wouldn’t mind. It’s not as if I were with another man. I think it would be different in his mind.” Of course she had something to go on, because she had told him about us and knew his reaction, but I was not aware of any of this and thought she was just rationalizing. If anything, I thought a husband would be a great deal more upset to find out that his wife was with another woman. That would be a rejection of him as a man. That was the way I saw it. I also felt that Jerry would lose respect for both of us, that he would think we were perverted.
I didn’t know what to do, what to think, how to feel. But I did know that I felt absolutely wonderful for having made love with Peggy, and everything just went all warm and lazy and I fell asleep.
It was the first really good sleep I had in ages.
The next day we had the comedy of errors bit. I was sitting around feeling damned ambivalent and exchanging secret glances with both of them, first her and then him, and ultimately I just couldn’t handle it all and announced I was going for a walk in the woods. And Jerry immediately said he would come with me, which I wanted and didn’t want at the same time, but there was no way to avoid it, so I said all right, and we went walking in the woods.
3 is Not a Crowd (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 8