3 is not a Crowd

Gordon & Rita & June

JWW: Gordon and Rita Parris live on a thirty-eight acre farm in southern Ohio not far from the Kentucky line. They do not work the farm. Gordon owns and operates a hardware and plumbing supply business in a town about fifteen miles from their home. While the business is prosperous, their life style does not reflect this. The old house is simply furnished. A color television console and a new station wagon are the sole marks of affluence. Gordon and Rita share the house with several dogs and cats, their three-year-old son, and Rita’s sister, June.

Gordon is tall, balding, thirty-eight, with rugged mountaineer features and a warm but infrequent smile. Rita, thirty-four is dark and although slender, her body remains soft and feminine. Her manner is withdrawn and introspective. June, thirty-one, bears a strong resemblance to her older sister but appears more than three years Rita’s junior. Her face is open where Rita’s is reserved, and there is more warmth and vitality in her conversation.

At the time of the interview June, the sister, was several months pregnant, and just beginning to show.

GORDON: Something like this, now, you tend to look back off it and try to say just how it started. Rita and I will be married eight years next spring, and it’s just over four years that it all got started with June. But sometimes it seems as if it was going on long before that, see, because the desire was always there. Even before we were married, when Rita and I were first seeing each other, of course June would be around a lot, and I always liked her. We always cared for each other.

Of course I never thought of all of this in terms of going to bed. Of having sex. Not that I didn’t think, well, it would be nice to go to bed with that girl. You take a normal man and put a good-looking girl in front of him and he’s going to have that sort of thought whether it’s in his mind to do anything about it or not. It’s just in the nature of a thought. Like I might have the thought, now, if that wasn’t Rita’s sister, or if I weren’t seeing Rita, now, I might want to do something about that. But at the time it never went any further than that, not even in my mind. It was the same as you’re driving along the street and you see a girl walking down the street and you have the thought that she’s attractive, that you wouldn’t mind getting next to her, but it’s no more than a thought and you don’t even hit the horn, you don’t even slow down, you just keep driving along to get wherever it is that you’re going.

Rita and I didn’t get married right off. We were seeing each other for about three years. I was working for a man outside of Dayton, he had a hardware business there, and I wasn’t making much money and out of that I had to support my mother. I have a brother in the Merchant Marine and he would send money when he could but even so I wasn’t fixed well enough to get married, especially with trying to put money aside for a business of my own. I would drive on down here after work and than we would go for a ride or see a movie or just sit and have coffee with June and their Pa, and then I would have to drive on home.

We would be seeing each other quite regular, and then not so much for a while, and then regular again. Sometimes I would see other girls in between, but it never stuck. I would be all the time trying to think of something to say to them, whereas with Rita I would just relax and be myself. I never felt uncomfortable. Even if it was just a matter of sitting in front of the television and neither of us saying much at all, I always felt at ease with Rita, and I guess I knew a long time before we talked about getting married that sooner or later I would marry Rita.

I was always easy with June, too, as far as that goes. It was much the same in some ways, although of course it was Rita I was going with and June was her sister, her kid sister. And June being younger she did seem like a kid in certain ways. She was a kid to Rita, and their Ma being dead for so many years, Rita tended to be the mother of the family and to be always looking out for June.

Now and then when things weren’t going right with Rita and myself it would cross my mind that if Rita went and married somebody else I might think about getting something started with June. But that was just in the back of my mind once in a while and nothing more than that.

RITA: I think I always knew Gordon and I would get married. All the time we were going together, I knew it. We were just right for each other from the beginning. Once I was through school and spending all my time here with Pa and June, I never really saw anybody. I dated some in high school but not so much, you know, and except for Gordon I scarcely saw anybody once I started seeing him. Once in a while I would meet a boy and we might go to a movie, but then either he wouldn’t call again or I wouldn’t want to see him, so I never really went with anybody but Gordon, and I knew it was just a question of when he would be in a position to marry me, with his mother and getting a start in business and all of the rest of it.

As for Junie, I never thought about her and Gordon that way. I was just glad they liked each other, they got along so well together. But Gordon got on well with my Pa, and it was the same way to me, and I thought about it the same way and was glad the same way, that he was like one of the family to them.

GORDON: Rita and I commenced having intercourse just under a year before we got married. This was something that was a long time coming. I had had some experience but not very much of it. It was mostly with girls that were that way, that they would do it for anyone, and you went out with them once and had it with them and that was all there was to it. There were other girls that I would go out with regularly before I met Rita, but I had never had intercourse with any of them, only with what you might call the tramps, the easy girls. There were, I guess, seven of those, and twice with prostitutes when I was in the service, and that was about the whole extent of it. Of course with the girls I dated we would park and pet, but there was a big difference between parking and petting and having the whole thing. I don’t know why it should be that way, thinking about it now, but there was always a great distinction between going all the way and not.

When Rita and I finally got to having intercourse, as I said it had been a long time coming, and by this time we had gotten in the habit of parking for years, you know, or petting in this very house when June and her Pa were asleep. So eventually there was this one night when we had both had a couple of beers and we were feeling pretty good, and instead of stopping we didn’t stop. So, after that we talked a great deal, and talked about getting married, and all things being equal we would have gotten married immediately. But at the time my own mother was very sick and it was just a question of time before she was going to die, and it seemed to us that it would be for the best to wait until this happened. Anything that would be a shock, anything in the way of a change, wouldn’t be good for my Ma, so we waited until nature had taken its course, and then when she did die we waited another two months and then we were married.

RITA: During this time we were continuing to have intercourse. I wouldn’t have felt right about this except that I knew we were going to get married and it was just a matter of time. I felt that we were already married in every way but the official way and that it was right for us to be together.

GORDON: Actually it was foolish of us to wait as long as we did.

RITA: Yes, but that’s looking back on it, only it didn’t seem that way at the time. As far as bringing up my own children nowadays, well, Prescott is too young now to tell him anything but to do his business in the toilet and not in his pants, which he still has his trouble remembering—

JUNE: Oh, he’s not so bad.

RITA: —but when the time comes I would tell him to do what he wants if it’s someone he loves, that it’s nothing but foolishness to wait for no particular reason at all. And I would say the same thing to a daughter. A lot of people will say that to a son, but I would say it to a daughter as well. And I would rather have a son of mine have sex with a girl he likes and respects than with a girl he has no feeling for — in the way Gordon did when he was younger. I think that must be awful, to do it for someone when there’s no other feeling.

After we started having it regularly, you know, even then it came to me that we were fools for waiting so long, And I can say that I never felt guilty or anything of the sort. Now I would have felt guilty if I were a girl at the time, I suppose, but you have to remember that I was twenty-five years old at the time. You could say I was an old maid at the time the way they usually figure those things.

GORDON: Oh, the hell you were an old maid.

RITA: But that’s how it’s usually figured. Twenty-five and never married is an old maid. Whether I was an old maid or not, what I certainly wasn’t was a child, you know, and so I couldn’t feel I was doing anything wrong having sexual intercourse with Gordon. The only thing that bothered me was Junie or Pa finding out about it, and not knowing how they would feel about it.

JUNE: Didn’t you worry about getting pregnant?

GORDON: I did, somewhat. But what you do, you take precautions and let it go at that. Worrying about that isn’t enough to leave off doing it.

RITA: Now this is funny, but I can’t really say I worried about that at all, about being pregnant. For one thing I knew Gordon was taking precautions, and I guess I was naive in that I thought if you took precautions that was all there was to it, that you were perfectly safe. What he used was rubbers, and of course I realize now that you can get pregnant through a rubber, that it can break or whatever happens, but at the time I thought they were a hundred percent. Another thing is that I wouldn’t have been that upset if I was pregnant. All it would mean is that we would have gotten married a little sooner than we figured, but that’s all, and if a girl is a little bit pregnant when she gets married, well, nobody’s particularly surprised or shocked at something like that.

GORDON: The saying is that first babies take five or six months to be born, but all the ones after that take nine.

RITA: And people just take that much for granted. And I wasn’t so much concerned that Pa or June would know we were having relations but that it would be thrown in their faces. Like if they were to walk in on us, because we would often do it on this very couch when they were upstairs, and you can get carried away and not notice somebody coming downstairs, and they could have walked in right while we were doing it, and that used to worry me. Sometimes I would get to thinking of that and it would keep me from letting go and enjoying myself completely—

GORDON: But not often.

RITA: No, I don’t guess. Or I thought we might be careless and leave one of those rubber things lying around, or something of that sort. But I don’t think Pa ever knew.

JUNE: I did, though.

RITA: You did, but not by anything you saw or heard, I don’t think.

JUNE: No. I don’t know how I knew, but I guess I just did, that’s all.

RITA: Well, that’s not the same as walking in on us.

JUNE: Oh, I never would have come downstairs like that. I guess because I knew what I might walk in on.

GORDON: And maybe your Pa never came downstairs for about the same reason.

RITA: That could be. I suppose that could be.

JUNE: I was hit hard when they got married. I didn’t know how or why but I was. Here I had been looking forward to the wedding and all. I was maid of honor and had it all figured out in my mind that I would have a romance with Gordon’s brother, Roy, who came in to be the best man. I was dreaming about this, and thinking how Roy and I would be married and everything just like Gordon and Rita, and as it turned out Roy was nothing like Gordon at all. He’s a lot older and hardly talks at all, or at least he didn’t have more than two words to say to me. So the wedding itself didn’t go the way I had it in mind for it to go.

After the wedding they went off for a week to Chicago, and then they came back for a visit, and then they moved to an apartment in Dayton so that Gordon could be near his work, and then all of a sudden I just felt so alone. Rita just about brought me up, and I was so glad she was marrying Gordon so that he could really be part of the family, and now all of a sudden they were both gone. Oh, we would see them most weekends, but it wasn’t the same. Now it was just me and Pa living out here by ourselves.

What happened to me at this point, although it didn’t happen right away or all at once, was that I guess I got a little bit sex-happy. I guess it was part of being lonely and part of being jealous of Rita. Jealous that she had Gordon and jealous that she had a life of her own to live. I don’t know that I thought of it that way at the time. I just felt left out of things and figured that I needed to have a man of my own. I suppose it was the same thing that led me to make a big thing out of Roy, and then to be so disappointed when he was nothing at all like his brother.

I had sort of lost interest in boys when Gordon and Rita started going together and he would be over to the house so much. The boys I had gone with before were younger, they were about my age, and they just seemed like kids compared to Gordon, and I got so I more or less stopped going out with them. And staying around the house night and day, and being out in the country, I didn’t meet anybody.

What I wanted to do was get some kind of job in town, but I couldn’t do this because of having to keep house for Pa. Not that he said it in so many words because I never even asked him or said anything about it. It was just something I knew, that I had to do this, so I never did more than have thoughts about a job in town.

But I took to going into town now and then. I would go in to do the shopping and instead of coming straight home I would hang around and maybe have coffee or something like that, or walk around looking in the windows, and I would meet people that way. Boys, I mean. They would generally be boys I had gone to school with so it wasn’t a matter of picking up total strangers but boys I had known and then lost touch with over the years. Some of them would be married and some not. And I would get offered a ride or asked to go to a movie, and I would go.

You know, I would talk to those boys, and as often as not there would be no parking at all on the first date or two, and one of them, he was married, I guess he’d been married for four or five years, he got his girl pregnant in high school and they had to get married, and I must have seen him a dozen times or more, and he never so much as kissed me. He never even tried to. I would have kissed him, or just about anything, I guess, if he’d wanted, but he just liked to go for long rides with me and talk to me. We would talk about his wife and how they weren’t getting along so good, and how he was a fool to get married so young and be all locked up with a wife and kids. I guess he needed me for someone to talk to about these things.

GORDON: He must have wanted to have sex with you.

JUNE: I suppose he wanted it, I suppose he had sexual feelings for me, but he never even tried to do anything about them. He could have done something about it but he never tried. As a matter of fact he would let things drop from time to time about how if he were free he would really be interested in me, but he never took it any further than that.

But what I was getting at is that it wasn’t just sex all the time, but when I think back on that time it seems that way to me, as though that was all I did and all I thought about. It wasn’t, really. You know how it is? As though — remembering it — the sex part is in color and the rest of it, what I did from day to day, is in black and white. That’s the only way I can think to explain it.

RITA: But you were a virgin.

JUNE: I know.

RITA: That’s what is really strange about it.

JUNE: Yes, it is. I guess even then I was saving myself for Gordon.

RITA: Oh, how in the world can you say that? I mean how could you think of it that way at the time?

JUNE: I didn’t think of it but that is what I was doing.

RITA: You didn’t think this would happen, with the three of us.

JUNE: I may have known it inside, without knowing what I knew. Or I may have wanted it inside.

But all this time I was having sex and not having it. The one important thing was staying a virgin. I would I go with these boys — you have to call them men, they were all ages from twenty-five to thirty-five. And I would do anything but go all the way. Anything but let them put it inside of me. That was the one thing I refused to do under any circumstances, and I never did do it.

GORDON: Didn’t you ever want to?

JUNE: No.

GORDON: You must have gotten excited—

JUNE: It wasn’t that kind of being excited. I would feel in two parts when I was with a boy, part of me acting and part of me sitting across the room watching, sort of not attached to what was happening. I was excited, but not the way I am now. It wasn’t complete.

RITA: You would have orgasms.

JUNE: Once in a while. But it was not the same, it was not complete.

And what I generally did, it wasn’t so much a case of my getting excited. I would get excited in my mind more than my body because of what it was that we did. I mean, they might pet me some, but mostly it was what I would do for them...

I don’t know exactly how to say this...

Well, before this time I really didn’t know much about sex. I simply didn’t know very much, I was ignorant. And one boy finally had to explain to me that it was different for a man, that you couldn’t just expect them to stop, that a man has to have release when he’s excited or it’s physically bad for him. Frustrating. I didn’t know but that this might just be a line—

GORDON: No, it’s the truth. But nine times out of ten a man will say it as much for a line as anything else.

JUNE: Well, I decided it must be true, but at the same time I said that this was something I wasn’t going to do, to go all the way. I made this very clear. I put it right on the line, that I wasn’t going to do this and that was all there was to it, that I wouldn’t do it. The boy I first had this all out with, he was married, so he couldn’t try to convince me by giving me a big thing about loving me and how he would marry me if anything happened. He couldn’t say that because we both knew better and knew that there was no love involved, that we were both of us there for the pleasure of it, and for the company.

GORDON: Did it bother you, that he was married?

JUNE: It never bothered me at all.

GORDON: That’s what you told me before, but it’s just hard to believe.

JUNE: I never counted, but I think there was a lot more married than not. Especially the ones I would see again and again, they were for the most part married. When they weren’t married either they got tired of me because of not being willing to go all the way, or I lost interest in them. Because I didn’t want anything that would lead to me getting married to somebody, I suppose. I don’t know as I thought of it that way at the time, except that I would look at one of these fellows and I would say, now, do I want to marry this particular boy? And the answer was always that I didn’t.

When they were married it was safe, see. They didn’t want to leave their wives and I didn’t want them to, so it was safe.

This man I was talking about, that was married... this was another reason I believed him about being frustrated and having to have a release. Because he was married.

Anyway, he came right back and said that there was something I could do without going all the way. Now this was something I honestly knew nothing about. It’s hard to believe how ignorant I was in this subject.

RITA: It certainly is.

JUNE: I thought anything I might do would just make it worse. But he showed me what to do. He opened his pants and showed me how to handle his penis in a certain way. I really didn’t know what I was doing — I mean I didn’t know how to go about it or anything, but I would pay attention to what excited him and what didn’t, and he got very excited, and I was sort of excited by his excitement, if that makes any sense, and then he had an orgasm. As a matter of fact he came all over my blouse. He offered to pay for having it cleaned but I told him not to be silly and I just took and washed it myself after I got home.

After that I wouldn’t see him too often, but when I did it would always be the same. We would drive to a good place to park and then he would undress me and play with me. Once I knew that I could trust him I would take off all my clothes because I knew he wouldn’t try to force me. He would touch me, my breasts and elsewhere, and then I would jerk him off, pardon the expression.

You know, I liked that part better than being touched. That other was more for his benefit than for mine because it excited him tremendously to touch me and finger me. I think it excited him especially that I was a virgin. He would keep talking about it, touching me and saying that no one had ever been inside me, as though this was something special. I let him do this and I won’t say I didn’t like it—

RITA: No one would believe you if you did.

JUNE: But no, the other part was what I really enjoyed. Making him have an orgasm. Getting him all excited and then giving him a climax.

We tried some other ways, too. Like one time he put himself between my breasts and moved back and forth that way until he had an orgasm. Or against my leg. But I didn’t enjoy this as much as just having him sit there while I did it for him with my hands. I guess he didn’t, either, because he just wanted to do it the one time and then didn’t want to again.

I was dating other boys, too, and I started doing the same with them as well. They didn’t even have to ask. I would go on and touch the front of their pants, and usually they would be hard by this time from the petting, and some of them would right away open their pants and others wouldn’t, so I would touch them some more and then open their pants and reach inside. I remember a boy said he really couldn’t figure me out, that I was so aggressive about going for his penis but that I still drew a line about having intercourse. “That’s the way I am,” I said, “and you may take me or leave me.”

Now there was this other man, he was married and quite a bit older than most of the ones I dated, and actually you could say he picked me up. He was from Cincinnati and I met him at a coffee shop and we went for a ride, and then back to the motel where he was staying at. Now this was the first time I was ever in a motel room with a man, or any other kind of a room, for that matter, so as soon as we were inside I out and told him that I wouldn’t go all the way, that I was virgin and fixed to stay that way. He said I must be either a liar or the oldest living virgin in the state of Ohio. I said I would do something else to make sure he was satisfied, if that was all right with him, but otherwise we should just forget the whole thing, because I refused to have intercourse.

He said that was all right with him and that I should stay there with him.

To make a long story short, I was handling his penis, and he said, “Honey, why don’t you give it a kiss?”

So I had never done this, but I thought, Why not? So I leaned over and gave it a little peck. I didn’t see what was such a big deal about that.

“I mean really kiss it, honey,” he said.

So I kissed it again a few times but that wasn’t what he meant, and I finally had to say, “Look, maybe I’m stupid, but I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean you should suck it,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”

So he laughed and grabbed hold of my hand and had me point my finger, and he sucked on my finger the way he wanted me to do on him. He showed me just how he wanted me to do it, by doing it on my finger.

Then he got the rest of his clothes off and laid out on his back and I did it for him. Now this was something I had honestly never heard of in all my life. I had heard expressions in school, “blow job” and “eat it,” but I never knew what it meant. I knew there was such a thing as fairies but I never guessed what it was they did with each other. I just had no idea. And I never knew anything about sucking a man’s penis. In school, the expression “eat it,” I thought it meant “eat shit.” A short way of saying it. And I just had no idea what “blow job” meant.

But I did it, and I just couldn’t believe how excited it got him. He acted as though it was the most exciting thing in the world. I couldn’t really say whether I enjoyed it or not because it was so new to me and I had to concentrate so much on what I was doing.

When I knew he was going to have an orgasm I took my mouth off him and he came, but not in my mouth. He really moaned a lot when he came.

I asked him afterward how he liked it and if I did it good, and he said I did, that I was very good at it, which made me proud for some reason, but he asked why I took my mouth away at the end. I said I didn’t know. I asked if you weren’t supposed to or what. He said it was much better to come in a girl’s mouth than not. I said I didn’t know about that. He said some girls would swallow it and that was the best of all, which didn’t make any particular sense to me, because why should it feel any different for a man if you were to swallow it or spit it out? I didn’t understand it, but I knew immediately that I would no more swallow it than I would let a man have intercourse with me. I didn’t know why but I knew that this was something I would never do. As far as letting him come in my mouth, I wasn’t too sure about this one way or another. This was something I was going to have to think about.

As it turned out I didn’t have to think about it for very long, because I saw this man again a few days later and we went to his room and again I sucked him off, and this time I let him come in my mouth without a second thought, and I was very surprised to discover that I liked it better this way. As a matter of fact I believe I had an orgasm. The kind of orgasm I was able to have at that time. Nothing like the sort of complete orgasm that I can have now, but at the time I didn’t know there was anything better. Like a radio before they discovered television, I suppose. I didn’t know there was anything else.

This particular man would drive all the way from Cincinnati just to see me, and to have me suck him. Eventually he told me he could do the same thing for me, and he ate me there. I got terribly excited but I didn’t like it at the time. It’s hard to explain. I don’t know what it was about it that I didn’t like. Nothing about thinking it was dirty. For some reason I never thought of oral sex as dirty. I don’t know why, I guess most people do at one time or another, but I don’t recollect that I ever felt that way.

But there was something about the excitement, I don’t know, that bothered me and kept the whole thing from being good. Maybe that he was reaching me and I didn’t want him to, and so I held back or tried holding back or what all, and it kept it from being good for me. So what happened was I told him that I didn’t like it, and he never tried to do it again. I think he just wanted to do it for my sake, and when I said I didn’t like it he never asked to do it again.

In a way, I suppose I wanted him to ask again, and if he had I guess I would have let him do it, if only to see if I got anything more out of it the second time or whether it would be the same again.

Now and then he would want me to swallow it, when he came, but I would never do this. “You’re rejecting me when you spit out my seed,” he said. That was the way he put it. “That’s the way I am, take me or leave me,” was what I would say, and he accepted that that was the way it was going to be if he wanted to keep on seeing me.

I also did the same thing with other boys. A lot of them couldn’t believe that a girl would want to do this. I guess at one point some of them started talking about me, and I was getting a reputation around town, but fortunately I realized this in time and put a stop to it. When boys I didn’t know asked for a date, and they had this look in their eye, I would refuse to go out with them. Or I would go out with them but not do a thing, not even let them kiss me, and that got rid of that rumor fast enough. This was another thing about men who were married. I didn’t have to worry about what they would say, because of course they were crazy to keep the whole thing a secret. So for the majority of the time there were four or five married men that I would see now and then, and occasionally a date with a single man that I wouldn’t do anything with to speak of, and that was about the extent of it for the greater part of the time between Gordon and Rita getting married and Pa’s passing away.

Now this was a period of between three and four years, and when I think about it all there seems to be is sex, and yet I would go into town two days a week at the most, and the rest of the time I was out here watching television or cooking or cleaning or taking care of the chickens or the garden or any of the things I would do around here. I think about that time and in my mind I was just one giant mouth sucking men constantly, pardon the expression, and of course it was nothing of the sort at all. Nothing of the sort. And the last couple of months after Pa had his first heart attack and before the second one, which was the one that killed him, I hardly ever saw a man. So it was maybe three years, and there weren’t that many boys involved or that many times.

After Pa died, and after Rita and Gordon moved back, I was never with another man until this day, and won’t ever be.

RITA: From the beginning, from as soon as we were married, I wanted to have a baby. Now at first we couldn’t afford to do this, with trying to save money so that Gordon could open his own store. It didn’t make sense to rush and have a baby right away. He said there would be plenty of time for that later, and I knew he was right, but even so it pained me to wait. I wanted to get pregnant first thing and never stopped wanting to, even though we took precautions.

GORDON: Of course there would be times like waking up in the middle of the night when we wouldn’t bother with the precautions, and whenever that happened I would think, well, that’s the sort of chance a person has to take, and if we’re meant to have a baby we’ll have it, and I wouldn’t worry much about it. We would use the rubbers when we could, but if something happened during one of those other times, well, a baby is something you can always afford to have, when you come right down to it, so we wouldn’t have gone and had a fit if we had found out that Rita was pregnant.

RITA: But I never was.

GORDON: To think of the money we wasted on those rubbers, and for no good reason at all.

RITA: After about a year we had managed to save quite a bit of money, and Gordon saw about buying a store right in Dayton, but that deal fell through, so he said we would just bide our time and buy a store in another year, when he knew we would have more than enough money saved, and that we could start a family in the meantime. And we tried. We would make love just about all the time, and month after month I would get the curse just like clockwork.

And this just went on and on. I got so that I couldn’t stand it, any of it. We would come down here for the weekend or just a Sunday and Pa would start riding us about hurrying up and having a grandson for him, and I had all I could do to keep from crying or shouting or I don’t know what. I just felt so bad about it that it was preying on my mind night and day. I wanted to go to a doctor but I was scared to go, and I wanted for Gordon to go but couldn’t even bring myself to ask him, and neither of us went for the longest time, and every month as sure as there were dates on the calendar I would get the curse again, and I was always fretful and miserable at that time of the month anyway—

GORDON: You still are.

RITA: Not the way I used to be.

GORDON: No.

RITA: And never as bad as I was then, because I had the disappointment on top of everything else. I didn’t know whether it was my fault or Gordon’s fault and I wanted to know but I didn’t want to know. I didn’t know whether it meant we could never have children or what. I wanted to know one way or the other but at the same time I was afraid to find out. Afraid of knowing.

JUNE: I would have found out one way or the other.

RITA: You say so, but how do you know what you would have done? You can never know something like that until it happens to you.

JUNE: Well, I know what I think I would have done.

RITA: It’s not the same. The things that would go through my mind. I was thinking that if we couldn’t have children it was the end of our marriage. And it was almost the end of our marriage anyway the way it ate at us all the time. We got so we didn’t talk about it at all. About having children. And Gordon was working late more often than not, and coming home exhausted, and he couldn’t have felt much like having sex relations, but if it was the right time of the month we would have them anyway, feel like it or not, and every month the curse, and God, I wonder now how we stayed together through all of it.

GORDON: I didn’t know what to think, whose fault it might be. I got so I would put the whole thing out of my mind entirely. It was more what it was doing to Rita that bothered me. As far as I was concerned, we could have adopted children or put off having them for awhile. I wanted a family, but I didn’t want it the same way Rita did. She had to be a mother or die in the attempt, it was the way she was.

But what it was doing to our marriage, that was impossible all around. We loved each other and were easy with each other all the time we knew each other, and now this thing was pushing us apart.

It was finally me who said we ought to go to a doctor. I wound up having to talk her into it. We both of us went, and they ran all these tests, and it turned out that there was no reason the doctors could discover why we shouldn’t be having children. We were both perfectly normal and healthy, except Rita being run down from all this worrying and all, but they gave her vitamin shots and pills for that and said she was fine, she should be having a child every year, and we should just relax and be patient.

RITA: Of course the last thing I was about to do was relax. Something about it made it all worse than ever. There was nothing wrong with us but just the same I was getting the curse every month no matter how much we had sex or what we did or anything. So we went home and tried twice as hard as ever, and it drove us both crazy.

GORDON: I guess you could say that we were both of us impossible to live with. And the thing of it was that by this time we couldn’t get any time away from each other, because I had bought the store and Rita quit her job and came to work for me so that we could make a go of it. This meant we were seeing each other for close to twenty-four hours a day. We would take our lunch separately, or I would go off now and then to attend an auction if there was a store in bankruptcy that I might pick up something below wholesale. Except for that we were with each other every minute of the day. Before this I at least had the hours I was working to be by myself and get our problems out of my mind. But now I didn’t.

The thing is, I had always dreamed of how perfect it would be, our own store, the two of us working together side by side. I had always thought that this would be about the most perfect way to go through life, two people working together for something they both wanted. And instead of heaven it was sheer hell and nothing else.

RITA: It was my fault more than Gordon’s, and I knew it at the time, but there was nothing I could do about it. I would start crying for no reason at all, right out of the blue I would start crying. I might be waiting on a customer and I would get a lump in my throat and feel the tears welling up in my eyes, and I would hurry to finish waiting on him and then go in the back of the store and start crying. And I knew this was just tearing Gordon apart but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it, not a thing in the world.

I didn’t know what would be the outcome of it all. There were times when I ached to leave him and the store and the apartment and every damn thing and go back home to Pa and June. But I never did this. I never even came close to doing it, but I would think about it.

Of course we got ultimately to the point where we had no sex life to speak of. There was just no way for us to stand up to that kind of pressure, day after day after day. We got so that weeks would go by without us making love at all. He would say he was tired or I would say I had a headache, and we could do this without having an argument because we would both of us be relieved that we didn’t have to go through with it again.

I knew it was just a question of time until Gordon had an affair, and I made up my mind in advance to look the other way and keep from knowing it. But I guess I knew about it from the beginning. He was acting different, and I knew the most likely reason for him to be acting different was that he was seeing another woman, and God knows he had every right in the world to be in the mood to see another woman, so I guessed that had to be it.

GORDON: In a way the last thing I wanted was an affair, but that seems as if it’s the way a man is put together. Throw something at him that he can’t handle and he’s going to feel that the answer is another woman, that if he can just have some other woman he can put himself back together again. I got to thinking about it more and more and I suppose I knew the same as Rita, meaning that it was just a question of time before it happened...

You know what I was doing?

I’m ashamed to say it. I was masturbating. You know, playing with myself.

Now I had stopped doing this years ago. I had never heard of a married man doing this, or even a grown man, for that matter. Since then I have learned different. I have read in certain books that men will go on masturbating all their lives from time to time whether they are married or not, but at the time I didn’t know this. I would do it and worry that I was losing my manhood, that I couldn’t father a child or make love to my wife but instead was masturbating like a boy, like some kind of perverted person.

Of course, now, this made me all the more anxious to have an affair with somebody. But I was with Rita all the time except for lunches and the occasional business that took me out of the store. So I barely had the opportunity to do anything about it.

There was this waitress in the place where I usually had lunch, and she and I had got in the habit of kidding around, the way people will do. A lot of her customers would do that with her, joking and all. She was a real skinny girl from I believe it was Tennessee, a real mountain accent, and we’d rag her about that.

And the men, it was generally all men who had lunch there, would hand her a certain amount of sex talk. Nothing out of hand but just the friendly sex joking you’ll get in a situation like that. And one time she and I were talking, and it came to me that she liked me and I had a chance with her. I don’t know what set it off but it just came to me out of the blue. So I asked her when she got off work, which was at seven that night, and I arranged to pick her up and we would go out for a few beers or something.

I gave Rita some story about an auction. She asked if I wanted her to come along and I pretended to think it over and said no, it was out toward Annandale and would probably run late, and why didn’t she just catch a movie or get herself some magazines.

Then I picked up this waitress and we went to a tavern where they had a country and western group, and we got fairly well beered up. We went back to her place. She had a room over a grocery store with religious pictures all over the walls. It felt funny, all of those pictures. I had brought a six-pack of beer along and we sat drinking and smoking and talking. We were laughing a lot. It was very easy being with her after how tense it had been between Rita and me. We finished a couple of beers and then I sat next to her on the bed and we started kissing and petting.

She was really skinny. Hardly any breasts at all, hardly anything on her but skin over the bones.

But it was exciting. The kissing and petting. Rita and I, of course we were at the point where we got all undressed and into bed first and then took it from there, and it was exciting to work up to it gradually for a change. But it wasn’t like a kid on a date because it was taken for granted that this girl and I were going to have sexual intercourse. That was absolutely taken for granted.

And we did.

I got to going over there a couple of times a week. I liked her a good deal but that was all there was to it. I never even thought about leaving Rita for her. It was as if she was just a convenience, someone for me to relax and joke with and then have sexual intercourse with. I was pretty certain she was seeing at least one other man at the time, and this didn’t bother me at all. If anything I was relieved to think it because I didn’t want her being dependent on me or falling in love with me.

When we were in bed together she would say she loved me, but that was just bed talk. I never told it to her, though. I wouldn’t let the word out. I suppose she would have liked it if I did, but I didn’t.

One night I went over there with a six-pack as usual and she had this gal there who was her sister just up from Tennessee for a visit. I thought, well, I won’t stay long and there won’t be any sexual intercourse this time.

Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

My waitress told me how her sister was very randy and hadn’t been with a man in a long time. She talked like this right in front of the other girl and asked did I want to do her a favor and have sex with her. And she stayed right in the room there with us while her sister and I had relations. She sat there next to the bed and petted at me while I was doing it to her sister, and then we all sat around naked and joked and drank beer, and one of them went down for more beer and came back up and got naked again, and I went to it with the waitress while the sister watched and joked and spilled beer on us, and we had what you might call an orgy.

I didn’t see her as much after that. I would still see her maybe once a week, but no more than that.

RITA: I knew you were seeing someone.

GORDON: I thought maybe you knew. I didn’t want to throw it in your face, but as close as you and I were, I figured you would have to know.

JWW: I asked him if he had made any connection between the waitress and her younger sister and his relationship to Rita and June. That experience with the two girls from Tennessee had been his only venture into sexual relations that were in any sense abnormal or unorthodox, and the parallel seemed clear — an older sister with whom he had had a relationship, and a younger one who joined in the game, with the older one playing a permissive quasi-parental role. Had he noted the similarity at the time? Or afterward?

GORDON: No, I don’t guess I ever thought of it that way. Not at the time it was going on. Now with Rita and June it is something completely different. It is a hundred percent different. It is a case of love on all sides, it is a relationship that grows and grows. It is real.

With that waitress and her sister, all it was was sex. That is absolutely all there was to it. It was sex, and it was dirty sex, and that was the part that made it exciting. I was cheating on Rita to begin with, and this took something dirty and made it dirtier by putting three in a bed instead of two, and that made it exciting but it also made it leave a bad taste when it was all over. I was sorry afterward that I went with them and didn’t want to go with them again, and if the kid sister hadn’t of gone back to Tennessee I probably wouldn’t have seen the waitress again at all.

But later on now, when things got started here with June, I guess I did think back on that waitress and her sister, I guess I did, but mostly to see for myself how different it was. That it could be clean one time and dirty another, depending on how the people felt about each other.

GORDON: When their Pa had his first heart attack, we took to getting down here as often as we could. He was supposed to take things easy and get his strength back, but he was an old man by this time and the first attack took a lot out of him. He looked terrible. His color was off and his face looked twenty years older after the attack than it did before it. So we would talk about how he’d be up and around soon, and he and I talked about taking a fishing trip in the fall, and I don’t know what that man believed but I knew for certain he would never go fishing again, that it wouldn’t be long before it was over for him. So we spent as much time down here as we could and hoped we might be with him when the end came, but as it turned out we were in Dayton then. I was just in the course of making a deal to sell the store. I had a lead on this place in town, the town I’m in right now, the same place, as a matter of fact, and we were going to buy it and take a house in town so Rita could be with her Pa as often as she liked. But we didn’t make it in time. The deal was still getting set up when we got a phone call from June saying it was over...

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 hard 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.

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 that 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.