3 is not a Crowd

Jerry & Peggy & Kay

JWW: Jerry and Peggy Klein and Kay Jordan live in an architect-designed ranch house on a hillside in northwestern New Jersey, not far from the New York and Pennsylvania borders. None of them is a native of the area. Jerry was born in New York, Peggy in Connecticut, Kay in a suburb of Chicago.

Jerry, thirty-one, is a commercial artist. His work consists almost exclusively of paperback and magazine covers, primarily in the field of science fiction, where he has achieved some prominence. He is medium in height and build, with shaggy lank brown hair and a Mexican bandit moustache. There is occasionally a theatrical flair to his speech. He is extremely articulate, but tends to use the word “fucking” as more confined souls use commas. While his income is above average, a substantial inheritance of Peggy’s obviates the necessity of living within it. Thus the architect-designed house, the spectacular view, the frequent vacations for the three of them, and the option of undertaking only such artistic assignments as Jerry finds appealing.

Peggy and Kay are both twenty-eight, and less than two months apart in age. (My notes do not seem to indicate which one is older, nor does it seem to much matter.) Peggy is a lithe blonde, an avid gardener, a lover of animals. Her face is very expressive, changing considerably with her moods. Kay is quite bookish and less talkative. She is auburn-haired and possessed of a full-blown figure.

Jerry and Peggy make an extremely attractive and charming couple.

So do Jerry and Kay.

So do Peggy and Kay.

KAY: When you write this up, I hope you won’t make me look like the third wheel. The interloper. After all, I knew Peggy before Jerry did.

JERRY: And knew her well.

PEGGY: Biblically, one might say.

KAY: One, indeed, might.

PEGGY: You needn’t be smug about it. If memory serves—

JERRY: It also stands and waits.

PEGGY: —I was the one who seduced you.

KAY: You were the experienced one. I was young and innocent and wet behind the ears.

JERRY: Among other places.

PEGGY: I wasn’t all that experienced.

KAY: I wasn’t all that innocent. Or all that hard to seduce. I’m a notoriously easy lay.

JERRY: That’s why you’re so popular around here.

KAY: I knew there was a reason. And here I thought it was my personality.

JERRY: You have a notoriously easy personality.

KAY: You say the nicest things.

PEGGY: I’m enjoying this too, but John—

JWW: So am I, actually.

PEGGY: —John wants to write this up, God knows why, unless he’s just a lech or Allen Funt in disguise or—

JWW: No, this is for real.

PEGGY: So John wants to write this up, and here we are impressing him with our wit, which may or may not be impressive, but it won’t make a book.

JWW: A chapter in a book, actually.

JERRY: Just a fucking chapter?

KAY: We’re not worth a whole book?

JWW: You’re probably worth a trilogy, but the plan is for three or possibly four case histories on the one theme.

JERRY: Oh, the others are in the same bag? Triangle sets?

JWW: Uh-huh.

PEGGY: So we’re a third of a book or a quarter of a book or whatever. In any case, wouldn’t it be simpler if one of us talked and the other two cooled it for the time being, so that we can let a story develop instead of playing Three Characters in Search of a Bed?

KAY: So talk, lovey.

PEGGY: Who, me?

JERRY: Oh, Christ—

JWW: Obviously, these three particular individuals were not so constituted as to take turns delivering lengthy speeches. The cross-talk never stopped, nor did I see any reason to try to put a lid on it; I had an abundant supply of tape reels and more time than I knew what to do with. And I cannot recall an interview I enjoyed more. My editing has consisted largely of leaving the greater portion of the cross-talk on the cutting room floor. The result might have been more entertaining had everything been left precisely as it was, but space limitations ruled this out, for better or for worse.

PEGGY: Kay and I first got to know each other during our freshman year at college. At the time we were both majoring in English, although I later changed my major twice, first to psychology and then to biology, and she changed to history and then back to English again. We had a few classes together and got to know each other fairly well, although we were not enormously close. I had been planning to room the following year with another girl, but near the end of the spring she decided to transfer out, and I happened to mention to Kay that I didn’t have a roommate and neither did she, so we decided to room together.

KAY: And from such a small beginning bloomed love.

PEGGY: As far as sex was concerned, I had had a certain amount of experience. I had gone to a boarding prep school, and while it’s certainly possible to do this without having a sensitive homosexual experience, you wouldn’t really feel as though you had gotten the full benefit of such a costly education if you passed it up. I had had relations with four girls during prep school. Not big passionate love affairs, although we generally kept up a pretense of being in love with each other. We said the words, you know. And I’m sure a lot of the more neurotic girls took it very seriously, but I never did and I don’t think any of my partners did. I didn’t consider myself a lesbian, for example. Looking back on it, I think I had a marvelously healthy attitude. I decided that sleeping with another girl was more fun than sleeping alone and playing with another girl was more fun than playing with oneself.

KAY: And eating another girl was more fun than eating yourself, and with less wear and tear on the backbone.

PEGGY: The whole thing in prep school could have been a lot more traumatic if I hadn’t managed to get myself laid somewhere along the line. I think if my whole frame of reference had been affairs with other girls, it would have bothered me more. But as it happened I lost my virginity at fifteen, which was almost a full year before I put a finger into any vagina other than my own, and I made it with a couple of other boys while I was at that school.

I was the only girl from my class at the college I went to, so there was nothing connecting me to the past. Of course the place was crawling with dykes but I didn’t know any of them and didn’t feel in a mood to seek them out. As a matter of fact I was in a fairly withdrawn stage during my freshman year, very determined to do well academically and not too anxious to have sex with anybody, male or female. I had had a pregnancy scare that I was a long time recovering from, and I didn’t even feel like dating or even developing a close friendship, let alone like balling anybody.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PEGGY: Eight.

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

JERRY: Because she loves you, darling.

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

JERRY: How you’ve changed!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JERRY: Hear, hear!

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

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

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

KAY: Look what we might have missed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JERRY: Oh, you sly devil, you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PEGGY: Ugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KAY: But it felt so good—

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

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

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

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

KAY: We did love each other.

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

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

PEGGY: I never even considered going with another girl.

KAY: I did, at the very first.

PEGGY: I wasn’t enough for you?

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

JERRY: I love the choice of words.

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

PEGGY: No question about it.

KAY: And yet there was no jealousy on either side if one of us went out with a boy.

PEGGY: Because that was a different thing entirely. We did date boys, and we occasionally got laid, and oddly enough we found ourselves enjoying this more now than we had before we started sleeping together. When I would be with a boy I couldn’t wait to get home afterward and tell Kay everything about it, what he was like and what we did — all the gory details, absolutely everything. And then we would generally make love to each other.

KAY: If any of those boys had known—

PEGGY: They would have utterly flipped.

KAY: Absolutely.

PEGGY: You know, I think that was part of the fun. Part of the excitement. The whole secret nature of our affair, the feeling that we were putting something over on the world and on the boys we dated. Not only the ones we made it with but especially the ones we held out on. I remember taking a particularly sadistic delight in an evening I spent with this one clod, a blind date, and I let him do his damnedest to seduce me but wouldn’t let him get there. For some reason I disliked him intensely and used that as an excuse to do a total cockteasing number. I drove him up the wall. I wouldn’t even give him a hand job or a dry fuck or anything.

JERRY: I only married her because she’s such a class broad. You notice how every word out of her mouth smacks of an aristocratic heritage.

PEGGY: I just kept getting him hot and letting him down, I was really vicious, and then I made him drive me back to the dorm, and I rushed in so excited that Kay didn’t know what to make of me. And we made wild love, and I told her all about what had happened, and we made love some more.

JERRY: What an absolute ball-buster you must have been. I’m glad I didn’t know you then.

PEGGY: It’s just as well you didn’t. But that was by no means typical. As a matter of fact, if anything I became a lot better at relating to males during that time.

KAY: So did I. For one thing, the pressure was off. Also I learned to enjoy myself sexually through Peggy, and I developed a sense of what my body was and how it worked, and this knowledge stayed with me when I was with a boy. Masturbation is supposed to be very good training for girls, I’ve read. Girls who play with themselves are statistically more likely to be able to have good orgasms when they screw.

PEGGY: That could also be because the girls who masturbate are basically freer and sexier to begin with.

KAY: But it’s also that they learn how to let their bodies groove, and they stay with the same pattern later on.

PEGGY: Then that Christer from Nebraska must be the world’s greatest lay by now, because by the end of the year I knew her she was just about running out of fingers. She must be utter dynamite by now.

KAY: I’m not sure it applies in every case.

PEGGY: I hope not. I can’t imagine her being any good that way.

KAY: The point is that I think our relationship worked the same way. That it served as preparation for other things. Not that it wasn’t satisfying as an end in itself, but you know what I mean.

And I think too that one of the reasons we were able to continue having a steady sexual relationship for over two full years without getting big guilt hang-ups was that instead of finding ourselves cut off from men we found ourselves getting along much better with them.

Ultimately, shortly after the start of our senior years, I started going with a guy in a serious way. And that was the first time I began to feel any real conflict.

PEGGY: She came home one night and seemed far more reserved than I had seen her in a long time. Of course Kay and I were practically an old married couple by now and we didn’t have sex every night, but it had been awhile, and I gave her a kiss, and she went slightly tense in my arms. I asked her what was the matter and she said nothing was, and we made love, and something was wrong and I asked her about it again.

She said, “Well, I think maybe I’m in love with Ken. And all of a sudden I feel a little funny about us.”

I said, “Do you mean you don’t want us to make love any more?”

She said she didn’t know, she wanted to think about it. Then a day later she said maybe we shouldn’t make love any more, and she offered to move out and room elsewhere. I told her not to be ridiculous—

KAY: Well, I thought you might go crazy, seeing my fair white body and not being able to possess it.

PEGGY: —and that I would always be her best friend, in bed or out of it, and that there was no reason for her to move. So she kept on going with the guy, and married him after graduation.

KAY: Peggy was my maid of honor.

PEGGY: Not quite a maid, I’m afraid, and of bloody little honor. She got married and she and Ken moved to — San Francisco?

KAY: Berkeley.

PEGGY: Berkeley. And I was happy for her, and only missed her on alternate Thursdays. Not quite. I would miss her a great deal when things were going poorly for me, which was more often than I would have liked. But all in all I got along without you very well, baby.

KAY: And I without you.

PEGGY: To be honest, I think I was very glad you were on the other side of the continent. And I guess you must have felt about the same.

KAY: Yes.

PEGGY: I was a little afraid that if we were geographically close, if we saw quite a bit of each other, something might happen that we wouldn’t want to happen.

Let me see now. After graduation I went to New York and had a crap job with a social welfare agency, which I kept longer than I should have out of a conviction that I was Doing Good Work to Benefit Mankind. I was very alone. I didn’t know many people and didn’t care awfully for the ones I knew. I had had a particularly tacky affair with a girl at school a month or so after Kay and I wrote finis to our little fling. This girl was a sophomore and very much committed to homosexuality. And a trifle crazy, I think. She was into the dyke scene heavily and was a virgin heterosexually and couldn’t understand how I could go with men as well, she thought I was horribly immoral in that respect. I slept with her three times and didn’t enjoy it at all. I just hated the whole thing. I had had this highly emotional relationship with Kay and felt nothing at all for this poor girl, and without the love part it was really a big nothing. I had trouble breaking it off with her. She had managed to convince herself that she was in love with me, and the more I tried to get loose the deeper in love she got. She was some sort of emotional loser, she could only really love someone who did not love her. Hardly uncommon, but this was the first time I had ever been involved in this kind of scene and I couldn’t get out of it fast enough.

In New York I eventually decided to find out whether or not I wanted homosexual relations, and I went to a gay bar on the West Side and got picked up. Just one time. It wasn’t any good and I told myself I was glad because it meant I had outgrown all of this and I didn’t have to be afraid to meet a guy and marry him, because the fling with Kay was a part of the past and I was beyond all that now.

KAY: I believed that myself. I was sure I could see you and nothing would happen, and that I would never be drawn to another girl.

PEGGY: I had been in New York for about a year when I met Jerry. I had had a couple affairs, nothing very serious, and I had spent more time completely alone than I had ever spent in my life. I was unemployed when we met, and happy about that because I really hated my job toward the end. My mother had died recently and I had an independent income—

JERRY: Why do you think I married you?

PEGGY: —and I was ready to fall in love with someone about then, and when I met Jerry it was magic. Absolute magic, something fresh out of a fucking Doris Day movie. We were so perfect together on every level that I was terrified to go to bed with him.

JERRY: Thanks.

PEGGY: Terrified that it would be lousy, and it was very important to me that it not be lousy, because I knew this could be the one, the start of something big, all those good things. So I wound up playing harder to get than I usually would do if I was attracted to a man, but I wasn’t all that hard to get, and he got me... well, I think we stayed in bed for an entire weekend. And around the end of the weekend he said, “You know, we’ll have to get married sooner or later, because this is too good to ever hang up on.” And two weeks later we got married.

JERRY: And lived happily ever after.

PEGGY: More or less.

JERRY: I met Kay for the first time not too long after Peggy and I were married. We were living in the city at the time and she and her husband were in town for a week. I liked her right away. I could have done without him, but I liked Kay. Bright, hip, attractive — it was fun having her around.

Now at the time I had absolutely no idea that the two of them had been anything more than good friends.

PEGGY: The best of friends.

JERRY: I knew Peggy had screwed around a lot. This didn’t bother me at all. I can say that quite honestly, it’s never bothered me. My own attitude had always been that I would screw a snake if somebody would hold its head, and I’ve never bought the notion of a double-standard. It never made sense to me. I didn’t want Peggy fucking anybody else after we were married, but as for what went on before, I couldn’t have cared less about it.

Not long after that we heard from Kay. We had just moved out here and she called to say she had just gotten a divorce and was remarried to another guy. I didn’t talk to her. Peggy did and said she sounded very strange, very different from her usual self.

KAY: That’s what happens when you lose your mind. The thing with Ken had gone wrong almost from the beginning, and I couldn’t just pick up and get out of it, so I wound up having an affair with a really terrible man. He was a minor politician involved with organized crime in the Bay area, and I managed to sell myself on the idea that I was madly in love with him, and I divorced Ken and married him. It was a rotten marriage from the beginning and I think I knew myself that it would he a miracle if it lasted two years.

Twenty-one months later I had my second divorce.

JERRY: After the phone call, Peggy got very moody and wanted to talk about Kay. She was very worried about her. I said something to the effect that Kay was a big girl and could take care of herself, and I think I added that a girl like Kay would very likely have this sort of trouble for most of her life because she was so sexily female and would always attract men very strongly.

This got Peggy going. She said there was something I didn’t know about Kay, or about her, either, for that matter, and she felt like talking about it.

PEGGY: I told him the whole story. I don’t know why I felt compelled to, but I did. I really was worried about Kay that night. She didn’t sound right at all and I had the feeling she was screwing up her life and getting involved in something she couldn’t handle.

KAY: That’s what she was doing, all right.

JERRY: I think I was supposed to disapprove, or be very sympathetic and understanding, or something. I’m afraid my reaction wasn’t what it was supposed to be.

What happened was that I got very fucking turned on by the whole thing. I listened to Peggy and I pictured the two of them in the hay together and I thought it was the most exciting thing ever.

I’ve always found lesbianism appealing. Exciting. I gather this isn’t especially unusual. I used to do a lot of fuck book covers — titles like Sin Slut and Passion Cunt, high type literature of that sort — and I don’t remember one that didn’t have a heavy lesbian component in it. This was standard. And it was common for editors to request a dyke scene on the cover if there was justification for it in terms of content. Of course the fuck book covers these days are all print, no art work at all. That’s a shame, because a lot of good men got their start in the business that way, and now that whole market is gone. The money stank and the quality was usually pretty bad, but it paid the rent for a lot of artists.

Once, a couple of years before I met Peggy, a buddy of mine and I picked up a couple of semipro hookers at a bar over on York Avenue. They had an apartment together and we went there and smoked some hash. I was just getting into grass at the time and had never had hashish, and we all got beautifully high. The girls asked if we wanted to see a show, and we said sure, and they got undressed and one of them made love to the other one. Kissed her, felt her up, ate her out, then strapped on a dildo and socked it to her.

I suppose the hash must have had something to do with it, but it was the most wildly exciting time I ever had. I wanted desperately to screw them, I wanted to grow an extra cock so I could screw them both at once, but at the same time I wanted it to go on forever, to watch them forever.

Finally they were done, and my buddy grabbed one of them and I grabbed the other, and we screwed them, and then we switched girls and screwed some more, and then we got the girls to do their thing some more, and we just kept switching back and forth and screwing them all night.

I never ran into either of them again. I went back to that bar a couple of times but never saw them. I couldn’t go to the apartment because I wasn’t sure where the hell it was. As I said, we all got pretty well stoned.

When Peggy did her confession number, of course I immediately thought of that evening, which I don’t think I had told her about before—

PEGGY: You hadn’t.

JERRY: That’s what I thought. My mind went back to it, and I imagined her and Kay doing what the two whores had done, and I got very excited. I wanted to hear everything, wanted to know all the details.

PEGGY: His interest was damn near clinical.

JERRY: We wound up in bed, of course. We were never lousy in bed, but this particular time was better than usual. Quite sensational.

Afterward, when the glow wore off, she was convinced she had made a mistake telling me about it. That whether or not it excited me, I would lose respect for her because of what I knew about her. This just wasn’t so, and I think I made her realize it. I told her I thought lesbians were a groove. I said I had to admit that I found faggots generally off-putting, and that might be because of hang-ups of my own, but that I frankly dug lesbians and felt that a girl didn’t lose any of her femininity by having that kind of an experience. I think this is true in a way that it isn’t for male homosexuals. I think they give up masculinity. But if anything, I find a girl more desirable as a result of lesbian experiences.

KAY: That could be one of your hang-ups, too.

JERRY: No doubt about it. Remember, our neuroses are the only thing that separates us from the apes.

But ever after that night my wife was just a little more exciting to me. She was exciting enough to begin with—

PEGGY: Thanks.

JERRY: —but this was icing on the cake. I do a lot of my living in fantasy — I think a majority of creative people do — and I would have fantasies in which Kay and Peggy and I would romp together. And of course I was seeing Kay in a new light now. I remembered being attracted to her the one time I met her, and now I was including her in a variety of fantasies.

PEGGY: You were doing more than having fantasies.

JERRY: What do you mean?

PEGGY: You wanted to go into the city and pick up a whore and bring her out here and have us both make love to her.

JERRY: Oh, I was joking.

PEGGY: You pretended you were joking, and I pretended that I knew you were joking, and you were like hell joking. You were trying it on, love.

JERRY: Well, if you had gone along with it, I certainly would have had no objection.

PEGGY: That’s not joking, then.

JERRY: Maybe not.

PEGGY: You also told me that if I ever wanted to see a girl on my own you would have no objection.

JERRY: Well, I was just being decent.

PEGGY: I’m not sure that’s the word for it.

JERRY: Oh, cut the shit. That was altruistic, as a matter of fact. I just wanted you to know that if you ever got the yen you shouldn’t hold yourself back out of concern for how I might feel about it, that you didn’t have to tell me and could do what you wanted with a clear conscience. You can’t make me the heavy for that.

PEGGY: I know. It’s just that something like that, some idiot Village pickup or some orgy with a hired whore, I mean that was the last thing I could possibly want and I was a little disgusted that you thought I might want it.

JERRY: Didn’t you ever want it?

PEGGY: No.

JERRY: You never wanted a girl after we were married?

PEGGY: No.

JERRY: You must have thought about it.

PEGGY: Of course I thought about it. When we went to a party and some men made a pass at me I thought about that, too, but that didn’t mean I had the slightest interest in having an affair. I didn’t, whether with a man or a woman. I was perfectly happy with just you, hard as it may be for you to believe it.

KAY: My second marriage made my first marriage look peachy by comparison. I don’t really see any point in talking about it now. If you were a psychiatrist instead of a writer, or if we were into some version of group therapy, maybe. But let’s just say that it was rotten, and he screwed around, and I screwed around, and for a while I became something of a pillhead, Dexedrine in the morning and Preludin around noon and Librium at martini time and Seconal before bed.

I don’t want to talk about that part.

After I got the second divorce I didn’t know just where to go or who to see or what to do. I was done with the pills and beginning to put myself together. I had spent some time with a shrink, and maybe if I had stayed with him it might have done me some good, but it seemed to me that he was just screwing me up more. I know I always felt worse after I saw him than before, so I really couldn’t see the point in it.

I called Ken, which couldn’t have thrilled him too much. He had remarried and has a kid, and I said something about coming to stay with him and his wife, as if they would welcome me with open arms while I got myself back together. At first he seemed to think I was putting him on and then he decided I was out of my mind, which wasn’t that far from the truth, and finally he lost his patience, a commodity he never had in abundant supply, and told me to fuck off. And then he hung up on me. I called him right back and as soon as he picked up the phone I said something along the lines of “I’m sorry, honey, we were disconnected, and I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to take your advice and fuck off, and thanks very much,” and I hung up on him this time.

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.

When he kissed me I froze.

He asked me what was the matter.

“The whole situation,” I said. I was very close to either tears or laughter, I don’t know which. Maybe both. “The whole situation with you and Peggy and me, the whole screwed up situation, I just don’t know what to do.”

“Listen,” he said, “I know about you and Peggy.”

I looked at him. I thought maybe he meant that he knew we were close emotionally and that was why I was uptight. But he clarified it.

“I know what you are to each other,” he said. “Peggy told me everything. And it doesn’t bother me. I want you to know that; it doesn’t bother me, in fact I’m glad.”

Well, of course he was saying that he knew Peggy and I had had a thing in college, but the timing of it all, I interpreted it as meaning that sometime between last night and now Peggy had told him that we had knocked off a piece, and I was just staggered. I couldn’t believe it.

I said, “She told you?” And he nodded. “And you don’t mind?” No, he said, he didn’t mind.

“And now I’m going to make love to you,” he said.

And he did just that. We found a nice shady spot under a tree, with soft grass on the ground, and we fucked each other almost into a coma.

Afterward I said, “And now I suppose you’ll tell Peggy about this.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “She wouldn’t understand.”

“But she told you about last night.”

He misunderstood. “I didn’t say anything about last night,” he said. “All I did last night was kiss you, and what makes you think I said anything to her?”

“No,” I said brilliantly, “I mean she told you that she and I made love last night... you just said so, so I was just wondering if you would tell her—”

JERRY: My reaction must have been worth filming. It was really as strange a conversation as I’ve ever had. I wish I had it on tape.

KAY: I’m just as glad you don’t.

JERRY: The whole scene was really strange.

PEGGY: I’m sorry I missed it.

KAY: Oh, you’d have loved it.

PEGGY: I’m not generally psychic, but occasionally I do get flashes. I think I was doing something creative, like the dishes, when they went for their walk in the woods. Yes, I was doing the dishes, because I remember loading up the dishwasher and suddenly getting this certain thought that the two of them were going to screw in the woods. I hadn’t even considered this possibility before but all at once I just knew it.

So when they got back to the house I was looking for this, and the way they behaved, the whole attitude, I became quite certain.

And I was glad. That was the surprising thing, that my immediate feeling was joy. I was glad because it would be good for both of them, she needed a man who wouldn’t exploit her, she needed a safe and healthy relationship with a man, and Jerry obviously needed something more than he had with me. And also of course this took away the guilt I might have had for making love with Kay. I can’t explain or pin down all of the feelings I had, but I know that if I had speculated on this in advance I would have thought that I would be very jealous, and actually there was no jealousy at all.

When I saw them, I looked at one of them and then at the other and then I went over to Kay and kissed her on the cheek and said something like, “Poor baby, you’re really leading an active life all of a sudden, aren’t you?”

KAY: I wanted to die. I said, “Oh, Peggy, don’t hate me, we couldn’t help it.”

PEGGY: I said, “Hate you? But I love you, I love both of you.”

JERRY: And we spent hours talking it out, really opening up to each other. At first Kay was convinced she would have to go away, have to leave us. It’s hard to get past your conditioning. But gradually it worked out as we opened up to each other. The thing of it is that each of us wanted a three-way relationship. I loved both of these girls and wanted them both and was delighted that they were having each other, delighted and more than a little turned on by the whole number. Peggy was glad I was the man in Kay’s life and wanted to go on sleeping with Kay herself as well. And Kay loved us both and wanted to go on being part of our family.

KAY: Families that ball together are all together.

JERRY: Right on. So we all wanted this, but the problem was realizing that everybody else wanted it, too. Once we opened up and saw where we were all at, there was really no problem left. All we had to do was keep on keeping on.

PEGGY: The one thing that took a little time happening was for us all to wind up in the same bed at the same time. At first we had a mixed-up scene in which two of us would go off together while the third one read a book or went for a walk. Which was ridiculous but which I would say was also understandable.

Then one day Kay and I were in bed. I was all stretched out with my eyes closed and she was kneeling at the foot of the bed eating me. It was utterly divine. I was like completely passive, just enjoying things, eyes shut, mind floating, when I just sensed another presence in the room. I knew someone had come in, and I opened my eyes and saw Jerry in the doorway, He was fully clothed and he was watching us. But he didn’t see that my eyes were open.

JERRY: I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. Not merely erotic but beautiful in an artistic sense. I don’t think there’s anything particularly attractive in the sight of a man and woman fucking. I think it’s a gas, but I don’t think it’s pretty to look at.

KAY: I do. I love to watch you with Peggy.

JERRY: Call it a personal reaction of mine, then. But I think there is something particularly pleasing to the eye about two women together.

PEGGY: I could see that he had an erection, and I wanted him. And the expression on his face, I knew he was really involved in the whole scene, and I thought, well, why not? Why shouldn’t we all be together?

So I said, “Come on, darling, come join the party.”

JERRY: So I did. I got out of my clothes and went over behind Kay and took her from the rear while she went on kissing Peggy. It was — I can’t even describe how it was. Make up your own ecstatic metaphor.

After that, we all went absolutely sex mad. There are a certain number of things that two people can do in bed, and most couples will try them all in the first few months of marriage. With three, the possibilities for variety are almost endless. From a pure standpoint of physical variety, it just makes an enormous difference when you add a third person to the bed. I don’t have to explain this, it must be obvious to you and to anybody else who stops and thinks about it.

PEGGY: I wonder if it is, though. Obvious to everyone. I know I had never really thought in these terms before, myself. And it really is exquisite. The sensation of being fucked and eaten at the same time. There’s really nothing like it. Of course long before, I had entertained that sort of notion in fantasy. Just in ordinary lovemaking you might do both, you know, first one and then the other, and in your mind you might imagine the two things happening at the same time. But when it really does—

JERRY: I remember one time as the relationship was beginning to swing into gear when the three of us were just absolutely flipped out over each other. We didn’t get out of bed for hours on end, and there were times, you know, you reach a point where it becomes just flesh.

PEGGY: Thanks.

JERRY: You know what I mean. And I would find myself sucking a breast or licking a clit and would suddenly realize I didn’t know whose it was.

PEGGY: You knew it wasn’t yours, lover.

JERRY: True enough. I think it was in one of your books that somebody made the observation that he was convinced God meant people to sleep in threes. I’m always a little leery of people who find God’s will a perfect explanation for their own idiosyncrasies, but in a figurative sense I can dig it in this case, because it’s just so much better.

JWW: The relationship of Jerry and Peggy and Kay seems to have gone on without any emotional strain or any discernible guilt for any of the three partners ever since its inception. I suspect the fact that all three are basically unorthodox in their approach to all facets of life, and that they are not subject to either direct or indirect community pressure, has more than a little to do with this.

The question of offspring from this triangular union has never come up, nor will it; early in their marriage, while he and Peggy were still living in New York City, the two decided that they were not temperamentally inclined to raise children and that both the political climate of the world and the very real problem of the population explosion were such that they felt morally more at ease not having any children. Accordingly Jerry submitted at the time to voluntary sterilization.

There was a brief interlude, he said, when he began to regret the operation. It is reversible in a certain number of cases, and he considered finding out if it could be reversed, and as an alternative he and Peggy considered adopting a child. He attributes this uncertainty to a decline in the quality of their marital relationship — “When things go wrong you start thinking it would be better if you had a kid” — and the impulse passed completely and evidently forever when Kay entered their lives. In a sense, just as Kay was seeking in them a family substitute after her second divorce, I suspect she fills the role of a child in their lives.

JERRY: Not long after all of this between the three of us took shape, I began to be interested in knowing a little more about other people in the same approximate situation. After all, misery isn’t the only thing that loves company. So does ecstasy. I wanted to know what sort of adaptation other trios made, and what motivated them.

I picked up a lot of books on the subject, and of course a large proportion of them were just hoked-up pornography. No case histories in any real sense of the term, and excessive descriptions designed to turn the reader on, and most of them not doing the job very well, either. The typical 42nd Street crap.

But I also picked up some books that seemed legitimate enough, including yours, several of yours, which is how I happened to write to you in the first place, as you know. And for the most part I read about trios that came about as a result of swinging.

Peggy and I had never really considered swinging, although we had discussed it from time to time, mostly in the vein of isn’t it weird what some sickies will do? I would have liked to give it a try myself at the time but I didn’t even have the nerve to so much as suggest it to her, and I don’t think in retrospect that she would have gone along or that I would have felt like following through with it if she did. I enjoyed entertaining the notion in the realm of fantasy, but I doubt I’d really have cared to carry through on that particular fantasy.

After all of this got going, and I started reading about swinging, I thought how tremendously different what we’ve got is from the trios that the swingers get involved in. Now on a purely physical level I can see nothing but plusses in swinging. Not merely the idea of injecting some variety into a marriage, but because possibilities for fun do increase as the number of persons increases. Simple arithmetic.

But these people are balling strangers, and I’m not putting this down, but I’m contrasting it with what we’ve got. The three of us, you see, are very much in love. Completely in love, and it’s more than a matter of each of us loving both of the others, but that we love us as a trio, if you know what I mean. We love the whole usness of us.

I’m sure that swingers who make the trio scene enjoy themselves no end, and if they’re true swingers, if they’ve got past the usual hang-ups, it must be very good for them. But I think they’re missing a tremendous amount if they don’t try and get into a permanent trio scene, a loving relationship where there’s no hustle and no exploitation and where there’s an emotional basis to it all that goes beyond good clean sex. I’m not knocking good clean sex, I have nothing at all against it, but there’s so much more that can enhance it.

Maybe I’m projecting too much, feeling that everybody would be better off doing what we’re doing. It’s such a total groove for us that I can’t fucking avoid the belief that it would be good for everybody, and maybe that’s an oversimplification. Different strokes for different folks, after all.

But we sure are having a gas of a time.