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

  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 someth
ing 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 . . .