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

  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.

  Peter & Wanda & Grace

  JWW: Peter and Wanda and Grace St. John share a spacious two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise near Lincoln Center, on the West Side of Manhattan. Peter is a furniture designer, and most of the furnishings in the apartment are his work. He is successful in his work, and Wanda also earns a good living as a freelance interior decorator. Her interest is period decoration, while Peter’s taste runs to the extremely modern. Grace does not work, but occasionally earns money posing for more or less pornographic photographs and acting in exploitation films and stag movies.

  Peter is twenty-seven, below average in height, with blond hair and blue eyes and typical Anglo-Saxon features. He is slender and occasionally almost elfin in his movements. Wanda, Peter’s sister, is a year his senior and very much like him in appearance. She is slightly taller than he is, and her hair, blond like his, is worn long and loose. Grace is Peter’s wife. She is twenty-two, red-haired, voluptuous, and short.

  Peter and Grace have been married for three years. About a year and a half ago Wanda joined them.

  My interviewing of the St. Johns spanned several sessions. Grace was not always present.

  • • •

  PETER: Let me tell you one thing. I don’t have any real idea how people get the way they are, and I don’t think anybody else does, either. In the past twelve years or so Wanda and I between us have seen perhaps two dozen psychiatrists and psychologists and psychoanalysts, and they can help you trace things back and see the sequence in which things occurred and the way one thing may have led to another. It’s a very elaborate game, and quite often it becomes quite an absorbing one in the bargain. You learn no end of things about yourself.

  But I don’t know that it answers any basic questions.

  I find it just as easy—perhaps easier—to believe that we are simply born the way we are. If you can believe that a handful of genes and chromosomes determine our precise physical makeup, everything from the shapes of our noses to the patterns on our fingertips, I don’t see why it should be any harder to believe that those same genes and chromosomes determine our personalities. They are more and more coming to believe that mental illness itself is physical, either chemical or glandular or whatever the latest theory maybe. Biochemical to one degree or another. If this is so, it seems eminently reasonable to me that less radical personality traits are also biochemical, and predetermined from the moment of conception. Or from the moment of birth, if you’re astrologically inclined. Grace is, by the way. Wanda and I are not.

  WANDA: All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Peter thinks we were born perverted.

  PETER: Not perverted. Kinky.

  GRACE: What’s the difference?

  PETER: Perverted is nasty and sick. Kinky is just tons of fun.

  WANDA: Then we were perverted and we gradually turned kinky.

  PETER: Absolutely wrong.

  WANDA: What, then?

  PETER: We were born kinky, and the world turned us perverted, and now we’re just kinky again.

  GRACE: Do tell.

  • • •

  PETER: There were just the two of us. No other brothers or sisters, that is. My mother did have another child when I was five. A stillbirth, he would have been a boy. I gather he was deformed.

  WANDA: Physically kinky, dear.

  PETER: Wanda and I were always very close. From the cradle, so to speak. We were so close in age, you know. Just thirteen months apart. I’m sure the parents didn’t plan it that way. I rather suspect I was a misconception.

  WANDA: We were both accidents, dear. Mother told me once, in a fit of pique. We were neither of us hoped for. She would have preferred to have no children, she confide
d.

  PETER: Filthy bitch. Can you picture the two of them together? Her with one eye on the clock, I’m sure. I’m glad they’re dead.

  WANDA: Don’t say that.

  PETER: Why on earth not . . . ? Where was I? As I was saying, Wanda and I were very close. As far back as I can recall, early in childhood, I took it for granted that someday I would grow up and marry Wanda. I vaguely remember being told that I couldn’t do this, that brothers and sisters couldn’t marry one another. And this struck me as grossly unfair. Of course I was going to marry Wanda. I loved her and would marry her and we would have children together.

  WANDA: Perish forbid.

  PETER: Quite. Our genes aren’t that worthy of perpetuation, are they? And in combination we’d have to produce an utter monster. The thalidomide babies would pale by comparison. I did manage to impregnate Wanda once, as it happened.

  WANDA: I was fifteen.

  PETER: She was aborted in the third month, and I didn’t even get to see her after the operation; they shunted her right off to a funny farm. Now both my angels are on the pill, so there will be no little St. Johns. I rather wish they didn’t keep finding out new bad things about the pill.

  GRACE: Oh, they’re twisting it all out of proportion. I heard that the Catholics are behind it.

  PETER: All a papist plot? You really heard that? No, I’m afraid it’s more than that. I’m afraid the pill is really bad for you. Not as bad as being pregnant, but not as good as Vitamin C. Rather a shame Vitamin C doesn’t keep one from getting pregnant.

  I suppose I shall eventually break down and have a vasectomy, but something within me has kept me from doing that yet. We’ll see what happens.

  To continue, the first time Wanda and I had sexual relations was when she was nine and I was eight.

  WANDA: We had played before this. Showed each other what we had.

  PETER: Which was precious little at that age.

  WANDA: We took baths together, you see, and were naked around each other rather often. And we would touch each other. I remember being absolutely fascinated by Peter’s little penis. I thought it was just the cutest thing. I don’t know whether I wanted one of my own or not.