You know what I was doing?
I’m ashamed to say it. I was masturbating. You know, playing with myself.
Now I had stopped doing this years ago. I had never heard of a married man doing this, or even a grown man, for that matter. Since then I have learned different. I have read in certain books that men will go on masturbating all their lives from time to time whether they are married or not, but at the time I didn’t know this. I would do it and worry that I was losing my manhood, that I couldn’t father a child or make love to my wife but instead was masturbating like a boy, like some kind of perverted person.
Of course, now, this made me all the more anxious to have an affair with somebody. But I was with Rita all the time except for lunches and the occasional business that took me out of the store. So I barely had the opportunity to do anything about it.
There was this waitress in the place where I usually had lunch, and she and I had got in the habit of kidding around, the way people will do. A lot of her customers would do that with her, joking and all. She was a real skinny girl from I believe it was Tennessee, a real mountain accent, and we’d rag her about that.
And the men, it was generally all men who had lunch there, would hand her a certain amount of sex talk. Nothing out of hand but just the friendly sex joking you’ll get in a situation like that. And one time she and I were talking, and it came to me that she liked me and I had a chance with her. I don’t know what set it off but it just came to me out of the blue. So I asked her when she got off work, which was at seven that night, and I arranged to pick her up and we would go out for a few beers or something.
I gave Rita some story about an auction. She asked if I wanted her to come along and I pretended to think it over and said no, it was out toward Annandale and would probably run late, and why didn’t she just catch a movie or get herself some magazines.
Then I picked up this waitress and we went to a tavern where they had a country and western group, and we got fairly well beered up. We went back to her place. She had a room over a grocery store with religious pictures all over the walls. It felt funny, all of those pictures. I had brought a six-pack of beer along and we sat drinking and smoking and talking. We were laughing a lot. It was very easy being with her after how tense it had been between Rita and me. We finished a couple of beers and then I sat next to her on the bed and we started kissing and petting.
She was really skinny. Hardly any breasts at all, hardly anything on her but skin over the bones.
But it was exciting. The kissing and petting. Rita and I, of course we were at the point where we got all undressed and into bed first and then took it from there, and it was exciting to work up to it gradually for a change. But it wasn’t like a kid on a date because it was taken for granted that this girl and I were going to have sexual intercourse. That was absolutely taken for granted.
And we did.
I got to going over there a couple of times a week. I liked her a good deal but that was all there was to it. I never even thought about leaving Rita for her. It was as if she was just a convenience, someone for me to relax and joke with and then have sexual intercourse with. I was pretty certain she was seeing at least one other man at the time, and this didn’t bother me at all. If anything I was relieved to think it because I didn’t want her being dependent on me or falling in love with me.
When we were in bed together she would say she loved me, but that was just bed talk. I never told it to her, though. I wouldn’t let the word out. I suppose she would have liked it if I did, but I didn’t.
One night I went over there with a six-pack as usual and she had this gal there who was her sister just up from Tennessee for a visit. I thought, well, I won’t stay long and there won’t be any sexual intercourse this time.
Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
My waitress told me how her sister was very randy and hadn’t been with a man in a long time. She talked like this right in front of the other girl and asked did I want to do her a favor and have sex with her. And she stayed right in the room there with us while her sister and I had relations. She sat there next to the bed and petted at me while I was doing it to her sister, and then we all sat around naked and joked and drank beer, and one of them went down for more beer and came back up and got naked again, and I went to it with the waitress while the sister watched and joked and spilled beer on us, and we had what you might call an orgy.
I didn’t see her as much after that. I would still see her maybe once a week, but no more than that.
RITA: I knew you were seeing someone.
GORDON: I thought maybe you knew. I didn’t want to throw it in your face, but as close as you and I were, I figured you would have to know.
JWW: I asked him if he had made any connection between the waitress and her younger sister and his relationship to Rita and June. That experience with the two girls from Tennessee had been his only venture into sexual relations that were in any sense abnormal or unorthodox, and the parallel seemed clear — an older sister with whom he had had a relationship, and a younger one who joined in the game, with the older one playing a permissive quasi-parental role. Had he noted the similarity at the time? Or afterward?
GORDON: No, I don’t guess I ever thought of it that way. Not at the time it was going on. Now with Rita and June it is something completely different. It is a hundred percent different. It is a case of love on all sides, it is a relationship that grows and grows. It is real.
With that waitress and her sister, all it was was sex. That is absolutely all there was to it. It was sex, and it was dirty sex, and that was the part that made it exciting. I was cheating on Rita to begin with, and this took something dirty and made it dirtier by putting three in a bed instead of two, and that made it exciting but it also made it leave a bad taste when it was all over. I was sorry afterward that I went with them and didn’t want to go with them again, and if the kid sister hadn’t of gone back to Tennessee I probably wouldn’t have seen the waitress again at all.
But later on now, when things got started here with June, I guess I did think back on that waitress and her sister, I guess I did, but mostly to see for myself how different it was. That it could be clean one time and dirty another, depending on how the people felt about each other.
GORDON: When their Pa had his first heart attack, we took to getting down here as often as we could. He was supposed to take things easy and get his strength back, but he was an old man by this time and the first attack took a lot out of him. He looked terrible. His color was off and his face looked twenty years older after the attack than it did before it. So we would talk about how he’d be up and around soon, and he and I talked about taking a fishing trip in the fall, and I don’t know what that man believed but I knew for certain he would never go fishing again, that it wouldn’t be long before it was over for him. So we spent as much time down here as we could and hoped we might be with him when the end came, but as it turned out we were in Dayton then. I was just in the course of making a deal to sell the store. I had a lead on this place in town, the town I’m in right now, the same place, as a matter of fact, and we were going to buy it and take a house in town so Rita could be with her Pa as often as she liked. But we didn’t make it in time. The deal was still getting set up when we got a phone call from June saying it was over...
GORDON: I went through with the deal anyway. I got a better price than I’d figured and made a better deal on the place here in town than I had figured, so even from the point of view of business it was the sensible thing to do. But it was a case more of we had to get out of Dayton and back where we belonged.