“I don’t know why men want to see two women together,” Ellen said. “Would you get off on watching two guys?”
Elaine said she wouldn’t, but she’d read that a fair number of straight women enjoyed watching gay male porn. But she couldn’t believe it was anywhere near the proportion of men who were turned on by lesbians.
“No, I’m sure it’s not.” To me she said, “Is it a turn-on for you? Two women?”
“It doesn’t make me want to run out of the room,” I said.
“A lot of clients wanted it,” Elaine said. “What they wanted was a date with me and a friend of mine, but they always wanted us to fool around a little before they joined in.”
“Did you like dates like that?”
“They were okay,” she said. “I never felt romantic about a girl, but I didn’t mind the sex part.”
“That’s what I was thinking of, when it’s romantic. What that one woman said.”
The woman in question, I learned, was a lesbian. Her girlfriend was also in the game, so when a client wanted a threesome that was who she recruited, and they put on a show and did each other, and then they both did the guy.
“Like you do,” Ellen said.
“And it ruined her relationship,” Elaine said. “Once they’d turned their lovemaking into a performance, it wasn’t fulfilling anymore. It made them self-conscious, as if someone was watching them.”
“With his dick in his hand,” Ellen said. “They broke up not long after that. And the ironic thing is that the main reason she picked her girlfriend for the date was because she thought it would be cheating if she brought in another girl.”
I’d wished I could be a fly on the wall at a Tarts meeting, and this was even better.
Elaine told how her regular partner on threesie dates had been her best friend in the game. “And if anything we were closer friends afterward.”
“Because you’d shared the experience.”
“Not just that. She was cute and funny and very sweet, and I’d had thoughts about her. Not fantasized exactly, but, you know, wondering what it would be like.”
“To be in bed with her.”
“Uh-huh. And it was nice. Matt probably knows who it was.”
I said I could probably guess. “Connie Cooperman?”
“Yes, and all of a sudden I’m so sad I could cry.” To Ellen she said, “She met a real nice guy and got married and moved out to — was it Indiana?”
“Ohio,” I said.
“And then someone went out there and murdered her and her whole family. I don’t want to think about it.”
Ellen said, “You said something earlier. In a Jewish accent.”
Elaine didn’t remember, but I did. “The woman who borrowed the pot,” I said.
“Oh, right. So there are these two dames, and one accuses the other of borrowing a pot from her and never returning it. And the second woman denies everything. “In the first place, I never borrowed from you a pot. In the second place, it was an old pot. And in the third place, I gave it back to you in better condition than you gave it to me. It’s not really much of a joke. It’s better as a reference than a joke.”
“The way you used it.”
“Right.”
One thing it did, it got the spotlight off Connie Cooperman.
Ellen asked if a client of Elaine’s ever wanted to bring her home to his wife. Never, Elaine said. She’d heard enough stories along those lines, but nobody ever invited her to that sort of party.
Ellen said, “Really? I would get that a lot. And, you know, it was a different experience every time. Once it was obviously all his idea, and his wife hadn’t had any experience with women and didn’t particularly want to. She was just helping him fulfill his fantasy.”
“Accommodating of her.”
“Another time the wife had a lot more experience with girls than I did, and knew just what she wanted to do. And another time...”
The energy in the room had changed. All this sexually-charged talk, I thought. It could hardly fail to raise everybody’s temperature.
But it was more than that.
Ellen shifted in her chair, crossed her legs. She said, “There was this one couple.”
“Oh?”
“He was a nice guy. A lot older than me, like really a lot. And I’d had two or three dates with him, and he said he knew his wife would like me, and how would it be if the three of us went out for dinner?”
Elaine: “Like a date? I mean a date date?”
“Kind of. Still, it was pretty clear how the date was supposed to end. I put on a good dress and met them at a really nice restaurant. I mean, not some ridiculous place with a $200 tasting menu, but a decent French restaurant. I couldn’t tell you what I ordered, but I remember it was good, and so was the wine.”
She paused, thinking back, and not about the food or the wine.
She said, “I don’t know why, but I expected his wife to be closer to my age than his. I was wrong about that, she couldn’t have been more than a few years younger than him. But she was still pretty, and she’d kept her figure.”
“An attractive woman of a certain age.”
“And very sweet, and completely at ease. The food was excellent, and the conversation was about everything in the world but what we were there for. He was a Yankees fan and she was a Mets fan, and they said they were living proof that a mixed marriage could work out. There was a Tom Stoppard play on Broadway, and they’d seen it and so had I, and we talked about that. We never ran out of things to talk about. It was a great conversation and a terrific meal, and afterward we sipped our espresso, and nobody wanted an after-dinner drink.
“And she said, ‘Ellen, we like you very much. Would you like to come back to our apartment?’ ”
“I guess you went.”
“You think? Their apartment was just a block or two from the restaurant, and it was a beautiful night, and we walked there. Not too fast and not too slow, because we really wanted to get there but the anticipation was too exciting to hurry through it. Do you know what I mean?”
I knew what she meant.
“It was like electricity in the air, that kind of energy. They lived in a full-service building, of course, with a doorman and an elevator operator. They were on the twelfth floor, and he unlocked the door and locked it again when we were inside, and she took me in her arms and told me how sweet and pretty I was. Then she kissed me, and I got all caught up in the kiss, and then she let me go and he took her place, kissed me on the mouth and then on the side of my throat, right at the pulse point. He had his arms around me, and then she was touching me, too.
“I never said their names, did I?”
“No.”
“Gordon and Barbara. Their apartment was gorgeous. Antique furniture from different periods. Art on the walls. He pointed out a couple of paintings, told me things about the artists, but I couldn’t take it in.
“There was soft indirect lighting in the bedroom. The bed was queen-size, and it had been turned down. He took off his jacket and hung it over a chair, and she turned so that I could help her with the zipper of her dress. And when we’d all taken off all our clothes, she looked me up and down, and her face just filled up with delight, and I honest to God felt like the most beautiful woman in the world.
“She came over to me, and put a hand on me. No one had said a word since we entered the bedroom, but now she spoke. ‘Let’s do everything,’ she said.”
“It was kind of magical,” she said. “Very highly charged sexually, but there was something else going on, too, something primal. I felt as though I was healing something from my childhood, some trauma I didn’t even know was there. I remember there was one moment, I was lying on my back and they were on either side of me, not touching but close enough that I could feel the warmth of their bodies. And I felt safe. It was like I’d never in my life felt completely safe, and now I did.”