Lydia was smart, fat, and shy. I don’t believe she and Dave had come for dinner that night — perhaps they’d dropped over later in the evening, and I’d offered them some of whatever cobbler or pudding — along with coffee — we were having for dessert. Dave’s attitude toward our three-way relationship was an odd combination of tolerance and — sometimes — importunate curiosity. Since we were all three pretty verbal people — Marilyn and I in a literary and analytical way, Bob in a gregarious and anecdotal one — we were all open to discussing things, if anyone wanted to ask. So, from time to time, Dave asked. The only preface to the evening I’d gotten, however, was when, a few days before, he’d told me: “I was talking about you guys’ threesome to Lydia. And she says there’s a lot about it she doesn’t understand. I think she’d like to discuss it.” When they’d come in, I’d wondered if this visit would yield some informal interrogation. But by the time coffee was poured, I’d decided it wouldn’t. Yet, soon, we were answering one or another of Dave’s questions. And Lydia said: “But the three of you don’t get jealous of each other, do you …?”
I said: “So far we haven’t. I don’t think we will, though.”
“I mean, say,” Lydia said, “we all went to bed with one another. You wouldn’t mind that?”
“That sounds kind of fun,” Bob said. “You want to?”
Dave laughed. “You really want to?”
“We could all play strip poker,” Bob declared, obviously warming to the idea. “The winner gets to do whatever he wants with the losers. …” And he was clearly a man set on winning.
Marilyn had a kind of strange look, part smile and part something else.
“No, here, I’ll show you.” There was a deck of cards on top of the refrigerator. Bob was up and back at the table with them in a minute. And so Bob, Marilyn, Dave, Lydia, and I found ourselves in a game of cards. Clearly Bob was set for this to turn into a five-way orgy.
But just as clearly, as we sat around our kitchen table and one piece of clothing came off after another, neither Marilyn nor Dave was particularly enthusiastic.
Neither Bob nor I wore underwear; we were soon both sitting with bare buttocks on the board bench. Out of some sense of compensation, Dave had taken off his pants and underpants first, leaving his shirt and T-shirt on. I have a memory of Marilyn, looking a bit sour, in her slip, and another, of Lydia removing her white, shiny bra and, as one cup fell from her broad breast, my surprise that the nipple centered on the pink saucer of its aureole was so small.
“You know,” I said, “I don’t think anybody’s into this, really.” It acted like a kind of signal, and Marilyn and Dave began to reach for their clothing again.
“Shit,” Bob said. “I was!”
“Well, nobody else is,” Marilyn said.
Lydia re-dressed silently.
“You know,” Dave said, pulling up his jeans, bare feet wide apart on our kitchen’s gray linoleum, “what we’d kind of been wondering — Lydia was talking to me about it, and she thought … well, I guess we were both curious, you see, just what a threesome would be like. In bed. But I mean, how do you find something like that out — ”
Lydia buttoned her blouse, and added demurely: “—unless you’ve got three people.”
Now it came out that Lydia had been interested in a threesome and, basically, had hoped to borrow me for the evening. No, not an orgy. Just me.
Though I’d always been rather fond of her, I was a bit surprised. “Just me?” I asked.
Shyly, Lydia confirmed it.
Bob’s response was big and somewhat — even I felt — overgenerous: “Well, Jesus, why didn’t you justly so? You wanna take him off for the night? It’s okay by me as long as you get him back here by morning.” He turned to Marilyn. “You mind if they take your old man off for the night?” He put his arm around her.
Marilyn looked surprised, then shrugged. “I guess not.” Her look at me was questioning.
But I wasn’t too sure how I felt about it myself — perhaps more curious than anything else.
“What about you?” Lydia asked.
“Yeah,” Dave said. “How do you feel about it?”
“Well,” I said. “I guess it’s okay. I mean, if you really want to. …”
So Lydia and Dave took me back to their apartment on Tenth Street. We all went to bed. In its way, it was pleasant enough. As I said, I’d always liked Lydia. And Dave was my best friend. But in spite of the odd hard-on with Dave, though I did reasonable oral duty with Lydia, I couldn’t get really physically excited — though both of them did. And for someone not really into the male side of the sex, Dave was as generous as anyone could have been. “Well, it’s easier with someone like you,” he said. “That’s all.” My memories from that warm, full bed are of Dave, bucking above a panting Lydia, one arm caught around me, hard enough to hurt my shoulder; another of gazing over Lydia’s pale bulk, while she laughed about something Dave had said. During some other sexual maneuver, I remember a brief surprise when I saw Dave’s circumcised penis — though of course I knew he was Jewish; and I was circumcised myself. Still, after Bob’s heavily foreskinned cock, it looked momentarily odd. We talked, we joked, we drank Coca-Cola. We lay around in bed. For me, I don’t think of it as sexually very successfuclass="underline" I was the only one who hadn’t come. But its purpose had been to assuage their curiosity — and mine. And it had.
I walked back home, my jacket shrugged up around my ears, about three in the morning, climbed upstairs, went into the apartment, and got into bed with a sleepy Marilyn and Bob. We talked about it briefly the next day. Bob was mostly put out by the time it had taken for them to get around to saying what they’d wanted. “I thought we were all gonna fuck. If they didn’t wanna, they should have said so right off!” Marilyn just seemed content that things were back to usual.
Now, where within this account do I locate its difficulty? What makes it, if not the last tale told, certainly the last tale written? (Is it that difficulty which makes me place it here? Or did this all occur much earlier in the relationship? The fact is, I don’t know.) Is it the embarrassment of impotence in a work that might otherwise be mistaken for an elaboration of endless and unmitigated prowess? Perhaps. Is it that, after all this time, I still feel protective toward Bob in some way this anecdote necessarily violates, with its picture of a coarser side to his sexual enthusiasm than the rest of us perhaps possessed? It’s conceivable. Is it because my failure to enjoy Dave and Lydia sexually suggests that what happened between Bob, Marilyn, and me was not some fetishized “perversion” sought as a replicable object, but rather three people relating (personally, sexually, socially) within the margins of their own sexual possibilities — and thus betrays an area of privacy, still untouched, more comfortably elided than articulated? Certainly that’s possible. But whatever those reasons on the margins of desire, they are inextricably mixed in with the more writerly fact that Lydia exists for me only in this one incident. If I ask, “What was her feeling toward Marilyn?” logic alone tells me the two must have liked each other, since Lydia was as voracious a reader as Marilyn or Sue, even if her natural reticence kept her from giving her opinion on what she read quite as freely. “What was her reaction to Bob?” I suspect she found him interesting and baffling — and perhaps somewhat off-putting, at least that night, through simple cultural estrangement: again, a logical speculation. And to Dave? Over these months her affair with him, before they broke up, developed the problems that seemed to me characteristic, in retrospect, of the time, the place. But, again, this is logic. (Did, at some point in the night, she laugh and say: “I think it’s very nice of you to do this.” Did Dave say: “Well, Chip is just a nice guy.” Having written it, I seem to remember it. But is it memory? Or logic? Or only the pressure of narrative, yearning after its own truth?) However much any of these speculations satisfy (or subvert) a narrative sense, specific memories do not come with them to suggest, to confirm, to create, to invest these structural judgments with images, with textures, with lingering sensory detriti. Thus the writer attacks this moment — in its way, more like a story than any other in the book — with a feeling of an immense impoverishment of all the extra-narrational material that impels diegesis into possibility, into narrative, into language.