3 is not a Crowd

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.