3 is not a Crowd

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.

RITA: And Junie was all alone in this big empty house. We couldn’t leave her like that. I suppose we could have had her move in with us in Dayton, but neither of us ever liked that place anyway. We didn’t make friends there, maybe for lack of trying. I’ve never been good at having a lot of friends. Just a few people that I like and see all the time, and I’d rather have it be family than friends.

GORDON: It was important for Rita to have June close at that time.

RITA: She was all I had left and I blamed myself for not being with Pa toward the end, and I wanted to be with Junie.