3 is not a Crowd

He said, “But I do. You love me and you love your sister. She loves me and she loves you. Why can’t it be that I love you both and you both love me?”

“Well,” I said, “that sort of thing cannot be because people are not like that. A man has one wife and a woman has one husband and that is all. I do not see how a man can have two wives. Is that what you want, for us both to be your wives?”

And he said yes, that was what he wanted, and he thought that was what we both wanted, what all three of us wanted, and I said I could not understand it.

GORDON: Of course I had been thinking about this all day, and it was the only way I could see for us to work it out.

RITA: I told him if he loved me he wouldn’t need anyone else, and he said that wasn’t true, that loving Junie made him love me more. I said how could that be and he said that was how it was.

And I said, “What would you do, sleep with me three nights a week and with her three nights, and on the seventh day you would rest?” And he laughed, but I didn’t mean it to be funny. I said, “You cannot have us both and you will have to choose.” And he said for me to think about it, and I said that I didn’t see as there was anything to think about.

I said, “Well, what would you want us to do? Maybe you would want for us to get one big bed and we would all sleep in it, with her on one side and me on the other side and you in the middle.” And he said that would be the best way to do it. “Well, you must be crazy,” I said, “to think that I would go along with something like that, or Junie, either, for that matter. You must be stark crazy to think we would put up with that.”

He said, “What do you mean, ‘to put up with it’? Because it would not be taking anything away from you, or making you do anything you wouldn’t want to do, so how is it something to have to put up with?” I asked him if he thought I could just lie there in bed with them and watch him making love to my sister. “I don’t see why not,” he said. And then he would expect me to make love to him while she was there. “I think it would be a beautiful thing,” he said.

Well, I could not understand any of this.

GORDON: I had not worked every bit of this out in my mind beforehand. A lot of it, a great part of it just came to me as I was talking to Rita. It was a matter of being able to see things clearly that I had not so much as thought of before. All at once I was seeing that we are all taught certain things about sex and love — we aren’t even taught them so much as we grow up with them taken for granted all around us — and for the first time I was looking at these things and seeing that they did not make any sense to me. I was seeing these things clearly and plainly as never before. I was seeing them the way a person will all at once come to see God at a revival meeting. It was that way, it was what you would call a revelation. Now I have been to revivals in the past and I have never had this sort of an experience, although I have seen others have it and have known what it is like. And it was that sort of a feeling that came over me, that I had found something great and beautiful and important. It was that kind of a feeling and I wanted to take Rita in my arms and make her see how beautiful it was, how beautiful and right it could be.

RITA: I said, “You just want more sex, that is all you want. You want two women instead of one and that is all.” He said if that was all he wanted there were easier ways to get it, and he wound up telling me all about the waitress in Dayton, which I knew about but we had never brought it up and I didn’t know who she was, just that there was a woman. Well, he discussed this, although at first I didn’t want to hear about it, and as he was talking a strange thing began to happen to me and that is that I began to be calm and began to see things differently. I do not know how to explain this so that it will make sense. This had all been going against the grain of me, and now it was becoming so that there was no grain and it was going smooth.

After a time he went and brought June in, and we talked and cried and Junie and I kissed and held each other. I held her at arm’s length and looked at her and at Gordon and said that now I suppose they would want to make love. And he said yes, he would like very much to make love to June, to have intercourse with her. And I said maybe he would like me to leave them alone, and he said I could leave them alone if I that was what they wanted, but that he would like it if I stayed with them so that we could all be close.

I said, “Junie, is that what you want?” Thinking that she would not want me with them at such a time. But she said yes, she would like that, and that I should stay.

It was like something happening in a dream. It just was not real. I watched him with her and it was like he was doing it to me, I saw myself in her, and I could not understand this. I watched them have intercourse.