3 is not a Crowd

KAY: This wasn’t universal. There were certainly a lot of kids who had real relationships, but neither of us were that sensational at relating to boys at the time. I was especially unequipped for it, so the scenes we were in were always bad ones. The kids today seem to be a lot more honest. I don’t know if this is true at the cow colleges as well, but among the hipper kids it’s certainly the case. They’re able to admit honestly that they screw each other because they want to. The boys aren’t as obsessed with the idea of scoring and the girls are freer of the kind of hang-ups that most of our generation went through.

PEGGY: I don’t know how clearly we saw all this at the time, but I do know that we grew to look on our love affair as something temporary. There were times when we would talk about being together forever, but most of the time we both knew very well that we were going to outgrow this, that we would grow apart, and that we would ultimately graduate and get married and live essentially traditional middle-class lives. We didn’t intend to get caught in the same binds our parents did, we wanted more out of life than the fucking Marjorie Morningstar trip, but we knew we also wanted the bit of a husband and children and stability and security.

As a matter of fact, our relationship itself wasn’t exactly a love affair.

KAY: We did love each other.

PEGGY: Of course. But we weren’t particularly possessive or jealous or anything.

KAY: I would have been jealous if you were with another girl. Insanely jealous.

PEGGY: I never even considered going with another girl.

KAY: I did, at the very first.

PEGGY: I wasn’t enough for you?

KAY: At the onset, I had this big urge to be a lesbian to the hilt.

JERRY: I love the choice of words.

KAY: What I mean is that this whole thing was very new to me, and I would think about not only making it with Peggy but with other girls as well. I would see girls on the campus and wonder if I would enjoy kissing them or eating them. I was thinking in those terms, but I never really planned to do anything about it, and before very long I realized that this was something between the two of us and that the last thing I wanted was to get anything going with anybody else. But I would have been jealous and hurt if you went with another girl, and I think you would have been the same way if I did.

PEGGY: No question about it.

KAY: And yet there was no jealousy on either side if one of us went out with a boy.

PEGGY: Because that was a different thing entirely. We did date boys, and we occasionally got laid, and oddly enough we found ourselves enjoying this more now than we had before we started sleeping together. When I would be with a boy I couldn’t wait to get home afterward and tell Kay everything about it, what he was like and what we did — all the gory details, absolutely everything. And then we would generally make love to each other.

KAY: If any of those boys had known—

PEGGY: They would have utterly flipped.

KAY: Absolutely.

PEGGY: You know, I think that was part of the fun. Part of the excitement. The whole secret nature of our affair, the feeling that we were putting something over on the world and on the boys we dated. Not only the ones we made it with but especially the ones we held out on. I remember taking a particularly sadistic delight in an evening I spent with this one clod, a blind date, and I let him do his damnedest to seduce me but wouldn’t let him get there. For some reason I disliked him intensely and used that as an excuse to do a total cockteasing number. I drove him up the wall. I wouldn’t even give him a hand job or a dry fuck or anything.

JERRY: I only married her because she’s such a class broad. You notice how every word out of her mouth smacks of an aristocratic heritage.

PEGGY: I just kept getting him hot and letting him down, I was really vicious, and then I made him drive me back to the dorm, and I rushed in so excited that Kay didn’t know what to make of me. And we made wild love, and I told her all about what had happened, and we made love some more.

JERRY: What an absolute ball-buster you must have been. I’m glad I didn’t know you then.

PEGGY: It’s just as well you didn’t. But that was by no means typical. As a matter of fact, if anything I became a lot better at relating to males during that time.

KAY: So did I. For one thing, the pressure was off. Also I learned to enjoy myself sexually through Peggy, and I developed a sense of what my body was and how it worked, and this knowledge stayed with me when I was with a boy. Masturbation is supposed to be very good training for girls, I’ve read. Girls who play with themselves are statistically more likely to be able to have good orgasms when they screw.

PEGGY: That could also be because the girls who masturbate are basically freer and sexier to begin with.

KAY: But it’s also that they learn how to let their bodies groove, and they stay with the same pattern later on.