3 is not a Crowd

JERRY: Why do you think I married you?

PEGGY: —and I was ready to fall in love with someone about then, and when I met Jerry it was magic. Absolute magic, something fresh out of a fucking Doris Day movie. We were so perfect together on every level that I was terrified to go to bed with him.

JERRY: Thanks.

PEGGY: Terrified that it would be lousy, and it was very important to me that it not be lousy, because I knew this could be the one, the start of something big, all those good things. So I wound up playing harder to get than I usually would do if I was attracted to a man, but I wasn’t all that hard to get, and he got me... well, I think we stayed in bed for an entire weekend. And around the end of the weekend he said, “You know, we’ll have to get married sooner or later, because this is too good to ever hang up on.” And two weeks later we got married.

JERRY: And lived happily ever after.

PEGGY: More or less.

JERRY: I met Kay for the first time not too long after Peggy and I were married. We were living in the city at the time and she and her husband were in town for a week. I liked her right away. I could have done without him, but I liked Kay. Bright, hip, attractive — it was fun having her around.

Now at the time I had absolutely no idea that the two of them had been anything more than good friends.

PEGGY: The best of friends.

JERRY: I knew Peggy had screwed around a lot. This didn’t bother me at all. I can say that quite honestly, it’s never bothered me. My own attitude had always been that I would screw a snake if somebody would hold its head, and I’ve never bought the notion of a double-standard. It never made sense to me. I didn’t want Peggy fucking anybody else after we were married, but as for what went on before, I couldn’t have cared less about it.

Not long after that we heard from Kay. We had just moved out here and she called to say she had just gotten a divorce and was remarried to another guy. I didn’t talk to her. Peggy did and said she sounded very strange, very different from her usual self.

KAY: That’s what happens when you lose your mind. The thing with Ken had gone wrong almost from the beginning, and I couldn’t just pick up and get out of it, so I wound up having an affair with a really terrible man. He was a minor politician involved with organized crime in the Bay area, and I managed to sell myself on the idea that I was madly in love with him, and I divorced Ken and married him. It was a rotten marriage from the beginning and I think I knew myself that it would he a miracle if it lasted two years.

Twenty-one months later I had my second divorce.

JERRY: After the phone call, Peggy got very moody and wanted to talk about Kay. She was very worried about her. I said something to the effect that Kay was a big girl and could take care of herself, and I think I added that a girl like Kay would very likely have this sort of trouble for most of her life because she was so sexily female and would always attract men very strongly.

This got Peggy going. She said there was something I didn’t know about Kay, or about her, either, for that matter, and she felt like talking about it.

PEGGY: I told him the whole story. I don’t know why I felt compelled to, but I did. I really was worried about Kay that night. She didn’t sound right at all and I had the feeling she was screwing up her life and getting involved in something she couldn’t handle.

KAY: That’s what she was doing, all right.

JERRY: I think I was supposed to disapprove, or be very sympathetic and understanding, or something. I’m afraid my reaction wasn’t what it was supposed to be.

What happened was that I got very fucking turned on by the whole thing. I listened to Peggy and I pictured the two of them in the hay together and I thought it was the most exciting thing ever.

I’ve always found lesbianism appealing. Exciting. I gather this isn’t especially unusual. I used to do a lot of fuck book covers — titles like Sin Slut and Passion Cunt, high type literature of that sort — and I don’t remember one that didn’t have a heavy lesbian component in it. This was standard. And it was common for editors to request a dyke scene on the cover if there was justification for it in terms of content. Of course the fuck book covers these days are all print, no art work at all. That’s a shame, because a lot of good men got their start in the business that way, and now that whole market is gone. The money stank and the quality was usually pretty bad, but it paid the rent for a lot of artists.