3 is not a Crowd

At the same time, I think Peggy and I were both a little apprehensive. Ever since the confession number, I had been teasing Peggy off and on about her notorious lesbian past. This was just a game, but it wasn’t one she always enjoyed. I think she was worried that Kay’s presence might increase the tension in our own relationship.

For my part, I was a little concerned that Kay might drive the two of us farther apart. l don’t know if anybody mentioned it, but Peggy and I were not exactly in the throes of the honeymoon any longer. It was more a case of seven-year itch. I had had a girl in New York for a while, I would see her when I was in town, and Peggy more or less realized this, and she and I were by no means going on the rocks, but at the same time the whole relationship was cooling slightly and going quietly stale, and we didn’t seem to know what to do about it. It was still good for the most part, but we were having more and more days that were less than terrific.

There was the further complication that I knew about Kay and Peggy, and Peggy knew that I knew obviously, but Kay didn’t know, and we had decided it would be foolish to tell her.

When she got here, though, all the worries we might have felt took a back seat to the immediate problem at hand, which was to help Kay put her head together again.

KAY: I was rather a mess.

JERRY: The lady was a wreck. An emotional basket case. Her hands shook, she had a nervous tic in the temple, her appetite was shot, and during occasional lulls in the conversation she would excuse herself and go into the bathroom and cry for ten or fifteen minutes.

KAY: The perfect house guest.

JERRY: Gradually she began to work herself out of this, at least to a degree. She liked taking long walks in the woods, alone or with one or the other of us. At night we would all sit around sipping brandy and talking, and happily we all got along very well. Kay and Peggy discovered, once the initial unfamiliarity wore off, that they were close in the same way they had been close at college.

PEGGY: Emotionally close, that is. There was no quick rediscovery of the fact that we were hot for each other.

KAY: But we were.

PEGGY: Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? And I think each of us made the discovery privately but kept it to herself. I know I fought for the longest time admitting it to myself. I kept telling myself that we had a lovely thing going in college but that it was over forever, and that perhaps the best thing about it was that now, some years later, we could live together and be really close friends without having sex get in the way. I don’t know why I was dumb enough to think this. The fact that we could still have such emotional rapport should have led me to suspect that the physical rapport — oh, hell, the love, that’s what it is—

KAY: Amen.

PEGGY: —was still there as much as ever.

I kept fighting this, but I was too honest with myself to be able to believe it for long. I found myself wanting to make love to Kay. We would be talking, just the two of us, and I would feel this rush of sympathy for her, I would sense how hurt she was, and I would think how I could make her feel better, how if we were in bed together and I could make love to her all the pain and tension would go away and she would be happy.

JERRY: How supremely unselfish of you.

PEGGY: Don’t be bitchy. It was partly unselfish. Of course I wanted Kay, I wanted the pleasure I would have with her, the thought wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t wanted her, but I also did feel that this was something she needed and that it would be good for her.

KAY: I wanted you, too. For a variety of reasons. One of them being simply that I found myself remembering those days more and more and contrasting them with what had come later. It seemed to me that we were secure and happy then and that I had never really been happy since.

But I was terrified of this. Because you were this wonderful warm family that I had sought out, and I could see myself driving a wedge between you, and I actually told myself more than once that before I ought to let myself do such a thing, break up the good thing that you two had... that I ought to go and kill myself. I never got to the point of figuring out how to go about it, but I felt suicide was a noble alternative to getting in your pants again.

PEGGY: Kind of an extreme solution, no?

KAY: A final one, certainly.

The other thing, and this really began to convince me that I was crazy, was that I began to want Jerry.

JERRY: Thanks.

KAY: Huh?

JERRY: You’re overfucking flowing with compliments. If you wanted me, then you must be crazy. That’s what you just said. Thanks a bunch.

KAY: Oh, Christ, you know what I meant. I liked you. I found you disturbingly attractive.

JERRY: Now you’re talking.

KAY: And I had a great urge to ball you. Happy?

JERRY: You betcha.