3 is not a Crowd

KAY: But I tried to figure out why, and what seemed like the obvious answer was that I wanted to drive the two of you apart. That I wanted to spoil what I couldn’t have. That I wanted to compete with Peggy and take her man away from her. I kept finding different motivations, and I didn’t like what any of them told me about myself.

PEGGY: That shrink on the Coast really fucked you up, didn’t he?

KAY: I guess he did.

PEGGY: When you start analyzing that way, you can really get messed up. I think those schmucks do more harm than good, I really do.

KAY: Well, I didn’t go to him that long. Maybe I would have turned a corner somewhere along the way and maybe he would have started to do me good, but in the amount of time I went to him I would tend to agree that he hurt more than he helped.

JERRY: Meanwhile, while these two were hot for each other and keeping it to themselves, and while Kay was beginning to go for me, I was finding it just about impossible to keep from making a pass at her. Now I hadn’t expected this. I had anticipated that something might get started between the two of them, and I had privately decided that I wouldn’t object to this at all, that if they wanted to do a little private mutual gobbling, that was their business and none of mine. I probably wanted this to happen, I liked the idea, but in any case I had no objection to it.

But I didn’t think I would fall in love with Kay.

Which of course is what happened. It started off with sympathy and a strong sexual attraction, and it got enhanced by the sheer sexual stimulation that grew out of the fact that the two of them had been lovers, and then it turned a big corner as I got to know Kay better and better and developed tremendous feeling for her as a person. I don’t know if I recognized it as love at the time. We’re all so conditioned, you know. So totally fucking programmed by the crap they drill into us as children. I had always considered myself more liberal and open-minded than most. I knew that a person could and would normally want more than one person sexually. I found it wholly unremarkable that I loved Peggy and dug Peggy sexually and nevertheless wanted to make it with Kay. But I didn’t take the thought a step further and admit I was in love with Kay, because of this monogamy hang-up that makes people think it’s only possible to love one person at a time.

This is a lot of shit. Of course it’s possible to love more than one person at a time, but we all have this concept of love, that it’s exclusive.

If we had all had a more mature outlook, if our minds had been a little more open, we would have saved a couple of very uncomfortable weeks. But if you look at it from another angle, if our minds had been just a little less open, the scene we have now would never have come about at all. We would have locked each other out permanently.

JWW: The three of them talked at some length about the period of several weeks during which each was attracted to the other without anyone’s doing anything about it. The innuendoes and hints, the subtle emotional changes, were analyzed by all three at some length.

To summarize, the general tone of the total relationship at this stage seems to have been one of frustration interwoven with excitement. Each had sexual desires which were not being satisfied, yet each had the feeling that something was coming, that during the next day or the next week or the next month something extraordinary was going to happen.

JERRY: Peggy was out shopping, and I was showing Kay some preliminary sketches for a cover I was working on. This was for a science fiction magazine, and she had read the script of the story I was supposed to use for the cover illo, and I had done some line drawings based on it for the inside pages and some rough sketches for the cover. And she was looking them over, and commenting on them, and as usual I was impressed with her comments, and impressed with other things about her as well, and by this time I had sensed that the attraction was mutual. So I took her by the shoulders and kissed her.

KAY: I was unprepared for this, and I just felt myself responding immediately. My reaction was almost one of relief. Finally something was happening. Anything is better than waiting after a point, you know.

The kiss went on for a while and I got slightly lost in it. Then I felt his hand under my skirt, reaching for me, and I just managed to break the kiss and draw away. I wanted him desperately but I also wanted this not to happen. I said, “God, this is crazy, we can’t.” He said that we both wanted each other and it was ridiculous to fight it. I said I couldn’t do something like that to Peggy. It would kill her, I said. He said he wouldn’t tell her if I didn’t.

I said, “She’ll be home any minute,” which was a cop-out of the worst sort. But it was also true, and I figured if we managed to postpone this, I could try to figure out what I was going to do about all this.