3 is not a Crowd

He went along with this. But he said, “Honey, we’re going to make it sooner or later. There’s no way around it. Why kill ourselves putting it off?”

All through dinner and the rest of the evening I kept thinking about this. I wondered if it was true. I had already sensed that Jerry wanted me, and I knew I wanted him, but the kiss, the electricity of it all, just had more impact. It made it clear that the magic was there and that it worked both ways, and I knew the two of us could be very good together.

I couldn’t look at either of them that night. It was really strange. I couldn’t look at Peggy without feeling guilty as all hell and I couldn’t look at Jerry without the two of us exchanging little messages.

That night we all went to bed fairly early. And I could hear them making love. My room wasn’t that close to theirs but I could still hear them.

It really got to me. It drove me up the wall.

JERRY: Actually, it was the worst kind of cheating. I was making love to my wife to use up some of the hunger I had for Kay, and I was balling Peggy and picturing Kay in my mind. I was fantastically passionate, but the passion wasn’t for what was going on, it was for where I was living in my imagination. So while anybody watching would have thought it was particularly satisfying, it wasn’t. You could call it a form of masturbation, I think.

PEGGY: I don’t read minds, so I couldn’t know whether Jerry was screwing me or Jane Fonda. I don’t know whether it was his attitude that did it or my own problems, but we had a really passionate time, and it must have gone on for half an hour, and I couldn’t come. I wound up faking it.

And he fell asleep, and I crawled inside my mind and decided that I had been unable to make it because I was all strung out with wanting Kay.

So I waited until I was sure he was sleeping soundly, and then I got up and went to the bathroom and douched and showered and put perfume all over my fair white body, and then I went down the hall to Kay’s room.

KAY: I was just starting to fall asleep. Just on the point of dropping off. It had driven me crazy listening to them fucking. Maybe it was only a half hour, but it seemed like hours. I tried to ease the tension by playing with myself. This didn’t work particularly well.

Then the door opened and Peggy was in my room, and I thought Jerry might have said something to her and she wanted to talk, and I thought, Christ, what am I going to say, what am I going to do?

But she got out of her robe and got into bed with me before I could say a word, and she put her arms around me and kissed me and said, “I love you, I never stopped loving you,” and I just let go of everything and we had each other.

It was such a feeling of total relief. I turned my mind off entirely and just let myself enjoy it, and all of the years fell away from me like the albatross from the neck of the ancient mariner. That must have been how he felt. All the emotional garbage of all those years fell off and we were two kids in college just kissing and touching and eating each other, just rolling in each other’s arms and having sweet loving orgasms. God, I don’t think I had ever needed anything so much in my life.

Afterward we lit cigarettes and she looked at me and said something like, “I almost had forgotten how sweet you taste,” or something like that. And I just started to cry, and she held me, and we held onto each other. “I thought this was over years ago,” she said, “but it was never over and it will never be over. We’re a thing.”

I said, “But what are we going to do?”

“All the things we used to do.”

“But if Jerry finds out—”

“He doesn’t have to find anything out,” she said. “And maybe he wouldn’t mind. It’s not as if I were with another man. I think it would be different in his mind.” Of course she had something to go on, because she had told him about us and knew his reaction, but I was not aware of any of this and thought she was just rationalizing. If anything, I thought a husband would be a great deal more upset to find out that his wife was with another woman. That would be a rejection of him as a man. That was the way I saw it. I also felt that Jerry would lose respect for both of us, that he would think we were perverted.

I didn’t know what to do, what to think, how to feel. But I did know that I felt absolutely wonderful for having made love with Peggy, and everything just went all warm and lazy and I fell asleep.

It was the first really good sleep I had in ages.

The next day we had the comedy of errors bit. I was sitting around feeling damned ambivalent and exchanging secret glances with both of them, first her and then him, and ultimately I just couldn’t handle it all and announced I was going for a walk in the woods. And Jerry immediately said he would come with me, which I wanted and didn’t want at the same time, but there was no way to avoid it, so I said all right, and we went walking in the woods.

When he kissed me I froze.

He asked me what was the matter.