3 is not a Crowd

Then one day Kay and I were in bed. I was all stretched out with my eyes closed and she was kneeling at the foot of the bed eating me. It was utterly divine. I was like completely passive, just enjoying things, eyes shut, mind floating, when I just sensed another presence in the room. I knew someone had come in, and I opened my eyes and saw Jerry in the doorway, He was fully clothed and he was watching us. But he didn’t see that my eyes were open.

JERRY: I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. Not merely erotic but beautiful in an artistic sense. I don’t think there’s anything particularly attractive in the sight of a man and woman fucking. I think it’s a gas, but I don’t think it’s pretty to look at.

KAY: I do. I love to watch you with Peggy.

JERRY: Call it a personal reaction of mine, then. But I think there is something particularly pleasing to the eye about two women together.

PEGGY: I could see that he had an erection, and I wanted him. And the expression on his face, I knew he was really involved in the whole scene, and I thought, well, why not? Why shouldn’t we all be together?

So I said, “Come on, darling, come join the party.”

JERRY: So I did. I got out of my clothes and went over behind Kay and took her from the rear while she went on kissing Peggy. It was — I can’t even describe how it was. Make up your own ecstatic metaphor.

After that, we all went absolutely sex mad. There are a certain number of things that two people can do in bed, and most couples will try them all in the first few months of marriage. With three, the possibilities for variety are almost endless. From a pure standpoint of physical variety, it just makes an enormous difference when you add a third person to the bed. I don’t have to explain this, it must be obvious to you and to anybody else who stops and thinks about it.

PEGGY: I wonder if it is, though. Obvious to everyone. I know I had never really thought in these terms before, myself. And it really is exquisite. The sensation of being fucked and eaten at the same time. There’s really nothing like it. Of course long before, I had entertained that sort of notion in fantasy. Just in ordinary lovemaking you might do both, you know, first one and then the other, and in your mind you might imagine the two things happening at the same time. But when it really does—

JERRY: I remember one time as the relationship was beginning to swing into gear when the three of us were just absolutely flipped out over each other. We didn’t get out of bed for hours on end, and there were times, you know, you reach a point where it becomes just flesh.

PEGGY: Thanks.

JERRY: You know what I mean. And I would find myself sucking a breast or licking a clit and would suddenly realize I didn’t know whose it was.

PEGGY: You knew it wasn’t yours, lover.

JERRY: True enough. I think it was in one of your books that somebody made the observation that he was convinced God meant people to sleep in threes. I’m always a little leery of people who find God’s will a perfect explanation for their own idiosyncrasies, but in a figurative sense I can dig it in this case, because it’s just so much better.

JWW: The relationship of Jerry and Peggy and Kay seems to have gone on without any emotional strain or any discernible guilt for any of the three partners ever since its inception. I suspect the fact that all three are basically unorthodox in their approach to all facets of life, and that they are not subject to either direct or indirect community pressure, has more than a little to do with this.

The question of offspring from this triangular union has never come up, nor will it; early in their marriage, while he and Peggy were still living in New York City, the two decided that they were not temperamentally inclined to raise children and that both the political climate of the world and the very real problem of the population explosion were such that they felt morally more at ease not having any children. Accordingly Jerry submitted at the time to voluntary sterilization.

There was a brief interlude, he said, when he began to regret the operation. It is reversible in a certain number of cases, and he considered finding out if it could be reversed, and as an alternative he and Peggy considered adopting a child. He attributes this uncertainty to a decline in the quality of their marital relationship — “When things go wrong you start thinking it would be better if you had a kid” — and the impulse passed completely and evidently forever when Kay entered their lives. In a sense, just as Kay was seeking in them a family substitute after her second divorce, I suspect she fills the role of a child in their lives.