3 is not a Crowd

But I took to going into town now and then. I would go in to do the shopping and instead of coming straight home I would hang around and maybe have coffee or something like that, or walk around looking in the windows, and I would meet people that way. Boys, I mean. They would generally be boys I had gone to school with so it wasn’t a matter of picking up total strangers but boys I had known and then lost touch with over the years. Some of them would be married and some not. And I would get offered a ride or asked to go to a movie, and I would go.

You know, I would talk to those boys, and as often as not there would be no parking at all on the first date or two, and one of them, he was married, I guess he’d been married for four or five years, he got his girl pregnant in high school and they had to get married, and I must have seen him a dozen times or more, and he never so much as kissed me. He never even tried to. I would have kissed him, or just about anything, I guess, if he’d wanted, but he just liked to go for long rides with me and talk to me. We would talk about his wife and how they weren’t getting along so good, and how he was a fool to get married so young and be all locked up with a wife and kids. I guess he needed me for someone to talk to about these things.

GORDON: He must have wanted to have sex with you.

JUNE: I suppose he wanted it, I suppose he had sexual feelings for me, but he never even tried to do anything about them. He could have done something about it but he never tried. As a matter of fact he would let things drop from time to time about how if he were free he would really be interested in me, but he never took it any further than that.

But what I was getting at is that it wasn’t just sex all the time, but when I think back on that time it seems that way to me, as though that was all I did and all I thought about. It wasn’t, really. You know how it is? As though — remembering it — the sex part is in color and the rest of it, what I did from day to day, is in black and white. That’s the only way I can think to explain it.

RITA: But you were a virgin.

JUNE: I know.

RITA: That’s what is really strange about it.

JUNE: Yes, it is. I guess even then I was saving myself for Gordon.

RITA: Oh, how in the world can you say that? I mean how could you think of it that way at the time?

JUNE: I didn’t think of it but that is what I was doing.

RITA: You didn’t think this would happen, with the three of us.

JUNE: I may have known it inside, without knowing what I knew. Or I may have wanted it inside.

But all this time I was having sex and not having it. The one important thing was staying a virgin. I would I go with these boys — you have to call them men, they were all ages from twenty-five to thirty-five. And I would do anything but go all the way. Anything but let them put it inside of me. That was the one thing I refused to do under any circumstances, and I never did do it.

GORDON: Didn’t you ever want to?

JUNE: No.

GORDON: You must have gotten excited—

JUNE: It wasn’t that kind of being excited. I would feel in two parts when I was with a boy, part of me acting and part of me sitting across the room watching, sort of not attached to what was happening. I was excited, but not the way I am now. It wasn’t complete.

RITA: You would have orgasms.

JUNE: Once in a while. But it was not the same, it was not complete.

And what I generally did, it wasn’t so much a case of my getting excited. I would get excited in my mind more than my body because of what it was that we did. I mean, they might pet me some, but mostly it was what I would do for them...

I don’t know exactly how to say this...

Well, before this time I really didn’t know much about sex. I simply didn’t know very much, I was ignorant. And one boy finally had to explain to me that it was different for a man, that you couldn’t just expect them to stop, that a man has to have release when he’s excited or it’s physically bad for him. Frustrating. I didn’t know but that this might just be a line—

GORDON: No, it’s the truth. But nine times out of ten a man will say it as much for a line as anything else.

JUNE: Well, I decided it must be true, but at the same time I said that this was something I wasn’t going to do, to go all the way. I made this very clear. I put it right on the line, that I wasn’t going to do this and that was all there was to it, that I wouldn’t do it. The boy I first had this all out with, he was married, so he couldn’t try to convince me by giving me a big thing about loving me and how he would marry me if anything happened. He couldn’t say that because we both knew better and knew that there was no love involved, that we were both of us there for the pleasure of it, and for the company.

GORDON: Did it bother you, that he was married?

JUNE: It never bothered me at all.

GORDON: That’s what you told me before, but it’s just hard to believe.