3 is not a Crowd

PEGGY: Then that Christer from Nebraska must be the world’s greatest lay by now, because by the end of the year I knew her she was just about running out of fingers. She must be utter dynamite by now.

KAY: I’m not sure it applies in every case.

PEGGY: I hope not. I can’t imagine her being any good that way.

KAY: The point is that I think our relationship worked the same way. That it served as preparation for other things. Not that it wasn’t satisfying as an end in itself, but you know what I mean.

And I think too that one of the reasons we were able to continue having a steady sexual relationship for over two full years without getting big guilt hang-ups was that instead of finding ourselves cut off from men we found ourselves getting along much better with them.

Ultimately, shortly after the start of our senior years, I started going with a guy in a serious way. And that was the first time I began to feel any real conflict.

PEGGY: She came home one night and seemed far more reserved than I had seen her in a long time. Of course Kay and I were practically an old married couple by now and we didn’t have sex every night, but it had been awhile, and I gave her a kiss, and she went slightly tense in my arms. I asked her what was the matter and she said nothing was, and we made love, and something was wrong and I asked her about it again.

She said, “Well, I think maybe I’m in love with Ken. And all of a sudden I feel a little funny about us.”

I said, “Do you mean you don’t want us to make love any more?”

She said she didn’t know, she wanted to think about it. Then a day later she said maybe we shouldn’t make love any more, and she offered to move out and room elsewhere. I told her not to be ridiculous—

KAY: Well, I thought you might go crazy, seeing my fair white body and not being able to possess it.

PEGGY: —and that I would always be her best friend, in bed or out of it, and that there was no reason for her to move. So she kept on going with the guy, and married him after graduation.

KAY: Peggy was my maid of honor.

PEGGY: Not quite a maid, I’m afraid, and of bloody little honor. She got married and she and Ken moved to — San Francisco?

KAY: Berkeley.

PEGGY: Berkeley. And I was happy for her, and only missed her on alternate Thursdays. Not quite. I would miss her a great deal when things were going poorly for me, which was more often than I would have liked. But all in all I got along without you very well, baby.

KAY: And I without you.

PEGGY: To be honest, I think I was very glad you were on the other side of the continent. And I guess you must have felt about the same.

KAY: Yes.

PEGGY: I was a little afraid that if we were geographically close, if we saw quite a bit of each other, something might happen that we wouldn’t want to happen.

Let me see now. After graduation I went to New York and had a crap job with a social welfare agency, which I kept longer than I should have out of a conviction that I was Doing Good Work to Benefit Mankind. I was very alone. I didn’t know many people and didn’t care awfully for the ones I knew. I had had a particularly tacky affair with a girl at school a month or so after Kay and I wrote finis to our little fling. This girl was a sophomore and very much committed to homosexuality. And a trifle crazy, I think. She was into the dyke scene heavily and was a virgin heterosexually and couldn’t understand how I could go with men as well, she thought I was horribly immoral in that respect. I slept with her three times and didn’t enjoy it at all. I just hated the whole thing. I had had this highly emotional relationship with Kay and felt nothing at all for this poor girl, and without the love part it was really a big nothing. I had trouble breaking it off with her. She had managed to convince herself that she was in love with me, and the more I tried to get loose the deeper in love she got. She was some sort of emotional loser, she could only really love someone who did not love her. Hardly uncommon, but this was the first time I had ever been involved in this kind of scene and I couldn’t get out of it fast enough.

In New York I eventually decided to find out whether or not I wanted homosexual relations, and I went to a gay bar on the West Side and got picked up. Just one time. It wasn’t any good and I told myself I was glad because it meant I had outgrown all of this and I didn’t have to be afraid to meet a guy and marry him, because the fling with Kay was a part of the past and I was beyond all that now.

KAY: I believed that myself. I was sure I could see you and nothing would happen, and that I would never be drawn to another girl.

PEGGY: I had been in New York for about a year when I met Jerry. I had had a couple affairs, nothing very serious, and I had spent more time completely alone than I had ever spent in my life. I was unemployed when we met, and happy about that because I really hated my job toward the end. My mother had died recently and I had an independent income—