E-LOVE IN VAIN

That was exactly Tad's state of mind three years ago, when he experienced the most basic level of troilism—what he called an "E— love gropefest."

He had recently broken up with his girlfriend of five years. He found himself at a party and saw an attractive twenty year old. He followed her and watched her get into a cab. He got into his Mercedes. When the cab stopped at a light, he pulled up. They made a date to meet the following night at a club.

She showed up with a girlfriend named Andie. "Fortunately," said Tad, "Andie turned out to be out of her mind." She'd just gotten off a plane from Italy and was swanning around in a fox fur coat. After consuming E-tabs, the three went back to Tad's loft, drank champagne, smashed the glasses on the floor, groped. The twenty year old fell asleep, and Tad and Andie went at it, with the twenty year old next to them on the bed.

Peter jumped back in. "It's more experiences, every day, therefore you have to do more and constantly faster! And more!" he said. "It's going beyond carrying capacity, pushing our luck, inventing new niches, expanding. .»

"It's like someone walking by with a tray of cookies and you take a couple off the tray," said Garrick, thirty, a guitarist with a downtown band.

Tad started to agree with Peter. "It's the whole idea of more," said Tad. "It's four breasts, not two."

Thankfully, Sam, an investment banker, arrived. Sam, forty-one, was the type of guy who was always saying he wanted to get married but often «forgot» to call back the women he was dating. So he was still single. Sam said he had had threesomes.

"Why did you do it?" we asked.

Sam shrugged. "It's variety. You get tired of being around anyone after a while."

Sam said there are three basic situations that lead to threesomes. One: The guy has been secretly lobbying for a long time to get his girlfriend into bed with another woman. The reason could be that he's bored, or he secretly wants to sleep with her friend.

Two: The girlfriend secretly wants to sleep with another woman, and gets her boyfriend to go along to make it easier for her to deal with it.

Three: Two women are into each other and plot to get the guy into bed.

Sam said he'd had a girlfriend, Libby, for about six months, and he talked himself into believing that she really wanted to have sex with her best friend, Amanda. Of course, the truth, which he now admits, is that he wanted to have sex with Amanda.

Under pressure, Libby finally agreed to engineer the evening. Amanda came over. They had wine. They sat on the couch. Sam

told the two women to take their clothes off. And then? "I was a complete failure," said Sam. While Libby remained on the couch, drinking wine, Sam took Amanda to bed. "I was totally into her. The problem is, you usually end up preferring one woman over the other, and then the other one gets left out," he said. Finally, Libby came over to the bed. "I guess they wanted me to tell them what to do, to take control of the situation. But I was so into Amanda, I couldn't do it," Sam said. Libby never got over it. Two months

later, Sam and Libby broke up. Libby and Amanda didn't talk for a while.

Sam admitted that he knew there could be «consequences» from the threesome, but "you go ahead, anyway, because you're a guy."

Rule number one of threesomes: "Never, ever do it with your girlfriend," said Garrick. "It's always a disaster."

Rule number two: "You can't plan it. Something always goes wrong," said Simon, who said he had been involved in six or seven threesomes. "It has to be spontaneous."

Before we got to rule number three, the buzzer rang. Jim, a twenty-one-year-old magician, and Ian, a twenty-five-year-old television producer, arrived. Jim announced that he had been involved in a threesome the week before. "You get to tell your friends afterwards," he said.

"It was kind of cheesy," he said, "because the three of us had just seen the movie Threesome."

But before he could continue, the buzzer rang again. We all looked at each other. "Who's that?" All of the men who were supposed to be there had already arrived.

Peter looked up from his painting. "It's another woman," he said calmly.

I went upstairs to open the door. It was another woman, all right. We stared at each other in mutual surprise. "What are you doing here?" she asked.

"I was about to ask you the same question," I said. Then we did what women in New York always do, no matter how they really feel: We kissed each other on the cheek.

"Hello, Chloe," I said.

She was wearing a leopard-print jacket and a pink scarf. She is a sort of well-known girl-around-town, one of those women who are gorgeous, but you never know how she will end.

The men watched us walk down the stairs. Jim leaned back in his chair. "Now we might see some action," he said.

Chloe and I looked at each other. "I don't think so," we said.

Chloe surveyed the room. "This looks like an intervention," she said. Someone fixed her a vodka. I told her what we were talking about.

"I think every girl's least favorite thing is a threesome," Chloe said. She said it like she was talking about hair accessories. "Girls like one-on-one," she said. "They like the attention."

She took a sip of vodka: "I've been put in that position so many

fucking times where a man wants a threesome. I was just with this boyfriend. We were with this other couple. They all wanted to play some kind of S&M game. I was put in the bedroom with the other woman's husband, whom I'd known for years. We looked at each other, and I said, 'This is never going to work because we're both submissives. It's a joke. We cancel each other out. "

I wanted to know what happened if the two women in a threesome ignored the man.

"I pray for it," said Simon.

"That's what we all want," said Tad. "It's the real thing. It's like having a hve movie in your bed. You do the work to get the two women together."

Jonesie seemed to be convinced that it worked a little differently. He kept using the word "pro." We weren't sure if he meant an actual prostitute who specialized in threesomes or something else.

"Usually, these things happen because the pro really wants to sleep with the woman," Jonesie said. "She's actually a lesbian, but she'll sleep with a man to get the woman. The pro is going to deal with you as best she can, and keep you going for as long as she can, so the other woman, whom she really wants, doesn't get nervous that she's been aggressively sold out by the guy. The pro will keep you going as long as she can until she finishes you off. Then she devours the other woman."

"I reject that," Simon said. "Jonesie's had a narrow range of experience."

"IMAGINE SAYING NO"

"One of the girls in my threesome; she loved to have sex," Jim said. "She'd had sex with all the guys we know."

"Wait a minute," Chloe interrupted. "How do you know she actually had sex with them?"

"Because Ian had sex with her," Jim said. "Ian had sex with her, and he said she loved to have sex with every guy."

"But how does he know?" Chloe said, indignant. "Maybe she only liked having sex with him. That's what's wrong with you guys."

"Her idea is that she can be like a guy," explained Ian. "Her idea is: Why do women have to be different from men? If a man can have sex with every girl he wants, why can't she have sex with every guy she wants?"

"Look at Simon," Jonesie said. "He wants her name and phone number right now."

Jim continued: "The other girl was the opposite of the first girl. She was kind of virginal. She'd had two boyfriends in her whole life. Anyway, these two girls had moved in together. And the crazy girl changed the life of the virginal girl, because a week later, the virginal girl was ready to sleep with everyone.

"We're all good friends," Jim said. "I had slept with the crazy girl, and the virginal girl was a girl I'd been pursuing for a year. We went to see a movie, and afterwards we got a bottle of wine and went to their apartment. We drank the whole bottle of wine."

"But that's only three and a half glasses," Chloe objected.

"There was a time when you, too, Chloe, could get drunk off of three and a half glasses of wine," Tad said.

"Okay," Jim said. "So we went back to their apartment and drank the teeny, tiny, little bit of wine that we had, and afterward, me and the crazy girl went into the bedroom—it was one of those bedrooms where the bed takes up the whole space so the only place to hang

out is on the bed. So me and the crazy girl started fooling around. She wanted the other

her. She was walking around the apartment, trying to do her own thing. Walking into the bathroom and then the kitchen. Back and forth."

"What did she have on?" Simon asked.

"I don't remember," Jim said. "But we finally grabbed her hand and pulled her into the bedroom."

"And then you raped her," Simon said.

Jim shook his head. "Nooooo. We sat her down on the bed and just started touching her. Rubbing her back. Then we pulled her down onto the bed. The two girls were apart, so I just started putting one girl's hand on the other one's chest. And then the girls got into it. I was still involved, but I was trying to creep away, just to watch. After that, they went around and did it with everyone in New York. They probably did it with twenty guys from Buddha Bar."

Ian also had a story. "One time, I was having sex with a girl and there was another girl in the bed," he said. "At one point, I looked at this other girl and our eyes locked. And for the next five minutes, we were just staring at each other. That was the kicker. That's when it was great. That was intimate."

Peter Beard, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, suddenly spoke up. "Imagine saying no to a threesome," he said. "What an asshole you'd have to be."

"IT'S SPORT"

"But you don't really want to do it with a girl you care about," said Tad.

"The best is when you do it with a girl who's a great friend and a player," said Ian.

"And that's the reason why men want to have a threesome with you," Tad said to Chloe. "You're a great friend."

Chloe glared.

And then, pretty much out of the blue, Ian made an announcement. "I've been in more situations when it's two guys and one girl." He quickly added: "And I haven't participated

There was a moment of stunned silence. I wasn't quite sure that I'd heard correctly.

"It's the easiest way to do it," Ian shrugged. "It's sport. You don't care for that girl; otherwise, you wouldn't let your buddy have sex with her. It's not like she means anything to you."

"And it's a lot cheaper," Sam, the investment banker, piped in.

I thought of a few female friends of mine who had confessed to me the occasional fantasy of being with two men. I decided to tell them it's best to leave it a fantasy.

Chloe was still skeptical. "I've never had two men try to do that," she said. "Besides, men are so fucking competitive with each other, you'd think they wouldn't be able to deal with it."

"I wouldn't want to have sex with a woman after another man had been with her," said Peter.

Tad disagreed. "If it's my best friend, anything goes."

"Totally," Ian said.

"I could care who goes first, or what happens," Tad said.

"It's a conspiracy between the two guys," said Ian. "It's a one-on— one thing with your buddy. You're wondering with your buddy if you're going to be able to pull it off. And when you pull it off you're like—yeah!"

Jim was shaking his head violently. "I disagree."

"Jim, how can you say you disagree?" Ian asked.

"Yeah," Tad said. "You did it once with Ian."

"It's the idea of it that I don't like," Jim said.

Ian pointed at Jim. "But he was pushing me up to the girl," Ian said.

"A BAD VIBE"

Garrick spoke up. He said he had had about ten threesomes— "Hey, I'm thirty-five, a lot of shit has happened to me" — and several were with another guy. "It was always with my best friend, Bill," he said.

Bill was a model, and Garrick and Bill met at a gym downtown when Bill asked Garrick to spot him on the bench press. "Most of the guys who worked out there were gay," said Garrick. "So after that, it was hke we were going out of our way to prove we weren't gay. The three-way was almost a validation of our heterosexuality. You're validating your masculinity to another guy.

"With me and Bill, it was about the thrill of the freak show," Garrick said. "Sometimes both of us had intercourse with the girl at the same time. Once a woman's submitted to that role of being with two guys, she's pretty much open to anything."

Garrick leaned forward in his chair and took a drag of his cigarette. "Bill once did it with another guy," he said. He laughed. "I always kid him about it. There was interaction between them. I don't know. To me, that constitutes latent homosexual yearnings. Do I have those yearnings? I don't know. Maybe Bill wasn't my

t ype»

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 830