Smooch and Then Some
(or, as I affectionately refer to this essay in my head, “The Girl Scout’s Guide to Threesomes.” Also written for a memoir workshop in the fall)
Adrian and I got to know each other in a short story seminar our first semester at Pratt. We spent fifteen weeks writing about our fierce parents, the cities from which we had traveled. At the end of term, the class had a reading at a café called Smooch with dim lighting and couches draped in white cloth, where you could get espresso but not drip coffee. Our professor was drunk and affectionate, insisted on buying us two slices of vegan carrot cake, and we all read in a warm, dark room about family. There wasn’t much of an audience; mostly we were reading to ourselves, about ourselves, which is a good way to celebrate surviving your first season in New York.
Afterward, Adrian (or Age, as she had come to be known) and I went to Alibi for drinks, ran into two other girls from the class. They looked at our glasses of whiskey, and one of them asked the other, accusingly, “Why are we drinking beer?” None of us had much more to say, though we were friendlier with each other than we’d been all semester. “Walk on the Wild Side” was coming out of a jukebox that usually only played hip-hop. We swayed to it and called it dancing, and Adrian whispered something about how much she had loved seeing me with Sam, my boyfriend, who had recently come up for a weekend visit. He was a painter, lion-haired and stumble-worded, as though we had decided early in our relationship that one of us would be the voice and one of us the hands. We left the bar and walked home through piles of oak and gingko leaves that always seemed to disappear the morning after they appeared: And that was fall. She came to my room and we spooned and watched Shirley Temple movies and documentaries about Hunter S. Thompson.
Jules knocked on my door around 2 AM—her group of friends had ostracized her for sleeping with someone-or-other’s boyfriend, she had done a lot of cocaine and was crying. “Can you come with me to the bodega? I need to get beer so I can sleep,” she said. We put our coats back on. I only ever did cocaine twice. Once it was fine, it went fine, though it felt a little bit like crushed and dried anxiety to me. The other time I went home from the bar with the bartender’s girlfriend, who I had half-heartedly tried to ditch. But she had figured out where I was headed, and followed me there. Maybe I told her where I was going, I don’t remember. Some women, it seems, are just perpetually on the lookout for opportunities to betray their boyfriends. She smelled like she didn’t wash a lot but she was pretty and afterward I went back to Dave’s apartment that was soon to become my apartment, too. And talked a lot about feeling inferior when really I meant feeling like I had no identity, and that time I cried a lot.
When Jules left my room I finally sucked my breath in and put my hand on Adrian—lightly, so lightly. She was wearing a grey leotard with a scoop neck and slacks. I was young and so had the stomach for whiskey, but not rejection. Years later, we would both claim to have engineered this night, to have conspired in advance for the other. We wanted to be knights where really we were sweethearts. I wanted to thank her a thousand times for being the simplest love I had yet found—the most obliging, the breathless, the one that wasn’t afraid to understand the body along with the person. The next morning we walked through Prospect Park and read to each other from a book called Dinners and Nightmares, which, I was learning, sums up the two main components of any young life in New York. She had her long hair stuffed inside a newsboy cap and I was learning that I wouldn’t ever be able to be near her again without feeling an admiring crash somewhere in my lungs or stomach or some other organ I couldn’t quite place.
Our arms linked, back at the Pratt campus we were about to part ways when she said, “How do you and Sam feel about threesomes?” the same way she might ask how we felt about polka, or walnuts in brownies. Like it was a natural question, but anyone’s guess, as a sort of errant goodbye. I had truthfully never thought of it before, when I thought of sex, and Sam, I thought how I missed it, and him, back in Baltimore. It wasn’t a time of innovation: I drank what my brother drank, smoked what my classmates smoked, and I made love to my boyfriend instinctively, how I knew how. I hated to be away from him and I hated to be on top. He operated much the same way: He loved me and he could bear to think of me with other women but not other men. We acted as it occurred to us to act.
“I don’t know,” I told Adrian. “He’s pretty vanilla.” As though at eighteen I knew the meaning of the word, my collection of jolted, sweatless lovers lined up in an adolescent tour de force. I would only stop calling Sam vanilla once he had acquired the habit of coming on me and then (tenderly, somehow) collecting it on his fingertips and having me lick it off.
Still we had a bed established, and he had already met and taken to Adrian, and he had red blood. So I called him over a carton of grapefruit juice in a hardwood booth and said, almost apologetically, “I told her I didn’t think it would be your thing.”
I was answered with a pause on the other end of the phone, followed by his voice saying, “Lily. That’s—” and another pause, “that’s my thing.” The voice said: I want to correct your ridiculous error, but I want you to feel no shame, because you are honest and precious and spoke in earnest.
So we got on a bus to Baltimore from the crowded depot in Chinatown. It was the week before the semester ended, around St. Lucia’s day, a Scandinavian holiday that Age and I had already claimed as our own. It has to do with humoring the youngest child in the house, beating out the bad spirits, and waking a house full of family before dawn with fresh rolls. In short, it was exactly the kind of hearth we were interested in creating, as fledgling cooks, fledgling women. We barely had houses that we were already toiling to make homes.
It was made easier because there was a sense of home wherever we went together. Us and our collection of poets, playwrights, darlings, astrologists, botanists, all of us disjointed and therefore all of us at ease. On the bus, we were like excited kids up before dawn for a family trip, talking about breakfast and our brothers and the writers who first made us care. The canon as we saw it. Adrian loved savory oatmeal and Flannery O’Connor and Richard Brautigan. I ate egg-in-a-hole, which I had learned to cook because I thought it was endearing. We both agreed about Salinger. “The last ten pages of Franny and Zooey,” Age said. “You know, when you can’t breathe.” Both of our brothers had been institutionalized on opposite coasts of the country for felonious robbery. Our writers and lives were different but somehow we had come across similar kin.
The first night was spent flipping through a slideshow of Baltimore—one that I knew and had forgotten, that she had never met. All the friends she had heard equated with people we knew in New York, the high school poetry teachers, the Christmas picture books in milk crates at my mother’s. We slept in the massive, iron-framed bed my parents had passed down and passed down (to their studios, to their friends who were drunk and therefore needed a place—indefinitely—to sleep) until it came to rest in my childhood bedroom. I thought my limbs would catch on fire with the effort it took not to touch hers. I don’t know why I felt like it wouldn’t have been okay, but there are many countries in a mattress, and she didn’t reach across to me, either. It felt like something about respecting who we were as children, or what those children would think of us grown.
The following night we spent at Sam’s: The three of us sat on his bed, which sat on the floor, drank Seagram’s whiskey and sank into the rainbow pillowcases. We kept the conversation and eyes soft, trying to endear ourselves to one another. Where we were already endeared, where we needed no introduction.
But Adrian was from a brew town, was unaccustomed to much liquor, and we were all drinking anxiously at the prospect of staying the night together. She later described it as getting “over-zealous,” and even though I can’t remember how she wore too-drunk now, I knew instantly then that it was upon her. Maybe I knew more then about Adrian, or women, or drunkenness, but I think more probably I knew less, and in knowing less, was more sensitive. So Sam and I marched her to vomit, then marched her to bed in a hallway futon, and spent the night with what we’d been missing of each other for three and a half months.
The next morning I realized the bus back to New York was at 1 PM, and we hadn’t, and we were there to…So I went to brush my teeth and in my awkwardness but eagerness, insisted that Sam do the talking. From the upstairs bathroom, through the heat ducts, I heard him say something like, “We wanted to know if you wanted to join us.” When Adrian was waking, wearing the necklace I told her it was dangerous to sleep in, as though it hadn’t all been her idea, and the invitation might shock her. We were all so careful then, thinking warmly but nervously of each other, like one might think of expensive china stored very high up.
And of course she came in—I say “Of course” now, but nothing felt certain then, every move we made felt like a question. By the time we were all naked, we were happier but no more sure-handed, still asking if it was alright to touch, where touching might stop, drop off, veer into some intrusive mistake from which our friendships may never recover. In the end, we realized that what was kosher between any two of us was allowed among us all, that part of what had drawn us to each other to begin with was a similar style of loving. An ability to be giving without drawing away the one hand that always protected our chests. Adrian’s prematurely wrinkled palms, Sam’s fog of hair. My tiny tattoos, revealed one by one over my body, always a source of secret joy, in that no one but a lover could possibly find them as they are placed. A fleshiness or a musculature, each as it happened naturally. Adrian’s face pressed close to mine while Sam made it with her, and none of us were embittered or disillusioned. Our hands worked in time.
Afterward, I excused myself for food while the two of them scoffed and whined in bed. “I want more,” Sam said.
“Me too,” said Adrian. And then, with the scolding air of a teacher, “Lily, you’re a part of this!”
I didn’t deny it, but neither did I deny myself the moment alone—one hunger, I reasoned, is not greater than another. I poured some cereal and sat calmly ripping photographs of women in pretty clothes out of a catalogue that had come to the house for one of Sam’s roommates.
When I came back downstairs, for a moment, they were so engaged with each other that they didn’t notice I had returned. That, I’ve noticed since, is often what it feels like to step into a room containing more than one person who you love. They are always surprised to find you, their hands are always occupied. But the pleasure to see you, once they’ve realized that’s what they’re looking at, never wanes. It comes in through the window, something like morning light, and reminds you to get up or stay. But whatever you decide, no one else will see this, so please look out for each other.
