One Plus One Plus One
by Jami Attenberg
August 29, 2007
It was nearly ten years ago when I had my first threesome.
Ten years ago, before I met my husband the mathematician, and bought the pickup truck, and rented the cottage on the coast of Oregon, where we live a quiet life, a quiet life of love.
Before the threesome there had been a failed pass made on me in college. Two of my poetry-workshop classmates — the star of the class, Melinda, a tall girl from Colorado who had big thighs and wore tight jeans and a denim jacket and dusty boots and no makeup except for lipgloss, just like a real cowgirl, and Eli, a curly-haired, bespectacled Ultimate Frisbee player who regularly refused to
use punctuation as some sort of political statement — called me into a room during a party and offered me joint after joint. Melinda was sitting on one end of the bed, telling how much she liked my hair while stroking it, and Eli was on the other end rubbing my feet because "they looked like they needed it." I had no idea what was going on, only all of a sudden I felt weird, so I got up abruptly and walked the few blocks home to my apartment thinking, "That was weird. Wasn't that weird? Why was that weird?" and then forgot about it the next day. And I swear to you, it wasn't until like, two years later, maybe I was watching a movie and there was a scene of haphazard seduction, maybe someone was telling me a similar story, I can't recall now, but all of a sudden I realized they were trying to have a threesome with me.
The sunsets are spectacular on the coast, and my husband and I walk, hand in hand, down to the ocean to watch them every night. On the way home, in the early dusk, mosquitoes dive-bomb us like vicious soldiers.
And there was the brief interlude that followed a few years later, primarily between me and one of my best girlfriends from grad school in Chico and, in a tertiary fashion, the scummy pothead she was dating, an act that was all well and good, seeing as it was so naughty and foreign, but one that also convinced me I was straight. Because when I got to the end, I had to ask, where was the penis?
He is writing another textbook. I am writing another chapbook.
And then there was the one I am about to tell you, the one that to this day I summon back when I have run out of current fantasies during masturbation. The one I thought I would have to hide forever. It's the story of what happened on my twenty-sixth birthday.
I was in New York City, where all bad (good) things happen to good (bad) girls. An old friend from college named Tommy had flown me out as a birthday present. He was a wispy blonde Southern man who worked for MTV. I suspected he was trying to figure out if he was gay or not and needed a witness to his behavior, which involved, I soon learned, late nights at dirty little techno speakeasies in the East Village, copious amounts of cocaine and long hugs goodbye with many men who had indeterminate accents (except for the one guy was very much from New Jersey). Gay, I thought in my head. Gay, gay, gay. Still, he had a pixie-haired girlfriend with a loud laugh and a deep voice, and he never asked my opinion in the first place, so I kept my mouth shut and did another line.
This was the first time I had done coke. I had been living in the Chico for a few years and meth was just start to rise up and rear its angry (and then really happy, and then angry again for like twenty-four hours straight) head, and as far as I was concerned, all white powder was the devil's work. But it was my birthday, and I was on vacation. I had on a low-cut black dress, we ate at an Italian restaurant in the East Village where Champagne was waiting upon my arrival along with everyone I knew in New York, and I felt like I was going to be famous at any moment.
Tommy and I sneak in late-night phone calls after my husband goes to sleep early, always early.
After dinner Tommy and I went to a bar on East Fifth Street, off of Avenue A, a dark one with weird knick-knacks in the window, like a ceramic frog and a stack of aging international beer coasters as high as my head. I don't know if it's still there anymore, but I looked it up in a guidebook once. It said that was the place to go if you were interested in meeting sleazy European artists, which might not sound half bad to some people. Not me, though.
At the bar we played pool and went to the bathroom and did more drugs and drank cocktails made with cheap vodka. I put money in the jukebox. Tommy and I tried to finish the worst game of pool ever played. He checked his cellphone frequently for a message from his girlfriend, who was coming when she got off her shift. I leaned against the wall and laughed.
"More," I said, and shook my empty drink. "We need more of everything."
I haven't been to New York in years. My husband won't let me go. He said he'd miss me if I went so far away without him, and he hates flying so he'd never make the trip himself. But I know it's because he thinks I'll get in trouble. He knew me when I was wild, and he helped me change my ways. He approached me as if I was a problem to be solved, and I was, and he solved me.
At the bar I told the bartender it was my birthday. A man sitting next to me insisted on buying me a drink. He was pale and had a shaved head and light, crystal-blue eyes with dark lashes. He was wearing smart-guy glasses, which made me trust him. His friend came back from the bathroom and stood next to us. He was tall and barrel-chested and had wooly hair and a long, Germanic jaw. He smelled like spices and the sea, and he told me he had just gotten off a film shoot down by the waterfront. He did something with lighting. I told them I was visiting, that I was a grad student, a poet, and they both nodded as if that were the coolest thing in the world. Looking back now I wonder if they resisted the urge to snort, as so many men had before when I told them. I'd like to believe that I was the sexiest thing on earth, though.
And I really was at that moment. I had long, brown, curly hair past my shoulders and I was skinny and healthy from biking all over town and from long hikes at Big Chico Creek on the weekends, and my skin was clean and pure from all the fresh air, and I loved that dress I was wearing so goddamn much. I liked the way my breasts rose to the top of it, inviting everyone to look, and how it made me feel different and glamorous. When you feel sexy, you are, you are, you are.
In the winter the storms turn the ocean into swirling madness, and the air is so damp we are wet until spring. We drink tea all day and clutch each other in the mornings with our arms and our mouths.
The guy in the glasses was an environmental lawyer. A lawyer! Maybe we would get married. I swear to God I thought that for a second. He asked if I wanted to go to another bar called Bob. Tommy and his girlfriend joined us, and we hopped in a cab and headed further downtown. There were lots of drag queens at Bob. Glasses and I started making out. It felt really good — hot and slow and salty and extreme. He went for my breasts right away, squeezed them right through my dress, and whispered in my ear, "I love your tits." He tasted like the city. His friend watched us, sort of, from the bar. Tommy was in the corner with his girlfriend, gently guiding her hand away from his ass.
"Do you want to go somewhere else?" Glasses said. I put my hand on his crotch, and his dick was hard. I wrapped my palm around it, to see how big it was. It felt nice. We kissed and held our tongues together. My whole mouth was full with his tongue. "Do you want to come home with me?" he said.
It's so quiet where we live that you can hear the waves through the window late at night, once traffic stops chugging along 101. And the seagulls, cackling and cawing.
"All I have wanted to do is go home with you all night long," I said. The drugs and the coke had made me phenomenally horny, and I could feel how damp my stockings were. I wanted him for my birthday present, and I told him that. He slipped a hand under my little black dress. "Okay, okay, let's get out of here," I said.
Glasses, his friend and I all got in a cab. Glasses gave an address to the cab driver, then we started making out in front of his friend. He rubbed all over me. I was moaning. Then suddenly there was a third hand on me, his friend's hand, tentatively on my knee. Everything felt awesome. I didn't stop him. I kissed him, and his tongue was longer and leaner and he licked my ear. Then, suddenly, I was pushing his hand up my dress too. The cab driver turned down the radio, and we drove like that for a while, the noise of the city beating in through the windows, and the three of us sucking on each other, and touching all over, and all the little sexy noises that resulted from that.
We ended up on a quiet street down near the South Street Seaport. There were no bars, no street traffic, just a gorgeous loft building, behind it the East River wafting lazily. The three of us tumbled out of the cab, into the building and then a well-lit elevator, where we shielded our eyes from the light, from each other, someone's hand quietly pushing up the back of my skirt, until we finally arrived on the sixth floor. Into his vast apartment we went. There was a sunken living room, a long leather couch that stretched against the windows, a staircase to a lofted bed, big windows with a view of the water. Glasses made us all vodka on the rocks and we all sat on the couch, the two men surrounding me. It took a minute before my dress was off. Every part of me was gasping, my mouth, my chest, the heat that was coming out from between my legs. I was full of a kind of sexual steam.
We go bird-watching on the weekends.
I lay down on the couch and they split my body in half, Glasses down between my legs, licking me, and his friend stroking and kissing my breasts, alternating between them, and then biting my nipples. After a few minutes Glasses got up and went to the bathroom, then returned with a box of condoms, which he dangled above me.
"Is this okay?" he said.
I nodded. I had ceased being able to talk. Then he lay on top of me. His friend continued to play with my breasts. With a few strokes Glasses was fucking me. I screamed. The rest of it was kind of blurry, the two of them switching off, there were different positions, there were always two sets of hands on top of me, or in me, fingers in my mouth, tasting myself, and, near the end, one cock in my mouth while one cock was in my pussy. It felt better than anything else, or anything since. It was the most complete I have ever felt sexually. I felt full. There was no way I would ever do it again, but I loved it, I loved the two men at once.
There have been many things about my husband I love. I love that he loves math like I love poetry. I love the way that he sees everything as possible, I love how much he needs me, I love how he never wants me to leave him. I love how he holds me close, how he is my baby, my sweetheart, my love. I love that he forces me to embrace the quiet, because that is the only way to really hear yourself think. To know yourself. But alone, alone, he will never be able to fuck me the way I want. Alone, on his own, he will never be able to make me totally happy.
©2007 Jami Attenberg and Nerve.com