Relationship In Love

Manhattan Menage! Seven Men Pop the Inevitable Question

I’m at dinner with a man. We’re into a second bottle of 1982 Chateau Latour. Maybe it’s our thrid date, maybe our tenth. It doesn’t matter. Because, eventually, it always comes up. The Inevitable.
“Errrr,” he begins.
“Yes?” I ask, leaning forward. He rests his hand on my ghigh. Perhaps he’s going to “pop the question.” It is not likely, but then again, what is?
He begins again. “Have you ever…”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever… wanted to…”
“What?”
“Have you ever wanted to… have sex with another woman?” he asks, triumphant.
I’m still smiling. But there it is, sitting on the table like a puddle of vomit. I already know what’s coming next.
“With me, of course,” he says. “You know, a threesome.” Then comes the kicker: “We could maybe get one of your friends.”
“Why would I want to do that?” I ask. I don’t even bother inquiring why he thinks one of my fiends might be interested.
“Well, I would like it,” he says. “And besides, you might like it, too.”
I don’t think so.

“A Sexual Variant”
New York is a place where people come to fulfill their fantasies. Money. power. A spot on the David Letterman show. And while you’re at it, why not two women? (And why not ask?) Maybe everyone should try it at least once.
“Of all the fantasies, it’s the only one that exceeds expectations,” said a photographer I know. “Mostly, life is a series of mild diappointments. But two women? No matter what happens, you can’t lose.”
That isn’t exactly true, as I discovered later. But the threesome is one fantasy at which New Yorkers seem to excel. As one male friend of mine said, “It’s a sexual variant as opposed to sexually deviant.” Another option in a city of options. Or is there a darker side to threesomes: Are they a symptom of all that’s wrong with New York, a product of that combination of desperation and desire particular to Manhattan?
Either way, everyone has a story. They’ve done it, know someone who did, or saw three people about to do it—like those two “top models” who recently pulled a male model into the men’s room at Tunnel, forced him to consume all his drugs, and then took him home.
A menage a trois involves that trickiest of all relationship numbers: three. No matter how sophisticated you think you are, can you really handle it? Who gets hurt? Are three really better than two?
Lured perhaps by the promise of free drinks, free joints, and free honey-roasted peanuts, seven men joined me on a recent Monday evening in the basement of a SoHo art gallery to talk about threesomes. There we found the photographer and 1980 ladies’ man Peter Beard on his hands and knees. He was “collaging”: painting shapes on some of his black-and-white animal photographs. Some of the photos had rust-colored footprints on them, and I remebered I had heard Peter was using his own blood. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.
Peter is a sort of “wild man,” about whom one hears stories. Like: He was married to 1970s superbabe Cheryl Tiegs (true); that once, in Africa, he was hogtied and nearly fed to some animals (probably not true). He said he would work while we talk. “I’m just doing work all the time,” Peter said. “Just to word off boredom.”
Everyone made cocktails, and then we lit the first joint. Except for Peter, the men asked me to change their names for this article. “Using our real names wouldn’t be good for our client base,” said one.
We launched into the topic of discussion.
“It’s an avalanche right now,” Peter said. “I know some girls, one of whom I’m meeting tonight, who says that over 90% of her girlfriends have propositioned her. This is definitely a new phenomenon.”
Peter dipped his brush in the red paint. The modeling industry, he said, seemed to be grooming women for threesomes. “Agents and bookers are pushing favors from the girls to get them bookings.” Then he added, “All the models are getting stroked in the loo.”
Tad, forty-one, a golden-boy architect, remained skeptical. “I think the numbers are being kept by the government census bureau.” But he went on. “Women physically represent more sensuality and more beauty,” he said. “So it’s easier for a man to fantasize about two women together. Two men together is kind of a dry fantasy.”
Peter looked up from his spot on the floor. “Women can sleep in the same bed, and no one thinks anything about it,” he said.
“We applaud it,” said Simon, forty-eight, the owner of a software company.
“It’s very unlikely any of us would sleep in the same bed with each other. I just wouldn’t do it,” said Jonesie, forty-eight, an East Coast-based record executive. He looked around.
“The reason men don’t do it is because most other men snore,” said Peter. “Plus, it’s not good for the nervous system”
“It brings up all kinds of deep-rooted fears,” said Simon. There was a moment of silence while we looked around the room.
Peter broke the tension. “The underground reality of this is the biological rat studies,” he said. “Density, stress, and the overcrowding of the niche structures. The first phenomenon of over crowded rat is the separation of the sexes. And in this city, with all the lawyers and all the overcrowded niche structures, you have incredible pressure. Pressure fucks up the homosexuals; and homosexuality is nature’s way of cutting down on population. All of these unnatureal things we’re talking about exponentially expand.”
“That sums it all up,” Tad said dryly.
“We’re leading sensory-saturated lives,” Peter said. “High density. Intensity. Millions of appointments. Millions of lawyer appointments. A simple thing is no longer fun. Now you have to have two or three girls, or exotic stippers at Pure Platinum.”
“On the other hand, the reason to have multiple sex partners could just be curiosity,” said Tad. “Without being overly analytical.”
But Peter was on a roll. “How about insincerity?” he demanded. “There’s less sincerity and less honesty.” If you’re really attracted to a girl, you don’t want another girl. But nowadays, there is less sincerity.
“That might be,” Jonesie said cautiously.
“When you meet people in New York, all you get is their bullshit,” said Peter, not noticing that his paintbrushes were drying out. “You get all their stuff they tell you at parties. You get the same damn thing at these dinner parties until you just stop going.”
“You cut down,” Jonesie agreed.
“And you go into the bathroom, and you get a blow job from someone in the fashion industry,” Peter said. There was a brief and, if I’m not mistaken, awed silence. Then more Peter: “It’s not reality. It’s not communicating. It’s not sincere. It’s just a moment in their stress-ridden lives.”
“And I thought I just wanted to get laid,” Tad said.

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 attrative twenty year old. He followed her and watched her get into a cab. He got into his Mercedes. When the cab stoped 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, everyday, 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, Aam, 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 threesome.
“Why did you do it?” we asked.
Sam shrugged. “It’s variety. You get tirecd of being around anyone after a while.”
Sam said there are three basic situations that lead to three somes. 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 twowomen 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 nuber 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, opne 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, who 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 out out.’”
I wanted to know what happended if the two women in 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 live 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 wsex 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 ws 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 tha’t 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 afterwards, me and the crazy girl went into the bedroom—it wsa one of those bedrooms wehre 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 girl. And I wanted the other girl. We were both looking at 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. “Noooo. 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 in. 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 in having sex with the other guy.”
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 yor 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 diagreed. “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 thng 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 down-town 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 ws like 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 validatin your masculinity to another guy.”
“With me and Bill, it was about the threll of the freak show,” Garrick said. “Somethimes 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 interation between them. I don’t know. To me, that constitute latent homosexual yearnings. Do I have those yearnings? I don’t know. Maybe Bill wasn’t my type.”
The younger men got kind of quiet.
Instead, Peter spoke. “I’m not a homophobe—I did happen to be in a situation with my best friend once and another woman. They were sleeping in a queen-sized bed in the same room. And I remember the vibes of sex. And when it was over, his hand was burned. Even though he was my best friend, I saw that he was an extra man on the scene, and it was such a bad vibe. I just remember pushing his burned hand away. It was such a bad vibe.”
We all sat back for a moment. It was getting late. Almost time to go for dinner.
“Aw, I don’t know,” Garrick said. “I’m convinced threesomes are good for your psyche emothionally. It’s such an atypical sexual experience, it’s almost like it doesn’t count. As soon as it’s over, you don’t think about it. If you cheat on your wife or girlfriend, you usually feel guilt afterwards. With this, there’s no way you’re going to have an ongoing relationship, so it’s no threat.”
“Besides,” Garrick continued, “it brings you closer to the guy. Cements the relationship. What else can you do that even comes close? You’re sharing the most intimate experience.”
And what about afterward? The next morning?
“Oh, no problem. I remember, once, we all went to breakfast,” Garrick said. “I remember it, because I paid.”