New England Triad Ch. 10

Chapter 10

Epilog: Stephen, Beth, and Ann tried to rebuild utopia. Could it have worked? And couldn't Stephen have done a better job writing about it? Plus an update.

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Author's note:

This brief, humorous epilog will be most fun for people who have read chapters 1-9 of this bawdy soap-opera. If Chapter 10 is your first acquaintance with New England Triad, I hope you'll find the chapter amusing... but I can't make any promises. I'll give you the same Money-Back Guarantee everyone else gets, though.

Advisory: This chapter has no extended, graphic descriptions of sex. Quite an oversight, huh? What was I thinking?

Thanks: To tennesseered, for his support, shrewd critiques, astute cultural criticism, and good advice on storytelling. To legsfeettoes, for his very good suggestions and his support and encouragement. And to JBEdwards, for demonstrating that a lighthearted, comic approach to sex works better than somber high-seriousness... and that I really needed to lighten up a bit.

Some background to the story: The narrator, Stephen Lancome, is a 39-year-old college English professor, a bicyclist, Ann's husband, and Beth's lover. Stephen and Beth's affair, begun in early July--during a bike ride--now appears to be largely but perhaps not entirely over. Dev is Beth's sweet but uninhibited housemate. She and Stephen are quite attracted to each other. Ann had sex with Justin on two occasions this fall--to say nothing of sex with Beth on two other occasions. It is now late January.

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The blonde waitress knew exactly how many buttons to leave unbuttoned. She was a natural blonde, too, judging by her eyebrows. She brought Harry and me our second beers.

"We should have just ordered a pitcher," Harry observed.

"I like our waitress," I countered. "Beautiful legs."

"My field isn't English, Stephen, but I can detect irony when I hear it."

We both smiled, raised our mugs, and sipped. Harry's field was sociology. He could interpret White working-class sexual display even better than I could. He was 50--a decade my senior--balding a little, just a hint of paunch, graying handsomely. He was my colleague at the university, off and on my mentor, now technically my superior: Acting Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences. He still taught one course a semester just to keep his hand in.

He was a better scholar than me--both of his books had been very well-received--and probably a better teacher. We had grown close while working on committees together, some years back. Our minds worked similarly, and we shared many of the same offbeat cultural tastes: Firesign Theater, Monty Python, Vietnamese food, well-executed porn, films by Pedro Almodovar and by now-up-Shit-Creek Woody Allen. Not to mention unrequited lust for Miriam Evans Cross, Associate Professor of Chemistry. Well, unrequited on my part--I'm not sure about Harry. I wouldn't lay odds against him. That was back before he became Dean, of course.

I had had quite a summer and fall last year, a time of glorious love and sex with multiple partners, all touched off by a lady's flat tire on a bike trail. Trying to make sense of that perplexing period, I did what any English professor would do: I turned it into a short story. But the short story insisted on turning into a long story.

Then I thought maybe I'd publish it. What good is a story that nobody reads? Obviously, the piece wasn't Kenyon Review material; I'll publish it, pseudonymously, on a porn site. After writing and revising several chapters, I sent the drafts off to Harry. I knew he'd get a kick out of them. Probably he'd have some useful feedback for me, too, before I made the final revisions and uploaded the saga. That was the proximate cause of our beer-enhanced conference this gray January afternoon.

"How much of this is actually true?" Harry started off. "Is this fiction or nonfiction?"

"You haven't been keeping up with advanced literary theory, Harry. Apparently there's no difference. But everything I say happened happened. I changed a name or two. Gay City State Park would just take too many words to explain, so I used the place's archaic name, Factory Hollow. Melinda, Beth's Venezuelan housemate, is actually an Indian named Devra. Dev. Before I publish it I need to go back and give Ann and Beth different names too. I won't bother changing Justin Abernathy, Ann's Black lover. He probably won't mind the world knowing what a great catch he is. Assuming his girlfriend back in Massachusetts doesn't browse porn sites on the Web."

"I like the average-sized penis you gave him. There's a switch!"

"I call 'em as Ann sees 'em," I said.

"So it's all true? Even the psychedelic first fuck with Beth?"

"Yes. That ecstatic feeling of communion with the universe actually happened. It was one helluva trip, I can tell you."

"And Ann really was that forgiving and accepting? Instead of divorcing your cheating ass, she stayed with you and shared you with Beth until you came back to her?"

"I never left her. But she did love me that much, yes," I said. "Kind of takes your breath away, doesn't it?"

I decided to send out a probe. "Donna stayed with you regardless of Miriam, right?"

"That was touch and go for awhile.... Wait. You didn't hear that, I didn't say it, and Miriam didn't do it. Right?"

"Right, you lucky bastard."

"Don't confuse luck with... look, let's go back to this story of yours. The style is nicely done, as one would expect, but the piece does have a few problems. For one, I believe it but nobody else will."

"I was afraid of that," I said.

"For two, there's hardly any conflict. You've got all the materials for a lurid potboiler, but nothing actually happens! Nobody gets angry and takes terrible revenge; nobody gets killed; nobody gets divorced, loses his job, gets knocked up, comes down with the clap, or even gets yelled at! Everybody just gets together in every possible combination--except you-plus-Justin--and loves one another and has great sex together."

"Yeah, I can see that's a problem in terms of narrative development."

"Not to mention your story thumbs its nose at just about every convention of erotic fiction! To start with, you've got a Black stud with an ordinary-sized cock. Making the character Ann totally unable to say that having her vagina stretched to the breaking point and her cervix smashed hard at every thrust drives her to orgasms far more intense than a White man like her husband could ever give her."

"Has any woman ever actually said that, to anyone?" I asked.

"Who knows? I'm talking conventions, not abnormal psychology. Speaking of conventions, you have a flagrant adulteress whose sins remain entirely unpunished. Not only is she not burned at the stake at the end, her wronged husband doesn't even divorce the quote cheating bitch unquote."

"We love each other," I said. "You have to learn how to forgive. You're a married man: you know that. Besides, I'm more guilty of infidelity than Ann is. Not that anyone is actually feeling any guilt."

"Let's add that one to the list too. Look, my friend: for his egregious failure to make that Jezebel rue the day she was born, the author of this story--not the male character, not the narrator, but the author himself--is going to be denounced as a pussy-whipped faggot-wimp cuckold whose greatest ambition in life doubtless is to slurp some Real Man's semen out of his wife's overused honeypot. Trust me, you won't enjoy reading the comments."

"For a pussy-whipped faggot-wimp cuckold, I've certainly been getting more than my share of really good sex," I countered. "Just imagine what I could get if I had any balls! And Christ, Harry, a cuckold does not know of his wife's infidelity. Look it up. I was a cuckold only for four days back in September. Since then I have been a wittol. Doesn't anybody read Chaucer any more?"

"No, and they're not going to read your 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation' narrative, either. Look, Stephen, the story has about ten other problems as well. The obligatory scene where the hotwife shaves her pussy bald to please her lover? Are we forgetting a little something?"

"I just stuck to the facts, Harry. Besides, Justin really liked her pubic hair. Something new and different for him--especially in honey-blonde. Apparently you can't get that in Massachusetts."

Harry was starting to get that look on his face we all get--when you realize the student you are trying to explain things to must have slept through the past eight weeks of class.

"All right," he said. "I'll stop with one more. A biggie. Every female character in the story is strong, powerful, highly intelligent, highly literate, sexually adventurous, terrific in bed, unashamed, independent, self-supporting, and in not the slightest need of a strong he-man to protect her. Who wants a heroine like that?"

"They sound great to me--all three of them."

"Of course they do. To me too. It sounds like every woman on the faculty--though I can't vouch for the 'sexually adventurous' and 'terrific in bed' part. Though it wouldn't surprise me. Okay, I can vouch for it in one or two cases. But we're academics, Stephen; we're not normal people! Ann and Beth and Melinda-or-is-it-Devra would have any male on the faculty drooling with lust within ten seconds. Never mind Miriam: you're the lucky bastard! But those ladies would scare the shit out of 75 percent of the men in the country. Stephen, just before she pulls down your pants for the first time, your heroine is quoting Tertullian to you--in Latin!"

"She didn't know it was Tertullian. She thought it was Pascal."

"Are you going to write porn that only college professors can get off to?"

"Somebody else must like strong, intelligent women," I said. "Physicians? Air-traffic controllers? How about politicians? There are a lot of strong, capable women in public office these days."

"Stephen, I did a word search of the files you sent me. The word 'slut' does not appear one single time. Nada. The word 'whore' appears only twice--both times in an abstract, general, hypothetical sense. You have entirely omitted the obligatory scene when the heroine says to the hero, 'Yes, I'm your slut! Make me your slut, your whore! Use my slutty body any way you like! All my holes are yours! Degrade your filthy whore-slut now!'"

"I know. But why would any man find that a turn-on? Ann and Beth offered me all their holes, and Dev two of hers so far, without anybody feeling degraded."

"How about pissing on your girlfriend after the lasagna?"

"That was just role-playing, Harry. You know that."

"Stephen, I implore you: don't quit your day job. Just give me Beth's street address, email, and phone number. And copies of those two nude photos of her and Ann."

I knew he was kidding. "Harry, you're a scholar. Don't be so fucking lazy. I already told Beth's town of residence, occupation, and date of birth. How hard could it be to find out the rest? Feel free to tell her that, if she wants to cheat on Jimmy with someone other than me, you have my highest recommendation."

We both smiled. The waitress returned. We declined a third round.

"You didn't give her a glance that time," Harry observed. Ann's really are that nice?"

"There's not a lie in the story, Harry. You have my permission to go see for yourself."

"Nobody needs your permission any more, Stephen. Remember your agreement with Ann? All those principles and rules you two came up with for making your open marriage work? I need only Ann's permission... and I guess Donna's, unfortunately.... All right, before we head out of here, how about an update? The story ended in, what? late October?

"Okay," I said, "let me think.... By now, Ann and I are in something close to an old-fashioned, sexually exclusive relationship--if you don't probe too deeply. That's just due to accident and coincidence, not any deliberate plan. We've refined our agreement further, and we're both very happy with it. I would describe us as happily married. She always was my main squeeze.

"Justin was something Ann needed and wanted at the time, but it didn't develop into anything really serious. Beth and I are still slowly drifting apart. I think I'm always going to love her, and I hope vice versa. But there is just so much she needs that no married man could give her. It breaks my heart.

"Anyway, Beth and Jimmy are definitely an item now. I don't know how deeply they feel about each other. We'll have to see what develops. Jimmy continues to improve in bed, I am told. Of course he's studying under a master. And by now he's had a taste of what the master is capable of when she really puts her mind to it. He is suitably impressed. I hope Beth doesn't rush into anything she'll come to regret. But as Tracy said to Isaac in Manhattan, you have to have a little faith in people."

"Great scene," Harry said. "I love it too. How about Dev?"

"Dev has a lot on her plate. She did get her biochemistry Ph.D. in December. Ann and I went to her graduation party. There's a story there--remind me to tell you sometime.

"Dev now has an overabundance of options: postdoctoral fellowship offers, teaching opportunities, job opportunities, maybe going on for an APRN.... Advanced Practice Registered Nurse: sort of a junior-varsity MD. Too many options. New Ph.D.s in English don't have that problem."

"Or sociology."

"Right. Dev and I liked each other from the start. We are intimate once in a while. No watersports since that first time, though. Now and then Dev just feels she needs some understanding and affection and a good fucking. Don't we all. I'm trying not to get too deeply involved. Her life is just so unsettled, and she has those old issues, and of course I am still in love with her housemate. But we can sing in the sunshine, as the old song goes. Every now and then, anyway.

Harry quoted a line from the song. "'Just take what they may give you... and give them what you can.'"

"That's us," I said. "It works okay."

"So it's not entirely, but pretty much mostly, just you and Ann now."

"Yes. We had close to four months of nonstop adultery, with lust, love, affection, and both female and male bodily fluids flying about in all directions. Afterwards--not despite all that but as a result of all that--we have a marriage that's stronger and better than it was before, and mutual love that's even deeper, and a better understanding of each other. And an agreement that we think will help keep everything going in the right direction. Go figure.

"As for the future, who knows? None of those extramural relationships has been formally declared Over And Done With, as Beth put it. Including Beth and me, though I'm now giving her some space she very much needs. Nor Dev and me, though I'm trying to maintain some distance there too.

"Ann and Beth still see each other at work from time to time. Who knows if they'll decide to get intimate again? And nobody said, 'Go away and don't come back' to Justin, either. I suspect he'll be fondling those pink nipples again at some future point--sorry, am I getting too graphic?"

"Let's just say I feel I know Ann more intimately than you know Donna."

"That could be remedied," I said. "I haven't actually had a MILF yet."

"Just wait ten years, and you'll have plenty of your own to choose among, apparently."

I put a decent tip into the tray.

"Oh, I forgot to mention," I said. "Beth's new Bianchi is all finished. It is gorgeous. And the old Nishiki's owner told her she can keep that, too. The Nishiki she can take out on the rail trail. How's that for fantasy material for me? A chance reunion, somewhere east of Andover. I should stash some almonds, dried cranberries, and a couple condoms in my rear bag, in case the stars line up just right again.... Or I suppose I could just call her up and invite her."

Harry shook his head. We rose and put on our jackets. A question occurred to him as we zipped.

"Just out of curiosity, what did you write your dissertation on?"

"Literary utopias," I said.

"It figures," he said. "I wrote mine on incarceration. Utopias. And there you were, building one of your own right here in southern New England. Like the Shaker village up in Pittsfield, only instead of zero sex, yours had more sex than anyone would know what to do with. And better sex too, I gather."

"Yes," I said. "But I didn't have to design and build utopia from scratch. In my heart of hearts I do believe that utopia once really existed. In the late 1960s, 1970s. My parents once lived there. The Summer of Love, Woodstock, the Sexual Revolution, the new oral contraceptives--apparently they were quite popular and immediately put to good use! 'Sexual liberation,' 'Make love, not war,' flower power, open marriage. Joy of Sex on the bestseller list for months. Back then, when the Goddess spoke, more people heard her.

"She spoke again, to Beth and to me, in July. That touched off our own Summer of Love, just like 1967. We could rebuild some of that abandoned utopia, Harry: we felt it. We even launched our restoration project with a psychedelic acid trip--no actual acid required this time. What could be more late-'60s than that? How auspicious can you get?

"Eventually Ann joined in too, though none of this was her idea. Joined in even before Justin came along, I mean. Jefferson Airplane's 'Triad' no longer sounded like a wild provocation; it sounded like common sense. As it would have to a lot of its original listeners. To mangle Lincoln Steffens: 'I have seen the past and it works!'"

The door clunked shut behind us. The outside world was quieter. I made an effort to speak less loudly.

"It's odd," I said, "but the important thing about our own triad--our own little utopia--really wasn't the sex. It was the love. For months I knew and felt--still feel--that two women love me--one sincerely, the other very, very deeply. And I love each of them in the same way. It's hard to describe how nourishing that feels. Also how natural it feels. Loving and being loved by two women. If you ever get the chance, don't turn it down."

"Donna will like that," Harry observed.

I replied obliquely. "Probably most people--or their spouses--try to nip extramarital love in the bud, lest it lead to that most horrible bugbear, extramarital sex. Somehow, this is not considered insanity. Go figure. All a couple needs to do is reclassify extramarital sex as Not Necessarily a Problem."

"Donna will like that one too," Harry observed.

Maybe sex was easier to talk about than love, at least for men. I changed the emphasis back.

"There aren't any 'whores' and 'sluts' in utopia, Harry. That's why your word search didn't turn up anything. Literal prostitutes, maybe--why not? And a ton of strong, smart, liberated women who think that less fighting and more loving and more good sex is exactly what the world needs. And when they act accordingly, the men don't lose respect for them and call them nasty names. The men admire them all the more."

The sky was getting grayer overhead and the breeze snappier. I put my hands in my jacket pockets as, silently, we walked the last 30 yards to our cars.

"Stephen, my friend," Harry said at last, "let me make just three requests, huh? About your story."

"Shoot," I said.

Harry looked me in the eye, "One, don't publish the damned thing. Two, if you do publish it, at least change the hero's occupation. Admission applications are down. Nearly sixty percent of students in Arts and Sciences are young women. We do not want their fathers to understand so clearly what our professors are actually like."