It was nine o’clock. I offered her twenty dollars to come back to my apartment with me, and she said, “Sure, why not?” At the apartment, we drank a bottle of cheap red wine and quickly found ourselves talking like friends from high school, and never got around to having sex that night. She was bright and funny and warm, and at a time when I hated myself for having failed to save the world, she made me feel that I could at least save her.
Her daughter was at a sister’s place, she said, and was okay till midnight, when the sister, who worked the night shift at the clam cannery, went to work. At eleven-thirty, I invited Carol to move in and share my apartment, take the larger of the two bedrooms for herself and her daughter. I’d carry the rent and cover food and other costs until she got herself cleaned up and found a job. She accepted, and shortly after midnight she and Bettina moved in. Two nights later, Carol and I were lovers. In a week, she had a part-time job as a waitress that after a month became full-time.
And look at her now, I thought, a free and independent woman who’s saving someone else. She’s become what I tried to be and couldn’t.
Carol, Zack, and I sat up late drinking beer, smoking pot, and elaborately talking around the difficult question of who was going to end up in bed with Carol. We played an old Neil Young tape over and over, seventies ballads and hymns that celebrated reckless abandon, which didn’t help change the unstated subject. We wandered back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, feigning interest in how Carol had redecorated the place. The walls and woodwork had all been repainted in new colors like mauve and taupe and lapis. My old room was now Bettina’s. The Che Guevara and John Brown posters had been replaced by New Kids on the Block and Paul McCartney in a band called Wings.
Finally, we three found ourselves standing together at the door to the bedroom Carol shared with Zack. The double bed was unmade, and a harried working mother’s clothes draped from chairs and the dresser.
“Sorry about the mess,” Carol said. “Zack’s such a neatnik and takes care of most of the place, but he refuses to pick up after me in the bedroom. It’s the one thing we fight about.”
Zack crossed in front of us and flopped down in the middle of the bed. “C’mere, you,” he said.
“Who?” Carol asked.
“Both of you.”
“Zack,” I said. “I’m not your type, remember? And you’re not mine.” Carol walked over, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Zack began to stroke her bare arm.
“Yeah, but you’re Carol’s type,” he said. “And she’s yours.”
Carol and I looked at each other. When the object of your past desire is placed in front of you like that, sexual nostalgia can be very powerful. There are so many vague, lingering memories of having once been satisfied and so few specific details that you want to revisit the source.
Zack reached over to the bedside table and lighted a chunky blue candle. I hit the wall switch, and he said, “That’s better. Now, c’mon over here with us.”
I stayed put by the door. “Is a threesome what you’re after?”
“I wouldn’t mind. But if you’re not into that, it’s okay by me. There’s other possibilities.”
“What about you, Carol?”
She shrugged. Zack slowly unzipped the back of her dress, and she looked down and smiled coyly.
“Maybe you’d like to watch me and Carol,” Zack said. “Or maybe you’d like me to watch you and Carol. Like I said, there’s other possibilities. I’ve never seen two women make love before. In real life, I mean.”
“Real life,” I said. “Is this real life?”
“It’s not a movie, man,” he said. “Come on over here. You know you want to.”
I took one step, then two, and then I was standing beside Carol on the bed. Zack slid over to make room. I sat down, my ears buzzing like a teenager’s, and placed one hand over hers. With my other hand, I brushed her hair off her shoulder and touched her throat. She turned to face me, closed her eyes, and kissed me on the lips.
And the rest? Well, you know the rest.
No, that’s not true. You don’t know the rest. You don’t know that Zack and I both made love to Carol. You don’t know that while he fucked her I leaned back against the headboard and watched them and touched myself and for the first time in my life was swallowed whole by sexual pleasure. I left my body behind and merged with theirs and had no thoughts, no awareness of my mind or body. You don’t know that afterwards I felt deep, nearly inexplicable gratitude to Zack and Carol, as if they had gone through a terrible, mind- and body-searing ordeal solely for me, so that I would not have to endure it myself. Though, of course, unlike me, all they had done was take their pleasure.
THE NEXT MORNING, after a breakfast as casual and companionable as if we had been sharing the kitchen for months, Carol drove over to her mother’s apartment in the East End to pick up Bettina, leaving me and Zack for the first time alone in the apartment. I was washing the dishes from breakfast and the night before; he sat at the table smoking a cigarette and reading the sports section of the morning paper. He seemed content. He knew that what happened last night was going to continue for a while, at least until something unforeseen, a factor outside the equation, stopped it. Instead of waiting for Carol and me to betray him in secret and then, after a period of deception, displace him, Zack had right away made me a player in his sexual relations with her. I hadn’t seen that coming. He liked having me watch them make love. It put him in control of the sexual aspect of my relationship with Carol, which was the only part of it that had threatened him.
Zack looked up from the paper and smiled. “So, babe, do you think you’ll go back to Liberia?”
“I have three sons and a husband there.”
“That doesn’t mean you’ll go back, though.”
“No. But I will, as soon as it’s allowed.”
“By whom?”
“The president, Samuel Doe.” I gave him the short version of the events leading up to my departure from Liberia, including the reasons for Charles’s flight and Woodrow’s brief arrest. Mention of Charles brought a wide grin to Zack.
“So my man Charlie is very cool after all,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s true, he skimmed over a million bucks from some fund over there? Him and your husband?”
“Yes.”
“That bastard. I thought he was lying to me. I thought it was all a con.”
“What was?”
“He told me he’s willing to turn a million bucks over to anyone who can spring him from prison and get him out of the country. He’s a very political guy, you know, a guy with large freedom-fighter ideas and big ambitions.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Yeah, well, he is. A genuine comrade. I was telling him about our years in SDS and Weather, which was naturally of great interest to him. And at some point I told him how Weather had sprung Timothy Leary out of a California prison and got him all the way to Algeria, and Charlie goes nuts for it.”
“Goes nuts for what?” I leaned against the sink and faced him. I wasn’t sure where this was leading, but the conversation made me anxious. I was reasonably certain that Charles was smarter than Zack and probably more cynical, too.