3 is not a Crowd

WANDA: I also had a climax. I’m certain that I did. I’ve been solemnly told that this was impossible, but I also understand it’s impossible for a bumblebee to fly, according to science. Fortunately bumblebees are not scientifically inclined and they go on flying whether they’re supposed to or not. I had a climax whether I was supposed to or not.

PETER: We were confident that Wanda was going to have a baby. There’s a joke which I can’t quite remember in which a pair of earthlings demonstrate reproduction to some Martians and the Martians are astonished that the baby doesn’t appear for nine months... I wish I remembered the joke — from what I just said you wouldn’t believe there was anything hysterical about it, would you? The point, though, is that we expected the baby to come out almost at once. When hours went by without Wanda’s giving birth, we thought we had done something wrong.

Then over the next few weeks the two of us picked up a great body of information on the subject. We both consulted with various schoolmates and asked no end of questions, and Wanda found an erotic novel that one of our parents had done a poor job of hiding—

WANDA: Not an erotic novel. Pure and simple pornography. One of those mimeographed tracts with every other word misspelled. Sadomasochistic, too. I remember the plot. A waitress finishes work and her boss takes her to a nightclub where there’s a sex performance on stage, and then her boss, who’s been feeling her under the table, hands her over to the woman and two men who have been performing. He tells them that she’s a virgin, and they strip her and torture her and force her to do all manner of things, and finally they gang fuck her, and by the time it’s over she loves it, and her boss takes her home and screws her ass off. The sadism was really very freaky, but we were most interested in the book as a source of information on how to copulate. There were some rather crude drawings in which all the men had immense penises—

PETER: Made one feel inadequate.

WANDA: One of our parents, indeed. Obviously it was our father’s. With that bitch for a wife he must have jerked off over dirty books ten times a day.

PETER: What do you suppose she jerked off over?

WANDA: I don’t know. God knows. Copies of Vogue, I suppose.

PETER: I was thinking Parke-Bernet catalogues.

WANDA: I like that much better. Isn’t that a lovely image? Masturbating over a description of a Sheraton tea caddy. Oh, I love that!

PETER: I’m trying to remember just what we learned during that period. That we couldn’t have babies, for one thing. We learned the right thing for the wrong reason — as we understood it, you couldn’t have babies unless you were married, and we already knew that you couldn’t get married until you were grown up. We also learned — perhaps we had always known this — that you couldn’t marry your sister, that brother and sister couldn’t marry. This disturbed us but I think we more or less tabled the matter, figuring that we would work something out when the time came.

We also learned any number of positions to screw in. The dirty book was particularly instructive in this respect. We learned about oral sex, which had never occurred to us, and about buggery. The book was wildly enthusiastic about buggery. They kept fucking this poor waitress up the ass, and she never did enjoy that part. It was evidently supposed to be excruciatingly painful, and we almost decided to forego the pleasure on the basis of this description.

WANDA: I said why not try it and stop if it hurts, which seemed reasonable enough. And it didn’t hurt a bit.

PETER: If I had been hung like one of those gorillas in the book—

WANDA: Oh, well, that was ridiculous. That’s the trouble with pornography, it’s positively surrealistic. If you had been built like those apes you would have disabled a brood mare, let alone your sister.

PETER: I don’t want to let alone my sister.

WANDA: Jack, we were the sexiest kinkiest little devils imaginable. It was really incredible. We had the sense to know that we weren’t supposed to be doing this, so we didn’t say anything to anyone. And kept it from our parents, which wasn’t difficult because they were hardly ever around. We would do it almost every day and we became quite accomplished. Invented positions of our own and everything. At nine years old, I was a rather artful cocksucker. Few girls can make that statement.

PETER: Few girls can make that statement at any age.

WANDA: If it weren’t for the rest of the world, I don’t think we ever would have had any trouble staying sane. As far as that goes, if we ever did have children—

PETER: No.

WANDA: Just as a hypothesis.

PETER: No. I don’t even care for the hypothesis.

WANDA: If you had children with Grace. Or if we adopted children.

PETER: No.

WANDA: Oh, shut up and let me talk, please. I don’t want children, either; this is purely hypothetical.

PETER: Go ahead.