3 is not a Crowd

PETER: I’m not sure it would have been worse that way. As it was, she left us in a pretty bad way. We had known for a long time that we were doing something wrong, but we had never seen anything wrong with it, and we didn’t know it was considered to be anywhere near as sinful as she led us to believe. Also, we weren’t sure whether or not any of the stuff she l said was true, such as my cock dropping off.

WANDA: It was scary.

PETER: It was. We talked about it, we talked of nothing else, and we finally decided that maybe we had better stop doing this. That sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? After all, you wouldn’t think it would be too great a hardship for children that age to get along without sex. Most of them do, after all.

WANDA: I wonder. I’ll bet a lot more children have sex at that age than anybody realizes.

PETER: It’s tempting to think so. I’m not sure it’s true.

Let’s say, though, that most children don’t. Not at that age. Not on a regular basis. But we had gotten used to it, you see, and it was — I was going to say it was like a drug, which would not be true at all. It was habit forming in quite another way. We were used to it and we loved it, and how could we suddenly stop taking baths together? Or stop wanting each other? Childhood is not the time when self-denial comes easily. It’s not the natural impulse of a child. It takes maturity to enable people to delude themselves into giving up the things they enjoy and doing things they hate. A child is made of simpler stuff. He does what he likes and doesn’t do what he doesn’t like, and what we liked to do was have sex, and until that bitch walked in on us we had been doing just fine.

WANDA: We gave it up for a while. Then we decided maybe it would be all right as long as he didn’t get inside of my vagina, so we stuck to extra-coital things. Oral and anal and manual pleasures. They were great good fun, and we evidently managed to slough off the fact that the maid had found this sort of thing even worse than screwing. You would have thought it would be the other way around, after the way she had acted.

PETER: She yelled at Wanda, “How can you put a filthy thing like that into your mouth?” Filthy? After the way Wanda washed it?

WANDA: After, I don’t know, a few months of this, one day Peter said, “You know, I really would like to fuck you, and we haven’t done it in so long.” So we did it, and from then on we resumed doing it regularly.

PETER: It’s amazing we got away with it as long as we did. After the maid discovered us, that is. We had almost three years after that. It seems incredible now that we managed for so long.

WANDA: We were very careful. And we were extremely bright children, don’t forget. And good at keeping secrets. We never did anything with any other children. Never even considered it. Never talked about anything with them. This was a completely private thing of ours and we had no intention of sharing it with anyone. Otherwise I’m sure we would have been discovered much earlier, but this way it stayed a secret.

PETER: Until she found out, that bitch.

WANDA: Mother.

PETER: That bitch.

GRACE: Was she really such a bitch or is it just the way she was with you two?

PETER: No, she really was.

WANDA: I don’t know how she found out. Whether she figured it out by herself or whether one of the servants found out and told her. But from then on nothing was ever the same.

PETER: I would prefer it if we talked about the next seven or eight years as little as possible. It was a horrible time, and in a great many ways we’re still in the process of recovering from it.

They sent us to psychiatrists, and everybody asked us questions and talked to us and showed us ink blots and otherwise conspired to drive us insane. And it’s not particularly hard to drive a person insane. I’m sure if you take any normal healthy individual and send him to a funny farm and keep him there for a few months, you’ll have a lunatic on your hands. We’ve been in a variety of those institutions, from the ones that are like country clubs except that it’s hard to get out, to others that are more like prisons. And they’re all basically the same.

The result of this, of course, is that we did become crazy. They kept us apart and filled us full of guilt and institutionalized us and shunted us to first one doctor and then another, and we both flipped out in different ways. They weren’t complete breakdowns, but some of them were pretty good ones. Wanda tried to kill herself a couple of times. She still has scars on her wrists.

WANDA: I would love not to talk about that.

PETER: Fair enough. I want to convey as much as I can of that period without going into any more detail than I have to. I think the worst of it was that they kept us apart. Each of us was literally all the other had. Not just sexually, but in every way. Wanda was my other self. We had no secrets from each other.

WANDA: It was inconceivable for us to have secrets from each other.