Three In Love

Excerpts from Three In Love

"The air hinted of autumn while we hurried to the movies. We wanted to see ourselves. The three of us, one man and two women, had been a New York-based menage a trois through the eighties, a decade officially oblivious to our lifestyle.

Now, 1990, wondering if other threesomes were converging on the theatre, we headed to the downtown opening of Philip and Rose Kaufman's Henry and June. Ironically, the title neglected the other woman, Anaïs Nin, on whose diary the film was based. Nin was really the first person of this unholy trinity.

On the ticket line we spoke in undertones about Henry Miller's novels of Bohemian Paris. Ezra Pound, center of a lifelong triad, had called them "dirty books worth reading." Miller, the gangster author, would have loved the publicity storm raised by the porn rating of X initially assigned the movie. We speculated about his shadowy wife June, a Brooklyn moll who doted on Dostoevski. Could Nin have guessed she would become scribe to the most talked about threesome since Jules and Jim and Catherine gamboled on the Left Bank?

We were seated for the intensely impersonal ritual, popcorn and all, that is movie going. Amid a crowd of strangers, we linked moist palms in the darkness.

We were all voyeurs bent toward the poet Hart Crane's "flickering panoramic sleights."

Did we feel Henry, June and Anaïs annoint their successors? When the lights went up, we looked round for additional acolytes. The audience paired out. No doubt some found the movie tame compared to videos watched at home. . .

Since 1981 we three had, in a sense, been married to each other.

Now we were about to embrace a story grander than our own, one that demanded a new name: Triography, the study of threes in love. You won't find it in the Library of Congress catalog of subject headings. Reference works iqnore it, including an Encyclopedia of Sex that claims to cover "all aspects of sexuality." Although Alexandre Dumas père, that musketeer of the boudoir, quipped long ago, "The chains of marriage are so heavy it takes two to bear them, sometimes three," the menage remains a smutty secret, the last taboo. . .

We'd survived being single, married and three. We'd made the scene, passed through Existentialism to the non-existence of the Void. We'd traveled to the East, written and lectured, and more books were on the way.

Yet our lovestyle made us alien.

Before we could convey our intimacies, our deepest feelings, we needed to trace the lineage of three in love. We sought a tradition.

By the time we left the Cafe of the Artists, after a wink to the neophyte menage on our way out, our quest was on."
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THREE IN LOVE
menages a trois from
ancient to modern times
Now available from iUniverse.com

Dedicated to "lovers everywhere, whether alone,
by twos or threes or more."