A curious proposal.

A couple of days ago, Delilah* came round ours for dinner since she hadn’t seen our mutual university friend for a decade. I went out with her to get takeaway, and somehow our conversation got onto the subject of lesbianism. She told me that she and a friend have a lesbian joke going on at work, whereby she bounces her friend on her knee in the staff room. After a little while, male colleagues make excuses and escape elsewhere, presumably to relieve themselves.

“Would you ever do it with a woman?” I asked and Delilah* allowed that she’s keeping an open mind and willing to be swept off her feet by the right person.

I was in a most peculiar mood that evening. Perhaps it’s because I’d been taking an extended ‘sabbatical’ since my last relationship, and the frustration was suddenly catching up with me, but I found myself contemplating Delilah* from a different angle. “Is it wrong to find Delilah* attractive?” I asked Gabriel*, freshly divorced from her, and he didn’t think so, though he accused me of trying to make a move on his ex-wife ‘while the marital bed was still warm’. I wasn’t really; all I did was stroke her arm, and invite her to sit on my knee, but combined with my other behaviour that evening – making numerous remarks laden with innuendo, clawing Gabriel’s* leg and biting a wooden chair due to an overflowing of…something – it led Delilah* to believe that I really was hitting on her. She’s probably still traumatised. As for me, to borrow Isabel Allende’s words, I’m suffocating in the hair shirt of my own skin.

Though I’ve found women attractive since I was seventeen, I’ve never done anything about it because I find attractive women far more intimidating than men. Men are more straightforward, and as someone impervious to subtlety, I find them to be more on my wavelength. I also find it far easier to discuss sexually explicit matters with my male friends than with female ones, since the latter fall roughly into two categories: respectable married women or virgins. Triệu Thị Trinh* is an exception, she may be married, but ‘respectable’ she ain’t; she’s the bluntest, most graphic person I know. The other night, our household was assembled in our living room, and our newest housemate, eyes wide open, was listening to Triệu Thị Trinh* talk very matter-of-factly about how she doesn’t care to wear underwear and she doesn’t like to shave down there, either, before moving onto the topic of sex toys. That’s just Triệu Thị Trinh*; she doesn’t believe in self-sensorship; if her accidental audience doesn’t like what it’s hearing, it can go hang.

Tonight we were in London, having dinner with Hector* and his girlfriend Persephone*, whom I'd never met. I hadn’t seen Hector* for a year, and he emailed me recently to invite me to crash at theirs, saying that Persephone* was curious to meet me. She and I got on very well, sharing mugging stories (we’ve both been mugged by teenagers), visa denial stories (I was ‘removed’ from the United States, while she had to go before the king of Morocco after overstaying her visa), modelling stories (we were both nude models at our respective universities) and Jamaica anecdotes – it seems that Hector* has told her about our wild time in the Caribbean, four years ago.

Hector* popped out for a cigarette, and I received the following text message: “Threesome?” I thought it was a jokey allusion to our incestuous household in Jamaica, when he had something going on with another intern but was showing a considerable interest in me at the same time, which didn’t amount to much, since I was also involved with another intern, as well as feeling guilty about a long-distance relationship with Forrest, and fending off the advances of a randy fifteen year old boy at the same time.

When we left the restaurant, Hector* and Persephone* suggested going for another drink, so I let Gabriel* go home and resigned myself to staggering drunkenly through the underground – the only likely outcome of an encounter with three glasses of wine.

When Hector* went out for another cigarette, Persephone* leaned towards me. “Hector* and I wanted to meet up with you because we’re interested in having a threesome and we’re wondering how you feel about it.”

Gosh. The last time this happened, I was twenty one and it was after some crazy night in London, when I was too late to catch a train back to Cambridge for some reason and ended up crashing at Rio’s, the clothing optional ‘health spa’ at Kentish Town. I slept in a lawn chair, wrapped in towels, and found myself at a nearby café in the morning, being plied with coffee and croissants by a pleasant middle-aged couple, who talked about how nice it’d be to ‘get together sometime’. I accepted the coffee and fled.

Persephone* was refreshingly straightforward. She explained that she’s been wanting to try a threesome for a while, that she’s talked Hector* into it (difficult as that may have been), but that they didn’t really have much in the way of open-minded friends, and apparently ‘open-minded’ was an adjective used when he described me to her. He was also rather flattering in his physical description of me. I confessed that I wasn’t against the idea, but wanted a week to mull it over. Since none of us have ever participated in a threesome, we pondered the practicalities of it all – how much attention to pay to whom, what lines not to cross (i.e. no extreme pain or golden showers)…how it would all work, really. One of my exes told me about a threesome he took part in. It was him and two girls; in his own words, “it was bloody hard work”, trying to please two women at the same time. He gave me the impression that it’s something a man tries once, because it sounds like fun, and never again.

I warned Persephone* that in spite of my self-proclaimed bisexuality, I’ve had less experience with women than my sister (who had to snog another girl onstage during some drama production), which is a bit embarrassing, really. Does this make me a faux-bisexual? Persephone* hasn’t had any experience with women either, hence the curiosity. “I love the female form, especially breasts,” she told me, and I admitted that I like breasts too – one of my favourite words is ‘boobies’; I see them as fun objects and would probably go around groping my female friends if it weren’t for certain social conventions and if they didn’t seek to clobber me for it.

The offer’s on the table. My friends are not an unattractive couple, but I have to be clear about my reasons for either going through with it or not. It would be out of curiosity rather than desire, a clumsy and entertaining experience, perhaps, rather than an intense private one, but then again, I’m all for experimentation. Perhaps I should indeed have sex sometime soon before I forget which bit goes where.