Sex and the City (9 page)

Money. Power. A spot on the David Letterman show. And while you're at it, why not two women? (And why not ask?) Maybe everyone should try it at least once.

"Of all the fantasies, it's the only one that exceeds expectations,"

said a photographer I know. "Mostly, life is a series of mild disappointments. But two women? No matter what happens, you can't lose."

That isn't exactly true, as I discovered later. But the threesome is one fantasy at which New Yorkers seem to excel. As one male friend of mine said, "It's a sexual variant as opposed to sexually deviant." Another option in a city of options. Or is there a darker side to threesomes: Are they a symptom of all that's wrong with New York, a product of that combination of desperation and desire particular to Manhattan?

Either way, everyone has a story. They've done it, know someone who did, or saw three people about to do it—like those two "top models" who recently pulled a male model into the men's room at Tunnel, forced him to consume all his drugs, and then took him home.

A menage a trois involves that trickiest of all relationship numbers: three. No matter how sophisticated you think you are, can you really handle it? Who gets hurt? Are three really better than two?

Lured perhaps by the promise of free drinks, free joints, and free honey-roasted peanuts, seven men joined me on a recent Monday evening in the basement of a SoHo art gallery to talk about threesomes. There we found the photographer and 1980 ladies' man Peter Beard on his hands and knees. He was

"collaging": painting shapes on some of his black-and-white animal photographs. Some of the photos had rust-colored footprints on them, and I remembered I had heard Peter was using his own blood.

He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.

Peter is a sort of "wild man," about whom one hears stories.

Like: He was married to 1970s superbabe Cheryl Tiegs (true); that once, in Africa, he was hogtied and nearly fed to some animals (probably not true). He said he would work while we talked. "I'm just doing work all the time," Peter said. "Just to ward off boredom."

Everyone made cocktails, and then we lit the first joint. Except for Peter, the men asked me to change their names for this article.

"Using our real names wouldn't be good for our client base," said file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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one.

We launched into the topic of discussion.

"It's an avalanche right now," Peter said. "I know some girls, one of whom I'm meeting tonight, who says that over 90 percent of her girlfriends have propositioned her. This is definitely a new phenomenon."

Peter dipped his brush in the red paint. The modeling industry, he said, seemed to be grooming women for threesomes. "Agents and bookers are pushing favors from the girls to get them bookings." Then he added, "All the models are getting stroked in the loo."

Tad, forty-one, a golden-boy architect, remained skeptical. "I think the numbers are being kept by the government census bureau." But he went on. "Women physically represent more sensuality and more beauty," he said. "So it's easier for a man to fantasize about two women together. Two men together is kind of a dry fantasy."

Peter looked up from his spot on the floor. "Women can sleep in the same bed, and no one thinks anything about it," he said.

"We applaud it," said Simon, forty-eight, the owner of a software company.

"It's very unlikely any of us would sleep in the same bed with each other. I just wouldn't do it," said Jonesie, forty-eight, an East Coast-based record executive. He looked around.

"The reason men don't do it is because most other men snore,"

said Peter. "Plus, it's not good for the nervous system."

"It brings up all kinds of deep-rooted fears," said Simon. There was a moment of silence while we looked around the room.

Peter broke the tension. "The underground reality of this is the biological rat studies," he said. "Density, stress, and the overcrowding of the niche structures. The first phenomenon of overcrowded rats is the separation of the sexes. And in this city, with all the lawyers and all the overcrowded niche structures, you have incredible pressure. Pressure fucks up the hormones; when the hormones are screwed up, there are more homosexuals; and homosexuality is nature's way of cutting down on population. All of these unnatural things we're talking about exponentially expand."

"That sums it all up," Tad said dryly.

"We're leading sensory-saturated lives," Peter said. "High density. Intensity. Millions of appointments. Millions of lawyer appointments. A simple thing is no longer fun. Now you have to have two or three girls, or exotic strippers at Pure Platinum."

"On the other hand, the reason to have multiple sex partners could just be curiosity," said Tad. "Without being overly analytical."

But Peter was on a roll. "How about insincerity?" he demanded.

"There's less sincerity and less honesty. If you're really attracted to a girl, you don't want another girl. But nowadays, there is less sincerity."

"That might be," Jonesie said cautiously.

"When you meet people in New York, all you get is their bullshit," said Peter, not noticing that his paintbrushes were file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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drying out. "You get all their stuff they tell you at parties. You get the same damn thing at these dinner parties until you just stop going."

"You cut down," Jonesie agreed.

"And you go into the bathroom, and you get a blow job from someone in the fashion industry," Peter said. There was a brief and, if I'm not mistaken, awed silence. Then more Peter: "It's not reality.

It's not communicating. It's not sincere. It's just a moment in their stress-ridden lives."

"And I thought I just wanted to get laid," Tad said.

E-LOVE IN VAIN

That was exactly Tad's state of mind three years ago, when he experienced the most basic level of troilism—what he called an "E-love gropefest."

He had recently broken up with his girlfriend of five years. He found himself at a party and saw an attractive twenty year old. He followed her and watched her get into a cab. He got into his Mercedes. When the cab stopped at a light, he pulled up. They made a date to meet the following night at a club.

She showed up with a girlfriend named Andie. "Fortunately,"

said Tad, "Andie turned out to be out of her mind." She'd just gotten off a plane from Italy and was swanning around in a fox fur coat. After consuming E-tabs, the three went back to Tad's loft, drank champagne, smashed the glasses on the floor, groped. The twenty year old fell asleep, and Tad and Andie went at it, with the twenty year old next to them on the bed.

Peter jumped back in. "It's more experiences, every day, therefore you have to do more and constantly faster! And more!" he said. "It's going beyond carrying capacity, pushing our luck, inventing new niches, expanding . . . "

"It's like someone walking by with a tray of cookies and you take a couple off the tray," said Garrick, thirty, a guitarist with a downtown band.

Tad started to agree with Peter. "It's the whole idea of more," said Tad. "It's four breasts, not two."

Thankfully, Sam, an investment banker, arrived. Sam, forty-one, was the type of guy who was always saying he wanted to get married but often "forgot" to call back the women he was dating. So he was still single. Sam said he had had threesomes.

"Why did you do it?" we asked.

Sam shrugged. "It's variety. You get tired of being around anyone after a while."

Sam said there are three basic situations that lead to threesomes.

One: The guy has been secretly lobbying for a long time to get his girlfriend into bed with another woman. The reason could be that he's bored, or he secretly wants to sleep with her friend.

Two: The girlfriend secretly wants to sleep with another woman, and gets her boyfriend to go along to make it easier for her to deal with it.

Three: Two women are into each other and plot to get the guy into bed.

Sam said he'd had a girlfriend, Libby, for about six months, and he talked himself into believing that she really wanted to have sex with her best friend, Amanda. Of course, the truth, which he now admits, is that he wanted to have sex with Amanda.

Under pressure, Libby finally agreed to engineer the evening.

Amanda came over. They had wine. They sat on the couch. Sam file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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told the two women to take their clothes off. And then? "I was a complete failure," said Sam. While Libby remained on the couch, drinking wine, Sam took Amanda to bed. "I was totally into her.

The problem is, you usually end up preferring one woman over the other, and then the other one gets left out," he said. Finally, Libby came over to the bed. "I guess they wanted me to tell them what to do, to take control of the situation. But I was so into Amanda, I couldn't do it," Sam said. Libby never got over it. Two months later, Sam and Libby broke up. Libby and Amanda didn't talk for a while.

Sam admitted that he knew there could be "consequences" from the threesome, but "you go ahead, anyway, because you're a guy."

Rule number one of threesomes: "Never, ever do it with your girlfriend," said Garrick. "It's always a disaster."

Rule number two: "You can't plan it. Something always goes wrong," said Simon, who said he had been involved in six or seven threesomes. "It has to be spontaneous."

Before we got to rule number three, the buzzer rang. Jim, a twenty-one-year-old magician, and Ian, a twenty-five-year-old television producer, arrived. Jim announced that he had been involved in a threesome the week before. "You get to tell your friends afterwards," he said.

"It was kind of cheesy," he said, "because the three of us had just seen the movie
Threesome."

But before he could continue, the buzzer rang again. We all looked at each other. "Who's that?" All of the men who were supposed to be there had already arrived.

Peter looked up from his painting. "It's another woman," he said calmly.

I went upstairs to open the door. It was another woman, all right.

We stared at each other in mutual surprise. "What are you doing here?" she asked.

"I was about to ask you the same question," I said. Then we did what women in New York always do, no matter how they really feel: We kissed each other on the cheek.

"Hello, Chloe," I said.

She was wearing a leopard-print jacket and a pink scarf. She is a sort of well-known girl-around-town, one of those women who are gorgeous, but you never know how she will end.

The men watched us walk down the stairs. Jim leaned back in his chair. "Now we might see some action," he said.

Chloe and I looked at each other. "I don't think so," we said.

Chloe surveyed the room. "This looks like an intervention," she said. Someone fixed her a vodka. I told her what we were talking about.

"I think every girl's least favorite thing is a threesome," Chloe said. She said it like she was talking about hair accessories. "Girls like one-on-one," she said. "They like the attention."

She took a sip of vodka: "I've been put in that position so many file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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fucking times where a man wants a threesome. I was just with this boyfriend. We were with this other couple. They all wanted to play some kind of S&M game. I was put in the bedroom with the other woman's husband, whom I'd known for years. We looked at each other, and I said, 'This is never going to work because we're both submissives. It's a joke. We cancel each other out.'"

I wanted to know what happened if the two women in a threesome ignored the man.

"I pray for it," said Simon.

"That's what we all want," said Tad. "It's the real thing. It's like having a hve movie in your bed. You do the work to get the two women together."

Jonesie seemed to be convinced that it worked a little differently.

He kept using the word "pro." We weren't sure if he meant an actual prostitute who specialized in threesomes or something else.

"Usually, these things happen because the pro really wants to sleep with the woman," Jonesie said. "She's actually a lesbian, but she'll sleep with a man to get the woman. The pro is going to deal with you as best she can, and keep you going for as long as she can, so the other woman, whom she really wants, doesn't get nervous that she's been aggressively sold out by the guy. The pro will keep you going as long as she can until she finishes you off. Then she devours the other woman."

"I reject that," Simon said. "Jonesie's had a narrow range of experience."

"IMAGINE SAYING NO"

"One of the girls in my threesome; she loved to have sex," Jim said.

"She'd had sex with all the guys we know."

"Wait a minute," Chloe interrupted. "How do you know she actually had sex with them?"

"Because Ian had sex with her," Jim said. "Ian had sex with her, and he said she loved to have sex with every guy."