Threesome

When I was a college senior, I fell in love with David, a grad student five years older than I. David was a neurotic, hilarious and particularly brilliant one-man-show of an American literature student. I met him in a graduate seminar where he made lengthy theoretical rants about Jefferson significantly more palatable with his caffeinated funny-Jew shtick.

David had a constant foil in his soft-spoken, good-looking best friend and fellow Americanist John. The two were a social and academic package: Dave-and-John, John-and-Dave. John was a part-WASP, part-native American Ivy League graduate; he looked like the kind of guy who always had a woman on his arm. Not like the flame-haired, bespectacled David, whom I pegged as a diamond-in-the-rough boy who'd probably developed his class-clown act to mask his romantic insecurities. I would fix this, I decided in our first class together. I would become his sexual savior.

It was as a college senior that I learned to distrust the diamond-in-the-rough theory of men.

David -- wonky Melville scholar and laugh-out-loud nebbish -- was in fact catnip for girls, and he knew it. He was being pursued by women from every sector of campus: the blond, North Face-encased sophomores from the classes he taught, his masters-student roommate with whom he was having an affair, a gamine history Ph.D. candidate named Elizabeth. And me.

David wasn't interested in settling on just one woman. He entertained all his admirers -- chatting us up, making us laugh, sometimes hooking up with us, but never allowing himself to get caught up in the messy matter of emotional attachment.

I hung on David's every word, spent every available hour in his presence. It's funny, how little pride I had then. I, who would now prefer to chew off my own foot than leave myself vulnerable to a man. My devotion to David was visible with every smile, every over-eager laugh, every Saturday morning I awoke early and hung over to visit him at his work-study shift in the library.

We settled into quite a social routine, we admirers of David. We drank together, went to Jonathan Richman concerts and to Wrigley Field. I introduced David and John to my undergraduate friends; they let me into their inside-joke of a world. Sometimes we'd sit in the student center drinking coffee and smoking all day long. One of us would get up to go to class and return to find the others still sitting there, discussing Dylan, or Springsteen, or "Seinfeld."

David enjoyed my attention. I think he was genuinely taken with me on some level, and flirted enough to keep me circling: a visible appraisal of my body, a hand on my thigh that would make me crazy. But as soon as the touch lingered for a moment too long, he'd find a reason to get up and go away. David prided himself on his own mercurial impulses, and often made a big show of not showing up somewhere, or of leaving in a huff. His ability to walk out on an opportunity to spend time with me always hurt. But I realized it wasn't just about me; David was always walking out on people -- always sending a signal that he didn't care about anyone as much as they cared about him.

When David had an antisocial spell, John and I would often find ourselves partners in rejection -- and I always suspected that he was as stung as I. I confided everything in John. He was a wonderful listener, a kind and smart man, who lived his social and intellectual life entirely in the shadow of his best friend. And he was the perfect ear for my litany of woe; John, after all, must have been in love with David too. As time went on, he began to counsel me in earnest: He'd tell me I was too good for David, that he was a self-absorbed lout who didn't know what he had in me. I had a hard time buying John's line: If David was such a jerk, why did John orbit him as attentively as I did?

Sometimes John and I would bump into each other and go for a drink just the two of us, though we'd still talk mostly about David. He'd stop by my apartment on weekends to visit me and my roommate, Becca. Sometimes, he took us downtown to the dive bars he frequented. John had a girlfriend, though no one ever saw her. I remember him telling me once about how she'd had a craving for the sausage links and hot chocolate breakfasts of her youth, so he'd driven her all the way to a Bob Evans restaurant in Indiana.

I have no idea when John first told me he was in love with me. It didn't matter; I don't think I even really heard it. It was a seagull call completely drowned out by the crashing waves of my obsession with David. "But I'm no good for you," I'd tell him impatiently. "I'm too in love with David." In truth, I wasn't worried about whether I'd be good for John. I didn't consider John. And he knew it. But he'd nod kindly and tell me again that he loved me.

By spring, David and John were taking their orals; I was writing my thesis; we were all reading Faulkner in cafes together. Every sensation seemed heightened; every afternoon sharp with pressure and possibility. I was still aware only of my fast-beating want for David, and not of the other confused beams of desire shooting around me. David was simultaneously more remote and more sexually attentive to me. He was also dating Elizabeth, the gamine historian, and I could tell he was hurting her already. John had broken up with his girlfriend and was increasingly devoted to me. Each night, he talked me off a ledge, convinced me to get back to my thesis reading, bought me a beer, indulged me in some cattiness about Elizabeth.

John gave me his good-luck baseball to help me through the last, backbreaking weeks of my thesis. There was a story behind the ball, something about the game where he'd caught it, or the fact that he'd used it to alleviate stress when he was finishing his undergraduate thesis, or something; I can't remember. But it was a big deal that he gave the ball to me. I remember feeling like I didn't deserve it.

I never kissed John. I don't even remember how we said goodbye after I packed up my things to move to New York. I recall every last moment with David -- none of which were satisfying or even particularly warm. I do remember that at some point I tried to give John his baseball back and he told me to keep it; he said the first few years out of college required a lucky baseball.

By the time I left, David and John weren't really friends anymore. David and I stayed in touch for a couple of years and then had a dramatic (and, it seems, permanent) falling out. He finished his dissertation and got a teaching job on the East Coast. John and I lost touch almost immediately after my move. I understand he dropped out of grad school and that he's now married to Elizabeth, the gamine historian. The way I heard the story -- secondhand -- they first bonded by commiserating over the ways that David had hurt them. My former roommate Becca said she saw John on a Chicago street recently with their son.

There's no part of me that thinks that John and I would have -- or should have -- ended up married. But I think every so often about how my final year in college could have played out, had I bothered to listen to the imprecations of a man who not only liked me, but whom I genuinely liked. I liked John so much -- in a way that was companionable and gentle and probably even sexy, had I only understood sex better -- that it never occurred to me to fall in love with him. He didn't rip me apart or remain elusive; he never once caused me pain or made me feel rejected. And that meant that for me, he barely existed. Love then was the sensation of insatiable desire shooting through my body; it had nothing to do with affection or the possibility of union.

I wonder how much I could have learned about healthy romantic relationships had I let myself fall for John. I wonder whether I could have broken my pattern of pursuing cads earlier, before I spent more years chasing the ambitious, the neurotic and the narcissistic down the sidewalks of New York. I wonder mostly if John and I would have had a laughter-and-sex-filled year, a warm winter and sunny spring together, both blissfully free from giving a shit about David and his ilk.

I haven't heard from John in over seven years. But the baseball he gave me sits on the bookshelf next to my desk. I don't treat it with reverence or anything; I can't remember throwing it around, even in moments of great stress. But on some level, it's one of those possessions -- origins nearly forgotten -- that I'm careful not to let slip through my fingers.

-- Rebecca Traister

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