Fever Dreaming
1.
You go out on the Girls' Nights to not be with men. Because sometimes you need those dim bluish lights and other people's cigarette smoke and the complicated overpriced mixed drinks that you will look at but not touch, because no, you are being good, so good. Once Susan found out, she turned into the in loco Carteris sobriety police, anyway. All good recovering alcoholics go to heaven. You're ready for your fucking halo.
They've repossessed it. You lost your claim to angel wings when it stopped being you and Susan and Jing-Mei crashing at whosever apartment was closest and started being you and Susan stuffing Jing-Mei in a cab so you and Susan can curl up together on her big bed. It's not that you don't like Jing-Mei, just that it's different with her than it is with the other two of you. Jing-Mei goes out on a Saturday night to get trashed and have fun. You and Susan go out together to see what the other one is wearing and to imagine her out of it.
And at first it is just friendship, just talking. You make sense to her in a way that you've despaired of ever making sense to anybody. Lying next to her on that bed at 2 AM watching M*A*S*H on cable, you realize you both used to park yourselves in front of that show as kids. That was how you both escaped. The second TV generation in avoidance mode. Both of you remember waking up at four in the morning on school days to mop the kitchen because no one else would take care of the cat shit or thrown food or vomit. You both read The Catcher in the Rye in ninth grade and hated it because Holden Caulfield didn't know what it meant to have something to complain about. And to hold it in, bottle it up like you could sell it, because what would change if you said anything? You are what happens when that kind of kid grows up. You are both such good girls. Resilient children.
When she kisses you, she is drunk and you are sober. Sobriety seems like a character trait you lack; even when you are serious, it is with fire and intensity and irony. It is a state you have to fight hard to keep yourself in. She tastes like blue curacao and Captain Morgan's, and you know you taste mostly like Kamel Reds, because the way you keep from noticing that you're drinking club sodas with a twist of lime is by chain smoking. If you were a sober person, you would say something about having decided not to sleep with any more women. You might mention something about your boyfriend. But you're not sober. You just haven't had a drink tonight.
You start going out without telling Jing-Mei, but that seems to be missing the point, so you start inviting Jing-Mei again but having other nights when you stay at Susan's place watching teen dramas on the WB, eating takeout and kissing. You kiss her because there seems to be no other way to be that close to her, and because she is there wanting to kiss you. She has a way of cradling your face in her hands that makes you feel like she could hold you up if your bones suddenly melted away.
And then there is one night with a Law & Order spinoff and deep-dish pizza. She is making some joke about those "ripped from the headlines" promos. You kiss her, which by now is almost expected, almost routine. Her breasts brush yours through four layers of cloth. As long as you are just kissing, you can play lip service to "just friends."
You unbutton the fly of her jeans. She's sitting down, and it's hard to get them past her hips. Her spine tightens, and then she yields to you: she might have been hoping for this. You graze her clit with your thumb. "Abby," she says, and she lies down on the bed. Her shirt rides up to the edge of her bra, and you lay your head on her stomach while you push your fingers into her vagina.
You have to tell Carter. If he is going to have to share you, he should know. But you procrastinate, telling yourself that there is no good way of telling him, that you can't break his heart like that, and in the meantime you make love to him and you make love to her and you do it desperately, knowing that soon you will lose one or the other or both. And where will you be then? Abby alone again.
You go to him. You sit him down at Doc Magoo's, because a diner across the street from a hospital is designed for the bearing of bad news. "Carter-- I-- I don't know how to-- there's this--" You might as well be playing charades. Category: irreconcileable relationship problem. Four words.
"Are you drinking again?" He is not accusing you.
"Seven weeks sober as of yesterday," you say. "It's... you know... Susan and I are friends, right?"
"Of course," he says with a laugh.
"There's-- there's an attraction," you say.
His face drains to white. "Are-- are you cheating on me with Susan?"
"No, I mean... I haven't slept with her or anything." It all sounds true while you're saying it.
"But you've thought about it."
"I kissed her."
He sighs. "What the hell do you want me to do about this, Abby?"
"I don't know," you say. "I don't know what I want me to do about this. but I don't-- I don't want to lose you over this."
"Stop seeing her," he says, like it is a novel and ingenious suggestion.
"That would be simple, neat and wrong," you say, hoping he actually read that book of Mencken essays that you lent him and now he can't find. "I mean-- I don't think I could stand losing you, but I don't think I could stand losing her, either, and I-- Maybe I should have come up with a solution before I came to you, but..."
"Maybe you should let me know when you've got one," he snarls. He slaps a few dollar bills down on the table for his coffee and bagel and leaves quietly, like he's not angry. You miss him already.
2.
Kerry Weaver knows. This strikes you as funny because she was always the last to find out anything. Gossip has a way of taking the long way around her. But she knows nonetheless: stops you in the Drug Lockup of Love and asks if there's something weird going on with you and Carter and Abby. Maybe it's the subject matter that made her aware. You're just a tourist in Lesbian Land, but she's put down roots there. Or maybe everyone else is too polite to look any of the three of you in the eye and ask what in the world has been happening lately, first with the secret smiles and now with all of you avoiding each other. They'd rather speculate on things kinkier than they'd ever do than strap on some balls and narrow it down to the truth.
Kerry Weaver is missing the part of her brain that generates tact and subtlety, and right now, you can't help but admire her for that. You stutter something about not being sure what she means, and something else about not wanting to say anything that would hurt anybody, and she stands there with her arms crossed like she's waiting for you to buy a vowel. "I'd like to talk about it," you say, and you would, if not necessarily with Kerry. "But I can't."
"Whatever it is," she says, "it's starting to... affect the way the three of you work together. And I think... you can understand why that's... a problem for the rest of us."
"You're absolutely right," you say. "This has gone on way too long already, and I'll-- I'll take care of it."
She offers you the closest thing to a comforting smile you have ever seen her give to a non-patient. "Good," she says. "And if you ever decide you can talk about it..."
"I'll let you know," you say. You have decided once and for all that you can't really dislike her. You're even willing to leave room for learning to like her. And you wish you could have this clarity of emotion about the two people for whom it is most important.
As if you've been answered just for wanting it, things start to sort themselves out as you finish your shift, like a damaged heart catching a defibrillator's artificial inspiration and easing into its own rhythm. Or less fancifully, because you are forced to think about you and Abby and Carter and Abby (and keep on circling around and around and around) your mind begins to isolate some sensible ideas. You put on your coat and hat, knot your scarf, and believe that you can resolve this.
You get home. The place smells stale. You throw out some old pizza and a few takeout cartons from the back of the fridge and hurl the full trash bag down the garbage chute in the hall. Ocean Breeze Lysol should take care of the rest, but you haul the vacuum out of the closet and give it a pass over the living room carpet just to make sure. You sink into the couch to flip channels until you find a reality show or something on TV Land that makes you feel, just for a second, like you're thirteen years old. There's no more overdue-pizza stench, but you can't get rid of the smell of betrayal.
You are going to call Abby and beg her to come over, but that will only make things worse. Instead, you dial Carter's number. He is the problem; he ought to be the solution. It takes some cajoling to get him to come over for a beer, but it's a promising "yes" when he does say it, like it has dawned on him that this might be a way out. You get a couple of hoarded bottles of Goose Island Winter Ale out of your sparse pantry and put them in the freezer so they'll be cold by the time he gets to your apartment. Then, considering how far this could go, you take a few condoms from the box in the drawer in the bedroom. You have to dig to the back: they've been superseded by KY and massage oil and the Hello Kitty vibrator that Abby thought it would be funny to buy you for Christmas. It's jarring to realize that you've been screwing around with Abby long enough to have a two-month-old Christmas present in your drawer. You cast around the living room for a place to put your handful of condoms until you start to worry that Carter will arrive at your door and catch you overprepared. You hide them under a pile of magazines on the coffee table and turn the TV on defensively. There's a Dragnet marathon on TV Land.
He buzzes from the ground floor and you let him up. Your building has, to put it gently, an extremely deliberate elevator. It takes him so long to get to your apartment that you start entertaining paranoid thoughts. The elevator has stopped between floors, leaving him trapped. That creepy woman in 4-B has accosted him and is holding him hostage in her powder room. He's been stabbed by a crazy transient in the hallway. Which apparently has already happened to him once, albeit not in your hallway.
He knocks on your door. Thank God. "Do you realize there are two Lewises in your building now?" he says.
"There were three in my graduating class in high school," you say. "And a Susan Loomis, who seemed to sit behind me in every class."
"It's the kind of thing that makes you wish you were named Abby Wyczenski, isn't it?"
You wish he wouldn't say her name, not just yet. "I guess," you say. You turn sideways, tacitly inviting him in. He dives for the sweet spot on the couch, the one that all couches have; yours is on the right, hugging the armrest. You've let yourself forget how well he knows your apartment. Well enough to forget which one must be the other Lewis, you remind yourself.
You take the beers from the freezer. They're not exactly chilled to perfection, but they'll do. You pop both bottles' caps off under the sink and hand one of them to Carter. "That's a good idea," he says.
"What?"
"Putting them in the freezer."
"It's just what you do," you say, knowing that isn't really true for a guy like him. A lot of the truths of your universe don't apply to him at all.
"I guess the butler used to do that for me," he says. You don't laugh, just in case he isn't kidding.
"Weaver says I have until next week to resolve the whole you and me and Abby disaster," you exaggerate nonchalantly, still standing in the kitchen, staring at your full bottle of beer like it might tell your fortune.
"So Weaver steps in where common sense fails?" he says. "And how does she know about the whole you and me and Abby disaster, anyway?"
"I don't want to lose all my friends over this, and I blame gaydar. Respectively."
"Listen, I was faithful. She cheated on me with you. By no stretch of the imagination am I the bad guy here."
"But the fact of the matter is, she's not going to leave me for you, and she's not going to leave you for me," you say.
"So I'm told."
"So it's... neither or both." You are incredibly bold for a sober woman, and that warrants a deep swig of your beer.
He looks at you. And he looks at you. He needs another hint, but if he isn't smart enough to run with what you've handed him, you haven't got time for this. "So your brilliant plan is to keep on doing what we've been doing?" he says.
"Not exactly," you say, sitting down next to him. He's looking at you blankly again. "Carter, you and I-- I mean, we like each other, we're attracted to each other--"
"That failed miserably, Susan."
"But don't you think-- if it meant keeping Abby? That we could make it work."
You can practically hear the gears of his brain grinding into motion. "Are you saying-- all three of us--" He takes an emphatic drink. "You've got to be kidding."
"Why should I be?" You put your mostly-full beer down on the coffee table, because you need both hands to yank him towards you and kiss him more forcefully than you ever did when you were his girlfriend. And if you weren't sure before, you are sure now: you are going to fuck him but hard. You are going to explain to him with your body why it didn't work the first time, and why it is going to work now.
You straddle him and unzip his fly. He isn't hard enough, but he's getting there. He pulls you in so your breasts are smashed against his chest and reaches under your shirt to unhook your bra. He smells like hospital. You realize that he'd just come home from work when you'd called him-- as you should have known, because he always works late. Tireless, selfless, like he's been sentenced a lifetime of hard labor to assuage his liberal guilt. You don't really mind; the sour stink of unwashed guy has always turned you on. It might be what's been keeping you going back to men after all these years.
"Your clothes smell like work," you say. He tries to get up to take them off, but you pin him down. The most you allow him to do is wriggle out of his shirt sleeves while you yank off everything else. In the past year or so, his face has been making a graceful transition from cute to interesting-looking, and now you see that his body has, too: he's still got nice lines, but he's getting a hairy back. It's kind of sweet.
You slide off your own pants and reach under the magazines for a condom. You put it on him and take him in you and try to feel something when he fucks you. He jerks in release and pulls out, looking concerned. He strokes your thighs and says, "I'm sorry, but with a condom I've got to--"
"I know," you say. "It's no big deal."
"Don't ever say that," he says, thumbing your clit. "Of course it's a big deal." You close your eyes and grind against his hand. He lays you down on the couch. His tongue is cautious and ticklish when he first goes down on you, but after a few minutes, he's got you mapped out. You should have known he'd know about things like patience, precision, technique. And now he knows that when someone does it right, you're a screamer.
You want to tell him exactly what he's done. How you lost your virginity when you were fifteen and sampled half the male student body of Maine West Township High School after that, thinking that if you had enough sex, you'd start to like it. And four years later on the floor of Stephanie Bianchini's dorm room with a hand mirror and her hands, setting up your lifelong pattern of women for satisfaction and men for you've never been sure what. You want to tell him that he's solved the puzzle, but instead you lie on your couch holding him, letting him kiss your neck.
"This could work out," you say softly.
"I hope so," he says.
3.
"Where are we going?" Abby asks. She's in the passenger seat of your Jeep, flipping radio stations because she claims that if you make her listen to the new Sum 41 one more time, she is going to have to kill you.
"I told you, it's a surprise." She says she doesn't like surprises, but you know she likes being curious and hyperaware. You've got that little-brother mean streak, and you enjoy watching her squirm.
"I can't believe you took me back," she says. "I always kill things. I thought I'd killed this one good and dead."
"I had a talk with Susan," you say.
"You went to Susan? You weren't supposed to go to Susan."
"We've decided we're willing to share, on the grounds that--"
"What do you mean, you're willing to--"
"Let me finish," you say. "We're willing to try... the three of us."
"What the-- Jesus Christ, Carter. Let me out of the car. Let me out of the fucking car."
You pull the Jeep into a Walgreens parking lot and lock the doors. It's too cold out to cut the engine, so you leave the heat and the radio beer commercial blasting out pollution. "You're in love with her, right?" you say. Abby nods. "And you're-- you're in love with me." She nods again. "Then it's selfish to say that this isn't what you want."
"And you and Susan came to this brilliant conclusion together?"
"It was her idea, actually." You turn your CD back on and shift the car into drive. You kind of wish that she would kill you. It would quell your terror, at least. "I was going to bring you to her place," you say, "but I can just take you home, if that's what you want."
"Let's go to Susan's," she says. "We can get it over with."
You squeeze your Jeep into a parallel spot just shy of a loading zone and lead your recalcitrant girlfriend into Susan's building. "I know the way," she says, and there is something in the edge of her voice that tells you for certain that she was lying when she told you she's never slept with Susan. That comforts you. It will make things easier.
Susan answers the door barefoot, in a tight black t-shirt and a long gray flannel skirt. You can tell she's not planning to wear them for long. She's sexier now that she isn't trying so hard to make you like her. You've had the taste of her pussy on your lips and the ring of her moans in your ears for three days now, and you want to refresh them so they'll never fade.
"I defrosted some steaks," Susan says, "but I didn't think dinner would be what you wanted to do first."
"We talked in the car," you whisper to Susan. "I think she's kind of torn between pissed off and turned on." Abby, who is hanging up her coat sullenly, narrows her eyes at the two of you.
Susan slides a gentle arm around Abby's waist. She looks like she's about to tell Abby that this won't hurt a bit. She brushes Abby's lips with her own. Abby closes her eyes-- half, it seems, in resignation-- and returns the kiss. You watch Abby's posture soften gradually. She is releasing all of that defiance into Susan's arms.
This is supposed to be the ultimate wet dream. Guys make up letters to Penthouse about the two sexy women who invite them to join in. But this is not two women in the abstract; it is Abby and Susan, and you are here solely because they want you, specifically you, to be here.
You flip Abby's hair over her shoulder and begin kissing the back of her neck. You find yourself holding Susan to keep the three of you close together. Susan has her hands on your waist, and it's like Abby is clutched in between you by kisses and static electricity. Susan leans past Abby's face to kiss you, as if signaling that it's time for you three to tumble into her bedroom.
You and Susan practically tear Abby out of her clothes, kissing and licking and stroking her and each other along the way. While you're crawling out of your own clothes, Abby gets Susan flat on her back and starts nipping at the insides of her thighs. By the time you're down to your last sock, Abby is finger-fucking Susan, and you're not sure where you fit in. You've got Abby's back staring at you. You sink your teeth into her shoulder and tease her nipples with your fingers. Susan's laid out some condoms on the nightstand. Abby started taking Depo shots about a week after you two got together, and you've been a little careless since then. But now, with the introduction of a third person, it seems right to be cautious. You slip on a condom and ease into Abby from behind. She yelps, but then she moans. You've got one hand on Susan's calf and the other wrapped around Abby's ribcage. When you come, it is like a cascade: first Susan, then Abby, then you. You're not used to being last, but it seems fair, somehow.
Abby collapses, her head resting between Susan's breasts. "All right," she says. "You win. Both of you."
You and Abby quietly help Susan get dinner on the table, all haphazardly half-dressed. None of you is ready to say anything yet. After you clean up, Susan finds some bad cable movie on her bedroom TV, and Abby rubs your back until you fall asleep. You wake up in the middle of the night with a full bladder and a woman on either side of you.
You've got work the next day, a seven-to-seven shift right in the middle of flu season, and when you're not so busy kicking people out without antibiotics that you can't concentrate on anything else, you worry about whether you will ever have another night like the last one. You're the one who has tried everything, and it's easy for you to get comfortable. You fear that one of them will bolt away as the magic fades into afternoon.
At 5:30 in the evening, Abby pages you. When you finish with your patient and call her back, she tells you to meet both of them at Susan's when your shift is over. Susan answers the door topless and has you undressed before you reach the bedroom. Abby is sitting cross-legged on the bed, naked. Susan parks you with your back against the headboard and commands you to stay put. They've probably been planning this all day, whatever "this" is.
Susan leaves her jeans and panties behind in a puddle on the floor. Abby presses Susan down onto the bed. She teases Susan's breasts with her tongue. Susan is impatient, pleading with her hands. She gasps when Abby goes down on her, and she comes as loud for Abby as she did for you. Watching, you feel almost as much a participant as if it were your tongue. Susan's skin is bright with arousal, her lips swollen. You are captivated by the curve of her neck.
You are hard, but you barely notice your erection until Susan is on top of you, filling your mouth with kisses. She parts your legs with one hand and guides your head with the other so that when you arch your back sharply, you don't bang your skull against the headboard. She lowers her mouth over your cock. You love this more than penetration, to be honest: the intimacy of her lips, the skill of her tongue. Susan gives head as ferociously as she takes it. You come with your nails leaving marks in the back of Susan's neck and Abby's eyes on you like spotlights.
Susan stretches; she rolls off of you and the hell out of the way. Abby is lying like an odalisque, her feet pointed towards you. You don't have to ask for instructions. You kiss her toes, her ankles, her knees. Abby has heavy calves, and you know that she wishes they were thinner; to you, they seem strong and lived-in. You could spend a day or two touching them, but she'd probably kick your teeth out. Instead, you knead her ass with your hands, but she doesn't need it, because after bringing forth one orgasm and witnessing another, she's got sticky circles on the insides of her thighs. Her rough, salty smell fills your lungs. You flutter too lightly across her clit at first, to make her writhe and giggle your name, and then you get to work, long and hard and fast, drawing rhythmic "oh"s that accelerate as she gets closer, and then one low, languid moan like she's shedding her skin.
You rest your cheek on Abby's stomach. Susan twines her arms around both of you and kisses the nape of your neck. After a few slow breaths, she shatters the peaceful mood by saying something sarcastic about not wanting to go first next time.
"Maybe next time, you just won't get a turn," Abby says, and they pull you into their wrestling match, laughing and kissing and rolling all over the bed like a snowball full of cartoon characters.
You've got another shift the next day. You and Weaver cross paths in the lounge; she looks at you sternly. "Resolved," you say.
"Oh, really?"
"Completely." You form a triangle with your thumbs and index fingers. She smiles and looks away like that was a lot more information than she needed.
4.
Good things and bad things come in threes, and for you, that's everything: three for dinner; three tickets at the movies (you two go ahead and sit down while I get the popcorn); somebody's going to have to sit in the back seat. There were three in the bed, and the little one said, "Come on, one more time before we go to sleep?" You don't know why it works, but you are beyond asking. You've gotten used to waltz time, and it's become the music you most want to dance to.
You wind up in Susan's apartment most of the time because she's the only one with a big enough bed for three people to tangle up comfortably. In your bed, it's the proverbial can of sardines; at least in Susan's, you're more like a box of assorted rubber bands or those Barrel O' Monkeys games everyone had as kids. You go there to sleep even when you know no one else will be home, and sometimes you'll wake up to find someone holding you.
As much as you are crazy in love, early enough in the relationship that just being together is like somebody turned all the lights on, it's hard for three people to be joined at the hip, especially three people who work such long hours and spend so much of their time off exhausted. If all three of you are together, that's divine, but two is still time with a person you love, and if it's just you, well, a gang of three helps a woman appreciate her time alone.
A threesome does break down into twosomes, but then, it doesn't: what it doesn't break down into is couples. Two of you may be together without the third, and you may even have sex, just the two of you, or leave the third at home because he refuses to see the new James Bond movie or she always throws up when she goes on roller coasters or yoga scares you. But there is always a present recognition that two is not the whole story. You have a relationship with Susan and a relationship with Carter; the two of them have an inscrutable relationship that excludes you. But these relationships are dependent upon the absent third. You know how they were when you were two and two and two instead of three together, and it was not the same at all.
For one thing, there's Carter, the way he isn't afraid anymore to lie on his belly while you knead the strain out of his back. He used to make love to you with his shirt on so you wouldn't have to look at his scars-- not because he thought they would shock you, but out of the habit of protecting women from them. "They're like tattoos," you tell him, tracing their borders with your finger.
"You choose what goes into a tattoo," he says.
"But they're permanent the same way," you say. "And anyway, you can't see them, so how do you know?"
You will never heal him completely. He has a chronic lumbar hematoma, a knot of bad poetry lodged where it will hurt until the day he dies. But he is willing to let you-- always you, of the nurse's compassionate hands, never Susan-- chip away at the mountain. When you rub his back, the muscles in his face go slack, and he looks like a different person. And slowly all these things spool out like knots in telephone wire: the hour-long argument with his mother, long distance from some island in Greece; the fear that Weaver will terminate his extended Chief Residency and tell him to go look for a new job, or worse, fire Luka and give him the attending slot. All these things that you can pull out of him and take away.
For another thing, there's Susan, who understands you in a different way, in your rhythms, in wearing whatever is the opposite of rose-tinted glasses and finding no contradiction in feeling incredible optimism when you lie next to each other naked on her bed and give each other Cosmo quizzes. Susan is the first person you have ever been with whom you've not been compelled to fix, because there is nothing about Susan that is broken. She is fascinatingly capable of rescuing herself, like starfish that can grow new limbs. If you and Carter have learned to own your darkness, Susan is the embodiment of light.
And in return, she revels in all the light things about you instead of telling you they're immature or middle-class. She says it comes from living in Arizona, where people noticed her accent but didn't bat an eye when she could hold a conversation about NASCAR. She's almost talked you out of wanting to be Cinderella. There has to be some fairy tale where the two peasant girls wind up together.
Or one where Prince Charming chooses two of them. Except that's not quite right, either: you are drawing him out of his old existence as much as he is drawing you out of yours. You have learned that money is no cushion against the terror of eight years old, clinging to the bannister listening to your mother scream and smash dishes on the floor. That his house was bigger than yours and the dishes fine china didn't make him any less that child.
So it is not surprising that sometimes it seems like you are all one body, and never more so than when you are in bed together. The kissing and touching, and sometimes even the fucking, gets so mixed up in the six arms and the three mouths and the thirty toes that you're seldom sure whose hand that is, and you never care. Of course, there are certain preferences that everyone tries to respect: Susan is much more interested in Carter's tongue than his cock, and while he's getting better with his fingers, you'd still take Susan's hands inside you every time.
But that is not how you like to think of the three of you, except maybe in the giggling, wrestling, "watch your elbows" way. The sex isn't why. It is something you get to have because there are people who love you so much that they want to be part of you physically. It is all the things it is supposed to be-- satisfying, varied, frequent-- but when you were sure they were both going to leave you, the sex was the thing you were least upset about the prospect of losing.
No, what you think about when you think about the three of you is how you are when you're doing things that you could do alone, things that you would still do and be doing if it weren't for each other. You're on the couch in sweats and a t-shirt, well on your way to being the only woman in America who hated The Lovely Bones. Susan is flinging invective at the Blackhawks game on TV. Carter is lying with his head in your lap and his knees across Susan's, an orange highlighter in his mouth, reading the Annals of Emergency Medicine. One of the teams calls a time-out, and Susan kisses your neck.
That's what you'd like to show people. When you have to explain to people about your girlfriend and your boyfriend, how it could be that it is all of you together, this is how you could make it all clear. That love is not a finite quantity but a thing that can be produced sufficiently for as many people as can receive it. If love is a bond between two people, then among three it is like another leg added to the stool, that much more stability. You are so safe, surrounded by them, that sometimes you swear this is not your real life, because it is so close and so good, and it is all yours.