Three Women by Marge Piercy

onto his stomach, used the surgical jelly and slowly, caressing his way, put himself into Chad’s ass. Chad winced and bit at the pillow, but once Evan was in, he seemed to mind it far less. She liked watching. She loved watching. She was possessing Chad through Evan’s cock. She was fucking him through Evan. She wanted Evan to thrust harder, but he was careful, gentle. She could almost feel his come. Then he rested for a moment, turned Chad over and began to suck his cock. She came just watching them.
    Afterward Chad lay as if dazed. “Do you do this a lot?” he asked finally, trying to recover himself.
    “We fuck all the time,” Evan said. “We study and we fuck. But it’s the first time we’ve ever taken anybody else with us. You should consider it an honor.” He was grinning widely.
    “Did you like being with us?” Elena asked almost shyly. He was so beautiful, Chad with the blue blue eyes and the carved face.
    “I’ve spent worse afternoons.” He reached out and pulled her down on the bed with him. He was staring into her eyes. “I don’t understand you.”
    “Sometimes I don’t understand myself.”
    With a light caress now his hand moved over her breast. “You’re like something I made up lying in bed at night.”
    She jerked away. “I’m no fantasy.”
    Evan said, “You know, we could all have a lot of fun.”
    Chad looked at him, his hand coming to rest on Elena’s bare thigh. “I think you’re right.”

5
    Suzanne
    Rachel was silent for an entire week. Suzanne tried to call her twice at the apartment she shared with two other rabbinical students. Suzanne left pleas on the answering machine, but Rachel did not return her calls. Finally a reply came in her E-mail.
    Mother:
    I really can’t imagine what you were thinking of, to give my room to Elena. I just can’t believe you did that to me. I think it was incredibly selfish of you not to give up your gym or your office, but to make me the sacrificial lamb. I am certainly not coming home until I have my room back. You are always expecting me to put up with anything to satisfy Elena, who can never be satisfied anyhow!
    It seemed to Suzanne that Elena somehow occupied seventy percent of the apartment. Her jacket lay on the back of the couch. Her CDs were scattered about as if flung. She left the television on and wandered away. Her flame red brassieres and bikini panties hung on the rod in thebathroom. She was on the telephone as much as in high school, when Suzanne had gotten Elena her own phone in self-defense. Furthermore Suzanne had to deal with Sam, who dropped in on his adopted daughter a little too frequently for Suzanne’s comfort.
    Sam was ensconced on her couch at the moment. “I pulled Judge Fogarty. That man must be a hundred years old. Why don’t they have mandatory retirement for judges? It would help if they had to leave the bench before senility overcomes them.”
    Sam was big—broad shoulders, big bones, and curly sandy hair. He had been a good-looking man when she had married him, twenty-three years ago, but he had spread out considerably since then. She had never been madly in love with him the way she had with Elena’s father, Victor. She had not wanted to be. She had seen herself going down the same road as her mother, rendered idiotic by blind passion for a series of ill-chosen men. Sam had been a rational choice. She had made that choice as much for Elena as for herself. She had loved him, certainly, but with clarity, with her mind as well as her body.
    Their careers had got in the way, so that in an average week, most of the time they spent together was in bed and almost all of that, asleep. They were both young political lawyers very much on the make and far more passionate about their cases than about each other. Their marriage had disintegrated under the pressure. But Sam had always been a good father, to his three children with his current wife (who did not work); to his own daughter Rachel and to Elena, whom