Polyamory

Memory can eat you and rewrite you - and be rewritten and recreate you as you recreate it. I don’t believe in factual history: it’s all about subject; it’s all about culture. When I try to articulate my life as part of a polyamorous triad, I find myself facing down a media-saturated, pop-culture memory that wants to hype up ‘reality’ into a music video montage rather than spit forth blank facts or facets of love and sex and desire. To think as a writer back to that life with two loves and two lovers – the months which marked me indelibly – to attempt with my words to pull it forward again into meaning and re-creation – I struggle and curse myself – and balk. I find myself, hiding.

Spinning my history into a sit-com plot main-veined from my protective psyche: six legs wrap and caress and interchange inside sweaty sheets; sheer white fabric blows soft across white, freckled hips; a man in a jester-hat dressed up for Mardi Gras bounces ahead of me on a salty sidewalk at dusk; three faces intimately close breathe each other in and laugh. Taste and smells of alcohol and lipstick and cigarette…that watery smell of her hair…the ether and dust of his black-haired arms; soundtrack of acid jazz and possibly a Miles Davis slow wail. Frenetic-paced, playful, transparent - reapportioned history becomes a 5 second sound byte like a VH1 pop-up video on steroids.

It takes a decided, exacting effort to pull pieces off of that rotating, fractured disco-ball of my glossy, slick recollections and examine them in the light without immediately bouncing refractively off into another rich, rapidly-moving sample of taste and sound and touch. I can’t illuminate those windows without the tainted elusive light of reflection and retrospective - nor without the stain of pain and loss. But to recall just those short spring weeks in the mid-90’s is, at least, to bounce between happy fragments: I was in love with two: trio-ed. I was loved. It was glorious. It was too fast. It was too much.

No matter how much I try to reassemble them, I cannot seem to fix those moments into a chain of history but only into chips and shards of emotion and sensation that do not stay focused; dissolving into mirage and illusion.
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What I can recall easily at first are a few sharp, short images: Beth, in black, dances, her eyes closed. Beth, a fellow grad-student of my partner. Out at one of the few nightclubs in Salt Lake City, the four of us: Rebekah and Paul; Seth and Beth.

Beth and Seth. One of those odd, narcissistic, twin-like pairings who so resemble each other physically: slim with long curly brown hair, round eyes, tapered, long fingers and generally exhausted, dissipated demeanors. Dressed alike in a popular combination of punk and 1990’s Victoriana – velvet and piercings and lace and combat boots. Beth and Seth. Like an Edward Gorey illustration: the Odious Twins. Like a joke: their names, their clothes, their absolute intertwined-ness.

And then…that night she and I stood in the anteroom of the only blues bar in town, touching and retouching our faces and standing too close as we attempted to wipe the smear of too much alcohol and lipstick into desirable mouths again. Beth moves even closer - speaks…suddenly, alarmingly touchable. Her long body at that moment more than something to admire with improbable envy. I can't recall what she said to me, only that with a few short sentences we traversed boundaries into something I hadn’t really contemplated.

We emerged arm in arm and somehow communicated this new drunken urgency quickly to our waiting, equally drunk partners until the four of us stumbled our way back to her house imbued with previously un-articulated desire, Paul surprising me with his eagerness to envelop those two, and Beth and Seth simultaneously more detached-seeming and more ardent than either Paul or myself.

And me? I can’t say what I would have been like seen through anyone else’s mind that night. I see myself later, curled up with Beth and Paul, our long brown, black, red hair spilling and curling together across our pillows, and I’m purring with love and happiness. And again later, shopping…or furtively holding hands at some art gallery. Long dinners cooked together and eaten in that unmistakable, short-lived ecstasy of new love and a complex, new pink-skinned self-identity as three.
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I am the child of a pastor and a haunted, crazy woman. Whatever history I have piled onto that foundation, I cannot remove from myself the fact of my father in the pulpit and my mother bellowing as she endlessly sifted through the months of garbage she could not bring herself to throw away.

Years later, safely entwined in two pair of loving arms, I cannot shut down the inner psychoanalyst who questions me relentlessly as I try to sleep safely: “Is that only Beth’s breast you suck? Is that only Paul’s cock? Who really are you loving as you lie here? Who are you really trying to find in this trio?” And when Beth takes me to her favorite thrift store and claps her hands delightedly when I try on the white-lace shift she’s selected, or when Paul takes me by the hand and gently wipes a fleck of dirt from my cheek, or when together they take me to get a nose-ring – identical to Beth’s – and the two of them are holding my hands to stave off a pain that never comes…am I woman and lover, or am I child and pet and plaything? It’s a question I cannot fully answer.

I know that it’s more complex than my pseudo psychoanalysis can touch. That I had missed the loamy scent of a female lover’s sex, the soft whispers and caresses and touch of a woman’s body as I remained with Paul, just as I loved his unflinching, unsentimental seduction and the way he broke into emotion with so much open passion. And his smell - the thousand smells of him - I so did not want to lose that. Beth gave me more than a way to be re-mothered with safety and compassion, and Paul more than a way for me to get my father to see my pain and help me finally grow up. But I also find myself nuzzling to her breast while wanting his hands on my hips with a need for more than sex or comfort, and I cannot rid myself of that recognition of need for envelopment and safety, nor completely stifle that need in the face of the newness of polyamory.

I did not make choices solely bent on repairing my childhood, but my desire for the two of them may also be part of the hinge between adulthood and my old, irrefutable child-loss. Just as polyamory was the hinge between those parts of myself needing both Beth and Paul to answer my sexual/emotional needs. I swam for weeks that spring in desire, smothering my doubts and instead finding self-definition in how much I can love and give and spread to encompass two with a vastness of desire and delight. Lost in the perfect, pointed muscles of his calves that I taste and admire, in the shape of her moon-face cupped in her hands while we smile into each other’s eyes. Somehow I suppress my inner Freud and bask in a balanced, equal triangle of temporary happiness.
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I am also a musician, and I cannot retell you anything without the soundtrack and hum of song and body music - three bodies arching, speaking – the purrs and sighs and soft cat-tones of our wordless communications and negotiations.Songs of desire, certainly; connection and harmony. And, although I cannot yet write into what became the future of that long ago spring, it was also, eventually, a dischordant song of loss.

It is most certainly with a memory of loss that I recall the way her full hips tucked perfectly against mine and the way I had to negotiate her waist-length hair so that I could sleep without choking. I wake up sometimes once again reaching out to push the hair of memory aside. It is loss to recall how his lips kissing her neck kept me fascinated and delicately wondering. I wanted to slide my fingers into the hollows between their skin – somehow to feel what they felt without intruding into their momentarily private shared space. It is loss to remember the night I cried out some small, personal anguish into his tangle of chest hair, listening as the rare Utah thunderstorm filled the dusk with water and dust and salt – the sound of rain-beats punctuating his atonal soothing croon as Beth slept on next to us unaware. My arms empty, my ears ringing with the silence of my own voice and body - alone in a bed that was once big enough for three.
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There are moments when I am afraid of the monster of memory. Afraid of why I can’t recall what happened to Seth. I know he was there that first night of dizzy, drunken coupling, tripling, quadrupling…and then – nothing. Was he angry? Afraid? I remember that we spoke once, after, but I cannot remember anything said. Is that amnesia driven by guilt? Did any of us know or care? So hungry for what we had, was it trivial that Beth’s doppelganger had been replaced by a pair of new lovers? I shake my head but cannot retrieve any history of Seth after that one night.
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Memory is a cloud and a clown. To remember with clarity, without editorializing, without editing out the pain or the meandering nuances that go nowhere is to destroy my own complicated self-protection. And though I try, I find myself lost inside a bricked up, windowless stymieing tidiness of my own creation that has replaced any linear history I may have with forgetfulness and easing away from pain. Doors are shut; keys are lost. It takes time to soothe this one complex many-armed truth out of it’s shell into the light and capture it. And though I try, I fear that the truth isn’t something I am ready to fully embrace.