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

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

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 Samp;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."