“You wanna bump?”
“I’m good,” I said.
I have rarely known drugs to be a predinner activity. Cocaine in particular seemed at philosophical odds with this scene.
“What are you guys looking at?”
I pointed at the computer, assuming either Alex was picking out music or Hank was picking out a recipe.
“Don’t show her that!” Savannah said, bursting in from the porch, holding a pellet gun.
“Don’t show her what?” I asked.
“Come on,” Hank reasoned, “she’s cool.”
“I’m cool,” I said, speaking to the gun that everyone seemed to be taking for granted.
“Oh, get over yourselves,” Alex said. “Have a look, honey.”
He twisted the laptop around. On the screen was a series of vertical boxes, featuring naked couples. Most were full-body shots but some were only from the waist down and some only from the neck up, smiling and wholesome as wedding announcements. I tried so hard not to look surprised, my pendulum swung too far in the other direction. I nodded at the screen as if these naked couples were not as impressive as the many naked couples I see every day.
“The worst,” Hank said, rolling his eyes, “is when Savannah gets a guy with a small dick. You should see some of these tiny dicks.”
Should I, though?
“Oh,” I said, “I’ll bet that sucks.”
“Or doesn’t at all.” Alex snickered and scrolled.
“So,” I asked, “you guys are swingers?”
Is that a wind chime?
“We just do pairs,” Savannah explained. “It’s hard around here. You get a lot of people who are either gross or married or people who have never done this before. I told Hank: Never again with the virgins. Never again.”
“Like 9/11,” Alex mumbled, wiping his nose.
“That’s ‘Never forget,’” I said, “but sure.”
“Last week,” Savannah went on, “this chick freaked out halfway through and locked herself in the closet. I felt kind of bad fucking her boyfriend while Hank had to sit out in the living room.”
I gave them a pinched look, as if I, too, hated it when that happened. I imagined Hank waiting patiently, listening to Savannah climax, flipping through worn copies of Mother Jones.
“A lot of people don’t agree with our orientation,” Hank said.
Was it a hobby or an orientation? I wasn’t sure it qualified as an orientation unless they couldn’t have sex without four people in the room.
“She should help you guys look,” Alex said and lit a cigarette.
Should she, though?
He held it up by his ear, fingers flared. He saw right through me.
“That’s a great idea!” exclaimed Savannah. “How’s your eye for labia? Can you smoke that outside please?”
* * *
I was equal parts relieved and insulted to be categorized as someone who could help hunt but not be hunted herself. I did not want to have sex with either of them. Or both of them. But everybody likes to be considered. Instead, I got to work, weeding out couples I suspected were lacking in genetics or experience. Hank diced tomatoes for the bruschetta while I jotted down my favorite pairings on a notepad.
Laura and Craig. Her: 5′2″, 119 lbs, boobs. Him: 6′1″, 170 lbs, bald.
Diana and Jay. Her: 5′7″, 130 lbs, flat. Him: height N/A. 140 lbs. Jockey?
“Too little.” Savannah stood over my shoulder, licking a wooden spoon.
“Which one?”
“Him. The bald guy.”
“Not the jockey?”
“It says he’s a jockey?”
“That’s just what I’m calling him.”
“Well, your jockey has a ginormous cock. Look at him. He’s hung like a horse.”
“How can you tell?” I asked. “It’s just his face.”
“You get good at reading people,” she said, shrugging. “Everyone’s always trying to tell you something. It’s in their eyes. It’s not that hard.”
“Man.” I kept scrolling. “You’re good.”
* * *
“I can’t.” Hank waved his hands back and forth. “I can’t with the pancake nipples.”
We were eating dinner outside, breathing in the cool forest air and trolling the Internet for nipples of an acceptable diameter.
“What would you go for?” Savannah asked. “If you were us.”
“Me?”
All I could think about were logistics. I wondered how long it took to get a response from the couples, if they all took each other out to dinner afterward, if they split the check four ways. The three of them were waiting for an answer. I tried to imagine what the newfangled Northern Californian version of myself would say. Days working alone, deep in thought, had left my mind uncluttered and unusually prepared to access thoughts on the subject.
“I guess I’d go for something traditional,” I mused. “So a girl with a distinct figure and long hair and a tall guy with chest hair. Or I’d focus on diversity so there’s one of everything in the room. It leads to less whose-ass-is-that and so forth. Conversely, I could see hunting down a set of body doubles to make the transition more seamless. But if the whole idea is to go outside the relationship, then what’s the point of that?”
Alex lit up another cigarette. The paper crackled.
“Precisely,” Hank whispered.
Was I a foursome savant? I’d never been so flattered in my life. A foursome is one of those activities that lives in the “would” section of my brain alongside “black tar heroin” and “petting a baby cobra.” Would I do these things? Sure, if the circumstances were perfect and consequence free and came with a bucket of antivenom.
* * *
After dinner, we marched into the woods, single file, because Savannah and Hank had a surprise for me. I felt out of my body, as if narrating my evening from the trees: Unbeknownst to her loved ones, a writer befriends her sexually liberated neighbors and allows herself to be escorted to a dilapidated garden shed. Her would-be assailants roll her a joint the circumference of a giraffe turd. So relieved is she not to list her current activity as “being stabbed” that she does not hesitate to take it. Inside the shed is a creaky staircase that leads to the center of the earth.
The stairs opened up into a space more expansive than I had expected. I heard the dull buzzing of a generator. Hank flicked on a series of infrared lights. And there, underneath Hank and
