The fantasy he’d worked out—that had elaborated itself in his head over the last two days—called for Marcia to know what was happening, and to have helped plan it with him (the him in question being, of course, Russell Thomas: the poet’s identity an additional safeguard in case something went wrong, as well as a physical self it felt good to wear, and which was undoubtedly more pleasing than his own), then persuaded her two somewhat hesitant but interested friends to participate with her. So Marcia was the one who locked the door to the faculty lounge behind them and turned out the lights, plunging the room into a semiobscurity lit only by the faint reddish glow filtering in through the curtains. And it was Marcia also who took the lead and encouraged her friends, undressing both herself and the bogus poet, making quiet ecstatic love with him on the carpet and couch until the time came when June and Terri too shed their clothes and all three were rolling around in a passionate, sweating tangle of bodies, breasts, thighs, genitalia, and multiple orgasms, in ever more complicated and abandoned linkages, pairings, and daisy chains. St. Jacques was indefatigable, trying things he’d never before even allowed himself to imagine, no longer really sure when something had originated in his own fantasies and when it came from one or more of the girls…. He found his physical form changing, so that for a while he was a boy of fourteen, at other times various older men he knew instinctively were the girls’ fathers, at yet another time a man who could only be his own father, then, briefly, he was two men, one of them Russell Thomas while the other was his own adolescent self. Meanwhile the girls had been shifting and flowing between various identities, Marcia becoming first Liz and then St. Jacques’s mother, while Terri and June had become his two younger sisters, then both of them were Veronica as she’d been when St. Jacques first met her. One of them even became Mother Isobel, and for an instant she stared fiercely and furiously around her, but their combined desires overcame the innate censoring mechanism that had called the nun into their midst, and she grew younger, became the Sister Isobel she’d been when St. Jacques first met her, then younger still, a shy adolescent girl, before she melted back into Veronica and the two Veronicas again began to flicker through the identities of various other girls in his classes before regaining their true forms as Terri and June…. All of them, every identity, spasming and melting through orgasm after orgasm, each the ultimate possible release from the tensions of the one before until even that ultimate possible release showed itself in turn to be merely a state of intolerable tension by contrast with the release that followed it.
Finally—perhaps gradually, perhaps abruptly, St. Jacques wasn’t sure—they’d disentangled themselves, were showering and soaping one another clean in the shower stall that had made a sudden appearance in the bathroom, then were toweling one another off and getting out. St. Jacques was himself again, no longer Russell Thomas, but a younger self, seventeen or eighteen years old, with the confidence and grace that Russell Thomas had pretended to and he himself had always lacked.
St. Jacques glanced at his watch as he was putting it back on: 7:15. His dream-time had caught up with the waking-time it was recapitulating. St. Jacques reminded all three girls that they’d have to forget everything as soon as they awakened. Marcia said she would make sure she did, then had to excuse herself and leave, as they’d all known she would.
St. Jacques felt an irresistible urge to return home, taking Terri and June with him. He finished dressing then waited for June and Terri to put their heavy pullovers on over their jeans—all three were dressed casually, for the street now—then put his arms around them and walked them to his car. He felt singingly happy, with a quiet excitement growing in him that he was content just to feel. The girls squeezed into the front seat with him and he drove them back to the house, all three waving to the gate guard as they left.
At the house St. Jacques opened a bottle of champagne—St. Jacques had always liked champagne and both girls had a weakness for it—then sat around the living room sipping it in silence and watching the fire that had sprung to life in the fireplace. When they finished the bottle, they went into the bedroom to make love some more.
