2.5

My girlfriend’s other girlfriend was a novelist
     who every other weekend had a tryst

with B, a hedge-fund manager, in a Manhattan
     hotel room, while another woman,

also a novelist, sat beside the bed.
     All three, it should be said,

were very rich. The second novelist—
     who was, I’m told, romantically obsessed

with B—got off on watching him ejaculate inside
     my girlfriend’s girlfriend, while begging from the bedside

that he stop. At home B had an infant
     and a wife, for whose unwitting absent

body my girlfriend’s girlfriend’s made a kind of proxy—
     absorbing the animosity

of the second novelist, whose true object was
     the woman B had married. The ménage à trois

also qualified as field work, since both writers’ manuscripts
     narrated their relationship.

(Each hoped her own, of course, would be
     the better book, eventually.)

When I thought about their triangle—devised,
     it seemed, to make perverse the otherwise

bourgeois and corporate days
     in which their creativities were caged—

my mind went to my own. My vanity.
     My wile like the quiet savagery

inside a dog that gets the dog put down
     If there was a distinction to be drawn

it was only that the thought of my betrayal
     didn’t turn me on at all

but pained me in a way I couldn’t fetishize.
     And the jealousy that would arise

in me did not increase my selfish pleasure
     but threatened—so I felt—to snuff it out forever.