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.