Adam Thirlwell - Politics

When it was the night before Christmas, when Nana was still young enough for proper Christmas, Papa would sit on the edge of her bed and read to Nana. He read to her The Night Before Christmas. It was a poem. In this poem, Nana found out what preparations had been made in Lapland for Father Christmas’s journey to the end of the night, delivering Christmas presents. Nana knew all about each reindeer. She knew their names. When she was older, she could only remember Rudolph — of course she could remember Rudolph — and Dasher and Prancer and Donna and Blitzen. There were more reindeer, but those were the ones she remembered. When Papa read the poem, he seemed very serious. It was not just a story. He seemed very concerned and grave. And Nana loved Papa’s seriousness. She thought that this was right. It was the most serious thing — how Father Christmas would get to Nana.

It was Nana’s favourite memory. She loved Papa’s reading voice.

1

Conventionally, the menage a trois is seen as sexually unconventional. It is edgy. Couples can be obscene, it is true, but in the end they are still just couples. They are still ordinary. Whereas a menage a trois is bohemian. It can’t help being bohemian.

In case this incontestable point needs proving, take the film Cabaret. Produced in New York in the early seventies, Cabaret has a trashy glam-rock glamour. Set in Berlin in the early thirties, this film tells the story of an American cabaret singer called Sally (played by the young Liza Minelli), and a British writer called Brian. Sally and Brian are girlfriend and boyfriend. Then they meet Maximilian. Maximilian is a German count. You can imagine what happens. Sally falls for Maximilian. Brian also falls for Maximilian. Maximilian falls for both of them.

The threesome is the hallmark of a glam-rock plot. It wouldn’t be bohemian without a menage a trois.

For instance, the most famous line in the film is this. ‘Twosy beats onesy, but nothing beats three.’ The line is sung with a leer by the rouged and male MC of the Kit Kat Club, in evening dress, flanked by two buxom women. And that is the conventional view of the threesome. The threesome is virulently sexual. It is pre-Nazi decadence. It is sex personified.

I know all that. I know that this is how lots of people think about the menage a trois, if they think about it at all. I just think this view of the menage is inaccurate. It misses out so many of the facts.

It was autumn. As she had told Papa, Nana moved in with Moshe. She began a new term at the Architectural Association, to begin her Ph.D. in Architectural Theory. Moshe came to the end of his run as Slobodan Milosevic in Richard Norton-Taylor’s play, Peacekeeping Force, at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn. Anjali completed her year’s contract of Johnson’s Baby Powder adverts. Anjali kind of moved in with Moshe too. She had a key cut. So she popped in and out. She stayed there every weekend.

I hope you are happy now. I hope you are clear about the living arrangements.

They were a contemporary menage a trois . They were definitely a menage a trois. It was undeniable. They had sex in twos and three.

2

But a menage is not just a sexual thing. It is not just a pre- Nazi decadent thing. Like everything else, it is also domestic. Nana and Anjali and Moshe played depraved sexual games, of course, but the three of them also went swimming. On Saturday mornings, Moshe and his two girlfriends went swimming in the Oasis Pool on High Holborn. And I want to watch them swim. I especially want to watch Moshe at the swimming pool.

Swimming was mostly pure bliss for Moshe. But there were some complications. Some of these were minor, one of them was not.

These were the minor complications.

He was put out by the separate changing rooms. Gender segregation seemed unfair. He felt a little jealous. As he took off his low-cut HM jeans, keeping his feet dry by standing on his socks and shoes, he had no idea what was going on in the girls’ changing rooms. Morosely, Moshe stared at other men’s penises. He disliked them. He only liked breasts. Carefully, without seeming gay, pretending to extract wax from his ears with a blue cotton bud, he compared his penis to the other penises. It seemed all right. It did not seem specially wonderful, but it seemed all right.

Moshe got into his navy Adidas trunks, dipped his feet in viscous disinfectant, and walked through to the pool. He stepped down, clinging bravely to the stainless-steel steps. The pool, at its deepest point, was three metres. This slightly scared Moshe. He did not know his height exactly, he did not know his height in metres, but he reckoned that three metres must be double. It must be at least double how tall he was.

Moshe looked round and saw a white cage containing bendy sponge floats, candy-striped rafts and orange inflatable armbands. He wondered if it might be possible to use this large array of floats and rafts and armbands. He decided not. Anyone else could come in. A pretty sixteen- year-old girl could come in. And if a pretty sixteen-year-old girl joined him in the pool, Moshe did not want to be clutching a blue-and-white-striped polystyrene float.

Moshe hovered in the shallow end, looking at the entrance to the girls’ changing room. He thought about the tricks they played on him. One morning, Nana and Anjali fitted Moshe up with water wings and carried him. Or Nana and Anjali swam away and kissed, treading water, in the deep end. Nana and Anjali were much better swimmers than Moshe. They teased him. He imagined them porno- graphically soaping each other’s tits in the pre-swimming shower. This gave him an erection, trapped in his tight trunks. So he stood there, leaning his elbows on the greasy bobbled tiles, looking nonchalant and pensive. And he was being pensive. He was thinking about his coffee afterwards in his favourite cafe called the Mustard Seed in Finsbury. In the Mustard Seed, Moshe could dab Vaseline on to the chlorinated sores and welts of his fingers’ eczema. The Mustard Seed was his rest cure, his urban retreat.

3

While he waits for his erection to subside and thinks about cappuccino, let us consider Moshe. We have considered all the minor complications that made Moshe’s domestic routine problematic. But now let us consider his erotic nature. His erotic nature was the major complication.

The thing is, Moshe was not a Don Juan type. If he had been a Don Juan type, he would have seen his current sexual situation as a conquest. He would have seen two girls at once as a sexual victory. But Moshe did not see it this way. And I can understand this. I am not a Don Juan type either.

Moshe was moral. He loved Nana. He loved her virtuously. And this virtuous love meant that he could not really enjoy it, the menage a trois.

In the glam film Cabaret, there is a fraught conversation between Sally and Brian, the original girlfriend and boyfriend. Brian shouts, ‘Oh screw Maximilian!’ to which Sally replies, ‘I do.’ Then Brian, after a little pause, quietly says, ‘So do I.’

I very much like this snippet of conversation. It summarises neatly the underlying relationships in a menage a trois. The menage, as Moshe was finding out, was based on mutual infidelity. A threesome was three different couples. And one of these couples was Anjali and Moshe. This did not make Moshe very happy. He enjoyed it, he enjoyed all the sex with Anjali. He was just not sure that he approved. It was, in the end, infidelity.

Moshe was not a Don Juan. He was not cool. He was a romantic. Now, my definition of a romantic is this. A romantic is a person who needs a love affair to be a moral affair as well. And Moshe did not think that a menage a trois was moral.