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It was nearly ten years ago when I had my first threesome.

Ten years ago, before I met my husband the mathematician, and bought the pickup truck, and rented the cottage on the coast of Oregon, where we live a quiet life, a quiet life of love.

Before the threesome there had been a failed pass made on me in college. Two of my poetry-workshop classmates — the star of the class, Melinda, a tall girl from Colorado who had big thighs and wore tight jeans and a denim jacket and dusty boots and no makeup except for lipgloss, just like a real cowgirl, and Eli, a curly-haired, bespectacled Ultimate Frisbee player who regularly refused to

use punctuation as some sort of political statement — called me into a room during a party and offered me joint after joint. Melinda was sitting on one end of the bed, telling how much she liked my hair while stroking it, and Eli was on the other end rubbing my feet because "they looked like they needed it." I had no idea what was going on, only all of a sudden I felt weird, so I got up abruptly and walked the few blocks home to my apartment thinking, "That was weird. Wasn't that weird? Why was that weird?" and then forgot about it the next day. And I swear to you, it wasn't until like, two years later, maybe I was watching a movie and there was a scene of haphazard seduction, maybe someone was telling me a similar story, I can't recall now, but all of a sudden I realized they were trying to have a threesome with me.

The sunsets are spectacular on the coast, and my husband and I walk, hand in hand, down to the ocean to watch them every night. On the way home, in the early dusk, mosquitoes dive-bomb us like vicious soldiers.

And there was the brief interlude that followed a few years later, primarily between me and one of my best girlfriends from grad school in Chico and, in a tertiary fashion, the scummy pothead she was dating, an act that was all well and good, seeing as it was so naughty and foreign, but one that also convinced me I was straight. Because when I got to the end, I had to ask, where was the penis?

He is writing another textbook. I am writing another chapbook.

And then there was the one I am about to tell you, the one that to this day I summon back when I have run out of current fantasies during masturbation. The one I thought I would have to hide forever. It's the story of what happened on my twenty-sixth birthday.

I was in New York City, where all bad (good) things happen to good (bad) girls. An old friend from college named Tommy had flown me out as a birthday present. He was a wispy blonde Southern man who worked for MTV. I suspected he was trying to figure out if he was gay or not and needed a witness to his behavior, which involved, I soon learned, late nights at dirty little techno speakeasies in the East Village, copious amounts of cocaine and long hugs goodbye with many men who had indeterminate accents (except for the one guy was very much from New Jersey). Gay, I thought in my head. Gay, gay, gay. Still, he had a pixie-haired girlfriend with a loud laugh and a deep voice, and he never asked my opinion in the first place, so I kept my mouth shut and did another line.

This was the first time I had done coke. I had been living in the Chico for a few years and meth was just start to rise up and rear its angry (and then really happy, and then angry again for like twenty-four hours straight) head, and as far as I was concerned, all white powder was the devil's work. But it was my birthday, and I was on vacation. I had on a low-cut black dress, we ate at an Italian restaurant in the East Village where Champagne was waiting upon my arrival along with everyone I knew in New York, and I felt like I was going to be famous at any moment.

Tommy and I sneak in late-night phone calls after my husband goes to sleep early, always early.

After dinner Tommy and I went to a bar on East Fifth Street, off of Avenue A, a dark one with weird knick-knacks in the window, like a ceramic frog and a stack of aging international beer coasters as high as my head. I don't know if it's still there anymore, but I looked it up in a guidebook once. It said that was the place to go if you were interested in meeting sleazy European artists, which might not sound half bad to some people. Not me, though.

At the bar we played pool and went to the bathroom and did more drugs and drank cocktails made with cheap vodka. I put money in the jukebox. Tommy and I tried to finish the worst game of pool ever played. He checked his cellphone frequently for a message from his girlfriend, who was coming when she got off her shift. I leaned against the wall and laughed.

"More," I said, and shook my empty drink. "We need more of everything."

I haven't been to New York in years. My husband won't let me go. He said he'd miss me if I went so far away without him, and he hates flying so he'd never make the trip himself. But I know it's because he thinks I'll get in trouble. He knew me when I was wild, and he helped me change my ways. He approached me as if I was a problem to be solved, and I was, and he solved me.