Challengers arrived in theaters last week, bringing with it curated athleisure, tennis puns galore and the dishy, naughty thrill of a three’s-company-in-the-bedroom situation. The latest from Italian director Luca Guadagnino, the film follows Tashi, a former tennis prodigy, played by the gorgeous Zendaya, and two perpetually just-so sweaty men, all of whom have spent the last ten or fifteen years bouncing in and out of each other’s erotic orbits. A visual feast of sweat and skin, Challengers is, without doubt, the sexiest story ever to take place in New Rochelle, New York (apologies to Ragtime).
On a fateful night during the US Open Junior Championships, rising star Tashi met doubles partners Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist) at an Adidas party. The three shared some charged conversation and a beachside cigarette before taking things back to the boys’ hotel room for more chitchat and the film’s much-ballyhooed triple make-out scene, shown in flashback. Thus began a charged, long-running ménage à trois in which Art and Patrick seem equally gaga for each other as for Tashi, and just about everyone is as horny for game-set-match as they are for between-the-sheets action.
The film opens with the three reuniting at a pre-US Open Challenger tournament, and time-travels back and forth as Tashi dates Patrick, busts her knee, busts up the relationship and eventually marries Art. Now a successful pro rehabbing from an injury, Art views the rinky-dink Challenger contest as an attempt to bolster his confidence heading into the US Open, while Patrick, a perpetual also-ran, is there in a desperate bid to qualify for the main event in Queens. Tashi’s role is to support Art, as both his wife and his coach, and she’s determined to reignite his competitive fire. Her own career cut short by injury, she finds his post-recovery yen for a life after tennis a major turnoff. Despite having spent years bending two extremely attractive, virile fellows to her will, nothing gets her motor running like a good on-the-court rally. When a mournful Art asks her if she’ll love him “no matter what” happens in his upcoming match, she shoots back coldly, “What am I, Jesus?” The tournament’s final match between Art and Patrick, played out under Tashi’s watchful gaze, might qualify as the longest, most charged love scene of the year. It’s all very latter-day Noël Coward, powered by Gatorade instead of gin.
As in Coward’s work, style matters. The sportif ménage à trois is something of a ménage à quatre for the sartorially obsessed, with designer Jonathan Anderson, who costumed the film, a silent, yet highly visible, participant. “We had Zendaya, who understands fashion inside and out,” he told W Magazine, in a recent Q&A piece. Anderson ran with the star’s sartorial savvy, taking Tashi from Juicy-clad teen to Cartier watch and Chanel espadrille-sporting alpha female. (Longtime friends, the director and designer will reteam on Guadagnino’s upcoming Queer.)
While threesomes and sports movies may be a new partnership, in literature, there’s nothing new about a romantic imbroglio roomy enough for two men and a lady. Way back in 1554 Spain, an anonymous writer ruffled Inquisition feathers with The Life of Lázarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities. Lázarillo’s primary adversity: enduring the tongues that wag over his cuckolding via a financially profitable dalliance between his peasant wife and a lecherous Arch-priest.
Jump to the nineteenth century, and a tale of a less heretical nature unfolds in pastoral Switzerland in Gottfried Keller’s 1874 The Misused Love Letters. In an oddly modern spin, the “misuse” centers on pronouns. To respond well to love letters from her merchant husband, a non-wordsmith woman swaps out the third-person pronouns in his letters to her, making them read as if written by a gal to her beau. She sends these off to a young student who responds genuinely, and in turn, passes his letters back to her husband, after again making the necessary tweaks. Ultimately, the merchant discovers this editing scheme and insists upon a speedy divorce. Leave it to the Swiss to render a love triangle as a series of exercises in paperwork.
The thruple concept made the leap into the twentieth century with its fascination factor for the literary set intact. Those enamored include two of the era’s most celebrated storytellers. Famed chronicler of between-the-wars urbanity, the aforementioned Noël Coward, wrote Leo and Otto as two-thirds of his trio of creative types in his 1932 play, Design for Living. Otto, a painter, lives with Gilda, an interior designer, in a fabulously bohemian Parisian shack-up situation. Successful author Leo, old pal to Otto and old flame to Gilda (and most likely, Otto), swings back into town from New York. The whole thing is a complicated affair, with paramours sneaking out of bedrooms to avoid discovery by more legitimate lovers, and enough break-ups, make-ups and dustups to span three countries and two continents. Tired of ping-ponging between two men with as much subtextual simmering desire for one another as for her, Gilda ditches the triangle and settles into life in New York and a conventional marriage with her art-dealer friend Ernest.
Years later, Gilda hosts a swanky party for her clients. It’s the type of event, Coward notes in his stage directions, requiring her to be “elaborately and beautifully gowned.” Leo and Otto crash the party, both “attired in very faultless evening dress.” Typical of Coward, everyone behaves rather badly, but they all look great – an essential plot element. Coward makes no distinction between the superficial and the substantive. In his upper-crust milieu, visual style, of venue and dress, is as essential as verbal style, and his stage directions are often highly specific. When Ernest returns home from a business trip, he is greeted not by his wife, but by Leo and Otto, who have helped themselves to his accommodations and his pajamas. They explain that, after inviting them back to the house, Gilda “fluttered into the night like a great silly owl.” She returns having had an epiphany. Why settle for sweet, simple Ernest when you can have two complicated men, whom she describes as “looking very sleek and sly in their newly pressed suits.” Compliments to their tailors, because for Gilda, it’s rekindled love at first tux. Understandably upset to be dumped for a couple of guys who have co-opted his nightwear sans permission, Ernest declares the whole mess a “disgusting three-sided erotic hotch-potch.” After his exit, the happy, well-dressed trio collapses into a fit of laughter.
A less sunny, but equally glammed-up, threesome blazes through the French Riviera in Ernest Hemingway’s erotic novel The Garden of Eden, published posthumously in 1986. Not surprisingly, Papa departs from the type of fluid masculinity on display in Challengers and Design for Living. He presents a two-ladies-one-young-man triad more palatable to his bull-running, rum-drinking, war-reporting paragons of virility. Well, perhaps. Hemingway follows David and Catherine, newlyweds in a perpetual continental honeymoon phase. David is a handsome writer, and Catherine, a fetching gamine with a penchant for fisherman’s shirts. (David notes that his wife is “the first girl he had ever seen wearing one.”) They share a voracious appetite for pleasure, or as Hemingway puts it, “They were always hungry but they ate very well.” Yet, as David learns, life comes at you fast. It’s all beachside lunches and day trips into town until, one day, your wife gets a kicky new haircut. Next thing you know, you’re in bed and she’s asking you to “change and be my girl and let me take you.” And take him she does, the penetration roiling up a mix of fear and arousal that David labels “a strangeness inside.”
The gender play doesn’t stop there. "I'm a girl. But now I'm a boy too and I can do anything and anything and anything," Catherine declares. Though unsettled, David does his best to roll with his wife’s adventurous punches. When the couple meets Marita in a cafe, Catherine is eager to pursue her. Although David is initially ambivalent, all three parties fall in love, and into bed, though never the latter at the same time. Catherine’s aesthetic preferences dominate: The trio works a shared androgyne look with matching cropped hair. Professional concerns spill over into the personal arena as Catherine, who holds the purse strings, grows increasingly angry that David has abandoned chronicling their European adventures in favor of writing the story of his childhood.
Marita winds up in the role of the supportive wife to both, assuaging the raging egos and wildly vacillating moods of her two lovers. It’s a messy arrangement for messy people, all of whom bounce from jealousy to affection to something darker, often in the span of a day. “She must have done something really impressive to make you sleep like you were dead until the absolute end of the afternoon,” Catherine barks at David and Marita one day, “Thank her for that at least.” Later that night, she’s back in Marita’s bed and David is the one left stewing. Without spoiling too much, the coital antics do little to heal Catherine and David’s deeper issues. The Garden of Eden appears to have had some true-to-life underpinnings. According to biographer Mary Dearborn, Hemingway played out some boudoir gender fantasies with his fourth wife Mary Welsh, who cropped her own hair short at the author’s request.
Literary threesomes run the gamut from Coward-esque fizz to Hemingway’s tumultuous crash-and-burn to copyediting (well, if you’re Swiss). Sometimes a ménage à trois might just mean more of a good thing, or it could mean biting off more than you can chew. Still, the pull of the carnally connected trio over audiences both prudish and pervy remains a near constant (who among us doesn’t at least entertain the thought once in a while?). Its appeal on page and screen mirrors its real-world draw – three parts naughty, three parts saucy and, above all, unpredictable.