Foster (left), with husband Michael, and Letha

For years I sawed myself in half emotionally. This condition resulted from my double life: daytime a married academic, nighttime a Greenwich Village free spirit. I was happily wed to Michael — a former Brooklyn street gang leader who had gone to Harvard — yet I was free to see other men. With Machiavellian guile, I struggled to balance my personal and professional lives. While a coterie of friends were hip to the masquerade, strangers knew me as a university librarian engaged in research on Women's Studies.

Though my outer self displayed a bookish facade, its shadow (aka Bella Donna) voyaged to the wilder shores of love. Since each face of my Janus-self was well-fed, neither one felt deprived. The bourgeois and the anarchist lived together amicably. The model of civilized women such as Anaïs Nin or Simone de Beauvoir inspired my forays into the casino known as romantic affairs.

Before marriage I suffered from mental and physical constipation. Not that I had been beaten or abused — just bored to death in genteel Philadelphia. Marriage brought me an expansive love out of a Russian novel. Monogamy, the first stage in our romantic cycle, gradually gave way to a "tolerant marriage."

In the time before AIDS, love was in the air along with pot fumes at parties started one evening and ended whenever. Mystified, my "nice girl" side clucked her tongue at the redheaded hussy whose skin she shared. Quel frissons! I dared sample pleasures traditionally denied the married woman. On a few occasions, in the wee hours, my libido made foolhardy decisions. One winter night I found myself on an unfamiliar street in an outer borough after a casual romance soured. Luckily, I convinced a cab driver to take me back to the Village. My nervous system also recovered from a scary scene with a nice-looking gentleman who turned out to be Jack the Ripper in training.

These dicey explorations prompted me to constrict my erotic horizon. And to search for a more sensible familial structure that would integrate stability and freedom. It felt impossible to backtrack and resume a so-called traditional marriage. Besides, most of our friends were either unhappy with their partner or divorced and on their second or third. That caused pain and expense. In theory, a menage a trois seemed a reasonable answer. It would be a creative arrangement dedicated to art — like in Noel Coward's Design for Living.

We were great fans of the French actress Jeanne Moreau. Her legendary Performance in the Film Jules and Jim inspired us. Could we expand our sexual lives? Now helter-skelter, sensibly to add more pleasure while remaining devoted to each other? We were willing to gamble that our menage experiment would turn out more auspiciously than the one in the French onscreen classic. But where to find the right third — someone we could incorporate into our marriage?

The hand of fate provided a way. "Know Paris and die," goes the saying, but in the mid-80's a research trip to the City of Light opened the door on our new life a trois. Michael and I, as joint authors, were working on the convoluted life of Alexandra David-Neel, the French explorer. A critical event in the evolution of our marriage transpired when Mike casually met Letha at a cafe. She was reading David-Neel's most popular work, Magic and Mystery in Tibet.

After discovering that Letha was an American resident in Paris with an abiding interest in Tibet, Mike knew our third had arrived. That she was a stunning blonde with green eyes didn't hurt either. By necessity this first encounter had to be abbreviated. In mid-afternoon, we were meeting at the Guimet Museum to explore their holdings on Alexandra David-Neel. Bundling Letha — who later confessed to being overwhelmed — into a taxi, they careened through traffic to the Place d'Ilena. They found me stationed under a giant, golden statue of Buddha, one of the myriad treasures belonging to the museum renown for its Oriental artifacts.

Waiting for Mike, I watched the clock impatiently. I felt none of the tranquility the smiling Buddha towering above me emanated. We had a substantial amount of research to complete within a mere few weeks. One look at Letha dissipated my fit of pique. Although from New Mexico, she appeared to me a goddess descended from an Oriental painting. A spiritual quality, walking so lightly as though floating, set her apart from ordinary women.

It turned out that Letha's circumstances were far more pedestrian. Delighted to speak English with an appreciative couple in tune with her interests, words tumbled from her mouth as though she were subjected to a vow of silence for years. Fluent in French, she confessed to a longing for la vie boheme. Suddenly, a shadow darkened her bright face: thoughts of her husband. A colossal bore, he insisted on living on the Right Bank as far as possible from cafes where she might converse with Parisian intellectuals.

On a post-doctoral teaching fellowship, he expected Letha to shop, clean and cook him regular meals. Never mind that this bourgeois routine made her pursuit of operatic studies with a private teacher difficult. She hoped one day to go on the stage, but her husband thought too much of himself to make the slightest sacrifice, let alone become a stage door johnny.

In Paris one year, Letha had visited the Guimet several times before to spend hours gazing worshipfully at the finely chiseled Buddhas and painted fabrics known as "tan-kas." She expertly guided us through the Guimet, its stunning exhibits and Japanese garden. Alas, we hardly noticed a statue or bloom. The three of us chattered non-stop. Mike and I forgot about our research until Letha looked at her watch. Late for her voice lesson, she rushed toward the front door to catch the Metro. Before leaving, she thrust a paper in my hand with her address written on it. Could we come to dinner tomorrow night? She inquired. Oui, Oui, we both chimed as clearly as the bells of Notre Dame.

Talking it over later, Mike and I agreed that a menage a trois with Letha would present problems. Not only did she live on another continent, a classic case of a GU(geographically undesirable), but her husband would be resentful. Dinner at Letha's sparsely furnished apartment introduced us to an utterly self-absorbed individual. His conversation about the latest academic literary fad was excruciating!

Michael, Letha and I spent our own magic interlude pursuing the pleasures of Paris. Drinking wine in cozy cafes on the Boulevard St. Michel, our tetes a trois might last till dawn. Our talk ranged from existential conundrums to comic books, from the best croissant cafes to daring Spanish bullfighters. To thick to figure it out, Letha's husband was drawn by our three-way brush fire. Something of a voyeur, he sensed that a trinity is a source of power as well as excitement, and he wanted in. Alas, foursomes are clumsy and usually split into two couples, either combining anew or reverting to the tried and true. Anyone remember Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice? Three — not more — brings "light into darkness," ordains the I Ching.

Our research concluded, we said au revoir to Letha and Paris, or so we supposed. But the conversation continued and within a year, Letha joined us in New York, divorce pending. On the town in Manhattan, our heady evenings were cut short but proved just as precious. Come summer, we transported the menage to leafy Vermont. Our interaction was still tentative, a prelude to three lives being stitched together into a durable quilt.

In time the menage re-parented me with a family of choice allied with my wants and desires. Let the world couple off, an odd combination suited me. I agreed with the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who considered three the ultimate, mystical number. A triad gave me a solid base from which to explore the ins and outs of what Ralph Ellison called "the ass struggle." That old musketeer of the boudoir Alexandre Dumas expressed the plight of the committed yet unfaithful thus: "The chains of marriage are so heavy it takes two to bear them, sometimes three."

An existence both independent and familial spanned the chasm of loneliness. Although experimental, we three did not sleep together, not all at once. Neither Letha nor I is bisexual. For a man to watch two women caress each other may be great foreplay for some, but it didn't interest any of us. So we kept our lovemaking separate but equal. I saw other men but selectively. My three life brought me a caring family that satisfied my need for affection. At times, wounded, I crept back to my nest for healing. Instead of a jealous husband, mine understood. If the travel bug bit, I took off while Letha moved in temporarily.

I own an apartment on a quaint street in the West Village, too often crowded by movie company trucks. Letha rents a small, sunny apartment a comfortable walk away in ultra-hip Chelsea. Michael always enjoyed bouncing back and forth. He had several small suitcases that transported his belongings. At times he forgot what he left in which apartment. Like a gypsy, he packed up and unpacked jauntily as though he were on the road. We don't have the space to jointly house three cosmopolitan lives. Besides, who ever heard of giving up a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan? Summers, in a rambling retreat in Vermont, we have lived under the same roof.