John Warren Wells

The Wife-Swap Report

The Way Some People Live

There is a song Pete Seeger sings about little boxes made of ticky-tacky, identical ticky-tacky houses inhabited by identical ticky-tacky people. The Gordon house is a luxury-class version of just this sort of suburban sameness. It is a four-year-old split-level on a half-acre lot in a development in Morris County, New Jersey, within easy commuting range of New York City. The current market value of the house is probably around thirty-five thousand dollars. The house is made of ticky-tacky (several of the windows leak; there are ceiling cracks as the structure settles) and it does look rather like its neighbors on either side, but there is certainly nothing drab about it. On the contrary, it is representative of the good life in affluent, leisure-oriented mid-century America.

The people in the house do not look just the same as their neighbors. On balance, they look quite a bit better. Paul Gordon is thirty-two years old, tall, slender, with brown eyes and straight dark brown hair. While he is not handsome enough to model for menswear advertisements, there is a strength and vitality in his features which borders on the charismatic.

His wife, Sheila, is three years younger and several inches shorter. Her large eyes are green flecked with brown, and her hair, originally a light brown, is presently blond. She is slender almost to the point of thinness, with small breasts and boyish hips. Her face is unusually expressive, quick to indicate her mercurial changes of mood. Her upper incisors are somewhat prominent, her forehead broad and high. By no means beautiful, she is nevertheless strikingly attractive, the sort of woman men find highly desirable while never being able to explain exactly why.

There are three Gordon children, Mark and Lisa and Heidi, ranging in age from nine to four. The children are bright, active and healthy; Mark and Lisa look rather like their mother while Heidi has inherited Paul’s features. The backyard is a mare’s nest of bikes and swing sets, while the basement playroom is largely given over to their toys.

Paul is a systems analyst presently employed by a large corporation with executive offices in Manhattan. His current salary is $16,350, plus the usual array of fringe benefits and pension plans. His work occupies him five days a week from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, with another two hours a day commuting time. He characterizes himself as “a sort of efficiency expert for computers” and seems happy enough at it. One senses that it is no more than a job, that the compensation and challenge are sufficient to prevent him from feeling bored or trapped, and that the problems of the job rarely if ever occupy his mind while he is away from the office.

Sheila, like her husband, is a college graduate. Twice since graduation she has enrolled at a university to take additional courses toward a master’s degree, but both times she abandoned the project within a month or so. She talks occasionally of going back to college when the children are older, or, alternatively, of qualifying as an elementary school teacher. This seems more lip service to the feminine mystique than anything else, and if Sheila finds the role of wife and housekeeper confining, her reaction is certainly no more than typical for women in her situation, overeducated for an occupation which modern technology has in turn rendered increasingly mechanical and routine. In the main, she is happy with her role — in love with her husband, devoted to her children, secure in her home.

Little boxes on a hillside—

Ten or twenty or thirty times a year, for the past six years, Paul and Sheila Gordon have gotten together with one or more other couples for an evening of organized adultery.

The horror is that there is no horror, that the whole concept of wife-swapping has in the space of little more than a decade become a commonplace article of popular journalism, a staple for sensationalistic magazines and racy newsstand fiction. Consider the simple definition of the practice — married couples have revised their definition of the marital relationship so as to consider the exchange of partners for sexual purposes wholly compatible with the maintenance of these relationships. Such a state of affairs could hardly be less than remarkable.

And yet we scarcely find it remarkable at all. On the contrary, we are rather more likely to accept the existence of wife-swappers much as we accept the existence of electrons — we cannot see them, but we have it on good authority that they exist. We may read about them, being either titillated or enervated or bored according to our inclinations, but our involvement with them is never other than vicarious. They are certainly not the sort of people we are apt to meet on the street.

But this is manifestly not the case.

Over the past several years I have written a number of books and magazine pieces dealing with various aspects of the sexual revolution. The wife-swapping fraternity has featured prominently in my writing and research. And if one fact stands out among all others, it is simply that these swingers, these wife-swappers, are in every sense of the terms the “folks next door.” If there is one striking thing about the practice of swapping, it is the way in which it cuts across all strata of society. And if there is one striking thing about the average couple involved in this pursuit, it is how exceptionally average they are.

If this is the case, why then are wife-swappers universally regarded as a breed apart? The answer is not really that elusive. When a group is considered only in respect to that idiosyncrasy which sets it apart — whether sexual or racial or religious or whatever — the idiosyncrasy overshadows the individuals. It must be consciously borne in mind that while a man may be a homosexual or a Negro or a Mohammedan or a philatelist or a ditch digger, he is never one of these things twenty-four hours a day to the exclusion of all else.

All of which is a roundabout explanation of the genesis of this present book. I began interviewing Paul and Sheila Gordon in connection with another book dealing with various aspects of the contemporary sexual underground. I was struck at once by the special qualities of Paul and Sheila — their intelligence, their perception, and, perhaps most important of all, their ability to verbalize effectively concerning their ideas and experiences. While it is by no means rare to encounter swingers who are willing to talk about their experiences, the vast majority of them are not much good at talking about anything. The Gordons were unusually articulate subjects, and it never ceased to be a pleasure to interview them.

As it turned out, I did not make direct use of these interviews in the book I was then preparing, although the insight which I gained through my contact with Paul and Sheila did enable me to discuss other cases with greater perspective. After the book was completed, however, I found myself frequently thinking of the Gordons and wondering if there might not be some way to make use of their experiences. While musing on the inability of the average “civilian” to appreciate that swingers are the sort of people who might very well move next door to him (and without affecting his property values, either), it occurred to me that a book-length study of one married couple, told almost entirely in their own words, might fill a significant gap. By far the majority of books dealing at all seriously with the wife-swapping phenomenon (as opposed to trashy novels and thinly veiled bits of pornography) employ the anthology approach: i.e., they present perhaps a dozen case histories in order to illuminate many facets of the overall subject.

This is, certainly, a useful approach, presenting the reader as it does with more than a single look at a topic. I can also state from experience that it is very useful for a writer, as it is almost always a simpler matter to select the relevant data about a dozen couples than to mine a book’s worth of material out of a single case history. In this particular instance, however, it seemed to me that a study of a single couple in more than the usual degree of depth was indicated, and that it could prove sufficiently absorbing to sustain a full-length book.

When I broached the subject to Paul and Sheila, they were at first reluctant, less I think out of a desire to avoid exposing themselves than from the conviction that their lives and selves could not be all that interesting to the rest of the world. Once I was able to assure them that their story was potentially valuable to swingers and nonswingers alike, they were enthusiastic about the project and made themselves readily available for several additional interviews.

A word on method might be pertinent here. The material which follows is in the words of Paul and Sheila Gordon. The reader will note that I have presented it in the form of interviews. While the words which appear here are given as they were spoken by the Gordons, the interviews have been edited out of sequence in order to present various material in the most useful order. Similarly, I occasionally interviewed one or the other of the two without the spouse present, and there was an inevitable duplication of material, all of which had to be boiled down and parceled up and put into usable form. Thus, while what follows is in every sense the Gordons’ story, this is not to say that it consists of a simple verbatim rendition of the interview tapes. Such a transcription would be three or four times the length of this volume and of no practical interest to anyone.

It should go without saying that Paul and Sheila Gordon go by other names in the world at large, that the names given to them and to other “characters” in this book have all been deliberately fictionalized, as have any particular data about individuals which might tend to make them recognizable. While the persons appearing in the following pages are by no means fictitious, their names and other personal details about them very definitely are.

Lives made of ticky-tacky, all looking quite the same — one wonders if this, after all, begins to explain the special phenomenon of wife-swapping. We have all heard countless variations of the joke in which a man returns one night to his tract home, loses his way, and, unable to distinguish one house from the next, goes to a neighbor’s house and sleeps with the neighbor’s wife without anyone knowing the difference. Can it be, then, that we have witnessed the ultimate triumph of the Industrial Revolution, to the point where not only our machines but also our marriages are composed of interchangeable parts?

While the notion is a tempting one, I don’t suspect it has much real validity. One finds oneself searching for the “cause” of this or that type of socio-sexual behavior, as if in fact one were dealing with a particular disease specifically caused by a particular microorganism. Behavior patterns are not so simply engendered. It has been said that the “cause” of any moment in history is nothing more or less than the sum of all the moments which have preceded it, and in this sense it would be simplistic to point at precise causes for the existence of wife-swapping, in society in general or the Gordons in particular.

On the other hand, the reader will discover for himself any number of ways in which the marital relationship of Paul and Sheila Gordon, their drives and desires and fears and hopes and needs, reflect in diverse ways any number of aspects of the society in which they — and all of us — live. If sex seems to play an overly prominent role in their lives, do they then differ greatly from the rest of us in these times of heightened sexual awareness? If they seem ever dissatisfied, anxious, groping, are we not all subject to much the same irritating nameless yearnings? Indeed, in their strengths and weaknesses alike, and in the fashion in which these traits shape their lives, Paul and Sheila are all too typical of a generation, a nation, a world.

The reader will note that I have not bothered to moralize on the lives and practices of the Gordons, having been neither inclined by temperament nor qualified by virtue to cast initial stones. The reader may judge or not, as he desires. More important, he may learn (as the author did) something about himself and the world around him by considering the way some people live.

Beginnings

A Sunday afternoon in fall. Football weather. Sheila Gordon sitting on her feet on the living room couch, dark green slacks, a gold sweater, brown suede slippers. Paul Gordon in an armchair, a drink on the table beside him, slacks, a sport shirt. The children are downstairs watching television. Periodically one appears with a nose to be wiped or a question to be answered and the conversation is held up until the child is on its way.

SHEILA: About a year after it started, after we first got involved in swinging, I remember going through a real siege of introspection. Not just me individually, it was a mutual thing. We both found ourselves immersed in a sea of questions. Where are we? How did we get here? The usual. We were honestly astonished, I think, that this had happened to us. To people like us.

PAUL: You see, we had always regarded ourselves as basically conservative types. One of the key words in the swingers’ advertisements is “liberal.” You know the drill — “modern, liberal, free-thinking couple, etc.” Of course this has nothing to do with politics. But regardless, we had always thought of ourselves as middle-of-the-road people. We hadn’t had that much sexual experience before marriage, nor had our own marriage been that highly sexed. Not that we fell asleep on the way to bed, nothing like that, but not like the stereotyped picture you might have of typical swingers who have had nothing but sex on their minds since they hit adolescence.

SHEILA: That’s how it always happens in books, isn’t it? Two oversexed kids get married and within a couple of years they’ve tried every form of screwing there is until they just don’t turn each other on any more. Then they decide that something is missing from their lives, so he has an affair with a girl in his office and she plays house with the plumber, and finally they clear the air, talk things over, and invite the next-door neighbors in for a round of musical beds.

PAUL: It does happen that way.

SHEILA: Definitely. No argument, it does. But it didn’t for us. We weren’t all that experienced when we were married. I had had one very brief and completely unsuccessful bit of sleeping with a guy I was pinned to, and Paul had had a few affairs, most of which were just one-shot things, and the two of us did make love in the few months before we got married, but that was about all, and that’s certainly less experience than the average couple brings to marriage nowadays. We had a good relationship from the start, and of course Mark and Lisa came into the picture almost immediately. Mark when we were married just over a year and Lisa fifteen months later. So in the first four years of marriage we were really too busy adjusting to changes to feel confined or frustrated or whatever. Paul kept changing jobs, and each time it meant a complete relocation for us, giving up old friends and making new ones and finding out where to shop and, oh, all the complications that accompany a move from one city to another.

So I certainly didn’t have any affairs. I wasn’t bored with my own husband, for one thing. Nor was I beset by propositions. I gained innumerable pounds with each pregnancy and wasn’t all that good about getting them off afterward, so plumbers and deliverymen were sadly immune to my raw animal magnetism.

PAUL: Once, while Sheila was pregnant with Lisa, I had relations with another woman. You couldn’t call it an affair. I was in Chicago to interview a company that had been sending out job feelers, and I was all alone there and didn’t know a soul, and Sheila and I hadn’t been able to have relations for the past month and wouldn’t for two more months. This last was more an excuse than anything else, really, although I managed to convince myself at the time that a stray piece would have considerable therapeutic value. At any rate, someone had given me this call girl’s phone number. She came to my hotel room. I was really very jittery and nervous, not that anything untoward would happen, but, I don’t know, I felt awkward about the whole thing. At first I couldn’t do anything, but the girl used a massage device to get me over the hump, if you’ll pardon the expression. The whole experience was pretty blah, but later on I found myself thinking back on it and having fantasies about the call girl. Occasionally I would think of her while I was making love to Sheila—

SHEILA: That’s known as Walter Mitty cheating.

PAUL: It’s disgustingly common, too. I think everyone does it at one time or another. Most swingers will tell you that they’ve gone through it before they got in the swing of things. There’s a joke you may know — a man and wife are making love, just going on and on at it, neither of them able to reach orgasm. And finally he stops and looks at her sympathetically and says, “What’s the matter, honey? Can’t you think of anybody either?”

SHEILA: Actually it’s a pretty sad story.

PAUL: Pathetic, really. But that one experience in Chicago, plus a certain amount of fantasizing, was as much cheating as either of us did. Or planned to do, I would say. We had what we both felt was a perfectly satisfactory sexual relationship. Oh, it goes without saying that the initial thrill had worn off. It always does, and it wasn’t surprising to us that it did. You can’t make love to the same person for a period of several years without having the experience lose its excitement. Even for couples who remain devotedly monogamous throughout their lives, I can’t possibly believe that the thrill doesn’t wear off.

SHEILA: We thought it was a matter of getting used to sex. We didn’t realize then that what was missing was variety.

PAUL: Or if we did realize it we didn’t think about it very much.

JWW: Then the picture I have of the two of you after approximately four years of marriage is that of a reasonably contented and well-adjusted couple with no interest in adultery beyond the fantasy level?

PAUL: That’s about it.

JWW: You had no knowledge of the existence of the swinging world?

PAUL: Well, I wouldn’t go that far.

SHEILA: It’s impossible to be wholly unaware of its existence, don’t you think? There have been just too many books and magazine articles on the subject. Even if you never buy those magazines you see the titles of the articles plastered all over the covers every time you pass a newsstand. Just the name, the word “wife-swapping.” It’s enough to let a person know what it’s all about.

PAUL: But that was really the extent of our knowledge. We didn’t know any swingers personally, we hadn’t talked about swinging between ourselves, and to be quite frank, the few articles I did read didn’t make the whole thing sound that attractive to me. This may not be typical, because I’ve met a great many couples who were in a sense introduced to swinging by books and magazines — the husband would read articles on the subject and get all excited by the idea, and things would just sort of build from there. Maybe I picked the wrong articles, but what I read didn’t excite me at all. It was like reading about tribal initiation rites among the islanders of Pungo Pungo — you know, academically interesting, but not the sort of thing you could identify with personally to any appreciable extent. These just weren’t the sort of people we knew, they weren’t people like us, so I couldn’t get interested.

SHEILA: And I really didn’t know enough about it even to go that far in my thinking. For me it was just headlines, and I never gave it much thought.

PAUL: Then we got initiated.

SHEILA: You mean seduced.

PAUL: That sounds like a pretty ridiculous expression, doesn’t it?

SHEILA: It’s what happened.

PAUL: I guess that’s true enough. If you want to get really cloak and daggerish about it, it wasn’t just a seduction. It was a conspiracy. Jeff and Jan Creighton carefully plotted things out so that they could get the two of us into bed. When they eventually told us about it, we thought it was pretty hysterical. We got a lot of laughs out of it. Another time, during one of those agonizing reappraisals a married couple is apt to have from time to time, well, we had a little trouble appreciating the humor of it all. It began to seem pretty cold-blooded...

As he begins to recount the experience with the Creightons, Sheila visibly withdraws from the conversation. She sits back on the couch, lights a cigarette, smokes it in nervous little puffs and puts it out before more than half of it has been consumed. She looks at neither her husband nor the interviewer but lets her gaze flit about the room, now at a picture on the wall, now at the bookshelves, now at the carpet. She worries her lower lip with her teeth, picks at a loose thread on the couch. And yet it is obvious that she is keeping in close touch with the conversation, for she periodically breaks in with a phrase or comment.

PAUL: This was in Kansas City. We didn’t take the Chicago offer but wound up in Kansas City, and instead of taking a house we rented an apartment just outside of the city limits. A duplex, one side of a two-story home. I had the feeling at the time that we might not be staying there too long and I felt it wouldn’t be worthwhile to go into a house if we were going to pick up and move in less than a year’s time. We had as much floor space as we would have had in a home of our own, and as a temporary thing it was quite comfortable and convenient.

The Creightons were our next-door neighbors. Our other-side-of-the-house neighbors, I should say. They had been there for a year when we moved in. Jeff was a product manager with a major company. He was two years older than I, and I was twenty-six at the time, so he would have been twenty-eight. Jan was the same age as Sheila, twenty-three.

The four of us hit it off from the beginning. They were very friendly and of course we didn’t know a soul in town, so we were glad enough to be friends. They had a kid just about the same age as ours and he must have been making about the same salary as I was, and all of this helped; the more you have in common, the easier it is to connect and get acquainted.

SHEILA: It was more than that. Rapport.

PAUL: That goes without saying. No matter how much people have in common, there’s a special chemistry that has to be present or else nothing happens. It was there. I liked Jeff from the beginning. He was a good-looking, athletic guy, dressed well without looking like a male model, spoke nicely, knew how to tell a story or listen to one. Jan was a tall girl with a really fantastic figure. The Playboy gatefold type, very voluptuous, almost overblown. The sort of figure that’s likely to come unglued when a woman’s in her thirties, but she was twenty-three then and everything was right where it was supposed to be. She had a way of looking straight into your eyes when you were talking, as if she was staring right into you and getting past what you were saying to what you were thinking about. I suppose the conventional term is bedroom eyes, but it was actually something beyond that. It wasn’t just a matter of sex. It was intimacy, in the real sense of the word. That was what she projected.

JWW: You were attracted to her. Did you think about having sex with her?

PAUL: In a way.

SHEILA: Oh? Which way did you think about?

PAUL: You know what I mean. I thought about it the way any man will think about a woman he finds attractive. I didn’t make a big fantasy thing about it, and I certainly didn’t have the slightest intention of actually going and doing anything about it. But I thought about it, imagined it, wondered what it would be like. People always do this, you know. It seems to be true that men are more predisposed to do this than women, and I can think of several reasons for this, both biological and cultural. On the cultural side, women have been more carefully conditioned to think that they can only have relations with their husbands. The notion of men cheating is less shocking somehow than of women cheating. And biologically, well, I think it’s an inherent drive that makes men want variety, a basic biological urge to have relations with and impregnate as many women as possible. I have a feeling it’s all tied up with natural selection and evolution, survival of the fittest and all of that...

The point is that I had an urge, and so did Sheila. I don’t think hers was as well defined—

SHEILA: I found Jeff attractive, that’s all. And more sympathetic than most men. Generally a man won’t really talk to another man’s wife as a person. He’ll treat her as part of a couple, not as an individual. Maybe so she won’t think he’s making a pass, or so his own wife won’t be jealous. Or because deep down inside most men simply cannot relate to most women as human beings, which is sad but true, I’m afraid. Jeff Creighton made me very conscious of myself as a woman, and I felt he liked and appreciated me. How much of that feeling was sexual I couldn’t say.

PAUL: It became sexual soon enough. We moved into that duplex in February, and in May we swapped with them. It didn’t take them very long at all.

They started things off by getting as well acquainted with us as they possibly could. It was natural for the four of us to see a lot of each other, but as time went by we were constantly thrown together. The two girls were together for a few hours every afternoon for coffee and conversation, and we got together as couples at least once a weekend and one or more nights during the week. It certainly was convenient — we would drop over there or have them over to our place without the aggravation and expense of finding a baby sitter. And you couldn’t even get a sitter on week nights, so an evening with Jeff and Jan was like free entertainment — we didn’t have to plan it in advance and it didn’t cost us anything.

Sometime in April things began to get a sexual tone to them. I don’t know exactly how it started, but it got there gradually enough.

SHEILA: Jan used to bring sex into the conversations during the afternoons. She would say that she was having her period and that Jeff just couldn’t stand waiting until she was done with it.

PAUL: Women will discuss personal things with each other that two men would never dream of bringing up. It never ceases to amaze me. Men might talk about what they do outside of marriage, but women just talk about what they do inside it.

SHEILA: Once she suggested that we ought to have a mutual agreement — Jeff would sleep with me when she had her period, and she would take care of Paul when I had it. Just a joke, all very casual, but with the obvious purpose of planting the idea in my mind.

JWW: And did the idea take hold?

SHEILA: I suppose it did. Not the idea of that sort of mutual compact, certainly. Although I have heard of quite a few cases of wives setting up something like that when they had to stop having sex because of advanced pregnancy. That’s quite common, believe it or not. People start off that way and later on get into swinging once they find out that they enjoy a little variety. But I would have to say yes, it did force me to think of Jeff as a potential sex partner. When something is brought to your attention that way it’s virtually impossible to avoid thinking about it. And if you try to banish a thought, all you do is force it all the more firmly into your consciousness.

PAUL: Jeff was a little less obvious about things. He would occasionally tell me that Jan really thought a lot of me, that she had said she really liked me and felt comfortable with me, that sort of thing. “I don’t think I’d trust the two of you together”—lines like that. And then when the four of us were together, the subject of sex seemed to get brought into the conversation more and more frequently. It just came up more and more often. Conversations would have double meanings, that sort of thing. This happens with sophisticated couples as they feel increasingly at ease with each other and of course it doesn’t necessarily mean anything in and of itself, but here it was another way of breaking the ice and conditioning us for the big step.

When that came, it was sort of a one-two combination. It started on a Friday night. We were over at their place, their side of the house, and we had had the usual quota of drinks to celebrate the fact that the work week was over. I guess I was on my way back from the john or something and I ran into Jan in the kitchen. She and I had been exchanging these looks all night long. She told me I had a spot on my tie, and I couldn’t find it. She came over to me to show me. I was staring down the front of her dress when she suddenly raised her eyes and caught mine. The next thing I knew we were kissing. I’ll never know which one of us made the first move, but it hardly mattered. She seemed to resist at first, if only for a second, and then her mouth opened and she was breathing hard and moving her body against me. It was unbelievably exciting. I knew that Sheila or Jeff could walk in at any moment and catch us, but even so I couldn’t stop kissing her. The thought that we could be caught almost added to the excitement. Then finally she pushed me away and the two of us stood staring at each other. I felt excited and guilty and foolish and drunk, everything all at once. I didn’t know what to say, and so I didn’t say anything and we drifted back to the other room.

Later that evening she would catch my eye now and then and give me a secret smile. It was... well, I suppose disconcerting was the only word for it. I didn’t know how to feel, how to react. I drank more than usual that night and passed out as soon as my head hit the pillow.

All the next day I couldn’t think about anything else. I felt guilty, not because I had particularly done anything but because I knew this would always be there between us, this attraction, whether I ever got around to doing anything about it or not. And I really wanted to make love to Jan. I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. That Saturday I was doing the usual weekend things, playing with the kids and working around the house and looking at television a little, and throughout it all I would get these vivid images of making love to Jan and I kept having erections like a teen-ager. It was really crazy.

Then they came over that night. I made everybody’s drinks a little stronger than usual, mainly because I felt the need of getting a little tight and I didn’t want to be the only one. I was really torn up, in the sense that I was afraid something was going to happen and I both wanted it to and didn’t want it to. As the evening wore on, Jan and I were more and more conscious of each other. The attraction was so strong you could feel it in the air, like static electricity.

SHEILA: The two of you were pretty obvious about it.

PAUL: I didn’t know whether we were or not. I couldn’t tell.

JWW: How did you feel then, Sheila?

SHEILA: I don’t know. A little jealous, but not entirely that, really. The calm before the storm is the cliché that comes to mind. It was like that. You know the feeling the air has on a hot day just before it pours? It was like that on an emotional level. The air was charged with something but I don’t think I knew consciously what it was. And of course it’s impossible now to know how much of this is being filled in by hindsight and how much I recognized at the time.

PAUL: I was particularly uncertain as to how I felt about Jeff. That’s where the real guilt was — not that I would be cheating on Sheila but that I would be betraying my best friend. I was making drinks when he came in, and I said something properly inane, and he said, I forget the exact words, but something to the effect that if I enjoyed kissing his wife I would probably want more than a sample.

I was just stunned. Literally that, because I didn’t know how to react. He said what an angry man would say in his place, and yet he didn’t seem angry. I started to apologize or explain it away as the result of liquor, but he didn’t let me get started. He put a hand on my arm and gave me a smile. “Save it,” he said. “Jan and I are too broad-minded to be jealous. The two of you like each other. She’d like to go to bed with you. You’d like to go to bed with her. That’s fine with me.” I just stood there with my mouth open while he moved past me and went on back to the living room.

I took my time fixing the drinks, trying to digest what Jeff had said. All I could think was that he was giving me carte blanche to make love to his wife, and it was as though once he had given his permission no other considerations could possibly stand in the way. The fact that my own wife might object, or that it might put a crimp in our marriage, somehow didn’t enter into things. I could only think that Jan and I wanted to make love and that nothing stood in our way.

When I returned to the living room there was slow music playing on the hi-fi and Jan and Jeff were dancing together. Sheila was sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette. I put my drink down and held out my arms for her and we danced. I felt very warm toward her, very warm toward everyone. I knew something extraordinary was going to happen but I couldn’t think too clearly about just what it would be. I was very happy and exuberant, I remember.

As the record ended, Jeff and Jan moved alongside us. Jan said, “Why don’t we try changing partners?”

The phrase rang in my head, over and over. Why don’t we try changing partners? It was more than double-entendre. It was just a direct sexual suggestion, and at the moment I was all for it. At any rate, I began dancing with her and Jeff danced with Sheila.

Jan danced with her whole body. We pressed together at once, and I felt the pressure of her large breasts and the heat of her loins, and I got excited immediately. She began breathing heavily. I was afraid she would notice that I had an erection, and at the same time I wanted to press it against her, to let her know how I was responding to her. Then she touched it with her hand and whispered, “Oh, how nice!” and started rubbing herself against me. I danced her off into a corner and kissed her, and this time her mouth opened immediately and we kissed deeply, furiously.

SHEILA: I could see what they were doing. Not all the details, but I could certainly see that they were involved in more than a friendly session of social dancing. I’ve always wondered how I would have reacted if I had been cold sober. The drinks did make a difference. They gave everything an unreal feeling. It’s hard to explain just how I felt about it. I was angry, and hurt, and oddly excited, and — well, confused, as much as anything else. I was sort of waiting for Jeff to cue me as to how I should be reacting. His wife was making out with my husband, and if he had gotten furious I would have done the same. I waited for him to lead so that I could follow.

PAUL: When the record ended Jan said she had to check the children. “I’m afraid to go there alone,” she said. “All the way next door. You don’t mind if I borrow your husband, do you, Sheila?” We didn’t wait for an answer. I went along with her and we went out the door and let it close after us. The fresh air sobered me for an instant, and I almost turned and went back inside, but then she was in my arms and I was kissing her again. She was very passionate.

We went into their half of the house. There wasn’t even any pretense of checking the children. She led me upstairs to their bedroom and we kissed again. Of course I knew we were going to make love. I couldn’t really believe it, but I knew it.

We sort of tumbled onto their bed, clothes and all. There was really no time for foreplay. The whole thing was far too urgent. We just got enough clothes off to get at each other, and then I was on her and inside of her and I thought, God, it’s actually happening after all, then I couldn’t even think any more...

SHEILA: When they walked out of the house together I couldn’t believe it. I honestly couldn’t believe it. I stood staring after them, and then I turned and stared at Jeff. It’s as if I was incapable of reacting on my own.

He said, “Do you know where they’re going, Sheila?”

I shook my head.

“They’re going to bed,” he said.

I didn’t say anything!

“Jan and Paul,” he said. “They’re going to make love. And now I’m going to make love to you.”

I said, “Why?”

He said, “Because you’re beautiful and I want to fuck you.”

I had absolutely no will of my own. None. If he had said he was going to kill me I suppose I would have gone along with that, too. We stayed there in the living room with the same idiot record playing over and over. He took off all my clothes, then undressed himself. I remember looking at his penis and thinking that it was the first penis other than my husband’s and my son’s that I had seen in years. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

We made love on the couch. It must have been incredibly boring for him at first, unless he had a thing for necrophilia. I guess I did a fairly good impersonation of a corpse. I was just numb. I lay there on my back while he touched me and kissed me.

He was very patient. He went down on me and just did that very gently for what seemed like ages, and my mind relaxed and got loose, until finally my stupid body put two and two together and realized that something exciting was going on. I got excited, very excited, and he stayed with me and I had an orgasm that way.

Then we had intercourse, and I had another orgasm, and so did he.

PAUL: When Jan and I finished, I think I must have blacked out. Not for very long, but for a few minutes, anyway. When I came out of it I didn’t know where I was for a moment. Then I saw her face and felt her body under mine and got my bearings.

I was suddenly very sober and very much shocked about the whole thing. I thought back to what Jeff had said in the kitchen, and it seemed now that he hadn’t really given us permission to do this at all, but that I had read things into his words. And of course I was completely torn up at the thought of what Sheila was going to say.

Jan told me to relax. “Jeff knows we’re together,” she said. “And he doesn’t mind.”

I asked her if she was sure of this. She said she was, and that as far as she and Jeff were concerned, this sort of thing had no adverse effect on their marriage. She said in fact that it kept their marriage strong, because they didn’t get bored with each other and weren’t tempted to do any secret cheating. She said Jeff knew she loved him and that what she did in bed with me or anyone else wouldn’t affect the love she and Jeff had for each other.

She asked if I would mind if another man made love to Sheila.

I said I didn’t know. She asked if I would mind if Jeff made love to Sheila. “We had our fun,” she said, “and they’re having theirs.” All at once I had this strong mental picture of Jeff and Sheila in our bed, making love. A really vivid photographic image of this. And the feeling that rushed through me was one of relief. That was exactly what I felt. I had nothing to feel guilty about now, because Sheila and Jeff were doing what Jan and I had done, and the two acts canceled one another out.

“You don’t have to worry about a thing,” she said. “I love Jeff and you love Sheila. You won’t ruin your marriage, Paul. Your marriage will be stronger than ever before. But think of all the fun we’ll have, Paul. We can do this once a week. All open and aboveboard, and we won’t have to worry about anyone finding out. No sneaking around, no hiding.”

I was too rattled to say anything. I thought we would straighten our clothing and go back to join the others. I didn’t know what we would say or do, but I figured I could play it by ear. But Jan wasn’t through. She wanted another turn — and I can’t really blame her, the first didn’t last too long. She stood up and took off her clothes. I stared at her. She had a really exceptional figure.

There were any number of things I wanted to ask her, but it was no time to talk. I got out of my clothes, and while I made love to her I imagined Jeff with Sheila, and the whole experience was exciting in ways I couldn’t even begin to understand...

We did finally get dressed and go back to the party. I would have barged right on in, but Jan stopped me and knocked on the door, and I guess that gave them time to get their clothes on. Jeff opened the door. “I hope you kids had as much fun as we did,” he said, grinning.

Until he said that I don’t think I completely believed that he and Sheila had really done it. Hearing him say it gave me a very funny feeling.

Then he said that he was sure we would have a lot of questions, that he knew there must be a lot we would all have to talk about, but that it would keep until morning and that Sheila and I would probably want to be alone for the time being. He told us everything was going to be great and not to worry about a thing, and then he and Jan went out the door and left us alone with each other.

SHEILA: Neither of us knew what to say.

PAUL: That’s an understatement We got through it by saying as little as possible. We just went upstairs and got undressed and into bed.

SHEILA: I could smell her on him. Her perfume. More than that — her smell. I asked him if she was better than me. “Just different,” he said, and I knew exactly what he meant. Because Jeff was different from him, and it was different being with Jeff than with Paul. Not better or worse. Different.

I said, “But it was more exciting, wasn’t it?” He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I knew it was more exciting for him because it had been more exciting for me. Four years of making love to each other and to no one else — it isn’t a question of getting stale, of the romance going out of a marriage. It’s just that you can’t possibly have that first-time thrill when you’re doing it with someone for the five-hundredth time. So I knew.

We didn’t talk, but we were close together. We held each other, and he told me he loved me, and I guess I cried a little. And then — and this may seem strange — then we made love.

PAUL: That happens more often than you might think.

SHEILA: It almost always happens with people who go into swapping with their eyes open, as a matter of fact. In our situation I think it was a little unusual.

PAUL: It probably was.

SHEILA: It was also very satisfying. I don’t remember what I thought at the time. I probably thought about myself with Jeff and about Paul with Jan, but I don’t honestly remember. But it was very exciting and satisfying.

JWW: And in the morning?

PAUL: By a sort of unvoiced agreement, neither of us mentioned it in the morning. This was pretty weird, actually. I kept finding myself wondering if it really happened or if maybe I dreamed the whole thing.

SHEILA: I had the feeling that you might have blacked it all out. We were all drinking fairly heavily, and I thought maybe I remembered it all and you didn’t.

PAUL: That’s a funny notion.

SHEILA: Hysterical.

PAUL: Well, to get back to the subject, we didn’t really discuss it at all until the Creightons came over. They turned up on our doorstep in the middle of the afternoon. We sent the kids outside to play and Sheila put up a pot of coffee, and they filled us in on the whole situation. For the most part they just talked and we listened, throwing in an occasional question here and there. Jeff carried the conversation, with Jan functioning as a sort of echo.

SHEILA: We were only the second couple they had done this with. Now this is funny — at the time I was really surprised to learn that they had ever done this before, which shows how naive I was. But later I was more surprised to think that they had carried out this elaborate seduction with so little experience as swingers. In any case, we were the second couple on their list. The first couple had been the previous occupants of our apartment, believe it or not. There had been no seduction then. The other couple had been reading about wife-swapping, and the four of them got to talking about it and studying books on it, and they decided to give it a try. All open and aboveboard, and pleasing for all concerned, except that the other couple had moved to the West Coast after a few months of fun and games.

What they did, mainly, was explain the effect that swinging with this other couple had had on their marriage. They went to great lengths to sell us on the idea that swapping did more to hold a marriage together than to break it up. They emphasized that swinging with the other couple had livened up their own sexual relationship, that it had kept them from getting urges for affairs with outsiders — all the standard rationalizations that swingers have. Maybe “rationalizations” is a bad term, because most of these arguments are true enough, and quite valid. The only thing is that they don’t really explain why people stay with swinging.

JWW: Which is?

SHEILA: Because it is exciting...

PAUL: They didn’t just talk to us. They also left us a satchel full of literature. They were more anxious to pass out pamphlets than the religious nuts who go around ringing doorbells, and the books and magazines they gave us were a hell of a lot more interesting. There were the usual books on swapping, plus a variety of swap-club magazines and newsletters.

JWW: Then the Creightons had been active in swap clubs?

PAUL: No, they hadn’t. They had sent for the literature just as a matter of interest, and after their friends moved out they had planned to try to find new friends through correspondence, but they had never quite gotten around to taking the plunge. It’s a big step, you know, actually writing letters and arranging a meeting with total strangers. I’m sure they would have gone through with it sooner or later, but then we moved in next door to them, and they were strongly attracted to us, and so they decided to see if they couldn’t get something started with us before they got involved in correspondence.

SHEILA: Remember, this was back in the days when the postal inspectors did a lot of entrapment of swingers. That’s stopped now, but at the time it was a very good reason for staying away from the correspondence clubs.

JWW: How did you react to all of this?

PAUL: It was almost too much to absorb. At first it really wasn’t a question of reacting. We were too busy trying to digest all this information, to figure out what sort of people our friends were and what sort of world this society of swingers was. We talked to them all afternoon, had dinner, put the kids to bed, then had them come over and talk to us some more. And then we stayed up half the night reading the books and magazines and discussing what we read, and, inevitably, getting excited from the reading and conversation and making love.

JWW: Just the two of you, that is.

PAUL: Yes.

SHEILA: That whole night and the next few evenings as well served as a tremendous emotional catharsis for us. I think over the year or two prior to that time we had begun shutting each other out. People tend to do this, you know. Even in a good marriage there’s a tendency to build walls between the partners, to lead semiprivate lives. This experience, jarring as it was, got us to open up to one another and talk about a lot of things we had barely thought about before. Our whole ideas, not only concerning sex, but about, oh, lots of things — marriage, love, life.

I was able for the first time to talk about the affair I had had before I began going with Paul. There were aspects to that affair, I won’t go into them now, but they needed talking about and I had kept it all locked inside. And Paul told me about the girl in Chicago, which was something he really had to get out in the open but which he could not possibly have talked about before this. Nor could I have listened, as far as that goes.

PAUL: We did clear the air. And we decided that, well, that we would do this again.

JWW: That you would continue to exchange partners with the Creightons.

PAUL: Yes.

SHEILA: It would be a regular Friday-night thing, we decided. A weekly swap. I remember I got together with Jan the afternoon after we finally decided, and I told her, and we talked about almost everything. She told me she had felt very close to me from the day we moved in, but that now that we were sharing husbands she felt infinitely closer to me than ever before. I knew exactly what she meant. I felt a tremendous amount of tenderness for her, and warmth. She said that we were sisters, closer than sisters.

Thursday night Paul and I practically had an orgy. All we could think about was what we would be doing the following night. Not the simple fact of having sex relations with Jeff and Jan but the whole idea of meeting together and systematically changing partners. I’m sure the forbidden aspect of it was part of the excitement. Forbidden fruit and all that.

Friday night, they came over to our place again after dinner. It was amazing how relaxed all four of us were. A real contrast to the scene a week earlier.

We put on records, danced a little, then turned down the lights and had a regular necking party. I sat on Jeff’s lap on an armchair and Paul and Jan took the couch, and we kissed and petted like teenagers.

Then I took Jeff upstairs.

Love Thy Neighbor

PAUL: It’s a cliché to say that the average married couple doesn’t know what they’re missing. Cliché or not, it’s very literally true. It was certainly true in our case.

SHEILA: In other words, we thought we were happy. We didn’t realize how miserable our lives were.

PAUL: No, seriously. We did think our lives were full, that we were getting as much out of sex and love and life as we could reasonably expect to. We didn’t start with this basic feeling of sexual discontent that you hear so much about. In other words, we didn’t know what we were missing. That first night with Jan and Jeff opened up a whole new world for us, to add yet another cliché to the pile. There was a potential excitement in sexual relationships that we had not known to be there—

SHEILA: We had never been that technique-minded before, for example. We would vary positions and try different things to a limited degree, but for the most part we had settled into a comfortable groove. There were certain things we both knew that we liked, and we would do that, and there was very little interest in increased experimentation. But when we started swinging we would learn little things from Jeff or Jan and introduce them into our own relationship. And besides that, we were just more concerned with matters of technique, more interested in the whole idea.

PAUL: This is universally true, incidentally. Swingers are just better in bed than civilians.

SHEILA: That’s partly because they get more practice, of course. And because they’re sexier people to begin with. But it’s also because they care more. They don’t confine themselves to the same partner year after year after year. They make love with a lot of different people, and so they have a basis for comparison.

PAUL: And they take pride in technique. You might be surprised to learn how much skill a man or woman can develop simply through practice and application. The average person tends to think that sexual ability is inborn. That a person is or is not passionate, for instance. That the major factors are the size of a man’s penis or the shape of a girl’s body. Those are probably the least important considerations, as a matter of fact. How long a man can sustain intercourse, the extent of a man’s or woman’s muscular control, any number of oral and manual techniques — these have more to do with one’s ability or lack thereof in the hay.

SHEILA: Amen to that...

They are easier, now, with one another and with the interviewer. Before, when they discussed the manner in which the Creightons had seduced them, there was a very noticeable quantity of tension in the air, accompanied by a note of sorrow, perhaps a lament for their vanished innocence. The recollection of their reactions at the time — their confusion, the awkwardness of the situation, their doubts and fears — had introduced those very emotions as a background to our conversation. Now they have gotten past that initiation and reminisce as veteran swingers defending the life and proud of their abilities and strengths.

Over the summer, their relationship with the Creightons gradually developed and deepened. Before the summer’s end, the frequency of their sessions had increased from once to twice a week, with both Tuesday and Friday nights given over to sexual exchanges with the other couple. The social lives of both couples became so thoroughly centered upon the switching of partners that sex literally served as the focal point of all their lives.

PAUL: The change in our relationship was a very gradual thing. You have to remember that we were all of us not far removed from the novice stage in this sort of thing. The Creightons had swung with another couple, true enough, but they had never gotten any further than simply trading partners and going off to separate rooms for an hour or two of fun and games. This of course is the most basic level of swinging, and most couples move on to more involved stuff before very long.

SHEILA: And we knew what other couples did.

PAUL: Yes, that was the wild part. Between the ads in the club publications, some of which got pretty explicit, and the books which purported to tell all about swapping, we knew that what we were doing was regarded by hard-core swingers as pretty tame stuff. We would read about other things, threesomes and foursomes, all balling in the same room, that sort of thing, and I think all four of us really wanted to get into that bag but nobody wanted to be the one to suggest it. Like at a square party, for instance, where maybe all of the people there would really dig swapping for the night, but of course no one has the nerve to suggest it and so it never happens.

So the four of us got into this sort of thing in a gradual way. Looking back on it, it seems almost childish the way we would sort of stick our toes in and then look around carefully to make sure no one was overly shocked. The first testing of the boundaries was conversational. We began talking about things, all four of us together, that wouldn’t have been brought up in conversation earlier. For example, one Friday night we were at our place or theirs, it hardly matters, and we were sitting around having drinks as a sort of prelude to what would follow, and Jeff announced that he was hungry as a bear and that he intended to give Sheila the frenching of her life. She rose to the occasion with some remark about his well-trained tongue—

SHEILA: There are times when I wish you didn’t have a photographic memory for everything I say.

PAUL: Well, you said it, didn’t you? Anyway, that broke a particular conversational harder. We began talking openly about what we intended to do together, or what we had done. It made things more intimate.

SHEILA: That sounds funny, doesn’t it? I mean you would think that when four people are swapping, that’s about as intimate a situation as you can get. But it’s not so. Even in a swapping situation, there are all sorts of progressive degrees of intimacy.

PAUL: It wasn’t long, then, before we all four made love in the same room.

SHEILA: God, do you remember the first time we did that?

PAUL: Naturally.

SHEILA: That was the most exciting night.

PAUL: Again, this was a case of all of us having wanted to do this, but no one getting the ball rolling. Let’s face it — a very large proportion of the excitement in swinging is vicarious. The thought of Sheila getting extreme sexual pleasure with Jeff was as much a part of my enjoyment of the whole thing as what I did with Jan. That’s the one thing that the average civilian finds almost impossible to understand. People tend to think that there’s a sort of quid pro quo involved, that I’m willing to have another man make love to Sheila because I’m getting his wife in return.

SHEILA: Even the expression “swapping” gives that impression. That you make a trade, that you give up one thing to get another. That’s one reason I’m not too crazy about the phrase. I prefer swinging.

PAUL: I’ll say you do.

SHEILA: I mean the word.

PAUL: Just kidding, love. But the point is that I wanted Sheila to make it with Jeff, not just so I could have Jan with no guilt feelings but because the thought of her having her kicks was thrilling to me. And by extension I wanted to watch the two of them together, and wanted to make love to Jan in front of Sheila. I think we all wanted that.

SHEILA: Not at first. We had to get used to it.

PAUL: True enough. We had to get used to what we were doing before we could really want to do it all in the same room. As I said, as we’ve been saying throughout, all of this was a gradual process. Let’s face it, even nowadays, in what we like to think of as highly enlightened times, people grow up with a view of sex that is not far removed from old-fashioned New England Puritanism. Even those of us with so-called liberal attitudes, with not much bias against premarital sex and with the feeling that what a man and wife do in bed is beautiful, even so there’s an inevitable feeling that sex has to be secretive and hidden, that it can never involve more than two people, that it has to be tied up with love and hooked into the fabric of a permanent relationship. Even when you reject all of this on an intellectual level, it remains a very real part of your outlook. Now people can be conditioned to get themselves free from all of this, but it takes time. It has to happen bit by bit.

JWW: When it did happen for the first time, the four of you making love in the same room, was it as a result of someone’s suggestion?

PAUL: No, it just happened.

SHEILA: It had been mentioned. Don’t you remember? We had talked about how silly it was to split up, and you said you would like to watch me with Jeff.

PAUL: In a joking way, yes. And of course the joking had a foundation in fact as joking generally does, but that was about as far as it went. No, the way it happened was simple enough. We had the lights turned down low and were doing some dancing and necking. Very slow dancing that was more a matter of vertical petting than anything Arthur Murray would recognize. It was particularly exciting because we would switch partners every once in a while, not just for dancing but for petting as well. The thing of going from one woman to another, from Jan to my wife, had a sort of orgiastic feeling to it that was very erotic.

SHEILA: Then I think it was Jeff who took off his shirt. He said he was too warm and he didn’t see any reason why he should be uncomfortable. I think by this time we all knew what we were building up to. In the books we had read, this sort of thing often started with a game of Strip Poker, but I really don’t believe any of us could have taken anything as childish as Strip Poker at all seriously. The whole idea of it is too silly. I know there are swingers who use it to break the ice, but I just can’t see it. In order for it to work, you would have to get past the fact that it’s basically so juvenile, and you would also have to be conditioned to find nudity erotic in and of itself. There is something erotic in nudity, but not when you have a bunch of naked people sitting cross-legged on the floor playing cards. That crosses the line between eroticism and absurdity.

PAUL: From the sublime to the ridiculous, you might say.

SHEILA: Just the same, when Jeff took his shirt off, the words that flashed through my mind were “Strip Poker.” We began dancing again, and he kissed me and put his hand up under my skirt. I went all weak in the knees, and when I got my strength back I pushed him away and told him all of a sudden I was uncomfortably warm myself. I took off my blouse and my bra. We started dancing again, both of us bare from the waist up, and it was something.

PAUL: Naturally one thing led to another. I took off my shirt, and Jan took off not only her blouse and bra but her skirt and panties as well. Before long we were all four of us naked. The excitement of the situation was absolutely fantastic. I was holding Jan in my arms and looking over her shoulder at the other two. Jan was a tall girl, and I only had to bend my knees slightly in order to manage coitus in a standing position. Then Jeff and Sheila saw what we were doing, and Sheila called out that we should all look at her, and she dropped to her knees in front of Jeff and took his penis in her mouth.

SHEILA: I wanted to do it. I wanted them to watch. I wanted to do it and for them to see me.

PAUL: And that just tore the lid off of everything. We never did separate that night. We rolled around on the floor screwing like mad, just kept doing it all night long...

They talk animatedly of the central role sex comes to play in their lives. There is now and then an air of braggadocio in their conversation, as if they are seeking to impress, perhaps specifically to shock. They describe an evening with the Creightons in which they engage in troilistic activity for the first time — the Creighton woman has expressed a desire to make love to two men simultaneously, and Paul has coitus with her while she fellates her husband. It is Sheila who takes the lead in describing the activity, doing so in photographic detail and explaining how she watched the entire escapade, how it excited her, and how she determined to enjoy similar pleasures herself.

JWW: It almost seems as though there was a tolerance factor operating, as though you had to extend your involvement in swinging in order to maintain the level of excitement.

PAUL: Oh, that’s absolutely right. I think that’s the case for just about everyone.

SHEILA: At the beginning, certainly. Until you find your particular groove, you have to keep getting further and further out. If you give it some thought, you can see that there’s nothing particularly remarkable in that. Swinging in any form consists of a violation of society’s rules for sexual behavior. Naturally part of the kick is the excitement of the forbidden, of kicking over the traces. And another part of the excitement is the sheer novelty of what you’re doing. So there’s an irresistible impulse to break more rules, and at the same time there’s a natural desire for even more in the way of novelty.

PAUL: Sooner or later you reach a point where there are no frontiers. The kinkier things don’t happen to turn you on, and of those things which do appeal, there are none you haven’t tried. We’ve known couples who hit that plateau in no time at all — they just plunge right into the swinging society with no holds barred and they find their own level almost at once. And then there are other couples who make their way a little at a time over a period of quite a few years, getting a little teensy bit more into the swing of things as they go. Sooner or later, though, every swinger becomes a burned-out case.

SHEILA: As in leprosy — a burned-out case is a leper for whom the disease has run its course.

PAUL: Which happens to swingers. They find their niche in the whole scheme of things and they stay there. Or drop out — and this happens a great deal of the time.

SHEILA: We did, of course.

PAUL: That was a little different. We dropped out and came back, and that’s something that I think most people go through at one time or another. Not all of them, certainly, but I would say the greater portion. People go through emotional changes, they have second thoughts...

But there are certain couples who run the gamut of swinging and keep going further and further as we described, and then when they find no worlds left unconquered they just give the whole thing up and abandon swinging altogether. It’s like the way certain guys’ll take up a sport or a hobby and stay with it until they reach a certain level of proficiency, and then all at once they’re bored and they drop it and start in on something new. They try swinging and see what it’s like, and after they’ve tried everything there is to try, then they give it up and start collecting stamps or something.

JWW: To get back to your experience with the Creightons, I gather that the desire to extend the range of swinging was something shared by all four of you.

PAUL: Definitely. And by the same token, we were all a little reluctant to do too much too soon.

JWW: Why?

PAUL: I don’t know. Perhaps because new experiences and new ideas do take getting used to. Perhaps because we were worried about straining our relationship or ruining one or the other of our marriages...

On that point, I’m sure we sensed even then the danger of getting that intimately involved with just one other couple. There are any number of plus factors, of course. Not just such obvious things as safety and convenience but the whole quality of the relationship that develops.

SHEILA: Thinking back, it was really an extraordinary relationship. We’ve never had anything like it since. It was like a four-way marriage, if that makes any particular sense. It was really a four-way love relationship, and that can be both good and bad. It makes for a lot of very fine feelings. So often swinging is just an involved way to scratch a particular itch in a new improved fashion, but here there was emotional involvement in addition to good nitty-gritty sex, and that can make a real difference.

PAUL: It can also make for drawbacks, too.

SHEILA: Oh, yes. You know, I think maybe that sort of relationship could work in one of those hippie communes you read about, I think they have them out in California, where everybody sort of lives with everybody else in a tribal relationship and all the children are reared in common. While Paul and I aren’t exactly hippie types—

PAUL: No kidding.

SHEILA: —even so, I have to admit I find the idea of those communes very attractive. The idea of everybody just loving everybody else. Oh, I know how it sounds when you hear the words coming out of the mouths of one of those idiot flower people, but I’m serious. In a situation like that you could really have group love and make it work.

PAUL: Maybe.

SHEILA: But for us — well, with Jan and Jeff, in a sense it was as though we were all married to one another, and in another sense it wasn’t. Because we were a part of the society we lived in, and our individual marriages were separate economic and legal units. So there was a — I forget the term, it’s the anthropological reason why every society has incest taboos?

PAUL: Something about confusion of roles?

SHEILA: Something like that. As I understand it, the real reason why you can’t marry your brother has nothing to do with recessive genes and all that. Because primitive tribes didn’t know anything about genetics, they didn’t realize that inbreeding would lead to faults in the offspring. But what they did realize was that a sister and brother would grow up relating to one another in a particular way, and then if they became man and wife they would have to relate in an entirely different way, and that the outcome of all of this was a lot of confusion.

PAUL: I’m not entirely sure I’ll buy a hundred percent of that. I think they may also have noticed that sisters who got laid by their brothers had a tendency to have babies with two heads, or whatever. You don’t want to sell primitive tribesmen short. They may not calculate with the speed of a computer, but they did have a habit of coming up with the right answer sooner or later.

SHEILA: Well, that’s beside the point anyway. I may have picked a bad example, I don’t know. I certainly couldn’t love Jeff Creighton the same way I loved my own husband, because I was married to Paul and not to Jeff, and I couldn’t maintain the marriage and divide my emotional responses that way, and — oh, I don’t know, really. The four of us were just too damned close, that’s all.

PAUL: I’m sure that could only happen in a first-swap situation.

SHEILA: Except that it wasn’t a first-swap situation for Jeff and Jan.

PAUL: Well, it was close to it. I hadn’t realized that when I spoke, though. You’re right. Still, the point is that an experienced swinging couple would not be likely to get that intimately involved with another couple in an emotional sense. We’ve even known some swingers who make it a point never to have social contacts with their swinging friends, and vice versa. Of course on the other side of the ledger there are a great many swingers who associate socially almost exclusively with other swingers. I would think either extreme is probably a mistake, and yet I can understand both points of view.

SHEILA: We would never get that close with another couple again. We never have, and I’m sure we never will.

PAUL: That makes it sound as if we regret our experience with Jan and Jeff, and that isn’t true.

SHEILA: I didn’t mean it that way. It was great while it lasted, and I wouldn’t want to give the impression that it ended badly or anything like that. It didn’t. In fact, while we were swinging with them we didn’t feel there was anything unhealthy about the situation. As a matter of fact it wasn’t until afterward, when we had had experiences with a wide variety of other people, that we even thought there was anything wrong with what we had had going with the Creightons.

PAUL: It would have ended badly, though.

SHEILA: Do you think so?

PAUL: If they hadn’t moved away, yes. I’m sure of it. And I think they knew it, too, and that’s one of the reasons why they didn’t reject that job offer and stay in K.C.

SHEILA: I suppose that’s possible.

We lapse into a pensive silence. A stack of records comes to a close and Paul turns them over. Sheila takes my glass into the kitchen and freshens my drink. Paul begins to tell an anecdote about a couple they have just met for the first time and their particular social and sexual peculiarities. The conversation meanders on, turns tangentially to educational standards in the county, to local government and politics, and then, inevitably, back to sex. I ask eventually if they had had any other sexual partners during their time they were seeing the Creightons.

PAUL: We thought of it. I’m sure they did, too, as far as that goes, but it didn’t go any further than thinking. Sheila and I would discuss the possibility. In fact we would look through the club magazines and pick out ads that we would be interested in replying to, but we didn’t go so far as to draft letters or anything like that.

JWW: What stopped you?

PAUL: Oh, a few things, I guess. Most of all the feeling that Jeff and Jan wouldn’t approve, that we would be somehow disloyal to them. Also there was the worry about postal inspectors, or that we might get involved with the wrong class of people. To put it simply, it was a lot safer and easier for us to go along with Jeff and Jan than to break new ground. We certainly didn’t know anybody else who was in the swinging whirl, and the idea of plunging straight into correspondence with total strangers was kind of scary. Exciting, but also scary.

SHEILA: Actually, the idea of having sex with strangers was both of those things — exciting and scary at the same time. Remember, we were close friends of Jeff and Jan by the time we wound up making love with them.

JWW: Then your relationship with the Creightons did a great deal to determine your whole approach to swinging.

PAUL: Absolutely. On the one hand, it kept us away from the whole central world of swinging for a long time. We missed a lot while we were with them. Face it — one of the real reasons to swing is variety and novelty — making it with new people in a new situation. By staying with the Creightons, you could almost say that we were turning monogamy into a plural marriage thing and running out of variety and novelty in the process. Instead of having one wife and an endless procession of one-shot mistresses, I had two wives, if you see what I mean.

SHEILA: That’s one side of it, that we stayed away from the whole scene of correspondence clubs much longer than we would have otherwise. But on the other side of the scale, we got into more sophisticated sex than we would have otherwise.

PAUL: Very true.

JWW: Why was that the case?

PAUL: Let me see, what’s the best way to explain it? I suppose by contrasting our story with that of another couple, a couple of kids we were comparing notes with not long ago. In certain respects their story parallels ours — their situation, if not their story.

They’re about our age, and they’ve been swinging for five years, almost the same amount of time as we have. Instead of getting involved through another couple, they followed the fairly common pattern of the husband reading about swinging and getting interested, and gradually talking the wife into it. I would say nine out of ten couples start this way. Maybe the percentage is higher, I don’t know. They began immediately with correspondence, and they started swinging at the rate of a couple a week. They would see certain couples more than once, but they made a big pitch for variety. For security reasons they made a point of swinging with people fifty miles or more from their home base, so it was actually easier for them to have variety than to exchange visits regularly with another couple.

The point is that the variety and the novelty of meeting new people all the time made it more or less unnecessary for them to go overboard looking for sexual variety. As a result they were swinging for months without doing anything more out of the ordinary than changing partners and having sex in separate rooms. There was enough of a challenge in getting to know another couple and breaking the ice, and then there was enough novelty in making love to a stranger, so that the kinkier swingers’ games didn’t come into the picture for them for a long time, really.

We, of course, were just the other side of the coin. We didn’t have the variety of partners, so our thing became more and more sophisticated from a purely sexual standpoint.

To put it another way, for them the steady kick was doing the same thing with different people, while for us it was doing different things with the same people.

SHEILA: We certainly did plenty of different things.

PAUL: That’s for sure.

JWW: What pattern did your experimentation take?

SHEILA: A sort of Rorschach inkblot pattern, spreading out in all directions at once.

PAUL: At first, when we were just trading partners for simple sexual intercourse, what we did in swap sessions was basically what we did in our own marriages. We had already experimented with fellatio and cunnilingus as well as with most of the basic coital positions. Naturally we had a more distinctly experimental attitude when we started swinging because of our increased interest in technique. Also I think we got somewhat more oriented toward oral sex.

SHEILA: Because it feels so groovy.

PAUL: Cut it out! Seriously, this seems to be universal among swingers. One of the major reasons is that an individual is always physically capable of performing orally, while this isn’t true of coitus. The increased sexual activity swingers enjoy is such that a man has more opportunities to make love than he can shake a stick at — or that he has a stick to shake at, if you follow me.

But I seem to have gotten off the track. As I was saying, we became more oral-oriented than we had been, and I gather this was true for the Creightons as well. We also got into anal intercourse. Jeff and Jan had had no experience at all with this. Sheila and I had tried it out early in our marriage, as a matter of fact, and she hadn’t cared for it.

SHEILA: It hurt, damn it! Later on I found out that a person can learn to relax the sphincter muscles so that it isn’t painful. And using the right lubricant makes a difference, and if you can learn to get excited in that area — well, that underscores the whole point, really. There are techniques involved in anything, and when you get with swinging you’re apt to become increasingly aware of technique.

PAUL: Let me see, Then we began to get into threesomes and all that, and that was particularly exciting. I suppose if you had to draw a line, that was where we began to get to the kinky stage.

JWW: I notice you use that word a lot — “kinky.” Just how do you mean it? Obscene? Perverted?

SHEILA: Perverted, but in a nice way. Right?

PAUL: Beautiful. That hits it on the nose...

SHEILA: But I think you would have to say we hit the kinky stage before we started with the threesomes. We began with pictures before then. Jeff had a Polaroid, and once we got to the point of all making love in the same room, it was just a short step to taking pictures of each other. Of course you know that the Polaroid camera is God’s gift to swingers. Well, the pictures we took could only have been taken with a Polaroid, since none of us had a darkroom.

PAUL: Pictures, and threesomes, and from there on in I’d be hard put to say just what we did and when. Let’s see — we first made it with them in May, and sometime in August or September we stopped going to separate rooms, and a month or two after that we were swinging with pictures and threesomes and almost anything we might have read or dreamed up and wanted to try out. Contests, that sort of thing.

JWW: Contests?

PAUL: This was an idea we got from what we read. They do it in the larger clubs. For example, you divide into couples and the object is to see which girl can make her partner have an orgasm first. That would be one type of contest, but it could work any way at all.

JWW: I see. The sort of party games that large groups of swingers often use.

SHEILA: And they work fairly well in groups, but with just four of us they were pretty silly, actually. We tried them out, though, because we wanted to try anything.

I wonder if I can find the right words to explain this. It’s very easy to get a wholly false impression of those months. When you read about something like this in a book the message seems to be that the people are compelled by a hunger for stronger and stronger kicks. Like a heroin addict who has to have more and more of the drug in order to get high or whatever it is that they get. Is heroin like that?

JWW: To an extent. Amphetamines are a better example, or barbiturates.

SHEILA: I’m afraid we’re not up on the drug scene. Swingers are more apt to stay away from things like that, you know. Some people try sex stimulants, but more of us tend to stick with high-protein diets and health foods. The only drug everybody takes is birth control pills...

She talks briefly about the impact of birth-control pills and other technological advances upon the sexual revolution in general and the society of swingers in particular. The discussion ranges far afield, touching too upon the various paraphernalia which swingers have taken to using in the past few years — artificial phalluses and vaginas, vibrators for vaginal and anal massage, French ticklers and coronal extenders, etc. Ultimately Sheila returns to her point — that their turn toward increasingly “kinky” activity was more than a symptom of dissatisfaction and the need for ever-more enervating stimulation.

SHEILA: Here’s what I’m getting at. You have to realize that this whole swinging scene, all of it, was a completely new world for us. It was absolutely new, and we found ourselves getting tremendous pleasure out of everything we did. Even those stupid party games, even things like that were a thrill as a novel experience. And because of this of course we wanted to try everything once.

We hardly ever watch television. Paul likes the sports and the kids watch their shows and I look at documentaries now and then, but outside of that we don’t have much use for the TV. Well, a year ago Christmas we replaced our old portable with a color console. Paul bought a really good set and we had a special antenna installed and got excellent color reception. Well, let me tell you, for the first couple of months we found ourselves watching anything that moved. You would think we had never seen colors before, we were that enthusiastic about watching color television.

Admittedly color television is something the squares would never get as nervous about as they do about swinging, but in a sense it was the same situation. We found swinging so exciting that we couldn’t get enough of it, and we had to try everything. It wasn’t because we were getting jaded. It was just the reverse.

JWW: Did you reach a point where you were doing things that seemed too kinky? I know that usually happens sooner or later.

PAUL: It always happens, except for some of the really raving perverts you meet, and brother, you do meet a lot of them if you’re not careful. I mean real maniacs who don’t draw any lines at all. Excepting those kooks, it’s inevitable that you find out where your own particular line is, and you find out by crossing it inadvertently and then stepping back over it again. But it didn’t happen for us at the time, with the Creightons, because we didn’t go that far. I think we might have, sooner or later, but we didn’t.

SHEILA: I thought we did at one point, but then I changed my mind.

PAUL: When was that?

SHEILA: With Jan.

PAUL: You mean the two of you? Oh, of course. You know, that’s funny; that’s been so much a part of the scene for us since then that I’ve almost forgotten that you had a mixed reaction to it at first.

SHEILA: Mixed is the word for it.

JWW: I gather you had homosexual relations with Jan?

SHEILA: That’s right. And this, I must say, was a definite exception to what we said earlier — that all of us looked forward to everything we did. For my own part, I learned early from what I’d read that Lesbian relations seem to be almost universal in swinging.

PAUL: While male homosexual contacts, on the other hand, have always been extremely rare. This isn’t as true as it once was, actually; especially on the West Coast, male swingers are apt to be bisexual. But the proportion of wives who have gay contacts is still far, far higher.

SHEILA: So the books all said. And I read all of this, and I gathered that the idea of Lesbian relations between myself and Jan was going to be brought up sooner or later, and I wasn’t all that certain as to how I felt about the whole thing. I’m being perfectly frank now in saying that I had never in my life had a conscious homosexual impulse, let alone an actual experience. I tried to detect desires for Jan in my mind, and I couldn’t, and then I worried that I was repressing a strong latent streak, and, oh, all the sort of crazy things a person can think of.

When the subject came up among the four of us, I wasn’t surprised. I had been expecting it. But I didn’t know quite how I felt about it, or how I ought to handle it—

Tres Gay

Sheila explains that the idea of Lesbian relations was hinted at or alluded to several times in passing by either Jeff or her husband. One or the other of the men would suggest it half-humorously at times when the male members of the quartet were too exhausted to continue performing coitus. The suggestion was neither meant nor taken seriously. But Sheila characterizes it as a case of “kidding on the square” — i.e., a joke with an undercurrent of seriousness beneath it.

• • •

SHEILA: There was a point, I don’t know exactly when it was reached, when it became obvious that the men were both really interested in getting something started along these lines. As I’m sure you know, most men are fascinated almost beyond belief by the thought of two women making love. I have trouble understanding this, because the reverse just isn’t true at all. Women don’t get turned on by male homosexuality; if anything, the reverse happens. They get utterly turned off by the whole idea.

PAUL: There’s a difference. A man becomes less masculine by having relations with another man — or at least that’s the way people tend to think of it. Whereas a girl doesn’t lose any of her femininity by entering into a sexual situation with another girl. If anything, she becomes more desirable, a more fully sensual person.

SHEILA: Yes, but why? That’s the question...

I don’t know why the men were so anxious to get something started. Paul and Jeff both said at the time that they wanted to watch. I’m not sure that covers the whole thing. Voyeurism and exhibitionism are certainly big factors in all of swinging, no argument there, but I don’t think that’s all there was to it. After things got going, for instance, Jan and I would occasionally fit in a little loving to break up a dull weekday afternoon, and when Paul learned about this he was all for it. He thought it was great. It was almost as if he wanted me to have a gay experience for its own sake, just for the sake of the experience.

PAUL: What does it prove? I’m a latent fag getting my kicks secondhand? I suppose it’s possible.

SHEILA: Maybe there’s no point analyzing it to death. Anyway, I’m getting the story out of order. One night, it was early in the evening before we had gotten anything going, Jeff brought it up. He just asked straight out why Jan and I didn’t have a try at one another. I tried to joke back with him, I said something properly inane, but this time it didn’t work because he didn’t even pretend to be kidding.

And good old Paul here backed him up immediately. He said if nothing else the two of us could just go through the motions while Jeff took some pictures. The way the two of them made it sound, Jan and I had to have sex just to be good sports about the whole thing.

JWW: How did you react to the idea?

SHEILA: I was, oh, very tense. Nervous. Apprehensive.

JWW: Did you have any feelings of desire for Jan?

SHEILA: Not that I was aware of. Except... well, as you know, we had engaged in threesome activity by this time, and in tangles like that you get in rather close proximity to whoever else is involved in the threesome. For example, if Jan and I were both making love at the same time to one of the men, naturally our bodies occasionally came into contact. If you were going to get in the mood enough to relax and enjoy it, you had to be able to have this sort of contact happen without drawing back as if you’d been burned or something. So I had been in physical contact with Jan’s body in situations in which I had experienced sexual pleasure heterosexually. That kind of experience establishes a link in your mind and you become able to regard another woman as a source of pleasure, or at least a potential source of pleasure, if that makes any sense.

PAUL: Not a hell of a lot of sense, but I know what you mean.

SHEILA: And also there’s the fact that if you think about something long enough and often enough... Well, it’s only human to begin wondering. It isn’t even desire so much as curiosity. Everything I had read had a great deal to do with it, of course.

JWW: How do you mean?

SHEILA: Oh, for example, all the books gave the impression that one woman could really give another woman a special thrill in cunnilingus, that it was a very different experience from having the same act performed on you by a man. I couldn’t imagine why this should be so — a tongue is a tongue, after all, and if a man is a good lover you would think he would be ultra-sensitive to your mood and your response. But naturally I wanted to know for certain.

I also wondered what it was like to make love to a girl. To stroke a woman’s breasts, to go down on her, everything. Once you are able to conceive of yourself doing a certain thing, it’s only human to wonder what it’s like. And, with nothing to push you in the other direction, the next step along the line is to desire to do it.

So while I didn’t have a desire for Jan per se, I wasn’t completely out of tune with the idea, either.

That night, though, I didn’t think I was ready for it. When parrying Jeff’s idea with a gag didn’t work, I tried again. I said I certainly had enough fun with men to get me through three or four lifetimes, and I would wait until the thrill of it wore off before I moved on to bigger and better things with girls.

Both of the men jumped on me then. Verbally, that is; I would have preferred it if they had done it physically. Jeff said it was the same smug argument that kept square married couples doing it once a week in the standard position and never swinging at all. And Paul pointed out that we had tried just about everything we could think of in the past few months, and that I had enjoyed all of it, so that there was probably a damned good chance that I would enjoy this, too. The hell of it was that both of these arguments made very good sense to me. I didn’t admit as much, but they did.

I was sort of annoyed that Jan didn’t come to my support. She was just sort of sitting on the sidelines taking it all in. The significance of this somehow failed to dawn on me at the time.

I made myself another drink, and I made it stiffer than usual. I don’t know whether I wanted the alcohol as fortification or to make it easy for me to excuse my going ahead with it.

The men went over the same arguments again. What I said finally was that they were being very selfish, just wanting us to perform for their pleasure as if we were actors on a stage. That’s a pretty stupid line in retrospect, but at the time it sounded pretty trenchant to me. “Besides,” I said, “I’m sure Jan’s completely turned off by the whole idea.”

She just smiled.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget that smile. Ever since then I’ve known what it was that the Mona Lisa was smiling about. Obviously the Mona Lisa was gay.

From her smile, I knew immediately, and I guess I knew then that I was going to go through with it. After all, it was three against one, and with those odds I would have trouble finding excuses for myself. I just looked at her, and she said something like, “What makes you so sure of that, Sheila?”

I said, “Oh, come off it. You’re not a Lesbian.”

She said you didn’t have to be all of something to enjoy a taste of it. I said I didn’t believe she knew what she was talking about.

“Oh, Sheila,” she said. “Didn’t you ever have a crush on another girl at school? Or on a teacher? Didn’t you ever fool around with your roommate in college?”

I said that I hadn’t, that I had never even thought about anything like that at the time, which was perfectly true. “And I suppose you did?” I said. I meant it to come out sarcastic, but I think it was more wistful than biting.

“Yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Then you were a Lesbian?”

“I didn’t say I was a Lesbian,” she said. “You don’t have to pin labels on people like that. I wasn’t a Lesbian, but during my junior year in college I had a very warm and enjoyable love affair with my roommate.”

This really shocked me. Jeff had obviously heard this before, but it was news to me, and to Paul as well.

PAUL: It was tremendously exciting to me.

SHEILA: I wouldn’t say it was exciting to me as much as it was disturbing. It shook me. I asked her what exactly she and her roommate did. Whether they just sort of kissed and like that. She said they did everything. I asked her what everything meant.

She gave me that smile again. “It seems silly for me to tell you,” she said. “Why don’t I just show you?”

I almost couldn’t believe this was Jan Creighton talking. I had known her so well, and all the time she had never given me the slightest hint that she was anything other than a hundred percent heterosexual. I had no inkling that she could have had experience like this.

I asked if she had ever done this with the girl of the other couple, the other people they had swung with before we moved in. She said she had never had relations with a girl since she was married.

“But would you want to?”

“I’d like to give it a try,” she said. “The worst that can happen is that we find out we don’t like it.”

I wasn’t about to admit it, but the way I saw it, it was just the other way around. The worst thing that could happen would be for me to find out that I did like it.

PAUL: You’re really making a thing out of this, aren’t you?

SHEILA: It was a thing. I don’t—

PAUL: I mean, for someone who’s come to dig the gay scene as much as you do—

SHEILA: But don’t you see, that’s the whole point of it!

PAUL: How?

SHEILA: I must have sensed the potential for this in myself, and I must have been repressing it. You know. I must have been secretly afraid that I would go overboard if I once started, and for that reason it was a big thing for me. Doesn’t that make sense to you?

PAUL: I suppose so.

SHEILA: And another thing you have to understand. Lesbian relations seemed like a giant step beyond what we had been doing. Swinging, the adulterous aspect of it and even the actual techniques we were using, they were what we had been brought up to regard as morally wrong, but the acts themselves seemed healthy enough. But having relations with another girl was what I had been conditioned to regard as unnatural. This was a big difference.

PAUL: That I can understand. That makes sense to me.

SHEILA: Well, thank you, kind sir.

JWW: To continue, I gather that you let the three of them coax you into having relations with Jan?

SHEILA: Oh, from the moment she gave me that smile I don’t suppose the issue was ever seriously in doubt. I was pretty well trapped. I ultimately agreed that there was no valid reason not to try it.

JWW: This was the same evening?

SHEILA: The same evening. We never abandoned the subject from the moment Jeff brought it up.

I agreed to go along with it, although I protested that I wouldn’t know what to do. Jan rode right over that. She said I didn’t have to do anything, that she would do everything and all I had to do was relax and enjoy it. If I felt in the mood to touch or kiss or caress her, I could join in the action, but all I really had to do was be there. I was glad that she said that because it seemed to me that it would be much easier to endure something than to participate actively in it. If all else failed, I could just lie there like a corpse until she gave it up as a bad job.

PAUL: You were the most active corpse in history. Instead of embalming fluid they must have used cantharides on you.

SHEILA: Well, we all make mistakes, don’t we? I have to admit, though, that it was pretty fantastic. Jan suggested that we go to one of the bedrooms by ourselves, that I might be less inhibited if the men weren’t around. I wanted to do this, but I preferred to rationalize that we were just doing this so the men could get their jollies watching us, so I said, no, we would stay right there, which is the way it happened.

We got undressed. For me, it was as if I was seeing Jan’s body for the first time, which was patently ridiculous, because ever since we had started swinging I had seen her body about as often as I saw my own. Now, though, I was seeing it as a love object, as a source of sexual pleasure and satisfaction, and this was something new.

I was embarrassed beyond belief. I even felt strange being nude in front of Jan because of what we were going to do and the way she was looking at me. I was on the couch, and she came over and sat next to me and I felt unbelievably silly. She put her hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye and told me I was beautiful.

I said she had a much better figure than I did. She said she liked the way I was built.

Oh, it just seemed so ridiculous!

When she kissed me, it was just too strange for words. Women, you know, kiss each other all the time, and it generally means no more than when men shake hands. But this was different, obviously, and it felt odd. Her mouth was so soft, and her aroma...

I pushed her away and said that it was all just so silly. “You have to give it a chance,” she told me. She was very serious about the whole thing and her voice had an odd husky quality to it. Obviously she was already getting into the mood.

I decided I just had to go through with it and that it would be best if I did everything I could to enjoy it. I asked for another drink and somebody brought it to me. I think it helped. Jan kissed me again, and this time I closed my eyes and told myself I would just pretend that she was a man making love to me.

It started that way, in my mind that is, but it didn’t go on that way for very long. It was very confusing, very strange. I opened my mouth and she put her tongue inside. I found myself getting involved with the kiss. I don’t know how to explain this, it was very strange, very odd. On the one hand I was a woman and she was like a man kissing me, and at the same time I was a man making love to a girl. I was feeling both sets of emotions, not exactly both at once but alternating back and forth, first one way and then the other. Of course the fact that I was pretty well on the way to being drunk had something to do with it. It loosened me up and it made it easier for me to turn my mind off and let my body do whatever it wanted to do.

We lay down on the couch. I was on my back with my eyes closed and she was on top of me kissing me. I felt her breasts pressing against mine and thought how odd it was. Odd but nice. I really enjoyed that, enjoyed the sensation.

I was imagining how the two of us looked together. Seeing us in my mind.

We lay there kissing for along time. She stroked my breasts and kissed them and sucked the nipples. I wanted to do this to her but I didn’t. Her touch was very sure. I remember that I was impressed by how soft her hands were. At one point I did actually take her breasts in my hands. I had impulses that made me want to do more than this, but I also wanted very much to remain as passive as possible and simply to experience the sensations and respond to them.

She was arousing me by then. Definitely. But I couldn’t quite identify what I felt as sexual excitement because it was so different from what I had experienced with men. Completely different...

As she speaks, Paul leans forward in his chair to listen to her words carefully, his face mirroring the intensity of his concentration. He truly hangs on every word. Before, he had been somewhat detached, chiming in with observations and clever commentary, doing facial double takes for my benefit. Now he is too caught up in the flow of her narrative to behave in this fashion. It is almost as though he is trying to immerse himself in her words to the point where he will be able to recapture his original excitement at observing the two women together. Sheila, for her part, goes on talking with her eyes half-lidded, her voice halting as she searches now and then for just the right word to convey the particular nuance of the situation. I am reminded from time to time of psychiatric patients recalling the past under hypnosis.

SHEILA: Ultimately I became completely involved. Completely caught up in it. She went down on me. She got between my legs and started to eat me. I felt her hair brushing my thighs, her long hair. And her face was smooth on the inside of my thighs. Men have beard stubble, they’re scratchy, nice but scratchy, but she was soft, soft—

She knew just what to do and how and when. She knew everything there was to know.

God—

Somewhere along the way I got lost. It all... I don’t know. Everything got lost and I forgot where I was or what was going on. It was just sex then, just passion. I got completely into it and completely out of myself, out of my situation. I came in colors, just oozing and exploding all over the place...

PAUL: It was the most fantastic thing—

SHEILA: And before it was completely over — I was still glowing and pulsing with it — and the two of them were on us. Jeff was with Jan and Paul was with me, getting on top of me and inside of me and absolutely fucking me like a mad stallion.

PAUL: That’s a nice couth way to put it.

SHEILA: It’s what you did. At first I didn’t want that. It was about the last thing I wanted, but then I got with it and went swinging off to the moon again.

What a fantastic night.

I wanted to return the favor, to do the same for Jan, but I still felt odd suggesting it. But later — you have to realize the effect that had on all of us, how it sent everybody’s passion soaring, to the point where we really balled incessantly for hours.

PAUL: It was pretty extraordinary. I had what amounted to a permanent erection that evening. No matter what we did or how often, I never wanted to quit. Now that I think about it, it’s amazing I didn’t screw myself into the hospital, or have a stroke or something. That much sexual excess has to be physically dangerous.

SHEILA: Well, you were younger then, dear.

PAUL: You may think you’re kidding, but to be perfectly honest I’d be terrified to go through that kind of evening again.

SHEILA: Do you think you could?

PAUL: Probably not, and I’m just as glad, because I don’t think I would live through it...

SHEILA: Later that same night we were all four on the floor in a catch-as-catch-can group grope. And then I had the chance to return the favor. I don’t think I actually planned it, but there was Jan and there I was, and I managed to get my mouth on her and give her a good frenching. I was being taken from the rear at the time by one of the men, and the other man was being sucked by Jan, so it was more a case of a real tangle than what you would call a real Lesbian thing. It was an orgy more than anything else, but it gave me a chance to get used to the idea of performing actively on a girl.

JWW: Did you enjoy it?

SHEILA: Enjoy it? I don’t think that really entered into it, as a matter of fact. There was too much else going on to compartmentalize it, for one thing, and also there was the fact that the evening was so highly keyed and we were all so sexed up that I probably could have had an orgasm by patting my tummy with a washcloth.

PAUL: Don’t knock it — maybe it’s a kick.

SHEILA: But I had wanted to do it, and I didn’t feel bad about doing it; and afterward I was glad I had done it to her. And I did make her come that way, which was exciting and gratifying for me. In that sense, then, you could say that I enjoyed it.

Another time, a weekday afternoon, I am again at the Gordon house. The two older children are at school, the youngest is taking a nap, and Paul is at work. Sheila and I sit together and she once again reminisces about her early experiences with Lesbianism. She is more detached this time, less involved with her memories.

SHEILA: Jan and I got much more intimately involved sexually than either of us intended. Much more deeply than Paul was ever aware, I think, although I didn’t consciously keep anything from him. But he couldn’t have understood quite how far it went. He knew that I wanted him all the time, and that I enjoyed sex with Jeff as well, and so I don’t think he could understand what Jan and I were caught up in.

Part of what made it so exciting and fulfilling for me, I’m sure, was the forbidden-fruit thing. In a way everything else that we had done, all of the swinger games we played, all of the changes we worked on the one basic theme, were all just that — variations on a theme. They were just extensions of the basic sexual relationship that Paul and I had established long ago. Just variations on the basic man-woman thing and nothing more.

I’m not knocking it when I say that, not by any means. But they weren’t as totally different as having sexual relations with another girl. That was utterly different, and it was even... oh, let’s say it was kinky in a different way.

As an example, although I don’t know if this is a particularly good example or not, we could take the photographs. We weren’t as queer for pictures as some swingers are — my God, Paul and I have met people who literally get more of a thrill out of looking at pictures of what they’ve done than they do of the actual balling. We’ve had people say as much to us — and you’re left with the feeling that they only swing so that they can look at the pictures afterward. We weren’t any of us like that, but the Polaroid camera was a sort of fun toy and we did get a kick out of looking at pictures of ourselves in the act. Until you get used to it, it’s kind of bizarre to see yourself having sex. It takes a lot of getting used to.

But it was one thing to see a picture of myself making love with Jeff or Paul, or even in a threesome, and it was another thing entirely to see a photograph of myself with Jan. Even if we weren’t doing anything all that wild. Even if it was just a picture, say, of one of us petting the other’s breasts or something.

And this special excitement I felt with Jan scared the daylights out of me. I never said as much to Paul, and while I don’t keep it from him now, I would probably avoid stressing it so heavily if he were here now. Because he has always made light of this. He always turns it into a joke or asks me why I always want to do it with girls nowadays if I’m so scared of it. He simplifies the entire subject, and that’s not like him, he’s not by any means a simplistic person. I could probably figure out the reason for this, for his acting in an atypical way on this one subject. I could suggest that it’s a latent thing on his part, or a virility anxiety thing, I don’t know what, but to tell you the truth I’d just as soon not go into it. During the bad times, when not only our marriage but our whole lives and psyches seemed as though they were about to come apart at the seams, both Paul and I found ourselves looking perhaps too deeply into what made us tick. A little of this goes along way. I’m sure to a certain extent this sort of self-analysis is valuable, but I think after a point it becomes destructive and self-defeating. You can always find a dirty and unpleasant motivation for every human act, and it may be perfectly valid, but why dig out the unpleasant all the time? It’s not pollyannaish to avoid that kind of probing. It’s a simple matter of self-preservation. Look too closely at the way you are and you can very easily go insane or kill yourself or just fall apart. I may tend to exaggerate the dangers involved because of my own experiences, which God knows are enough to make me turn green at the thought of a psychiatrist’s couch. Remember, though, I did try to kill myself. Not once but twice, and they say three times is the charm, and it was really terrifying...

To return to the situation with Jan, though, I think in retrospect that what was really scary about that relationship was the extent of it. How involved we were.

Paul and I have never tried to become as close with another couple as we were with them, with Jeff and Jan. Partly, as I think we said, or Paul said, because that negated the idea of seeking variety, which is an integral part of swinging. But also because there is such a thing as getting too close, too involved. It’s hard enough to stand close, intimate involvement with one person in the framework of a marriage — that’s why so many people get divorces. It’s harder to be married to another couple as well.

Yet the thing that makes me, personally, most anxious to avoid getting that close with another couple is the idea of the female relationship, like I had with Jan.

JWW: I’m not sure I understand. Perhaps I’m wrong, but it was my impression that your current swinging includes Lesbian relations almost as a matter of course.

SHEILA: That’s right.

JWW: Then I don’t—

SHEILA: Not as a matter of course. Only if both of us are in the mood, and if there’s a mutual attraction. But I would say that more often than not the conditions are right and it happens. Either as a part of some general scene or as a two-shot.

JWW: Then what sort of female relations are you anxious to avoid?

SHEILA: Oh, maybe I didn’t express myself clearly. I want to avoid — I have to avoid — not relations but a relationship. The closeness, the intimacy, the long-term nature of it.

Jan and I were really too close before she made love to me. I suspect there was an undercurrent of homosexuality in our friendship from the beginning, don’t you think? Since she had had experience in this area before, and was drawn to me and knew enough, was experienced enough, to recognize this in herself. And of course swapping is supposed to have homosexual components. The idea of sharing your mate with another girl, you know, with your mate as a surrogate-self...

Finally, with the original friendship and then the swapping and finally our becoming lovers, we were just involved with each other in too many different ways. And the simple proximity element — she was always around, you see. Men go out of the house, they go to the office and see different people all the time, and there are loads of strangers around, and thus they get away from things. Women don’t. Women stay home with housework and children, and children may be a joy but they aren’t the best conversational companions, especially when they’re small. And housework doesn’t take all that much time unless you’re a fanatic, and as you can see I’m not a fanatic.

So it got so that she was always in my kitchen or I was in her kitchen. Coffee and conversation every afternoon, five afternoons a week. And sometimes love. And this was just too many ways to know a girl, and too much of a good thing. She was a girlfriend and a mother and a daughter and a sister and a lover and a co-wife and my husband’s mistress and my lover’s wife — it was confusing.

JWW: I see.

SHEILA: I really don’t like the idea of making love on a weekday afternoon, just the two of us together without the men around. It felt like cheating, like adultery, which is a feeling swinging should not have. It bothered me.

JWW: Then why do it?

SHEILA: It felt good.

JWW: Really?

SHEILA: No, of course, that wasn’t the motivation. Of course not. I’m not like that. I suppose that would be hard for a civilian to understand. Hard for anyone to understand, perhaps. That a person can be an all-out swinger without being motivated primarily by a desire for physical pleasure as such.

You want it, of course. That sweet, happy little tickle, you never outgrow wanting it, thank heavens. But if that was the main thing you wouldn’t need different people or different ways or anything. As far as that goes, you could use a candle in the bathroom.

Of course it was the closeness that I needed, that we both needed. The woman-woman closeness which you can never have with a man, not as completely, not really. There is a very real qualitative difference.

When I talk about this with Paul — I used to, I don’t any more — he seems not to understand. I don’t think he wants to understand.

Sometimes I don’t think I understand it myself.

Reassurance — we gave each other a lot of that, Jan and I. We learned to use each other’s bodies as antidepressants. Headache, take aspirin; tension, take that gentle little blue pill; depressed, play sixty-nine with the girl next door. And it worked, but it also set up a nice guilt pattern that leaves you more depressed a few days later, with an obvious method of curing that depression, until you’re involved in the sort of vicious circle that makes you start wondering seriously if maybe deep down inside you’re basically a Lesbian.

Sometimes I have insane thoughts.

JWW: Like what?

SHEILA: Oh, the things a person thinks about. The unthinkable — I mean nothing really is unthinkable, is it? Or inconceivable.

Sometimes I imagine them all gone. Dead. Paul, the children. Always a sharp, clean death, an auto wreck, an airplane disintegrating. All of a sudden it’s over, my marriage and my family, gone.

I don’t mean that I want it to happen. God, I don’t. I hate myself for having the thought, the fantasy. And I hate the idea that you only get strong irrational fears of that sort when you secretly want them to happen. An irrational fear is an irrational desire, isn’t that what they say?

JWW: Some of the time, perhaps.

SHEILA: I think, if it happened, if something like that happened, if the marriage was over and the family was over, if my whole life was over, I think, well, what would I do? I don’t mean how would I stand the shock, that’s something else, but what would I do with the life that was left to me? What role would I play?

And I often think — and it makes sense to me, it makes logical sense in the context of the fantasy — I think that I would probably go to some big impersonal city and become a Lesbian.

Not because that’s the sort of sex I really enjoy. It isn’t a sexual thing, a sexual decision. It isn’t that at all.

She pauses, a cigarette burning unnoticed between her fingers. She furrows her brow in an attitude of extreme concentration, then abruptly lets her eyes close and her features relax. When she resumes speaking some moments later it is in this attitude. The eyes remain closed, the face in repose. Her voice has to it a detached, dreamlike quality. I find myself wondering whether this is wholly natural or if she, who indeed has a finely developed sense of theater, is in fact seeking consciously to convey a mood through an assumed pose.

SHEILA: Because, you see, it would be safe and cool and easy, so much easier. When there is a man and a woman there is a situation of conflict, give and take. Opposites. When you are a woman with a woman you remain yourself and she becomes your other self. An alter ego. An altered ego.

So there is no need to surrender any part of oneself. It is never required. You remain whole, complete...

You see, I frighten myself...

Her eyes open, her features take firmer shape. Suddenly awake and alert and businesslike, she leans over to stub out the cigarette, fingers forcefully mashing the butt in the ashtray.

SHEILA: I almost wish that machine of yours wasn’t running. Listen to the girl sounding like a philosopher. I don’t really think I’m gay. Come to that, I’m not certain that anybody really is anything. Everyone has bits of everything inside him. Labels are simpler than understanding, but they don’t do the job, do they?

Gay or not, I scare myself a little. It scared me with Jan, scared me a lot more than I would admit to Paul. If he were able to understand, and I guess he can’t, not on that point. A blind spot for him. God knows I have enough of my own...

I would never have a relationship with a woman again. I’ll admit it, I’m a coward.

JWW: Then why do you have sex with women at swinging parties?

SHEILA: Because it’s so safe. There’s no contact, no feeling, except for the physical. And I can take it, and enjoy it — because the actual things you do, the physical things, are pleasant whomever you do them with, once you get past any hang-ups you might have. And by the same token I can leave it alone, because again it’s just sheerly physical, and just as it’s guaranteed to be pleasant it’s also guaranteed to be something you can live without.

So if I’m at a party, let’s say, and for one reason or another I go down on another girl, or she on me, or whatever, I can — I was going to say have my cake and eat it, if you’ll forgive an unintentional play on words. And not a very good one either, come to think.

And I can tell myself that I’m not repressing anything, because I’m having these contacts, and also that I’m not abnormal, because I can take them or leave them alone...

Will you use all this in the book?

JWW: Would you rather I didn’t?

SHEILA: I don’t know. There’s something that I’m uneasy about, and I’m going to ask you to go now, if you won’t take that the wrong way. Because if you stay I’ll stay with this line of thought, and I don’t think I should. What I said before about looking into things too deeply.

JWW: All right.

SHEILA: It’s just laughs, that’s all. All anything is. I make it with girls at parties because it’s fun, and Paul wants me to, so why not? And I’m glad Jan moved away because we were getting involved, and who needs it?

I pack up my tape recorder. We make plans for another interview session later in the week when both she and her husband will be available. That settled, we turn to small talk, both of us relieved to have fought free of a conversation that had become mutually uncomfortable. She walks me out the door and across the lawn to my car. I am just the least bit apprehensive about leaving her alone in her present mood, and as we reach my car she either guesses or senses as much. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be all right. I’ve learned things. I’ve learned to preserve myself. I’ve become, well, very strong.”

The Swim of Things

PAUL: Sooner or later we would have looked for another couple — or couples, really. We were ready for that sort of variety, of meeting with strangers, and I think the Creightons were as well, but neither of us quite got around to suggesting it. And there were other mitigating circumstances as well...

But when we found they were moving, then there was absolutely no question about it. It was taken for granted immediately by all four of us that we would all have to find new outlets for swinging, and that we would do so, either through correspondence or by some other means. First we assured each other that we would travel across the country now and then to get together for auld lang syne, and then we hurled ourselves into one of what turned out to be a whole string of going away orgies, because it did take them quite a while to make their move from the time Jeff accepted the new position. And then, finally, we all four sat down together to read through the tabloids and the club papers and pick out ads for us all to answer...

Another night, cold and dark, with intermittent rain audible against the picture window. Paul wears a bulky Aran sweater and wide-wale corduroy slacks. Sheila’s sweater matches his; her slacks are plaid, a Black Watch variant. The mood tonight is one of jovial reminiscence. A fire burns idly in the fireplace. There is a generous tray of canapés on the coffee table — roll-ups of chicken liver and water chestnut and bacon, tiny cocktail wieners transfixed by colored plastic toothpicks, melba rounds spread with Camembert. We are drinking excellent Scotch and go through an impressive quantity of it in the course of a few hours, but no one at any point seems adversely affected by drink; the only outward sign is the absence of tension and a heightened sense of camaraderie. There is to be no thoughtful probing this evening no inquiry into needs and motives, no attempt to summon up the flavors and nuances of recollected experience. Tonight we exist and function on a far simpler plane.

PAUL: We must have thumbed through those papers and magazines until the print was gone. First we ruled out all ads that were out of our geographical area, which meant that we were eliminating a good ninety percent right off the top. And of course we crossed off ads seeking single girls, or ads placed by men looking for threesomes — in other words, we limited ourselves to couples looking for couples, couples in our age bracket who seemed to be in about the same position we were in.

SHEILA: And then we began to narrow it down. If there was no photo — some magazines would print a photograph of the wife, although that was less common then than it is now — if there was a photograph, and if the girl didn’t look appealing, we passed up that ad. If the things the couples liked to do sounded excessively perverted, we crossed them off.

PAUL: Or if we didn’t know what their code meant.

SHEILA: Right. I remember that some of the ads specified an interest in English culture. We didn’t know what this was because the expression was just beginning to come into the swinging lexicon. French culture meant oral and Greek culture meant anal and Prussian culture meant discipline and Roman meant orgies, and what was Egyptian? I think miscegenation. That was in use for a while and then disappeared. I don’t know how some slang terms gain acceptance among swingers and others don’t. Who decides what euphemisms swing?

PAUL: English culture means flagellation, of course.

SHEILA: So we wouldn’t have been interested anyway, as it turns out. There were other things, animal training for bestiality, the usual kinky things. And one couple I remember who described themselves as gourmets. I remember the phrasing: “not gourmands but gourmets.” We crossed them out. We assumed that they were Francophiles, but there was something about the phrasing that left room for doubt, so we decided the hell with them. I’m still not sure whether they were just fond of oral sex or whether they had something else going for them.

PAUL: When we finally made our selections, we almost changed our mind and didn’t write at all.

JWW: You thought of giving up swinging?

SHEILA: No, never that! Quite the reverse.

PAUL: We were going to run an ad of our own.

SHEILA: And for the silliest possible reason. You’ll love this. We were literally terrified that we would write to someone at random and it would turn out to he someone we knew! As if there was any real likelihood of that, when we knew so few people in the area who weren’t actually in Kansas City.

PAUL: Well, that wasn’t the really ridiculous part. The stupid thing was our feeling that this would be terrible for a friend of ours to get that sort of letter from us. We completely ignored the fact that anybody who placed such an ad would be in the very same boat with us, and hardly in the position to cast the first stone.

SHEILA: People in the same boat shouldn’t cast the first stone — is that what you’re trying to say?

PAUL: Ouch! Sorry about that. But I think you get the point. As a matter of fact, sooner or later quite a few swingers will have that weird experience of getting a contact through the mails from another couple they never thought of as swingers. There are just so many people involved in swapping that it has to happen now and then.

JWW: Has it happened to you?

PAUL: Twice, both times when we had an ad of ours answered by casual acquaintances. One time we met the couple and swung with them, and the other time they were people who didn’t appeal to us and we never answered the letter. So it’s possible that it happened more than once — we could have answered ads and had acquaintances of ours fail to answer.

SHEILA: But we appeal to everybody, sweets.

PAUL: Be that as it may.

SHEILA: To get back to where we were, we finally decided that we were being stupid, but we felt it still might be a good idea to be somewhat indirect about getting acquainted. If nothing else, there was still the problem of entrapment by the Post Office finks. There was also a certain amount of danger in writing to a professional associate of Paul’s. Even if somebody else would have as much to lose from that sort of exposure, we felt nervous about giving anyone that kind of power over Paul’s career. Sending out a photograph of me was all right — not that many of Paul’s business friends had even met me. And Paul could be in the picture, too, just by turning his head so his face wouldn’t be recognizable. But we wanted to avoid putting our names on line, or our addresses.

PAUL: We thought about a Post Office box under a phony name, until we realized how completely insane that would be if there were Post Office inspectors involved. And we also considered using a false name and giving no address, just our phone number. In fact we wrote out a few letters with that in mind but didn’t mail them. For one thing, we would be letting people about whom we knew nothing have a chance to call us up any time they wanted to. You can’t tell anything from an ad, and the last thing you would want to do is turn your telephone number over to a telephone pervert. Also, we weren’t all that sure that somebody couldn’t find out who we were from our telephone number. Information won’t give out that data, and they’ll tell you they don’t have it filed that way, but that’s nonsense. The police can always get it. As a matter of fact, it would be virtually impossible for the telephone company to establish any sort of data-processing system without listing customers by their phone numbers. And if the information exists, then the Post Office people could get it if they wanted to, and we were really leery of that.

SHEILA: You wouldn’t believe the things we worried about it. And the precautions we took.

PAUL: Imagine a couple where the wife wears a diaphragm and jelly and takes the Pill, and the husband wears three condoms, and then they sleep in separate beds and don’t screw. That’s how careful we tried to be about the damned thing.

SHEILA: All the tabloids had ads from secret mail-forwarding services. For so much a week or so much a letter they would forward your mail. But we didn’t see any reason to trust them, either. I have a criminal mind, as you may have noticed, and it occurred to me that if I wanted a very simple way to get into the blackmailing business for fun and profit, why all I would have to do was open a mail-forwarding operation and read the mail before forwarding it. I don’t suppose the average person in that racket even bothers, actually, but it was enough to scare us off.

PAUL: After all this buildup, what we did is going to sound anticlimactic. I used an alias, and as an address I gave the street address of a third-rate downtown hotel. After the letters were in the mail, I stopped at the hotel one afternoon, gave my false name to the clerk, and slipped him a couple of bucks to look out for any mail that came for me. Of course I started dropping by too soon. The clubs have to forward your letters, and sometimes they take their sweet time, and the mails are often slow, and the people who place the ads are sometimes simply deluged with correspondence, and even if they intend to answer a certain letter it may be some time before they get around to it. Once you get into the swim of things these delays don’t bother you. You have enough letters out at any given time so that you are constantly getting answers and establishing new contacts. We were just beginning and we were impatient to get with it, and so I began checking for my mail a couple of weeks before the first letters trickled in.

SHEILA: We sent out ten letters, each with a photograph enclosed. The pictures were fairly revealing but not obscene in any sense of the word, and we were also careful not to be too outspoken in our letters. We knew that much at least from what we had read. There was not only the legal problem, but we had read that a very frank letter was unlikely to get a reply. It scared off the true swingers.

PAUL: Because they suspected it was from a postal inspector. The Post Office finks are notorious for writing the really raunchy letters.

SHEILA: And also because most swingers, the greater proportion of them, are not interested in meeting really crude people. And anyone who gets too intimate in correspondence with a stranger is either a barbarian or a verbal exhibitionist, and neither is much fun to have around. Incidentally, occasional correspondents will urge us to be more candid in our letters, emphasizing that nothing shocks them and giving an example of their own ability to send original pornography through the mails.

PAUL: You know the drift, John, I’m sure. “Do you like to suck? I sure like to eat pussy. I wish you were here now so I could suck your pussy. I am imagining it and right now I have my tool in my hand—” And on and on until you could really vomit. One glance at a letter like that and you know the clown is a masturbator and nothing else. Never meets anybody, just beats off when he writes to you and beats off all over again if you answer him. Not that I have anything against people like that. I’m all for them finding each other, which I guess happens often enough, nowadays many of them will state in their ads that they only want correspondence. If they get their kicks this way, I don’t think it’s any of the Post Office’s business what they send through the mails.

SHEILA: Sometimes I really wonder about this country. You can send guns and weapons through the mails but not birth-control information or dirty letters.

PAUL: And big corporations can send their cruddy junk mail to me whether or not I want it, and at a rate that means I as a taxpayer am subsidizing the crap, but when some poor pervert chips away at the postal deficit by paying a full six cents to mail a dirty letter, then the public is supposedly being taken advantage of. Well, I’m part of that public, and the junk mailer certainly hurts me and takes more advantage of me than the pervert.

There is more light discussion of the Post Office and the expanding role of government. Politically, Sheila and Paul could be most precisely described as libertarian conservatives, a category into which a majority of upper-middle-class swingers probably belong. They are concerned about the scope of government and its control over the citizenry. Government spending bothers them, as do economic controls, which they regard as creeping socialism. At the same time their feelings regarding civil rights and civil liberties, as well as basic economic assistance for poverty classes, would be characterized as extremely liberal, and their Vietnam position is markedly dovish. This evening’s political comments consist mostly of gentle carping, and before long we return to the topic at hand.

SHEILA: Of our ten letters, seven brought more or less prompt replies, which we later discovered is a remarkably high average. As a general thing, fifty percent is considered good. We had done the right thing in phrasing our letters intelligently and in selecting people who were geographically close to us.

Of the seven, one couple wrote courteously to say that they had a full schedule for the time being. The courtesy of a negative reply was rare enough six years ago. It’s almost nonexistent now. The other six were all raring to go. They sent their pictures and their phone numbers and wanted to meet us.

We narrowed the group down. One couple was interracial, a white girl and a Negro man. At the time we were anxious to avoid that sort of thing—

PAUL: The prejudices you grow up with take a long time dying. Even for swingers.

SHEILA: Another couple wrote a letter that just didn’t ring true. I would be hard-pressed to say how, but it didn’t. We knew there were a lot of phonies in the swinging world, and we had the vague feeling that this was from one of them, so we passed it up.

The other couples all looked like good prospects. We picked the two closest couples, one here in K.C. and another just across the river in Missouri. One was in town and the other struck us from the photograph as slightly more attractive to us, so we tossed a coin, and Kansas City won.

PAUL: They had enclosed their phone number, so one evening we gave them a ring. We had been putting it off for several days and it was really wild. Talk about being tugged two ways at once! We were really desperate for some swinging — it had been about two months since Jeff and Jan moved away — and at the same time we had a rougher case of sexual stage fright than Fay Wray on her honeymoon with King Kong. Somehow all that we had learned from our reading didn’t seem to help in the least. It was like reading books about sky diving — they wouldn’t make it any easier to take that first step out of the plane.

SHEILA: So we stalled until we reached a point that was almost disgusting. Lying in bed together with their letters and pictures and sexing ourselves up with fantasies, and then working it off on each other. I didn’t like that at all. I suppose a civilian would think we had it all backward — that actual swapping is perverse but a little vicarious stimulation between husband and wife is just another onion in the stew of matrimony. I can’t buy that.

PAUL: It’s like jerking off, except that instead of your hand you use you wife’s vagina.

SHEILA: Jesus, what a revolting thought!

PAUL:...When we finally decided to call them, I could think of nothing else all day at the office. I really made a hash of my work, and I was so preoccupied that it was a miracle I didn’t crack up the car on the ride home. We were going to call after dinner, but by the time we had had cocktails we decided not to wait, and I made the call.

The couple we reached were Anne and Harold Kline. I introduced myself by the alias I had used in the letter and they knew at once who I was. They remembered our letter. They were both on the phone, and I got Sheila to pick up the extension in the kitchen, and we had a surprisingly relaxed four-way conversation. They asked us if Friday was all right, and we said it was, and Anne suggested we come over there, and Harold seconded the motion but got across the message that they would understand if we preferred to meet on neutral territory.

SHEILA: In a cocktail lounge, for instance, so that we could all size each other up and call off the swap graciously if we wanted.

PAUL: I would have preferred to do this. In fact Sheila and I had discussed it beforehand. But they were essentially saying that they didn’t have any reservations about swinging with us, and it didn’t seem particularly well mannered for us to express reservations about them. Especially since they were veterans and seemed sure of themselves, which made them two-up on us. So we set a date.

Somewhere in the middle of the conversation I thought to myself that Anne had a sexy voice. Poised, educated, well modulated, and equipped with a husky undertone. And then it struck me that this woman I was chatting with, this total stranger, was going to be my bed partner in three days’ time. It was shocking, and tremendously exciting...

Friday night we left our kids with a sitter and drove across town to their house. Their place was way over on the other side of the city in a section we weren’t at all familiar with, and we had a hell of a time finding it. But we got there, all right. The house was very impressive — a brick two-story home overgrown with ivy and set back on a half-acre lot. Huge oak trees, a first-class landscaping job. We hadn’t known how grand they might live; I knew Harold was a pharmacist, but that could mean anything from a glorified clerk drawing $7800 a year to a man with a chain of drugstores. We learned later that Harold owns three stores on three of the best shopping plazas in the Kansas City area, which made him a far cry from a clerk.

Their son was awake when they let us in. About fourteen years old, an alert, good-looking kid. They introduced him and he shook hands with us and went upstairs to watch television. It sort of shook us up. It really did.

SHEILA: We had had the Creightons over when our kids were in the house, of course. But Mark and Lisa were tiny then, and even if they had walked in on us they wouldn’t have known what was going on. This was a big kid, and the idea of introducing him to the folks his parents swung with—

PAUL: I think we were also more aware of their ages by meeting their son. Their ages were no secret. They were in their mid-thirties, I think thirty-six and thirty-four, which made them substantially older than us but not enough to turn us off, certainly. But when we met their boy, well, he did make them seem to be older than they looked, and it also occurred to me that we were about as close in age to the kid as we were to his parents, and that was an odd feeling.

SHEILA: With Jeff and Jan, we had had everything in common, and so we were now very conscious of differences.

PAUL: Fortunately the Klines put us at ease. We had a few rounds of drinks and began to unwind. They were very attractive people. He was losing his hair in front, but his hairline was receding neatly and evenly so that he only looked bright and distinguished, not ridiculous the way some men do when they begin to go bald. He had a good sense of humor and a knack for keeping a conversation alive.

Anne was a fair-skinned brunette with very large brown eyes and a really extraordinary figure. Most swingers begin to cut a few years off their ages once they pass the thirty mark. In Anne’s case, I would have thought it was the other way around. It was almost impossible to believe she was thirty-four years old with a fourteen-year-old son. Even up close she could have passed for a full ten years younger.

SHEILA: Easily. If I were to meet someone like that now I would be fiercely jealous, but at the time I was too young to mind. When you’re twenty-four you think you’ll be young forever.

PAUL: I noticed that Anne wasn’t drinking the same thing as the rest of us. Later on she explained that she was a health nut. Never touched alcohol or tobacco or tea or coffee or any of the other things that normal people stay alive on. And she drank — what the hell was it?

SHEILA: Vegetable juice. Carrot and parsley and celery. She had an elaborate machine to squeeze them with. And she never ate sugar or white bread or dozens of other things. Or took any kind of pill, including aspirin.

PAUL: She used to say that she only had one vice and she wanted to be able to give it all her energy.

SHEILA: The crazy things she ate and didn’t eat. I shouldn’t say crazy, should I? It certainly worked for her. If I had any sense—

PAUL: No you don’t. You’re too much of a fanatic, honey. If you quit smoking and drinking you’d go all the way and cut out sex, too, and then where would we be?

SHEILA: Dead of boredom in a week.

PAUL: You said it. Well, let’s say that I was sufficiently impressed with Anne. Her figure was great in clothes, and the bathing-suit shot they had sent us had proved she looked good out of clothes, too. There was no doubt in my mind that I was interested, and Shelia and I exchanged glances and her eyes let me know that she wasn’t averse to the idea of making it with Harold, either. So I relaxed and waited for them to take the initiative.

This took a while. I guess they wanted the kid to have a chance to get to sleep, or else they just wanted to give us all a chance to get acquainted. But around ten o’clock Anne asked if we would like to see the basement recreation room. I started to go with her, and Sheila was ready to tag along.

SHEILA: Sometimes people can be too subtle.

PAUL: And this was one of those times. But Harold took hold of her and asked her to keep him company for a few minutes, and then my genius wife got the message. And so did I.

There was a Castro convertible downstairs, all opened and ready for action — which was a good description of the state Anne was in, as far as that goes. It was really a pretty odd scene. At one moment she was this calm and cool hostess, and the next minute she was a bitch in heat. Literally. I saw the couch opened up and said something moderately clever and turned to smile at her, just the least bit afraid that maybe I had been overly risqué with her playing it so cool, and there she was with her dress pulled over her head and nothing but her underneath it. She kicked off her shoes, flopped on the bed, and started panting.

I was really stunned by all of this, and instead of rising to the occasion I stood there staring like a jerk. Not for long, though. Then I got undressed and got in bed with her.

We began touching and kissing, and at one point I was about to go down on her. Just as a matter of course, because we had all reached the point where we hardly ever had coitus without some french preparation first.

Anne didn’t want that. “No,” she said, “not that. I don’t want that. Just put it in me. Your big hard thing, put it in me and give it to me as hard as you can.”

This put me off-stride for a moment. I don’t like being told how to make love to a girl, not that bluntly; it’s a de-balling sort of thing. But I thought, hell, the customer is always right, so I got on and rode.

I was surprised. She turned out to be sensational at it — muscular control, rhythm, empathy for what her partner wanted, everything. This shouldn’t have been surprising, maybe, but the abruptness of the approach had more or less turned me off and I had estimated her to be sexually unrefined, unsophisticated, the get-on-and-do-it-and-get-off type. She wasn’t that way at all. It was just that her whole orientation was phallic. The size and rigidity of my organ was about all she cared about. And she kept talking about it constantly while I was balling her, how large it was, how firm, how marvelous it made her feel—

SHEILA: Mr. Modesty hasn’t told you this, but he happens to have a seventeen-inch penis.

PAUL: Oh, out it out.

SHEILA: With 18-karat gold trim and a two-piece charcoal filter.

PAUL: You’re a riot. I’m not boasting, not by any means. I’m about average, and so are maybe ninety eight percent of the men we’ve met, as far as that goes. The whole point was she was making all this fuss over something that wasn’t all that unusual. I wasn’t about to object, though. It was good food for the ego—

SHEILA: Poor starving little ego.

PAUL: —and as I said, she was enjoyable enough in the rack. So I stayed with her. She didn’t mind variety, as long as it came out with my plug in her socket, so we ran through a variety of positions and kept going until I ran out of gas. I had acquitted myself fairly early and I certainly hadn’t left her hung up, but there was a sort of wistful expression on her face and I had the feeling she could have kept on going for hours.

SHEILA: And meanwhile I was upstairs on the living room couch finding out why Anne liked what she liked. See, she couldn’t get it at home.

JWW: Harold was impotent?

SHEILA: In the worst way. He didn’t have one.

PAUL: Isn’t that too much?

SHEILA: Not enough is more like it. When they went downstairs he kissed me and began making love to me, and he wound up going down on me on the couch without taking off his own clothes. He was an artist at this — impotent fellows generally are, if they’re swingers, maybe because they haven’t got much else going for them.

I made it, and we sat back and had a cigarette. I asked if there wasn’t something I could do for him, and he said not now, that he was fine. I gathered that he had ejaculated while he was eating me, which happens. I made some joke to this effect, some very stupid joke about how he should have saved it until he found the proper receptacle. Just a stupid joke, and one that seemed a lot stupider when he explained that he didn’t have a penis.

PAUL: A swinger without a penis. Isn’t that incredible?

SHEILA: Oh, I don’t know. I’m a swinger without a penis.

PAUL: Just incredible. A swing-errrr without a penis/ Is like a ship/Without a sail—

SHEILA: I’ll ignore that. It wasn’t in the war. It was an accident, I think an automobile accident. He showed me what he had left, which was virtually nothing. But he still had his testicles and they still functioned, and if he became very excited sexually he was still capable of ejaculating. But of course he couldn’t have coitus, because of what he was missing.

PAUL: What you call all dressed up and no place to go.

SHEILA: That wasn’t even funny. And why joke about it?

PAUL: Because, if you really want to know, just thinking about it gives me a terminal case of the chills. Why don’t we talk about something else? Something conversationally safe, like religion or politics?

SHEILA: Castration fears, sweetie?

PAUL: No, just an inverted case of penis envy.

SHEILA: That’s funny. Well, to make a long story short—

PAUL: Which is what Harold’s accident did, God help him.

SHEILA: —he had an artificial phallus which he and Anne would use, and of course he would go down on her, but he explained that it was mainly what he was missing that made them go into swinging, more for her sake than anything else. I had never heard of anything like this at the time. Since then I’ve known plenty of couples where the husband is wholly or partially impotent, but nothing equivalent to Harold.

I asked if there was anything I could do for him, and he said the one thing that thrilled him that way was to bring a girl to orgasm. And he spent the next few hours doing that, once wearing the rubber dildo and the other times in more common ways.

On the way home we compared notes and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. At first we more or less decided not to see them again. They didn’t go for anything more elaborate than separate-room twosies, and of course there was that big gap on his part and her single-minded interest, and it hardly added up to ideal partners for us. I remember that we got mildly hysterical on the way home, comparing the two of them to Jeff and Jan. All the difference in the world. We couldn’t help laughing, and yet it wasn’t all that funny, because we thought of what it would be like to swap with them on a regular basis, you know, see them exclusively. It was a very grim idea.

PAUL: And one grim idea led to another. We felt, well, pretty damned foolish. All of this planning and scheming and driving across town to make square love with a cock-crazy health-food nut and her prickless husband, if you’ll excuse the language, but that was how we thought of them. All of that aggravation, and for what, really?

SHEILA: I was ready to give it up. Swinging, the whole scene. I had a good time with what’s-his-name, Harold, but it left a bad taste. And he was so pathetic that I couldn’t hate him or even despise him, which made it worse.

We went to bed and compared notes, and that was the big surprise, because it turned us on. We didn’t think of it as exciting, but when we talked about it we did get excited, each of us showing what we’d done earlier, and we made very good love...

And as it turned out, we saw the Klines off and on as long as we stayed in K.C. Once we had made other contacts and got involved in swinging with a wide variety of people, we grew to appreciate them in a strange way as an occasional change of pace. Oh, say we made it with them five, six times over the next year or so. Maybe only four times. They were nice people. Not natural swingers, because they were driven to it, but nice people just the same...

They begin reminiscing about other couples with whom they had relations during their stay in Kansas City. Their circle of sexual partners gradually enlarged, they explain, both through additional correspondence and through introductions arranged by past contacts. We sit in repose, smoking, drinking, nibbling at the tray of canapés, while they discuss these past sexual exploits with an air not unlike a pair of college fraternity brothers at a twentieth reunion, trading roseate memories of pranks that sound oddly unreal now.

I hear of this couple and that couple, this man and that woman. I am provided with thumbnail sketches and capsule biographies: A, married for the second time, would inherit a million-dollar landscape gardening firm if his father ever died; B, flat-chested and pear-shaped, had a mad passion for fellatio; C, a thoroughgoing bisexual, had been a virgin on her wedding night and became an all-out swinger in less than six months; D, a sound engineer at a local television studio, had some fantastic erotic tapes; E and F, according to a persistent rumor, were brother and sister now living as man and wife but no one had dared ask them about this to their faces.

I change the reels in my tape recorder, but somewhere along the way, I must confess, I fail to change the reels in my head; the words they utter are no longer recorded in my mind but pass in and out unnoticed; I tune them out. And later I wonder at this. Perhaps I have dwelled too long among the swingers. Perhaps I have listened one time too many to this sort of recital, this shockingly unshocking narrative of loveless love, of oddly sexless sex. The Klines, I muse, were at least something unusual, a man without a penis, a woman who did not deign to be cunnilingued. But now they have been discussed and released, and the others are not so distinctive; all the men have penises, all the women delight in being eaten. And both Paul and Sheila, who have heretofore impressed me as being so singularly perceptive, so gratifyingly articulate, have suddenly lost their charm, their verve, their vision. Their conversation is preoccupied with total recall of who did what and with which and to whom.

I try to blame the Scotch for all our shortcomings — the tedium of their conversation, the impatience of my response to it. But the blame will not stick. There is another element at work, another influence beyond that of alcohol.

Sheila takes up the narrative, carries it for a time, permits her husband to take over. I am barely conscious that they are talking. Later, when the tapes are transcribed, I learn the particulars of their swinging in Kansas City. This seems to have been a period when their enthusiasm was at its most unqualified. Sex was ever-new and ever-fresh, new people were always available and almost always worth the trouble, and orgasms were as lush and perfect as in the fantasy world of pornography. All the men had penises, all the women liked to be eaten—

That night I plead a headache, which is not entirely a fabrication, and leave earlier than they had expected or I had intended. My drive home is not unlike their return from Harold and Anne Kline’s. I, too, become slightly hysterical. I, too, moody and depressed, seriously contemplate abandoning a project, in this case, a book.

It is later, when I read the transcriptions of my tapes, that I take a blue pencil to my own reactions. For the tone of that night with Paul and Sheila was, I realize, very much as it ought to have been. Automatically, unconsciously, they had managed to recapture if not a mood then at least an attitude, the attitude which had characterized them during the days of experimental swinging which they had been describing. The glibness, the arch patter, the surface judgments were a bona fide if unintended recreation of their past selves.

The happy time. The first party with more than four in attendance. The first viewing of a pornographic movie. The first experiments with extrapersonal devices. The first really bad meeting, with a pair of sadomasochists who want to tie Sheila up and lash her with whips — “But, the thing of it was that this clown kept stressing that it wouldn’t leave marks or do any damage, unable to understand that it still wasn’t something Sheila had any interest in, and he was so persistent I thought I might have to knock him on his ass, but fortunately he finally got the message and backed down, and we got the hell out of there. We got home hours earlier than we planned, and there was our pimple-faced baby-sitter getting herself fucked on the living room couch. We walked in on her, and the boy turned absolutely green, and Doris burst into tears, and it was just too much after all that. We looked at each other and started laughing. We laughed our heads off, we couldn’t stop, and finally we did catch our breaths, and there was this long, stony silence, and then the girl said, “What’s so funny?” Not sarcastic or bitter but just baffled, because of course she didn’t see why we would laugh like that. And Sheila, I don’t know how she did it, but the kids had been doing it in the standard missionary posture, face to face with him on top, and what she said was, “I just never heard of doing it in that position, that’s all.” And naturally we both broke up completely, and the poor girl started bawling all over again. Crying, that is. Not balling as in making love.”

The happiest memories, I decide, are of those experiences which are a joy to remember but which we would not for anything care to relive — fraternity pranks, football rallies, front-line combat, early loves. One is doubly grateful for them — that they happened, and that they need never happen again.

Sooner or Later You Make Yourself Sick

PAUL: Sorry we had to cancel out last night. We tried to reach you, but you were out and we left a message with your service. I was afraid you might drive all the way out.

JWW: I thought I’d call first.

PAUL: If you had come, I guess you could have interviewed four people instead of two.

JWW: Oh?

PAUL: We had a couple over last night. New people. New to us, that is. A young couple. He’s a commercial artist. They don’t live ten minutes from us. Friends of some friends of ours.

We are lunching at a small, unprepossessing restaurant near his office. After abruptly canceling an interview scheduled for the previous evening, today Paul has called me in midmorning to request this lunch date. I expect that the cancellation and the appointment are related, and that he has chosen this way to tell me he and Sheila have decided to abandon the book project. I am prepared to encourage him to stay with it; I have found that interviewees commonly develop a form of stage fright somewhere along the line, and generally want only to be assured that they ought to go on.

His manner suggests that my suspicions will be proved correct. He talks somewhat disjointedly, with long reflective pauses between clauses and sentences.

PAUL: They were quite a bit younger than we are. Maybe twenty-three, twenty-four. Married just two years. They started, they got into swinging after just a year of marriage.

JWW: That seems to be more and more common lately.

PAUL: I would say so. Oh, a year is not a record, not by any means. Nowadays you’ll often see a couple come together originally as swingers, so that they’ll have partied together from their first date, long before they married. From what I gathered, these kids last night both had pretty active sex lives before marriage and a solid premarital relationship. And after a year of marriage they were ready to get with it.

They had a sort of semi-hippie look to them. Clean and well groomed, but the girl had that long, perfectly straight hair and they were both dressed very mod.

JWW: Must have made you feel ancient.

PAUL: Oh, maybe a little bit, but that’s not what I’m getting at. I’m not sure what I am getting at. It’s funny talking about this in public, in a public place like this. No one can hear us, I know that.

JWW: If you’d rather go somewhere else—

PAUL: No, I have only an hour. I suppose this was silly, getting you down here for nothing, but it came to me last night — that I wanted to talk to you, and just the two of us. Not that it’s anything I wouldn’t want to say to Sheila, but I wanted it to be while the ideas were fresh in my mind. I don’t know—

A waiter brings something. The conversation stalls. When we resume, Paul has organized himself.

PAUL: Last night the girl, her name was Barbara, wanted to do a sandwich. You know what that is? To be specific, she wanted me to screw her from front while her husband had her anally from the rear. She explained that she really liked to do this, it was her particular pleasure, and she offered to give Sheila some head during all this, but Sheila declined.

These people here, all around us. Assuming they’re civilians, can you imagine their reaction overhearing this conversation? Suppose they just managed to overhear it? Once they got past shock, do you know what the majority of them would think?

JWW: I suppose they would be envious to a greater or lesser degree.

PAUL: No question about it. They would think, well, here’s a man describing a really exciting experience. Really thrilling. Some of them would get physically excited thinking about it.

In a way, that’s part of my point. John, picture this. The three of us are on the bed in our bedroom. I am having relations with this Barbara. Her husband is trying to get in her from the rear, but he can’t maintain an erection. Sheila comes over and stimulates him and he tries again and can’t do it, and then the girl asks if we have a vibrator, so she and I separate and she works on him with a vibrator.

And more of this, you get the general idea, I forget exactly who does what and it doesn’t really matter, but what it adds up to is that this is a real production number. I mean we literally spend half an hour getting ready to treat this kid to her sandwich, and then we do it. Of course it’s a great bore. The poor husband has been so excessively stimulated by now that he ejaculates prematurely. The girl and I, on the other hand, can’t finish at all. We poke around for a while, then everybody showers and gets dressed and we go back downstairs.

Sheila makes coffee, we drink coffee, and we try to manage a conversation. The failure in the bedroom has us all unstrung by this point, especially the husband who can hardly avoid feeling inadequate. We fill a few minutes with talk of mutual friends. Otherwise it turns out that we don’t have very much to talk about. They’re decent enough kids, but aside from sex we have nothing in common with them, and would never have spent an evening with them except to swing together. Finally they leave, and that’s that.

And that, John, is the fantastically exciting evening that would have nine out of ten men in this room drooling if they heard about it. Do you see what I’m driving at?

JWW: I’m not sure.

PAUL: That it seems more exciting than it is. Oh, some evenings are better than others, there’s no question about it. Last night was particularly bad. What do hippies call it? Last night was a bummer. But every once in a while you get a night like that...

And even the good nights, what’s the real point of it all? Just the same old thing every time. New people, maybe some halfway new ways of having sex, but otherwise it’s all the same. Intimate relationships with people you don’t know intimately, people you don’t honestly know at all. People in many cases whom, if you did know them at all well, you wouldn’t want to talk to, let alone have relations with.

JWW: You don’t always feel this way.

PAUL: No, of course not.

JWW: On quite a few occasions you’ve told me you feel swinging is the only way for a married couple to live in today’s world. I believe you meant this when you said it.

PAUL: I did. That’s really why I wanted to talk to you today, while I still had this particular fix on the whole scene. To give you this side of it while it was fresh in my mind.

Look — every swinger has certain times when he sees nothing but the positive side of swinging, and other times when he sees the negative. I would say this is true for virtually everyone. But in the interviews we’ve had I constantly find myself taking the same position, and this is legitimate because it’s the position Sheila and I have come around to over the years. It’s the way we feel most of the time. So whenever we’re talking and that little machine is taking it all down, I slip into gear, as if I’m programmed to respond a certain way in an interview situation.

I thought right now I’d be primed to break the pattern and give you the other side of the coin.

He begins to develop what we have already agreed will be a purposely unbalanced indictment of swinging. He talks about the hazards of the life, the dangers inherent in the practice of having intimate relations with strangers.

PAUL: The first time we ran an advertisement of our own, we were really shocked by the response. Not the quantity — we ran the ad simultaneously in four or five club bulletins, so we knew it would draw well — but the kind of people we heard from!

Single perverts who just wanted to write filthy letters. Money-hungry perverts who wanted to sell us something — anything from pornographic pictures to their own services for a fee.

And men posing as couples, of course.

JWW: I understand that happens constantly.

PAUL: All the time. A tremendous number of men want to get in on the action but won’t enter the game on equal terms. They’re all for swapping, but they don’t have anything to swap. Some of them are single, but most of them usually turn out to be married.

Some will write to couples and offer themselves for threesomes. Most of the ads nowadays specify no single men, but if a guy is sufficiently hard up he’ll gamble a letter anyway. Or he’ll write a letter trying to set up a private meeting with the wife — we’ve had a few of those over the years. This sort of man is just a nuisance. With all the men like him compared with the small number of couples looking for threesomes with single men, I don’t think he gets much of a return for his time and effort. We just throw his letters away...

The really aggravating single guy is the one who pretends to be a couple. We have never actually gotten taken in this way ourselves, although on several occasions we’ve broken off correspondence with a “couple” when it became obvious that we were dealing with a single man. There are certain obvious tip-offs. Separate photos of husband and wife, for example, with those of the wife fairly standard professional cheesecake shots. Or letters explaining that the little woman was in bed with the flu, but that the husband would be down our way and would like to get acquainted with us in the meantime. We were lucky enough to get the message whenever we were corresponding with one of these kooks, and we just stopped writing.

We’ve known people, though, who have been taken in this way. They’ll go so far as to set up a date, either by phone or through correspondence, and turn up alone with some bright excuse. A swinging couple will generally know at this point that they’re being taken in, but swingers do tend to give others the benefit of the doubt. And since it’s too late to make other plans for the evening, and since some people figure that a threesome is better than nothing at all — well, now and then a single man with a lot of nerve can cut himself in on the action this way...

He talks of other swingers, of the apparent emptiness of their lives and of their single-minded absorption in sexual matters. I suggest that he sees them this way because his contact with them is exclusively sexual.

PAUL: It’s more than that. Swingers are compulsive. This constant desire to go further and further, to try new people, to do wilder and wilder things. It’s a compulsion.

JWW: Is swinging always like that? For everyone?

PAUL: It’s like that for everyone, I think. Everyone I’ve ever known. But it isn’t always like that.

JWW: I don’t get the distinction.

PAUL: What I’m saying is that every couple gets caught up in that kind of whirlwind. A cycle where you just go on and on from one thing to another. We were like that toward the end of the time in Kansas City, and then for a few months after we moved to Louisville.

It got... well, very bad. Very wild. I don’t know if I can get across to you how absorbed in this we both were. We were reaching a point where we hardly thought about anything else. My job — this was in Louisville — I was in a new job and I came very close to blowing it. I just didn’t seem to care about my work any more. It was a good opportunity, an important opportunity, but I had trouble keeping my mind on it, and if things had gone on that way I’m fairly sure they would have let me go before too much longer.

Swinging just became everything. We hardly ever made love, just the two of us. A couple of times we tried, and it didn’t work. We couldn’t do anything, and I guess that scared us both. The implications. So instead of facing it we made excuses for ourselves, and even told each other that it proved the value of swinging, because otherwise we would have no sex at all. You can’t even attempt to find logic in this. We ceased to behave logically, that’s the whole thing.

Around this time I became a very compulsive record keeper. I got a Polaroid and we both went nuts trying to keep a complete record of what we did and with whom. After a date — we dated at least two nights a week, sometimes more — we would write up the night’s entertainment. We made lists of what we had done and what the people had been like. Lists to go with the photographs.

Crazy.

I knew it couldn’t go on like this. I knew that it had to peak.

JWW: Did you think about slowing down?

PAUL: That’s the whole point. The sort of thing we were caught up in, it was impossible to slow down. Absolutely impossible. We couldn’t gradually put the brakes on. We were driving a car without brakes and heading downhill. The only way to stop was to crash.

JWW: Do you know why that was so?

PAUL: We were looking for something that wasn’t there...

I keep thinking of nymphomaniacs. A girl who enjoys sex very much, very intensely, but who never quite comes completely, who always feels that maybe the next orgasm will be the really big one.

We were like that. For a time we kept waiting for it to burn out the way the urge for bigger and better varieties of sex had done. We were really past the point of looking for more extreme kicks by this point. We had found our level in that respect. But the extent of our involvement in swinging, the role it played in our lives — this didn’t level off.

I don’t know why this was. Secret guilt, hidden perverted desires, I don’t know, I’m no psychiatrist.

The waiter refills our coffee cups, We have stayed past Paul’s lunch hour. He glances at his watch, says that he ought to be getting back, then hastens to assure me that another few minutes will make no difference. He lights a cigarette, smokes thoughtfully.

PAUL: I can’t pinpoint it. We both knew that some sort of crash was coming, but even so we had trouble discussing it. Whenever one of us brought up the subject the other would take the opposite tack. Almost as if we were deliberately balancing one another out.

We began getting along badly. There was talk of divorce — the word came up in the course of arguments, as I suppose it does with any couple going through a rough time. In a sense that was what we were, a couple going through a rough time, but swinging was at the heart of this because it was at the heart of our whole lives.

As for what finally did it for us, what turned us away from swinging, I’m not sure I know. Of course the actual incident was Sheila attempting to kill herself. She took pills. It was close...

Afterward all I could think of was how close I had come to losing her, and the entire swinging scene, the whole pattern of our lives, was just disgusting. Completely disgusting. All I wanted to do was make a clean, sane life for us. We had to rebuild our lives.

The suicide, the attempted suicide, was the crash. I don’t know if there was any single thing that actually made Sheila do it or not. I don’t really think there was. I suppose it was a combination of things, all getting to her at the same time, reinforcing each other.

It happens, in swinging. It doesn’t have to be violent, abrupt, but it does happen. Sooner or later you make yourself sick. For some people it’s gradual — they find themselves losing interest, turning down more and more dates, limiting themselves to a few old friends, until gradually they’ve become inactive. In our case the break had to be immediate and complete. Taking a knife and just chopping everything away.

We settle the check, walk together out of the restaurant. On the sidewalk he apologizes for dragging me to such a depressing interview. I assure him it has been time well spent. “I gave you all the bad side,” he said. “Blame it on my mood. If I told you the same story tomorrow it would sound completely different. In the right sort of mood I could make anything sound bad. And after all, we went back to swinging. We did go back to it.”

His smile stiffens slightly, “I never thought we would,” he says. “I never thought we would.”

Dropping Out and Dropping In

SHEILA: People ask if I really meant to kill myself. If you’ve ever been there you know that the question itself is no good. When you reach that state there’s no saying what you do or don’t mean. Everything gets blurred around the edges. Reality loses its definition. There are certain things that happened then — or didn’t happen — and I will never really be sure, because I can’t say positively whether they occurred or I have false memories of them. I don’t know if psychiatrists recognize the condition of temporary insanity or whether it’s just a way for murderers to get acquitted, but that’s how I would describe the state I was in, as a state of temporary insanity. So as to whether or not I intended to kill myself—

PAUL: When you were safely out of it, you certainly wanted to live.

SHEILA: I remember feeling like a very small child. Absolutely no will of my own. I remember being in bed, a hospital bed, everything white and clean, and people looking down at me. Strangers, strange faces. And all I could think was that these strangers were big people who would take care of me. They would tell me what to do and all I would have to do was obey their orders. I wouldn’t have to make any decisions. I would do as I was told and they would take care of me.

And I remember a doctor’s voice, the first words that I heard that made any impression. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

This kept ringing in my head. You’re lucky to be alive. I don’t know if this happens to everybody, but when I’m in a stress situation of one sort or another, or it may be just that my perceptions are flooey because of some drug and ordinary clichés go around in my mind until they take on a new meaning. I don’t mean that I take drugs, because I don’t, not in the hippie sense. I’ve never even had marijuana. But I’ve had pills to lose weight, and allergy pills, and once some tranquilizers, which incidentally were the worst of all in this respect. I suppose it’s a change in body chemistry; your system is suddenly playing by a different set of rules and it does something to your mind.

You’re lucky to be alive. It echoed in my mind, and I took it a step past the obvious meaning, that I had come fairly close to losing my life and that it was luck which saved me. That obviously was what the doctor was trying to get across to me.

What I also interpreted it to mean, though, was that of two possible states, alive and dead, I was alive. And that this state, being alive, was desirable. And thus I was lucky. And since I agreed with this analysis, since I felt that I was lucky to be alive, it meant that basically I was accepting life, I was responding to it affirmatively. Does this make any sense at all or was it just meaningful to me at the time? Because I think I know what I mean, but I don’t know if the distinction comes across.

PAUL: It says something about your state of mind, I think. And I know what you mean, even though I can’t say I understand the logic of how you got there.

SHEILA: I don’t suppose it matters. It was all part of a reaction, of course. And I had turned the corner. It wasn’t just a matter of wanting to go on living. I wanted to make everything right again, and clean and sane and... I don’t know. I wanted everything to be perfect.

Paul and I talked. I don’t mean that we had a significant conversation. I mean we talked. God, do you remember the way it was? Weeks and weeks of planning and talking and explaining and analyzing.

PAUL: We had never before opened up to each other that completely.

SHEILA: It was too much, really.

PAUL: We needed it at the time.

SHEILA: Yes. But you can go too far. A person needs to live a portion of his life alone...

We discuss this for a time. It is a position Sheila has taken — on other occasions — that communication must be limited, that even self-analysis can become dangerous when carried too far. And often I sensed a pull of opposing forces at work within her: on the one hand the impulse to inform and educate and display through the development of our book, and on the other hand the urge to keep some part of herself hidden from me, from Paul, from the reader, and indeed from herself.

She is a thoughtful, analytical person, considerably more so than her husband, and at the same time more defensive and secretive. Our luncheon conversation, given in the last chapter, provides an excellent illustration; Sheila would not have been inclined to initiate such an interview, but should it commence, she would have had far less difficulty marshaling her thoughts and articulating them.

She returns now to a period of time following her initial suicide attempt, when she and Paul determined to separate themselves entirely from the world of mate-swapping. The process, as she and her husband describe it, is not unlike any religious conversion — a moment, perhaps shock-inspired, of blinding revelation; an absolute and unequivocal break with the past; soul-seeking introspection; and, finally, the embracing of a new pattern of living which is nearly as extreme as the one now forsaken. It is so often thus that converts are made, and apostates as well.

PAUL: There’s a sort of daydream I always find myself having when things get out of joint. I’m sure it must be universal. Just a dream of starting over completely. That the slate is clean, that you could get a completely fresh start and be free from all the things that make your present situation unbearable.

SHEILA: The original American dream, isn’t it? A new start in a new world. Go west, young man, and all that.

PAUL: Or the attraction of confession in the Catholic Church. The idea that you can get completely clean. That you can wash off old sins and start anew.

SHEILA: With new sins.

PAUL: You know what I mean. We were like that. It wasn’t enough for us to change our sexual lives, to put a 180 degree bend in our whole approach to sex. We were like a doctor with a patient suffering from every known disease, and instead of just treating the one that would kill him first we had to treat everything at once, everything from cancer to an ingrown toenail at the same time.

SHEILA: We cut out swinging. That very nearly goes without saying. In fact we got so completely caught up in the pattern of changing our lives that we almost forgot about swinging. Forgot that we had done it, that is.

JWW: Not literally?

SHEILA: Hardly that. But it was as though the change in our personalities had been so complete that we were worlds removed from ourselves as swingers. We stopped talking about those days. Not because of a conscious desire to avoid the subject but because we honestly didn’t think about it.

PAUL: Which may simply have meant that we were repressing the thoughts themselves—

SHEILA: Well, the hell with that. It’s hard enough being responsible for one’s conscious mind. What’s that joke about a man who dreamed he was committing adultery, and his wife was jealous?

PAUL: Right. On a conscious level, we were absolute puritans.

JWW: I’m not sure I get the full picture. You say that this reformation embraced not only swinging but everything else.

PAUL: That’s right. Our whole life style.

JWW: I’m not sure if I understand what’s involved in “everything else.” As far as I can see, your only real deviation from societal norms lay in your being swingers. You weren’t criminals, you didn’t take dope, you didn’t drink—

PAUL: You’re missing the point completely.

SHEILA: Yes, you are. We became completely idealistic in the purest sense of the word. Does that give you anything, John?

PAUL: We not only gave up swinging, we gave up smoking.

SHEILA: And drinking. And aspirin, for Christ’s sake. And staying up late, and eating rich desserts, and drinking anything alcoholic, and overindulging in coffee—

JWW: Oh, now I understand.

PAUL: We started dozens of little self-improvement projects. We bought language records, we were going to broaden ourselves by learning a foreign language. And we started little programs of reading worthwhile books. We stopped spanking the children and started reasoning with them, which must have confused the hell out of them.

SHEILA: It’s easy to see it now as a period of reaction, the pendulum swinging the other way to compensate for what had gone on before. Living through it was something else again. We dropped all our friends and didn’t seem to have time to find new ones. When we did meet people, they never went out of their way to see us again. I’m sure we made people uncomfortable. Never relaxed, never had a drink, never joked, took everything so damned seriously.

PAUL: Did you happen to read The Arrangement?

SHEILA: Oh, for Christ’s sake!

PAUL: She has a problem, she can only read things that are well written. I can only tell whether or not something is interesting, and if it is, I stay with it. There was a part in this book that reminded me of us. The narrator is almost killed in an auto wreck, and then he and his wife go through this same sort of idealistic thing, fooling around with art and spiritual development and getting to know each other deeply, all of that. I understand the book’s not considered the greatest novel in the history of world literature, but that section of the book brought it all back to me...

They further define their behavior during this period, the various disciplines involved. As Paul describes the ease with which they both gave up smoking, Sheila lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. Paul takes one himself shortly thereafter. Ultimately I express interest in their sexual relationship during this period of adjustment — has swinging left them jaded? Or does sex itself seem irrelevant to their new way of living?

PAUL: At first we just left it alone.

SHEILA: It was the one subject we did not discuss. Not sex in general, we were able to talk about that, but sex as a function of our new relationship. We didn’t talk about it, nor did we do anything about it. We were very close physically and all, kissing and holding hands and sleeping in one another’s arms, but nothing sexual happened, nothing was desired on either side.

PAUL: If I thought anything, I thought it was over.

JWW: Permanently?

PAUL: I would say so. And it seems odd, thinking back on it, but I don’t believe this bothered me. I felt as though we had outgrown sex, as though we had gone beyond it.

SHEILA: This was just at first, of course.

PAUL: The first stage. Later we got off that bicycle and went for the sex-is-holy routine.

SHEILA: You’re being a little too flippant. It was more complicated. We decided to have another child.

PAUL: Heidi.

SHEILA: Obviously. There’s no point in going into our reasons for this. I think it’s obscene to explain the reasons which led to the existence of a human being.

PAUL: It’s comical and you don’t want to admit it.

SHEILA: It’s not comical.

PAUL: The hell it isn’t. Having a kid to symbolize our new way of life, our no-more-swinging way of life, and then wearing maternity clothes to—

SHEILA: Stop it!

PAUL: —to a swap session, and—

SHEILA: God damn you! You don’t have to talk about it!

PAUL: You’d rather hide it?

SHEILA: I don’t have to listen to this shit!

She storms out of the room. Paul and I sit awkwardly. He abandons his narrative, which he had taken up only to provoke his wife. He turns the conversation to some less crucial topic. We chat mindlessly for a few minutes until Sheila abruptly reappears with a fresh pot of coffee and a plate of cookies. The conversation is taken up as it was before Paul began baiting her, with no further mention of the quarrel, no apology on either side.

SHEILA: When we decided to have Heidi, when we first began making love again, I know we were both very much afraid, concerned that... well, that nothing would happen.

PAUL: Or that it wouldn’t be any good.

SHEILA: I suppose we thought we might have gotten completely jaded as a result of our experiences in swinging. In a sense, that had happened to us for a time while we were swinging, we did reach a point where we were only excited in the presence of other people.

PAUL: We were probably worried that the process wouldn’t reverse itself. All the obvious hang-ups were involved... To make a long story short, we turned out to be a hundred-percent wrong.

SHEILA: It was wonderful.

PAUL: Absolutely wonderful.

SHEILA: We were astounded at the time, but when you look back on it I don’t see how anything could have been more natural. We were incredibly close at the time, closer than we’ve ever been before or since. And I’m not criticizing our present relationship when I say that. What we have now is, I would say, an improvement on what we had then. We were too close, too earnest, too—

PAUL: Too intense.

SHEILA: That’s it.

PAUL: Because when you spend enough of your time talking about your relationship, you’re just too involved in it. People, especially people who happen to be married to each other, ought to be able to relax with their relationship. But we were in a special set of circumstances, and I guess you could say we were too close.

SHEILA: It certainly made for good sex.

PAUL: I think it’s particularly fulfilling when you’re trying to conceive a child.

SHEILA: At least it was, given our mood at the time. There was something holy about what we were doing, in our eyes, at least. And the joy of lovemaking seemed to last longer. It didn’t end with orgasm but seemed to be an on-going affair.

JWW: Did you have any difficulty in becoming pregnant?

SHEILA: None. I seem to be embarrassingly fertile.

JWW: Let me just sum up the temporal picture. About how long after you dropped out of swinging did you conceive Heidi?

PAUL: I guess it was about three months.

SHEILA: And three months after that — it was just about three months, I had just started wearing maternity clothes — why, we dropped back in again.

JWW: That seems surprising, in view of what you’ve said.

PAUL: It was surprising.

SHEILA: We didn’t expect it to happen, certainly. Or if we did suspect it secretly, it was something we didn’t think about, let alone discuss. But you have to appreciate how artificial this “arrangement” of ours was. Not artificial in the sense that we were consciously doing something phony, but in that we were not really being ourselves. We thought we were being ourselves, but it was just role playing. The people we were pretending to be were types who had no use for swinging, and we thought we would remain that way forever.

PAUL: The hell, we thought we would stay off cigarettes forever, too, as far as that goes. I stuck it out for three months and Sheila for close to four, and by then we were both ready to give up giving up smoking. It was the same thing with swinging, only we lasted a little longer.

JWW: Was it really the same thing? A habit that wouldn’t stay broken? Or was it more complicated than that?

SHEILA: Your Honor, the prosecuting attorney is leading his witness.

JWW: And you wish to record an objection?

SHEILA: I don’t know. Here’s what happened—

As she begins, Paul leaves the room briefly, returns with a freshened drink, then sits in silence listening to her version of the return to swinging. The bitterness which Sheila evidenced earlier, the uneasiness she seemed to feel at the memory of resuming swinging during her pregnancy, seems to have been entirely put aside. Her thoughts could hardly have been better organized, I realize, had she taken the trouble of writing them out beforehand.

Her ease in discussing the return to life as swingers is particularly noticeable now, while she confines herself to narrating precisely what happened rather than probing motivations. Later, when we take up those matters, she becomes somewhat less certain of herself verbally. Even then the tension evident earlier in the evening does not reassert itself, at least not visibly.

SHEILA: Like so many things, it seemed to happen out of the blue, with absolutely no warning, no advance preparation whatsoever. When we looked back on it, though, we were able to see that it had been building up for some time without our noticing it. So many things happen this way; in retrospect the signs were there all along, but you only see them after you’re past them.

On the surface, everything seemed to be fine between us. Not merely on the surface that we presented to the world but the surface which we ourselves were able to see. I was having a much easier time with pregnancy than I’d had with Mark or Lisa, hardly any morning sickness and I wasn’t gaining nearly as much weight. My mental attitude was good, too. With the first two children, much as I wanted them, I was still worried about my ability to handle the role of motherhood. Now I’d had enough experience in that role to know I could manage it at least adequately. And Paul was earning more money and enjoying firmer job security than ever before, and we were both more emotionally stable, or at least seemed to be, all of which made us both more comfortable with the whole idea of pregnancy than ever before.

In the third month, a strange thing happened. I was at my obstetrician’s office and he was giving me an internal examination. A finger wave, as they call it. Now I’ve heard thousands of jokes about women getting excited during a gynecological examination, so I suppose it must happen now and then, but actually I can’t think of anything that ought to be duller for both the patient and the doctor. At best it’s a burlesque of sex because the mood is so distinctly asexual. This particular doctor always picked that time to talk about something profoundly boring — his kid’s schoolwork or the membership policy at the country club or something equally provocative. I have a feeling he does this purposely to make it less likely that a patient will be either embarrassed or excited.

I certainly wasn’t embarrassed. I couldn’t be embarrassed by a plumber’s hand in there, much less a doctor’s.

But this time was really crazy; I got excited.

It happened without any warning, just a spontaneous feeling of passion. I got very wet and felt extremely warm there from a rush of blood to the loins. I began getting all breathless and passionate. All the standard symptoms, all perfectly suitable if I were in bed with somebody, but a little bit out of place in a doctor’s office. And it wasn’t purely physical, although it may have started that way, because I found myself looking at him and making him the specific object of my interest. He was a fairly handsome guy, dark complexion, white teeth, a sort of rugged stocky build, and all at once I was not only getting hotter than hell from the fingering but was wondering what it would be like to ball him.

If he noticed what was happening, at least he had the grace to keep it to himself. He seemed completely oblivious to it all. I think that if he’d tossed off some flip line right about then I would have gone through the floor. I’d have quietly died.

On the other hand, if he’d given me the slightest encouragement I would have raped him.

For me, that was the start. I went home and found myself thinking about it, over and over. I couldn’t push the thought out of my head. I wanted to discuss it with Paul, but of course I couldn’t. There was really no place for a discussion to go. But I went on thinking about it, very close to being obsessed with it. One night we were making love and my mind wandered, as minds are apt to do, and there was a moment when I realized that I was imagining myself making love with my doctor instead of my husband. And I felt the urge to stay with the fantasy, you see, which I could not possibly permit myself to do; after all, this was during our marriage-is-sacred stage, you see. So I broke off the fantasy, but I missed having an orgasm that night.

Then one afternoon I was feeling moody and depressed and unattractive, and I went to bed and had the fantasy that I was with my doctor, and I used my finger instead of his, and for the first time in a really long time I masturbated.

Doesn’t it make a beautiful picture? A well-adjusted young matron — and if that isn’t a dreadful word, “matron”; I get this picture of a beefy dyke guard in a woman’s prison — but a well-adjusted young married woman, then, mother of two with a third on the way, in love with her husband and through with promiscuous sex and all that, taking to her bed in the middle of the afternoon and secretly frigging herself to distraction with thoughts of pelvic examinations dancing in her head.

I felt this all-consuming guilt afterward. And I felt that everything was a farce, that I was a phony playing a phony role. All this bilge about the sanctity of our mature relationship, and after six months of it I had only succeeded in turning myself into a jerk-off.

After that there were random thoughts. Every man I saw, every person I saw, I would view as a potential sex partner. Oh, not really, not the way it sounds. Not the way it is with nymphomaniacs who stare at the crotch of every passing man and try to imagine what his organ feels like. Nothing that abnormal. just the sort of sexual speculation, the I-wouldn’t-do-anything-about-it-but-there’s-no-harm-in-window-shopping attitude that the average married person goes through all the time. Of course I speculated that way with girls as well, probably because I’d had experience in that direction as well, but otherwise it was nothing unusual. Except that it was unusual for me because we had six months of this crazy total emotional and physical fidelity.

So that was when it started for me. And it was happening about the same time for Paul. Exactly the same time, as we found out later. Again, nothing really happened. Just urges.

PAUL: I was responding to other women, that’s all. It didn’t upset me nearly as much as it did Sheila because I knew that every man does this all the time. Also it came up more gradually; I didn’t suddenly get hot in a doctor’s office. I didn’t intend to do anything about it, either. I considered it — there was a young kid in the office who made it fairly obvious that she thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread — but it never went farther than that. As far as I was concerned, all this was only evidence that I was becoming human again. I wasn’t as isolated from society as Sheila was. I was at the office seeing people every day, and I knew that every normal man my age was either cheating on his wife or else wanted to, but didn’t have the guts. The ones who weren’t doing it talked and joked about it all the time, and the ones who kept quiet were getting all the action they could handle. And these people weren’t swingers, understand, just ordinary men who would have turned green at the thought of sharing their wives with other men. Just ordinary American husbands who believe in ordinary cheating.

I didn’t plan to do anything about it, not then. But I guess I took it for granted that I would be like them sooner or later, that something would come along and I would take advantage of it. I wouldn’t say that I planned it, but I was set up so that something along those lines would not have surprised me.

SHEILA: Especially with me pregnant.

PAUL: You mean because of the first time?

SHEILA: I wasn’t even thinking of that. Something else. You see, Paul happens to be turned off by pregnant women, which I guess is perfectly understandable unless one happens to be a pregnant woman oneself, in which case it becomes utterly incomprehensible. You know that garbage about a woman’s true beauty emerging during pregnancy? That crap about pregnant women glowing, about their radiant eyes and all the rest? It may make good propaganda, but my husband was never taken in by it.

I don’t believe the propaganda myself, but neither can I see why pregnant women should be seen as sexually revolting. Oh, I can understand a man losing interest in his wife when she reaches the stage where she can’t see her feet without a mirror. A woman’s figure can become grotesque, at least from a sexual standpoint, and that might put a man off. But Paul, at least in this pregnancy, more than in the others, I think—

PAUL: Definitely.

SHEILA: —just seemed to be sexually turned off by the simple thought of my being pregnant. In the third month, now, I showed a little, but not enough to make much difference. He was able to respond strongly to no end of women who were a good deal fatter year in and year out than I was during early pregnancy.

PAUL: You’re getting hung up on trivia.

SHEILA: You’re right. The point is that we were both just about ready, whether we knew it or not. Paul was developing a wandering eye and was at the same time having trouble getting up an interest in me, and I mean that literally. And I was trying to keep the situation in hand, and I mean that literally, too.

So we were set up. If Phil and Mona had been a pair of aggressive swingers, or if they had been swingers at all, they could have gotten to us in no time at all. Our mood was right, and God knows the mutual attraction was there. As it was, they merely brought things into focus for us without having any idea themselves of what was happening.

JWW: Phil and Mona?

SHEILA: Phil and Mona Pettit. They were very nearly our only friends in Louisville at the time. Phil was a copywriter at the advertising agency that handled the company Paul was working for, and the Pettits lived just a block or two away from us. We didn’t see them too often — at this stage of the game we didn’t see anyone very often, you’ll remember — but we did get together fairly frequently.

They were attractive people. Phil was about my height with very broad shoulders and a heavy frame. “Built like a fireplug” is the usual description, I guess. Thick, dark eyebrows and almost olive skin.

I just this minute realized that he looked like Dr. Mahler.

JWW: Your obstetrician?

SHEILA: Isn’t that fantastic? They didn’t look alike exactly, but they were the same type. A description of one of them would be a good physical description of the other. Now, does that mean that my desire for Phil made me respond to Dr. Mahler’s fickle finger, or was it the other way around? Or did I simply have a thing for that type of male? And does anybody really care?

PAUL: If you’re taking a poll—

SHEILA: All right, love. The point is that they were an attractive couple. Mona was short and slim and cuddly, with small, precise features and fantastic blue eyes. The type of girl men feel protective toward. Soft voiced, too, and, if the truth b known, not exactly the brightest girl on God’s earth. But a nice enough girl for all that.

We got a sitter one Saturday night and joined the Pettits for dinner at an Italian place just outside of town. It was one of those evenings when everybody is sufficiently determined to have a good time, to the point where you have fun even if nothing that great is happening. We were all playing to each other and connecting neatly, and this made a mediocre meal into a gourmet feast and a third-rate Chianti into the finest wine ever.

Whether it was fine wine or not, we drank a lot of it. Two bottles for the four of us, along with Manhattans before dinner and cordials afterward. The restaurant had a broken-down three-piece band. I think it was an accordion and two hurdy-gurdys. The music was no better than the food or the wine, but like them it seemed better than it was, and we did a little dancing.

Naturally enough, we changed partners. We had done this before with the Pettits and never thought anything of it. But this time we had all been interconnecting in a definitely sexual way. No obvious flirting, but plenty of subtle stuff. When we were dancing, Phil got to me immediately. A full physical response that left me weak in the knees. I don’t know if he had any idea what he was doing to me, but I could tell what I was doing to him, because he was sporting a full-fledged erection. I tried to rub against him subtly enough so that he wouldn’t think I was doing it on purpose but effectively enough to make him come in his pants, if you’ll excuse the expression. I didn’t quite manage it.

PAUL: Mona and I were getting along pretty well. Not as well as they were, because I was too tall and she was too short. Nor did I have any great desire to rub either of us into an orgasm on the dance floor. But I must admit I was making plans to see her privately. I was pretty sure I could score with her, and I had to admit that I wanted to.

SHEILA: He didn’t have to admit it — it was obvious.

PAUL: No more obvious than you and Phil.

SHEILA: I guess neither of us are remarkably subtle. As I said before, if Phil and Mona had been swingers, we would have swung that night. I’m sure of it. But they weren’t, and after we left the Italian place things cooled down a great deal. We stopped off at their place for a nightcap, then headed back to our own house.

While Paul was taking the sitter home, I remembered the time we came home from a swinging session and caught our sitter in bed with a boy. Somehow this set up some mental short circuit for me, and when Paul got back I accused him of making a play for our sitter. It wasn’t exactly an accusation. Sort of a half-joking “What took you so long?” approach, which he would normally have laughed off, especially since that particular baby sitter was an absolute pig.

But instead of laughing it off he made a nasty crack about me and Phil. He said if he ever screwed our sitter he’d do it lying down, not standing up on a dance floor. So I came back with a line about him and Mona. I don’t remember what I said.

That did it. I think that must have been the first time we had a real argument since we dropped out of the swinging scene. I’m not exaggerating — I honestly think that was the first time. But it was a beaut.

He accused me of wanting to make it with Phil, and I admitted it, and told him he’d been flirting with Mona all evening, and asked him how many secretaries he was screwing at the office, and he asked me if I was carrying on with any plumbers and TV repairmen, and we were very sarcastic and nasty with one another. The odd thing is that neither of us raised our voice anywhere along the line. It wasn’t that kind of fight. No losing of tempers, just plenty of malice for all.

It led to a big what-have-we-come-to scene. I told Paul we hadn’t changed at all, that we still wanted other people. He said maybe it was just temporary. We went to bed. We tried to make love, and at one point I started to respond and he asked me point blank whether I was thinking about him or Phil. I wasn’t really thinking of anyone or anything, but I told him Phil, and instead of getting mad he just laughed.

We couldn’t quite make it that night.

I didn’t know what to do. The things that go through a person’s mind — I started considering an abortion, a divorce. I began being very sorry that we had decided to have Heidi. I don’t know why, because I can’t for the life of me figure out what I suspected she might have to do with all this. I don’t suppose I was being very rational.

I thought about varying our arrangement so that each of us would have affairs on the sly. Good old standard American cheating. I suppose there’s something to be said for it, but once you’ve been a swinger it’s impossible to put up with the sort of hypocrisy that’s involved in that kind of adultery. Even if your marriage is permissive, even if you don’t feel that you’re cheating and you don’t exactly hide it from your husband or wife, it’s not as free and open as swinging.

PAUL: There’s a purely physical thing, too, and you shouldn’t leave it out. We wanted the big thrills of swinging.

SHEILA: That’s true. Even then I couldn’t help getting caught up in that sort of fantasy. Making it with girls, with two men at once, all the things we had done before. It’s almost impossible to stop yourself from responding to a situation that you’ve formed exciting and satisfying in the past. It’s hard to turn a like into a dislike. I’ve read that one of the problems in curing homosexuals — not that I think it’s something to be cured, but I know that some faggots do go to psychiatrists looking to be reconverted into heterosexuals — one of the problems is that of making a person not desire something he once desired and enjoyed.

PAUL: Like teaching a kid not to like ice cream.

SHEILA: After he’s already enjoyed it for years. That just about says it. You can decide, as Paul and I did, that pluralistic sex is no good, that it’s evil, that it’s bad for your marriage, all of that. But the hard part is telling yourself that it’s no fun, because no matter how you drill the words into yourself, you can’t erase the memory of what it was like.

JWW: And the thrill is that much better?

SHEILA: In a word, yes.

PAUL: We watched one of the late-night talk shows a couple of years ago, and one of the guests was a former drug addict and bank robber. Now he was an actor, or was trying to be. Tall, good-looking guy, very poised. He told about what he had gone through, the agonies of being addicted to heroin, the life of crime that was inevitably a part of heroin addiction. All in all he made it perfectly obvious that the life he had led was nothing but hell and that he thanked God night and day that he was out of it forever.

And the moderator asked him, I forget how he put it, but asked him if heroin was really such a kick, if it was the sort of thing he would think about with longing now, knowing what he knows now. Obviously the answer he expected was that it certainly wasn’t worth it and he doesn’t think about it at all.

The answer he got, and it was shocking and very obviously the truth, was just the opposite. The former addict got this strange expression on his face, and thought for a moment, and then said that it was the biggest kick in the world and he knew he would never get over wanting it if he lived to be a thousand years old.

I don’t mean to suggest that swinging sex and heroin are similar in any particular way. Just let’s say that I knew what the poor son of a bitch meant.

JWW: And you felt as Sheila did?

PAUL: More or less. I figured we had lived something that turned out to be a lie. I don’t think I got as emotional about it as she did, but then I didn’t happen to be pregnant. During the next week I told her we were making ourselves nervous for no reason at all, and that maybe we ought to consider going back to swinging. We started to argue, to cut each other up verbally, but then we got off that platform and managed to loosen up.

SHEILA: I said I didn’t know if Phil and Mona would go for it, and that I was a little afraid to start something with them if they wouldn’t. And I was also a little leery of getting involved with them if it turned out that we didn’t really want to go back to swinging ourselves. So Paul suggested getting together with another couple, with strangers. If we changed our minds we could just get rid of them with no hard feelings on either side, and if we decided swinging was where we belonged, well, then sometime later on we could see whether or not the Pettits might be interested.

I had any number of reservations. So, I’m sure, did Paul, although he was less shaky about things than I was. But I agreed, and we went through with it. Once you decide to do something, waiting is just agony. We didn’t draw things out this time. We had the name and phone number of a couple who were supposed to be real swingers and very warm and attractive people. They were about thirty miles from Louisville. They were one of the couples we had not quite gotten around to calling after we arrived in Louisville, although some friends had recommended them strongly, and we still had their name and address and it seemed worthwhile getting in touch. We didn’t want the aggravation and uncertainty of correspondence right now. Nor, frankly, did we want to get involved with anyone right in town, in case we found out that swinging wasn’t for us after all. You see, we had deliberately severed relations with swinging couples in Louisville, and getting back in the groove could turn out to be awkward.

We called this couple — their names were Marge and Bill — and we told them who we were and whom we knew. Surprisingly enough, they recognized our names and said they had been expecting to hear from us; some mutual friends had told them we were moving to Louisville. I spoke with Marge and gave her a quick rundown on our personal situation. She seemed to understand completely, and we found out later that they had been through something similar themselves, although they had never gone to the extreme we had. But it does seem as though most couples give up swinging sooner or later — and most of them go back to it, sooner or later.

We drove out to see them. At their suggestion, we met at the cocktail lounge of a motel not far from their home. They wanted to make it easy for us to cop out gracefully if we changed our minds.

On the way out there it felt like those first times all over again. Marge and Bill were a few years older than we were. He sold fertilizer to farmers, which may not be the most romantic business in the world but which must have paid off pretty well for him. A handsome man with a good physique. And Marge was also quite attractive — and not at all pregnant, which was the main consideration from my husband’s point of view.

PAUL: You know, from a biological standpoint there’s no reason for the male to be attracted to the pregnant female. His attentions to her can’t serve any purpose.

SHEILA: They can make her happy. And to hell with biological purpose, anyway. What’s the biological purpose of oral sex?

PAUL: It feels good.

SHEILA: I’m sorry I asked... To make a long story short, we got along famously with Bill and Marge, and there was no question but that we wanted to swing with them. They were very good at putting us at ease. We went to their place and took separate rooms.

I still felt somewhat awkward and virginal. All this changed when Bill kissed me. I went wild. We got out of our clothes and he made me lie still while he went down on me. It seems he was tremendously excited by my pregnancy and kept kissing and licking my belly. It didn’t really protrude all that much but the idea of it turned him on. Then he started frenching me in earnest. I came in Technicolor, and came again and again when he screwed me. He put me on my hands and knees and mounted me from the rear and fucked me like a stallion.

Sheila seems at first to be speaking crudely on purpose. It soon becomes clear, however, that she is barely aware of the words she is using. She is responding sexually to her own words or to the memories they evoke. Her eyes are half-lidded and her sentences come in spurts; she pauses intermittently to nibble at her lip or lick both lips with her tongue. She squirms in her chair, buttocks twitching, thighs rubbing nervously together. I feel almost as though I am intruding. I turn to Paul, who is staring fixedly at his wife; he, too, seems to be sexually affected by her account of the experience.

SHEILA: Afterward we went into the other room. I told Bill I wanted to watch Paul with Marge. This is something I wanted very much. I remember being afraid for a moment that I was having all this fun and that Paul wasn’t doing anything. I didn’t think this was so—

PAUL: Not quite.

SHEILA: —because I knew she turned him on and that she liked him, but I was worried. Also I wanted to see them, I wanted to watch them doing it.

We walked into the bedroom and it smelled like a whorehouse. The bed was all stained and everything. And he was lying on his back with his eyes closed and a dreamy expression on his face, and Marge was giving him head. She was stretched out sort of sideways and sucking him.

I got hot all over. Just instantly hot all over.

I turned to Bill. “Is your wife bi?” I asked, and he nodded, and I asked him if he thought she would mind if I joined in.

He said go ahead.

I don’t think I gave a damn if she did or not. I just had to do it. I put my face between her legs and began eating her without a word. I could taste Paul there...

Marge and Bill both used depilatories. Many swingers do; they remove all their pubic hair. She was all smooth there.

It was so good. Everything was so good.

And we did just everything. We were with them for hours and we did everything and it was fantastic. I was too involved to think. Later on we thought about it and talked about it but at the time it wasn’t even possible to think. I was too busy doing and feeling and I couldn’t think about anything else.

On the way home I said, “Well, now we know what we are.”

And Paul agreed.

And I said, “I’m glad we had the past six months. I guess we were only fooling ourselves, but I’m glad we had it the way we did. I think we learned from it, I think we grew, but I’m also glad it’s over. I’m glad we’re having another baby, but I’m glad we’re back in the swinging scene again.”

So that was that. We had dropped out, and now we dropped in again.

All Things in Moderation

JWW: When you first got involved in swinging, in swapping, I know you were quite anxious about your situation. Was there comparable anxiety when you returned to swinging after six months of abstention?

PAUL: No.

SHEILA: Not really, no. They say you never forget to swim once you learn. It’s the same with swinging. You not only don’t forget how but you don’t have any trouble relearning the right mental attitude. And you know, I was expecting the guilt, the anxiety, all of that. I was primed for it, all prepared to handle it, and then it didn’t really come.

JWW: That’s very interesting.

PAUL: And a little hard to believe.

JWW: Well, perhaps a little.

PAUL: John, did you ever quit smoking?

JWW: Oh, dozens of times. Hundreds of times, I suppose.

PAUL: For any real length of time?

JWW: Usually for a few hours or a few days. But once for over a year, and other times for periods of a month or two. Why?

PAUL: Do you know how they say that the first cigarette after a long layoff tastes terrible?

JWW: I’ve heard that often enough, but in my case it’s simply not true. The first cigarette always tastes better than any cigarette after it. It’s almost worth quitting just to start in again... You know, I’m beginning to see where this conversation is headed. Do you really think there’s much of a parallel between smoking and swinging?

SHEILA: There are obvious differences, of course. Smoking is far more dangerous physically. And swinging is illegal.

PAUL: There are also some similarities. Yes, I think the parallels are significant, John. When you smoke too much, cigarettes lose their taste; you just go on out of habit. You don’t enjoy them, but you can’t go on without them. And when you quit you get past the withdrawal period through sheer enthusiasm, but you never entirely forget how good cigarettes used to taste. You get so that you only remember the pleasant associations of smoking.

JWW: So sooner or later you start in again.

PAUL: That’s right. You may vow to cut down, or to switch to a filter or whatever, but sooner or later you go back to it. And pretty soon you return to whatever frequency is natural for you. Maybe you feel guilty about it and maybe not. I suppose you have to feel some guilt, because after all smoking is bad for you. It does all sorts of physically damaging things to a human being. Swinging, on the other hand, has no bad physical effects unless you’re dealing with the sort of compulsive nut who literally screws himself into the grave, in which case he’ll have that problem whether he’s a swinger or not. Aside from those hardship cases, it’s good exercise. It doesn’t even rot your teeth.

JWW: It might have had emotional effects though, mightn’t it? It seems to have done so the first time around.

SHEILA: But that’s a different thing, John. That only happens if you’re mentally prepared for it to happen. But there’s such a thing as adjusting yourself to swinging. And when you’re able to put it in its proper perspective, it doesn’t tear you up that way.

JWW: I’m not sure I’ll buy that.

PAUL: Why not?

JWW: Because I’ve known any number of long-time swingers, couples who have stuck with the scene to such an extent that you would have to describe them as adjusted to it. And whenever I’ve known such people for any length of time I’ve discovered that they’re subject to periods of depression, that now and then they come unglued, that they will occasionally admit they aren’t convinced that what they’re doing is right—

PAUL: No argument. Everybody lives with that. I do, Sheila does, everybody does.

JWW: Then—

PAUL: But you learn to handle it. You learn to smooth out the really bad downs and the really manic highs so that you can coast easy somewhere in the middle. Even so, now and then it gets bad. Sometimes we need a vacation from swinging, a couple of weeks where we carefully avoid extramarital sex. And by the same token, there are times when we’ll feel the need for a no-holds-barred knock-down orgy. Not as a steady diet, but to blow off steam every once in a while. You know, the ancient Greeks had a way of looking at things.

SHEILA: They certainly did.

PAUL: Seriously, they did. “All things in moderation and nothing to excess”—that’s the principle, and it’s a good one. If you look at it that way, nothing is bad in and of itself, just so long as it’s kept in proportion.

JWW: “All things in moderation” seems like an unusual motto for a swinger.

PAUL: Does it? I suppose it does, but you’d be surprised; most people with some experience and with a little depth to themselves come around to the same position, although they may not put it in the same words.

SHEILA: Nobody swings twenty-four hours a day. And nobody swings seven days a week.

PAUL: Right. That’s the whole thing. On balance, swingers are not a particularly far-out group of people — except in the sexual sphere. They’re a fairly average lot, a little more intelligent than the average, a bit better off, and a little bit better educated, but outside of that they’re very ordinary people who happen to have what nonswingers would regard as an unusual approach to sex...

The discussion covers familiar ground now — the justification of wife-swapping as a logical and intelligent behavior pattern for essentially ordinary husbands and wives, a pastime wholly consistent with the Greek concept of all things in moderation. At one point I remind Paul of our conversation of a few weeks earlier, our luncheon date during which he inveighed so unequivocally against swinging and all its insanities. He replies that he told me at the time that he was in a particular mood, and that he has never denied that swinging will look alternately good and bad depending upon one’s state of mind. Sheila adds that no regimen is assurance that a given date will not be a disappointment, and that such a disappointing date is very frequently followed by dissatisfaction with swinging itself. “You have to expect a certain amount of this,” she goes on, “and gradually you learn how to avoid the worst of it and ride with the part you can’t avoid. Like anything else, it’s a matter of learning and a matter of adjustment.”

A little later on, we move around to a discussion of the form their adjustment took.

SHEILA: After our evening with Marge and Bill, it was pretty obvious that we were due for another drastic reappraisal. Obviously we had made a mistake in our plans somewhere along the line. In Kansas City we had thought that we were all-out swingers and wanted nothing more than to let loose and kick up our heels. Then later we found out that this didn’t seem to be working, and we thought a complete renunciation of swinging was the answer, and that we would never again desire that mad involvement in sex. Well, it was easy to see that we were wrong again, so—

PAUL: So back to the old drawing board.

SHEILA: Right. And what we came up with fit the general principle of moderation, although I don’t think we had the tag for it at first; I think we just worked things out and then realized later on what we had come up with. The first step in the program was to avoid programming our lives too rigidly. In other words, we had to avoid absolutes and leave ourselves room to find our own way. We had to stay loose.

Next, we realized that there was always the danger that sex would wind up playing too central a role in our lives. This was really what went wrong the first time around, that coupled with a hang-up built on the need to go a little further each time out. We decided we would absolutely limit ourselves to one swinging date a week.

PAUL: That may not sound like much of a limit. But when you realize what some couples do, then it is. And one a week was a maximum, not a set quantity. Anytime a week went by without a date, that was perfectly fine.

SHEILA: Of course it hasn’t happened that often. But it does happen from time to time, and we don’t let ourselves get upset about it.

Another principle of ours was to really get to appreciate our swinging friends as individuals, so that they would be more than a collection of organs and techniques to us. This may seem in contradiction to our determination to avoid the sort of ultra-intimate relationship that we had with our first couple, Jan and Jeff. It isn’t, really. It only means that we want to be able to relate to other couples as people. You don’t have to know someone a long time to do this, don’t have to see them all that frequently. All you have to do is know them the right way.

PAUL: Along the same lines, we stopped keeping records.

SHEILA: Absolutely, because that was something that had really come to strike us as sick, and now that we had more perspective we saw it as a symptom of our inability to relate to people, and our failure to find any real meaning in our sexual contacts. My God, when you have to keep notes on your dates — what you did and how it felt and how many times everybody got their rocks off — it’s as though that’s the only way you can hang onto it, as though otherwise you won’t be able to remember it, or to prove to yourself that it ever really happened.

Photographs are the same thing. We still have our Polaroid, but we use it only to take pictures of the children.

PAUL: You’re exaggerating a little. Sometimes another couple will request that we shoot some pictures while they’re over here, or someone will get an urge to see what something looks like from a given angle. So we do take pictures now and then, and we don’t mind if the couples we swing with want to take pictures for their own benefit. But the point is that we don’t save the pictures, we don’t use them as a way of keeping a record.

SHEILA: Once in a while we’ll save a particular snapshot because it happens to be a particularly good shot. Either it’s an attractive balance artistically or it happens to turn one or both of us on sexually, and so we’ll keep it around until we get tired of it. But no record keeping, none of that nonsense. And no record-keeper mentality, no comparisons and analysis of sexual idiosyncrasies, no keeping count of positions and strokes and orgasms and all the rest of it.

PAUL: Because I get enough data processing at the office.

SHEILA: Another thing we decided to do was maintain a certain number of nonswinging friends whom we would see socially. We still do this to a degree, but in actual practice it’s harder than you might think.

JWW: Because you want to have sex with the ones you respond to, and the rest bore you?

PAUL: Good guess, but not quite. Actually it’s not that simple. The most important thing, I guess, is that when you’re a swinger and you’re used to the relaxed, and I think, wholesome sexual attitudes of swingers, you find the average civilian pretty unpleasant company. Nonswingers are just a bore.

SHEILA: Not because they’re, oh, square or anything like that. It must be pretty obvious that we’re not a couple of hippies ourselves. But the thing is that the sexual attitudes of civilians really get to us after a while. It’s almost as if they’re more obsessed sexually than we are, because they don’t let loose and do the things they want to do, and as a result they’re all tied into knots about it.

PAUL: It’s the usual repression thing. The people who scream loudest about banning pornography are always the ones who get a hard-on if someone farts. They’re the ones who tell the dirtiest jokes — not the funniest ones, just the dirtiest.

SHEILA: They’re also the ones who play horrid little games of kneesies with other people’s mates. The funniest feeling in the world comes when we go to a civilian party where everybody gets into the liquor pretty hard. Sometimes I like to stay sober just to watch them. The utter hypocrisy of these people, the way they think they’re being so subtle as they sneak off with one another for a fast round of stand-up necking in the bathroom or a quick mutual frigging in the shrubbery. Or maybe they’ll actually go so far as to make a date to meet some afternoon for a quickie after the kids finish their lunch and before they come home from school again. And the ones who aren’t doing anything or setting anything up are all flirting like mad, using all the double-entendre they can and giving the impression that sex is the only thing on their minds. It’s almost as if they have to do this, the men to assert their virility and the women to prove they’re desirable. It gets ridiculous sometimes; you can’t tell which ones are playing the part but really mean it as a joke and which ones are pretending to be joking but really mean it. You can’t tell, and as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really matter.

PAUL: Not all civilians are like this, of course. Not by any means. In a way, you could say it’s as much a function of large parties with heavy drinking as it is of anything else. If you had a houseful of drunken swingers—

SHEILA: But you wouldn’t — that’s the point, isn’t it? Swingers wouldn’t drink that heavily. Oh, we drink, we all drink, and sometimes we drink enough to feel it. But we don’t knock ourselves out with liquor in that desperate way so many Americans do nowadays. For one thing, you can’t give a great performance in bed if you’re drunk. And since swingers know that the evening is going to end in bed, and that the success of the night stands or falls upon how the sexual side of it goes, well, drunkenness is kept to a minimum.

But other people have to get stoned in order to get through one of those evenings...

As far as being turned on by nonswinging friends, of course that happens now and then. When it does, one thing that we always do is make an effort to find out if the other couple swings. This happens a surprising amount of the time — two swapping couples drawn together by accident, or if not exactly by accident at least with neither one having prior knowledge of the other. We’ve had it happen from time to time. If you suspect it, you sort of toss out leading questions and try to make a connection. There are ways. Some of the correspondence clubs even have little pins for swingers to wear, innocent little bits of junk jewelry that enable you to zero in on each other in a crowd like members of some secret fraternity. I think that’s a little much — I mean, you would never know what sort of creep might try to connect with you that way. But you can accomplish as much by hinting at it.

PAUL: And as Sheila said, it happens a surprising amount of the time. Sometimes in the family circle.

SHEILA: You’re not going to tell—

PAUL: Don’t you want me to? For Christ’s sake, honey, it’s not really incestuous.

SHEILA: I know, but—

PAUL: But what?

SHEILA: It seems incestuous, I guess. And I suppose that was part of the thrill at the time, and you can make of that what you will. But go ahead and tell John. By now he must be imagining something a lot more far out than what happened.

PAUL: To save time, what happened was simply that we went to Sheila’s hometown when there was a death in her family, and after the funeral we happened to meet her cousin and his wife, and they turned out to be swingers. Ralph was about the same age as Sheila and I gather they were very close as children, and there must have been an undercurrent of sexual attraction that they weren’t entirely aware of, and as a result the whole thing had a special spice for her. Frankly I can’t see anything too spicy in the idea of first cousins screwing, but I suppose they felt a lot of the old wouldn’t-the-rest-of-the-family-die-if-they-saw-us-now, that bit, and that made it very unusual for them. I didn’t get the full impact of that, but Ralph’s wife is a tiny thing with oversized breasts and a comfortably tight vagina, so I wasn’t going to complain, certainly. I enjoyed myself.

SHEILA: Didn’t you get just the slightest little forbidden-fruit kick?

PAUL: Only sympathetically, by sharing some of your fun. But not directly.

SHEILA: It’s a shame — you missed a good thing. But maybe all is not lost.

PAUL: How so?

SHEILA: Maybe your sister’s a swinger. I don’t know about the other, but she’s certainly a tiny thing with oversized breasts, and it ought to be kinky enough to make you happy.

PAUL: Let’s talk about something else, huh?

SHEILA: Seriously, you know, it’s possible that she is a swinger. Marty’s a pretty sharp guy. It’s possible.

PAUL: Anything’s possible.

SHEILA: What would you do?

PAUL: Are you crazy?

SHEILA: Well, what would you do?

PAUL: Let’s drop it.

SHEILA: Can’t you just answer the question?

PAUL: Look, stupid, I don’t want to answer the question. Oh, hell. Suppose your parents were swingers, honey.

SHEILA: That’s utterly ridiculous.

PAUL: Well, just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose they were. And suppose they turned up one day—

SHEILA: All right, you made your point.

PAUL: —and your dad put his arm around you and said—

SHEILA: Let’s drop it, Paul...

The interview breaks up shortly thereafter. The incest speculation has a deadening effect upon the conversation, with Paul and Sheila drawing into themselves. Later, on separate occasions, Paul will tell me that he should not have used the example he did, that he feels Sheila has always had profound unresolved Oedipal yearnings directed toward her father; Sheila in turn will confess that her provocation of Paul was ill-advised in view of his strong attachment to his sister, an attachment she suspects may have involved some sort of sexual experimentation in early adolescence.

In another interview, I ask whether a sexual relationship ever developed with the Pettits.

SHEILA: Oh, we should have mentioned that last time, shouldn’t we? I completely forgot. Actually, it was a funny thing. After things worked out so well with Marge and Bill, we didn’t feel anxious to rush things with Phil and Mona. We thought we would let things define themselves a little better before we made any efforts in that direction, and meanwhile we could establish contacts with some other swingers in the area, and see more of Marge and Bill. We still were very strongly attracted to the Pettits, but we realized that the original attraction was at least partly due to the fact that we were about ready to get back into swinging. By the same token, once we were back in the fold I stopped getting hot every time Dr. Mahler put his fingers up me.

I suppose we would have started something with the Pettits sooner or later, but it kind of got started for us. Phil Pettit tried to seduce me.

PAUL: I guess you gave him so much encouragement that one night he thought he was home free.

SHEILA: That was obviously what had happened. He dropped in one afternoon just after I’d sent the kids back to school with some story about being in the neighborhood. Said he had been thinking about me and just wanted to stop by and see how I was doing. Now this sort of thing is so utterly unknown among swingers that I didn’t even put two and two together. I thought he had just stopped over to say hello. The next thing I knew he was kissing me and pawing at my breasts and telling me that he loved me and his wife didn’t understand him.

PAUL: It’s hard to believe, but civilians really talk that way. “My wife doesn’t understand me” — as if that’s such a hardship to bear! There are plenty of times when I wish to hell my wife didn’t understand me.

SHEILA: I was really stunned, John! Stimulated and excited but also a little disgusted and contemptuous at the same time. I didn’t want to have a quick tumble with him, it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to avoid. But I did like him, and he was frustrated and I didn’t want to leave him hung up like that. And it wasn’t as though I intended to keep it from Paul. I planned to tell Paul right away.

So I told Phil that if he would just cut it out with the love garbage I would be perfectly delighted to go to bed with him.

That made it his turn to be stunned. He was at a loss for words, but fortunately words aren’t necessary in bed. And Phil was very good company in bed. Just straight intercourse and not too imaginative, but very nice, and I had a lovely time.

It’s funny how you feel inhibited with a nonswinger. Afterward we were lying there together sharing a cigarette, and I looked down at his penis and had a very strong desire to take it in my mouth. But I was worried that he might think this was a perversion.

PAUL: You know, swingers aren’t the only people who suck, honey.

SHEILA: I know that, but — oh, forget it. Anyway, I had to get the point across to Phil that I wasn’t interested in afternoon quickies, but that Paul and I were very definitely interested in him and Mona. I considered and rejected all sorts of subtle approaches, and then he turned to me and smiled and said we would have to do this again.

So I said, “I’m game, but not in the afternoon. How about Friday night?”

He said, “How are we going to get rid of Mona and Paul?”

“Why don’t we just let them screw each other?” I said. “Paul and I are swingers, Phil. Wife-swappers. We do this all the time.”

Well, you could have knocked him over with a feather from a hummingbird. He thought wife-swappers only existed in books. You know the pitch — we couldn’t possibly be wife-swappers because he knew us and he didn’t know any wife-swappers. Then when he finally believed it he said he was sure Mona would never go for it.

“Oh, come off it,” I told him. “She was practically wetting her pants dancing with my husband.”

I suggested that he go home and talk her into it. I gave him some of the paperbacks to show her, but all he did was read them himself and call me the next day with a complicated plan. He couldn’t tell Mona himself, but he wanted me to get Paul to seduce Mona, and then they would all work it out together.

PAUL: It struck me as unnecessarily complicated, but what the hell. I picked an afternoon, told Phil to stay away from the house, and dropped in on Mona. The poor kid happened to have picked that day to have her hair in curlers. I made a pass at her, a straight physical pass, and she turned out to be easy enough. I found out later on that she wasn’t just easy for me. She put out for deliverymen and door-to-door salesmen whenever she got the chance.

She fucked like a mink.

Afterward I got her hot again and told her that Sheila and I were swappers.

“I sort of thought you were,” she said, perfectly matter-of-fact about the whole thing. “I suspected it. I’ve always wanted to try it, but do you think we can get Phil to go along with it?”

SHEILA: So many couples go through life like that. Both of them fooling around and keeping it a secret from each other. And both of them secretly anxious to try swinging, but each one convinced the other wouldn’t go for it.

PAUL: Once they understood what was happening, Phil and Mona were natural swingers.

SHEILA: And improved the quality of their marriage in the process. I hate to sound like one of those messianic swingers who makes it sound like a cure-all—

PAUL: Prevents divorce, cures cancer, cleans up pimples, ends bleeding gums—

SHEILA: Lord, doesn’t that just have a familiar ring to it? But it does help some people stay married. Whether it’s literally true or not, both Phil and Mona are convinced that they would have eventually gotten a divorce if we hadn’t turned them on to group sex.

PAUL: They still may, you know.

SHEILA: It’s possible.

PAUL: That marriage wasn’t exactly made in heaven, I don’t think.

SHEILA: No, I don’t suppose it was.

The Games Swingers Play

A Sunday afternoon, the air crisp with the smell of burning leaves. Paul and Sheila are in particularly good spirits. Last night they went to another couple’s home for a party at which a total of a dozen persons were present. The evening seems to have been an unqualified success. They discuss it with a disarming lack of inhibitions, not so much as if to savor the experience as to convey to me the pleasure they took in it and the ease with which they are able to talk about it.

I suggest that perhaps they might discuss some of the ways they keep their swapping experiences fresh and varied. To an extent swinging does represent an attempt to avoid the presumed monotony of monogamous marital relations, and I wonder aloud whether or not the same aspect of monotony does not similarly threaten swingers. Paul agrees that this is so and points to it as a factor in precipitating their original disenchantment with the life.

SHEILA: Of course that’s the whole point — that you have to be careful not to substitute one routine for another. You have to keep things new and varied, and at the same time you have to avoid going overboard to the point where every date has to go a step further than the preceding one. I think we discussed all this before, didn’t we? It has a familiar ring to it.

JWW: Yes, but I was thinking of a different aspect. What I’m getting at is the question of how you manage this balance, this mutual avoidance of monotony and excess.

SHEILA: You have to be inventive, that’s all.

PAUL: That’s a big part of it. They say necessity is the mother of invention; well, if that’s so, then the father is monotony. But I think you make a mistake to credit inventiveness with making swinging stay interesting. More important than the new things you think of is the mental attitude you develop.

Face it — there are only so many ways to have sex. This may be more obvious when you’re limited to the same two people in a marital relationship, but it’s just as true in an orgy. There are only so many ways, so many sensations, so many methods of obtaining that happy little orgasm. If a person becomes obsessed with the need for variety, it can only turn out to be a hang-up. It’s more important to learn to enjoy what you’ve got than to be constantly yearning for more.

SHEILA: I think John is more interested in the actual methods of varying things. Aren’t you?

JWW: I think it might be of interest.

SHEILA: Well, anything to make our readers happy. It’s hard for me to believe that somebody is actually going to read all this, you know. I suppose if I really believed it I would have to weigh everything I say, or I would freeze up entirely or something...

There are certain things that a great many experienced swingers will do. I suppose you could call them games. First of all there are the icebreakers, and games of this sort are a sort of swinging version of the icebreaking games that civilians use, and to tell you the truth I think they make about as much sense.

The obvious ones, like Strip Poker or Strip Scrabble, are really too silly to talk about. I read about them all the time in phony books on swinging, but I don’t know anyone who makes much use of them. After all, once you get beyond the first stages of sexual freedom, you find out that nudity in and of itself isn’t that much of an aphrodisiac. I can’t get delirious at the thought of seeing another man’s penis, not after I’ve seen enough of them.

There’s a swinger’s version of Post Office and one of Spin the Bottle that works pretty nicely. And I would have to admit that these games serve a purpose when you have a large number of people together for the first time. A crowd of strangers is always inhibiting to certain people, and when you use this sort of game to develop a sort of round-robin petting match, it gets people into the spirit of the thing in a gradual way. Of course the ground rules vary according to the group. Sometimes it’s just a plain kissing game with the players naked. Other times different rules will be followed.

These games are usually used as icebreakers, but they also serve to vary the pace in groups that have been meeting together for some time. In the clubs, you know, you have to guard against falling into a set routine, and there are a lot of games that are used not because anybody’s absolutely crazy about them but just to break up the pattern.

PAUL: Which is one of the basic problems with clubs, and a good reason not to join one.

SHEILA: We felt that way, but not everyone does. Remember, there are advantages to a club. None of the dangers you always have in correspondence, for example. No worrying about meeting with people who will turn out to be a drag — and that happens pretty often no matter how you try to avoid it. And for some people a club helps to keep swinging in proportion.

JWW: I’m not sure I follow that last point.

SHEILA: Well, when you make all of your own arrangements, it’s very easy to find yourself going off the deep end, making so many swinging dates that you can’t keep up with your own schedule. Almost everyone seems to do this at one time or another, mainly because the average person can’t believe that there’s such a thing as too much sex.

PAUL: The clubs have set meeting times — once a week, twice a month, whatever. So you can regulate yourself that way. I don’t think that means much, to tell you the truth. If people are determined to overdo it, they can still make dates on the side.

SHEILA: From our experience, I would say that the clubs are far more oriented toward games and contests than people who meet privately on a couple-with-couple basis. Of course part of this is purely mathematical — you can’t really have much of a contest unless you have enough people to make it interesting.

PAUL: Don’t forget Swing.

SHEILA: I’d just as soon forget it, if you don’t mind. You know the game, don’t you, John? It’s sort of Monopoly for swingers, a commercially available board game that lends itself to a swap situation. Different cards order players to remove an article of clothing, or kiss all the other players, or race off to the bedroom with someone. Maybe ninety percent of the swingers we know have played it at one time or the other, and except for a few novices no one has been much impressed with it.

PAUL: It’s supposed to be funny.

SHEILA: And it doesn’t quite make it. But as far as that goes, humor isn’t always what you want to set the stage for an erotic evening, is it? The funny thing, though, is that a lot of nonswingers seem to own and play the game. It’s sold by mail order, you see, and the various ploys are vague enough so that I suppose if you weren’t a swinger you could just interpret them as risqué. I guess the same kind of people play the silly game as listen to those tacky party records, Belle Barth and the red-haired one, I forget her name.

PAUL: Rusty Warren.

SHEILA: That’s the one. You know the type — the very worst kind of nonswinger.

PAUL: We’ve heard — or maybe we’ve read — that the game is occasionally used for seduction purposes, either when a swinging couple wants to get a nonswinging couple in the mood or when somebody wants to get a civilian social group oriented in a swinging direction. Frankly, I have a hard time believing that this ever happens. I don’t despise the game quite as much as Sheila does because it doesn’t offend me. My charming wife has a tendency to take things personally.

SHEILA: All it offends is my taste.

PAUL: You’re just letting your experience show, honey. People who are new to swinging get a kick out of things like that. It’s largely a matter of kicking over the traces, I would guess. Everything that normal society would regard as outrageous becomes desirable for that reason...

We discuss the use of games in two-couple situations. Sheila remembers a young Southern couple whose entire approach to swap situations was humor-oriented, to such an extent that an evening in their presence was composed more of laughs than of sexual relations. We talk of the possible use of games and contests in the wild-party or orgy situation, and Paul says that they do not fit in there; if such a party is effective it works spontaneously, and if it is not, games and contests will not help it. We then turn to the subject of games and contests in the context of the swap-club experience. The Gordons belonged to a club in Louisville after a pair of bad mail-order experiences made them leery of meeting with strangers. Their club met two evenings a month at the home of one of the members. Total membership ranged from eight to twelve couples during the relatively brief period of time that Paul and Sheila belonged.

PAUL: The club had been in existence for well over a year by the time we were invited to join. By that time, incidentally, we had become acquainted with more than half the members. As I understand it, two couples started the club and gradually enlarged it. I don’t know how one would go about starting a club, or how the various ground rules would evolve, as everything was in operation by the time we got involved.

The basic operation was simple enough. Member couples took turns hosting the meetings, with us and another couple excused from this duty because we had no way to get the kids out of the house for an entire evening. The rest of the couples either had parents around town who would have their kids over for the night or, in some cases, had no kids at all to worry about. In ordinary swap situations no one worries about a sleeping kid in the house, but with a dozen couples on hand it’s a different story.

Meetings began promptly at eight-thirty, and you can rest assured that no one made a point of getting there fashionably late. That’s one thing about swingers — they somehow lose interest in some of the more senseless social conventions... Dress also seems to be of less significance to swingers, probably because you don’t keep your clothes on for very long.

A typical meeting would begin with up to an hour of general socialization, with light drinking and conversation. At this particular club there was an unspoken rule that the conversation during this early period would not be centered on sex. Anything else was a suitable topic — religion, politics, anything but sex. I think the object was to let the excitement build, and also to let people know each other in more than a purely sexual sense.

SHEILA: It was a particularly good idea, too. Especially for the second reason. From what other people have said, clubs can be absolutely deadening over a period of time when there’s nothing between the members but sex. What happens is that you have the anonymity of an orgy week after week without the excitement of strange bodies. You ball the same strangers every week — that’s what it amounts to. And that’s the main reason most clubs fall apart in a very short period of time.

JWW: I thought quite a few clubs lasted for long periods of time.

SHEILA: Some last for ten years or more, and those are the clubs everybody knows about. But they make up only the smallest minority of the clubs that come into existence. There are literally hundreds of clubs organized every year all over the country. It’s very easy to organize a club, you know. There’s nothing easier. Sometimes a single man will put a club together because it’s the easiest way for him to make contact with swingers. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it does. He runs an ad announcing the formation of a club in a given area and balances out the replies so that he has the same number of men as women, and he’s in business. It’s nothing to start a club, but I would guess that nine out of ten clubs don’t stay together for more than three or four months.

PAUL: Our Louisville club was a particularly good group, as groups go. I don’t know that it’ll last ten years, but it was well set up. As I said there would be up to an hour of general conversation. Then around nine the entertainment section started.

This could take any of a number of forms. It was the responsibility of the host and hostess to organize things, and they had all the leeway in the world as far as innovation was concerned. As I’m sure you can imagine, each couple tried to put on a better program than the one before, and the results were worth the effort. It was the same sort of unstated competition that civilian hostesses have to prepare the most exotic hors d’oeuvres.

The most common form of entertainment was movies, at least at first. When we first joined, it was evidently quite difficult to come by stag films in the Louisville area. The few films that were readily available were yellow with age. Then someone made contact with a distributor in I think Cincinnati, and we were able to get quality films, occasionally in Technicolor and once with a sound track.

The films were good up to a point, like everything else. We learned not to let a film show go on too long, because once we were conditioned to handle that kind of vicarious stimulation, an overlong show merely became a drag for everyone. The main function of the films, really, was to focus everyone’s attention on sex and let the tension build a little.

SHEILA: It also created an opportunity for a group grope. A little mutual fondling was perfectly permissible all around. Of course you weren’t supposed to get carried away.

PAUL: Or else you wind up with the film watching the audience.

SHEILA: It’s not hard to avoid when you’re experienced in that type of situation.

PAUL: There was a point, during our own first few months in the club, when good stag films were becoming available at a steady rate and there just wasn’t a meeting without one. Then one of the original members hosted a meeting and introduced an innovation. He had us all take seats for the movies, then rolled up the screen and put it away. We had just selected our partners, he explained; each man was then coupled with the girl on his left.

At that point everybody was told to strip. Then the rules of the contest were explained. The couples were not exactly partners, because each had the opposite goal. The women could do anything they wanted with the object of making the men ejaculate. The first woman to make her partner come was a winner, and the man who held out the longest was also a winner.

SHEILA: Paul won the game that first time, but it wasn’t exactly a victory to be proud of. He was put off by the whole idea, maybe because it came out of the blue like that. And he just didn’t get excited at all. His partner did everything she could. She would have had better luck with a corpse.

PAUL: It was terribly embarrassing, too, because the girl was colored. There was one colored couple in the group. This was in Louisville, remember, which is not Southern but not exactly Northern either, so a lot of the people down there thought it was really something pretty daring to swing with Negroes. We had done this before. However, I had never had relations yet with the Negro girl in the club, although Sheila had been with her husband, and I was really upset at the thought that she might think it was her color that kept me from responding to her. Perhaps it was worrying about this that reinforced everything, but whatever it was, nothing happened, and instead of being sent home from the party I was declared the winner, which didn’t make much sense.

There were no prizes that time. In fact that was all there was to the contest, and after it ended we got into the main part of the meeting. This was the same from one week to the next — couples were chosen by lot and went off by themselves to make love. A couple could stay together as long as they wanted before returning to the main room for group games if they felt in the mood. The general pattern was for a couple to go off and ball once, then either join another couple in a bedroom for a foursome or drift back to the living room and find some congenial sort of group activity.

As time went by, though, hosts and hostesses would make the contests more elaborate. For a while there were prizes for the winners, and then someone introduced the idea of rewarding the winners sexually. The male winner would receive the simultaneous attention of all the women in the group, for instance, or the female winner would take on every man in turn.

SHEILA: In certain clubs they do this every week, usually just selecting the man and woman by a drawing or something. It can be an extremely thrilling thing to have a whole slew of persons of the opposite sex all making love to you at once. This is considered a game in itself. In books I’ve seen it described at length, and called Center of Attraction, which is a logical enough name for it.

PAUL: Another variation that some genius worked out was fairly clever. Instead of rewarding the two winners, he set things up so that we would punish the two losers. The man who came first and the woman whose partner held out longest were declared the losers, and they had to pay a forfeit. This made the contest itself especially exciting in a kinky way. And the forfeits themselves made it easy to introduce some unusual elements into the meeting without offending anybody.

JWW: How do you mean?

PAUL: By requiring the losers to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. The club itself was not particularly kinky, as swingers clubs go. There was more or less complete bisexuality for the girls, but no male homosexuality and no bondage or discipline, none of the Sadie Mae games. Nor did anyone go in much for gadgets or other offbeat things. It was felt generally that we wanted to avoid that sort of thing — Sheila and I had gotten involved to excess with kinky things in the past. But at the same time an experienced swinger generally likes to try these things once in a great while, as long as there’s a way to keep them a special treat and not a standard part of the game.

SHEILA: Certain acts are exciting because they’re unusual. But if you do them frequently they lose their unusual quality and they also seem perverse.

PAUL: That’s where the contest helped immeasurably. It provided a natural method of limiting the kinky stuff, and it also gave the person involved a good excuse, if he happened to need one. For instance, a man might be very leery at the thought of voluntarily performing a homosexual act with another man. I think I said that there was no male homosexuality in the group, and while I’m sure some of the fellows had bisexual inclinations, they kept them strictly quiet. Yet if a man lost a contest and the forfeit required him to perform fellatio upon another man, well, we were all sufficiently seasoned swingers so that we knew a single homosexual act wouldn’t make a man’s testicles wither. If a man happened to be geared that way, he had a chance to enjoy himself without looking like a faggot. Even if he didn’t swing that way, as most of us didn’t, you couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to do it and wanting to experience it, if only once. This made it easy.

JWW: Was this the usual forfeit?

PAUL: There was no “usual” forfeit as such, since the whole point was variety. Occasionally the forfeit was a performance which the male and female loser had to put on for the rest of the crowd. Or either or both of them might be used as victims for a bondage act — an act of submission. The actual forfeit could be anything that might be exciting now and then but that we wouldn’t feel comfortable with as a part of the standard repertoire.

JWW: Did anybody leave the club as a result of the forfeits?

PAUL: No.

SHEILA: This almost happened once, though. One time the forfeit was homosexual and one of the men flatly refused.

PAUL: Oh, I forgot about that.

SHEILA: He said he didn’t want to be a party poop or spoilsport, but he wasn’t willing to do anything that would make him feel dirty afterward, and that whether it was sensible of him or not he wouldn’t be comfortable performing a homosexual act. It could have been a really unpleasant situation all around, but the host smoothed things over quickly by suggesting an alternate. Do you remember what it was?

PAUL: Not offhand. What difference does it make?

SHEILA: None, I guess.

PAUL: We sort of dropped the male homosexual stuff from the forfeits after that. No one wanted to create tension...

Incidentally, as time went by we also developed a great many variations on the contest itself. We revamped an old game young boys use in masturbation sessions, with the object being to see which man could ejaculate the furthest. Things like this were strictly one-time contests introduced purely for the sake of variety.

SHEILA: As time went by, the forfeits changed a little. Inevitably the forbidden acts lost a little of their special quality. Then we would try to make the forfeit entertaining in another way, occasionally by introducing an element of humor. We might blindfold the person, for instance, and have him try to identify members of the opposite sex by touch or taste.

PAUL: Do you remember what we heard about the Denver club?

SHEILA: Oh, that’s absolutely disgusting! I’d just as soon you didn’t even mention it.

PAUL: Seriously?

SHEILA: I’m not sure I believe it, anyway.

PAUL: People have done odder things. Why should you find it so hard to believe?

SHEILA: I’m positive the story was embroidered. I don’t believe she didn’t know, and I don’t believe what she was supposed to have said. Do you?

PAUL: Maybe the people who told us tried to improve the story a little. Briefly, John, a group in Denver blindfolded a girl and had her try to guess which of the members was performing cunnilingus on her. According to the story we heard, they were fairly hard-core swingers and the gal was known as a good sport, which in a group like that meant she was sufficiently uninhibited to do it on television. So she entered into the spirit of the affair by squirming around and making it obvious that she enjoyed it no end, and saying that it must be a Democrat because she never had it so good, and guessing it must be a woman because no man was that sensitive, and so on. She kept guessing and kept getting it wrong, and finally they took the blindfold off and her “lover” was somebody’s German shepherd...

We continue to speculate on the pros and cons of club arrangements as they affect the quality of swinging. Both Paul and Sheila feel a club has both advantages and disadvantages, and that after a period of time the latter will inevitably come to outweigh the former. Paul explains that any club of substantial size will invariably have one or more couples as members whom a given club will find either undesirable or personally tedious, and as time goes by it becomes increasingly unpleasant to have relations, both social and sexual, with such people. “There are a lot of people you would have sex with once,” Sheila explains, “that you wouldn’t enjoy seeing a second time. In the club situation you feel this even more strongly, and sooner or later it has to get to you.” Both Paul and Sheila agree that they would not be inclined to join another club.

Later, I reintroduce the subject of generating variety, not at club meetings or in other group situations but in the course of general swinger socializing. How, I ask, do Paul and Sheila vary the style and quality of their sex lives now?

SHEILA: There’s really no special trick to it. It’s easy to go overboard this way, but it honestly isn’t essential. Variety has to be present in one’s life, but this doesn’t mean you have to seek it, or consciously plan for it. If you understand your own needs and capabilities, and if you learn what works and what doesn’t work, and if you just let things come naturally—

PAUL: That’s the main thing. You have to see new people without making a fetish of new contacts. And we’ve found it’s fun to keep a very open mind toward what we consider kinky acts — not as a frequent thing but on a one-time basis. Certain swingers will describe themselves in their ads or letters as being willing to try anything once. “Anything” covers too much ground, certainly — there are plenty of things I wouldn’t dream of trying, ever.

JWW: Such as?

PAUL: Oh, I wouldn’t know where to start. Believe me, there is absolutely no limit to what people will do. We’ve tried bondage and mild discipline once or twice, not because it’s that much of a kick for us but because we can get with it once in a while as a novelty. Well, that’s tame compared with some of the oddballs on the swinging scene. They’re absolute sadomasochists who practice actual torture on one another. I’m not exaggerating. They burn each other with cigarettes, they beat each other unconscious, they lacerate each other—

SHEILA: It seems incredible. No matter how sophisticated you are, you can’t really believe these people exist. But they do.

JWW: I’ve interviewed a few. The whole pattern of their conversation is weird. I’ll admit I have trouble establishing any kind of rapport with them.

PAUL: Of course a large percentage of them must be literally insane.

JWW: That’s probably true.

PAUL: You never know what to believe, but some friends of ours who aren’t given to bandying rumors about have told us that they’ve heard of deaths occurring during sadomasochistic torture. Some maniac gets carried away at a club meeting, and instead of just lashing some girl with his whip he wraps it around her neck and she strangles. Something like that. Of course the group hushes it up and you never hear any more about it. As I said, I don’t have anything approaching firsthand evidence, but I can believe it. I know what some of these nuts are like.

SHEILA: If they just whipped each other, I’d say fine, let them enjoy themselves, and at least it keeps them off the streets. God knows Paul and I are the last people to believe in imposing rules on other people. But some of these lunatics — I have to call them lunatics — some of them get their kicks by torturing people who don’t go for that sort of thing at all.

PAUL: In the early days, we several times met with people who wanted to work some variation of the discipline routine, but who hadn’t mentioned this in their correspondence. Fortunately none of them tried force. We know of one couple, though, who were horribly mistreated. They were swingers, but strictly limited to straight sex, you know, and they met this one couple and had a fine, normal evening and were invited to spend the following weekend with some friends of the other couple for what they thought would be more of the same. Well, it turned out that it was all a careful plot to have these people as torture victims. They went to the house as arranged, and right out of the blue they were overpowered and stripped and beaten and forced to perform various acts. I won’t go into details, I don’t want to, but let’s just say that they endured three hours of pain and humiliation and were then told that they had better not go to the authorities or they would be killed. Besides, how could they go to the police? They couldn’t confess that they were swappers, could they?

JWW: From my own studies, this sort of thing happens more often than the average person would suspect.

SHEILA: It’s really terrifying. And you know, I suppose it could happen to us, couldn’t it? We think it couldn’t because we are veterans at this sort of thing and can read between the lines of a letter, but don’t you suppose everyone thinks it couldn’t happen to him?

PAUL: All sorts of strange people. People who want to have their children join in the fun, which sickens me. People who have the gall to suggest that we have our children join in, which earned one friendly guy a sock in the nose from me. He couldn’t believe I’d hit him just because he’d suggested something like that. Hit him? I wanted to kill the son of a bitch.

SHEILA: That should give you an idea of a few of the things we don’t do, anyway. Generally we try to keep open minds, and to meet with different kinds of people and know them as people as well as sexually. And to meet mainly with individual couples, but to vary things by occasional dates with two or three other couples. And, finally, to let off steam now and then in a genuine all-out orgy.

Later that night I play back the tape. At first I compare the picture which Paul and Sheila convey of their swap club with what I have learned of the functioning of other such groups. I conclude that it is more or less typical. If anything, the group is, as they have said, somewhat better organized than most such clubs.

But before long my mind wanders, and I switch off the tape recorder and find myself thinking about Paul and Sheila and the particular form their marital adjustment has taken. I think of other swingers I have known and the lives they have made for themselves, and I conclude once again that Paul and Sheila are more similar to others I have known well than they are different, that their special quality is more a matter of how well they see themselves than how they live or think or feel.

I think again of the premise on which I tried to hang this particular interview session — i.e., the manner in which one assures variety and freshness in one’s career as a swinger. Earlier I had been somewhat irritated by their failure to grasp this premise, and now it occurs to me that the whole idea is basically absurd. And yet does not the absurdity speak, if not volumes, at least some extended chapters on the confused and confusing role of sex in the modern world? Is there not something especially revealing in the very idea of monotony as a peril in wife-swapping?

And I wonder, too, what sort of effect this process of seemingly interminable interviewing may have on the Gordons themselves. I have done no end of interviewing in this and allied fields, but never before have I spent an extended period of time with one individual or couple. In a sense, they have been forced into a role roughly equivalent to that of a patient in a psychoanalytical relationship. By seeking information for myself and for the reader, I inevitably probe in much the same way as an analyst might.

A day or two later, having had no intervening meetings with the Gordons, either together or separately, I dictate the following remarks to my tape recorder:

“How much time can one spend absorbed in sexual matters before they cease to be at all real? And how much of a role can sex play in human life before it completely loses touch with its original biological purpose? How far can we all go, as individuals and as a race? And what happens to us if and when we go too far?

“This project has affected me, though it will perhaps be some time before I know whether for better or for worse. I find myself wondering more and more frequently whether the profession of sexual researcher is fit work for a grown man. Even as I think that my white rats, my guinea pigs, my Paul and Sheila, ought to have more important things to occupy their minds, so do I think that I ought to be devoting my own time to more world-shaking work than their sexual preoccupations.

“And how my perspective grows distorted! Prolonged exposure to almost any attitude leads one to be increasingly exposed to regard that attitude as reasonable, even ordinary...

“How absorbed we are with ourselves, how obsessed with adjustments and relationships...”

Orgies, Nude Parties, and Lust Weekends

PAUL: When you read about orgies or hear the word used in conversation, there’s really no telling what people really have in mind. To some people, an orgy is any social evening in which the participants have more than three or four drinks. I suppose the average civilian would figure that any swinging evening was an orgy, or that any time two couples had sexual relations in the same room, that that sort of thing would come under the heading of orgy. Swingers have different definitions, but even then the word has a variety of meanings.

In my way of thinking, an orgy is a party with at least a dozen couples and no real ground rules at all, with everyone doing whatever seems like a good idea at the moment. Ideally the people don’t all know each other very well, and ideally everyone has the mental attitude that this particular occasion is going to be something special, something out of the beaten path. At a real orgy, a swinger will do things that he might not do in the course of an ordinary party.

SHEILA: Of course, there are some people who only swing at orgies. They never swap or anything else, but a couple of times a year they go off to an orgy and let everything go.

PAUL: I can’t see that, myself.

SHEILA: Well, that’s because we regard swinging as a way of life, as a part of our way of life. Others use it as an escape valve. You were telling me about someone at the office who drinks that way, never takes a drink all year and then goes on a binge?

PAUL: He does it a couple of times a year. If he takes one drink he can’t stop, he’s that kind of alcoholic, so he stays dry for months on end until I guess things get to be too much for him, I don’t know, and then he takes a train up to Boston and gets a hotel room there and stays drunk for anywhere from three days to a week. He stays completely smashed and then one morning he wakes up and according to him he knows instantly that it’s over, that he’s had it, and he comes back again. I see what you mean, that some people go on sex binges the same way. I prefer our approach to life, myself.

JWW: Do you make much use of orgies?

SHEILA: Oh, just once in a while, and I couldn’t really say how often because it’s not as if we operated on a schedule. A few times a year, maybe. It just happens, something comes up, somebody tells us there’s a party and we do or don’t decide to go.

PAUL: The real place for orgies is the West Coast, especially in the Los Angeles area. California has always been more free-wheeling generally in swinging matters, as I guess you know. For example, a single guy has a lot less trouble getting in on the action out there. In the swinger publications, the correspondence-club magazines, there are always a large proportion of ads from California that will come out and say “Three is not a crowd” or “Single men welcome,” whereas other advertisers will more than likely go out of their way to discourage single men.

As far as orgies are concerned, from what I understand it’s hard to live out there without getting invited to one every weekend.

SHEILA: I can’t believe it’s that free.

PAUL: Close to it, I think. I know I’ve seen ads for orgies, and I don’t mean in swinger publications, either. Right in the regular newspapers, not to mention the underground paper, I think it’s the Free Press. It couldn’t be any freer. They’re careful about the wording of the ads, but you barely have to be a swinger to get the message.

SHEILA: I know that some orgies on the Coast are sponsored by something called the Sexual Freedom League. No one seems to know if there’s really one organization with that name or if different people make a habit of borrowing the name. Also, I’m not sure that what they do is exactly what we would call an orgy.

PAUL: Sometimes.

SHEILA: But not always. Some friends of ours went once and said the meeting was a sort of a mixer for swingers. It was a nude party, which is what they generally do in California, unless I’ve been misinformed. You take your clothes off when you arrive and the party starts with everyone sitting around naked talking about politics and the movies and things, and then people pair off. The party we heard about had more men than women at it and relatively few married couples. I gather that it was a very young crowd. Our friends said they couldn’t get in the mood, it wasn’t their kind of party, and they left.

PAUL: When you get those young kids, and especially out in California, I suppose everybody gets high on marijuana or methedrine or LSD, and maybe it would be hard to relate to someone who was high that way if you weren’t high yourself.

SHEILA: I know that we’ve gone to nude parties right here in New Jersey, and once in New York City.

PAUL: They don’t work out so well.

SHEILA: Not for us, at least. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, although God knows I’ve certainly never thought of myself that way. But I don’t much care for the idea of being stark naked when I’m meeting someone for the first time. The mood isn’t sexual and nudity in itself isn’t exciting, not really, but at the same time I have to admit that it is embarrassing. There are some devout nudists in the swingers movement—

PAUL: They are some of the craziest people in the world.

SHEILA: Some of them are very nice people, but they’re out of their heads. All this poetic swill about the body being beautiful and natural and clean. They manage to make a religion out of the whole thing. And they’re also a bunch of nutty sun-worshipers, burning themselves so black all over that I imagine most of them die of skin cancer sooner or later. But to get back to the nude parties, what people apparently don’t realize is that the average person looks better with clothes on.

PAUL: Most people, let’s face it, are not beautiful. Swingers are head and shoulders ahead of the rest of the world in this regard. Not because they necessarily had a head start in the looks department, but because they take better care of themselves. Well, it stands to reason. The average person never gets seen naked except by whoever they’re married to, and in the average marriage they don’t care what their partner thinks, so there’s no incentive to stay in good physical shape. Swingers are very intent on being attractive, not only dressed but nude as well. On the other hand, civilians are apt to be better dressed. Sheila and I buy decent clothes, all things considered, but we can’t begin to approach the wardrobes of a great many of our nonswinging acquaintances. Because swingers may be just as anxious to make a good impression socially, but they know that they’ll be judged more on their appearance nude than how they look with their clothes on.

Even so, even taking this into consideration, most of us aren’t that sensational nude. People feel a lot better with their clothes off, but if the party’s at the talk stage, I don’t see any advantage in nudity.

SHEILA: The rationale is that it not only breaks the ice, it just about heats the water. Admittedly, once you’re over the initial shock value, it does set the stage for sex. And people who like nude parties say that it avoids getting clothes dirty by tearing them off in a rush and just throwing them aside. I can understand this. I know when we first started going on swinging dates I had trouble finding my panties at the end of an evening. They just sort of got lost in the shuffle.

PAUL: Now she knows enough not to put them on in the first place.

SHEILA: I think, all in all, that you have a much better chance to develop a sense of anticipation if people are clothed at the beginning of a party. In any activity, anticipation is a sizable portion of the pleasure.

PAUL: The rest is memory. If you think about it, nothing’s much fun while it’s happening.

SHEILA: I’m serious, Paul.

PAUL: I’m not entirely kidding, either.

SHEILA: Well, I don’t know what I was going to say. You threw me off the track, but I don’t suppose it was earthshaking. I guess I just got carried away on the subject of nude parties, and that makes me sound like quite the old square, doesn’t it? I’ll say it again — maybe we’re getting old-fashioned, maybe younger people react differently...

There is a brief and rather vague free-wheeling discussion of Marshall McLuhan’s observations and how they might relate to the wife-swapping scene. At the time it seems that we develop some salient points, but when the discussion is transcribed it will appear quite meaningless and vacuous. Then we return to the specific area of the sex orgy. Paul and Sheila describe several at some length, their conversational attitudes quite matter-of-fact, even disinterested. They elaborate on a three-day affair which took place a year earlier at a small resort in the Catskill Mountains: a group of swingers booked the entire lodge for the weekend and invited a total of fifty couples to share expenses. From Friday afternoon until late Sunday, the entire lodge was completely given over to a sexual marathon, with an endless string of sexual contacts interrupted by brief intermissions for food and sleep and, according to Sheila, “so they could carry out the wounded.”

The actual activity of the orgies seems oddly unimportant, even monotonous to reproduce. I had given some thought to including a verbatim selection of Sheila’s description of her actions in the course of their “lust weekend,” but a perusal of the transcript has eliminated any inclination I once felt in that direction. The reader must understand that the structure of an orgy is such that everybody does as he pleases all at once; thus, one person’s recollection of an orgy is like the blind man’s view of the elephant — he has only touched and can only report on a fraction of the whole.

In another work, I have recorded my own impressions of an orgy that I was privileged to attend. I did this despite my general reluctance to insert personal material in my writings because I felt that an orgy could only be conveyed verbally in terms of its effect upon an individual and its relevance to him. With the same thought in mind, I find it preferable to omit Paul’s and Sheila’s description of orgies in favor of including some additional material on their reaction to orgies and the effect of such experience upon them. If the reader wonders what then actually goes on at such an event, let him be assured merely that everything he can imagine, absolutely everything, is being done somewhere by someone to someone, with someone else watching and someone else taking notes and someone else waiting his turn.

SHEILA: You know, we talked to someone about it afterward, and it was their first experience with something anywhere along these lines. They had swapped and partied but had never swung all out in this fashion. And the girl said, “Honestly, it was too much for us, it was fun but it was just too much.”

And that really is the whole idea, the whole point of it. That you do overextend yourself, that it’s too much all at once and knocks you out and drains you, and that you leave the whole thing completely and utterly depleted. Literally so. Your sexual parts ache and your body is completely exhausted and sex is the last thing on your mind, you just couldn’t do anything to save your soul.

The point is that it’s supposed to make you feel like this.

PAUL: When swingers who use orgies occasionally talk about the whole idea of an orgy, they’ll use phrases like “blowing off steam” or “getting something out of your system.” And these phrases are very accurate descriptions of what an orgy does. You get everything out of your system, you empty yourself. It isn’t just that you go on and on until you can’t do it any more. You go far past that point. You immerse yourself in it, you surpass your capacity again and again. And it gets to your mind sooner or later.

SHEILA: You lost me. You mean it’s like masturbation, it gives you pimples and drives you insane?

PAUL: Oh, you know what I mean, for Christ’s sake. You know the way a person is affected mentally when you drive yourself to exhaustion and on. That weekend, for example, it wasn’t just the sex, though God knows that was the major factor, but there was also the fact that nobody got any sleep to speak of and everybody was getting by on hardly any food. And when a person is forced to function under those conditions strange things will happen to his mental processes. Your mind makes strange leaps, strange connections. Your memory falls apart. Sometimes people get so that they can’t carry on a conversation because they can’t remember from one minute to the next whether they actually got around to saying something aloud or whether they just thought it.

SHEILA: Now I understand. I missed the point. I thought you were saying that it does something to your state of mind afterward. As far as shaking your mind up, I don’t know whether it’s the exhaustion that does it or just the sheer volume of sexual contests. When something goes on and on like that you get punchy, that’s all...

And afterwards you ache, and you’re beat, and you feel certain you’ll never want to screw anybody again, and that although you had fun you’d just as soon never go to another party like this one. And you won’t want to party like that again for months, but it won’t be more than a few days before you’re in the mood for sex again.

JWW: You talk about blowing off steam. Is there that much unresolved tension in your lives?

PAUL: Evidently, or otherwise we wouldn’t go.

JWW: That’s specious, isn’t it? There’s another explanation — that the orgy serves a different function.

PAUL: Like what?

JWW: That’s what I was wondering.

SHEILA: I think the comparison of sex binges to alcohol binges is valid. I think an orgy, like a drunk, is a way to get out of yourself.

JWW: To get out of yourself?

SHEILA: Yes, I would say so.

JWW: Because of a basic dissatisfaction with things as they are?

SHEILA: Probably... All swingers are dissatisfied people, you know. And I don’t mean that in the sexual sense, or even in the Sunday Supplement sense of the term. But swingers are people who want more, who want to exceed the role in life that is handed to them. They’re dissatisfied in the same basic way that successful businessmen are dissatisfied, that artists and creative geniuses are dissatisfied. It isn’t enough for them to be themselves, it isn’t enough for the world to be as it always has been. They want more.

And they’re dissatisfied, and once in a while it catches up with them, with any of us. It has to. And when that happens you often have a need to get away from yourself, to get out of yourself. I suppose a swinger could use drink or drugs to do it. Any kind of a binge will do, but we’re people who react to things in sexual terms, so what could be more natural than to select a sex binge? The hangover isn’t too bad, and you don’t ruin your liver—

Some Questions and Answers, Pertinent and Impertinent

SHEILA GORDON

Are you glad you started swinging?

That’s a tricky question. An awfully tricky question, because when you ask a person if he’s glad about something that happened to him a long time ago and that has set a whole pattern of his life since then, it’s the equivalent of asking him if he likes his life, his present situation. Because obviously I can’t imagine what my life now would be like if Paul and I had never started, so if I say I’m glad it means I think what we have now is better than we would possibly have had otherwise. And vice versa.

Yes, I’m glad we started.

Especially when I look at people who didn’t. I’ve read that swingers typify the overemphasis of sex in American culture, that swingers are people who are obsessed with sex. Well, you can’t really argue with that, can you? We’re all of us obviously obsessed with sex.

But so is everybody else. Everybody. The whole fucking culture, the civilization, is obsessed with sex. Everything everybody reads or writes or says or does. The advertisements, Madison Avenue. Mouthwash commercials that just keep telling you that if you use their product nobody will know you like to suck. I’m sorry, this is awful, I’m being crude...

Everybody is obsessed with sex, as if there’s nothing else in the world to think about. And the swingers are at least doing all the things that everybody else wants to do. We may be disgusting from time to time, and I feel we are, but we’re more honest than the rest of the world, and I do regard honesty as a virtue. A painful one, but a virtue all the same, and we’re not that long on virtues, are we?

I’m glad we started.

Do you think swinging is a permanent part of American culture?

This is something swingers talk about frequently. And it’s a popular parlor game to speculate on the number of swinging couples in the country. The books estimate as high as ten million couples, or ten percent of the population. But I can’t even think in those terms, and I understand the estimates have no statistical validity.

I do know the practice is spreading. People drop out, some of them stay out, but new people start in at a faster rate. And I can’t see any reason why the trend should shift.

In a way, I think swinging is a part of a broader cultural trend. More than just sex. Increasing use of drugs, increasing rejection of all the old values. That’s the direction we’re all going, and I suppose someday it has to stop, but if the end is in sight I can’t see that far.

Do you think it will always be a part of your life?

Yes.

I didn’t used to think so. I always thought that the idea of a couple of people in their sixties having a swap orgy was just too silly to think about. But then I remembered when I was a teen-ager and I couldn’t believe that married people actually made love after they were thirty or so.

In time we may have trouble finding people willing to swing with us. You know, I think that might be the charm that would bring on a third and final suicide attempt.

Let’s talk about something else.

Would you want your children to become swingers?

God, where did you get these questions?

That’s so impossible to answer. They’re so young, and to look at them now and try to answer that question, well, of course it’s impossible. And of course I’ve asked myself the same question, of course I have, maybe a hundred times or more, and if you think that makes it the slightest damn bit easier to answer—

Of course they don’t even know — I was going to say they don’t even know anything about sex at their ages, but I know that’s not true. They know more than I did at their age, I’m sure. But they don’t know about us, about swinging.

There’s always that fear, you know, that you’ll be banging some stranger on the living room floor and one of the kids will wander in sleepy-eyed looking for a glass of water. It’s happened to people we know, and we’ve heard stories... Some of the time I think it’s a case of people wanting to get caught, like a husband committing adultery and wanting to be found out. But that’s one of the big what-ifs swingers flash on. What if the kids walk in, that’s one; and the other is, what if we answer an ad and it turns out to be your parents, or the minister and his wife, or whatever your particular trip may be...

I wouldn’t want them to be swingers now, or at any time during their childhood. And when they’re older, when they’re old enough to make that decision for themselves, when they’re married, that is, then whether or not I would want it would not enter into it. I would have no right to want it or not want it. I would have no right to have my opinion.

But that’s copping out, isn’t it?

Shit.

Okay. I would want them to swing if that was what they wanted. I would want them to follow their own instincts, and if they wanted to swap, to swing, I would rather they did that than that they repressed it.

I would prefer not to know about it, however.

And I don’t care if that’s logical or not.

PAUL GORDON

Are you glad you started swinging?

Today? Yes, definitely, one hundred percent.

Because today I feel good, I feel positive. When things get to me I have a tendency to blame it all on the kind of life we lead. I suppose that’s natural enough. “Look, it’s raining, all because we became wife-swappers.” That sort of thing.

All in all, given the kind of people we are, I’m sure our lives and our marriage are better off now than they would be if we stayed faithful to each other or if we cheated on the side.

Do you think swinging is a permanent part of American culture?

I’m not even certain that there’s anything very permanent about American culture itself. Or about the world. Even if everything doesn’t go boom one of these days — and I’m very much afraid it will — but even if it doesn’t, I don’t really think the world will last out the century. If it isn’t the famine it’ll be the pollution. One thing or another. I don’t hold out much possibility of things working out. So in that sense I think swinging will last as long as the world does, because it’s certainly not going to die out in the next thirty or forty years.

More people do it every day. No one has any idea of the number, the figures you read are just wild guesses. What would numbers mean, anyway? They wouldn’t give a true picture, because as important as the numerical aspect is the nature of the people involved, their relative influence in the makeup of society.

It’s not just American society, either. I think there’s probably a higher percentage of swingers in Canada, and I know there are a lot of them in England and France and Germany and other Western European countries.

I can’t believe it will go away. Aside from all the arguments about the direction society is taking, more liberal and permissive and all, can you name me one single instance of a human vice dying out? Or even diminishing in number? When people learn a vice they don’t let go of it. Drinking, smoking, drugs, everything.

Do you think it will always be a part of your life?

I don’t know.

I think there probably comes a time when it completely loses its thrill. This is pure guesswork, but I would think it would happen with age, that a person looks for his kicks in different areas.

I’m not sure whether I hope that’s the case or not. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, I guess.

Like everybody else, I hope I’ll be able to have sex forever, one way or the other. You know the old line, the toast: “May you live as long as you want to and may you want to as long as you live.” I guess everyone dreads the idea of losing his potency.

I wonder if I’ll want younger women when I get old.

Probably. Everybody seems to.

Would you want your children to become swingers?

First they’ll have to marry Negroes. Then we’ll see.

Content

John Warren Wells
The Wife-Swap Report

The Way Some People Live

Beginnings

Love Thy Neighbor

Tres Gay

The Swim of Things

Sooner or Later You Make Yourself Sick

Dropping Out and Dropping In

All Things in Moderation

The Games Swingers Play

Orgies, Nude Parties, and Lust Weekends

Some Questions and Answers, Pertinent and Impertinent