John Warren Wells

3 is not a Crowd

Introduction

“Three is not a crowd.”

A few years ago, this variant of an old cliché began turning up with increasing frequency in personal advertisements in the swinger publications which first appeared in New York and Los Angeles. Ever since then, more and more couples seeking to enlarge their sexual relationships through contact with others have expressed their willingness to engage not only in two-couple swap sessions but in threesomes as well. Two is tedium, one infers, but three is not a crowd.

While this may be seen as a new direction of sorts in the swinger subculture, there is nothing wildly revolutionary in the idea of three in a bed. One is reminded of the Hollywood titan taken on a tour of a friend’s garden and shown a large brass sundial. When its function was explained to him, he shook his head in amazement. “What’ll they think of next?” he marveled.

And of course the ménage à trois is as much an invention of antiquity as is the sundial. The one is the result of man’s desire to know the time, the other of his even stronger desire to make that time pass more pleasantly. One recalls that both Sarah and her handmaiden Hagar dwelt deep in the bosom of Abraham, that Jacob married two sisters, that Lot tumbled both his daughters. (One may believe, in the last connection, that the girls were moved solely by filial piety and the urge to provide their father with male heirs. One may also believe that Lot didn’t know what was going on. One may further believe that the Earth is flat and the moon a wheel of Camembert.)

But however one may feel about the literal truth of the Bible, the simple endurance of these stories testifies to the age old occurrence of troilistic relationships and, even more, to the propensity of human beings to find such relationships of interest. That the contemporary sexual underground has embraced the ménage is hardly remarkable.

For quite some time now, I have been peripherally involved with America’s sexual underground. The rising tide of mate-swapping and other forms of ritualized extramarital sexual relations has lately proved to be neither a fad on the order of the hula hoop nor, as was often charged, a creation of the sensational press. On the contrary, it becomes increasingly evident that the tribe of swingers constantly wins new recruits and has emerged as a fact of life in contemporary America. Whether this trend will continue is moot. That it is quite real is indisputable.

At first glance, one may easily regard the threesome as a component of the swinging scene, of no special importance in and of itself. That a couple with a preference for group sex is willing to participate in an occasional threesome does not seem overwhelmingly significant. Indeed, one of the reasons many swingers will emphasize in their ads that “three is not a crowd” simply because a threesome is often more easily arranged than a four-or-moresome. The world of mail-order adultery is strangely competitive. Many ads draw surprisingly few suitable responses, while many responders find themselves writing dozens of letters and getting distressingly few letters in return from advertisers. Couples do find each other, certainly, and a pleasant evening with a couple will lead to other presumably pleasant evenings with that couple’s friends but the initial plunge into the pool can be difficult to arrange.

On the other hand, I have found that single swingers are in abundant supply. A couple expressing a willingness to swing not only with couples but with singles as well is virtually guaranteed a full mailbox and as full a bed as they desire. This is most notably the case when the couple wishes to swing with single males: the couple seeking an extra girl will not experience nearly so great a deluge of applicants.

When I first began encountering examples of troilism in swinging circles, I tended to attribute this partly to convenience and partly to that desire for variety for its own sake which is a hallmark of the swinger. And while these factors undeniably play a role in a large proportion of cases, they do not begin to tell the whole story.

In one way or another, I have been made acquainted with quite a number of cases in which the threesome is the preferred, even the exclusive form of sexual liaison. Neither convenience nor experimentation begins to explain these instances. Moreover, the persons involved can often not be called swingers in any real sense of the term. Their fixed sexual triangle constitutes the whole of their sexual experience, and no outside contacts are sought or permitted. They are, in essence, a sort of plural marriage.

I became sufficiently well acquainted with four of these triangular relationships to report on them at length in the pages to follow. While I prefer to let the facts — indeed, the participants — speak for themselves, some introductory observations might not be amiss.

First of all, the reader will note that all four of these triangles consist of one man and two women. One ought not to infer that this is the standard or even the most common form of the triangle. In swinging society per se, I would say that it is by far the most frequently sought — far more couples seek single girls through ads than single men — but that it is less frequently achieved — infinitely more single men respond to such ads. I am not statistically inclined, nor is my sort of research the kind that involves a large enough sample for statistical conclusions to be drawn. However, I would guess that the majority of more or less permanent and stable threesomes do involve a man and two women rather than a woman and two men. Generally speaking, a man may willingly share his wife with another man for a night or a weekend, but permanent polyandry seems to go against the grain of Western culture.

The reader will further note the presence of incest as an exceedingly strong component in these three-cornered sexual relationships. Two of the cases which follow involve genuinely incestuous situations while what I would consider symbolic incest plays a part in the others. One might argue that incest plays a subliminal role in all sexual relationships, that any lover is playing roles of parent and sibling and child at one time or another. But I do feel that incestuous overtones are far more strongly present in the threesome — in any threesome — and I think it is more than the workings of sheer chance that two of these cases do involve actual incest.

The stories which follow are told insofar as possible in the actual words of the participants. They are the product of a great many lengthy interview sessions, with the results of these interviews edited and rearranged but the content essentially undisturbed. I have tried to eliminate the backing and filling, the questions and answers which characterize most interviews, and to keep my own observations to a minimum while permitting the speakers to present a cohesive and straightforward narrative.

Beyond this, the only changes I have made have been the automatic changing of names and places and any similar material which might enable anyone to identify any of these persons. Any such attempt will be a waste of time.

Just how common is this sort of thing?

A good question, and one for which I have no good answer. In fantasy, certainly, the ménage à trois seems to be universal. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that every red-blooded American man spends a certain amount of time dreaming of having two wives or two mistresses or what you will. While the same man may in fact be incapable of satisfying one wife in the manner to which she would like to become accustomed, nevertheless the fantasy persists.

But in actuality how often does this go on?

More often, certainly, than one would at first suppose. The stable ménage à trois is as easily concealed a form of unorthodox sexual behavior as exists, with the possible exception of compulsive chastity. One must realize that the presence of an extra female “relative” in the household of a married couple occasions little comment in even the smallest and most provincial town. Whether she is indeed a relative, and just how she is related, and by whom, is rarely even a matter for speculation. The suspicion of homosexuality is almost automatic in these enlightened times when two men or two women live together, but equivalent suspicion is rarely visited upon a properly cloaked troilistic union.

I have learned two things well in the course of several years of absorbing (if occasionally hectic) research. The first, is that, in the realm of sexual behavior, there is absolutely nothing that the mind of man can envision which is not being enthusiastically practiced by someone somewhere. You may give your imagination free rein, you may concoct the most impossible sexual fantasy, and you may take it for granted that someone is at this very moment doing precisely what you’ve just invented, and has done it before and will do it again.

Secondly, the extremes of sexual behavior float, like icebergs, with their bulk well below the surface, forever unexposed. Thus not only does everything exist, but everything exists to a far greater degree than visible evidence would seem to indicate. Most men and women lead lives of quiet depravity.

We can interpret this as we wish. We can view it as evidence of the extreme decadence of our culture or of the immensely evil and perverse nature of humankind. Or, on the other hand, we can rejoice in the fact that, however desperate and disparate our urgings, we are not alone.

— JWW

Gordon & Rita & June

JWW: Gordon and Rita Parris live on a thirty-eight acre farm in southern Ohio not far from the Kentucky line. They do not work the farm. Gordon owns and operates a hardware and plumbing supply business in a town about fifteen miles from their home. While the business is prosperous, their life style does not reflect this. The old house is simply furnished. A color television console and a new station wagon are the sole marks of affluence. Gordon and Rita share the house with several dogs and cats, their three-year-old son, and Rita’s sister, June.

Gordon is tall, balding, thirty-eight, with rugged mountaineer features and a warm but infrequent smile. Rita, thirty-four is dark and although slender, her body remains soft and feminine. Her manner is withdrawn and introspective. June, thirty-one, bears a strong resemblance to her older sister but appears more than three years Rita’s junior. Her face is open where Rita’s is reserved, and there is more warmth and vitality in her conversation.

At the time of the interview June, the sister, was several months pregnant, and just beginning to show.

GORDON: Something like this, now, you tend to look back off it and try to say just how it started. Rita and I will be married eight years next spring, and it’s just over four years that it all got started with June. But sometimes it seems as if it was going on long before that, see, because the desire was always there. Even before we were married, when Rita and I were first seeing each other, of course June would be around a lot, and I always liked her. We always cared for each other.

Of course I never thought of all of this in terms of going to bed. Of having sex. Not that I didn’t think, well, it would be nice to go to bed with that girl. You take a normal man and put a good-looking girl in front of him and he’s going to have that sort of thought whether it’s in his mind to do anything about it or not. It’s just in the nature of a thought. Like I might have the thought, now, if that wasn’t Rita’s sister, or if I weren’t seeing Rita, now, I might want to do something about that. But at the time it never went any further than that, not even in my mind. It was the same as you’re driving along the street and you see a girl walking down the street and you have the thought that she’s attractive, that you wouldn’t mind getting next to her, but it’s no more than a thought and you don’t even hit the horn, you don’t even slow down, you just keep driving along to get wherever it is that you’re going.

Rita and I didn’t get married right off. We were seeing each other for about three years. I was working for a man outside of Dayton, he had a hardware business there, and I wasn’t making much money and out of that I had to support my mother. I have a brother in the Merchant Marine and he would send money when he could but even so I wasn’t fixed well enough to get married, especially with trying to put money aside for a business of my own. I would drive on down here after work and than we would go for a ride or see a movie or just sit and have coffee with June and their Pa, and then I would have to drive on home.

We would be seeing each other quite regular, and then not so much for a while, and then regular again. Sometimes I would see other girls in between, but it never stuck. I would be all the time trying to think of something to say to them, whereas with Rita I would just relax and be myself. I never felt uncomfortable. Even if it was just a matter of sitting in front of the television and neither of us saying much at all, I always felt at ease with Rita, and I guess I knew a long time before we talked about getting married that sooner or later I would marry Rita.

I was always easy with June, too, as far as that goes. It was much the same in some ways, although of course it was Rita I was going with and June was her sister, her kid sister. And June being younger she did seem like a kid in certain ways. She was a kid to Rita, and their Ma being dead for so many years, Rita tended to be the mother of the family and to be always looking out for June.

Now and then when things weren’t going right with Rita and myself it would cross my mind that if Rita went and married somebody else I might think about getting something started with June. But that was just in the back of my mind once in a while and nothing more than that.

RITA: I think I always knew Gordon and I would get married. All the time we were going together, I knew it. We were just right for each other from the beginning. Once I was through school and spending all my time here with Pa and June, I never really saw anybody. I dated some in high school but not so much, you know, and except for Gordon I scarcely saw anybody once I started seeing him. Once in a while I would meet a boy and we might go to a movie, but then either he wouldn’t call again or I wouldn’t want to see him, so I never really went with anybody but Gordon, and I knew it was just a question of when he would be in a position to marry me, with his mother and getting a start in business and all of the rest of it.

As for Junie, I never thought about her and Gordon that way. I was just glad they liked each other, they got along so well together. But Gordon got on well with my Pa, and it was the same way to me, and I thought about it the same way and was glad the same way, that he was like one of the family to them.

GORDON: Rita and I commenced having intercourse just under a year before we got married. This was something that was a long time coming. I had had some experience but not very much of it. It was mostly with girls that were that way, that they would do it for anyone, and you went out with them once and had it with them and that was all there was to it. There were other girls that I would go out with regularly before I met Rita, but I had never had intercourse with any of them, only with what you might call the tramps, the easy girls. There were, I guess, seven of those, and twice with prostitutes when I was in the service, and that was about the whole extent of it. Of course with the girls I dated we would park and pet, but there was a big difference between parking and petting and having the whole thing. I don’t know why it should be that way, thinking about it now, but there was always a great distinction between going all the way and not.

When Rita and I finally got to having intercourse, as I said it had been a long time coming, and by this time we had gotten in the habit of parking for years, you know, or petting in this very house when June and her Pa were asleep. So eventually there was this one night when we had both had a couple of beers and we were feeling pretty good, and instead of stopping we didn’t stop. So, after that we talked a great deal, and talked about getting married, and all things being equal we would have gotten married immediately. But at the time my own mother was very sick and it was just a question of time before she was going to die, and it seemed to us that it would be for the best to wait until this happened. Anything that would be a shock, anything in the way of a change, wouldn’t be good for my Ma, so we waited until nature had taken its course, and then when she did die we waited another two months and then we were married.

RITA: During this time we were continuing to have intercourse. I wouldn’t have felt right about this except that I knew we were going to get married and it was just a matter of time. I felt that we were already married in every way but the official way and that it was right for us to be together.

GORDON: Actually it was foolish of us to wait as long as we did.

RITA: Yes, but that’s looking back on it, only it didn’t seem that way at the time. As far as bringing up my own children nowadays, well, Prescott is too young now to tell him anything but to do his business in the toilet and not in his pants, which he still has his trouble remembering—

JUNE: Oh, he’s not so bad.

RITA: —but when the time comes I would tell him to do what he wants if it’s someone he loves, that it’s nothing but foolishness to wait for no particular reason at all. And I would say the same thing to a daughter. A lot of people will say that to a son, but I would say it to a daughter as well. And I would rather have a son of mine have sex with a girl he likes and respects than with a girl he has no feeling for — in the way Gordon did when he was younger. I think that must be awful, to do it for someone when there’s no other feeling.

After we started having it regularly, you know, even then it came to me that we were fools for waiting so long, And I can say that I never felt guilty or anything of the sort. Now I would have felt guilty if I were a girl at the time, I suppose, but you have to remember that I was twenty-five years old at the time. You could say I was an old maid at the time the way they usually figure those things.

GORDON: Oh, the hell you were an old maid.

RITA: But that’s how it’s usually figured. Twenty-five and never married is an old maid. Whether I was an old maid or not, what I certainly wasn’t was a child, you know, and so I couldn’t feel I was doing anything wrong having sexual intercourse with Gordon. The only thing that bothered me was Junie or Pa finding out about it, and not knowing how they would feel about it.

JUNE: Didn’t you worry about getting pregnant?

GORDON: I did, somewhat. But what you do, you take precautions and let it go at that. Worrying about that isn’t enough to leave off doing it.

RITA: Now this is funny, but I can’t really say I worried about that at all, about being pregnant. For one thing I knew Gordon was taking precautions, and I guess I was naive in that I thought if you took precautions that was all there was to it, that you were perfectly safe. What he used was rubbers, and of course I realize now that you can get pregnant through a rubber, that it can break or whatever happens, but at the time I thought they were a hundred percent. Another thing is that I wouldn’t have been that upset if I was pregnant. All it would mean is that we would have gotten married a little sooner than we figured, but that’s all, and if a girl is a little bit pregnant when she gets married, well, nobody’s particularly surprised or shocked at something like that.

GORDON: The saying is that first babies take five or six months to be born, but all the ones after that take nine.

RITA: And people just take that much for granted. And I wasn’t so much concerned that Pa or June would know we were having relations but that it would be thrown in their faces. Like if they were to walk in on us, because we would often do it on this very couch when they were upstairs, and you can get carried away and not notice somebody coming downstairs, and they could have walked in right while we were doing it, and that used to worry me. Sometimes I would get to thinking of that and it would keep me from letting go and enjoying myself completely—

GORDON: But not often.

RITA: No, I don’t guess. Or I thought we might be careless and leave one of those rubber things lying around, or something of that sort. But I don’t think Pa ever knew.

JUNE: I did, though.

RITA: You did, but not by anything you saw or heard, I don’t think.

JUNE: No. I don’t know how I knew, but I guess I just did, that’s all.

RITA: Well, that’s not the same as walking in on us.

JUNE: Oh, I never would have come downstairs like that. I guess because I knew what I might walk in on.

GORDON: And maybe your Pa never came downstairs for about the same reason.

RITA: That could be. I suppose that could be.

JUNE: I was hit hard when they got married. I didn’t know how or why but I was. Here I had been looking forward to the wedding and all. I was maid of honor and had it all figured out in my mind that I would have a romance with Gordon’s brother, Roy, who came in to be the best man. I was dreaming about this, and thinking how Roy and I would be married and everything just like Gordon and Rita, and as it turned out Roy was nothing like Gordon at all. He’s a lot older and hardly talks at all, or at least he didn’t have more than two words to say to me. So the wedding itself didn’t go the way I had it in mind for it to go.

After the wedding they went off for a week to Chicago, and then they came back for a visit, and then they moved to an apartment in Dayton so that Gordon could be near his work, and then all of a sudden I just felt so alone. Rita just about brought me up, and I was so glad she was marrying Gordon so that he could really be part of the family, and now all of a sudden they were both gone. Oh, we would see them most weekends, but it wasn’t the same. Now it was just me and Pa living out here by ourselves.

What happened to me at this point, although it didn’t happen right away or all at once, was that I guess I got a little bit sex-happy. I guess it was part of being lonely and part of being jealous of Rita. Jealous that she had Gordon and jealous that she had a life of her own to live. I don’t know that I thought of it that way at the time. I just felt left out of things and figured that I needed to have a man of my own. I suppose it was the same thing that led me to make a big thing out of Roy, and then to be so disappointed when he was nothing at all like his brother.

I had sort of lost interest in boys when Gordon and Rita started going together and he would be over to the house so much. The boys I had gone with before were younger, they were about my age, and they just seemed like kids compared to Gordon, and I got so I more or less stopped going out with them. And staying around the house night and day, and being out in the country, I didn’t meet anybody.

What I wanted to do was get some kind of job in town, but I couldn’t do this because of having to keep house for Pa. Not that he said it in so many words because I never even asked him or said anything about it. It was just something I knew, that I had to do this, so I never did more than have thoughts about a job in town.

But I took to going into town now and then. I would go in to do the shopping and instead of coming straight home I would hang around and maybe have coffee or something like that, or walk around looking in the windows, and I would meet people that way. Boys, I mean. They would generally be boys I had gone to school with so it wasn’t a matter of picking up total strangers but boys I had known and then lost touch with over the years. Some of them would be married and some not. And I would get offered a ride or asked to go to a movie, and I would go.

You know, I would talk to those boys, and as often as not there would be no parking at all on the first date or two, and one of them, he was married, I guess he’d been married for four or five years, he got his girl pregnant in high school and they had to get married, and I must have seen him a dozen times or more, and he never so much as kissed me. He never even tried to. I would have kissed him, or just about anything, I guess, if he’d wanted, but he just liked to go for long rides with me and talk to me. We would talk about his wife and how they weren’t getting along so good, and how he was a fool to get married so young and be all locked up with a wife and kids. I guess he needed me for someone to talk to about these things.

GORDON: He must have wanted to have sex with you.

JUNE: I suppose he wanted it, I suppose he had sexual feelings for me, but he never even tried to do anything about them. He could have done something about it but he never tried. As a matter of fact he would let things drop from time to time about how if he were free he would really be interested in me, but he never took it any further than that.

But what I was getting at is that it wasn’t just sex all the time, but when I think back on that time it seems that way to me, as though that was all I did and all I thought about. It wasn’t, really. You know how it is? As though — remembering it — the sex part is in color and the rest of it, what I did from day to day, is in black and white. That’s the only way I can think to explain it.

RITA: But you were a virgin.

JUNE: I know.

RITA: That’s what is really strange about it.

JUNE: Yes, it is. I guess even then I was saving myself for Gordon.

RITA: Oh, how in the world can you say that? I mean how could you think of it that way at the time?

JUNE: I didn’t think of it but that is what I was doing.

RITA: You didn’t think this would happen, with the three of us.

JUNE: I may have known it inside, without knowing what I knew. Or I may have wanted it inside.

But all this time I was having sex and not having it. The one important thing was staying a virgin. I would I go with these boys — you have to call them men, they were all ages from twenty-five to thirty-five. And I would do anything but go all the way. Anything but let them put it inside of me. That was the one thing I refused to do under any circumstances, and I never did do it.

GORDON: Didn’t you ever want to?

JUNE: No.

GORDON: You must have gotten excited—

JUNE: It wasn’t that kind of being excited. I would feel in two parts when I was with a boy, part of me acting and part of me sitting across the room watching, sort of not attached to what was happening. I was excited, but not the way I am now. It wasn’t complete.

RITA: You would have orgasms.

JUNE: Once in a while. But it was not the same, it was not complete.

And what I generally did, it wasn’t so much a case of my getting excited. I would get excited in my mind more than my body because of what it was that we did. I mean, they might pet me some, but mostly it was what I would do for them...

I don’t know exactly how to say this...

Well, before this time I really didn’t know much about sex. I simply didn’t know very much, I was ignorant. And one boy finally had to explain to me that it was different for a man, that you couldn’t just expect them to stop, that a man has to have release when he’s excited or it’s physically bad for him. Frustrating. I didn’t know but that this might just be a line—

GORDON: No, it’s the truth. But nine times out of ten a man will say it as much for a line as anything else.

JUNE: Well, I decided it must be true, but at the same time I said that this was something I wasn’t going to do, to go all the way. I made this very clear. I put it right on the line, that I wasn’t going to do this and that was all there was to it, that I wouldn’t do it. The boy I first had this all out with, he was married, so he couldn’t try to convince me by giving me a big thing about loving me and how he would marry me if anything happened. He couldn’t say that because we both knew better and knew that there was no love involved, that we were both of us there for the pleasure of it, and for the company.

GORDON: Did it bother you, that he was married?

JUNE: It never bothered me at all.

GORDON: That’s what you told me before, but it’s just hard to believe.

JUNE: I never counted, but I think there was a lot more married than not. Especially the ones I would see again and again, they were for the most part married. When they weren’t married either they got tired of me because of not being willing to go all the way, or I lost interest in them. Because I didn’t want anything that would lead to me getting married to somebody, I suppose. I don’t know as I thought of it that way at the time, except that I would look at one of these fellows and I would say, now, do I want to marry this particular boy? And the answer was always that I didn’t.

When they were married it was safe, see. They didn’t want to leave their wives and I didn’t want them to, so it was safe.

This man I was talking about, that was married... this was another reason I believed him about being frustrated and having to have a release. Because he was married.

Anyway, he came right back and said that there was something I could do without going all the way. Now this was something I honestly knew nothing about. It’s hard to believe how ignorant I was in this subject.

RITA: It certainly is.

JUNE: I thought anything I might do would just make it worse. But he showed me what to do. He opened his pants and showed me how to handle his penis in a certain way. I really didn’t know what I was doing — I mean I didn’t know how to go about it or anything, but I would pay attention to what excited him and what didn’t, and he got very excited, and I was sort of excited by his excitement, if that makes any sense, and then he had an orgasm. As a matter of fact he came all over my blouse. He offered to pay for having it cleaned but I told him not to be silly and I just took and washed it myself after I got home.

After that I wouldn’t see him too often, but when I did it would always be the same. We would drive to a good place to park and then he would undress me and play with me. Once I knew that I could trust him I would take off all my clothes because I knew he wouldn’t try to force me. He would touch me, my breasts and elsewhere, and then I would jerk him off, pardon the expression.

You know, I liked that part better than being touched. That other was more for his benefit than for mine because it excited him tremendously to touch me and finger me. I think it excited him especially that I was a virgin. He would keep talking about it, touching me and saying that no one had ever been inside me, as though this was something special. I let him do this and I won’t say I didn’t like it—

RITA: No one would believe you if you did.

JUNE: But no, the other part was what I really enjoyed. Making him have an orgasm. Getting him all excited and then giving him a climax.

We tried some other ways, too. Like one time he put himself between my breasts and moved back and forth that way until he had an orgasm. Or against my leg. But I didn’t enjoy this as much as just having him sit there while I did it for him with my hands. I guess he didn’t, either, because he just wanted to do it the one time and then didn’t want to again.

I was dating other boys, too, and I started doing the same with them as well. They didn’t even have to ask. I would go on and touch the front of their pants, and usually they would be hard by this time from the petting, and some of them would right away open their pants and others wouldn’t, so I would touch them some more and then open their pants and reach inside. I remember a boy said he really couldn’t figure me out, that I was so aggressive about going for his penis but that I still drew a line about having intercourse. “That’s the way I am,” I said, “and you may take me or leave me.”

Now there was this other man, he was married and quite a bit older than most of the ones I dated, and actually you could say he picked me up. He was from Cincinnati and I met him at a coffee shop and we went for a ride, and then back to the motel where he was staying at. Now this was the first time I was ever in a motel room with a man, or any other kind of a room, for that matter, so as soon as we were inside I out and told him that I wouldn’t go all the way, that I was virgin and fixed to stay that way. He said I must be either a liar or the oldest living virgin in the state of Ohio. I said I would do something else to make sure he was satisfied, if that was all right with him, but otherwise we should just forget the whole thing, because I refused to have intercourse.

He said that was all right with him and that I should stay there with him.

To make a long story short, I was handling his penis, and he said, “Honey, why don’t you give it a kiss?”

So I had never done this, but I thought, Why not? So I leaned over and gave it a little peck. I didn’t see what was such a big deal about that.

“I mean really kiss it, honey,” he said.

So I kissed it again a few times but that wasn’t what he meant, and I finally had to say, “Look, maybe I’m stupid, but I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean you should suck it,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”

So he laughed and grabbed hold of my hand and had me point my finger, and he sucked on my finger the way he wanted me to do on him. He showed me just how he wanted me to do it, by doing it on my finger.

Then he got the rest of his clothes off and laid out on his back and I did it for him. Now this was something I had honestly never heard of in all my life. I had heard expressions in school, “blow job” and “eat it,” but I never knew what it meant. I knew there was such a thing as fairies but I never guessed what it was they did with each other. I just had no idea. And I never knew anything about sucking a man’s penis. In school, the expression “eat it,” I thought it meant “eat shit.” A short way of saying it. And I just had no idea what “blow job” meant.

But I did it, and I just couldn’t believe how excited it got him. He acted as though it was the most exciting thing in the world. I couldn’t really say whether I enjoyed it or not because it was so new to me and I had to concentrate so much on what I was doing.

When I knew he was going to have an orgasm I took my mouth off him and he came, but not in my mouth. He really moaned a lot when he came.

I asked him afterward how he liked it and if I did it good, and he said I did, that I was very good at it, which made me proud for some reason, but he asked why I took my mouth away at the end. I said I didn’t know. I asked if you weren’t supposed to or what. He said it was much better to come in a girl’s mouth than not. I said I didn’t know about that. He said some girls would swallow it and that was the best of all, which didn’t make any particular sense to me, because why should it feel any different for a man if you were to swallow it or spit it out? I didn’t understand it, but I knew immediately that I would no more swallow it than I would let a man have intercourse with me. I didn’t know why but I knew that this was something I would never do. As far as letting him come in my mouth, I wasn’t too sure about this one way or another. This was something I was going to have to think about.

As it turned out I didn’t have to think about it for very long, because I saw this man again a few days later and we went to his room and again I sucked him off, and this time I let him come in my mouth without a second thought, and I was very surprised to discover that I liked it better this way. As a matter of fact I believe I had an orgasm. The kind of orgasm I was able to have at that time. Nothing like the sort of complete orgasm that I can have now, but at the time I didn’t know there was anything better. Like a radio before they discovered television, I suppose. I didn’t know there was anything else.

This particular man would drive all the way from Cincinnati just to see me, and to have me suck him. Eventually he told me he could do the same thing for me, and he ate me there. I got terribly excited but I didn’t like it at the time. It’s hard to explain. I don’t know what it was about it that I didn’t like. Nothing about thinking it was dirty. For some reason I never thought of oral sex as dirty. I don’t know why, I guess most people do at one time or another, but I don’t recollect that I ever felt that way.

But there was something about the excitement, I don’t know, that bothered me and kept the whole thing from being good. Maybe that he was reaching me and I didn’t want him to, and so I held back or tried holding back or what all, and it kept it from being good for me. So what happened was I told him that I didn’t like it, and he never tried to do it again. I think he just wanted to do it for my sake, and when I said I didn’t like it he never asked to do it again.

In a way, I suppose I wanted him to ask again, and if he had I guess I would have let him do it, if only to see if I got anything more out of it the second time or whether it would be the same again.

Now and then he would want me to swallow it, when he came, but I would never do this. “You’re rejecting me when you spit out my seed,” he said. That was the way he put it. “That’s the way I am, take me or leave me,” was what I would say, and he accepted that that was the way it was going to be if he wanted to keep on seeing me.

I also did the same thing with other boys. A lot of them couldn’t believe that a girl would want to do this. I guess at one point some of them started talking about me, and I was getting a reputation around town, but fortunately I realized this in time and put a stop to it. When boys I didn’t know asked for a date, and they had this look in their eye, I would refuse to go out with them. Or I would go out with them but not do a thing, not even let them kiss me, and that got rid of that rumor fast enough. This was another thing about men who were married. I didn’t have to worry about what they would say, because of course they were crazy to keep the whole thing a secret. So for the majority of the time there were four or five married men that I would see now and then, and occasionally a date with a single man that I wouldn’t do anything with to speak of, and that was about the extent of it for the greater part of the time between Gordon and Rita getting married and Pa’s passing away.

Now this was a period of between three and four years, and when I think about it all there seems to be is sex, and yet I would go into town two days a week at the most, and the rest of the time I was out here watching television or cooking or cleaning or taking care of the chickens or the garden or any of the things I would do around here. I think about that time and in my mind I was just one giant mouth sucking men constantly, pardon the expression, and of course it was nothing of the sort at all. Nothing of the sort. And the last couple of months after Pa had his first heart attack and before the second one, which was the one that killed him, I hardly ever saw a man. So it was maybe three years, and there weren’t that many boys involved or that many times.

After Pa died, and after Rita and Gordon moved back, I was never with another man until this day, and won’t ever be.

RITA: From the beginning, from as soon as we were married, I wanted to have a baby. Now at first we couldn’t afford to do this, with trying to save money so that Gordon could open his own store. It didn’t make sense to rush and have a baby right away. He said there would be plenty of time for that later, and I knew he was right, but even so it pained me to wait. I wanted to get pregnant first thing and never stopped wanting to, even though we took precautions.

GORDON: Of course there would be times like waking up in the middle of the night when we wouldn’t bother with the precautions, and whenever that happened I would think, well, that’s the sort of chance a person has to take, and if we’re meant to have a baby we’ll have it, and I wouldn’t worry much about it. We would use the rubbers when we could, but if something happened during one of those other times, well, a baby is something you can always afford to have, when you come right down to it, so we wouldn’t have gone and had a fit if we had found out that Rita was pregnant.

RITA: But I never was.

GORDON: To think of the money we wasted on those rubbers, and for no good reason at all.

RITA: After about a year we had managed to save quite a bit of money, and Gordon saw about buying a store right in Dayton, but that deal fell through, so he said we would just bide our time and buy a store in another year, when he knew we would have more than enough money saved, and that we could start a family in the meantime. And we tried. We would make love just about all the time, and month after month I would get the curse just like clockwork.

And this just went on and on. I got so that I couldn’t stand it, any of it. We would come down here for the weekend or just a Sunday and Pa would start riding us about hurrying up and having a grandson for him, and I had all I could do to keep from crying or shouting or I don’t know what. I just felt so bad about it that it was preying on my mind night and day. I wanted to go to a doctor but I was scared to go, and I wanted for Gordon to go but couldn’t even bring myself to ask him, and neither of us went for the longest time, and every month as sure as there were dates on the calendar I would get the curse again, and I was always fretful and miserable at that time of the month anyway—

GORDON: You still are.

RITA: Not the way I used to be.

GORDON: No.

RITA: And never as bad as I was then, because I had the disappointment on top of everything else. I didn’t know whether it was my fault or Gordon’s fault and I wanted to know but I didn’t want to know. I didn’t know whether it meant we could never have children or what. I wanted to know one way or the other but at the same time I was afraid to find out. Afraid of knowing.

JUNE: I would have found out one way or the other.

RITA: You say so, but how do you know what you would have done? You can never know something like that until it happens to you.

JUNE: Well, I know what I think I would have done.

RITA: It’s not the same. The things that would go through my mind. I was thinking that if we couldn’t have children it was the end of our marriage. And it was almost the end of our marriage anyway the way it ate at us all the time. We got so we didn’t talk about it at all. About having children. And Gordon was working late more often than not, and coming home exhausted, and he couldn’t have felt much like having sex relations, but if it was the right time of the month we would have them anyway, feel like it or not, and every month the curse, and God, I wonder now how we stayed together through all of it.

GORDON: I didn’t know what to think, whose fault it might be. I got so I would put the whole thing out of my mind entirely. It was more what it was doing to Rita that bothered me. As far as I was concerned, we could have adopted children or put off having them for awhile. I wanted a family, but I didn’t want it the same way Rita did. She had to be a mother or die in the attempt, it was the way she was.

But what it was doing to our marriage, that was impossible all around. We loved each other and were easy with each other all the time we knew each other, and now this thing was pushing us apart.

It was finally me who said we ought to go to a doctor. I wound up having to talk her into it. We both of us went, and they ran all these tests, and it turned out that there was no reason the doctors could discover why we shouldn’t be having children. We were both perfectly normal and healthy, except Rita being run down from all this worrying and all, but they gave her vitamin shots and pills for that and said she was fine, she should be having a child every year, and we should just relax and be patient.

RITA: Of course the last thing I was about to do was relax. Something about it made it all worse than ever. There was nothing wrong with us but just the same I was getting the curse every month no matter how much we had sex or what we did or anything. So we went home and tried twice as hard as ever, and it drove us both crazy.

GORDON: I guess you could say that we were both of us impossible to live with. And the thing of it was that by this time we couldn’t get any time away from each other, because I had bought the store and Rita quit her job and came to work for me so that we could make a go of it. This meant we were seeing each other for close to twenty-four hours a day. We would take our lunch separately, or I would go off now and then to attend an auction if there was a store in bankruptcy that I might pick up something below wholesale. Except for that we were with each other every minute of the day. Before this I at least had the hours I was working to be by myself and get our problems out of my mind. But now I didn’t.

The thing is, I had always dreamed of how perfect it would be, our own store, the two of us working together side by side. I had always thought that this would be about the most perfect way to go through life, two people working together for something they both wanted. And instead of heaven it was sheer hell and nothing else.

RITA: It was my fault more than Gordon’s, and I knew it at the time, but there was nothing I could do about it. I would start crying for no reason at all, right out of the blue I would start crying. I might be waiting on a customer and I would get a lump in my throat and feel the tears welling up in my eyes, and I would hurry to finish waiting on him and then go in the back of the store and start crying. And I knew this was just tearing Gordon apart but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it, not a thing in the world.

I didn’t know what would be the outcome of it all. There were times when I ached to leave him and the store and the apartment and every damn thing and go back home to Pa and June. But I never did this. I never even came close to doing it, but I would think about it.

Of course we got ultimately to the point where we had no sex life to speak of. There was just no way for us to stand up to that kind of pressure, day after day after day. We got so that weeks would go by without us making love at all. He would say he was tired or I would say I had a headache, and we could do this without having an argument because we would both of us be relieved that we didn’t have to go through with it again.

I knew it was just a question of time until Gordon had an affair, and I made up my mind in advance to look the other way and keep from knowing it. But I guess I knew about it from the beginning. He was acting different, and I knew the most likely reason for him to be acting different was that he was seeing another woman, and God knows he had every right in the world to be in the mood to see another woman, so I guessed that had to be it.

GORDON: In a way the last thing I wanted was an affair, but that seems as if it’s the way a man is put together. Throw something at him that he can’t handle and he’s going to feel that the answer is another woman, that if he can just have some other woman he can put himself back together again. I got to thinking about it more and more and I suppose I knew the same as Rita, meaning that it was just a question of time before it happened...

You know what I was doing?

I’m ashamed to say it. I was masturbating. You know, playing with myself.

Now I had stopped doing this years ago. I had never heard of a married man doing this, or even a grown man, for that matter. Since then I have learned different. I have read in certain books that men will go on masturbating all their lives from time to time whether they are married or not, but at the time I didn’t know this. I would do it and worry that I was losing my manhood, that I couldn’t father a child or make love to my wife but instead was masturbating like a boy, like some kind of perverted person.

Of course, now, this made me all the more anxious to have an affair with somebody. But I was with Rita all the time except for lunches and the occasional business that took me out of the store. So I barely had the opportunity to do anything about it.

There was this waitress in the place where I usually had lunch, and she and I had got in the habit of kidding around, the way people will do. A lot of her customers would do that with her, joking and all. She was a real skinny girl from I believe it was Tennessee, a real mountain accent, and we’d rag her about that.

And the men, it was generally all men who had lunch there, would hand her a certain amount of sex talk. Nothing out of hand but just the friendly sex joking you’ll get in a situation like that. And one time she and I were talking, and it came to me that she liked me and I had a chance with her. I don’t know what set it off but it just came to me out of the blue. So I asked her when she got off work, which was at seven that night, and I arranged to pick her up and we would go out for a few beers or something.

I gave Rita some story about an auction. She asked if I wanted her to come along and I pretended to think it over and said no, it was out toward Annandale and would probably run late, and why didn’t she just catch a movie or get herself some magazines.

Then I picked up this waitress and we went to a tavern where they had a country and western group, and we got fairly well beered up. We went back to her place. She had a room over a grocery store with religious pictures all over the walls. It felt funny, all of those pictures. I had brought a six-pack of beer along and we sat drinking and smoking and talking. We were laughing a lot. It was very easy being with her after how tense it had been between Rita and me. We finished a couple of beers and then I sat next to her on the bed and we started kissing and petting.

She was really skinny. Hardly any breasts at all, hardly anything on her but skin over the bones.

But it was exciting. The kissing and petting. Rita and I, of course we were at the point where we got all undressed and into bed first and then took it from there, and it was exciting to work up to it gradually for a change. But it wasn’t like a kid on a date because it was taken for granted that this girl and I were going to have sexual intercourse. That was absolutely taken for granted.

And we did.

I got to going over there a couple of times a week. I liked her a good deal but that was all there was to it. I never even thought about leaving Rita for her. It was as if she was just a convenience, someone for me to relax and joke with and then have sexual intercourse with. I was pretty certain she was seeing at least one other man at the time, and this didn’t bother me at all. If anything I was relieved to think it because I didn’t want her being dependent on me or falling in love with me.

When we were in bed together she would say she loved me, but that was just bed talk. I never told it to her, though. I wouldn’t let the word out. I suppose she would have liked it if I did, but I didn’t.

One night I went over there with a six-pack as usual and she had this gal there who was her sister just up from Tennessee for a visit. I thought, well, I won’t stay long and there won’t be any sexual intercourse this time.

Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

My waitress told me how her sister was very randy and hadn’t been with a man in a long time. She talked like this right in front of the other girl and asked did I want to do her a favor and have sex with her. And she stayed right in the room there with us while her sister and I had relations. She sat there next to the bed and petted at me while I was doing it to her sister, and then we all sat around naked and joked and drank beer, and one of them went down for more beer and came back up and got naked again, and I went to it with the waitress while the sister watched and joked and spilled beer on us, and we had what you might call an orgy.

I didn’t see her as much after that. I would still see her maybe once a week, but no more than that.

RITA: I knew you were seeing someone.

GORDON: I thought maybe you knew. I didn’t want to throw it in your face, but as close as you and I were, I figured you would have to know.

JWW: I asked him if he had made any connection between the waitress and her younger sister and his relationship to Rita and June. That experience with the two girls from Tennessee had been his only venture into sexual relations that were in any sense abnormal or unorthodox, and the parallel seemed clear — an older sister with whom he had had a relationship, and a younger one who joined in the game, with the older one playing a permissive quasi-parental role. Had he noted the similarity at the time? Or afterward?

GORDON: No, I don’t guess I ever thought of it that way. Not at the time it was going on. Now with Rita and June it is something completely different. It is a hundred percent different. It is a case of love on all sides, it is a relationship that grows and grows. It is real.

With that waitress and her sister, all it was was sex. That is absolutely all there was to it. It was sex, and it was dirty sex, and that was the part that made it exciting. I was cheating on Rita to begin with, and this took something dirty and made it dirtier by putting three in a bed instead of two, and that made it exciting but it also made it leave a bad taste when it was all over. I was sorry afterward that I went with them and didn’t want to go with them again, and if the kid sister hadn’t of gone back to Tennessee I probably wouldn’t have seen the waitress again at all.

But later on now, when things got started here with June, I guess I did think back on that waitress and her sister, I guess I did, but mostly to see for myself how different it was. That it could be clean one time and dirty another, depending on how the people felt about each other.

GORDON: When their Pa had his first heart attack, we took to getting down here as often as we could. He was supposed to take things easy and get his strength back, but he was an old man by this time and the first attack took a lot out of him. He looked terrible. His color was off and his face looked twenty years older after the attack than it did before it. So we would talk about how he’d be up and around soon, and he and I talked about taking a fishing trip in the fall, and I don’t know what that man believed but I knew for certain he would never go fishing again, that it wouldn’t be long before it was over for him. So we spent as much time down here as we could and hoped we might be with him when the end came, but as it turned out we were in Dayton then. I was just in the course of making a deal to sell the store. I had a lead on this place in town, the town I’m in right now, the same place, as a matter of fact, and we were going to buy it and take a house in town so Rita could be with her Pa as often as she liked. But we didn’t make it in time. The deal was still getting set up when we got a phone call from June saying it was over...

GORDON: I went through with the deal anyway. I got a better price than I’d figured and made a better deal on the place here in town than I had figured, so even from the point of view of business it was the sensible thing to do. But it was a case more of we had to get out of Dayton and back where we belonged.

RITA: And Junie was all alone in this big empty house. We couldn’t leave her like that. I suppose we could have had her move in with us in Dayton, but neither of us ever liked that place anyway. We didn’t make friends there, maybe for lack of trying. I’ve never been good at having a lot of friends. Just a few people that I like and see all the time, and I’d rather have it be family than friends.

GORDON: It was important for Rita to have June close at that time.

RITA: She was all I had left and I blamed myself for not being with Pa toward the end, and I wanted to be with Junie.

GORDON: So I bought the place in town, but instead of looking for a place to live there of course we just moved in here with June. It’s on toward fifteen miles to the store but that’s nothing to drive once or twice a day. And when you get there it’s not the same pressure you have with a store in a city. It’s quiet and you’ll know everybody, you’ll have the same people coming into the store all the time, and it’s a more relaxing way to do business.

Things were a little easier for the two of us, for Rita and me. Part of it came from moving, I guess, but that wasn’t all of it. Also I was running the store myself, which I could do without much trouble, just having Rita come down once or twice a week to help with cleaning and bookkeeping. That gave us some time away from each other, and we needed that. Also I had stopped seeing the waitress some months ago. And it helped having June around.

RITA: Just another person around to talk to made a difference. Before it was either we were together, the two of us, or else I was by myself. Another thing, for me, was that I knew about this waitress although I didn’t know who she was, and I also knew that now he had stopped seeing her, and it seemed to me that we had gotten through something, that we had come through it. Like in a sickness when a fever will come to a peak and then start to go down again, and you know you’ll be all right now. We had come through this and we were still together and it would be better for us.

GORDON: But it wasn’t good.

RITA: No, it wasn’t good.

GORDON: It was more a case of having a bad situation but of getting accustomed to it. You’ll see people who will stay married to each other for thirty or forty or fifty years, and they don’t love each other. Maybe they never loved each other. They don’t some of them even like each other. I know a case of a couple that is together and they haven’t spoken to one another for better than fifteen years.

RITA: Not even to say “Pass the salt.” They leave notes for each other when they have to. Fifteen years and not a word from one of them to the other.

GORDON: And yet they stay together. Now we were nothing like that. We stayed close and we stayed friendly but something had gone out of our lives. We were used to not having a baby and feeling tense about it, and the tension was there all the time like wallpaper in a boarding house, so that you got used to it and didn’t notice how ugly it was. We would have sex and it wasn’t bad and it wasn’t good, either. And we would talk, and it wasn’t as easy as it had been at first but better than it had been for a time. And the way I thought of it, I came to figure that maybe this was as much as you could expect. You know, the honeymoon being over, and that this was what happened when two people got used to each other and grew a little older. I knew I would rather be with Rita than anyone else in the world, and that I was living where I belonged now, and if anything I regretted that we ever went to Dayton in the first place, but of course we had to in order to get the capital to wind up back here.

JUNE: Of course I grieved for Pa. But the second attack was some months coming, and by the time he died it was a release, it was a mercy. He wasn’t himself toward the end and it was a mercy when he finally died.

But beyond mourning him I was just feeling so fine that Rita and Gordon were back again, that we would all live together again. I felt very happy about this, and it was as though something that had been going on in my life just went away and everything was right again. After they were home I would think about the men and boys I had gone with. Now I hadn’t been with any of them for some time. But I thought about them, and about what I had done, and it was as if all of a sudden I couldn’t believe that I had done these things.

I don’t mean that I felt bad about it. Guilty. I don’t think I felt guilty. I don’t think I felt I had done anything really wrong.

But I couldn’t believe it was me who had done it. All those things, using my mouth on them, just doing it with no love or feeling at all.

I couldn’t believe it was me. Somebody else wearing my clothes, wearing my body, but not me.

And then Pa was gone and they were back, Gordon and Rita both, and I wasn’t that person any more.

And I was so happy. It was like I was just seeing how lonely I had been now that I wasn’t lonely anymore. Now we were always sitting around and talking. With Rita during the day and with the both of them at night and sometimes late at night when she couldn’t sleep with Gordon. Rita would get tired early and Gordon and I would stay up drinking coffee and maybe watching television and maybe just talking, and I felt so close to him. I had always felt close to him but now I was really getting to know him and we would talk about everything.

GORDON: I found myself talking to June the way I couldn’t talk to Rita any more. I had been shutting Rita out, we had both been shutting each other out, and now with June it was the way it had been with Rita.

Around this time I guess we both started wanting each other.

JUNE: We always wanted each other, I think, but now we were starting to know it. But it was a confused kind of wanting. We were all so many different things to each other. Gordon was first of all Rita’s husband, but then he was a man I wanted to make love to, and he was, oh, it was like he was my father, taking Pa’s place, and he had come just at the time I lost Pa, and I got that mixed in. And Rita was my sister but she was also like my mother, she had been like a mother ever since Ma died, and now she was my best girlfriend, too, my only girlfriend, the only girl I really opened up and talked to in years, and she was Gordon’s wife, and it was all tangled up together in so many ways.

JWW: This observation of confusion of familial roles cropped up frequently in June’s conversation, and was echoed occasionally by Gordon and Rita as well.

RITA: You would have thought I might have noticed what was going on. To look back on it there was something in the air like right before an electric storm. That kind of feeling. But all I thought was how good it was that they got along so well, and that I had my whole family together, my sister and my husband.

GORDON: The current was in the air a long time before anything came of it.

RITA: Oh, I know it.

JUNE: I don’t know when it was that I knew just what I wanted with Gordon. I think when I learned how they were trying to have children and couldn’t. They both told me that. Not together. Rita told me one day, and then a few nights later Gordon brought it up, and I didn’t let on that Rita had already told me.

And I found myself thinking, well, I wish I could give him a child.

RITA: Looks as though you’re finally going to, doesn’t it?

GORDON: Or else she swallowed a watermelon seed.

JUNE: But I thought, oh, I don’t know. I had this idea that maybe Rita would agree to let me do it with Gordon once just to get pregnant, and then when I had the baby I would give it to her to bring up, and it would be their baby, it would be Gordon’s child and their baby to raise. It was just a crazy thought and it came to me that I must be crazy to think it.

GORDON: I had had the same thought, but I don’t think it came from a desire for a baby. I was beginning to want to go to bed with June and looking for a reason for it. I couldn’t just let myself think that wanting her was reason enough. I had to make up something else.

RITA: Oh, now, as far as that goes I had the thought before either of you. In Dayton, even, before there was anything in the air at all. I would get depressed and think, well, if I can’t bear him a child, well, every man needs to be a father, and maybe he could have it with June.

JUNE: But once I started with that thought, I knew what it was that I wanted, and that was that I wanted to have sexual intercourse with Gordon. And when I faced the thought I knew it was something I had wanted all my life. Then it came to me that I was very glad that I was a virgin. That I had never given myself to anyone, because now I knew that I had saved myself for a purpose. That I had all along been saving myself for Gordon so that he could be my lover.

The night it happened. It was this warm summer night with all the humidity in the air, and that afternoon Rita had gotten the curse. She was more depressed when it happened than I ever saw her before. She was really feeling terrible about it, all down in the mouth and miserable.

RITA: I thought I might be pregnant. Every month I would have the hope, and somehow this time I really thought I was, and then it turned out I wasn’t.

JUNE: Rita went upstairs early, and Gordon went up with her and came down a little while later with a face like an old hound dog. My heart just went out to him. I was so sad for him, and I felt so much for him.

We got to talking. I said how I knew Rita had the curse, and we talked about that, and about not being able to have children, and he asked me something about when was I going to get married and have a mess of kids. And I said I wanted to have kids maybe someday but I wasn’t looking to get married. He asked why not, and I said I couldn’t find a man I wanted, and he said maybe I wasn’t looking in the right places.

And then I just knew he felt the same way about me that I did about him. It wasn’t what he said or even the way he said it. Maybe it was the spaces in the conversation. I don’t know what it was but I looked at him and I knew.

I told him how I was a virgin. He didn’t even seem surprised. He just nodded as if everything was the way it should be.

And I talked a little about the men I had been with. I didn’t say exactly what I did with them. It was just that I had been with a lot of men and felt nothing for them and all, but that I was still a virgin. And he talked some about the waitress, and we went on that way, and I looked at him, the way he was crossing one leg over the other, and I saw the way the front of his pants was bulging, and I knew he was excited, that he was hard.

The rest of it just happened. I didn’t plan it or anything. I didn’t even think about it. It just happened and I found myself doing what I did.

He was sitting on this couch. I went over to him and sat next to him on the couch. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking off across the room.

I didn’t say anything and neither did he. I put my hand on the front of his pants and felt him. He just sat there and let me touch him. I kept touching him and he sat there and this wonderful feeling came over me. I loved him so much at that very moment.

I opened his pants and took them down and his underpants too. I looked at his face and his eyes were closed. I took his penis in both my hands and just held it. I could feel a pulse beat in it.

I got off the couch and got on my knees in front of him. I put my arms around his hips and took his penis right into my mouth. I took it in deep and just sucked on it and I felt so contented. I felt like a baby on the breast, I felt so completely contented and at peace with the world.

And I thought, I’m doing this for him, I’m doing this for him, this is all for him. But it wasn’t. It was for me, too, because I wanted to do it so much.

GORDON: I couldn’t believe what was happening. I would close my eyes and then I would have to open them to make sure this was really happening, and then I would close them again only to open them again later. I couldn’t believe this.

Rita had never done this thing.

RITA: You never asked for it.

GORDON: I know. I never thought, I never thought of it as something a wife would do. I had had it from a whore in the service and also the waitress did it two times but that was all, and I had enjoyed it all three times because there is no sensation like it in the world, but afterward I would feel strange about it because I guess I always thought of it as dirty. I had known boys in the service who had gotten this done for them by queers, fairies, and I guess I always thought of this as a fairy thing, and although I had only had it done by girls I guess I thought it was a fairyish thing for a man to enjoy it even from a woman.

But it wasn’t dirty when June did it. It was different, completely different. I never had the thought of it being dirty, not while she was doing it or ever afterward. I had some thoughts later about having relations with June, that this might be a wrong thing, a bad thing, but not that the act was wrong because of the way she did it. I never had the thought in that form.

RITA: I would have done this at any time if I had known it was something you wanted. But I never even thought of it.

GORDON: Neither did I. It was not something I thought of as something for us to do.

JUNE: Now this was something I had done often before, sucking a man. As I have said. But it was never like this before because I had never felt about anyone as I felt about Gordon.

My whole mouth was loving him. Loving him. My lips and my tongue.

When he shot in my mouth I had an orgasm. I wasn’t even conscious of any feeling between my legs until then but the minute he shot I had the strongest orgasm of my life. It just like to picked me up and tore me apart. I didn’t know that was what an orgasm could be. I had had little orgasms before, and I thought that was all there was, and then this came along and I hadn’t even expected to have any kind of an orgasm, and now this came along and it almost killed me. I swallowed every drop. Not even thinking about it but just wanting to do it without even knowing that this was something I wanted to do.

Swallowed every drop.

RITA: You’re sure giving enough of a description of it.

JUNE: It’s like it was happening now. I can remember it that clearly.

RITA: You’ll have everybody coming if you keep talking like that.

JUNE: I’m sorry.

RITA: Oh, I was just teasing. It’s nothing to be sorry for.

GORDON: In the morning I got up and went to the store and kept thinking on what had happened and trying to figure out what to do next. I first off decided that we would have to act like this had never happened, and it would never happen again. And then I would think that I loved June and wanted to have intercourse with her. And I knew I loved Rita too, and how could we keep all of this a secret from her?

I didn’t know what to do. I had never before in my life had a situation where I was so completely torn in different directions like this. I couldn’t go off with June because Rita was my wife and I loved her, June and I both loved her. I couldn’t move off with Rita, either, and I didn’t see how we could all go on living together without my having relations with June, because she and I both wanted each other so much. I didn’t see any solution whatsoever.

At dinner we acted as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Rita was still down with the curse, still depressed from it, but not so bad as the night before. She didn’t take to her bed right off but sat watching television with us until around midnight, and sitting there I just couldn’t get it all straight in my mind. I would look over at June and remember what had happened the night before and I would look at Rita and wonder if she had any idea and I just couldn’t put it all together so it would make sense to me.

I went upstairs with Rita when she said she was ready for bed. I wanted to stay up with June but I went up with Rita. Rita wanted me to hold her close, and I held her in my arms and petted her. It surprised me that I got hard immediately and had a great desire to have intercourse with her, but of course she had the curse. She noticed I was excited and said, “Well, it’s a shame to waste it, and why don’t you go down and make Junie happy with it?” Joking, of course, but she had never made this kind of a joke before.

When she went to sleep I fought with myself and decided I would have to go downstairs if only to talk things over with June. We had hardly talked at all after what happened the night before.

She was on the couch with the television off and the radio on, and she had a blanket over her. I thought, maybe she was sleeping and wondered why she hadn’t gone to her room. Then she looked over at me and took the blanket off herself, and she was naked and waiting for me.

We neither of us said a word. I went over to the couch and we had sexual intercourse. Of course it was her first time but it didn’t pain her too much and she was able to have a climax. When it was over I couldn’t stop holding her and touching her. It was like with Rita at the very beginning. I just kept holding her and touching her and telling her that I loved her.

Then we talked about Rita. We didn’t either of us know what to do. June said maybe she should go away, and I said maybe Rita and I should go away, and we knew that nobody could go away and that we couldn’t stop what we were doing, either, but no more could we keep on carrying on behind Rita’s back. It looked as though there was no way out.

JUNE: I was so filled with love for Gordon, but at the same time I loved my sister more than ever. And I felt closer to her than ever before because we shared this wonderful experience, we were both of us lovers of Gordon’s. And I thought, I’m taking something from her. But I didn’t want to take anything from her. I wanted to give love to her but instead I was taking something from her and I couldn’t do that, but no more could I give Gordon up.

GORDON: We decided we would have to tell Rita. We talked it out and I said I would have to be the one to tell her. We didn’t go so far as to discuss just what it was we would say. What I would say. There was just no way to talk about it because I had no idea at the time how I would say it or how I wanted it all to work out.

Then we had intercourse again that night. I didn’t know but that we might never have each other again after that. First she used her mouth on me for a little time, and then I did the same for her. She had mentioned about this man doing it to her and her liking it and not liking it both at once, and I had never done this to any girl nor to Rita either and was interested in seeing what it would be like and how she would like my doing it to her. It was better than either of us thought it would be, and then after doing it for awhile I got on top of her again and we had sexual intercourse, and then I went upstairs. Rita was asleep. I got into bed and didn’t think I would be able to sleep, but I dropped off right away.

RITA: When he told me it was a hammer hitting me in the middle of the chest, a sledge hammer in the middle of my chest, and then there was just this numbness, and the first thought I remember having was that this thing had been a long time coming and at least now it had finally happened and was out in the open.

And I said, “Well, you’ve got her now and I guess you won’t be wanting me anymore. And I can’t blame you because she is younger and prettier than I am and maybe she can give you the children that I couldn’t give you.”

And he said, “No, I don’t ever want to leave you, I love you and want you always.”

I said, “But then do you mean you want to stop with June?”

“No,” he said, “`because I love you both.”

I said, “Well, you can’t love both of us.”

He said, “But I do. You love me and you love your sister. She loves me and she loves you. Why can’t it be that I love you both and you both love me?”

“Well,” I said, “that sort of thing cannot be because people are not like that. A man has one wife and a woman has one husband and that is all. I do not see how a man can have two wives. Is that what you want, for us both to be your wives?”

And he said yes, that was what he wanted, and he thought that was what we both wanted, what all three of us wanted, and I said I could not understand it.

GORDON: Of course I had been thinking about this all day, and it was the only way I could see for us to work it out.

RITA: I told him if he loved me he wouldn’t need anyone else, and he said that wasn’t true, that loving Junie made him love me more. I said how could that be and he said that was how it was.

And I said, “What would you do, sleep with me three nights a week and with her three nights, and on the seventh day you would rest?” And he laughed, but I didn’t mean it to be funny. I said, “You cannot have us both and you will have to choose.” And he said for me to think about it, and I said that I didn’t see as there was anything to think about.

I said, “Well, what would you want us to do? Maybe you would want for us to get one big bed and we would all sleep in it, with her on one side and me on the other side and you in the middle.” And he said that would be the best way to do it. “Well, you must be crazy,” I said, “to think that I would go along with something like that, or Junie, either, for that matter. You must be stark crazy to think we would put up with that.”

He said, “What do you mean, ‘to put up with it’? Because it would not be taking anything away from you, or making you do anything you wouldn’t want to do, so how is it something to have to put up with?” I asked him if he thought I could just lie there in bed with them and watch him making love to my sister. “I don’t see why not,” he said. And then he would expect me to make love to him while she was there. “I think it would be a beautiful thing,” he said.

Well, I could not understand any of this.

GORDON: I had not worked every bit of this out in my mind beforehand. A lot of it, a great part of it just came to me as I was talking to Rita. It was a matter of being able to see things clearly that I had not so much as thought of before. All at once I was seeing that we are all taught certain things about sex and love — we aren’t even taught them so much as we grow up with them taken for granted all around us — and for the first time I was looking at these things and seeing that they did not make any sense to me. I was seeing these things clearly and plainly as never before. I was seeing them the way a person will all at once come to see God at a revival meeting. It was that way, it was what you would call a revelation. Now I have been to revivals in the past and I have never had this sort of an experience, although I have seen others have it and have known what it is like. And it was that sort of a feeling that came over me, that I had found something great and beautiful and important. It was that kind of a feeling and I wanted to take Rita in my arms and make her see how beautiful it was, how beautiful and right it could be.

RITA: I said, “You just want more sex, that is all you want. You want two women instead of one and that is all.” He said if that was all he wanted there were easier ways to get it, and he wound up telling me all about the waitress in Dayton, which I knew about but we had never brought it up and I didn’t know who she was, just that there was a woman. Well, he discussed this, although at first I didn’t want to hear about it, and as he was talking a strange thing began to happen to me and that is that I began to be calm and began to see things differently. I do not know how to explain this so that it will make sense. This had all been going against the grain of me, and now it was becoming so that there was no grain and it was going smooth.

After a time he went and brought June in, and we talked and cried and Junie and I kissed and held each other. I held her at arm’s length and looked at her and at Gordon and said that now I suppose they would want to make love. And he said yes, he would like very much to make love to June, to have intercourse with her. And I said maybe he would like me to leave them alone, and he said I could leave them alone if I that was what they wanted, but that he would like it if I stayed with them so that we could all be close.

I said, “Junie, is that what you want?” Thinking that she would not want me with them at such a time. But she said yes, she would like that, and that I should stay.

It was like something happening in a dream. It just was not real. I watched him with her and it was like he was doing it to me, I saw myself in her, and I could not understand this. I watched them have intercourse.

Later I said, “Well, now, this doesn’t seem fair, because I would like to do it, too, and I cannot do anything because of having the curse. Here I am being left out of the fun.”

And Junie said, “Why don’t you suck him then, because having the curse will not stop you from doing that.”

I said, “What do you mean?” Because I didn’t know what she was talking about. And she explained, and I asked her if she had done this, and she said yes, she had done it with several men and she had done it with Gordon. “Well, I do not know anything about it,” I said. “I would not even know what to do because I have never even heard of this and do not know anything about it.”

“Well, then, I will show you,” she said.

Which she did for a few moments, and then told me how to do it, and I did it to him until he had an orgasm. And I enjoyed this. I was surprised that I enjoyed it, but I did.

JWW: From that night onward, the three have lived as man and wives with no discernible difficulty. They sleep, as Rita had sarcastically suggested, all three together in a king-size bed, with Gordon in the middle and a sister on either side. There is, however, no schedule to determine whether Gordon will embrace Rita or June. Often he will make love to them both more or less simultaneously, having coitus with one while fondling the other.

The sisters have never engaged in homosexual relations per se, although the latent homosexual basis of any troilistic relationship would seem obvious enough. Their caresses are bestowed solely upon Gordon, and never upon each other. When I asked about this, all seemed to be genuinely shocked at the suggestion.

All three mentioned more than once how infinitely more exciting and satisfying their sex lives had become since the day of revelation. While this seems undeniably to be the case, I doubt that the addition of June to the nuptial couch is the sole explanation for this increase in sexual bliss. Gordon’s revelation, his discovery of the god Eros, led them all to an openness and enthusiasm for sex which had not heretofore existed for any of them. Gordon and Rita had been married for years without discovering anything more complex than cursory foreplay and coitus in three basic positions. The introduction of oral sex, which all three are apt to praise with true evangelistic zeal, no doubt had a good deal to do with all of this. So, too, did the fact that sex, which had long been more labor than love, and labor more aimed at attaining pregnancy than satisfaction, now became the central feature of this new relationship.

GORDON: As far as other people are concerned, what other people would think, I suspect they would want to lynch us or ride us out of town on a rail. I don’t have to tell you how narrow people are about this sort of thing. The average person thinks anyone who lives different from him is bad and ought to go to Hell. I find myself having a lot more of an open mind toward other people than I used to. A boy that wears his hair long or has a beard... you don’t see many around here but there’s a few of them everywhere, and this used to bother me. It got under my skin just because it was different. Or in Dayton I might see white and black together. A white girl with a black boy. Now I have to say that this absolutely turned my stomach. I could not stand to see it. But if you think about it, why should this be so? Why should any person care what other people do if it is what they want to do and hurts nobody? So I can see this now, whereas before I couldn’t see it for the world. A boy wants to let his hair grow, he doesn’t want to shave, that’s his business. A white girl wants to go with a black boy, wants to sleep with him, wants to marry him, and he wants her, fine. They’ll have themselves a hell of a time in this world, but if that’s what they want, fine, God bless them.

JUNE: If they knew about us, we would have to move, that’s all.

RITA: Yes, we would have to leave. But the thing is that when you live out in the country you do not have other people around all the time and people do not know about you. There is no cause for anybody to know about us, how we live. It is only a question of being easy about it in our own minds.

I was not easy about it all of the time at first. The thing that made me easy about it is when lo and behold I didn’t get the curse one month, and didn’t even realize at the time that I hadn’t gotten it, because for some reason I had stopped even thinking about it, about having babies or anything of the sort, and lo and behold I was pregnant!

Now all that I can call this is a sign from God. I do not go to church or think particularly much about God and perhaps should not be free with His name, but then you could call it a sign from Nature. Because it had crossed my mind that the three of us living together might be unnatural; in fact I had used that word myself when talking of it. But after living this way the most truly natural thing of all happened, with me becoming pregnant, and that had to be a sign.

And now with Junie having a baby, and we are so happy about that, that we are both having Gordon’s children, well, it may be a question as to how to keep people from knowing. There could be a problem to this. We could let it be known that June was going with some married man from Dayton or Cincinnati who fathered the child, but we would want the child to know that Gordon is the father. We might move right after the baby is born to some other area and have the story that Junie is a widow. Or we might just stay here and let people make their own guesses and tell the children the truth when they know enough to understand.

But one way or another I know it will work out all right.

Jerry & Peggy & Kay

JWW: Jerry and Peggy Klein and Kay Jordan live in an architect-designed ranch house on a hillside in northwestern New Jersey, not far from the New York and Pennsylvania borders. None of them is a native of the area. Jerry was born in New York, Peggy in Connecticut, Kay in a suburb of Chicago.

Jerry, thirty-one, is a commercial artist. His work consists almost exclusively of paperback and magazine covers, primarily in the field of science fiction, where he has achieved some prominence. He is medium in height and build, with shaggy lank brown hair and a Mexican bandit moustache. There is occasionally a theatrical flair to his speech. He is extremely articulate, but tends to use the word “fucking” as more confined souls use commas. While his income is above average, a substantial inheritance of Peggy’s obviates the necessity of living within it. Thus the architect-designed house, the spectacular view, the frequent vacations for the three of them, and the option of undertaking only such artistic assignments as Jerry finds appealing.

Peggy and Kay are both twenty-eight, and less than two months apart in age. (My notes do not seem to indicate which one is older, nor does it seem to much matter.) Peggy is a lithe blonde, an avid gardener, a lover of animals. Her face is very expressive, changing considerably with her moods. Kay is quite bookish and less talkative. She is auburn-haired and possessed of a full-blown figure.

Jerry and Peggy make an extremely attractive and charming couple.

So do Jerry and Kay.

So do Peggy and Kay.

KAY: When you write this up, I hope you won’t make me look like the third wheel. The interloper. After all, I knew Peggy before Jerry did.

JERRY: And knew her well.

PEGGY: Biblically, one might say.

KAY: One, indeed, might.

PEGGY: You needn’t be smug about it. If memory serves—

JERRY: It also stands and waits.

PEGGY: —I was the one who seduced you.

KAY: You were the experienced one. I was young and innocent and wet behind the ears.

JERRY: Among other places.

PEGGY: I wasn’t all that experienced.

KAY: I wasn’t all that innocent. Or all that hard to seduce. I’m a notoriously easy lay.

JERRY: That’s why you’re so popular around here.

KAY: I knew there was a reason. And here I thought it was my personality.

JERRY: You have a notoriously easy personality.

KAY: You say the nicest things.

PEGGY: I’m enjoying this too, but John—

JWW: So am I, actually.

PEGGY: —John wants to write this up, God knows why, unless he’s just a lech or Allen Funt in disguise or—

JWW: No, this is for real.

PEGGY: So John wants to write this up, and here we are impressing him with our wit, which may or may not be impressive, but it won’t make a book.

JWW: A chapter in a book, actually.

JERRY: Just a fucking chapter?

KAY: We’re not worth a whole book?

JWW: You’re probably worth a trilogy, but the plan is for three or possibly four case histories on the one theme.

JERRY: Oh, the others are in the same bag? Triangle sets?

JWW: Uh-huh.

PEGGY: So we’re a third of a book or a quarter of a book or whatever. In any case, wouldn’t it be simpler if one of us talked and the other two cooled it for the time being, so that we can let a story develop instead of playing Three Characters in Search of a Bed?

KAY: So talk, lovey.

PEGGY: Who, me?

JERRY: Oh, Christ—

JWW: Obviously, these three particular individuals were not so constituted as to take turns delivering lengthy speeches. The cross-talk never stopped, nor did I see any reason to try to put a lid on it; I had an abundant supply of tape reels and more time than I knew what to do with. And I cannot recall an interview I enjoyed more. My editing has consisted largely of leaving the greater portion of the cross-talk on the cutting room floor. The result might have been more entertaining had everything been left precisely as it was, but space limitations ruled this out, for better or for worse.

PEGGY: Kay and I first got to know each other during our freshman year at college. At the time we were both majoring in English, although I later changed my major twice, first to psychology and then to biology, and she changed to history and then back to English again. We had a few classes together and got to know each other fairly well, although we were not enormously close. I had been planning to room the following year with another girl, but near the end of the spring she decided to transfer out, and I happened to mention to Kay that I didn’t have a roommate and neither did she, so we decided to room together.

KAY: And from such a small beginning bloomed love.

PEGGY: As far as sex was concerned, I had had a certain amount of experience. I had gone to a boarding prep school, and while it’s certainly possible to do this without having a sensitive homosexual experience, you wouldn’t really feel as though you had gotten the full benefit of such a costly education if you passed it up. I had had relations with four girls during prep school. Not big passionate love affairs, although we generally kept up a pretense of being in love with each other. We said the words, you know. And I’m sure a lot of the more neurotic girls took it very seriously, but I never did and I don’t think any of my partners did. I didn’t consider myself a lesbian, for example. Looking back on it, I think I had a marvelously healthy attitude. I decided that sleeping with another girl was more fun than sleeping alone and playing with another girl was more fun than playing with oneself.

KAY: And eating another girl was more fun than eating yourself, and with less wear and tear on the backbone.

PEGGY: The whole thing in prep school could have been a lot more traumatic if I hadn’t managed to get myself laid somewhere along the line. I think if my whole frame of reference had been affairs with other girls, it would have bothered me more. But as it happened I lost my virginity at fifteen, which was almost a full year before I put a finger into any vagina other than my own, and I made it with a couple of other boys while I was at that school.

I was the only girl from my class at the college I went to, so there was nothing connecting me to the past. Of course the place was crawling with dykes but I didn’t know any of them and didn’t feel in a mood to seek them out. As a matter of fact I was in a fairly withdrawn stage during my freshman year, very determined to do well academically and not too anxious to have sex with anybody, male or female. I had had a pregnancy scare that I was a long time recovering from, and I didn’t even feel like dating or even developing a close friendship, let alone like balling anybody.

Things might have been different if someone had felt strongly enough to make a pass at me, but nobody did. The girl they had me rooming with was this maniacal Christer from one of those states you fly over. Nebraska, I think it was. She kept falling down and praying all the time. No exaggeration. We would be studying and all of a sudden she would drop the books and flop on her hands and knees and start praying out loud. I really didn’t know how to handle this. I got very abusive and would tell her to fuck off and shove her Bible up her ass. Ladylike things like that.

And she used to fingerfuck herself every damn night. We would both pretend I didn’t know what she was doing, and toward the end of the year I got particularly bitchy. I would wait until I knew she was about three digits away from orgasm and then I would start talking to her and throw her off stride.

I always knew when she came, because then she would start in again with the praying.

Surprising as it may seem, I didn’t try to get into her pants. Oh, she also had pimples, and she used one of those deodorants that smells worse than body odor. My God, I wonder where she is now. That poor girl. And I was so cruel to her.

I had a summer romance before my sophomore year. I went out to the Cape and wound up screwing a pre-law student from Northeastern. His main attraction was that he was there, and mine was that I would put out. It wasn’t sensational.

KAY: I, on the other hand, went through four years of public school and emerged intact. I would pet but I wouldn’t put out. Do you remember those articles. Do you have to pet to be popular? God, that dates me. Imagine an article like that today! For that matter, imagine a girl who doesn’t get laid in high school. You’ve come a long way, baby—

The answer to the question was yes, you had to pet to be popular, and I petted, and I was popular enough, but I didn’t put out. This wasn’t rare in my group. There were a couple of girls who did put out, but not too many. This was in my particular group, not in the whole school, where the percentage of virgins must have been much lower. But we were a very middle-class bunch. We might not be saving it for our husbands, but we were certainly saving it for our True Loves, and that meant wait until you’re in college and make sure he gives you his fraternity pin.

So I didn’t go to a school where there were boys, let alone fraternity pins. But I had relations with seven boys during my freshman year.

PEGGY: Eight.

KAY: No, it was seven, wasn’t it? Maybe it was eight. Why the hell should you remember if I don’t?

JERRY: Because she loves you, darling.

KAY: Sweet. The point is that once I started I didn’t know how to stop. I really was a slut. The classic tramp pattern. I felt very out of it socially. My group in high school was very snobby, the cream of the social order there, and all of a sudden I was with all of these private school people and I was snob enough to care about it at the time. I also decided I was pretty ignorant and mousy compared to all these polished preppie cunts. Typical low-estimate-of-self shit. Typical reaction formation. So of course I fucked around, and of course I didn’t enjoy it much, and this convinced me I was a lousy lay, which I very likely was.

JERRY: How you’ve changed!

KAY: And I got knocked up. Inevitably I got knocked up. And had an abortion, and at least I had the sense to do that right. No knitting needles routine. A real live doctor in a clean office, a quick scrape and no postoperative complications, thank God. Is it proper to thank God for a successful abortion? I don’t see why not.

The abortion put me off sex. I hit the old books just in time to save myself from flunking out. I spent the summer at home and dated the same crowd of boys I had dated during high school. Most of them had gone to schools like Michigan and Northwestern and pledged fraternities.

I laid a couple of them. Two of them. One of them decided he was in love with me and tried to give me his pin. I told him I wasn’t that kind of a girl.

When I went back to school and Peggy and I started rooming together, neither of us were particularly active socially. I had liked her well enough all along, but now we began to get really close. We talked quite a bit about men. Told each other what we had done sexually. Heterosexually, that is. She never said anything about fun and games at prep school.

Nor did it occur to me to ask, and I had nothing to report in that area myself. I was a complete innocent on the subject. If I ever had any subliminal urgings in that direction they were too subliminal ever to let me know about them. I suppose there were girls in my high school who had crushes on the gym teacher. That’s the usual pattern, isn’t it? And I suppose the gym teacher must have been a dyke. I suppose all lady gym teachers are dykes, whether they know it or not.

So here we were, the brainless tramp from the Midwest and the sexy two-way preppie, rooming together and spending more and more of our time with just each other for company, and discussing sex all the time, and telling each other how men were really a drag. And admiring each other’s bodies — I wished I were thin and long and lean and all like Miss Sophisticate here, and she had always wished she was like me, with a pair of tits that could qualify her as a stand-in for Elsie the Cow.

I think if Peggy had been as innocent in these matters as I was, we still would have wound up in bed together, because all the conditions were certainly right for it. All systems go, you know. But to make things easier she had been down this street before, and she did me the supreme favor of turning me out.

PEGGY: Actually I had a pretty hard time for a while that Kay didn’t know about. This big moral conflict thing. Like should I or should I not seduce my roomie? I wanted to a whole long time before I got around to doing anything about it. Kay was the first girl at college that I had felt this way about. The girl I had originally planned to room with that year, we were close, but in a completely sexless way. I would now and then see girls in a class or walking across campus and would say to myself that So-and-so would probably be fun to ball, but with no idea at all of doing anything about this. Pure window shopping and nothing but.

Kay and I became extremely close, and at this time neither of us was at all close with anyone else. And I knew what she was going through, what a screwed-up sex life she had had during the past year, all the conflicts that had been messing her up. We would talk about all of these things. In addition I found her enormously attractive physically, which is something you shouldn’t find terribly hard to understand.

JERRY: Hear, hear!

PEGGY: I wasn’t doing anything with boys at the time. No interest. So all my impulses were directed toward Kay. I wanted more than anything to make love to her, but I had to keep cool about the whole thing because the last thing I wanted to do was ruin the really beautiful relationship we had going.

KAY: I was just thinking. Suppose you never did make that pass.

PEGGY: Oh, it had to happen sooner or later.

KAY: Look what we might have missed.

PEGGY: I don’t even want to think about it.

The night it happened, Kay went out on a date with some yoyo from Williams. She had never met him but someone fixed her up and she wanted to turn the date down but decided the hell with it, she would go. I studied for a while and then just moped around the room wishing she hadn’t gone. I had a couple of drinks and put bluesy stuff on the record player and sat around feeling deliciously sorry for myself.

When Kay came back she was in tears. Literally. She was pretty much hysterical. Her clothes were a mess and her face was all runny with tears. She opened her coat and said, “Look at this, the son of a bitch came all over my dress!”

KAY: He really was a son of a bitch. He wrestled with me for half an hour trying to screw me, and I wouldn’t, and he slapped me and tried to stick it in my mouth, and I wouldn’t let him, and then he just pushed me down on the seat and got on top of me and jerked himself off all over the front of my dress, which I was wearing for, I think, the second time. “You can have it cleaned,” he said. “Listen, I’ll pay to have it cleaned. And it wouldn’t have gotten like that if you were just sensible in the first place. You’re not a virgin, for Christ’s sake, so why make a fuss about it? Why not just put out?”

He was a real charmer. I said something devastatingly witty like “Go fuck yourself” and went back to the room, crying every step of the way.

It was the way he treated me. It was just so disgusting, so cheap. I felt like a wastebasket.

PEGGY: I made her have a couple of drinks, and got her clothes off. We threw the dress out. She didn’t want to have it cleaned, didn’t want to look at it again. She went down the hall and showered until her skin was raw and then came back wrapped up in a terrycloth robe. A yellow robe. I can picture her in it so vividly even now, and I made us both fresh drinks, and we sat on her bed together and I knew tonight was the night. I just loved her so much at that moment and wanted to do something good for her.

KAY: She suddenly leaned over and kissed me. On the mouth. I just sat there feeling stupid. Not reacting at all. Then she put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me again. And I didn’t think. I just responded. I kissed back, and my mouth opened, and she put her tongue in my mouth—

JERRY: Oh, you sly devil, you.

KAY: —and something happened. I just felt totally warm and passionate, but passionate without being at all tense. I knew something weird was happening but I just locked out thoughts and concentrated completely on what was happening. I stayed with the present and didn’t get involved with the future at all. I wanted it to go on forever, the kissing. Her arms around me and our breasts pressing together and our tongues working. I just wanted it to go on forever.

We kissed for a very long time. It was such an unusual experience.

Then we came up for air, and I reached for my cigarettes and lit one, and Peggy took a drag on it and gave it back to me, and I took a drag and put it down on the edge of the dresser and looked at her, and our eyes locked. I couldn’t speak right away. Then I said, “Well, what happens now?”

PEGGY: I said, “Now I’m going to make love to you.”

KAY: I said, “I don’t know anything about this.”

She said, “Don’t worry, just let me love you, that’s all.”

I said, “Do you know what you’re doing?” She said she did. I wanted to know if she had ever done this before. She said that she had. I was full of questions but she kissed me again and told me not to talk, and then she made love to me. She took off my robe and I lay down on the bed and she stretched out alongside me and kissed me. While we kissed she took off her own clothes and when she was naked and our bodies touched I just put my arms around her and held her close and felt contented in a wholly unfamiliar way. I had never had any feeling remotely like this. I was very frightened in a part of my mind, but I somehow knew that everything was going to be good.

She kissed me and touched me for a very long time. It was fantastically exciting. I had never been aware of my body in this way before. Finally she curled up with her mouth on my breast and used her finger to bring me to orgasm. It was a sensational orgasm. It left me feeling utterly at peace. I had never felt like this after screwing.

Also, whenever I was with a boy, as soon as the act was over I really couldn’t stand the sight of him. Whether I liked him or not, whether I planned to see him again or not, I just wanted to get away from him for the time being and be by myself. And I invariably had a compulsive desire to take a shower. Not a hard compulsion to interpret, is it? I always felt very dirty, and I had none of this feeling with Peggy, and no desire to be alone, away from her. I wanted her to be right there with me.

I was filled with questions, overflowing with them. I had to know absolutely everything. When had she done this before and who with and what did it mean and were we both lesbians and what other things did lesbians do with each other? I must have been a dreadful bore.

PEGGY: You were a delight. I couldn’t get over how sweet you were, and how beautiful it had been. I felt such complete love for you.

KAY: I probably would never have run out of questions. But eventually Peggy grabbed me and kissed me again and I decided to shut up. I put my hands on her body and began to relate to her flesh in a sexual way. To regard her as desirable and to want to caress her.

This, too, was new. I had never desired boys as such, had never found them physically desirable. I had wanted to screw them for one reason or another but their bodies were never love-objects for me.

That first night, that was really incredible. Utterly incredible. We didn’t get any sleep at all. I really had no idea what I was supposed to do in bed. I had read novels with lesbian scenes in them but they were mostly rather vague as to who did what and with which and to whom. I more or less understood that lesbians went down on each other and rubbed their boxes together and used dildos on each other—

PEGGY: Ugh.

KAY: —but I was still very vague about it.

We fooled around at the beginning, and touched each other, and kissed each other’s breasts, and then Peggy went down on me. Some boys had done this briefly as a prelude to intercourse. The word seemed to be that if you did this to a girl she would go out of her mind with delight and then you could throw her a fuck with no trouble at all. I had never gone out of my mind with pleasure because I guess they didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and didn’t much enjoy it, and all it ever amounted to was a lick and a promise, so to speak.

When Peggy went down on me I thought I was going to die of pleasure. No joke. It was as different from what I had experienced as, I don’t know, night and day? Not a particularly original way to put it, but make up your own image, it hardly matters. It was just fantastic.

The whole night was fantastic. We did everything to each other, everything we could think of. Some things Peggy had never done with her bosom buddies at school. We made up things. We were in this great rush to do everything there was, to play with this brand-new toy to the fullest before somebody came and took it away from us.

PEGGY: It was really a very wonderful relationship that we had. I think one very important thing was that it didn’t start out with sex. We were very close friends long before we became lovers, and I think this made a considerable difference. If it had been a sexual thing from the beginning I think there would have been a great deal of guilt involved on both sides. And the whole thing would have been cheapened.

KAY: Of course there was a certain amount of guilt anyway.

PEGGY: Of course. Kay and I are both basically moody people. Introspective. She particularly tends to brood. There were times when one or both of us would worry that we were into something abnormal, and that what we were doing was wrong for one reason or another.

KAY: But it felt so good—

PEGGY: It was good that we had both had experience with boys beforehand. This kept us from being too quick to pin the lesbian label on ourselves. We knew we could make it with boys, and somewhere along the way we realized that it wasn’t heterosexuality per se which was a bore, but that the whole dating system conspired to make our relationships with boys basically superficial. I gather that kids nowadays are a lot cooler about this sort of scene, but when we were in college dating was very much an exploitive process. On both sides of the line. The girl wanted to make sure that she was properly treasured before she opened her legs. She would try to hold out for an engagement ring or a fraternity pin or a declaration of love or a batch of dates with the same boy before giving in to him, and the boy would try to get as much as he could for as little as he could.

KAY: This wasn’t universal. There were certainly a lot of kids who had real relationships, but neither of us were that sensational at relating to boys at the time. I was especially unequipped for it, so the scenes we were in were always bad ones. The kids today seem to be a lot more honest. I don’t know if this is true at the cow colleges as well, but among the hipper kids it’s certainly the case. They’re able to admit honestly that they screw each other because they want to. The boys aren’t as obsessed with the idea of scoring and the girls are freer of the kind of hang-ups that most of our generation went through.

PEGGY: I don’t know how clearly we saw all this at the time, but I do know that we grew to look on our love affair as something temporary. There were times when we would talk about being together forever, but most of the time we both knew very well that we were going to outgrow this, that we would grow apart, and that we would ultimately graduate and get married and live essentially traditional middle-class lives. We didn’t intend to get caught in the same binds our parents did, we wanted more out of life than the fucking Marjorie Morningstar trip, but we knew we also wanted the bit of a husband and children and stability and security.

As a matter of fact, our relationship itself wasn’t exactly a love affair.

KAY: We did love each other.

PEGGY: Of course. But we weren’t particularly possessive or jealous or anything.

KAY: I would have been jealous if you were with another girl. Insanely jealous.

PEGGY: I never even considered going with another girl.

KAY: I did, at the very first.

PEGGY: I wasn’t enough for you?

KAY: At the onset, I had this big urge to be a lesbian to the hilt.

JERRY: I love the choice of words.

KAY: What I mean is that this whole thing was very new to me, and I would think about not only making it with Peggy but with other girls as well. I would see girls on the campus and wonder if I would enjoy kissing them or eating them. I was thinking in those terms, but I never really planned to do anything about it, and before very long I realized that this was something between the two of us and that the last thing I wanted was to get anything going with anybody else. But I would have been jealous and hurt if you went with another girl, and I think you would have been the same way if I did.

PEGGY: No question about it.

KAY: And yet there was no jealousy on either side if one of us went out with a boy.

PEGGY: Because that was a different thing entirely. We did date boys, and we occasionally got laid, and oddly enough we found ourselves enjoying this more now than we had before we started sleeping together. When I would be with a boy I couldn’t wait to get home afterward and tell Kay everything about it, what he was like and what we did — all the gory details, absolutely everything. And then we would generally make love to each other.

KAY: If any of those boys had known—

PEGGY: They would have utterly flipped.

KAY: Absolutely.

PEGGY: You know, I think that was part of the fun. Part of the excitement. The whole secret nature of our affair, the feeling that we were putting something over on the world and on the boys we dated. Not only the ones we made it with but especially the ones we held out on. I remember taking a particularly sadistic delight in an evening I spent with this one clod, a blind date, and I let him do his damnedest to seduce me but wouldn’t let him get there. For some reason I disliked him intensely and used that as an excuse to do a total cockteasing number. I drove him up the wall. I wouldn’t even give him a hand job or a dry fuck or anything.

JERRY: I only married her because she’s such a class broad. You notice how every word out of her mouth smacks of an aristocratic heritage.

PEGGY: I just kept getting him hot and letting him down, I was really vicious, and then I made him drive me back to the dorm, and I rushed in so excited that Kay didn’t know what to make of me. And we made wild love, and I told her all about what had happened, and we made love some more.

JERRY: What an absolute ball-buster you must have been. I’m glad I didn’t know you then.

PEGGY: It’s just as well you didn’t. But that was by no means typical. As a matter of fact, if anything I became a lot better at relating to males during that time.

KAY: So did I. For one thing, the pressure was off. Also I learned to enjoy myself sexually through Peggy, and I developed a sense of what my body was and how it worked, and this knowledge stayed with me when I was with a boy. Masturbation is supposed to be very good training for girls, I’ve read. Girls who play with themselves are statistically more likely to be able to have good orgasms when they screw.

PEGGY: That could also be because the girls who masturbate are basically freer and sexier to begin with.

KAY: But it’s also that they learn how to let their bodies groove, and they stay with the same pattern later on.

PEGGY: Then that Christer from Nebraska must be the world’s greatest lay by now, because by the end of the year I knew her she was just about running out of fingers. She must be utter dynamite by now.

KAY: I’m not sure it applies in every case.

PEGGY: I hope not. I can’t imagine her being any good that way.

KAY: The point is that I think our relationship worked the same way. That it served as preparation for other things. Not that it wasn’t satisfying as an end in itself, but you know what I mean.

And I think too that one of the reasons we were able to continue having a steady sexual relationship for over two full years without getting big guilt hang-ups was that instead of finding ourselves cut off from men we found ourselves getting along much better with them.

Ultimately, shortly after the start of our senior years, I started going with a guy in a serious way. And that was the first time I began to feel any real conflict.

PEGGY: She came home one night and seemed far more reserved than I had seen her in a long time. Of course Kay and I were practically an old married couple by now and we didn’t have sex every night, but it had been awhile, and I gave her a kiss, and she went slightly tense in my arms. I asked her what was the matter and she said nothing was, and we made love, and something was wrong and I asked her about it again.

She said, “Well, I think maybe I’m in love with Ken. And all of a sudden I feel a little funny about us.”

I said, “Do you mean you don’t want us to make love any more?”

She said she didn’t know, she wanted to think about it. Then a day later she said maybe we shouldn’t make love any more, and she offered to move out and room elsewhere. I told her not to be ridiculous—

KAY: Well, I thought you might go crazy, seeing my fair white body and not being able to possess it.

PEGGY: —and that I would always be her best friend, in bed or out of it, and that there was no reason for her to move. So she kept on going with the guy, and married him after graduation.

KAY: Peggy was my maid of honor.

PEGGY: Not quite a maid, I’m afraid, and of bloody little honor. She got married and she and Ken moved to — San Francisco?

KAY: Berkeley.

PEGGY: Berkeley. And I was happy for her, and only missed her on alternate Thursdays. Not quite. I would miss her a great deal when things were going poorly for me, which was more often than I would have liked. But all in all I got along without you very well, baby.

KAY: And I without you.

PEGGY: To be honest, I think I was very glad you were on the other side of the continent. And I guess you must have felt about the same.

KAY: Yes.

PEGGY: I was a little afraid that if we were geographically close, if we saw quite a bit of each other, something might happen that we wouldn’t want to happen.

Let me see now. After graduation I went to New York and had a crap job with a social welfare agency, which I kept longer than I should have out of a conviction that I was Doing Good Work to Benefit Mankind. I was very alone. I didn’t know many people and didn’t care awfully for the ones I knew. I had had a particularly tacky affair with a girl at school a month or so after Kay and I wrote finis to our little fling. This girl was a sophomore and very much committed to homosexuality. And a trifle crazy, I think. She was into the dyke scene heavily and was a virgin heterosexually and couldn’t understand how I could go with men as well, she thought I was horribly immoral in that respect. I slept with her three times and didn’t enjoy it at all. I just hated the whole thing. I had had this highly emotional relationship with Kay and felt nothing at all for this poor girl, and without the love part it was really a big nothing. I had trouble breaking it off with her. She had managed to convince herself that she was in love with me, and the more I tried to get loose the deeper in love she got. She was some sort of emotional loser, she could only really love someone who did not love her. Hardly uncommon, but this was the first time I had ever been involved in this kind of scene and I couldn’t get out of it fast enough.

In New York I eventually decided to find out whether or not I wanted homosexual relations, and I went to a gay bar on the West Side and got picked up. Just one time. It wasn’t any good and I told myself I was glad because it meant I had outgrown all of this and I didn’t have to be afraid to meet a guy and marry him, because the fling with Kay was a part of the past and I was beyond all that now.

KAY: I believed that myself. I was sure I could see you and nothing would happen, and that I would never be drawn to another girl.

PEGGY: I had been in New York for about a year when I met Jerry. I had had a couple affairs, nothing very serious, and I had spent more time completely alone than I had ever spent in my life. I was unemployed when we met, and happy about that because I really hated my job toward the end. My mother had died recently and I had an independent income—

JERRY: Why do you think I married you?

PEGGY: —and I was ready to fall in love with someone about then, and when I met Jerry it was magic. Absolute magic, something fresh out of a fucking Doris Day movie. We were so perfect together on every level that I was terrified to go to bed with him.

JERRY: Thanks.

PEGGY: Terrified that it would be lousy, and it was very important to me that it not be lousy, because I knew this could be the one, the start of something big, all those good things. So I wound up playing harder to get than I usually would do if I was attracted to a man, but I wasn’t all that hard to get, and he got me... well, I think we stayed in bed for an entire weekend. And around the end of the weekend he said, “You know, we’ll have to get married sooner or later, because this is too good to ever hang up on.” And two weeks later we got married.

JERRY: And lived happily ever after.

PEGGY: More or less.

JERRY: I met Kay for the first time not too long after Peggy and I were married. We were living in the city at the time and she and her husband were in town for a week. I liked her right away. I could have done without him, but I liked Kay. Bright, hip, attractive — it was fun having her around.

Now at the time I had absolutely no idea that the two of them had been anything more than good friends.

PEGGY: The best of friends.

JERRY: I knew Peggy had screwed around a lot. This didn’t bother me at all. I can say that quite honestly, it’s never bothered me. My own attitude had always been that I would screw a snake if somebody would hold its head, and I’ve never bought the notion of a double-standard. It never made sense to me. I didn’t want Peggy fucking anybody else after we were married, but as for what went on before, I couldn’t have cared less about it.

Not long after that we heard from Kay. We had just moved out here and she called to say she had just gotten a divorce and was remarried to another guy. I didn’t talk to her. Peggy did and said she sounded very strange, very different from her usual self.

KAY: That’s what happens when you lose your mind. The thing with Ken had gone wrong almost from the beginning, and I couldn’t just pick up and get out of it, so I wound up having an affair with a really terrible man. He was a minor politician involved with organized crime in the Bay area, and I managed to sell myself on the idea that I was madly in love with him, and I divorced Ken and married him. It was a rotten marriage from the beginning and I think I knew myself that it would he a miracle if it lasted two years.

Twenty-one months later I had my second divorce.

JERRY: After the phone call, Peggy got very moody and wanted to talk about Kay. She was very worried about her. I said something to the effect that Kay was a big girl and could take care of herself, and I think I added that a girl like Kay would very likely have this sort of trouble for most of her life because she was so sexily female and would always attract men very strongly.

This got Peggy going. She said there was something I didn’t know about Kay, or about her, either, for that matter, and she felt like talking about it.

PEGGY: I told him the whole story. I don’t know why I felt compelled to, but I did. I really was worried about Kay that night. She didn’t sound right at all and I had the feeling she was screwing up her life and getting involved in something she couldn’t handle.

KAY: That’s what she was doing, all right.

JERRY: I think I was supposed to disapprove, or be very sympathetic and understanding, or something. I’m afraid my reaction wasn’t what it was supposed to be.

What happened was that I got very fucking turned on by the whole thing. I listened to Peggy and I pictured the two of them in the hay together and I thought it was the most exciting thing ever.

I’ve always found lesbianism appealing. Exciting. I gather this isn’t especially unusual. I used to do a lot of fuck book covers — titles like Sin Slut and Passion Cunt, high type literature of that sort — and I don’t remember one that didn’t have a heavy lesbian component in it. This was standard. And it was common for editors to request a dyke scene on the cover if there was justification for it in terms of content. Of course the fuck book covers these days are all print, no art work at all. That’s a shame, because a lot of good men got their start in the business that way, and now that whole market is gone. The money stank and the quality was usually pretty bad, but it paid the rent for a lot of artists.

Once, a couple of years before I met Peggy, a buddy of mine and I picked up a couple of semipro hookers at a bar over on York Avenue. They had an apartment together and we went there and smoked some hash. I was just getting into grass at the time and had never had hashish, and we all got beautifully high. The girls asked if we wanted to see a show, and we said sure, and they got undressed and one of them made love to the other one. Kissed her, felt her up, ate her out, then strapped on a dildo and socked it to her.

I suppose the hash must have had something to do with it, but it was the most wildly exciting time I ever had. I wanted desperately to screw them, I wanted to grow an extra cock so I could screw them both at once, but at the same time I wanted it to go on forever, to watch them forever.

Finally they were done, and my buddy grabbed one of them and I grabbed the other, and we screwed them, and then we switched girls and screwed some more, and then we got the girls to do their thing some more, and we just kept switching back and forth and screwing them all night.

I never ran into either of them again. I went back to that bar a couple of times but never saw them. I couldn’t go to the apartment because I wasn’t sure where the hell it was. As I said, we all got pretty well stoned.

When Peggy did her confession number, of course I immediately thought of that evening, which I don’t think I had told her about before—

PEGGY: You hadn’t.

JERRY: That’s what I thought. My mind went back to it, and I imagined her and Kay doing what the two whores had done, and I got very excited. I wanted to hear everything, wanted to know all the details.

PEGGY: His interest was damn near clinical.

JERRY: We wound up in bed, of course. We were never lousy in bed, but this particular time was better than usual. Quite sensational.

Afterward, when the glow wore off, she was convinced she had made a mistake telling me about it. That whether or not it excited me, I would lose respect for her because of what I knew about her. This just wasn’t so, and I think I made her realize it. I told her I thought lesbians were a groove. I said I had to admit that I found faggots generally off-putting, and that might be because of hang-ups of my own, but that I frankly dug lesbians and felt that a girl didn’t lose any of her femininity by having that kind of an experience. I think this is true in a way that it isn’t for male homosexuals. I think they give up masculinity. But if anything, I find a girl more desirable as a result of lesbian experiences.

KAY: That could be one of your hang-ups, too.

JERRY: No doubt about it. Remember, our neuroses are the only thing that separates us from the apes.

But ever after that night my wife was just a little more exciting to me. She was exciting enough to begin with—

PEGGY: Thanks.

JERRY: —but this was icing on the cake. I do a lot of my living in fantasy — I think a majority of creative people do — and I would have fantasies in which Kay and Peggy and I would romp together. And of course I was seeing Kay in a new light now. I remembered being attracted to her the one time I met her, and now I was including her in a variety of fantasies.

PEGGY: You were doing more than having fantasies.

JERRY: What do you mean?

PEGGY: You wanted to go into the city and pick up a whore and bring her out here and have us both make love to her.

JERRY: Oh, I was joking.

PEGGY: You pretended you were joking, and I pretended that I knew you were joking, and you were like hell joking. You were trying it on, love.

JERRY: Well, if you had gone along with it, I certainly would have had no objection.

PEGGY: That’s not joking, then.

JERRY: Maybe not.

PEGGY: You also told me that if I ever wanted to see a girl on my own you would have no objection.

JERRY: Well, I was just being decent.

PEGGY: I’m not sure that’s the word for it.

JERRY: Oh, cut the shit. That was altruistic, as a matter of fact. I just wanted you to know that if you ever got the yen you shouldn’t hold yourself back out of concern for how I might feel about it, that you didn’t have to tell me and could do what you wanted with a clear conscience. You can’t make me the heavy for that.

PEGGY: I know. It’s just that something like that, some idiot Village pickup or some orgy with a hired whore, I mean that was the last thing I could possibly want and I was a little disgusted that you thought I might want it.

JERRY: Didn’t you ever want it?

PEGGY: No.

JERRY: You never wanted a girl after we were married?

PEGGY: No.

JERRY: You must have thought about it.

PEGGY: Of course I thought about it. When we went to a party and some men made a pass at me I thought about that, too, but that didn’t mean I had the slightest interest in having an affair. I didn’t, whether with a man or a woman. I was perfectly happy with just you, hard as it may be for you to believe it.

KAY: My second marriage made my first marriage look peachy by comparison. I don’t really see any point in talking about it now. If you were a psychiatrist instead of a writer, or if we were into some version of group therapy, maybe. But let’s just say that it was rotten, and he screwed around, and I screwed around, and for a while I became something of a pillhead, Dexedrine in the morning and Preludin around noon and Librium at martini time and Seconal before bed.

I don’t want to talk about that part.

After I got the second divorce I didn’t know just where to go or who to see or what to do. I was done with the pills and beginning to put myself together. I had spent some time with a shrink, and maybe if I had stayed with him it might have done me some good, but it seemed to me that he was just screwing me up more. I know I always felt worse after I saw him than before, so I really couldn’t see the point in it.

I called Ken, which couldn’t have thrilled him too much. He had remarried and has a kid, and I said something about coming to stay with him and his wife, as if they would welcome me with open arms while I got myself back together. At first he seemed to think I was putting him on and then he decided I was out of my mind, which wasn’t that far from the truth, and finally he lost his patience, a commodity he never had in abundant supply, and told me to fuck off. And then he hung up on me. I called him right back and as soon as he picked up the phone I said something along the lines of “I’m sorry, honey, we were disconnected, and I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to take your advice and fuck off, and thanks very much,” and I hung up on him this time.

JERRY: And then she went and fucked off.

KAY: Shut up.

PEGGY: Then you called us.

KAY: Then I got drunk, actually, and then the next day I called you.

PEGGY: She said, “Two marriages and two divorces. I’m the kid who batted a thousand.”

KAY: I hadn’t planned on inviting myself for a visit. Not consciously. Unconsciously I must have, because it would seem to be consistent enough. I was obviously looking for a home, which was the one thing I obviously didn’t have. And I was somehow obsessed with the idea of visiting a married couple. I mean, I had even invited myself to visit Ken and his second wife, and while that notion was perhaps not the notion of a tremendously sane person, it seems to fit the pattern, no?

PEGGY: I’ve always thought you attach too much significance to that.

KAY: Perhaps. I don’t know.

At any rate, I called and delivered my line, and said I just wanted to keep them up to date on me, and Peggy asked what I was going to do next. I said I didn’t know, which was nothing if it wasn’t the truth. Well, was I going to stay out on the Coast? No, I said, the vibrations were not all that good for me there, and the memories were even worse, and I thought I would probably come back East, but I didn’t know where or when, and I didn’t really have any place to go or anything to do, and I might just sign myself into a sanitarium and let the good doctors and nurses try to make the pieces fit again.

Peggy told me I was crazy — which I already knew — and to come and stay with them for a while, which I’m sure I wanted all along because I felt this overwhelming feeling of relief flood over me when she said it.

PEGGY: Then why the hell did you make me talk you into it?

KAY: Misplaced pride, maybe. Or maybe I wanted to be assured that you really wanted me. I guess at the time I really felt a need to be wanted.

JERRY: You were wanted all right. Once you got here, you were about as wanted as it’s possible to be.

KAY: Uh-huh. By both of you.

JERRY: There was a certain amount of awkwardness when Kay first arrived. I was glad she was coming, and I don’t think this had anything to do with the idea that something might happen sexually. This may even have been in the back of my mind somewhere but I never honestly expected anything to occur. But I did know that Peggy had been pretty lonely out here. This is country out here, and country people are the salt of earth, but we don’t generally have a whole lot to say to them or them to us. The few close friends we had were people we knew in New York and as the years went by we tended to get into town less and less frequently. I would go in now and then to see editors and publishers, but we were getting out of the habit of driving in for a social evening. Also, most of our friends had moved into suburbs or country places of their own, and New York in general, the whole scene, has had progressively less appeal for us. You can’t breathe the air, you can drink the water, and frankly the whole town gives me a pain in the ass.

So I was glad Peggy would have company, and glad I would have the opportunity to know Kay better, since l had liked her when we met and she wouldn’t have that bore of a husband along this time.

At the same time, I think Peggy and I were both a little apprehensive. Ever since the confession number, I had been teasing Peggy off and on about her notorious lesbian past. This was just a game, but it wasn’t one she always enjoyed. I think she was worried that Kay’s presence might increase the tension in our own relationship.

For my part, I was a little concerned that Kay might drive the two of us farther apart. l don’t know if anybody mentioned it, but Peggy and I were not exactly in the throes of the honeymoon any longer. It was more a case of seven-year itch. I had had a girl in New York for a while, I would see her when I was in town, and Peggy more or less realized this, and she and I were by no means going on the rocks, but at the same time the whole relationship was cooling slightly and going quietly stale, and we didn’t seem to know what to do about it. It was still good for the most part, but we were having more and more days that were less than terrific.

There was the further complication that I knew about Kay and Peggy, and Peggy knew that I knew obviously, but Kay didn’t know, and we had decided it would be foolish to tell her.

When she got here, though, all the worries we might have felt took a back seat to the immediate problem at hand, which was to help Kay put her head together again.

KAY: I was rather a mess.

JERRY: The lady was a wreck. An emotional basket case. Her hands shook, she had a nervous tic in the temple, her appetite was shot, and during occasional lulls in the conversation she would excuse herself and go into the bathroom and cry for ten or fifteen minutes.

KAY: The perfect house guest.

JERRY: Gradually she began to work herself out of this, at least to a degree. She liked taking long walks in the woods, alone or with one or the other of us. At night we would all sit around sipping brandy and talking, and happily we all got along very well. Kay and Peggy discovered, once the initial unfamiliarity wore off, that they were close in the same way they had been close at college.

PEGGY: Emotionally close, that is. There was no quick rediscovery of the fact that we were hot for each other.

KAY: But we were.

PEGGY: Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? And I think each of us made the discovery privately but kept it to herself. I know I fought for the longest time admitting it to myself. I kept telling myself that we had a lovely thing going in college but that it was over forever, and that perhaps the best thing about it was that now, some years later, we could live together and be really close friends without having sex get in the way. I don’t know why I was dumb enough to think this. The fact that we could still have such emotional rapport should have led me to suspect that the physical rapport — oh, hell, the love, that’s what it is—

KAY: Amen.

PEGGY: —was still there as much as ever.

I kept fighting this, but I was too honest with myself to be able to believe it for long. I found myself wanting to make love to Kay. We would be talking, just the two of us, and I would feel this rush of sympathy for her, I would sense how hurt she was, and I would think how I could make her feel better, how if we were in bed together and I could make love to her all the pain and tension would go away and she would be happy.

JERRY: How supremely unselfish of you.

PEGGY: Don’t be bitchy. It was partly unselfish. Of course I wanted Kay, I wanted the pleasure I would have with her, the thought wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t wanted her, but I also did feel that this was something she needed and that it would be good for her.

KAY: I wanted you, too. For a variety of reasons. One of them being simply that I found myself remembering those days more and more and contrasting them with what had come later. It seemed to me that we were secure and happy then and that I had never really been happy since.

But I was terrified of this. Because you were this wonderful warm family that I had sought out, and I could see myself driving a wedge between you, and I actually told myself more than once that before I ought to let myself do such a thing, break up the good thing that you two had... that I ought to go and kill myself. I never got to the point of figuring out how to go about it, but I felt suicide was a noble alternative to getting in your pants again.

PEGGY: Kind of an extreme solution, no?

KAY: A final one, certainly.

The other thing, and this really began to convince me that I was crazy, was that I began to want Jerry.

JERRY: Thanks.

KAY: Huh?

JERRY: You’re overfucking flowing with compliments. If you wanted me, then you must be crazy. That’s what you just said. Thanks a bunch.

KAY: Oh, Christ, you know what I meant. I liked you. I found you disturbingly attractive.

JERRY: Now you’re talking.

KAY: And I had a great urge to ball you. Happy?

JERRY: You betcha.

KAY: But I tried to figure out why, and what seemed like the obvious answer was that I wanted to drive the two of you apart. That I wanted to spoil what I couldn’t have. That I wanted to compete with Peggy and take her man away from her. I kept finding different motivations, and I didn’t like what any of them told me about myself.

PEGGY: That shrink on the Coast really fucked you up, didn’t he?

KAY: I guess he did.

PEGGY: When you start analyzing that way, you can really get messed up. I think those schmucks do more harm than good, I really do.

KAY: Well, I didn’t go to him that long. Maybe I would have turned a corner somewhere along the way and maybe he would have started to do me good, but in the amount of time I went to him I would tend to agree that he hurt more than he helped.

JERRY: Meanwhile, while these two were hot for each other and keeping it to themselves, and while Kay was beginning to go for me, I was finding it just about impossible to keep from making a pass at her. Now I hadn’t expected this. I had anticipated that something might get started between the two of them, and I had privately decided that I wouldn’t object to this at all, that if they wanted to do a little private mutual gobbling, that was their business and none of mine. I probably wanted this to happen, I liked the idea, but in any case I had no objection to it.

But I didn’t think I would fall in love with Kay.

Which of course is what happened. It started off with sympathy and a strong sexual attraction, and it got enhanced by the sheer sexual stimulation that grew out of the fact that the two of them had been lovers, and then it turned a big corner as I got to know Kay better and better and developed tremendous feeling for her as a person. I don’t know if I recognized it as love at the time. We’re all so conditioned, you know. So totally fucking programmed by the crap they drill into us as children. I had always considered myself more liberal and open-minded than most. I knew that a person could and would normally want more than one person sexually. I found it wholly unremarkable that I loved Peggy and dug Peggy sexually and nevertheless wanted to make it with Kay. But I didn’t take the thought a step further and admit I was in love with Kay, because of this monogamy hang-up that makes people think it’s only possible to love one person at a time.

This is a lot of shit. Of course it’s possible to love more than one person at a time, but we all have this concept of love, that it’s exclusive.

If we had all had a more mature outlook, if our minds had been a little more open, we would have saved a couple of very uncomfortable weeks. But if you look at it from another angle, if our minds had been just a little less open, the scene we have now would never have come about at all. We would have locked each other out permanently.

JWW: The three of them talked at some length about the period of several weeks during which each was attracted to the other without anyone’s doing anything about it. The innuendoes and hints, the subtle emotional changes, were analyzed by all three at some length.

To summarize, the general tone of the total relationship at this stage seems to have been one of frustration interwoven with excitement. Each had sexual desires which were not being satisfied, yet each had the feeling that something was coming, that during the next day or the next week or the next month something extraordinary was going to happen.

JERRY: Peggy was out shopping, and I was showing Kay some preliminary sketches for a cover I was working on. This was for a science fiction magazine, and she had read the script of the story I was supposed to use for the cover illo, and I had done some line drawings based on it for the inside pages and some rough sketches for the cover. And she was looking them over, and commenting on them, and as usual I was impressed with her comments, and impressed with other things about her as well, and by this time I had sensed that the attraction was mutual. So I took her by the shoulders and kissed her.

KAY: I was unprepared for this, and I just felt myself responding immediately. My reaction was almost one of relief. Finally something was happening. Anything is better than waiting after a point, you know.

The kiss went on for a while and I got slightly lost in it. Then I felt his hand under my skirt, reaching for me, and I just managed to break the kiss and draw away. I wanted him desperately but I also wanted this not to happen. I said, “God, this is crazy, we can’t.” He said that we both wanted each other and it was ridiculous to fight it. I said I couldn’t do something like that to Peggy. It would kill her, I said. He said he wouldn’t tell her if I didn’t.

I said, “She’ll be home any minute,” which was a cop-out of the worst sort. But it was also true, and I figured if we managed to postpone this, I could try to figure out what I was going to do about all this.

He went along with this. But he said, “Honey, we’re going to make it sooner or later. There’s no way around it. Why kill ourselves putting it off?”

All through dinner and the rest of the evening I kept thinking about this. I wondered if it was true. I had already sensed that Jerry wanted me, and I knew I wanted him, but the kiss, the electricity of it all, just had more impact. It made it clear that the magic was there and that it worked both ways, and I knew the two of us could be very good together.

I couldn’t look at either of them that night. It was really strange. I couldn’t look at Peggy without feeling guilty as all hell and I couldn’t look at Jerry without the two of us exchanging little messages.

That night we all went to bed fairly early. And I could hear them making love. My room wasn’t that close to theirs but I could still hear them.

It really got to me. It drove me up the wall.

JERRY: Actually, it was the worst kind of cheating. I was making love to my wife to use up some of the hunger I had for Kay, and I was balling Peggy and picturing Kay in my mind. I was fantastically passionate, but the passion wasn’t for what was going on, it was for where I was living in my imagination. So while anybody watching would have thought it was particularly satisfying, it wasn’t. You could call it a form of masturbation, I think.

PEGGY: I don’t read minds, so I couldn’t know whether Jerry was screwing me or Jane Fonda. I don’t know whether it was his attitude that did it or my own problems, but we had a really passionate time, and it must have gone on for half an hour, and I couldn’t come. I wound up faking it.

And he fell asleep, and I crawled inside my mind and decided that I had been unable to make it because I was all strung out with wanting Kay.

So I waited until I was sure he was sleeping soundly, and then I got up and went to the bathroom and douched and showered and put perfume all over my fair white body, and then I went down the hall to Kay’s room.

KAY: I was just starting to fall asleep. Just on the point of dropping off. It had driven me crazy listening to them fucking. Maybe it was only a half hour, but it seemed like hours. I tried to ease the tension by playing with myself. This didn’t work particularly well.

Then the door opened and Peggy was in my room, and I thought Jerry might have said something to her and she wanted to talk, and I thought, Christ, what am I going to say, what am I going to do?

But she got out of her robe and got into bed with me before I could say a word, and she put her arms around me and kissed me and said, “I love you, I never stopped loving you,” and I just let go of everything and we had each other.

It was such a feeling of total relief. I turned my mind off entirely and just let myself enjoy it, and all of the years fell away from me like the albatross from the neck of the ancient mariner. That must have been how he felt. All the emotional garbage of all those years fell off and we were two kids in college just kissing and touching and eating each other, just rolling in each other’s arms and having sweet loving orgasms. God, I don’t think I had ever needed anything so much in my life.

Afterward we lit cigarettes and she looked at me and said something like, “I almost had forgotten how sweet you taste,” or something like that. And I just started to cry, and she held me, and we held onto each other. “I thought this was over years ago,” she said, “but it was never over and it will never be over. We’re a thing.”

I said, “But what are we going to do?”

“All the things we used to do.”

“But if Jerry finds out—”

“He doesn’t have to find anything out,” she said. “And maybe he wouldn’t mind. It’s not as if I were with another man. I think it would be different in his mind.” Of course she had something to go on, because she had told him about us and knew his reaction, but I was not aware of any of this and thought she was just rationalizing. If anything, I thought a husband would be a great deal more upset to find out that his wife was with another woman. That would be a rejection of him as a man. That was the way I saw it. I also felt that Jerry would lose respect for both of us, that he would think we were perverted.

I didn’t know what to do, what to think, how to feel. But I did know that I felt absolutely wonderful for having made love with Peggy, and everything just went all warm and lazy and I fell asleep.

It was the first really good sleep I had in ages.

The next day we had the comedy of errors bit. I was sitting around feeling damned ambivalent and exchanging secret glances with both of them, first her and then him, and ultimately I just couldn’t handle it all and announced I was going for a walk in the woods. And Jerry immediately said he would come with me, which I wanted and didn’t want at the same time, but there was no way to avoid it, so I said all right, and we went walking in the woods.

When he kissed me I froze.

He asked me what was the matter.

“The whole situation,” I said. I was very close to either tears or laughter, I don’t know which. Maybe both. “The whole situation with you and Peggy and me, the whole screwed up situation, I just don’t know what to do.”

“Listen,” he said, “I know about you and Peggy.”

I looked at him. I thought maybe he meant that he knew we were close emotionally and that was why I was uptight. But he clarified it.

“I know what you are to each other,” he said. “Peggy told me everything. And it doesn’t bother me. I want you to know that; it doesn’t bother me, in fact I’m glad.”

Well, of course he was saying that he knew Peggy and I had had a thing in college, but the timing of it all, I interpreted it as meaning that sometime between last night and now Peggy had told him that we had knocked off a piece, and I was just staggered. I couldn’t believe it.

I said, “She told you?” And he nodded. “And you don’t mind?” No, he said, he didn’t mind.

“And now I’m going to make love to you,” he said.

And he did just that. We found a nice shady spot under a tree, with soft grass on the ground, and we fucked each other almost into a coma.

Afterward I said, “And now I suppose you’ll tell Peggy about this.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “She wouldn’t understand.”

“But she told you about last night.”

He misunderstood. “I didn’t say anything about last night,” he said. “All I did last night was kiss you, and what makes you think I said anything to her?”

“No,” I said brilliantly, “I mean she told you that she and I made love last night... you just said so, so I was just wondering if you would tell her—”

JERRY: My reaction must have been worth filming. It was really as strange a conversation as I’ve ever had. I wish I had it on tape.

KAY: I’m just as glad you don’t.

JERRY: The whole scene was really strange.

PEGGY: I’m sorry I missed it.

KAY: Oh, you’d have loved it.

PEGGY: I’m not generally psychic, but occasionally I do get flashes. I think I was doing something creative, like the dishes, when they went for their walk in the woods. Yes, I was doing the dishes, because I remember loading up the dishwasher and suddenly getting this certain thought that the two of them were going to screw in the woods. I hadn’t even considered this possibility before but all at once I just knew it.

So when they got back to the house I was looking for this, and the way they behaved, the whole attitude, I became quite certain.

And I was glad. That was the surprising thing, that my immediate feeling was joy. I was glad because it would be good for both of them, she needed a man who wouldn’t exploit her, she needed a safe and healthy relationship with a man, and Jerry obviously needed something more than he had with me. And also of course this took away the guilt I might have had for making love with Kay. I can’t explain or pin down all of the feelings I had, but I know that if I had speculated on this in advance I would have thought that I would be very jealous, and actually there was no jealousy at all.

When I saw them, I looked at one of them and then at the other and then I went over to Kay and kissed her on the cheek and said something like, “Poor baby, you’re really leading an active life all of a sudden, aren’t you?”

KAY: I wanted to die. I said, “Oh, Peggy, don’t hate me, we couldn’t help it.”

PEGGY: I said, “Hate you? But I love you, I love both of you.”

JERRY: And we spent hours talking it out, really opening up to each other. At first Kay was convinced she would have to go away, have to leave us. It’s hard to get past your conditioning. But gradually it worked out as we opened up to each other. The thing of it is that each of us wanted a three-way relationship. I loved both of these girls and wanted them both and was delighted that they were having each other, delighted and more than a little turned on by the whole number. Peggy was glad I was the man in Kay’s life and wanted to go on sleeping with Kay herself as well. And Kay loved us both and wanted to go on being part of our family.

KAY: Families that ball together are all together.

JERRY: Right on. So we all wanted this, but the problem was realizing that everybody else wanted it, too. Once we opened up and saw where we were all at, there was really no problem left. All we had to do was keep on keeping on.

PEGGY: The one thing that took a little time happening was for us all to wind up in the same bed at the same time. At first we had a mixed-up scene in which two of us would go off together while the third one read a book or went for a walk. Which was ridiculous but which I would say was also understandable.

Then one day Kay and I were in bed. I was all stretched out with my eyes closed and she was kneeling at the foot of the bed eating me. It was utterly divine. I was like completely passive, just enjoying things, eyes shut, mind floating, when I just sensed another presence in the room. I knew someone had come in, and I opened my eyes and saw Jerry in the doorway, He was fully clothed and he was watching us. But he didn’t see that my eyes were open.

JERRY: I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. Not merely erotic but beautiful in an artistic sense. I don’t think there’s anything particularly attractive in the sight of a man and woman fucking. I think it’s a gas, but I don’t think it’s pretty to look at.

KAY: I do. I love to watch you with Peggy.

JERRY: Call it a personal reaction of mine, then. But I think there is something particularly pleasing to the eye about two women together.

PEGGY: I could see that he had an erection, and I wanted him. And the expression on his face, I knew he was really involved in the whole scene, and I thought, well, why not? Why shouldn’t we all be together?

So I said, “Come on, darling, come join the party.”

JERRY: So I did. I got out of my clothes and went over behind Kay and took her from the rear while she went on kissing Peggy. It was — I can’t even describe how it was. Make up your own ecstatic metaphor.

After that, we all went absolutely sex mad. There are a certain number of things that two people can do in bed, and most couples will try them all in the first few months of marriage. With three, the possibilities for variety are almost endless. From a pure standpoint of physical variety, it just makes an enormous difference when you add a third person to the bed. I don’t have to explain this, it must be obvious to you and to anybody else who stops and thinks about it.

PEGGY: I wonder if it is, though. Obvious to everyone. I know I had never really thought in these terms before, myself. And it really is exquisite. The sensation of being fucked and eaten at the same time. There’s really nothing like it. Of course long before, I had entertained that sort of notion in fantasy. Just in ordinary lovemaking you might do both, you know, first one and then the other, and in your mind you might imagine the two things happening at the same time. But when it really does—

JERRY: I remember one time as the relationship was beginning to swing into gear when the three of us were just absolutely flipped out over each other. We didn’t get out of bed for hours on end, and there were times, you know, you reach a point where it becomes just flesh.

PEGGY: Thanks.

JERRY: You know what I mean. And I would find myself sucking a breast or licking a clit and would suddenly realize I didn’t know whose it was.

PEGGY: You knew it wasn’t yours, lover.

JERRY: True enough. I think it was in one of your books that somebody made the observation that he was convinced God meant people to sleep in threes. I’m always a little leery of people who find God’s will a perfect explanation for their own idiosyncrasies, but in a figurative sense I can dig it in this case, because it’s just so much better.

JWW: The relationship of Jerry and Peggy and Kay seems to have gone on without any emotional strain or any discernible guilt for any of the three partners ever since its inception. I suspect the fact that all three are basically unorthodox in their approach to all facets of life, and that they are not subject to either direct or indirect community pressure, has more than a little to do with this.

The question of offspring from this triangular union has never come up, nor will it; early in their marriage, while he and Peggy were still living in New York City, the two decided that they were not temperamentally inclined to raise children and that both the political climate of the world and the very real problem of the population explosion were such that they felt morally more at ease not having any children. Accordingly Jerry submitted at the time to voluntary sterilization.

There was a brief interlude, he said, when he began to regret the operation. It is reversible in a certain number of cases, and he considered finding out if it could be reversed, and as an alternative he and Peggy considered adopting a child. He attributes this uncertainty to a decline in the quality of their marital relationship — “When things go wrong you start thinking it would be better if you had a kid” — and the impulse passed completely and evidently forever when Kay entered their lives. In a sense, just as Kay was seeking in them a family substitute after her second divorce, I suspect she fills the role of a child in their lives.

JERRY: Not long after all of this between the three of us took shape, I began to be interested in knowing a little more about other people in the same approximate situation. After all, misery isn’t the only thing that loves company. So does ecstasy. I wanted to know what sort of adaptation other trios made, and what motivated them.

I picked up a lot of books on the subject, and of course a large proportion of them were just hoked-up pornography. No case histories in any real sense of the term, and excessive descriptions designed to turn the reader on, and most of them not doing the job very well, either. The typical 42nd Street crap.

But I also picked up some books that seemed legitimate enough, including yours, several of yours, which is how I happened to write to you in the first place, as you know. And for the most part I read about trios that came about as a result of swinging.

Peggy and I had never really considered swinging, although we had discussed it from time to time, mostly in the vein of isn’t it weird what some sickies will do? I would have liked to give it a try myself at the time but I didn’t even have the nerve to so much as suggest it to her, and I don’t think in retrospect that she would have gone along or that I would have felt like following through with it if she did. I enjoyed entertaining the notion in the realm of fantasy, but I doubt I’d really have cared to carry through on that particular fantasy.

After all of this got going, and I started reading about swinging, I thought how tremendously different what we’ve got is from the trios that the swingers get involved in. Now on a purely physical level I can see nothing but plusses in swinging. Not merely the idea of injecting some variety into a marriage, but because possibilities for fun do increase as the number of persons increases. Simple arithmetic.

But these people are balling strangers, and I’m not putting this down, but I’m contrasting it with what we’ve got. The three of us, you see, are very much in love. Completely in love, and it’s more than a matter of each of us loving both of the others, but that we love us as a trio, if you know what I mean. We love the whole usness of us.

I’m sure that swingers who make the trio scene enjoy themselves no end, and if they’re true swingers, if they’ve got past the usual hang-ups, it must be very good for them. But I think they’re missing a tremendous amount if they don’t try and get into a permanent trio scene, a loving relationship where there’s no hustle and no exploitation and where there’s an emotional basis to it all that goes beyond good clean sex. I’m not knocking good clean sex, I have nothing at all against it, but there’s so much more that can enhance it.

Maybe I’m projecting too much, feeling that everybody would be better off doing what we’re doing. It’s such a total groove for us that I can’t fucking avoid the belief that it would be good for everybody, and maybe that’s an oversimplification. Different strokes for different folks, after all.

But we sure are having a gas of a time.

Peter & Wanda & Grace

JWW: Peter and Wanda and Grace St. John share a spacious two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise near Lincoln Center, on the West Side of Manhattan. Peter is a furniture designer, and most of the furnishings in the apartment are his work. He is successful in his work, and Wanda also earns a good living as a freelance interior decorator. Her interest is period decoration, while Peter’s taste runs to the extremely modern. Grace does not work, but occasionally earns money posing for more or less pornographic photographs and acting in exploitation films and stag movies.

Peter is twenty-seven, below average in height, with blond hair and blue eyes and typical Anglo-Saxon features. He is slender and occasionally almost elfin in his movements. Wanda, Peter’s sister, is a year his senior and very much like him in appearance. She is slightly taller than he is, and her hair, blond like his, is worn long and loose. Grace is Peter’s wife. She is twenty-two, red-haired, voluptuous, and short.

Peter and Grace have been married for three years. About a year and a half ago Wanda joined them.

My interviewing of the St. Johns spanned several sessions. Grace was not always present.

PETER: Let me tell you one thing. I don’t have any real idea how people get the way they are, and I don’t think anybody else does, either. In the past twelve years or so Wanda and I between us have seen perhaps two dozen psychiatrists and psychologists and psychoanalysts, and they can help you trace things back and see the sequence in which things occurred and the way one thing may have led to another. It’s a very elaborate game, and quite often it becomes quite an absorbing one in the bargain. You learn no end of things about yourself.

But I don’t know that it answers any basic questions.

I find it just as easy — perhaps easier — to believe that we are simply born the way we are. If you can believe that a handful of genes and chromosomes determine our precise physical makeup, everything from the shapes of our noses to the patterns on our fingertips, I don’t see why it should be any harder to believe that those same genes and chromosomes determine our personalities. They are more and more coming to believe that mental illness itself is physical, either chemical or glandular or whatever the latest theory maybe. Biochemical to one degree or another. If this is so, it seems eminently reasonable to me that less radical personality traits are also biochemical, and predetermined from the moment of conception. Or from the moment of birth, if you’re astrologically inclined. Grace is, by the way. Wanda and I are not.

WANDA: All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Peter thinks we were born perverted.

PETER: Not perverted. Kinky.

GRACE: What’s the difference?

PETER: Perverted is nasty and sick. Kinky is just tons of fun.

WANDA: Then we were perverted and we gradually turned kinky.

PETER: Absolutely wrong.

WANDA: What, then?

PETER: We were born kinky, and the world turned us perverted, and now we’re just kinky again.

GRACE: Do tell.

PETER: There were just the two of us. No other brothers or sisters, that is. My mother did have another child when I was five. A stillbirth, he would have been a boy. I gather he was deformed.

WANDA: Physically kinky, dear.

PETER: Wanda and I were always very close. From the cradle, so to speak. We were so close in age, you know. Just thirteen months apart. I’m sure the parents didn’t plan it that way. I rather suspect I was a misconception.

WANDA: We were both accidents, dear. Mother told me once, in a fit of pique. We were neither of us hoped for. She would have preferred to have no children, she confided.

PETER: Filthy bitch. Can you picture the two of them together? Her with one eye on the clock, I’m sure. I’m glad they’re dead.

WANDA: Don’t say that.

PETER: Why on earth not...? Where was I? As I was saying, Wanda and I were very close. As far back as I can recall, early in childhood, I took it for granted that someday I would grow up and marry Wanda. I vaguely remember being told that I couldn’t do this, that brothers and sisters couldn’t marry one another. And this struck me as grossly unfair. Of course I was going to marry Wanda. I loved her and would marry her and we would have children together.

WANDA: Perish forbid.

PETER: Quite. Our genes aren’t that worthy of perpetuation, are they? And in combination we’d have to produce an utter monster. The thalidomide babies would pale by comparison. I did manage to impregnate Wanda once, as it happened.

WANDA: I was fifteen.

PETER: She was aborted in the third month, and I didn’t even get to see her after the operation; they shunted her right off to a funny farm. Now both my angels are on the pill, so there will be no little St. Johns. I rather wish they didn’t keep finding out new bad things about the pill.

GRACE: Oh, they’re twisting it all out of proportion. I heard that the Catholics are behind it.

PETER: All a papist plot? You really heard that? No, I’m afraid it’s more than that. I’m afraid the pill is really bad for you. Not as bad as being pregnant, but not as good as Vitamin C. Rather a shame Vitamin C doesn’t keep one from getting pregnant.

I suppose I shall eventually break down and have a vasectomy, but something within me has kept me from doing that yet. We’ll see what happens.

To continue, the first time Wanda and I had sexual relations was when she was nine and I was eight.

WANDA: We had played before this. Showed each other what we had.

PETER: Which was precious little at that age.

WANDA: We took baths together, you see, and were naked around each other rather often. And we would touch each other. I remember being absolutely fascinated by Peter’s little penis. I thought it was just the cutest thing. I don’t know whether I wanted one of my own or not.

PETER: You could always have borrowed mine. All you had to do was speak up.

WANDA: Psychiatrists suggested this, that I wanted a penis of my own, that I wanted Peter’s penis. So I can’t really say whether this was true or not because it was suggested to me so often. I know I loved to watch him urinate, and sometimes I would hold it for him when he did, and I would move it around to make little patterns in the bowl.

PETER: We could still do that, if you want.

WANDA: Do shut up.

PETER: Just as she was supposed to envy me my penis, I was supposed to be vaguely disappointed that she didn’t have one. I don’t remember any such disappointment. The theory is that a little boy looks at a little girl and is distressed to find nothing there. I don’t know where these people have been, but when I look at the juncture of a girl’s legs I don’t see nothing. I see something quite charming. A female pubis is certainly remarkable for more reasons than the absence of a penis. I found Wanda quite fascinating in that respect.

WANDA: He used to put his little finger in.

PETER: I would wash it for her when we bathed. I strongly recommend this, by the way. We were quite the cleanest little children on earth, and our genitals absolutely squeaked with cleanliness. It was no trouble getting us into the tub. I remember bathing as quite the best part of childhood.

I was eight and Wanda nine when we first began to have intercourse. A surprising number of people find this difficult to believe. I’m damned if I know why. Boys that age get erections all the time. It may be small, but it gets stiff enough, and one wouldn’t want it too big if one were going to put it into a nine-year-old girl, would one?

Wanda initiated it. I was in my room and she came in and said she had found out how people made babies. We had both had a vague idea but it was rather confused. I seem to remember the belief that there was urination involved, the male was supposed to urinate into the vagina.

WANDA: Which can be great fun, but has little to do with having babies.

PETER: She explained that she had to lie down and open her legs and I was to get on top of her and put my pee-pee into her — what did we used to call your cunt?

WANDA: I think we called mine a pee-pee, too.

PETER: Had to put my pee-pee into her pee-pee — I’m sure we had a special name for yours and I wish to hell I could remember what it was — and that then she would have a baby. So I thought it would be a great idea to try it, and she got undressed and stretched out in my bed and opened her legs, and I got on top of her, and I didn’t have an erection and couldn’t get it in.

WANDA: It was like trying to thread a needle with a strand of cooked spaghetti.

PETER: Isn’t she charming? It was oddly frustrating. We knew we were doing something wrong, leaving something out, but couldn’t imagine what. I used to get erections all the time—

WANDA: I’m sure he was born with one.

PETER: It’s possible, you know. You’re joking, but babies are born with erections all the time.

GRACE: All the time?

PETER: Frequently, idiot. I got them when Wanda and I had sex play, or when I had to urinate, or riding in a fast car. All manner of things get a little boy hard.

WANDA: Including little girls.

PETER: Including little girls. So I was used to having erections, and I knew that it felt better to have an erection than not, and that it felt particularly good when I was hard when Wanda played with me. But it didn’t seem to occur to either of us that an erection would facilitate this baby-making which we were trying to accomplish.

We squirmed around for quite some time, and it felt very nice, but I couldn’t get inside of her. Then we gave it up and lay there talking, trying to figure out what was wrong. We were lying side by side, and Wanda put her hand on my penis and just held it gently, giving it a sisterly squeeze now and then, and you shouldn’t be too astonished to hear that it became erect in due course.

It was like Archimedes in the bloody bathtub. All of a sudden I realized what we had left out. “I think it’ll go in now,” I told her, and of course she was anxious to try it.

But it wouldn’t quite, because Wanda was tight and dry and said it was hurting her. We figured out that maybe it would be easier if we wet my pee-pee, so she put spit on her hands and wet my penis, which felt quite divine. Then we tried again, and it went right into her.

Well, it was absolutely unbelievable. Quite a difference between this and a soapy hand in the bathtub. It was just incredibly sensational.

Wanda’s store of information didn’t include the fact that I was supposed to work it in and out and in and out, but I seemed to know this instinctively. I did this, and Wanda wiggled her little tail as if she had been doing this all her life, and after not too long had a climax. I was too young to be producing any sperm, but I definitely ejaculated. Seminal fluid, I suppose it was. This was the first time I had ever had an orgasm or an emission.

I didn’t know what it was. I had gathered from what she told me that something came out of the penis during intercourse but I thought it might be urine or something of the sort, and I had no idea that there was this incredibly wonderful feeling involved in the process. I had been delighted enough with the way intercourse felt, but this was an added and wholly unanticipated bonanza.

WANDA: I also had a climax. I’m certain that I did. I’ve been solemnly told that this was impossible, but I also understand it’s impossible for a bumblebee to fly, according to science. Fortunately bumblebees are not scientifically inclined and they go on flying whether they’re supposed to or not. I had a climax whether I was supposed to or not.

PETER: We were confident that Wanda was going to have a baby. There’s a joke which I can’t quite remember in which a pair of earthlings demonstrate reproduction to some Martians and the Martians are astonished that the baby doesn’t appear for nine months... I wish I remembered the joke — from what I just said you wouldn’t believe there was anything hysterical about it, would you? The point, though, is that we expected the baby to come out almost at once. When hours went by without Wanda’s giving birth, we thought we had done something wrong.

Then over the next few weeks the two of us picked up a great body of information on the subject. We both consulted with various schoolmates and asked no end of questions, and Wanda found an erotic novel that one of our parents had done a poor job of hiding—

WANDA: Not an erotic novel. Pure and simple pornography. One of those mimeographed tracts with every other word misspelled. Sadomasochistic, too. I remember the plot. A waitress finishes work and her boss takes her to a nightclub where there’s a sex performance on stage, and then her boss, who’s been feeling her under the table, hands her over to the woman and two men who have been performing. He tells them that she’s a virgin, and they strip her and torture her and force her to do all manner of things, and finally they gang fuck her, and by the time it’s over she loves it, and her boss takes her home and screws her ass off. The sadism was really very freaky, but we were most interested in the book as a source of information on how to copulate. There were some rather crude drawings in which all the men had immense penises—

PETER: Made one feel inadequate.

WANDA: One of our parents, indeed. Obviously it was our father’s. With that bitch for a wife he must have jerked off over dirty books ten times a day.

PETER: What do you suppose she jerked off over?

WANDA: I don’t know. God knows. Copies of Vogue, I suppose.

PETER: I was thinking Parke-Bernet catalogues.

WANDA: I like that much better. Isn’t that a lovely image? Masturbating over a description of a Sheraton tea caddy. Oh, I love that!

PETER: I’m trying to remember just what we learned during that period. That we couldn’t have babies, for one thing. We learned the right thing for the wrong reason — as we understood it, you couldn’t have babies unless you were married, and we already knew that you couldn’t get married until you were grown up. We also learned — perhaps we had always known this — that you couldn’t marry your sister, that brother and sister couldn’t marry. This disturbed us but I think we more or less tabled the matter, figuring that we would work something out when the time came.

We also learned any number of positions to screw in. The dirty book was particularly instructive in this respect. We learned about oral sex, which had never occurred to us, and about buggery. The book was wildly enthusiastic about buggery. They kept fucking this poor waitress up the ass, and she never did enjoy that part. It was evidently supposed to be excruciatingly painful, and we almost decided to forego the pleasure on the basis of this description.

WANDA: I said why not try it and stop if it hurts, which seemed reasonable enough. And it didn’t hurt a bit.

PETER: If I had been hung like one of those gorillas in the book—

WANDA: Oh, well, that was ridiculous. That’s the trouble with pornography, it’s positively surrealistic. If you had been built like those apes you would have disabled a brood mare, let alone your sister.

PETER: I don’t want to let alone my sister.

WANDA: Jack, we were the sexiest kinkiest little devils imaginable. It was really incredible. We had the sense to know that we weren’t supposed to be doing this, so we didn’t say anything to anyone. And kept it from our parents, which wasn’t difficult because they were hardly ever around. We would do it almost every day and we became quite accomplished. Invented positions of our own and everything. At nine years old, I was a rather artful cocksucker. Few girls can make that statement.

PETER: Few girls can make that statement at any age.

WANDA: If it weren’t for the rest of the world, I don’t think we ever would have had any trouble staying sane. As far as that goes, if we ever did have children—

PETER: No.

WANDA: Just as a hypothesis.

PETER: No. I don’t even care for the hypothesis.

WANDA: If you had children with Grace. Or if we adopted children.

PETER: No.

WANDA: Oh, shut up and let me talk, please. I don’t want children, either; this is purely hypothetical.

PETER: Go ahead.

WANDA: I would be in favor of bringing them up to screw each other. I am absolutely serious. What a sane clean healthy way to grow up! Every brother and sister want to do it. They may never realize it, but the desire is universal.

PETER: They want to screw their parents, too. Would you draw a line?

WANDA: No.

PETER: Neither would I.

GRACE: I think I would draw a line at that.

PETER: That’s your hang-up.

GRACE: I guess.

WANDA: I never wanted to screw him. Did you ever want to screw Mother?

PETER: It never occurred to me. Not until a quack shrink suggested it. My reaction, as I recall, was one of nausea. She was dead by then and I pictured myself in bed with her rotting corpse and I retched. I didn’t bother explaining the image to the quack and he was sure we were on the verge of an earthshaking breakthrough. Stupid son of a bitch!

WANDA: But if children were brought up that way—

PETER: I think they do that in some of those islands. The places Margaret Mead goes to.

WANDA: Would you want your children to screw Margaret Mead?

PETER: Only if they really loved her.

WANDA: And if she has any kids, I want them brought up Catholic.

PETER: You’re a perfect goose. You truly are.

JWW: Observations on ideal ways to raise children and the advisability of encouraging their early sexual experimentation were voiced frequently in the course of our several meetings. It may seem remarkable that persons so thoroughly opposed to the idea of having children had so much to say on the topic of raising them. I think this is less a contradiction than it seems. Both Peter and Wanda were very much aware that the subsequent emotional problems derived in large measure from the manner in which their sexual behavior was dealt with, and blame their parents for this. Furthermore, it would seem to me that by defending the position that brother-sister sexual relationships should be encouraged, they are defending their own early behavior and at once expunging any guilt they may feel for past acts and for their present situation as well.

Grace had relatively little to say on the subject of her childhood sexual experiences. She did mention that she was seduced at a very early age by a lover of her mother’s, who performed cunnilingus upon her on several occasions and induced her to masturbate him. She seems to have been five or six at the time, the relationship was undiscovered and was terminated after a very short period of time when the man abruptly disappeared. She reported no further sexual experience until initial coitus at age fifteen with a boy her own age.

This sort of childhood seduction at the hands of a male father figure is classic. It occurs with uncanny regularity in the case histories of prostitutes and female homosexuals. While it is generally acknowledged that the memory is occasionally false — that the seduction did not in fact occur — in the great majority of instances the act did seem to have taken place.

WANDA: We had been having sex for months before anyone found out. Then one afternoon one of the maids walked in on us. I had Peter’s pee-pee in my mouth at the time and was lying there with my eyes closed sucking him.

PETER: By this time we knew its right name. We didn’t still call it a pee-pee.

WANDA: And this woman walked in. Woman? She wasn’t much more than a girl herself. Maybe twenty years old, a little Irish thing fresh off the boat from County Something. She very nearly went into cardiac arrest. You can imagine the effect this had on her. In her eyes, fellatio was a mortal sin even if the two participants were husband and wife. For a girl to be sucking off her brother, that was the height of sin! Or the depth of sin, perhaps.

PETER: She beat the living shit out of us, Jack. No one ever hit us, neither our parents nor the help. It just didn’t happen. But she completely lost her cool and slapped us silly, and then she sat us down and told us at great length about Hell and how we were certain to go there. She said we would go there anyway because we were Protestants, but we would burn for eternity in the very inner circle of Hell for what we were doing, and we would have to stop immediately and never so much as touch each other again, or even touch ourselves, and if I ever touched my penis again it would shrivel up and drop off, and, oh, it just went on like this forever.

WANDA: I was terrified.

PETER: We were both terrified. I believe I was honestly less frightened of hellfire or even my cock dropping off than I was of this dried-up little bitch losing control completely and beating us to death. And we were also afraid she would tell our parents, of course.

WANDA: She couldn’t bring herself to do this, though. The words would have been too much for her to speak. Evidently she couldn’t even bear to think about it, because she left within the week, collected her wages and went away and never came back. For which I give thanks.

PETER: It might have been better if she told them.

WANDA: Are you mad?

PETER: I’m not sure it would have been worse that way. As it was, she left us in a pretty bad way. We had known for a long time that we were doing something wrong, but we had never seen anything wrong with it, and we didn’t know it was considered to be anywhere near as sinful as she led us to believe. Also, we weren’t sure whether or not any of the stuff she l said was true, such as my cock dropping off.

WANDA: It was scary.

PETER: It was. We talked about it, we talked of nothing else, and we finally decided that maybe we had better stop doing this. That sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? After all, you wouldn’t think it would be too great a hardship for children that age to get along without sex. Most of them do, after all.

WANDA: I wonder. I’ll bet a lot more children have sex at that age than anybody realizes.

PETER: It’s tempting to think so. I’m not sure it’s true.

Let’s say, though, that most children don’t. Not at that age. Not on a regular basis. But we had gotten used to it, you see, and it was — I was going to say it was like a drug, which would not be true at all. It was habit forming in quite another way. We were used to it and we loved it, and how could we suddenly stop taking baths together? Or stop wanting each other? Childhood is not the time when self-denial comes easily. It’s not the natural impulse of a child. It takes maturity to enable people to delude themselves into giving up the things they enjoy and doing things they hate. A child is made of simpler stuff. He does what he likes and doesn’t do what he doesn’t like, and what we liked to do was have sex, and until that bitch walked in on us we had been doing just fine.

WANDA: We gave it up for a while. Then we decided maybe it would be all right as long as he didn’t get inside of my vagina, so we stuck to extra-coital things. Oral and anal and manual pleasures. They were great good fun, and we evidently managed to slough off the fact that the maid had found this sort of thing even worse than screwing. You would have thought it would be the other way around, after the way she had acted.

PETER: She yelled at Wanda, “How can you put a filthy thing like that into your mouth?” Filthy? After the way Wanda washed it?

WANDA: After, I don’t know, a few months of this, one day Peter said, “You know, I really would like to fuck you, and we haven’t done it in so long.” So we did it, and from then on we resumed doing it regularly.

PETER: It’s amazing we got away with it as long as we did. After the maid discovered us, that is. We had almost three years after that. It seems incredible now that we managed for so long.

WANDA: We were very careful. And we were extremely bright children, don’t forget. And good at keeping secrets. We never did anything with any other children. Never even considered it. Never talked about anything with them. This was a completely private thing of ours and we had no intention of sharing it with anyone. Otherwise I’m sure we would have been discovered much earlier, but this way it stayed a secret.

PETER: Until she found out, that bitch.

WANDA: Mother.

PETER: That bitch.

GRACE: Was she really such a bitch or is it just the way she was with you two?

PETER: No, she really was.

WANDA: I don’t know how she found out. Whether she figured it out by herself or whether one of the servants found out and told her. But from then on nothing was ever the same.

PETER: I would prefer it if we talked about the next seven or eight years as little as possible. It was a horrible time, and in a great many ways we’re still in the process of recovering from it.

They sent us to psychiatrists, and everybody asked us questions and talked to us and showed us ink blots and otherwise conspired to drive us insane. And it’s not particularly hard to drive a person insane. I’m sure if you take any normal healthy individual and send him to a funny farm and keep him there for a few months, you’ll have a lunatic on your hands. We’ve been in a variety of those institutions, from the ones that are like country clubs except that it’s hard to get out, to others that are more like prisons. And they’re all basically the same.

The result of this, of course, is that we did become crazy. They kept us apart and filled us full of guilt and institutionalized us and shunted us to first one doctor and then another, and we both flipped out in different ways. They weren’t complete breakdowns, but some of them were pretty good ones. Wanda tried to kill herself a couple of times. She still has scars on her wrists.

WANDA: I would love not to talk about that.

PETER: Fair enough. I want to convey as much as I can of that period without going into any more detail than I have to. I think the worst of it was that they kept us apart. Each of us was literally all the other had. Not just sexually, but in every way. Wanda was my other self. We had no secrets from each other.

WANDA: It was inconceivable for us to have secrets from each other.

PETER: Absolutely. Just inconceivable. We shared everything. We were slightly telepathic.

WANDA: We still are. And I would call it more than slight.

PETER: But it doesn’t prove out on Rhine tests. It’s not true ESP in that sense. Each of us generally knows what the other is thinking, but that’s because our minds are so close, our thoughts generally follow similar lines. And we’re very sensitive to each other’s moods, we have great sympathy in the real sense of the word.

For us to be separated, for our whole relationship to be thrown at us as something hideously shameful, was catastrophic for us. In a way it was better when one or both of us was under lock and key somewhere. At least that way the separation was surgically complete. But when we were both under one roof and still forbidden to do anything, and watched over constantly, and unable to be close and at the same time unable to stop wanting to be close

WANDA: It was very hard to take.

PETER: Impossible to take. And at the same time I realize that there wasn’t much else they could do.

WANDA: Oh, the hell there wasn’t!

PETER: What could they do?

WANDA: They could have left us the hell alone.

PETER: No, not really. You could have done that, in their position. But that’s not the way they were, that’s not the way they saw things. Look, we’re far advanced from their level. We have completely different views on certain things.

WANDA: On almost everything.

PETER: Granted. From our perspective, there’s nothing wrong with a brother and sister fucking. From theirs, which I grant you is a lot of crap, there was everything in the world wrong with it. I think they sincerely wanted what was best for us. This doesn’t take away from the fact that I also think they were the world’s worst parents, but their hearts were in the right place even if their heads weren’t.

WANDA: I could argue, but the hell with it.

PETER: Exactly. The hell with it.

I suppose it goes without saying that we got together every chance we had. I think I already mentioned that I managed to impregnate Wanda on one such occasion. There were many such occasions. Not as many as we could have wished, but as often as we could manage it.

We learned to put up a pretty good front. We learned to be very distant with each other whenever there was anybody around. And of course we would assure everybody — our parents, the doctors — that we were through with each other forever, that it was a horrible childhood mistake that could have had tragic consequences if we hadn’t nipped it in the bud, and that we fully realized the error of our ways.

WANDA: Sometimes this was true. That is, sometimes we did feel this way. You get brainwashed sooner or later. But eventually we would shake loose again and be ourselves, and being ourselves meant being together.

PETER: The funny thing is that they kept packing us off to places where sex really ran rampant. At one point they tried the boarding school bit — we each went off to a school designed to deal with difficult adolescents, and Wanda had her first homosexual experience at her school, and I had mine at my school, and this was evidently something perfectly all right, since they could ignore it, they didn’t have to look at it. It was perfectly fine for me to get fucked in the ass by this big son of a bitch I couldn’t stand the sight of, but it was wrong for me to make love to a girl I loved totally.

WANDA: There was even more sex at the funny farms. I never wanted it, either. I didn’t want to be with anyone but Peter. Strangely enough I didn’t mind doing it with other girls, I liked that well enough. It wasn’t anything compared to what I had with Peter, it seemed on another level entirely, but it was warm and friendly and I didn’t dislike it. With other boys, I found it really rotten. I couldn’t relate to them at all and didn’t want to. But in some of the institutions you didn’t have much choice. It was easier to go along with it than not. You could always be raped if you held out.

PETER: Your attitudes did change, though.

WANDA: That’s true. By the time I was, I guess, around twenty, I got past this to an extent. I started sleeping with boys and had occasional affairs. But I have never been completely satisfied by any man but Peter.

PETER: Even now?

WANDA: Yes.

PETER: Even when we swing with someone?

WANDA: Even then. I’ve told you all this often enough, haven’t I?

PETER: Yes, but I thought it might be part ego-food. I didn’t entirely believe you. I mean, I’ve seen you balling other guys, and either you’re an extraordinary actress or you have orgasms.

WANDA: I come, but there’s more to satisfaction than that. You know that. It’s possible to be more satisfied sometimes when you don’t have an orgasm than other times when you do. It’s that way for you too, isn’t it?

PETER: True. Coming isn’t a guarantee that the trip was good, and vice versa.

WANDA: Well, I can come with other men, but I can’t find it completely fulfilling.

PETER: I see. I thought you meant you couldn’t come, and I found that hard to believe.

WANDA: You know me better than that. I can come looking at a candle if I put my mind to it.

PETER: How about a picture of a candle?

WANDA: Probably.

WANDA: Here’s a funny thing. After they were both dead, after we were old enough to do what we wanted to do without anyone interfering in our lives, for the first time we voluntarily separated from one another. First Peter spent some time in Sweden and then Denmark studying furniture design. By the time he came back to the States I had left New York and was living in Chicago, working for a faggot decorator during the day and taking courses at U of C nights. You might think we would have finally taken advantage of the chance we had to be together, but it took us a long time to get back together again.

PETER: I think you used the word “brainwashing” earlier. This was part of it.

WANDA: Just part of it.

PETER: The other part was that we were going through a lot of changes. On the one hand we had some personal growth and development to undergo. Career-wise, for example. I really did want to get over to Scandinavia and learn why they could make chairs there that looked so damned much better than the chairs we make over here. Wanda also wanted to get into decorating in a meaningful way.

Beyond that, we were in a stock-taking period. We needed time to figure out how we really felt about each other. Correction — we knew how we felt about each other, knew we loved each other. What we didn’t know was what we intended to do about it.

There were a lot of big questions involved. Were we going to avoid each other for the rest of our lives? Were we going to live together and make love? Were we going to try to sublimate the whole thing, remain close but cut out the sex? The answers seem easy now, but the whole point is that they were not easy then, as screwed up as we were. We’d been through a very bad time, and it took a lot of settling before we were completely over it, if indeed we ever did get completely over it.

WANDA: Right before you went to Scandinavia, right before Peter went, we came very close to getting married.

PETER: That’s right, we did.

WANDA: We talked about it, and realized that a brother and sister can’t get married, but we also realized that we didn’t have to wear signs saying that we’re brother and sister. It would have been easy enough to take out a license and find some justice of the peace nearsighted enough to miss the family resemblance. I could have worn a dark wig or something.

PETER: You wouldn’t have had to. The average minister would hardly suspect a potential bride and groom of being brother and sister. It would never occur to him.

WANDA: I wonder how often it happens. Does it ever happen? Actual marriages?

JWW: As a matter of fact, I know of a case.

PETER: It’s not surprising. It must happen rather often. Do the people you know have children?

JWW: No.

PETER: It would be interesting to know of some who do. We’re past that now, the whole question of children, but at the time it was on our minds quite a bit. Not only as a practical consideration but because we had both heard at great length how the mating of siblings inevitably produced inferior children. I understand that this doesn’t have to happen, only if both carry an unfortunate recessive gene, but it seems as though it’s likely to happen.

The effect of this was that it did lend support to the arguments that our sort of thing is unnatural, contrary to nature. Now I could never accept this intellectually — I don’t think Nature gives a damn about what people do, certainly not what they do in bed. But I suspect it was one of the things that weighed rather heavily on our minds when we talked about getting married, and when we decided instead to let ourselves drift apart, at least for the time being.

JWW: Both Peter and Wanda mentioned several times that they were no longer interested in having children, problems of inbreeding notwithstanding. They went to great lengths to insist, to themselves more than to me, that children were the last thing they wanted for any number of reasons.

The frequent intrusion of this topic in our conversations led me to suspect that the issue of issue was by no means as settled as they prefer to think. I would be not at all surprised should they someday have children, either naturally or through adoption.

PETER: When I got back to the States, I found myself living very intensely, but very much on a day-to-day basis. The only part of my life with any sense of direction was my work. I made a good business connection and began doing rather well, and I channeled a tremendous amount of energy into my work. Socially, I was very active and striking out in all directions at once. New York, for an unattached young man with a certain amount of poise and a decent income, is by no means a hard place to take. I partied a great deal, I dated what seems in retrospect a staggering number of lovely girls, and I took most of them to bed.

I hardly ever wanted to see them again. A new girl, I could always manifest enthusiasm for a new girl, but once I had spent a night with her I would lose interest. I don’t think I had any distaste for past conquests. More likely I was looking for a perfect girl and not finding her.

Before very long I began getting involved with the swinging scene. I had had a taste of this in Copenhagen. There was a party, mostly students, where everyone fucked in the same room, and by the end of the evening a good deal of group groping and cluster-fucking took place, and the usual switching of partners. I had found this enormously exciting at the time, and I don’t remember quite how I found out about the orgies around New York, but someone or other invited me to bring a girl and join the fun. I called a recent conquest, a girl I figured might be game for this sort of thing. It turned out she was an old hand at orgies and would love to try some new people — on the orgy scene, you know, you quickly tire of the same old faces. Or the same old genitalia, I should say.

I went to the orgy, the party, whatever you want to call it, and I enjoyed myself immensely. I found it an exhilarating experience and a very useful release.

There was something, I don’t know, say, an honesty to it that I found preferable to the basic hypocrisy of dating. When I took a girl out I had to pretend an interest in her that I rarely felt. I had to relate to her as a person, or at least give the appearance of relating to her as a person. Now I’ll be the first to say that a full relationship yields the best sort of sexual relationship, but how often are two people capable of that? And how many persons is one person capable of relating to in any substantial way?

In an orgy — or in the smaller swinging scenes, two or three couples — there’s no pretense. If you relate as good friends, that’s a bonus. If you don’t, if you just relate sexually, that after all is what you’re all there for. The sex is what it’s all about.

I found it very satisfying, for example, that I would tumble a girl at a party without knowing her name or her knowing mine, without either of us giving a damn. Or to carry it a step further, I remember one party where I saw a girl with long black hair and immense pear-shaped breasts kneeling on the floor, on her hands and knees actually, and going down on a fellow. This was aesthetically pleasing to begin with, the lines of her body, the way her breasts hung like ripe fruit, the way her hair flowed.

I went up behind her and took her from the rear, slipped right into her, and she went on giving full oral attention to her gentleman friend. She rotated her bottom in the nicest way. By the time I finished he had still not come, although she had, in a delicious shuddering spasm, so she went right on blowing him while I slipped out as easily as I had slipped in. And I went off to get a drink or something, and she never even knew who it was that had obliged her.

I got to talking to her later during a lull, and she was quite charming and said nothing to indicate that she knew I was her phantom lover. I almost told her but decided that I liked the idea of leaving things as they were, of having had her without her knowing it.

I could go on laying out reasons why I found orgies appealing, and they would all be true enough, but perhaps the basic one of all is the simplest and most obvious. I’m a kinky person, and when that’s what you are, group sex is sensational. It really is. It’s not just what you do or how much of it you can have, but there’s the whole sex-charged atmosphere of the scene, all those bodies, everything. When you’re not doing you can watch... It’s more fun than television, you know.

But the best part about orgies, as far as I’m concerned, is that but for attending an orgy I would not have met my beautiful and exciting wife.

GRACE: My life before I met Peter was drifting, really. That is what I did. I drifted. I never really made a decision or set out to do anything in particular. I put out for anybody who asked in high school, just did what I felt like, you know. I mean, I wasn’t much. I never thought of myself as very much at all.

PETER: You were much, baby.

GRACE: I never thought so. Nobody ever thought so. I was, you know, I was a cunt. A pair of tits and a cunt.

PETER: And so much more inside.

GRACE: I didn’t know this and neither did anybody else. And so as far as what I wanted to do with my life, well, I guess I didn’t think about it. I got through school and I drifted. The Coast, and then New York.

I was a pretty girl who put out. It’s very easy to drift when that’s what you are. There are always men around to do things for you. And it’s no hassle to make money. I was always lazy, you know, I had nothing in particular I was good at, no job I was interested in. No career, you know. And I don’t think it ever occurred to me that what I ought to do was go out and get a job. I mean, what for?

But for a girl who will do things there’s no need. Like pose for sex pictures. If you’ve got a fair face and figure you can make fifty dollars in a couple of hours of posing. You don’t even have to ball anybody. The photographer will generally make a pass if he’s straight, and I would ball him or not depending how I felt about him, but if you didn’t that didn’t mean you lost the work. It was optional — you do it if you want.

And you can get work in movies. I mean the sexploitation films, the nudies and “beavers” and like that. Let’s face it, I’m not an actress. I’m pretty pathetic, I can’t stand to see myself on the screen because of the way I deliver a line. Like completely wooden. But in these films it doesn’t make that much difference if you can act or not. The major parts, it helps, but there are always loads of minor parts for girls and they don’t expect Katharine Hepburn. You walk around with your clothes off, you pet, you pretend to be screwing—

WANDA: Don’t they ever really screw?

GRACE: Well, as a matter of fact, some of the sexploitation producers do insist that you actually screw, although they don’t show it on camera. There are certain things they can’t show, like a male with an erection, for example. They can show a penis but not if it’s erect.

PETER: Talk about castration complexes.

GRACE: The producers say this gives realism even if they don’t show it on screen. Now nobody believes this. Sometimes I think it’s easier to look as though you’re screwing if you’re not. But they get certain kicks this way. Watching, or some of them will act in their own films.

In the stag films, of course, anything goes. I’ve been in, I think, it’s six of them. What they call hardcore pornography. I have a print of one, I ought to run it for you sometime.

So this is what I did. I started off living with a guy in the city and when he split I kept the place myself. Just a couple of rooms in the East Village. The rent was like thirty dollars a month. Cheap. If I went a month without working it was no big deal. I would work for a couple of days and make a couple of hundred and that would last me a long time.

Sometimes I think that with my attitude it’s a wonder I didn’t start tricking. That I never became a whore. I did once go to bed with a man specifically for money. That was when I was living with a musician in L.A. and he said that this man had come on to him and wanted to ball me, that he would give me twenty dollars. I didn’t need the money but this man I was with, he wanted me to do it. He said he dug the whole idea, just that I should do it once. I did it to please him. It was no big deal to me one way or the other. Afterward he gave me the twenty and my man and I went right out to spend it. We spent the whole twenty on a tie for him and a scarf for me. I don’t know what happened to the scarf. I must have left it somewhere, I haven’t seen it in years.

The party scene, the orgies, it was natural that I would start getting involved with that. I was the type of girl you could invite to an orgy and figure she would probably go along with it. Just a typical stupid cunt without a thought in her head, and that nobody had to give a thought to.

PETER: The night we met. It was a small party, I think four couples and two extra girls. It’s so rare to find extra girls at those sets. That’s the way everybody I prefers it, but usually it winds up the other way around, with extra men. A man can’t get in without a girl — girls are called tickets in some circles — but sometimes a man will bring a girl who doesn’t know what kind of a party it’s going to be, and she leaves, and then you can’t really throw him out.

I’m getting away from the point. Well. I went to this set, got there a little late, and I walked into the room and looked around. Things were in the undressed-but-not-balling stage. People were sitting around talking, and on one couch I saw Grace talking to a guy with a beard. She was playing with him in a sort of casual way.

It was love at first sight.

There is no other way to explain it. I took one look at her and it was absolute magic. I fell completely in love with her. I didn’t know the first thing about her and it couldn’t have mattered less to me. I wanted her. Not just to take to bed, but to take home and keep. She could have had a husband and ten children and it wouldn’t have mattered to me, I would have taken her away from all of them and kept her for myself. It was an immediate intense attraction wholly unlike anything I had ever experienced.

I had never believed in this sort of thing. Not for a moment. But when it happens to you it doesn’t help much to tell yourself you don’t believe in it. It’s like not believing in the principle of the internal combustion engine and getting hit by a truck. You become a believer in a hurry.

I went straight over to her. I paid absolutely no attention to the guy she was handling. I looked at her, and she turned from him and looked up at me, and our eyes locked together.

GRACE: He owned me. One look, and Peter owned me.

PETER: She let go of the bearded one and stood up. She said the bedrooms were in back. I said, “No, get your clothes on, we’ll go to my place.”

GRACE: I had come with a fellow but I didn’t even bother to tell him I was leaving. I was like hypnotized. If Peter had told me to walk out the window I think I would have done it. Absolutely. I never felt anything like this before.

His apartment, I had never seen anything like it. It was this place. I couldn’t believe he lived here all by himself. It’s big enough for the three of us now and he was all alone in it. And the furnishings, and the way everything went together so perfectly. And the view across the river.

But that was just part of the setting, the magic, the whole feeling that something new was happening. It was nothing compared to Peter himself.

I was really a person to him.

I can’t explain this very well. I’m not good with words, sometimes I know what I mean and can’t get the words right. Other times I even have trouble figuring out what I mean, never mind finding words for it.

PETER: We couldn’t get enough of each other. I had trouble believing what was happening, and couldn’t possibly believe it would last. I figured that I would have to screw this marvelous girl as much as I could before the thrill wore off, because I might never experience anything like this again. We fucked incessantly. After two days it became obvious that the glow was not wearing off, and I told her she was never going to leave. She said something about going back for her things. I didn’t want her to go back. I gave her money and sent her out to buy new things, then stopped her and insisted on going out with her to pick out her clothes.

GRACE: Peter picks out all my clothes.

PETER: For two weeks we were together constantly. I was in the habit of doing most of my work at home, so they didn’t miss me at the office, but I wasn’t doing any work during those weeks. It wasn’t just bed. We talked for hours, hours on end, talked on and on about everything.

GRACE: No one had ever bothered to talk to me before. People would talk at me, but no one ever talked to me. I was just this stupid cunt and it never occurred to anybody that I would have anything to say worth listening to. In fact I never thought I had anything to say.

Peter was the first person ever to take me seriously, and because of him I finally was able to take myself seriously. I really had always believed I was stupid and shallow, and during all those years I was. Peter changed me.

PETER: Like a butterfly from its chrysalis.

GRACE: I am by no means an intelligent person. I’m not. Peter and Wanda are both brilliant, and I can’t help feeling slightly dumb in comparison to them. But I am not as stupid as I always thought I was.

I can’t believe it was all there inside me just waiting. It’s so hard to believe. And if I hadn’t met Peter it would have never come out.

PETER: I hadn’t ever really talked to anyone but Wanda.

GRACE: I never even talked to myself. Never let myself have any real thoughts. Until I met Peter.

PETER: I married her a month after I met her. We could have gotten married sooner than that but there was never time, we were always either talking or making love. Finally we got around to getting married. A month doesn’t seem like an unduly long courtship, but in our case it seemed more like a year than a month because we were interacting so intensely in every way.

Before we were married we talked about swinging, about whether or not we ought to continue to do this. At first we thought no, we didn’t need it. We had such a complete thing ourselves that it didn’t seem necessary.

That’s the goddamned Protestant ethic operating, of course. No matter how liberated you think you are, old habits of thought die hard. Necessary, for Christ’s sake. None of the best things in life are really necessary. Who the hell cares if something is a necessity or not? The fact remained that swinging was something we had both always enjoyed intensely, and why on earth should we force ourselves to give up something we both enjoyed?

GRACE: I was afraid at one point that you would want me less if you went with other girls. Or that you wouldn’t want me if I went with other men. But that was just stupid. And when we realized that what we had been thinking was stupid we made a date to party with another couple that Peter knew.

PETER: This was before the wedding. I felt it would be worthwhile to find out how it went before going any further. It seemed obvious that we were going to resume swinging to one extent or another sooner or later, and if it was going to change our feelings about each other in any way, it seemed sensible to find this out before we were married, not after. I was confident that it wouldn’t change anything but it was only common sense to check it out.

GRACE: It didn’t change a thing. It got us over being anxious about the subject, that’s all. We had a good time with the other couple and then we came home and had a good time with ourselves, and nothing was changed.

PETER: I didn’t call Wanda until after we were married. We flew down to San Juan for a week-long honeymoon, and after we were back I called Wanda in Chicago. I had been putting this off longer than I should have. Obviously I was apprehensive as to how she would take it. We had been in touch from time to time since I returned to the States, mostly over the phone because neither of us has ever been much at writing letters.

I called her finally and told her.

WANDA: I was very happy for him. That was my immediate reaction. Also I was happy that he had been able to find someone with whom he could have a complete relationship, not only for his sake but for my own. It seemed to mean that I had the same thing to look forward to. In other words, if he could love someone other than me, I could perhaps love someone other than him.

I wished them well and spoke briefly with Grace and went out shopping for a wedding present. And then about ten days later a strange thing happened. I became desperately depressed. I started crying hysterically in the middle of the afternoon and had to go home from my job and take to my bed like a Victorian lady with the vapors. And for the next week I was in an amazing state. Enormous anxieties — I couldn’t cross a street without being firmly convinced that a car would careen wildly around the comer and mash me to the pavement. I worried about everything. Earthquakes, for God’s sake. I was in Chicago and I was afraid there was going to be an earthquake. This might make sense in California — everybody knows the whole place is falling into the ocean, but Chicago?

I was by no means blind to the reason for all this. It was clear enough.

It was Peter. He was in love and he was married and I didn’t have him any more.

In a sense I hadn’t had him in a long time. I hadn’t had him with me. But that was just temporary, you know, and whether I knew it consciously or not I was always certain inside that sooner or later we would get back together again. And even if we were apart we had continued to belong to each other, he was still a part of me, and now he was gone and it was like losing a part of myself. He was still the only thing I had to hang on to, the only constant in my life, and now he was gone and I didn’t know how to handle it.

I wanted to see them but I didn’t know if they would want to see me. I wasn’t sure what I should do, and I kept waiting for things to get better, and they kept getting worse instead of better.

I couldn’t function. I quit my job and stayed in my apartment day after day. It was all I could do to force myself to go out now and then and have something to eat. I had no interest, no appetite.

I wanted to kill myself. I had been vaguely suicidal from time to time in the past, but those occasions were always impulsive adolescent things. Now I was thinking about it, dwelling on it at great length. The main thing that stopped me, outside of that instinct for self-preservation which is what keeps us all taking one breath after another, was the thought of what this would do to Peter. If he knew my death was suicide he would inevitably blame himself for it and it would probably ruin his marriage, even his whole life. I couldn’t have that. I couldn’t louse up his life as well as taking my own.

There’s a saying to the effect that thoughts of suicide help people get through a lot of bad nights. This was true enough in my case. I think the solemn contemplation of suicide helped me realize that what I might as well do was go on living, and I tried to do this.

When I was in somewhat better shape, I decided to go to New York for a week and visit the two of them. I had to face them, I had to meet Grace. I didn’t know if she knew anything about me or not, the role Peter had played in my life and I in his. I also had to see how I felt about Peter now.

GRACE: Of course I knew everything about Wanda. Except that I didn’t know how Peter felt about her.

PETER: I didn’t know myself.

GRACE: As far as how I felt about her, in the first place I was terrified of her. Not that she would take Peter away. I didn’t think of that very much. But I was sure that she would hate me, and if she didn’t like me I felt it might affect how Peter felt about me. And also I knew how much Peter loved her and I wanted her to like me and approve of me because she was a part of Peter’s life and I wanted to share Peter’s life completely.

As far as how I felt about the two of them having sex together for so many years, I don’t think I thought there was anything wrong with it. I had never had any brothers or sisters and had never thought much about that kind of thing. As far as whether or not it was right or wrong, if Peter thought something was right, then it was right for me.

I must sound pretty simple-minded when I say something like that, but it was the way I felt. It’s mostly the way I feel now. I tend to take Peter’s word for things. I know I’m not his equal in most ways, or Wanda’s equal—

WANDA: Oh, come off it, honey. You still downgrade yourself all the time. You’ve got a good enough mind. Don’t keep putting yourself down.

GRACE: Well, I’m the only one around here who can cook worth a damn. That ought to count for something.

JWW: Wanda stayed for only a week on that first trip to New York. She had wanted to stay at a hotel but Peter and Grace were both adamant in insisting she stay with them.

The week seems to have gone rather well. Wanda was relieved to discover that she liked Grace very much and that the girl seemed to be perfect for Peter. She was also happy to find that she and Peter were still close and that the marriage did not seem to have changed his feelings for her, or hers for him.

Sex played no part whatsoever in the week’s entertainment. It was on everyone’s mind to a considerable extent, but no one considered saying or doing anything about it. Peter and Wanda seem to have wanted each other during the week, but in a somewhat remote fashion.

Grace liked Wanda at once and found herself more at ease with her than she had expected to be. She saw Wanda as a sort of female version of Peter and was attracted to the qualities she found so attractive in her husband.

The visit went very well, to the relief of all three. But they were also all somewhat relieved when the week ended and Wanda returned to Chicago.

PETER: It was about a year before we saw Wanda again. In the meantime, our life together went along magnificently. Grace and I never stopped being good together. If anything we improved in every respect, physically and emotionally, everything. The improvement would have been more noticeable if things hadn’t been so perfect from the beginning.

She began taking odd jobs of work from time to time. She was hesitant about this, not knowing how I would take it. She didn’t want to bring it up for that reason. God knows we didn’t need the money, but she felt she ought to be doing something now and then, contributing somehow.

But she needed a certain amount of life apart from me, however much we had going for us together. At first she tried the usual sort of housewife busy work. She took a couple of courses at the New School. This bored her to tears. She tried painting, then took some sculpting classes. She went to concerts while I was working. She enjoyed some of this and hated some of it, but what she really wanted was now and then to do what she had done — to pose for a photographer or act in a movie.

And I felt she ought to try it. I certainly wasn’t going to be jealous because she fucked some moron in a stag film. When we swung, which we did on the average of once every two weeks, I enjoyed watching her with other men. Jealousy is for insecure people.

WANDA: I guess I should have been jealous then, because I was certainly insecure. I went back to Chicago convinced that all I had to do was find a man who would be for me what Grace was for Peter. Suffice it to say that I didn’t find one, although God knows I auditioned enough candidates for the role. I wound up in a very messy affair with a married man and succeeded in breaking up his home, although by the time things got to that stage I had already realized that he and I couldn’t possibly work together. He left his wife and children and then I broke up with him, and ultimately he came to my apartment with a gun.

I don’t know if he intended to use it, or if he would have gone through with it, but who can say for sure? I went out through a window while he was banging on the door and used a neighbor’s phone to call the police.

After that I felt I had to get out of Chicago. Nothing was going right and I no longer felt good about the city. I was too completely alone and at too many loose ends. I wanted to go back to New York. There didn’t seem to be any reason to stay away. I was in touch with Peter and Grace — I would call them or they would call me several times a month. I never planned on living here with them but I felt it would be good for me to be in the same city. If nothing else, it would save on the phone bills.

They insisted I stay here at least until I could find a suitable apartment. I didn’t put up much of an argument. I always hated hotels.

This time we were all more immediately relaxed with each other. My trip earlier had gotten us past the reunion bit and the introduction bit both at once, and now Grace and I were almost old friends. Neither of us saw the other as a threat. I settled in and started apartment hunting and began to realize how impossible the housing shortage has become around here. I was quite honestly anxious to get a place of my own, but it was impossible to find anything decent.

PETER: I was conscious of a real yen for Wanda from the minute I picked her up at the airport. When I kissed her hello it was all I could do to keep my tongue in my own mouth.

WANDA: I felt the same way.

PETER: This would have disturbed me a year earlier. Now it amused me. I think that’s the best way to put it. I had come to take my own reactions to virtually all situations a good deal more casually. I enjoyed observing myself, my reactions to one thing or another.

WANDA: You grew up a lot. Marriage to Grace had quite an effect on you.

PETER: There’s no question about it. The detached view didn’t make the yen go away, however. I couldn’t put it out of my mind. Every time I saw Wanda I wanted her. I wondered whether part of this might not be habit — I had been in the habit of wanting her, and we hadn’t been with each other sexually in so long.

GRACE: I had this feeling that something was building up with the two of them. But I wasn’t sure if maybe it wasn’t all in my mind. Anyway, I liked having Wanda around. I felt almost like a sister to her. When I was a kid I used to imagine what it would be like to have a big sister.

WANDA: I wonder if I would have eventually made a move of my own. I had decided definitely not to, but a few more days of frustration might have made me change my mind. Because I definitely wanted Peter and there was no way to avoid realizing as much. The bill of goods I had half-managed to sell myself — that somewhere out there was a man for me — I didn’t believe this any more. I had tried enough men to convince me it just wouldn’t work that way. There was a man for me, but he happened to be my brother.

I slept late one morning, and when I woke up Grace had left. Peter told me over breakfast that she had gone to pose for some pictures. I knew vaguely that she was a model but had no idea just what sort of work she did, fashion or what, and I said something to this effect. Peter got up from the table and came back with a small stack of photographs. He flipped them onto the table and told me to have a look.

I was genuinely shocked. They were all deliciously pornographic. Grace with a man, Grace with a man and another girl, Grace with two men, Grace with a girl, with, as they say, nothing left to the imagination.

I looked up at Peter and he was grinning. “You let her do this?”

“Why not?” he said. “She enjoys it. Easy work, good pay, no withholding taxes.” But didn’t he mind?

He said he didn’t, and then he began to explain that he and Grace were in the habit of swinging with other couples. I was shocked all over again. Swinging was not a wholly new idea to me, I had been to fairly freewheeling parties myself, but I wasn’t prepared for such a revelation concerning my little brother and his wife. It stunned me and I didn’t know how to react.

PETER: You were remarkably cool about it.

WANDA: I didn’t feel remarkably cool. I felt very strange. And confused. I didn’t know whether or not this meant that Peter and I could be lovers again.

I excused myself and went into the bathroom to take a shower. I was standing under the hot water spray still a little shaky from what I had learned when the shower door opened and Peter stepped in beside me.

He said, “Do you remember when we used to take baths together, Sis? I always enjoyed that.”

I said, “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Sure,” he said. He took a bar of soap and rubbed it over my breasts. “I’m washing my sister,” he said. “I’m soaping you up.”

I stood there and he worked the soap over my breasts and down across my belly. He lathered my pubic hair. I was trembling from head to foot. I wanted him so intensely I couldn’t bear it. He kept soaping me all over.

We got out of the shower. We didn’t even dry ourselves off. We went straight into my bedroom, all wet and slippery, not giving a damn about anything but our need for each other.

I came the instant he entered me. And when it was finally over and I lay gasping for breath with his head pillowed on my breast, I felt the most overwhelming relief. We had needed each other for so long, so very long.

And no other man ever made me feel this way. I had always thought that this was so, but it had been so long since I had been with Peter that I sometimes wondered if I wasn’t remembering it as having been better than it really was. But no, we were something special together.

PETER: It was her reaction to the pictures that made me go into the shower with her. I knew we both wanted each other and that we were going to have each other sooner or later, and this seemed as good a time as any.

WANDA: I asked if he would tell Grace. He said he didn’t know. I told him I couldn’t come between them.

“No one can come between Grace and me,” he said. “And no one can come between us, either.”

PETER: I knew I would have to tell Grace sooner or later. But I found myself putting it off. I was afraid she might not be able to handle it.

This might seem strange, in view of the fact that we both embraced swinging wholeheartedly and with no feelings of jealousy on either side. But this was different. Swinging, after all, is essentially loveless sex, variety for its own sake, an occasional romp that has no emotional implications. Wanda and I were not only balling. We were also in love, and I was afraid Grace would feel threatened.

So for longer than I had intended Wanda and I would get together when Grace was out of the apartment. You know, thinking back on it, I wonder if the idea of having each other on the sly didn’t hold some nostalgic appeal of its own. We had had to sneak around when we were kids, and maybe we were recapturing some of that special excitement. It was our secret and we were having fun with it.

After about a month I told Grace.

GRACE: I was just numb. Peter and I were alone when he told me. I just stood there and listened to him say that he had started sleeping with his sister again. I felt as though the bottom was falling out of my life. The floor was falling and I was in the middle of the air.

I said that I guessed he wouldn’t want me around any more and I would leave whenever he wanted.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I’ll never let you go. I told you that the night I met you, that I wanted to take you home and never let you go.”

“But you love her,” I said. “You always loved her, and you married me because you couldn’t have her anymore, and now you have her back again and you don’t need me.”

“Of course I need you,” he said. “I need you now more than ever.”

I didn’t know whether I should believe him or not. I thought maybe he was saying this because he didn’t want to hurt me. I started to cry and Peter began making love to me. It went through my mind that this would be the last time we would ever make love.

PETER: It wasn’t, was it?

GRACE: But I thought it would be. And then afterward while I was lying there feeling all warm and together, Peter explained how he felt about me and about Wanda. I tried to think out how I felt about it. I didn’t mind if he was with other girls when we swung, and he didn’t mind if I was with other men. And I knew how deeply he and Wanda loved each other, and I was glad for this because it is beautiful to love someone that deeply.

It also came to me that it would be good for us all to be all three living together. Because Wanda gives Peter something that I can’t give him. The two of them, the way their minds work together, the conversations they have. I’m not putting myself down, honestly, but it would have to be boring for Peter to have nobody brighter than me to talk to for the rest of his life. I know you enjoy talking to me, Peter, but you know you can have a different kind of conversation with Wanda and that you have a need for it.

WANDA: When I returned home that day Peter was out and Grace was starting dinner. She came out from the kitchen to make a pair of drinks. We went over to the window to study the view, and she quietly told me what Peter had told her. I knew he was going to tell her but I didn’t know when.

I turned to her and my eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Grace, you must hate me very much,” I said. “But Peter loves you. His love for me doesn’t affect his love for you.”

She said she knew, and that everything was going to be all right.

We hugged each other, and it came to me that I wanted to kiss her.

We kissed.

I had had relations with girls at school and in mental institutions, and I think I may have said earlier that I was able to enjoy this. In fact for a long period of time I could relax more in sex with a girl than with a boy, any boy except Peter. But I had never felt comfortable kissing other girls. Somehow that seemed abnormally intimate, while a nice lazy sixty-nine was purely physical fun.

But I enjoyed kissing Grace. It started out as a warm sisterly embrace, and before either of us knew quite what the hell was happening it turned sexy. She put her tongue in my mouth.

GRACE: I didn’t plan it. It just happened.

WANDA: And I remember having the thought, This completes it, this closes the circle.

Of course I knew Grace had been with girls before. After all, I had seen those pictures. I suppose they must have put the idea of making love to her into my head, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

We went into her bedroom and got into the bed she shared with Peter. We rolled around in each other’s arms like a couple of giggling schoolgirls. I couldn’t get over how beautiful she was and how smooth her skin was. At one point we both said, “No wonder Peter loves you.” We both said it at precisely the same time and became hysterical about it.

It was so nice. When Grace comes she tastes like raw egg white.

GRACE: Oh, stop.

WANDA: Well, you do.

PETER: When I got home they were sitting together on the couch. I hadn’t known just what to expect, just how the confrontation would go, although I was hoping for the best. But I was immensely relieved to see them so much at peace with one another.

I said something like, “Well, you girls must have had a lot to talk about.”

And Wanda said, “We talked a little. But mostly we just balled each other.”

JWW: Since then the St. Johns have slept three in a bed, with no holds barred sexually. Grace and Wanda seem to complement one another well and Peter is devoted to both of them.

Swinging continues to play a part in their lives. The frequency of their sexual encounters with others is lower now and seems to have leveled off at one such meeting a month, with another single, couple, or group. Their participation in group sex is far more recreational than compulsive, and all three said they could get along without it easily enough but see no reason to deny themselves something they all find pleasurable. Peter mentioned that he would especially like to swing some time with a brother and sister combination. They have heard of a mother-daughter team with something of a reputation in East Coast swinging circles but have not yet been able to arrange a meeting with them.

All are very happy with the situation as it stands, and expect to continue in this fashion for the rest of their lives. Peter insists not only that it is natural for a brother and sister to have sex, but that it is unnatural for them not to. “If they had only left us alone to do as we wanted,” he says, “we could have been spared no end of grief. But I can’t feel too badly about it. At least it all worked out for us, for all of us.”

Bob & Carol & Whoever’s Handy

JWW: Bob and Carol Fessenden live in a split-level suburban house on the outskirts of Atlanta. Bob is a successful salesman of life insurance and mutual funds and an avid golfer. Carol paints in oils and acrylics, large geometrical abstractions characterized by a bold use of color. She has won prizes in shows throughout the Southeast and has sold several canvases through a local gallery.

At thirty-four, Bob looks like a former college football player who has managed to stay in better than average shape over the years. He has broad shoulders, a firm grip, and a salesman’s open face and easy smile. His hair is beginning to thin on top. He wears his sideburns fashionably long and dresses very well; like his wife, he buys his clothes in New York.

Carol is three years younger than her husband. She is small and dark, with strong features and bright brown eyes. While she too is a stylish dresser, her standard at-home garb consists of a peasant blouse with a scoop neckline and a pair of skintight paint-spattered blue jeans. She enjoys going barefoot around the house, and announced that she likes to do her housework in the nude.

The Fessendens have been married for ten years. In the second year of their marriage Carol gave birth to a Mongoloid idiot with other congenital defects as well. The child was placed in an institution and they have had no contact with it. Although they were assured that their chances of having additional normal children were as good as those of any other couple, the two decided the risk was too great to be undertaken, and Carol had her fallopian tubes tied shortly thereafter.

The Fessendens differ from other couples studied in the foregoing pages in several respects. At the time that I was able to see them, they had not formed a permanent troilistic relationship, although it was their hope to do so eventually. The other threesomes all came about through the interplay of personalities which ultimately led to a triangular relationship. With Bob and Carol, experiences with swinging led them to a preference for threesomes; thus the third party is chosen to fit the role rather than the role being designed to ft the person.

At one point I was prompted by these differences to omit Bob and Carol’s story from this book and confine it to the three threesomes already discussed. Further reflection convinced me that these very differences might serve to give the reader greater perspective on the topic of troilism.

A final argument clinched it — after all, the advertisements which the Fessendens run regularly in several swingers’ club bulletins invariably contain the phrase which serves as this volume’s title.

BOB: I guess we got into swinging in pretty much the same way most couples do. This was about three years ago, so we had been married seven years. That’s standard, isn’t it? The seven-year itch and all that.

CAROL: Except that it didn’t take you seven years to get the itch.

BOB: I don’t suppose it usually does. The average American male simply isn’t built for a steady diet of monogamy. Look at the animal kingdom. In most species, the male’s object is to knock up as many females as he possibly can. If you were a farmer and you had a bull that would only cover one particular cow, that bull would be hamburger overnight. Man is just another animal with an overdeveloped brain, and more often than not that brain gets in his way. It lets him think up rules for himself that go against his own basic animal nature.

CAROL: And if my husband’s got one thing, it’s a healthy animal nature.

BOB: Well, I’m proud of it. But the trouble is that we can’t go and live on desert islands. We’re all creatures of society. And the way society is structured, a man and a woman get married and live happily ever after. I guess it’s not hard to see that more people get married than live happily ever after. But for all its faults, marriage is necessary to our society. It’s the way things are. Sometimes I find myself sympathizing with these kids who want to tear the whole social order apart and build it over again. I’m not too crazy about the drugs they use or the way they wear their hair, but I find myself agreeing with them more than the average person in my position would probably do.

CAROL: I think swingers are generally more liberal that way. Not that their politics tend to be extreme, but that they are readier to appreciate someone else’s point of view than the run-of-the-mill civilian.

BOB: But when all is said and done, I don’t believe anybody’s going to tear down our social order. It’s changing, God how it’s changing, but certain things remain constant. And one of them is marriage. I know that, given the way things are, I wouldn’t be happy if I weren’t married.

Well, all of this is a roundabout way of getting to the point, which is that I did have a couple of affairs not too long after we were married. We were both very depressed after the baby was born and things turned out as they did, and Carol and I weren’t getting along as well as we had been, and I found myself on the prowl. I had a fling with a secretary in my regional office, and a brief affair with a policy-holder, and I spent one night with a high-class hooker at a convention in Miami Beach.

CAROL: I more or less knew he was catting around and I almost decided to have it out with him once or twice, but I swallowed my pride and kept it to myself. I knew it was common enough for men to cheat on their wives. My own parents were divorced because my father had another woman and my mother found out and made him give her a divorce. And several times after that my father told me privately that he had never wanted the divorce, that he loved Mother and wanted to stay with her and the other woman in his life never meant anything to him. He did subsequently remarry, but what he had always wanted was to stay with my mother. She never did marry again, so what did she get out of the whole thing? Just a life of loneliness, and that wasn’t what I wanted. It hurt me that Bob had to have somebody else, but I was determined that I wasn’t going to be a fool and ruin my life over it. I just waited for him to get it out of his system, and after awhile, just as I had known he was catting around, I also knew when he had stopped.

Then he started to get interested in swinging.

He was very cute about it. He brought home books and magazines on the subject and just happened to leave them around. Early in our life together he had brought home a cheap novel and just happened to leave it open to a page with an oral sex scene on it, and of course I read the scene. I had never done that to him before, but I was bright enough to take the hint and although we never mentioned the book I knew that he had left it for me with just that in mind, and he knew that the book had been where I got the idea.

So when these swinger magazines began turning up around the house, it wasn’t hard to guess what he had in mind.

I was terribly shocked. I knew the bare minimum about swinging, or wife-swapping as it was generally called in the magazine articles. I had read a little about it in women’s magazines, nothing very detailed or accurate, and then there were the standard nightclub jokes, usually some variation of the idea of a suburban party where the husbands draw keys from a hat or something like that.

None of this had ever seemed real to me. I could just imagine a group of our friends at the country club swapping wives and going to each other’s homes that way. It was so completely impossible. I never took it seriously. I supposed there were people who would do this, but certainly not nice people, not normal people.

And the idea that Bob would want me to have relations with other men. This really shocked me. I was a virgin when I met Bob, although I did sleep with him before we were married. He had had plenty of experience before he met me, which I felt was desirable, but I was always just as glad that I had been pure for him.

BOB: You never felt you’d missed out on anything?

CAROL: Oh, sometimes. In a vague general way. But I didn’t sit around sulking, and for the most part I was glad of the way things had happened. And I never considered having an affair after we were married. I did think about it when you were running around — the idea that sauce for the goose might be sauce for the gander, that it would be a way of getting even with you. But it seemed a childish way to do it. What would I be proving? And there was nobody I knew that I wanted to go to bed with anyway.

But now, seeing these books and magazines, I didn’t know what to think. I wanted to talk to him about it but I didn’t know how to begin or what to say or what I would say if he came right out and said this was what he wanted. So I put off talking to him, and in the meantime I read the books and articles.

Well, this did make a slight difference in my thinking. For one thing, it gave me a much better idea of what swinging was all about. I was thinking just in terms of games with the keys at this point, of swapping partners with friends of ours, and so I had a very narrow view of the swinging scene. I learned for the first time, for instance, that the typical swinging date was with some strangers you met through the mail, and that you went to their house or they came to your house and you had a pleasant social evening and then switched partners. This somehow made it seem far more palatable to me. I couldn’t see myself getting involved in this with someone I knew socially, but with a stranger who was in the same boat, I could see how that might work.

I also began to realize that the average swinging couple were people in the same general situation as us. Couples who had been married for a few years or more and who had gradually had the excitement go out of their sexual life. And I couldn’t deny that this was happening with us. In the books, couple after couple told the same opening story, the same pattern. I thought about how much less often we had sex these days and how so much of the time it was just the same as always. The freshness and excitement wasn’t completely gone, but it was going fast.

Now some of the books he had left around for me were nothing much more than pornography. Very crudely written and obviously stories some writer had made up. They pretended to be case histories but you could tell that they weren’t. And there was one that was supposed to be the autobiography of a swinger, but it was just one sex scene after the other with lots of description. Some, though, you could tell were true. They might have excessive descriptions because I guess that’s how books are sold, but the truth rang true. One was a book about swinging by a married couple in California who were swingers themselves, and who told their own story as well as the stories of some other people they knew.

And in this book in particular I was impressed over and over by the way couples explained that swinging not only brought excitement into their lives but improved their marriages. I had a little trouble believing this at first. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

One other thing I’ll have to admit is that the books got me hot. Partly the sexy descriptions themselves, and partly the whole idea of doing this, of swinging with another couple. I got very hot, and I would find myself thinking about this more and more, and when Bob got home I met him at the door wearing a sheer nightgown and carrying two martinis, and we had the drinks in the bedroom and I just about raped him.

BOB: She was really wild.

CAROL: It was the best we had been together in ages, and I wasn’t fool enough to doubt that it was reading those books that had made the difference. So while he was lying there getting his breath back to normal, I asked him just what he had in mind with the swinger books.

BOB: I guess I hemmed and hawed.

CAROL: I just guess you did.

BOB: Well, I was still recovering from your greeting, and the question took me by surprise.

CAROL: I told him I had read all the books, and that I wondered if that was really what he wanted for us to do. He said he just thought the books were interesting, that the whole idea was interesting. I said it looked to me as though he was more than just interested.

BOB: I asked her how she felt about it. She said she didn’t know because it was such a completely new idea to her. She wanted to know if I wouldn’t be unhappy at the idea of her with another man.

CAROL: He said he would be pleased for me to be enjoying myself that way. And that it would be better for both of us to do this sort of thing openly than to carry on affairs on the sly.

BOB: To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Carol being with somebody else. It did bother me to a degree, but I found the whole idea of swinging so exciting, so attractive in so many ways, that I wanted to give it a try and see what my feelings would be.

CAROL: We talked about all of this for hours. It was at this time Bob confessed to me about his three affairs, although the one night with the prostitute... you couldn’t really call that an affair. But in a way that part bothered me the most, that he would need variety so much that he would have to pay money to a whore who would just go through the motions of sex with him.

BOB: That gal went through some pretty good motions, honey.

CAROL: I was glad that we were talking about these things because they had been on my mind for so long. And talking this way made us both feel closer and more loving. We wound up that night getting some of the magazines, including a club bulletin that I had not yet seen, and we went through them looking at the advertisements and just speculating which ads we might answer if we did decide to give this a try. There were several ads that looked promising, couples around our own age and in this area who seemed to want the kind of thing that we wanted, a quiet evening of two couples.

BOB: I suggested that maybe we might get in touch with one of them and explain that we were newcomers, and that we would like to get together with them and discuss things, but with no strings attached. That way if either of us felt that it went against the grain, or if something about the other couple didn’t appeal to us, we would have a ready-made out.

CAROL: I liked that idea. We decided to sleep on it, and we made love for a second time that night, which was something we hadn’t done in I don’t know how long. The next day I got so excited thinking about the whole thing that I surprised Bob by writing a letter to the couple that sounded best from their ad. I had it all ready when he came home, along with snapshots of ourselves.

And we sent it off — you probably know how that works, you put your letter in an unaddressed envelope and then put that in another envelope and mail it to the club, along with a dollar forwarding fee. The clubs make their money forwarding letters, and some of the better ones do make an effort to police their lists and clear out objectionable people.

We sent the letter off, and after that we were tremendously anxious to hear from the couple we wrote to. Bob would call me every day when the mail came to ask if I had gotten a letter from them. And finally — it took about two weeks — we received a letter from this couple in Charleston with a photograph of the two of them and a very nice letter.

Now it’s only since then that I’ve realized how lucky we were.

BOB: Absolutely a first class case of beginner’s luck. We sent out one letter and got an answer to it, and it doesn’t usually work that way. A large percentage of the ads are just from jerks who want to get letters, or people who back out at the last moment. Or else an advertiser will get swamped with letters and he can’t possibly answer them all. Or you’ll get an answer, but it’s an old or unattractive or vulgar couple, or a single man posing as a couple, or any of a number of things that can go wrong. But we lucked out. This couple was truly charming, and reading their letter I was impressed how much like us they were. They had been married about as long, and he had a Chevrolet agency in Charleston, and they had been swinging for a little less than a year. He was a tall good-looking guy and she was a knockout blonde built like something straight out of the pages of Playboy. She was just wearing the bottom half of a bikini in the photo they sent along.

CAROL: Bob was practically drooling.

BOB: Let’s just say I was impressed. I was even more impressed by the letter because it was obvious that these were intelligent and civilized people. They understood completely that we wanted a no-strings arrangement and suggested that we come to their house so that we could leave easily if that was what we wanted.

As far as I was concerned, I knew that I wanted us to swing with them.

CAROL: I felt pretty much the same way, but I was a little less certain.

BOB: They included their phone number, so I called Ray and we set up a date for that Saturday. We went there and got along fine. There was no pressure and it was perfectly enjoyable right from the beginning. Ray and I compared notes, and it turned out coincidentally enough that he played defensive tackle for South Carolina about the same time I played for Georgia Tech, which meant we were probably on the same field at the same time, although we had never known each other. Carol also got along very well with Ray’s wife, Irene.

CAROL: We had a signal worked out. If I decided yes, I would say something to Bob about did he remember to leave a light on in the house so that burglars wouldn’t know we were out. And if I decided no I would remind him he had a golf date in the afternoon. At one point I almost forgot the whole thing because I was enjoying the conversation so much, and I forgot what brought it up but here I was jabbering away about Bob’s golf game, and Bob gave me a look—

BOB: I thought she was building up to call the whole thing off, and I couldn’t believe it because she was having so much fun.

CAROL: And in the middle of the sentence I realized what I was saying, and I stopped cold and said, “But that reminds me, Bob — did you leave a light on for the burglars?”

BOB: At which point the conversation stopped cold, and Ray and Irene looked as though they thought they had a couple of nuts on their hands. I just started laughing. “That means she’s decided she wants to swing,” I announced to everybody. “We were going to be subtle as hell about it, but my wife got carried away.”

Actually, this helped break the ice because it gave us all something to laugh about. And there was music playing, and Ray asked Carol to dance, and I danced with Irene, and things just went naturally from there. They had a couple of kids but had boarded them with Irene’s mother for the evening, which was their standard arrangement whenever they went swinging, whether they had a couple to their house or went somewhere else.

Well, it was a great evening. It was even better than I had expected, and Irene was as imaginative in bed as she was beautiful. Finally we drove home and got so excited telling each other about the evening that we stopped at a motel on the way and made love, and then made love all over again when we got home.

JWW: For the next few months, Bob and Carol followed a typical routine for new swingers. After their first markedly successful experience, they began answering a great many ads and setting up dates once a week. Some of these meetings were occasionally less than ideal but were never disappointing enough to cool their enthusiasm for swinging. They saw the Charleston couple several more times, had repeat dates with some of the other couples, and limited themselves to single meetings with those couples with whom they had less rapport.

On the second date with Ray and Irene, Ray suggested that all four undress in the same room together and watch a stag film. Bob and Irene petted during the movie, as did Ray and Carol, and when the film ended, the lovemaking was confined to one room rather than the couples going to separate bedrooms. From that time on, this became Bob and Carol’s preferred mode of swinging.

CAROL: Once you become used to this, to all being together it’s not nearly as enjoyable to separate and couple off. In a funny way it gets so that it almost feels like cheating on your mate to be off by yourself at a time like that. You get a much greater feeling of closeness when you all stay together and have sex openly in front of one another.

BOB: You also have the fun of watching, and I mean wholesome watching, not the peeping Tom variety. You participate and watch at the same time.

CAROL: I really enjoy watching Bob with another woman. I had thought that this would be something to really bring out the jealous streak in me. That’s not what happened at all. I get a real charge out of it.

Also, when you are together like that, you sort of change partners over and over again. You make love to each other in addition to the other couple. This also gives more of a feeling of togetherness. And there are all sorts of physical things about the four of you together, like a man may kiss one girl while he has relations with another, or different things of that sort which are outside of the usual and add a lot of spice to an evening.

BOB: Or the two girls may put on a show, for instance.

CAROL: Do you remember the first time that happened?

BOB: Did you think I would ever forget?

CAROL: And how I didn’t like the idea one bit. And if it had just been thrown out to me as an idea, or if that girl had just come over and made a pass at me, I think I would have run out of the house screaming.

BOB: It was our house. Where would you have gone to?

CAROL: Anywhere, anywhere at all.

BOB: And how far could you run? You were stark naked at the time, the way I remember it.

CAROL: I still almost ran, and naked or clothed would have made no difference at all. But fortunately they used the gradual approach. Even so, I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but I wasn’t as shocked as I might have been.

BOB: The way it happened was we had this couple over, real nice people and very experienced swingers. They had been to orgies, scenes of twenty couples or more.

CAROL: We never did try anything like that.

BOB: We were never with more than one couple at a time, never have been, and as enthusiastic as some people are over those mob scenes I never had the slightest interest in them. The whole idea of crowds rubs me the wrong way.

But we had this couple over and had a real good time. He was a skinny guy but fairly muscular, and she was a little old redhead, also on the skinny side, with deep eyes that could stare clear through you. And we had a good time with them, and there we were just lying around in the buff while they were telling us some of their experiences.

And he was saying that one of the things he really enjoys is watching two girls make love.

CAROL: And I said, “Oh, you mean lesbians.”

BOB: And he says not lesbians at all, but just two women who like to do this as a sort of exhibition. They don’t have to be lesbians, he says, but just to enjoy this sort of thing a little bit.

And Carol said that she couldn’t see how a normal woman could let herself do that.

CAROL: And the girl said that she was a normal woman, she certainly considered herself a normal woman, and she happened to like it. And then she gave me a long look and all of a sudden I knew we weren’t talking about something they had seen at a party. We were talking about here and now, about this redheaded girl and me.

And I got this shiver all through me.

So I said, “Look, are you trying to tell me you’d like to make love to me?”

“That’s what I’m saying,” she said.

“I’m not like that,” I said.

She gave me a big smile. She asked me if I had ever tried it, and I said no, I never had.

“Well,” she said, “you might enjoy it.”

“I couldn’t,” I said. “I would freeze up.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know,” I said. “I couldn’t touch you or do any of those things to you. I just couldn’t.”

I felt like crying. I really did.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, “you don’t have to do a thing. All you have to do is close your eyes and let me fool with you a little, and I won’t do anything that you won’t like. You can trust me that far, can’t you?”

I said I guessed I could, but would she really want to do this to me? She said it always got the men really charged up and she didn’t mind at all. But did she really want to, I wanted to know. Yes, she said, it was something that she enjoyed now and then if the other wife was someone who appealed to her, and she thought I was very beautiful and she knew she would enjoy it, and she guaranteed I would enjoy it, too.

Now you have to remember and bear in mind that not ten minutes ago I had been watching this girl and my husband making love to beat the band, so I knew she was normal, a normal woman. She was no out-and-out lesbian, I could know that much. And Bob here kept urging me to go along with it. I could see how excited he was about it.

BOB: It wasn’t hard to see. I had read about this in all the books, two of the girls putting on a show, and I had always found it very stimulating to think about it. I understood that it was very common at swinging sessions. In fact, Carol didn’t know it, but we had had overtures made to us before in this respect. Once a man asked me if Carol would go for it, and I told him I didn’t think so. And another time I noticed a gal said something to Carol with a sort of double meaning, waiting to see if she would pick up on it, but she didn’t and they let it lay.

CAROL: So to make a long story short I decided I would go along with it, but honestly not expecting to get anything out of it myself, because it had never even been in my mind that this was something that I or any other normal woman could enjoy. I had never really given the whole thing enough thought to form an opinion. But I would go along with it once and see if it was something I could put up with for Bob’s benefit.

Which just goes to show you how well I didn’t know myself, because it’s putting it mildly to say I got a lot more than I expected.

BOB: I never saw her like that before.

CAROL: I just about lost my mind. She went very, very slow with me. I stretched out with my eyes closed and she just started touching me at first, running her hands very lightly over my body from my shoulders all the way down to the soles of my feet and back again. She just touched me so gently and so lightly. It was like hypnotizing a cat by stroking its fur.

At first I was telling myself that I didn’t mind this, just hands touching me like that, and with my eyes closed I could even pretend it was a man touching me. But she went on doing the same thing, letting her hands glide over my breasts ever so lightly, and I felt my nipples getting stiff from the contact. Now this is something that just happens, it’s a purely physical reaction that will happen to a girl whoever touches her nipples, whether she feels sexy or not. It’s a reaction, but I felt it happening, and I thought, my Lord, she’s actually getting to me.

And I stopped wanting to pretend it was a man.

She went on and got bolder as she went along. I just lay there like a corpse but I was getting stirrings all through my body. She held my breasts and handled them in a wonderful way. I was hot now and there was just no question about it. I was even getting moist from it.

She started kissing me, just little kisses here and there on my body, and then she began using her tongue on my breasts, and she was fantastic at this. She knew just how to arouse me and she didn’t quit, and then she touched me between my legs, and finally she kissed her way down there and began to tongue me.

This was something which I always enjoyed when a man did it, but she was different in doing it. You can always tell the difference whether it’s a man or a woman doing this particular thing to you. Not just the obvious differences that her hair was so soft all over my thighs and her cheeks were smooth but the technique she used, the way she knew just what to do and when to do it. The whole feeling you get is different when it’s a woman doing it. Not necessarily that it’s better, but it’s different, and this was the first time I had been with a woman and it was very new and exciting to me.

Well, I almost lost my mind from it. She was evidently determined to teach me a lesson I would never forget. She could have just made me come right away quick, I was certainly ready for it, but instead she teased me. Not in a nasty way, but she would bring me almost to an orgasm and then she would change what she was doing so that I would cool down for a second, and then she would build me up again, and she kept doing this until I couldn’t stand it any more.

BOB: I never saw her like that before. Kicking her feet on the floor and moaning and squirming around as though her rear end was on fire.

CAROL: It was. I was burning. And then when I couldn’t stand another minute of it she took me all the way there and I had a climax that made me scream and scream and scream, and the next thing I knew she had moved away and Bob was on top of me hammering away at me like a madman, and I came again and again until I passed out. I literally passed out as cold as a mackerel.

Afterward when we all calmed down a bit I asked her if she would want me to do it to her. She said that was strictly up to me and she didn’t want me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I said I didn’t really know how I felt about it but I would do it if she wanted. She said as far as she was concerned she got a great deal of pleasure out of doing it to me and that was more than enough for her. Well, I asked, did she get a climax from doing it to me? She said she didn’t, but she got pleasure out of my climax, that it was as though it was happening to her at the same time.

I said I would like to give her a climax but I didn’t know how I felt about it, and she begged me not to rush into it because it wouldn’t be good for me that way, or for her, either, I suppose. They lived real close to us so we arranged that we would get together with them the following night by which time I would know one way or another whether that was what I wanted to do. We didn’t generally swing more than once a week but this seemed like a good time to forget about that particular little rule of ours.

After they left Bob and I talked, and I was a little concerned that he might think I was perverted, you know, a lesbian. But he said watching me with her was the most exciting thing he had ever seen in his life and that it seemed to him as though I was more womanly than ever with her making love to me. And while I didn’t understand exactly what he meant, I did know that I felt all female when she was doing me. And what she was doing, that was female, too. When I had thought about lesbians I had always thought in terms of one of them being the man, you know, but that wasn’t what she had done. There was nothing masculine about her in any way, or about what she did.

And I guess that was what made me decide to do the same thing to her the next night.

BOB: She was a natural at it. She had never done this before in her life but you never would have guessed that to watch her.

CAROL: Well, all I had to do was just what she had done to me. That’s how I started out, and then once I was involved in it, something happened. I don’t quite know how to put it but it was a case of instinctively knowing things about her body because it was a female body like my own, and what I was doing to her was as if I was doing it to myself. I could almost feel what she felt.

I thought the part of using my mouth on her, that I would find it distasteful. I had decided that I wanted to do it anyway because I would enjoy bringing her pleasure, but I didn’t think I would enjoy my part of it, the act of performing cunnilingus. You know, it’s beginning to sound as though I keep trying things I don’t think I’m going to like and keep finding out that I like them more than I thought I would.

BOB: That’s what happens to so many people in the course of swinging. The early experiences, as you keep extending your range and trying new things, it’s natural to approach them all with reservations, and time after time you find out that you like this new thing more than you had thought you would. With other couples, again and again the wife would tell us how much she dreaded the first time she made it with another woman, and how it turned out for the best. Except for the ones that may have been with another girl before they started swinging, but they were by far in the minority. Of the couples we have been with, I would estimate in eight out of ten cases the wife was bi, and in better than ninety percent of those cases she had her first bi experience while swinging. You never hear the word “lesbian” in this context, you know. It’s always “bi” or maybe “bi-minded.”

CAROL: The code word in the ads is “versatile.”

BOB: And you’re versatile.

CAROL: And you like it that way.

BOB: Once again, once the ice was broken we spent all our time in the pool. We got to the point almost immediately that we would only arrange meetings where the wife was definitely bi-minded. Sometimes this would involve the two of them putting on a show, or just about as often one girl would make love to the other or they would both do a sixty-nine while the husbands had relations with them simultaneously, either one’s own wife or the other gal.

With one couple, they wrote a very nice letter explaining that the wife was completely bi-minded but the husband was impotent. It was really a sad case because he had been a normal man in every respect and then he had gone and caught the mumps from his son, and when you get the mumps as a grown man it can have a terrible effect on you. Sometimes you become sterile or in extreme cases you lose your testicles altogether, they don’t function. This is what had happened to him. He had no ability to perform but had not lost his interest in sex. He had the interest but could do nothing about it.

CAROL: He was a very handsome man, too, and it was sad what had happened to him.

BOB: For this couple, swinging was a way the wife could go on having a healthy sex life and still have him be a part of it. His pleasure was to be there and watch, and also to do cunnilingus on the women. We agreed to this partly I think because it would have been cruel to turn him down in that situation and partly, too, because it sounded enjoyable to us.

CAROL: And then he decided he wanted to French Bob.

BOB: He put it in a very inoffensive way and you couldn’t really object to it, the way he put it, but it was the last thing I wanted to do. It wasn’t even a question of having to do it back to him because he got no pleasure that way whether it was done to him by a man or a woman, he said as much. I didn’t want to have any part of it, but I remembered how Carol had felt the same way with that girl the first time, and I thought, well, if you’re a swinger you ought to try everything once.

CAROL: There are plenty of things we neither of us tried and never will.

BOB: Within reason, that is. None of this tying people up and whipping them, but anything normal between people. And I knew Carol was bi and that didn’t make her less of a woman, so I figured if I turned out to be bi it wouldn’t make me less of a man. So I let him do it, just Frenching me without any foreplay because any touching would have been distasteful to me, and he did it, and he was good enough at it, but I couldn’t even get hard for the longest time. I didn’t want to disappoint him so I had his wife come over and I fooled with her while he did it, and I paid attention to her and more or less failed to take note of what he was doing to me, so that I could get my mind off the fact that it was a man I was having sex with. And that way I was able to have a climax, but even so it wasn’t good at all and I knew I would never want to do that again.

JWW: The preference for threesomes developed gradually. Bob found himself gradually getting less and less pleasure out of seeing his wife with another man, and Carol in turn found that she was taking infinitely more pleasure from her relations with bi wives than with their husbands. They noticed an increasing proportion of couple ads soliciting meetings either with couples with bisexual wives or with single bi-minded girls. At first they thought such advertisers had extra males available, extra males being a commodity in abundant supply on the swinging scene. Then they realized that the object of these ads was threesomes of two women and a man.

Their first experience as a trio, however, came not with another woman but with another man.

CAROL: The phone rang one night around dinnertime and it was this fellow we had visited with in Birmingham. He was in town overnight on business and his wife wasn’t with him, and he thought we would like to try a threesome. Now we knew he was legitimate because we had swung with him and his wife before and had had a very good time with them, in fact we hoped to swing with them again. You see, a lot of single men or men whose wives won’t swing will pass themselves off as a couple and then when they come around the excuse is that she’s sick or at a funeral or something of the sort, and then they want to have a threesome with you. We’ve never been stuck that way but we’ve heard plenty of stories.

BOB: The average swinger is a really good person, very open and aboveboard. But there are a lot of creeps, and nine out of ten times they’re married men who haven’t got the guts to get their wives to swing, or think their wives are too good for it, and they can mess things up for everybody.

CAROL: But this fellow was all right, so I asked Bob, and he said sure, invite the guy over, but I made it for after dinner because I had lamb chops on and there was no way to stretch them.

He came over and we had a fairly good time. The two men doubled up on me, one in back and one in front, and actually that’s about all we did, we spent most of our time sitting around and talking. I think he wanted company more than sex anyway, as far as that goes, and he said he always felt strange swinging without his wife and couldn’t really loosen up unless she was there.

BOB: After he left, Carol and I got to talking, and I said that as far as I was concerned, I’d rather not have a scene like that again. It was all right as far as it went, but I didn’t get much out of it, although I hoped she had enjoyed herself.

And she said that all things taken into consideration she really didn’t get that much pleasure with the other men, that for sex with men she really preferred just to do it with me, and that for her the highlight of swinging was bi-experiences with the other girl. And we tossed it around, and we came to the conclusion that as far as we in particular were concerned, the other husband was just something you put up with because he was there. That what we both really wanted more than anything else was a threesome with an extra bi-minded girl.

CAROL: The funny thing was that we had both had this in mind but neither of us would come right out and say it. I don’t know whether it was because I was afraid I would sound like an out-and-out lesbian or what.

BOB: I thought it would be pure selfishness on my part to suggest it, because I thought Carol would get a lot less out of swinging if there was no other man. I always took it for granted that this was a large part of her pleasure.

Another personal reason I had for preferring a threesome to a two-couple situation was that I really did not like contact with other men. The one time with the impotent fellow was the only real experience I had, but more and more we were noticing that couples would both be bi-minded, and the man would suggest something. I always said I wasn’t interested and that was the end of that, but turning somebody down puts a damper on things, and then of course you’re not inclined to get together with that particular couple again.

Also, even if the man isn’t bi-minded and has no interests that way, when you’re all four rolling around together there’s a certain amount of contact between you and the other man that can’t be helped. The worst part of it is that you have to keep being careful and avoiding this, so that with a lot of couples what we would ultimately wind up doing is having one of us men take a turn sitting out and watching while the other did a threesome with the two girls, and then vice versa. That way everybody can just touch whatever’s handy and not have half his mind devoted to worrying who it belongs to.

CAROL: Once we had it out in the open, how we both felt, we knew just what we were looking for. We went through the ads again and began starting correspondence. There were single girls who would advertise to meet with either couples or single girls, and we tried some of them, but we found that quite often these girls actually were lesbians and not bi-minded. They would put up with the husband in order to get to the wife, and that wasn’t what we were interested in. Then there were other single girls who wanted to swing with couples only, and that was precisely what we wanted, and it worked out very well.

BOB: There were also girls who were married and their husbands would come along with them or not, depending on how you wanted it. In fact, with one of these couples we arranged that Carol would go and party with them one night, just by herself, and that the other wife would come over alone herself the following night, so that we had a pair of threesomes but with the one couple the other man and I never even set eyes on each other.

CAROL: We tried that just the once, but I didn’t enjoy swinging without Bob at all, and he didn’t like the idea of it, and we never did it again.

BOB: It was like being the dummy all night long in a game of bridge. And not even watching the play of the hands.

CAROL: It was really no good for either of us. Without Bob along, I felt as though I was committing adultery. I felt very uneasy about the whole thing. It didn’t seem to matter to the other wife — she had done this often in the past and was completely at ease, but I didn’t like it.

BOB: Our first really successful threesome was one we arranged through the mails. This was with a girl named Frannie who lives right here in the Atlanta area. She’s about twenty-three. Her ad said she enjoyed the company of both men and women and wanted to meet refined couples for pleasant evenings. We wrote her a letter and enclosed photographs, and she wrote back with a picture of herself. She explained that she was a high school librarian, lived with her parents, didn’t go out much, and was very lonely.

CAROL: It was such a straight letter that we sort of wondered if she knew what swinging was all about.

BOB: Yes, because every once in a while there are people who put an ad in the swinger magazines or answer one, and they are just lonely people who are too square to guess what swinging is all about. They want to make friends because they are lonely, and they think it’s all like pen pals or something of the sort. We had never run into this personally but we had seen ads from time to time where you could tell the person placing the ad didn’t know what it was all about. It didn’t seem this way from Frannie’s ad, but the letter she wrote gave that impression, and the fact that she was a high school librarian living with her parents.

CAROL: Don’t forget the picture.

BOB: The picture she sent showed this little mousy girl with granny glasses wearing a dress that didn’t give you any idea what her figure was like. Now we had sent a photo of the two of us in bathing suits, except that Carol here wasn’t wearing the top of her suit, and my trunks were skimpy and you could see the outlines of my erection through them. Nothing you can’t legally send through the mails

CAROL: Some swingers will send pornographic pictures of themselves to other people in a first letter, and then they wonder why they get into trouble. You would think people would show a little common sense.

BOB: Well, it looked as though Frannie was showing a little more common sense than usual, or else she just didn’t understand what it was all about. We were a little worried about having her over for the evening, and then one of us making a pass at her and that poor little kid going straight up the wall. So instead of getting on the phone and calling her, Carol wrote out another letter asking her if she had swung much in the past, trying to word it so that if Frannie wasn’t hip to this sort of thing, she would just have it all go over her head, but if she was, then she would know to let us know it.

CAROL: Well, she called me one morning when Bob was out. She said she was Frannie, and I said hello and how I was glad to hear from her, and then she said evidently she hadn’t made herself very clear in her letter. She had this tiny shy little-girl voice.

And while I was thinking that she was no swinger at all and it was good we had checked, she said how she lived with her folks and had this job with the Board of Education and had to be very careful about appearances. “I fuck and suck and everything,” she said, in this same little-girl voice, “but I don’t like to put it on paper.”

Now I was speechless. We had this whole image of little innocent Frannie, and we were even thinking about how if she wasn’t a swinger yet it might be worth a try at getting her a little liquored up and converting her, and then she just laid it right on the line like that. I just stood there with the phone in my hand and she said after a minute that she hoped I wasn’t shocked and that she hadn’t said anything out of line, but she wanted to make everything clear.

I said, “Oh, absolutely. And why don’t you come over tonight, and Bob and I will give you all the fucking and sucking you can possibly handle.”

Now I had never talked over the phone like that before in my life.

BOB: She came over that night and we had a really great time with Frannie. Even in person she was the same as she was in her letters, very shy and demure and innocent, and then she would come out with a line that was purely shocking coming from her. You wouldn’t think twice to hear your average swinger talk like that. It would either seem like nothing at all or it might have a vulgar sound to it, but from Frannie it was like hearing it in church.

CAROL: She was a lot better looking than her picture showed.

BOB: I’ll tell you, she didn’t look twenty-three. She could have passed easily for seventeen, maybe less than that. She didn’t wear any makeup and she had a very young face. Big wide blue eyes. She was very slim. Hardly any hips at all and cute little breasts. Very good legs and a pert rear, and always this serious little-girl voice.

CAROL: But once things got started, she knew just what she wanted and she couldn’t get too much of it.

BOB: She just about took charge of things. She would say who should do what, and we let her call the signals. “You get on your hands and knees,” she told Carol, and Carol did it. “And now you get on her and give it to her doggie-style,” she told me. And I did just what she ordered, and she crawled underneath and ate us both at once while we did it. We had never done it quite this way before, but believe me, it was a way to do it that we didn’t forget about in a hurry. She was a real greedy little girl, Frannie.

CAROL: She stayed all night. Told her mother she was sleeping at a girlfriend’s house and stayed all night long. And we didn’t sleep much, either. We’d no sooner doze off than she’d be at one or the other of us and wake us all up all over again.

BOB: She told us she only liked to swing once in a while, maybe one time a month, and only with couples, and only if she really liked them. Her entire sex life was this once-a-month swinging. She had this one ad running, and she would get dozens of replies to it every week. Plenty of them from single guys, of course, but also a great many from couples. And she hardly answered any of them because everything had to be just right about a couple before she would have anything to do with them. Then she would have her one date of the month and fit a whole month’s worth of sex into one night.

We’ve swung with her three times since then. She doesn’t advertise any more. She has maybe a dozen couples that she will see off and on. And that’s just the way she wants it. She’s completely bisexual. There’s nothing we ever thought of doing that she doesn’t like to do. But it’s no good at all for her unless she’s with a couple. One guy alone or one girl alone — she won’t have anything to do with it.

CAROL: Not that everybody has to be involved in the act, but she has to be together with a couple, they both have to be in the same room with her.

BOB: We’ve been trying to figure her out, you know. It’s hard because she doesn’t want to talk about her personal life at all. My guess is that she had her first sex with a couple when she was very young. This is maybe a little more than pure guesswork. She let something slip, I don’t remember exactly what, but it gave this impression. I would even suspect it was relatives that seduced her. An aunt and uncle or a pair of older cousins or something. And then this formed her sexual attitudes, and she never changed them.

CAROL: I like her, though. I’d see her more often, if we could. But she has this rule of no more than once a month, and about a dozen couples she goes with more or less regularly, so we don’t get to see too much of her. I told her one time she ought to marry some boy and find an extra girl for threesomes, but that wasn’t what she wanted at all. She has to be the extra girl or she’s not interested.

JWW: It is always interesting to speculate on the reasons why people are willing to discuss the most intimate aspects of their lives with an interviewer. After all, I take a great deal of their time probing into their sex lives and offer them no compensation for their time and trouble beyond my personal gratitude.

(There has been one exception. For Tricks of the Trade, in which nine call girls were interviewed to create a “hooker’s handbook of sexual technique,” I had no choice but to pay the girls rather handsomely for their time. But they, after all, were professionals, and their credo that time is money operates whatever use is made of that time.)

The most obvious explanation — that a great many persons are inclined to be genuinely cooperative — is certainly true. Swingers are especially generous in this respect, and have often expressed the thought that wider dissemination of information on the sexual underground will open more people to the possibilities of the life and will make their own lot in society less potentially troublesome. Many enthusiastic swingers are sincerely evangelistic; they often mention that they first became interested through books on the subject, and welcome a chance to contribute to this educational process.

For others, particularly those with ambivalent feelings about the lives they are leading, the interviewer furnishes an extra ear similar in certain ways to that of a priest or psychiatrist. The confessional impulse transcends religion, and serving as the subject of an in-depth interview concerning sexual matters provides the chance to justify oneself to oneself, to obtain absolution for what one regards as sinful, and, finally, to clarify one’s thoughts by using the interviewer as a sounding board. Time after time subjects have followed general or personal observations with the notation that they have never had this particular thought before, and I don’t doubt that the interview situation does afford good opportunities for self-analysis.

In A Married Couple, a cinéma vérité filmmaker moved his camera into the apartment of a Canadian couple and filmed several weeks of their life together, producing ultimately a remarkable ninety minutes of brutally revelatory film. At the same time, his presence served to crystallize the attitudes of the man and wife toward each other and toward their marriage. In much the same fashion, I have occasionally found myself playing a catalyst’s role in a relationship. This was particularly true in the extended, almost painfully incisive interviews which saw print as The Wife Swap Report.

Exhibitionistic impulses also prompt some interviews to a greater or lesser extent. Of the correspondence which I receive, a certain amount invariably consists of calculatedly obscene letters detailing sexual experiences, the majority of which are clearly identifiable as fantasy or invention. In other cases, cooperative subjects are often aware of their own interest as exhibitionists. “If factual experiences such as these are of interest to you,” a Midwesterner wrote at the conclusion of a detailed record of incestuous practices, “I would be glad to give you details and, truthfully, get a lot of pleasure doing it.” While such self-awareness is exceptional, the exhibitionistic impulse in this regard is not.

All of the above serves as a lengthy preface to the observations that, in the case of Bob and Carol Fessenden, I was frequently made aware that our interviews provided them with a pleasurable means of reliving highly satisfactory sexual experiences. They spent a great deal of time discussing various sexual partners of theirs, much in the manner of their discussion of Frannie reported above. Frannie herself was discussed at greater length than I have reproduced, and with a luxury of detail which, if printed here, could only serve to embarrass Frannie, myself, and my publisher’s legal department.

For a time I interpreted this as simple exhibitionism, but further reflection convinced me that it was something rather different. Bob and Carol were sharing Frannie in conversation as they had earlier enjoyed sharing her in the flesh, and no doubt for similar reasons. Their conversational interplay, the avidness with which they passed words back and forth, echoed their earlier physical relationship with the girl.

BOB: I remember one girl we met who was different from the usual run. Her name was Linda and she lived in Philadelphia, which is a long way to travel for a night. This wasn’t that unusual, though, because we often get letters from as far away as the West Coast.

CAROL: I don’t think most people expect anything to come of it when they answer someone that far away. As a matter of fact, I think some people purposely write to faraway places so that they’ll have the excuse of being unable to travel. A lot of people just want correspondence without any meeting — you can usually spot their letters quickly enough after you get the hang of it.

BOB: Linda wasn’t in that class. She told us that she wrote to us because she was very strongly attracted to the pictures published with our ad, and also because the wording of the ad suggested to her that we might be safe.

CAROL: She was a virgin.

BOB: Not that she lacked experience, but that she had never had intercourse and didn’t want to. She told us different things at different times so it’s hard to know just what her story was.

CAROL: She said she was built too small to accommodate a male organ. That she was abnormally small. She put that in a letter. Another time she said something about having a muscular condition that made her tighten up immediately at the mere thought of intercourse.

BOB: Carol had the idea that she wasn’t a virgin at all.

CAROL: My guess is that someone raped her when she was just a child and it was a trauma for her, and she was deathly afraid of having anything inside her ever after. Because she made that an absolute rule before she would set up a date with us. Nothing inside her, not in front or in back either, not so much as a finger.

BOB: I thought from her letters — we corresponded with her for quite awhile before we got together with her — I thought she might have a dislike of penises in general. That she was more of a lesbian than a bisexual but she wanted to go with men, too, because she didn’t want to face the fact that she was all the way gay.

CAROL: If she hated penises, I’d hate to see someone who loved them.

BOB: Oh, that’s the truth. She was a born cocksucker and couldn’t get enough of it. She would take it all the way to the hilt, you know, and that always struck me as pretty strange. I mean that she wouldn’t let anything into her anywhere else, but that she could take it clear down to the back of her throat without gagging.

CAROL: And never spilled a drop, either.

BOB: She had a way of using the muscles in her throat that was out of this world. Just unbelievable. I can still remember how it felt.

CAROL: It’s a shame you couldn’t be watching yourself while she was Frenching you. The expressions on your face, you were something to see.

BOB: We were planning a trip to New York, so we made arrangements to stop in Philadelphia and spend some time with her. She was a secretary to a lawyer and lived by herself in a pretty nice apartment. She wasn’t as young as you would have expected. The idea of her being a virgin, we immediately got the impression of someone who wasn’t much more than a kid, but I would say she was about twenty-five.

CAROL: Maybe older than that. It was hard to tell her age, and while she said she was twenty-four I think she may have been taking off a few years. You might be surprised how many swingers will do that, especially when they get past thirty-five. The nicest people are honest that way, but a lot of them think they have to lie a few years or so in order to get in on the action.

BOB: Of course before we could set up a date with her we had to agree absolutely to her conditions. This didn’t bother me a bit, and of course it made no difference at all from Carol’s point of view. To tell the truth, we were both more than a little intrigued. The idea that she was a virgin was something new. And there’s no denying that novelty has a lot to do with what pleasure you get out of swinging.

CAROL: It’s not the whole thing, though. That’s the impression you get reading some of those books. In one of your books, Jack, you have this couple that tries everything and everything will be exciting to them at the beginning, and then each thing gets boring to them, until they run out of things that are new to them and they wind up getting out of swinging altogether. Now I didn’t think that was realistic from what we’ve experienced.

JWW: It happens in certain cases.

CAROL: I’m sure it must, and I know that might get people into swinging, but it’s not what keeps them there. There’s novelty in the different people but there are also things that you can’t have in a relationship with just two people, and those things do stay satisfying.

JWW: That’s generally true, but there are certain people who are just hooked on novelty, and of course they’re so constituted that they can never be satisfied over an extended period of time.

CAROL: Well, I can see how that would be true in certain cases, where it’s people with a problem in that respect. But it must be rare.

BOB: As far as that goes, honey, think how many one-timers there are.

CAROL: Yes, that’s true. That must be more or less of the same thing.

One-timers, we meet them all the time but it’s more common with couples than with the bisexual girls we swing with nowadays. Of course a couple may say they are one-timers after you’ve been with them as a polite way of explaining why they would as soon not swing with you again, rather than coming out and saying they didn’t enjoy it. We have done that ourselves. The genuine one-timer is a couple that announces it in advance and never repeats. Some people call them collectors because they approach the whole thing that way, wanting to collect as many other couples as they can.

BOB: They usually collect pictures, too. One couple told us they had a regular filing system, pictures and diary entries of every couple they swung with. You can imagine what would happen if some puritanical cop happened to raid them. But they didn’t seem at all worried.

But to get back to Linda—

CAROL: Yes, we really ought to get back to Linda.

BOB: The point of it is that we were more than willing to agree to her conditions, and we assured her of this, and met her in her apartment. She said that she had to be very careful in arranging dates because some men seemed to take her virginity as a personal challenge. Either they would try to wear her down with arguments, which just spoiled her whole scene, or else they would try to force her.

CAROL: There was a time when we suspected this was what she wanted — someone to hold her down and rape her.

BOB: It’s possible that she does want that unconsciously, but that’s not our scene.

CAROL: Thank heavens.

BOB: We met with her, and she was really very sweet. She greeted us by giving us each a warm kiss at the door. She was fully bisexual in this respect. Some girls will want to do sexual things with other girls, but they draw the line at kissing.

CAROL: I had a hard time at first until I learned to relate to other girls that way. But I can’t imagine two men kissing that way unless they were out-and-out homos. It’s interesting how there is a definite double-standard this way. And how among swinging couples there are so many more bisexual wives than there are husbands.

BOB: Linda was bi all the way. We talked for awhile and then got in the mood, had a couple of drinks, and all got out of our clothes. She had a beautiful figure and my first impulse was that I certainly would enjoy screwing her, and then I remembered that I couldn’t do this. It was a very strange feeling.

CAROL: I got this sensation of purity, that she was a virgin and had never been really possessed by a man, and I found this exciting.

BOB: It was a sort of a test of ingenuity to see just how many ways there were to make it with her without putting it inside her. Between the thighs and under the arms and between the breasts and everyway in the world, I guess.

CAROL: And of course her mouth.

BOB: God, what a mouth—

JWW: After considerably more details concerning Linda and several other female partners of theirs, the conversation turned to the subject of permanent troilistic relationships. I discussed several of these with which I had become familiar to varying degrees. Both Bob and Carol were extremely interested and questioned me at great length.

While they had not yet established a troilistic relationship of any permanence, they had been thinking along such lines for quite some time and hoped to establish a more or less stable ménage à trois when the right person came along.

BOB: What I would like is to find a girl who would really become a part of the family. Not just someone to party with regularly but to be a part of the household and live here regularly. I have seen advertisements trying to set something up along those lines but we haven’t gone so far as to place an ad of our own, and I don’t know if we will take that step or wait for something to turn up by itself. I don’t think advertising would be good because the person would have to be just right or the whole thing would not be good.

CAROL: The closest we came to anything of the sort was with this girl I mentioned before whom we would swing with every so often. We were planning this trip to the Virgin Islands — you know, come to think of it we should have taken Linda, the Virgin Islands and all. We had two weeks, and we mentioned it to this other girl and she said she would really love to come along. She offered to pay her own way but Bob wouldn’t hear of it and insisted on picking up the whole tab.

BOB: It didn’t cost that much more for three than for two, and she didn’t have money to throw away.

CAROL: Those were two good weeks. It was interesting, because when you swing with someone just for a night it’s really all sex. You may get to know each other fairly well or you may not, but either way there’s no time when sex isn’t the whole reason the three of you are together. But with two weeks at our disposal we couldn’t be in bed every minute of the time.

BOB: We did pretty well, though.

CAROL: Oh, we did every damn thing, but we also spent time on the beach or I would take her shopping or we would be at a restaurant or a nightclub, and it was a case of living together more than just having sex for the three of us. And we had thought about a permanent threesome before this, but now it really seemed attractive to us.

BOB: It wouldn’t have been right with this girl, though. She was fine to swing with and even fine for two weeks, but by the end of the two weeks we were beginning to feel the strain. We still see her, and would take a vacation with her again as far as that goes. But as far as making it permanent, I don’t think it would ever work out.

CAROL: No, not with her.

BOB: You would have to have absolutely the perfect girl. And it couldn’t be the sort of thing in the case you were talking about, where both the women are the man’s wives. Not that he’s married to both of them, but that it’s the same as if he were. I’ve got one wife and that’s Carol and she’s all the wife I need.

CAROL: I don’t mind sharing Bob, but I wouldn’t want to feel like part of a harem. I like it the way it is, with me being his wife and something special to him.

BOB: It’s more that we would want a girl we could both love. That she would be more or less the center of the triangle, if that’s the word for it.

CAROL: The apex.

BOB: That’s the word I was trying for. The apex of the triangle.

CAROL: You know, there’s a game swingers play called Center of Attraction. You choose by drawing lots or spinning a bottle or something like that, and the person chosen is the center of attraction, and lies passive while everybody else in the game makes love to her at once.

BOB: Or to him, as the case may be.

CAROL: Well, at large parties I understand it’s usually a woman that gets chosen, because all the women will be bi, whereas most of the men will not be. But anyway that’s how the game works.

We will play it at threesomes, not bothering to spin a bottle but taking turns. When it’s Bob’s turn the other girl and I will love him up for fifteen minutes or a half hour or however long we decide, and then it’s my turn and so forth. But what we found, we enjoy it most when it’s the girl’s turn, and Bob and I more or less make love to her as a team. Each sucking one of her breasts and so forth.

And I think that fits in with what Bob said about the extra girl being the apex of the triangle.

BOB: We’ve talked about what the perfect girl would be like. It would be best if she were a good deal younger than we are, and the less experience she has the better. We would want to take over her whole life and shape it so that she would be able to fit in perfectly with us. When a girl is older or has experience it’s harder to make her fit in.

CAROL: We had the idea of getting some younger girl as household help and seeing how she might work out. It would have to be a case of seducing her gradually and we would probably go through a lot of maids before we found the right one, but we think it might work sooner or later.

BOB: We had it in mind to hire a young colored girl, but that would be taking a big chance.

CAROL: Not that we consider ourselves prejudiced that way. We may be Southerners, but some people are a lot more open-minded down here than the average Yankee suspects. We do have certain prejudices which are more a case of being old-fashioned in some ways than anything else, but we don’t have prejudices where sex is concerned. For example, we have swung with colored several times and never found anything to object to on those occasions.

BOB: We never swung with a colored couple.

CAROL: Well, I beg your pardon, but we did.

BOB: They were interracial. She was colored but he wasn’t.

CAROL: Yes, that’s true. Never when the man was colored, although if it had come up I think we would have.

BOB: I don’t know if that’s so. But with colored girls, we certainly have no objection. And I think it would be easy to get one who would go along with it. They have a freer attitude that way, and getting a girl from some back-country town, that wouldn’t be hard to do.

CAROL: But if anyone found out—

BOB: Yes, that’s where the problem lies. It would have to be kept absolutely secret, and if anyone found out it would be the end of my career and the end of living anywhere in this area. As far as that goes it’s important to keep swinging a secret anyway, but you could have people suspect a great deal or even know for sure and they would tend to shrug it off. For the ones who never spoke to you after they heard about it, you would have others who were swingers themselves or thought it was a good idea.

Once it’s a question of race, though, down here that’s like waving a red flag at a bull. We consider ourselves flaming liberals on racial matters, but even so I have to admit that I would not want Carol to make love to a colored man. I might have gone through with it anyway when we were swinging with couples. Or I might not. But I know I wouldn’t have liked it at all.

Our neighbors, though. The people of the community. Now if I were seeing some colored gal on the sly that would be one thing, and most of them, the men that is, would be inclined to wink at it. But for the two of us to have a colored girl in our house and be having sex with her, no, they wouldn’t care for that. Maybe you could get by with it in New York, but Atlanta isn’t New York.

CAROL: We also have been thinking about getting a European girl as a domestic. They have employment agencies in New York that specialize in that, either from Ireland or Scandinavia, mostly. The Scandinavians are supposed to be very liberal on sex and we will probably get around to making inquiries one of these days. Again, you couldn’t expect to hit the jackpot on the first nickel, and we might have some disappointments, but with a Scandinavian girl, a young one, I think it just might work out.

BOB: Of course you’ve got to bear in mind, John, that we think about no end of things and make plans and all, and nothing ever comes of it. We enjoy the planning but we don’t actually do everything we have in mind, not by any means. I think we might up and get started on this, but we’ve been talking about it for a long while and haven’t done a thing about it up to now.

CAROL: I think we will, though.

BOB: Maybe.

CAROL: I think I’ll write a letter tomorrow. I wonder if you get to look at a photograph of the girl or you just take what they send you?

BOB: What I was getting at, about how we like to plan a number of things, some of which we know there’s hardly a chance in the world that we’ll do—

CAROL: You’re not going to tell him?

BOB: Why not?

CAROL: I don’t know.

BOB: We’re telling everything else. And this isn’t even something we’ve done yet, and probably never will, so what’s the point in keeping shut about it?

CAROL: I don’t know.

BOB: Don’t you want me to say anything?

CAROL: Well, you already said enough so that John here will only suspect worse than anything you could possibly say, so why don’t you go ahead? You might as well tell him what it is.

BOB: Well, there is this charity in New York where you can adopt a foster child in another country. You pay them $192 a year and they take care of the child, pay for food and clothing and put a roof on their hut and all the other things that the child needs. And from time to time they send you reports on how the child is doing, and pictures of her, and you can write her a letter once a month and she writes letters to you once a month which they translate and send to you.

CAROL: And we adopted one a year ago. A daughter, obviously.

BOB: We didn’t have anything in mind but to do a good deed for someone. We believe in charity, but just giving money to some big organization, you don’t feel you’re making a real contribution. All you’re doing is throwing one drop into a big bucket, and you keep feeling that if the government really wanted to cure cancer they would do better taking the money out of taxes than having all these charities. But something like this, you participate, and you see the results of what you’re doing. When you send a check to the cancer society you don’t know if it does any good or not, but here we know that one particular child won’t go hungry and will have clothes to wear.

CAROL: She’s eleven years old. She lives in Colombia, in South America—

BOB: Oh, Christ, he knows where Colombia is. He wasn’t going to think you meant Colombia, Missouri.

CAROL: Her name is Estrellita, which means Little Star. She’s part Indian and has the most beautiful face. Black shoe-button eyes and straight hair and the most beautiful innocent face you ever saw.

BOB: And now and then Carol and I will talk about seeing if we can’t bring her up here to live with us. Not right away but when she’s a little older. You know, the advantages of living in America, and of being able to have a decent life—

CAROL: Of course you can imagine what would happen if we had her here.

BOB: Well, when you stop and think, what would be so bad about that?

CAROL: I didn’t say anything would be bad about it.

BOB: The chances are strong that we’ll never go through with it. That we won’t ever take it past the stage of something to talk about. But if we ever did, I think it would be ideal. For her and for us. I think it would work out to be a perfect relationship, if we ever did anything about it.

Content

John Warren Wells
3 is not a Crowd

Introduction

Gordon & Rita & June

Jerry & Peggy & Kay

Peter & Wanda & Grace

Bob & Carol & Whoever’s Handy