The Wife-Swap Report (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

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

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

  SHEILA: We certainly did plenty of different things.

  PAUL: That’s for sure.

  JWW: What pattern did your experimentation take?

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

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

  SHEILA: Because it feels so groovy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  JWW: Contests?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • • •

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

  PAUL: When was that?

  SHEILA: With Jan.

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

  SHEILA: Mixed is the word for it.

  JWW: I gather you had homosexual relations with Jan?

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

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

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

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

  Tres Gay

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  JWW: How did you react to the idea?

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

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

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

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

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

  JWW: How do you mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She just smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Then you were a Lesbian?”

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

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

  PAUL: It was tremendously exciting to me.

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

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

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

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

  “But would you want to?”

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

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