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

by Lawrence Block

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

  • • •

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

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

  Dropping Out and Dropping In

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  SHEILA: It was too much, really.

  PAUL: We needed it at the time.

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

  • • •

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

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

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

  • • •

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

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

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

  SHEILA: With new sins.

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

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

  JWW: Not literally?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  PAUL: You’re missing the point completely.

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

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

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

  JWW: Oh, now I understand.

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

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

  PAUL: Did you happen to read The Arrangement?

  SHEILA: Oh, for Christ’s sake!

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

  • • •

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

  • • •

  PAUL: At first we just left it alone.

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

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

  JWW: Permanently?

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

  SHEILA: This was just at first, of course.

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

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

  PAUL: Heidi.

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

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

  SHEILA: It’s not comical.

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

  SHEILA: Stop it!

  PAUL: —to a swap session, and—

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

  PAUL: You’d rather hide it?

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

  • • •

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

  SHEILA: It was wonderful.

  PAUL: Absolutely wonderful.

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

  PAUL: Too intense.

  SHEILA: That’s it.

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

  SHEILA: It certainly made for good sex.

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

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

  JWW: Did you have any difficulty in becoming pregnant?

  SHEILA: None. I seem to be embarrassingly fertile.

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

  PAUL: I guess it was about three months.

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

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

  PAUL: It was surprising.

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

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

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

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

  JWW: And you wish to record an o
bjection?

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

  • • •

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

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

  • • •

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

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