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

by Lawrence Block

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

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

  But this time was really crazy; I got excited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  SHEILA: Especially with me pregnant.

  PAUL: You mean because of the first time?

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

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

  PAUL: Definitely.

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

  PAUL: You’re getting hung up on trivia.

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

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

  JWW: Phil and Mona?

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

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

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

  JWW: Your obstetrician?

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

  PAUL: If you’re taking a poll—

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

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

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

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

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

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

  PAUL: No more obvious than you and Phil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  We couldn’t quite make it that night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  JWW: And the thrill is that much better?

  SHEILA: In a word, yes.

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

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

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

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

  JWW: And you felt as Sheila did?

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

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

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