The New Sexual Underground: Crossing the Last Boundaries (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 10)

by Lawrence Block

  After two years of what both regarded as an ideal marital relationship, everything changed.

  • • •

  WENDY: It all started with a letter from a girl named Meg. She was a year behind me at Bennington and the two of us had had a brief thing during my last year there. No mad passionate love affair, but a few very comforting nights during which as I recall, we drank a great deal of wine and ate a great deal of each other.

  DAN: Charmingly put. My wife has way with words.

  WENDY: She wrote that she had been divorced. It was pretty messy—she had been having an affair with a married man, and his wife had detectives after him, and her husband got wind of it all, and by the time it was over he had managed to divorce her and get custody of the child, and she and her married lover had broken up, and she was coming back to live with her parents who have a house about twenty miles north of us, and she wondered if she could visit us while she was in the neighborhood. I told Dan about it, and wrote Meg and told her that of course we wanted to see her.

  DAN: But you carefully refrained from telling me that the two of you once had a thing going.

  WENDY: Because I honestly didn’t think of her in those terms any more. It was a very brief thing to begin with, and between her marriage and her affair she was obviously heterosexual. And so, as far as I was concerned, was I. I didn’t tell you she was an English major, either, or a Methodist. I knew that what she needed was a friend, not a lover, and never even thought about the two of us making love.

  DAN: I did, though. Whenever I met a friend of Wendy’s from school I would wonder whether it had been an old flame of hers.

  WENDY: What an awful expression.

  DAN: A mad pash, then?

  WENDY: That’s worse.

  DAN: The thoughts came automatically, and they excited me. I found myself very strongly drawn to any girl whom I suspected might have been intimate with Wendy. Not that I ever did anything about it, or even thought about doing anything, but it was there.

  WENDY: Meg was a wreck by the time she came to visit us. She was horribly depressed and a physical wreck as well. She wasn’t sleeping and she’d lost tons of weight and had permanent black circles under her eyes. Her parents didn’t make things any easier. They didn’t criticize her, but it was obvious that they were making a big thing of taking her back because they loved her in spite of her horrid horrid sins. Before long she was spending every day at our house and going back to her folks only to sleep. And when she did a lot of drinking, which happened a lot of the time, we would make her sleep over in the guest room.

  DAN: I knew instantly that Meg and Wendy had been lovers. Just an intuitive thing, I suppose, but I would have given very long odds on it. For my own part, I was so strongly attracted to Meg I was sure Wendy would notice. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Wendy says she looked like hell in those days, but as far as I was concerned that air of depravity just made her all the more provocative.

  WENDY: Oddly enough, I didn’t realize Dan was drawn to Meg, but what I did sense almost from the beginning was that she was attracted to him—which was something he missed for the longest time. I probably anticipated this. After all, she had just been the Other Woman in a messy divorce, and here she was spending all her time at my house, and whenever that happens in a movie you know the ending from the first reel. I thought Meg would try to have an affair with Dan.

  JWW: How did you feel about that?

  WENDY: Ambivalent. I felt challenged and in competition, and at the same time I was all set to play the dual role of Understanding Wife and Sympathetic Friend. And of course at the same time I was unconsciously yearning to get in bed with Meg, but didn’t realize it at the time.

  DAN: I finally suggested it. We were in bed one night with Meg racked out in the guest room, and I made an incomplete pass at Wendy, and when she said she wasn’t in the mood I joked that I should be in the guest room. She thought I meant that I should be there with Meg, while what I really meant was that Meg and I should change places. We had a nutty drunken conversation about the whole thing, most of which I’m just as glad I was too drunk to remember the next day. Yet when I got up the next morning I did a very realistic sketch of the two of them in bed together, with Wendy going down on Meg. I left it on the dresser for her.

  WENDY: And I managed to accidentally leave it where Meg would find it, and she—

  DAN: Accidentally my ass! At best it was a Freudian slip.

  WENDY: Freudian, schmeudian, as long as you know what you’re doing. Meg turned red and white and red again and asked if had told Dan about the two of us. I said he had guessed, and somehow we got into a discussion of the previous evening, and what each of us had said. Nothing happened, but something clicked and I knew I wanted Meg and she wanted me. Then I saw Dan upstairs in the studio and he informed me that he was going into New York that afternoon with a batch of cartoons and wouldn’t be home until late. He said he knew Meg and I wanted each other and that we ought to enjoy ourselves, that he only wanted me to be happy and wouldn’t be jealous. I told him not to be silly, that I was all over that phase of my life. He just repeated what he’d said and away he went.

  DAN: I honestly wanted them to make love. I didn’t expect to get any personal kicks out of it. I just wanted it to happen.

  WENDY: By now my head was really spinning. After he left Meg and I had a couple of drinks and I decided I had to clear the air. I told her what was going on, what Dan had said, and said that I couldn’t think straight but that all I knew was that I wanted her and that Dan had given me permission. We kissed and necked and then went up to my bed, the bed Dan and I shared, and got undressed and made the most wonderful love. I couldn’t imagine how I had given up all of this. It really rocked me. We kept drinking and making love and drinking and making love until we both passed out cold.

  DAN: Which was how found them when got back. I saw the two of them sleeping naked together and was overcome with this feeling of warmth and love for both of them. It wasn’t even sex. That came later. It was really pure love. I kissed them both goodnight without waking them and then went downstairs to the guest room. But of course I couldn’t sleep. I got up and had a few drinks and went upstairs again and looked at them for awhile. I kissed them again and caressed them both, touched them. Wendy was dead to the world but Meg moaned little in her sleep. I went back downstairs and had a few more belts and then I came upstairs and got undressed and got in bed next to Meg. I kissed her and stroked her until she came sort of half awake, and then told her I loved her and got on top of her and inside her. I came the instant I was inside her but stayed hard and kept at it and the next time around we both made it. She passed out again a second after it was over. I was going to go downstairs, but before I knew it I was asleep myself.

  WENDY: And the next morning there we were, all three of us wide awake and hung over and in bed together.

  DAN: The thing that really strikes me funny, now that I look back on it, is how godawful serious we all were about the whole thing. We decided that the three of us were in love and that we would go on living together. Each of us was very noble about not being jealous of the other two, while none of us admitted that we found the idea of the other two together very exciting sexually. So we set up a sort of round-robin arrangement where we each took a turn being the odd-man-out. The happy couple spent the night together while whoever was It spent the night in the guest room.

  JWW: How long did this go on?

  DAN: Just a week. A very stupid week, but—

  WENDY: I don’t agree with you.

  DAN: No?

  WENDY: No. I think we needed that crazy week of switching around in order to get us used to the whole idea of a threesome. Remember, during this time we were each doing individual acts which we could accept, acts we had already performed. Meg and I had made love before, and you and I had made love before—

  DAN: No kidding.

  WENDY: —and while you hadn’t made love to Meg before, you had had other girls.
So we had this interlude in which we were performing familiar acts, and during this time we were able to get used to the idea of a ménage à trois as a legitimate emotional relationship. By the time we had that much down pat, we were in a better position to accept the physical acts of a threesome, which I think might have struck us as perverted otherwise.

  DAN: You, perhaps. Remember I’d had that experience in Paris, and Meg once made it with two men at once.

  WENDY: You always thought the Paris thing was perverted, though. And Meg’s two-man threesome was closer to rape than anything else. She was dead drunk at the time and those guys were balling her before she knew what was going on. It certainly was never her idea of good clean fun.

  DAN: You’ve got a point there.

  WENDY: Thanks. But I don’t know exactly what it was that put the three of us in bed together. Oh, as a matter of fact, I do. Dan told Meg about the time in Paris, and she wanted to know exactly what it was that he and the two girls did. He said showing was easier than telling, and he went upstairs and came down with a couple of quick sketches of troilistic sex. In one the two girls were having 69 while the man was screwing one of them from the rear, and in the other they were arranged in an oral triangle. The thing was—

  DAN: Interesting how the details stuck in your mind.

  WENDY: Cut it out. The thing was that he’d made the people recognizable, and he had sketched the three of us. Dan has a terrific talent for caricature, he can get likeness in a very few lines. And looking at the sketch, oh, I’ve always been very suggestible, I get excited reading horny books or watching love scenes in movies, and the sketches really got to me. Meg was surprisingly cool. She studied the triangle very seriously and said it looked awkward. Then she looked at the other sketch and brightened. “Now this looks like worlds of fun, kids,” she said. “Let’s try it, and I want to be the one in the middle.”

  DAN: It was worlds of fun, all right. Meg stayed with us for three months and the guest room stayed empty. We did everything, and there’s no point in cataloguing everything we did. If you’ve ever been involved in a threesome you can appreciate the possibilities. Once there’s an extra person involved there’s just so much more that can happen.

  • • •

  Meg remained at the Hayes house for three months, then left to accept a job opportunity on the West Coast. They were sad to part, but by this time there was a certain amount of friction in the relationship, not so much in bed as out of it. Dan and Wendy agree that a ménage à trois cannot function indefinitely no matter how ideal the sexual relationship.

  But when Meg left, both of them were determined to recruit someone else. However, they were at a loss as to how to proceed. Wendy finally went to a lesbian bar in New York and let herself be picked up and taken to a girl’s apartment, where she had a moderately successful sexual encounter. When she suggested that the girl participate in threesome, though, her partner’s reaction was wholly negative. She was too discouraged, and too upset at the idea of promiscuous lesbian relations with a stranger, to repeat the attempt.

  After several frustrating months, Dan picked up a copy of a swinger’s club magazine. They found a great many ads from couples seeking single girls but very few placed by single girls seeking couples.

  • • •

  DAN: There was one picture of a very attractive blonde from Philadelphia who was looking for single girls or couples, and who mentioned that her husband was available. We agreed to try her and wrote her a fairly candid letter and sent along photos of ourselves. She replied with nude photos of herself and her husband and suggested that we get together for a foursome. It seems that this publication charged for couple ads but printed girl ads free of charge, and so they used this dodge. The girl wouldn’t go anywhere without her husband. So we drove down to Philly to see them.

  WENDY: It turned out to be mistake.

  DAN: We really didn’t know what to expect, and it was mistake, all right. The man turned out to be bisexual and was very offended when I wouldn’t let him play games. I told him if wanted to be analyzed I’d go to a psychiatrist. But aside from that, it just wasn’t good. The presence of the guy inhibited me, and that would have been so even if he’d been completely straight. And with four of us it was just impossible to establish any real rapport.

  WENDY: There’s very simple reason for that. Four is an imperfect number.

  JWW: Sexually?

  WENDY: In every respect. Think of the aesthetic difference between a triangle and a square. Four is basically an imperfect number while three is a perfect number.

  DAN: Three is a beautiful number.

  JWW: Would a threesome with two males and a female be similarly ideal?

  DAN: For people who swing that way, yes. We tried it once to see if it did anything for us, first making sure that the other guy was straight. We took turns making love to Wendy and also had her simultaneously, and I can understand how that would appeal to certain people, but for us it was a washout.

  WENDY: It was a bore, all right.

  DAN: As was that trip to Philly. It very nearly turned us off the idea of the correspondence clubs, but we really did want to get some three-way stuff going, so instead of answering an ad we placed one. The usual sort of thing, except instead of just a photo of Wendy we sent photos of both of us. We got what turned out to be a better than average response, and think that’s one of the major reasons.

  JWW: Did you make many contacts from the ads?

  WENDY: Several. First, of course, we rejected the unattractive girls and the ones who indicated in their letters that they were only game for lesbianism. There were quite few of those. They would make love to me and let Dan watch, and then he could have a turn with me but not with them. Or they would specify that they would have oral sex with him but he couldn’t get into their sacrosanct snatches. That wasn’t what we wanted at all. We were looking for genuinely bisexual girls.

  DAN: All girls are genuinely bisexual. The problem is that most of them are too dumb to know it.

  WENDY: Of the remaining replies, we picked a very pretty thing a few years younger than ourselves. She was still in college at the time—one of those colleges on Long Island, I forget the name. We had her come to the house for the weekend. Dan picked her up in the city and drove her out. She was very shy but sweet.

  DAN: She was afraid to swing three-way at first. She would make it with Wendy and she would make it with me, but not both at once. She didn’t even want the outsider to be in the same room while it was going on.

  WENDY: She learned.

  DAN: Oh, yes. And quickly.

  JWW: I don’t mean to be obtuse, but you don’t mean that you forced her, do you?

  DAN: Oh, of course not. That’s really the last thing we would want to do. I’m sorry if you misunderstood. No, it was more a case of educating her. After the first night, when she had gotten to know us both physically and emotionally, the inhibitions began to break down. Then we asked her if she had ever watched people fuck—

  WENDY: We didn’t put it quite that crudely.

  DAN: Sorry. But when we talk about things like this, it seems silly to avoid certain words. We asked her and she said she hadn’t, and we invited her to watch us. That gave her a way to get used to the idea of three in the same room without actively participating. So we went on like that a step at a time, and by the end of the weekend she was dreaming up things for the three of us to do all by herself.

  WENDY: She was delicious, really sweet and loving. We took her to Florida over Easter vacation. Her parents thought she was babysitting for us, which is a neat trick since we don’t have any children.

  JWW: I gather you are more interested in long-term affairs than in one-night stands.

  DAN: No question about it. What we want, really is a relationship, not a gymnastic trick.

  WENDY: That’s one reason why we try to avoid married women. There are quite few of them who swing with couples on their own, either with their husband’s permission or secretly. We can
’t have a love relationship with a girl in that situation because her husband always constitutes a sort of unseen presence. And also women like that are usually just looking for hit-and-run sex, and we aren’t.

  DAN: It’s hard to explain, but there’s a whole emotional magic in a really effective ménage à trois.

  WENDY: There is, and I’m not sure a person could understand it without having been involved in it himself. The sexual aspect is only part of it. The emotional bond that grows up, the interplay and interaction, is a very tender and loving thing. A relationship between two girls is limited and imperfect. It’s incomplete. And the relationship of man and woman is also limited. It lacks sisterly love, which can be sisterly and passionate at once, which is something that I don’t think is true of male homosexuality.

  DAN: I know that sounds like rationalization, but I have to agree with you.

  JWW: How do you feel your experiences with threesomes has affected your own marital relationship?

  DAN: Favorably.

  WENDY: Definitely. Look, for a couple of years we both had deep hang-ups and desires that we weren’t able to admit even to ourselves, let alone to each other. We both had a yen for three-way love and didn’t even know it. You can’t live forever with those sort of submerged yearnings without the strain beginning to get to you after a while. Now we’re doing what we always wanted to do, and doing it together, and enjoying it, and giving pleasure to each other and having pleasure ourselves. How could it fail to improve our relationship?

  JWW: And is your sex life still rewarding when you are not with a third party?