JWW: You went together for two years before you were married, is that right?
MOIRA: Just about.
JWW: How soon after you began dating did you have sex?
EDMUND: If you mean coitus, I think it was the third date. But the sexual attraction was very strong for both of us from the moment we first saw each other, and we got fairly passionate the first night and gave each other a finger wave the second.
MOIRA: Then he brought me home permanent.
EDMUND: That’s not a bad line, honey.
MOIRA: Edmund had his own apartment, and that made things much simpler than they had been for me before, when my sex life had been limited to sneaking around in dormitories or fraternity houses or knocking off a quickie in the back of a parked car. I was out of school myself, sharing an apartment with another girl, so I could stay at his place all night. What it really amounted to was that we lived together. I wasn’t there every night, because the first two years in law school are a real grind and some nights I had to take a back seat to Carruthers v. Murgatroyd 1884 or something equally exciting—
EDMUND: Even so, we had a full relationship. From the beginning, I don’t think there was any question in my mind that I would eventually get married to Moira, as soon as my education was over and done with.
MOIRA: We were never formally engaged—
EDMUND: We agreed that engagements are an idiotic convention in the present day.
MOIRA: —but we had what’s quaintly termed an understanding by the time we had been going together for, oh, say six months.
JWW: And I gather you were both satisfied with your sexual relationship during this time?
EDMUND: More than satisfied.
MOIRA: Enthusiastic. We had both had enough experience to know what we were doing, and of course I started on contraceptive pills immediately so there was no problem in that area. The conditions helped, too—we had the security of absolute privacy, and yet because we weren’t married there was a certain amount of added excitement. No matter who you are, there’s no escaping the fact that living in sin is more romantic than marriage.
EDMUND: One thing that helped is that our sexual attitudes were very similar. We’ve both always been liberal and open-minded in virtually all areas, sex included. Neither of us had any noticeable problem with guilt feelings or inhibitions. We experimented the way any couple will—different positions, extracoital techniques—and we got along very well together in the hay.
JWW: At the early stages, then, you had no intention of making swinging part of your marriage?
MOIRA: We did discuss it once or twice.
EDMUND: Hold on a minute. We discussed it, but not in terms of ourselves. Somehow or other the topic of wife-swapping came up, I forget how, and we had talked about it in general terms. At the time, remember, we both agreed that it was a pretty sick way for marriage to function. The whole idea of switching partners for sexual variety with a couple of total strangers seemed like a crazy way of making adultery mechanical, of taking the romance out of an extramarital affair.
JWW: So you didn’t think it was a course your own eventual marriage could conceivably take?
MOIRA: Definitely not.
JWW: And did you take it for granted that you would be mutually faithful to one another?
MOIRA: Well—
EDMUND: Yes and no. I thought fidelity was desirable, but at the same time wasn’t blind to the fact that ninety-nine men out of hundred cheat on their wives at one time or another, and the hundredth one is a liar. I couldn’t see any reason to regard myself as a saint—
MOIRA: Amen.
EDMUND: —nor could I ignore the fact that I responded sexually to attractive girls even though I loved Moira and the two of us had so much going for us. I think what it amounted to was that I planned to be faithful to Moira but that I realized I would probably have occasional affairs sometime in the course of our marriage.
JWW: Did the same thing occur to you?
MOIRA: I knew that men hardly ever go a lifetime without extramarital sex, and I didn’t have any illusions about Edmund’s sainthood, either. I think my general feeling was that what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me, and I trusted he would be kind enough to keep me from finding out. As far as the idea of my cheating was concerned, I can honestly say that it never occurred to me. I had already experienced sexual boredom before, with that jerk I was pinned to, and couldn’t conceive of our relationship going stale that way because it was so different. The idea that I might develop a yen for another man, well, that was just inconceivable.
EDMUND: How you’ve changed, love.
MOIRA: I don’t think it’s a matter of changing, really. You have to remember that men and women are different when it comes to getting yens. With men, physical attraction is enough by itself to guarantee a response. You take a man who’s absolutely crazy about his wife in every way and let the right girl walk by him and he’ll automatically respond to her and want to make love to her. He may be only conscious of the desire and may repress it immediately, but unless there’s something wrong with him it’ll be there. With women it’s different. A woman’s response is more to the situation, to romance, to love, to the character of the man. It may make her play around just as much as a man and it may make her every bit as anxious to get herself laid, but she won’t be as physically oriented and thus her response won’t be as automatic. And of course there are any number of social factors to reinforce this, the whole way in which men grow up with the idea that virility means screwing any woman who’ll hold still long enough while women even today think of sex as a function of home and family. That difference was much more important years ago, but it still plays a part in things.
EDMUND: You see what I meant about sociology majors?
JWW: Then as I understand it, Moira never experienced conscious desires for sex with other men during this period. You did, Edmund, but I gather you never acted on them.
EDMUND: That’s right. It took a particular set of circumstances for everything to get started, but we’ve looked back on it since and we both agree that it would have come to pass sooner or later. Our first involvement was with another couple that we were friendly with—the girl was Moira’s roommate, and had fixed her up with a classmate of mine, and the four of us spent a lot of time together. The one incident that got things going was completely unplanned and unexpected, but it’s obvious in retrospect that the relationship the four of us had was going in that direction anyhow and it was only a question of time.
• • •
The other couple, Pam and Lennie, seem to have been quite similar in general background to Edmund and Moira. Like them, they had hit it off immediately, began seeing one another exclusively, and enjoyed a rewarding sexual relationship and intended to marry after Lennie finished law school. The two girls had been quite close before, and the men had been fair friends. Now their common friendship brought them into close contact to the point where each couple was the other couple’s sole social contact. “We either went out with Pam and Lennie,” Moira said, “or we didn’t see anyone.”
The relationship between the two couples gradually developed much of the inter-couple flirting which frequently characterizes similar relationships among married couples—and which is often a prelude to wife-swapping. Lennie and Moira shared an interest in folk music, for which neither of the other two could summon up much enthusiasm. Edmund said, “I suggested one night, just as a gag, that the two of them could go catch the Joan Baez concert while Pam and I examined a more basic component of the folk process. I just said this for laughs and all it got was laughs, but seen in the light of what happened later it’s obvious that I was kidding on the square, making a joke that was more than a joke. And underneath I guess we all reacted to it that way.”
While this innocent flirting went on, a strong current of sexual attraction developed between Pam and Edmund and between Moira and Lennie. Still, no passes were made.
• • •
EDMUND:
Moira and I would occasionally continue the joking among ourselves, making sexual references to the two of them. She told me she knew I had letch for Pam and I didn’t bother to deny it. It was certainly true, but at the same time I had already decided that nothing would tempt me to try doing anything about it. As far as I was concerned it was just a letch, a sexual yen, and you don’t simultaneously screw your best friend’s girl and your girl’s best friend just because of an urge.
MOIRA: Pam and I talked about sex quite a bit when the two of us were alone together. We would sort of compare notes—
EDMUND: Isn’t that a hell of thing? Speaking of differences between men and women, there’s one you don’t want to forget. Two wives will tell each other the most intimate damned things about their relations with their husbands, the sort of thing one man would never dream of mentioning to another man. And on the other hand husbands will reminisce with one another about the screwing around they did before they met their wives, whereas damn few girls will discuss other men with their girlfriends.
MOIRA: Well, I don’t want to give the impression that Pam and I went into all the gory details, but I guess we did share pretty intimate confidences. And we did joke about trading partners. You know, in a sense it wasn’t even joke. We were very serious but with the clear understanding that it was something we would never do. She had said that Lennie had been particularly demanding lately, very horny, and now she had her period which sort of limited things. And I said I would take care of him for her if she returned the favor for Edmund next time I was down with the Red Plague. We agreed that it was a perfectly sensible way to do things—
EDMUND: Which is true enough.
MOIRA: —and I extended the idea so that one wife would help out if the other was out of action during the last weeks of pregnancy and right after childbirth. We laughed as we talked, and yet the whole thing seemed perfectly logical to us. I told her I’d much rather have Edmund crawl into bed with a nice clean girl like Pam who would be sure to treat him nice than have him waste his money on some whore who might give him a disease to bring home to me. And she said she was sure that I would enjoy spending a night with Lennie, that she would gladly give him an endorsement as an ideal lover. I replied with praise for Edmund.
EDMUND: Sweet of you.
JWW: But you never thought of actually arranging a trade?
MOIRA: Oh, no. It was all a lark, and while we were serious enough in thinking that this would be a sensible way to operate, it was with the understanding that the way of the world was such that we could never possibly do anything of the sort.
JWW: Did you begin considering an affair with Lennie?
MOIRA: I can’t say I considered an affair, any more than Edmund actually considered making a play for Pam. I didn’t want to do anything that would hurt either Edmund or Pam, but I did start thinking about what it would be like to sleep with Lennie. I guess you could say that I first got the urge around that time. And I think it probably had more impact on me than it did on Edmund, because he had found himself drawn to other girls frequently in the past—
EDMUND: Not as strongly.
MOIRA: No, but at least the idea of being attracted to someone else, of wanting someone else, didn’t come as a shock to you. It did to me. This was a new experience for me and it shook me a little. There were times, remember, when I felt very uncomfortable in Lennie’s presence, very much embarrassed, as if everyone there could sense my thoughts.
EDMUND: You never told me that.
MOIRA: It didn’t last long because I got used to a process of doublethink—wanting to do something and yet resigned to the fact that I would never do it.
EDMUND: Then came the wild weekend.
JWW: Exactly what happened? I gather that there was a mate-trading incident in the course of the weekend.
MOIRA: That pretty well sums it up. It was . . . let me see, I think it was in January or February of Edmund’s last year in college, which would mean that the two of us had been going together for little over a year. That’s right, and we got Pam and Lennie together when we’d been dating for a couple of months, so they must have been dating for a year when it happened. Pam’s dad had a cottage up in Vermont where he took the family during the summer, and he normally rented it out for the skiing season during the winter. This year the cottage was going to be vacant for a week right in the middle of the season, and while the four of us couldn’t get away for a week we managed to set up a long weekend together. We drove up on Thursday and were going to head back Sunday afternoon and fit in as much skiing as possible in the time we had available.
EDMUND: Except that the snow didn’t oblige. There wasn’t any, and so there wasn’t any skiing.
MOIRA: Which left us with what the British call a dirty weekend on our hands. It was slightly embarrassing at first. For just one couple it would have been the perfect romantic weekend in the pines, but there we were, the four of us, with no chance of skiing and nothing at all to do out there but drink and screw. We were all very open about the fact that I was sleeping with Edmund and Pam was sleeping with Lennie, but there’s still a difference when the four of you are under one roof in the middle of nowhere.
EDMUND: On top of this, that fresh mountain air was a mighty aphrodisiac. The girls wore the usual snow bunny outfits, with their ski pants fitting them like coats of paint, and if I hadn’t had a letch for Pam before I would have developed one then. Thursday and Friday night Moira and I took it all out on each other in the hay, and it was pretty great, even better than it usually was for us. It went the same way for Lennie and Pam, so you can’t say that we swapped out of sexual boredom or anything of the sort.
MOIRA: By Saturday we had become a pretty decadent group, though. We had gotten to the point where we talked about sex in the open. Lennie would say something like, “Well, should we have another drink or are you folks anxious to go upstairs and knock off a piece?” The whole atmosphere was charged with sex.
EDMUND: There was nothing else to do.
MOIRA: All day Saturday we were all thinking about switching. No one said a word, but all four of us had it in mind. As a matter of fact, Edmund told a joke that afternoon that was greeted with a long silence and then an extra-hearty laugh. Do you remember how it went?
EDMUND: I don’t think . . . oh, yeah. An oldie. This man and woman have been married for ten years and one night they’re both grinding away for hours and neither of them can finish, and finally the husband says, “What’s the matter, honey—can’t you think of anybody either?”
MOIRA: I was stunned, because when we made love the night before I had actually been imagining it was Lennie—
EDMUND: And I was thinking of Pam, which was why the joke occurred to me. And I suppose they’d had the same scene themselves, judging by their reactions to the line. Long silence and wild laughter and a quick change of subject.
MOIRA: We had been doing more than the usual amount of drinking that weekend, but Saturday night we really dug into the cabin’s liquor supply. Nobody got really drunk, probably because of the tension in the air, but we all got about as high as it’s possible to get. You know, you always read about couples who get started by dancing together and switching partners, but who the hell dances nowadays? Kids do all those twitchy dances. Can you imagine seducing somebody else’s wife during a fast watusi?
JWW: How did things get started?
MOIRA: Pam went downstairs to scout up a fresh bottle, and Edmund picked that moment to go outside for firewood. That left me with Lennie, and we were both trying not to notice each other. He was sitting in an easy chair by the fire and he closed his eyes pretending to be asleep so that he could ignore me without being boorish about it. I bounced over to him and said, “Hello, Sleeping Beauty!” and leaned over to give him a little kiss. The next thing I knew he had me in his lap, and his arms were around me and he had his tongue halfway down my throat. I was stunned, really stunned, but I was also so passionate that I didn’t care if Pam and Edmund walked in or not.
EDMUND: Which we did just about simultaneously. When I came in lugging a log on my shoulder I saw Pam in the kitchen doorway looking over to her right, and turned to see what she was looking at and there they were, hugging and kissing like a soldier home from the wars. I don’t know how much of my reaction was the liquor and how much was the yen I had for Pam, but I remember that my first thought was, good, now I could do what I’d been wanting to do all night.
JWW: No jealousy on your part?
EDMUND: Not a drop. I didn’t even spend much time looking at them but turned to Pam instead. She’s an entirely different type from Moira, blonde and a head shorter and built more generously—
MOIRA: Which is his way of saying that she has big tits.
EDMUND: Anyway, she’s a very different type, and at that moment she was far and away the most desirable creature on God’s earth. I just gaped at her, and that goddamn log fell off my shoulder and hit the floor with enough impact to register on seismographs clear across the country, and the two cuddling on the chair didn’t even notice it.
MOIRA: I didn’t even know you were in the room. I’m sure I never heard the log fall.
EDMUND: Pam did, though. She turned and looked at me, and there was that spark, you could feel it all the way across the room. We sort of flowed across the floor toward each other. Neither of us said a word. She pressed against me and we kissed and it was like an electric shock. I put my hands down to cup her buttocks and draw her in close, and she gave a little moan and thrust her loins against me. I could feel the heat of her through her clothes. We kept holding onto each other and kissing, and somehow or other we managed to get over to the couch and sit down. I couldn’t control my hands at all, they kept moving over her body. It was the most urgent burst of excitement I’d ever experienced.
MOIRA: I was like a robot. It was as though I no longer had any control whatsoever. We kissed for what seemed like forever, and then we stopped and Lennie put me on my feet and stood up, and I saw the two of them necking up a storm on the couch.
The New Sexual Underground: Crossing the Last Boundaries (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 10) Page 15