Versatile Ladies: the bisexual option (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  I was so inexperienced. I had had no experience with men to speak of and what sex I had had with men—boys, really—was frustrating and unsatisfying. All of that routine with the boy trying to get as much as he can from you, and you trying to satisfy him while giving as little of yourself as possible. Naturally in a situation like that I couldn’t get excited, and not being excited made me worry about myself, and without going into detail it got me to the point where an affair with Eileen seemed perfectly natural.

  Well, the thing of it is that of course it was perfectly natural; I relaxed and enjoyed sex for the first time, and that scared the hell out of me. Because that made me a lesbian—that was the way I immediately saw it—and being a lesbian meant I couldn’t possibly have a normal life. Being a lesbian meant never having children and never being married and never doing any of the things I had always taken for granted I would do with my life.

  It was very scary, very unpleasant in that respect, and that bothers me to this day because there was no need for it to be ruined that way. The time I had with Eileen could have been something beautiful if I had only known enough to let it happen and enjoy it for what it was. And Eileen was as naïve as I was in this respect. She had had experience, experience with one other girl before me, but she still had about as immature an understanding of human sexuality as I did. It’s a shame, because if either of us had been more sophisticated about it, I’m sure it would have worked out better for both of us.

  We had a very intense affair, loaded with guilt on both sides, very exciting in bed but very nervous outside of bed. We weren’t really together that long. Just a few months, and not all that much sex in the course of those months because we would go through periods of giving each other up and then we would go back together again, and it remained an on-again off-again kind of thing until it wore itself out and we stopped permanently, probably because neither of us could take the emotional strain of it.

  I thought I was over it. Time after time I thought I was over it, and as I said I had an enormous need to make it with a man, but also a fear of making it with a man, which kept me a virgin longer than most girls. I was so afraid of going to bed with a man and not having an orgasm, which to me would be proof that I was a lesbian.

  Ron was the second man I slept with. The first was a boy I had been going with for a month or so, and he wanted to lay me, that was all he really wanted from me, and I gave in and slept with him because I wanted to prove I could enjoy sex with him. I was terribly uptight and didn’t enjoy it in the sense that I didn’t have an orgasm, but there was no pain to speak of and I was if anything relieved to discover that I didn’t absolutely hate it.

  What I thought, afterward, was that it was something I could put up with. I could stand it, I could even enjoy it a little. My body didn’t enjoy it completely but the sensations were pleasant, they were enjoyable more than they were off-putting. And there was a pleasure for me in the way my lover was excited and the way he got so much obvious enjoyment out of making love to me.

  So I decided I could live a normal life. At this point I had already shoved the affair with Eileen into the past and was telling myself it was simply a stage in development. I had read that people go through a homosexual stage in adolescence and that was how I interpreted this. Now I felt I had no desire to make love to a girl again, and I also felt that it would not be at all unpleasant for me to marry and make love to a man night after night. I even felt that sex was a more important thing for a man than for a woman, that women did not necessarily experience very intense pleasure. And that my response with this man was thus normal.

  Then I met Ron, and fell in love with him, and I realized I had never been in love before. And the love led to bed, and the first few times were maybe nothing spectacular but they were certainly better than anything I had experienced before, either with the other man or with Eileen. You see, because of our hangups, Eileen and I couldn’t really get into sex in a complete way. Our hangups held us back and so did our general sexual ignorance. So although I could have climaxes with her, and although I very much enjoyed the physical things we did, and enjoyed bringing her to orgasm, it was still nothing like the sexual intensity I found myself having with Ron.

  And that made it easy to banish the memory of Eileen entirely. The more satisfying my relationship with Ron became, the more the thing with Eileen tended to look like kid stuff. Like nothing important, which of course was how I wanted to think of it.

  Then we got into swinging and there it was again.

  • • •

  Ron and Leila got into swinging in a not-unusual manner. The pattern is one which recurs time and time again in the backgrounds of swinging couples. A strong emotional bond and an intense sexual relationship—the first such relationship for both husband and wife—led to marriage. Both the sexual and the emotional bond deepened in the early years of marriage. Then, after not too many years, the glow began to wear off and, for the husband especially, the desire for sexual novelty and for an indefinable “something more” began to assert itself.

  Extramarital experimentation by one or both parties often makes an appearance at this stage. This was not the case here, although Ron did entertain fantasies of such an affair and made tentative overtures in that direction, lunching several times with a girl from his office and carrying a call girl’s phone number in his wallet for weeks without ever summoning up the requisite courage to call her. Simultaneously, the sexual relationship between Ron and Leila began to deteriorate. Ron found himself with more sexual desire than ever during the day but with substantially less desire when he was actually in bed with his wife. For the first time he began to experience occasional difficulty either achieving or in maintaining an erection. He would attribute this to tiredness from overwork. When they did have intercourse, he often tried to make the experience more satisfying by having fantasies that his partner was someone else, either one of several women he knew and found attractive or a faceless stranger.

  Leila also found sex not only less frequent but less enjoyable when it was performed. While she did not consciously think in terms of extramarital sex, she was aware that something was definitely missing from their life together. She resumed masturbating, performing the act after unsuccessful intercourse or, occasionally, during a dull afternoon at home. Her masturbation seems to have been largely mechanical, with little in the way of fantasy reinforcement.

  It was Ron who first suggested swinging. He had come across the practice in his reading and found the idea instantly exciting. It seems to offer all the pleasures and excitement of extramarital sex without the furtiveness and guilt of a clandestine affair. A conversation with a co-worker made the idea of swinging real for him. Previously he had not entirely believed that swinging happened, or felt it was a practice confined to the east and west coasts where he lived. While the friend with whom he discussed swinging did not actually admit that he and his wife practiced it, the implication was present, along with the assurance that the co-worker “knew for a fact” that couples in that very city were swinging on a regular basis.

  Leila resisted the suggestion, but from the start her resistance was ambivalent. She found the whole idea at once exciting and distasteful.

  • • •

  I could picture swinging in my mind and it was an exciting picture. But where I had trouble was putting myself in that picture. I did not think it could be right for me. I had an image of a swinger as someone who was basically immoral and unconventional and I did not feel that I fit that image. I had what I would suppose are the usual worries. That Ron, no matter what he said and no matter what he thought, would have to think less of me for having relations with another man. That sharing sex with other people would leave us with less for ourselves. That marriage meant fidelity, sexual fidelity, and that if you started having sex with others you would be doing something bad to your own marriage.

  Also I felt that I would hate myself in the morning. That I would be doing something immoral and that I would fi
nd it hard to live with.

  But at the same time it turned me on. The idea of it. And here is where I guess I gave Ron a hard time for a month or two, because we would be in bed together and fooling around and talking about swinging and I would get caught up in the heat of the moment and agree that it would be a good idea at least to give it a try, and then afterward when I had cooled off I would change my mind. On-again off-again, and it must have been frustrating for him.

  Ultimately of course I decided yes, let’s give it a try. I would be hard put to say what convinced me. I guess I finally realized that this was not something that would go away by itself. That it was always going to be on our minds and that it was something Ron really wanted to do, or at least he thought he wanted to do it, so that the thing to do was really to give it a try and see what would happen. I was fairly sure that nothing too terrible could happen. Either we would like it or we wouldn’t, and then at least we would know one way or the other.

  In a way, I suppose I was less worried about a bad experience than a good one. In other words I was afraid I would like it.

  Ron teased me about that. Like the little boy who won’t eat the cabbage. “I hate cabbage, I’ll always hate cabbage, and I’ll never try cabbage because I might like it and I hate it.”

  In other words I was afraid of being a swinger. And the same thing happened later on, with bisexuality. The same sort of fear. That I might like it if I tried it.

  Well, to make a long story short, I tried it and I liked it.

  I never expected to like it as much as I did. No, wait a minute, that’s not what I meant to say. What I mean is that I never expected to like it in the way that I did. I expected something very weird, something earth-shattering. Either that or something terrible.

  Instead what happened is that we corresponded with this other couple, exchanged I think three letters each, sent photos of ourselves and received photos of them, and eventually arranged to meet them at their house for an evening with no strings attached. The understanding was given on both sides that if anyone didn’t want to swing for any reason whatsoever that was perfectly all right and there would be no hard feelings on anyone’s part. From their letters and photos we knew they were a couple similar to ourselves in many respects, attractive but not movie star types, and just a year or two older than we were. They had swung before about half a dozen times but still considered themselves novices.

  I was glad of this, that they had had some experience but not too much. It’s interesting that the average couple wants to start out with people who are more or less in the same boat as themselves. You would think it might be the other way around, because of course you can learn much more in less time if you swing with people who are old hands at the games, but it seems to be human nature to want to be with people with whom you have the most in common, not only in age and social standing and everything but in terms of sexual and swinging experience as well.

  We went over there and everything went very nicely. We had a few drinks and got along very well, and there were times when I had to remind myself that we were there to swing, that I was ultimately going to go to bed with this man. Of course when the conversation was turned to swinging that was always on my mind, but when we talked about other things I would get involved in the conversation and it would just seem like any social occasion with a congenial couple.

  Ultimately the other husband said that they liked us very much, and that they would like to swing if we were agreeable. Ron and I exchanged glances, and he said he would like to, and that put it up to me, and of course I was still of two minds about it. I hemmed and I hawed. Eventually the other man said why didn’t I let him kiss me and at least we would see if we turned each other on at all. There was no way to say no to that and he sat next to me on the couch and we kissed.

  I enjoyed kissing him but couldn’t really get with it at first. I was not letting go completely, I was still too much aware of things. Then we broke the kiss and I looked over and saw Ron and the other wife necking on the couch. She had her dress down to her waist and her bra off and he was kissing her and touching her breasts.

  I remember being very pleased that her breasts were smaller than mine. I’ve had what you might call a complex about the size of my breasts. So for some reason it reassured me to see that I could compete with her in that department.

  We went back to kissing, and then he put his hand under my dress and touched me. I felt very conscious that this was another man, that he was not my husband, and that every time he did anything whatsoever to me it was a first time for me and there would be no undoing it.

  The next time I looked up Ron and the wife were gone. Which meant that they had gone to the bedroom, of course. The fact that I was alone now with this man relaxed me. I felt able to let go, and it turned out that I was able to let go.

  He undressed me on the couch and we petted. I wanted him to screw me immediately. Not that I was passionate because I was not really that. It was more a matter of wanting to get it over and done with. For better or for worse I wanted it to be done with.

  At one point I told him I was ready and to please do it. He laughed and said, “Oh, you’re not ready yet. Just see how much readier you get in a little while.” And he asked if I didn’t like what he was doing to me, and I said I did, and he told me to just relax and enjoy the way it felt and not worry about what happened when.

  Which was just the right thing to do, not rushing me and not letting me rush him, and somewhere along the line I really did manage to let go. I got out of my mind and into my body, which is what you have to do. I let go of myself and I stopped thinking about what I was doing and just enjoyed doing it. There was a point where it felt very natural to be on that couch and have him running his hands over my legs and kissing my breast and touching me.

  He went down on me very expertly. Ron had done this all along but more to get us both ready for intercourse. We had both always approached it that way rather than for full pleasure in the act itself. This time I let go and he kept doing it, and doing it so beautifully, and I had a powerful orgasm that way. I was still in the throes of coming when he got on top of me and began to screw me. He came almost immediately, but not until he had tipped me over the edge for another orgasm with him.

  Afterward we got dressed and shared a cigarette, and he kept kissing me and telling me I was beautiful, and I felt more at peace with myself than I thought possible. After awhile Ron and the other girl came back to the living room and we had some coffee and talked.

  It was so much better than I thought it could be, not wild crazy sex but just something very warm and exciting and pleasurable that was as good afterward as it had been while it was happening.

  You would think, with that for background, that I wouldn’t have made so much fuss about trying bisexualism. That I would have gone through with it for the same reason—to see what it was like and if I liked it, with the knowledge that, if it didn’t work out, it wouldn’t be anything disastrous for me, wouldn’t change me.

  And if it hadn’t been for Eileen I’m sure I would have tried it right off the bat in exactly that spirit, just as I’ve tried other things in swinging that I never had thought of before. But here I was desperately afraid that I would like it, and that it would mean I was abnormal or perverted.

  Thank God it didn’t take me too long to get over that. Perverted! What a curse it is that girls grow up thinking of homosexuality that way. From what I know about myself and other women, all women are bisexual. Some of them are just not aware of the fact.

  And that’s true on both sides of the imaginary line. By this I mean that a woman who never makes love to another woman is missing a full life, and at the same time a woman who only makes love to other women is missing something. Eileen, for example, became a full-fledged lesbian. She had a few experiences and liked them so much that she threw up barriers to make it impossible for her to ever get it together with a man. I went the other way, figuring that I would have to stay away from lesbian s
ex entirely in order to be a normal woman. Either extreme is a mistake. In fact I would say that either extreme is abnormal and bisexualism is the only way a woman can really fulfill her total sexual potential.

  I’m sure that’s a statement not everyone would agree with. But the way things are going, I think it won’t be long before the majority of women recognize themselves as bi. God knows that’s already the case among swingers. With almost any couple that’s been into swinging for any substantial length of time, the wife is bi. And with the younger couples who are starting to swing, couples in their early twenties who are getting into group sex, the wife is usually bi almost from the start. It’s only with novice couples in their thirties and forties that the wife is exclusively heterosexual, and the odds are that she won’t be for long.

  Of course the whole country isn’t swinging, and it may be a long time before it is, if ever. But the way things are going it’s hard to be sure, isn’t it?

  At least I know I’m bi, and I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way. It doesn’t make me enjoy sex with men less, any more than swinging made me enjoy sex with Ron less. On the contrary, the one always enhances the other. It works that way. It really does.

  • • •

  On the surface, Leila gives the impression that she never had any reservations about bisexual activity once she had first experienced it as a swinger. This is not entirely accurate, not so much because she has purposely altered facts as that time tends to blur the edges of uncertainty. This is true in any number of areas. I have noticed, for example, that the longer a couple has been swinging, the less apt they will be to dwell on their original doubts and fears. When, on the other hand, I speak with a couple who has just begun to swing, or to a couple considering the step, these doubts and reservations are far more in the forefront.