CAROLE: Of course the problem was our attitude. I realized as much a few days later and discussed it with David. We might enjoy ourselves with a tart, but not if we approached it as a love situation. We had to take the attitude that the girl was ours to command, a sort of mutually owned sex slave. I told David to see what he could find, and he surprised me wonderfully by bringing home a West Indian girl. I’m sure she was no more than seventeen. She was black as pitch, with firm little breasts and those grand protruding buttocks that some Negro girls have. It was easy for us to pretend that she was our slave. I’m sure the difference in race helped.
DAVID: We got terribly kinky.
CAROLE: Oh, we were dreadful! We kept her there all night. She wanted awfully to go home but we wouldn’t let her. We made her do everything. At one point she and I had mutual cunnilingus while David took her anally. I don’t think she’d ever been buggered before and it was evidently very painful for her. And at first this cooled me off, and then I thought, no, one ought to enjoy this sort of thing, so I locked her head in place with my thighs and made myself glory in her pain so that it became not a depressant but a stimulant. One never realizes one’s own capacity for the perverse. It was far too kinky for a regular thing, but marvelously effective as a change of pace. After that, we did let her go home. David gave her an outrageous sum, more than twice what he’d promised her—
DAVID: Forty or fifty pounds.
CAROLE: More than she could have earned in a week, I’m sure, but we didn’t want to risk her informing anyone. Money does soothe the injured spirit. She’d been in distress all night, but once she had the money in her hand she wanted to arrange another meeting with us. But we never did see her again.
DAVID: Another night like that one and I think the little chocolate bar would have learned to enjoy it. Astonishing how easy it is to pervert a person’s sexual orientation.
CAROLE: Or the reverse. You do remember Vivian, don’t you? Vivian was a lesbian who had a terrible crush on me, and she was aggressive in the special way some of the dykey types are apt to be. She kept telling me that if I once went with her I would find out how much pleasure one woman could give to another. I’d been brushing her off for years until one day I lost patience and told her I’d had plenty of homosexual experience myself, and liked it very much, and would be glad to go around with her anytime she wanted, with one condition—that David participate.
DAVID: She wasn’t really serious.
CAROLE: No, because I never dreamed she would consent. I just wanted to shut her up. She was exclusively homosexual and had a great fear of coitus. She said she’d been raped as a child, but I’ve never been sure that that wasn’t just a line she used. At any rate, instead of being put off she was intrigued. She wanted to know if we’d done this before, and I told her perhaps more than I intended to, and she said she would play the game our way with one reservation—it had to be agreed that David would not have coitus with her. Anything else was permissible, but her sacrosanct vagina was not to be penetrated.
DAVID: Which was fine with me. I didn’t very much want her at all, as far as that went. Mannish women have never appealed to me.
CAROLE: Or to me either. but we did seem to be committed. We spent an evening at her flat and did the sort of things one might expect. She approached it all with the attitude that she would endure David in order to get to me, but in spite of herself she began to enjoy his caresses, and before the night was out she insisted that David have intercourse with her. Actually insisted. And enjoyed it greatly, and had an orgasm. Viv couldn’t have been more astonished. New vistas and wider horizons, all of that. We never had her again—not our type, really—but ever since then she’s been truly bisexual.
DAVID: Her whole personality changed in the process. She’s gotten rid of all her tough butch mannerisms and is a good deal less aggressive than she was. Is she married, do you know?
CAROLE: There was something. She had a lover who was going to divorce his wife and marry Viv, but I don’t think it ever happened. I haven’t heard a thing about her in months.
DAVID: Well, that’s beside the point. At any rate, she actually became bisexual, and in the process grew a good lot easier to take.
• • •
As their experiments with troilism progressed, David and Carole were able to determine just what sort of relationships best suited them. They learned that the role they most enjoyed was that of sexual instructors to a younger male or female. Their ideal partner was a boy or girl in the late teens with relatively little prior sexual experience. With the proper partner, they prefer a protracted affair of several weeks to a one-night stand.
DAVID: Our short-term games are simple entertainments, kinky adventures. One of us might pick up someone without mentioning that there’s a husband or wife anxious to join the fun. I picked up a darling little fairy in New York once, for example, and he nearly broke down when Carole joined us. I gather he had one of those oedipal things where any woman immediately became his mother. My dear wife literally raped him. I mean exactly that. I held him down and Carole used a vibrator on him so that he simply couldn’t avoid becoming erect, it was a purely physical reaction. Then she mounted him and had coitus.
CAROLE: It was frightening, actually. He fought it all the way but couldn’t prevent himself from responding, and at the end he began thrusting violently. When he ejaculated he was squeezing my breasts in his hands and shouting “Mommy, Mommy!” at the top of his lungs. Exciting but terrifying. And he passed out immediately after orgasm.
DAVID: At first we thought he was dead.
CAROLE: Simply terrifying. David took him home and we left New York the very next morning. We were honestly afraid to see him again, or even to be in the same city with him. Do you suppose he had a breakdown?
DAVID: I shouldn’t be surprised.
CAROLE: That is a horrid thought. Quite the worst thing we’ve ever done, and the only act that I can’t look back upon without getting a queasy feeling. And not just in terms of the evilness of it. The way he called me Mommy, that did strike close to home. We know very well that we play a distinctly parental role with our younger partners. The permissive-seductive parent figure. I believe that’s the term I read somewhere. But it’s one thing to recognize this and another thing entirely to have someone actually think at the moment of orgasm that you are his mother. Unquestionably the worst thing we’ve done.
DAVID: You’re forgetting Catherine, aren’t you.
CAROLE: Lord, you’re not going to discuss that—
DAVID: Why not? I—
CAROLE: We’ve never discussed that with anyone.
DAVID: And with good reason. But Mr. Wells already knows enough about us to destroy us utterly, you know. And in terms of effect there was nothing so dreadful about what we did with Cathy. Besides, unless I’ve misjudged my man, Mr. Wells isn’t the sort for moral judgments. Am I right?
JWW: As a matter of fact, I don’t like to judge anyone else’s acts. I have enough trouble figuring out my own life. But please don’t tell me anything you don’t want me to know, or that would make Mrs. Shelton uncomfortable.
DAVID: Would it, love?
CAROLE: No, not really.
DAVID: Then you might as well hear this, Wells. Print it if you want, but with discretion. We were in London briefly a year ago. Some very good friends of ours left the country suddenly, they had to attend a funeral somewhere. Was it Stockholm? Stockholm or Oslo, I never remember which. It scarcely matters. They were to be gone for a week and asked if we could take in their daughter while they were gone.
Catherine was twelve then, and just coming into puberty. I don’t believe I have ever seen a more beautiful child. A stunning face and silky blonde hair. Little girl breasts that had just begun to blossom, the finest blonde pubic fluff—
CAROLE: You may gather that she made an impression upon David.
DAVID: On both of us. She had lovely legs, also. That’s very rare in young girls, you know. It’s unusual for t
hem to have shapely arms and legs.
CAROLE: We never in our lives expected anything would happen. Never. We lead unorthodox sex lives, as you well know, but we’re not the sort who find themselves carried away by uncontrollable impulses. Cathy was a child, the daughter of very dear friends, and not at all someone we would think of to have sexual relations with.
DAVID: Except that we found ourselves doing precisely that. The first night she woke up with a bad dream and came to sleep with us. We both found it impossible to sleep. The thought of seducing that child was appalling to both of us, yet we found ourselves overwhelmingly attracted to her. It was devilish. We had to have her and yet we couldn’t bear to. Carole awoke to find the little thing sleeping all warm and snug against her, and she automatically reached to caress her.
CAROLE: Fortunately I realized what I was doing before Cathy awoke, and I was able to restrain myself. Barely.
JWW: Did you seduce her, then?
DAVID: Yes and no.
JWW: I’m not sure I understand.
DAVID: This is disgusting, I’m afraid, but here you have it. After two nights of intense frustration we discussed it at length and decided what we must do. We drugged her.
CAROLE: That sounds even worse than it was. It was just something to make her sleep soundly.
DAVID: A barbiturate compound. We gave it to her with her bedtime cocoa and she went right off into a sound sleep. We took her to our room and undressed her. It would be impossible for me to describe the beauty, the sexual attraction of that sleeping child. We played with her for hours. Of course we didn’t tamper with her virginity or anything of the sort. We stroked her and kissed her all over that sweet girlish body and worked off our more intense enthusiasm with each other. And she remained unconscious throughout it all.
CAROLE: But she responded, David.
DAVID: Yes, and that was particularly lovely. She writhed and purred in her sleep almost as if our caresses were reaching an unconscious layer of her mind, or as if we were making her have sex dreams. And when she awoke the following morning it was as though nothing had happened at all. Everything was as it had been before.
JWW: It was just that one night, then?
DAVID: And another night as well. There you have it—perverse and immoral, yet no one was hurt. Cathy herself never knew what had happened to her, and we’ve never told anyone but you. Her father would kill us both if he knew. He would literally kill us, and I can’t say that I would blame him. Yet I’d do it again without a second thought.
CAROLE: There is something about a girl of just that age. Not all of them, just a very few—
DAVID: What do you say to spending part of September in Tangiers? You can get anything there, you know, either sex and my age. I’ll rent us a girl.
CAROLE: One that looks like Cathy?
DAVID: I’m afraid I can’t promise you that. Blondes are a bit hard to come by in that part of the world, you know. But some young thing with the same sort of beauty and innocence. We’ve a tenth anniversary coming up, we could call it an anniversary present. How does that strike you?
CAROLE: Do you really have to ask? But Mr. Wells is going to think we’re dreadfully kinky people.
DAVID: And well he might, love. Ah, my darling, wasn’t it a piece of great good luck that we found each other? How on earth could we have gotten through life apart?
• • •
The Sheltons, as you may have already figured out, were a rather extraordinary couple, and interviewing them was quite an experience. Not only did they constitute a unique variety of swinging marriage, but they also spoke very frankly of extremely bizarre incidents without ever permitting the interview to lose its tone of polite formality. David could discuss an extracoital technique in one breath and address me as Mr. Wells in the next, and did so without seeming either stilted or inconsistent. They are unique in my experience, and the reader would err greatly in considering them typical of either the general run of troilists or, on the other hand, the general run of Jet Setters. It is no doubt self-evident that they are a case unto themselves, but I state it again to make doubly sure.
As I write these lines, several months have passed since our interview. By now the Sheltons have perhaps flown to Tangiers to celebrate ten years of a rewarding if unconventional marriage by taking a twelve-year-old girl into their bed. And, as I reflect upon them now, I am a little less inclined to dismiss David’s theory of their behavior as sophistry. I suspect it does play a real part in the formation of their sexual attitudes.
Nevertheless, it is also quite obvious that the desire for variety, along with the need to satisfy mutual homosexual desires, plus of course the allure of forbidden fruit, all figure prominently in motivating these two unusual people. Furthermore, the reader may draw his own conclusions as to the manner in which their early sexual experiences and family backgrounds have shaped their lives.
I Came Four Times—How About You?
LEE: One thing, when you meet through the mails there are a lot of couples that are less than what you had in mind. Like last week we took a run down to Harrisburg to see this one couple. The wife was great, knockers out to here and great muscular control, so I had a damned good time. But it was a drag for June.
JUNE: We always insist on exchanging photos first, that’s a must. But you can understand why some people won’t send full-length nudes through the mail. Everybody’s heard too many stories about Post Office snoops. And a picture never tells the whole story. This guy looked good in his picture, but he turned out to be a shrimp. I don’t think he was more than five-foot-two with his shoes on, and that wasn’t the only thing small about him.
LEE: She couldn’t get any satisfaction.
JUNE: Isn’t it the truth. Lee here was having a ball and as far as I was concerned we could of stayed home and stuck with each other. And then of course this other woman wanted to go down on me, and I’d just as soon get along without that. Plain old-fashioned screwing is good enough for me, but Lee likes to watch and take pictures so I was a good sport and went along with it.
LEE: You came, didn’t you?
JUNE: Not with her. I faked it or I figured she’d never quit. With him I did, but it was no big deal. It just goes to show. You never know what you’ll get, or one of you’ll have a ball and the other won’t. Like now he wants to see them again, and I told him he can go without me and stay as long as he likes. Me, I’ll spend the time with Joe and Rita. Joe’s hung like a bull and he can last forever, but Lee hates to swing with him because Rita’s flat on top.
LEE: I admit it, I’m crazy about boobs. Maybe we’ll do it that way, you work something up with Joe while I have another shot at Harrisburg. The hell, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t both have a good time . . .
• • •
It would be impossible to imagine either Roy and Barbara Halliday or David and Carol Shelton ever carrying on a conversation similar to the one quoted above. The crudity of speech notwithstanding, the whole emotional attitude sets this dialogue far apart from that of the other two couples we have studied.
All of our subjects thus far, both couples and Marcia Duffy as well, share one characteristic. They have all arrived at a relatively stable sexual relationship and have made what they consider an unequivocally ideal adjustment to their own individual circumstances. Whether one is or is not inclined to view them as healthy, sane, moral or normal, one cannot obscure the fact that all five persons are satisfied with their position and that they are likely to continue to enjoy their sexual roles, at least for the foreseeable future.
Furthermore, in the case of the two married couples, swinging has been very much a marital function; it is viewed within the framework of the marriage, is considered as having a beneficial effect upon marital relations, and is designed for dual rather than individual gratification. Roy Halliday could not possibly enjoy sexual relations with another man’s wife if he knew that Barbara was having a bad time, any more than he could ask Barbara to submit to unenjoyable les
bian caresses just so that he could become excited watching her. Nor could David Shelton enjoy sexual relations with a man or woman whom Carole did not find attractive.
This is in no sense the rule in the swinging society. On the contrary, for a great many couples swinging represents an unstable and only partially successful way to resolve the frustrations of a marriage. Often it is a compromise between the desire to stay married and the desire for extramarital adventure. Utter selfishness is not uncommon; if one’s partner has a good time too, so much the better—but if not, one still enjoys oneself as much as one can.
There is often a sense of desperation in the attitude of this sort of swinger. I have occasionally found myself feeling that certain husbands and wives use swap sessions as a form of competition. I also cannot help feeling that these swingers who keep count of their orgasms and collect obscene photos of former swap-mates are compiling evidence to prove that they are sexually adequate and their lives sexually fulfilling. The idea that sex is the be-all and end-all of human existence, that the perfect lover and the perfect position and the perfect soul-shattering orgasm lie just beyond the horizon, keep a great many swingers leading generally frustrating lives, pursuing phantoms and rainbows on a sexual treadmill.
This chapter’s title sums up for me one aspect of the games these swingers play. It was a statement-cum-question which one wife put to her husband on the way home from a party, but I’m sure various versions of the line are uttered every day. “I had four orgasms, how about you?” As if sexual success or failure can be tallied as precisely as a corporation’s financial statement, and as if a sexually satisfied person has any need to keep score. Lee and June Kreinhauser live in eastern Pennsylvania in a city in which a number of John O’Hara’s novels and stories have had their setting. While they are several cuts below the country club set most often thought of as typical O’Hara characters, characters very much like the Kreinhausers have figured prominently throughout his work. Both Lee and June come from old Pennsylvania Dutch stock. Lee owns the downtown sporting goods store which his father opened years ago and has just recently arranged to open a branch store at a new shopping plaza. June’s father works as a teller at a local bank.
The Taboo Breakers: Shock Troops of the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 9