3 is Not a Crowd (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  PETER: Until she found out, that bitch.

  WANDA: Mother.

  PETER: That bitch.

  GRACE: Was she really such a bitch or is it just the way she was with you two?

  PETER: No, she really was.

  WANDA: I don’t know how she found out. Whether she figured it out by herself or whether one of the servants found out and told her. But from then on nothing was ever the same.

  • • •

  PETER: I would prefer it if we talked about the next seven or eight years as little as possible. It was a horrible time, and in a great many ways we’re still in the process of recovering from it.

  They sent us to psychiatrists, and everybody asked us questions and talked to us and showed us ink blots and otherwise conspired to drive us insane. And it’s not particularly hard to drive a person insane. I’m sure if you take any normal healthy individual and send him to a funny farm and keep him there for a few months, you’ll have a lunatic on your hands. We’ve been in a variety of those institutions, from the ones that are like country clubs except that it’s hard to get out, to others that are more like prisons. And they’re all basically the same.

  The result of this, of course, is that we did become crazy. They kept us apart and filled us full of guilt and institutionalized us and shunted us to first one doctor and then another, and we both flipped out in different ways. They weren’t complete breakdowns, but some of them were pretty good ones. Wanda tried to kill herself a couple of times. She still has scars on her wrists.

  WANDA: I would love not to talk about that.

  PETER: Fair enough. I want to convey as much as I can of that period without going into any more detail than I have to. I think the worst of it was that they kept us apart. Each of us was literally all the other had. Not just sexually, but in every way. Wanda was my other self. We had no secrets from each other.

  WANDA: It was inconceivable for us to have secrets from each other.

  PETER: Absolutely. Just inconceivable. We shared everything. We were slightly telepathic.

  WANDA: We still are. And I would call it more than slight.

  PETER: But it doesn’t prove out on Rhine tests. It’s not true ESP in that sense. Each of us generally knows what the other is thinking, but that’s because our minds are so close, our thoughts generally follow similar lines. And we’re very sensitive to each other’s moods, we have great sympathy in the real sense of the word.

  For us to be separated, for our whole relationship to be thrown at us as something hideously shameful, was catastrophic for us. In a way it was better when one or both of us was under lock and key somewhere. At least that way the separation was surgically complete. But when we were both under one roof and still forbidden to do anything, and watched over constantly, and unable to be close and at the same time unable to stop wanting to be close

  WANDA: It was very hard to take.

  PETER: Impossible to take. And at the same time I realize that there wasn’t much else they could do.

  WANDA: Oh, the hell there wasn’t!

  PETER: What could they do?

  WANDA: They could have left us the hell alone.

  PETER: No, not really. You could have done that, in their position. But that’s not the way they were, that’s not the way they saw things. Look, we’re far advanced from their level. We have completely different views on certain things.

  WANDA: On almost everything.

  PETER: Granted. From our perspective, there’s nothing wrong with a brother and sister fucking. From theirs, which I grant you is a lot of crap, there was everything in the world wrong with it. I think they sincerely wanted what was best for us. This doesn’t take away from the fact that I also think they were the world’s worst parents, but their hearts were in the right place even if their heads weren’t.

  WANDA: I could argue, but the hell with it.

  PETER: Exactly. The hell with it.

  I suppose it goes without saying that we got together every chance we had. I think I already mentioned that I managed to impregnate Wanda on one such occasion. There were many such occasions. Not as many as we could have wished, but as often as we could manage it.

  We learned to put up a pretty good front. We learned to be very distant with each other whenever there was anybody around. And of course we would assure everybody—our parents, the doctors—that we were through with each other forever, that it was a horrible childhood mistake that could have had tragic consequences if we hadn’t nipped it in the bud, and that we fully realized the error of our ways.

  WANDA: Sometimes this was true. That is, sometimes we did feel this way. You get brainwashed sooner or later. But eventually we would shake loose again and be ourselves, and being ourselves meant being together.

  PETER: The funny thing is that they kept packing us off to places where sex really ran rampant. At one point they tried the boarding school bit—we each went off to a school designed to deal with difficult adolescents, and Wanda had her first homosexual experience at her school, and I had mine at my school, and this was evidently something perfectly all right, since they could ignore it, they didn’t have to look at it. It was perfectly fine for me to get fucked in the ass by this big son of a bitch I couldn’t stand the sight of, but it was wrong for me to make love to a girl I loved totally.

  WANDA: There was even more sex at the funny farms. I never wanted it, either. I didn’t want to be with anyone but Peter. Strangely enough I didn’t mind doing it with other girls, I liked that well enough. It wasn’t anything compared to what I had with Peter, it seemed on another level entirely, but it was warm and friendly and I didn’t dislike it. With other boys, I found it really rotten. I couldn’t relate to them at all and didn’t want to. But in some of the institutions you didn’t have much choice. It was easier to go along with it than not. You could always be raped if you held out.

  PETER: Your attitudes did change, though.

  WANDA: That’s true. By the time I was, I guess, around twenty, I got past this to an extent. I started sleeping with boys and had occasional affairs. But I have never been completely satisfied by any man but Peter.

  PETER: Even now?

  WANDA: Yes.

  PETER: Even when we swing with someone?

  WANDA: Even then. I’ve told you all this often enough, haven’t I?

  PETER: Yes, but I thought it might be part ego-food. I didn’t entirely believe you. I mean, I’ve seen you balling other guys, and either you’re an extraordinary actress or you have orgasms.

  WANDA: I come, but there’s more to satisfaction than that. You know that. It’s possible to be more satisfied sometimes when you don’t have an orgasm than other times when you do. It’s that way for you too, isn’t it?

  PETER: True. Coming isn’t a guarantee that the trip was good, and vice versa.

  WANDA: Well, I can come with other men, but I can’t find it completely fulfilling.

  PETER: I see. I thought you meant you couldn’t come, and I found that hard to believe.

  WANDA: You know me better than that. I can come looking at a candle if I put my mind to it.

  PETER: How about a picture of a candle?

  WANDA: Probably.

  • • •

  WANDA: Here’s a funny thing. After they were both dead, after we were old enough to do what we wanted to do without anyone interfering in our lives, for the first time we voluntarily separated from one another. First Peter spent some time in Sweden and then Denmark studying furniture design. By the time he came back to the States I had left New York and was living in Chicago, working for a faggot decorator during the day and taking courses at U of C nights. You might think we would have finally taken advantage of the chance we had to be together, but it took us a long time to get back together again.

  PETER: I think you used the word “brainwashing” earlier. This was part of it.

  WANDA: Just part of it.

  PETER: The other part was that we were going through a lot of changes. On the one hand we had
some personal growth and development to undergo. Career-wise, for example. I really did want to get over to Scandinavia and learn why they could make chairs there that looked so damned much better than the chairs we make over here. Wanda also wanted to get into decorating in a meaningful way.

  Beyond that, we were in a stock-taking period. We needed time to figure out how we really felt about each other. Correction—we knew how we felt about each other, knew we loved each other. What we didn’t know was what we intended to do about it.

  There were a lot of big questions involved. Were we going to avoid each other for the rest of our lives? Were we going to live together and make love? Were we going to try to sublimate the whole thing, remain close but cut out the sex? The answers seem easy now, but the whole point is that they were not easy then, as screwed up as we were. We’d been through a very bad time, and it took a lot of settling before we were completely over it, if indeed we ever did get completely over it.

  WANDA: Right before you went to Scandinavia, right before Peter went, we came very close to getting married.

  PETER: That’s right, we did.

  WANDA: We talked about it, and realized that a brother and sister can’t get married, but we also realized that we didn’t have to wear signs saying that we’re brother and sister. It would have been easy enough to take out a license and find some justice of the peace nearsighted enough to miss the family resemblance. I could have worn a dark wig or something.

  PETER: You wouldn’t have had to. The average minister would hardly suspect a potential bride and groom of being brother and sister. It would never occur to him.

  WANDA: I wonder how often it happens. Does it ever happen? Actual marriages?

  JWW: As a matter of fact, I know of a case.

  PETER: It’s not surprising. It must happen rather often. Do the people you know have children?

  JWW: No.

  PETER: It would be interesting to know of some who do. We’re past that now, the whole question of children, but at the time it was on our minds quite a bit. Not only as a practical consideration but because we had both heard at great length how the mating of siblings inevitably produced inferior children. I understand that this doesn’t have to happen, only if both carry an unfortunate recessive gene, but it seems as though it’s likely to happen.

  The effect of this was that it did lend support to the arguments that our sort of thing is unnatural, contrary to nature. Now I could never accept this intellectually—I don’t think Nature gives a damn about what people do, certainly not what they do in bed. But I suspect it was one of the things that weighed rather heavily on our minds when we talked about getting married, and when we decided instead to let ourselves drift apart, at least for the time being.

  • • •

  JWW: Both Peter and Wanda mentioned several times that they were no longer interested in having children, problems of inbreeding notwithstanding. They went to great lengths to insist, to themselves more than to me, that children were the last thing they wanted for any number of reasons.

  The frequent intrusion of this topic in our conversations led me to suspect that the issue of issue was by no means as settled as they prefer to think. I would be not at all surprised should they someday have children, either naturally or through adoption.

  • • •

  PETER: When I got back to the States, I found myself living very intensely, but very much on a day-to-day basis. The only part of my life with any sense of direction was my work. I made a good business connection and began doing rather well, and I channeled a tremendous amount of energy into my work. Socially, I was very active and striking out in all directions at once. New York, for an unattached young man with a certain amount of poise and a decent income, is by no means a hard place to take. I partied a great deal, I dated what seems in retrospect a staggering number of lovely girls, and I took most of them to bed.

  I hardly ever wanted to see them again. A new girl, I could always manifest enthusiasm for a new girl, but once I had spent a night with her I would lose interest. I don’t think I had any distaste for past conquests. More likely I was looking for a perfect girl and not finding her.

  Before very long I began getting involved with the swinging scene. I had had a taste of this in Copenhagen. There was a party, mostly students, where everyone fucked in the same room, and by the end of the evening a good deal of group groping and cluster-fucking took place, and the usual switching of partners. I had found this enormously exciting at the time, and I don’t remember quite how I found out about the orgies around New York, but someone or other invited me to bring a girl and join the fun. I called a recent conquest, a girl I figured might be game for this sort of thing. It turned out she was an old hand at orgies and would love to try some new people—on the orgy scene, you know, you quickly tire of the same old faces. Or the same old genitalia, I should say.

  I went to the orgy, the party, whatever you want to call it, and I enjoyed myself immensely. I found it an exhilarating experience and a very useful release.

  There was something, I don’t know, say, an honesty to it that I found preferable to the basic hypocrisy of dating. When I took a girl out I had to pretend an interest in her that I rarely felt. I had to relate to her as a person, or at least give the appearance of relating to her as a person. Now I’ll be the first to say that a full relationship yields the best sort of sexual relationship, but how often are two people capable of that? And how many persons is one person capable of relating to in any substantial way?

  In an orgy—or in the smaller swinging scenes, two or three couples—there’s no pretense. If you relate as good friends, that’s a bonus. If you don’t, if you just relate sexually, that after all is what you’re all there for. The sex is what it’s all about.

  I found it very satisfying, for example, that I would tumble a girl at a party without knowing her name or her knowing mine, without either of us giving a damn. Or to carry it a step further, I remember one party where I saw a girl with long black hair and immense pear-shaped breasts kneeling on the floor, on her hands and knees actually, and going down on a fellow. This was aesthetically pleasing to begin with, the lines of her body, the way her breasts hung like ripe fruit, the way her hair flowed.

  I went up behind her and took her from the rear, slipped right into her, and she went on giving full oral attention to her gentleman friend. She rotated her bottom in the nicest way. By the time I finished he had still not come, although she had, in a delicious shuddering spasm, so she went right on blowing him while I slipped out as easily as I had slipped in. And I went off to get a drink or something, and she never even knew who it was that had obliged her.

  I got to talking to her later during a lull, and she was quite charming and said nothing to indicate that she knew I was her phantom lover. I almost told her but decided that I liked the idea of leaving things as they were, of having had her without her knowing it.

  I could go on laying out reasons why I found orgies appealing, and they would all be true enough, but perhaps the basic one of all is the simplest and most obvious. I’m a kinky person, and when that’s what you are, group sex is sensational. It really is. It’s not just what you do or how much of it you can have, but there’s the whole sex-charged atmosphere of the scene, all those bodies, everything. When you’re not doing you can watch . . . It’s more fun than television, you know.

  But the best part about orgies, as far as I’m concerned, is that but for attending an orgy I would not have met my beautiful and exciting wife.

  GRACE: My life before I met Peter was drifting, really. That is what I did. I drifted. I never really made a decision or set out to do anything in particular. I put out for anybody who asked in high school, just did what I felt like, you know. I mean, I wasn’t much. I never thought of myself as very much at all.

  PETER: You were much, baby.

  GRACE: I never thought so. Nobody ever thought so. I was, you know, I was a cunt. A pair of tits and a cunt.

  PETER: An
d so much more inside.

  GRACE: I didn’t know this and neither did anybody else. And so as far as what I wanted to do with my life, well, I guess I didn’t think about it. I got through school and I drifted. The Coast, and then New York.

  I was a pretty girl who put out. It’s very easy to drift when that’s what you are. There are always men around to do things for you. And it’s no hassle to make money. I was always lazy, you know, I had nothing in particular I was good at, no job I was interested in. No career, you know. And I don’t think it ever occurred to me that what I ought to do was go out and get a job. I mean, what for?

  But for a girl who will do things there’s no need. Like pose for sex pictures. If you’ve got a fair face and figure you can make fifty dollars in a couple of hours of posing. You don’t even have to ball anybody. The photographer will generally make a pass if he’s straight, and I would ball him or not depending how I felt about him, but if you didn’t that didn’t mean you lost the work. It was optional—you do it if you want.

  And you can get work in movies. I mean the sexploitation films, the nudies and “beavers” and like that. Let’s face it, I’m not an actress. I’m pretty pathetic, I can’t stand to see myself on the screen because of the way I deliver a line. Like completely wooden. But in these films it doesn’t make that much difference if you can act or not. The major parts, it helps, but there are always loads of minor parts for girls and they don’t expect Katharine Hepburn. You walk around with your clothes off, you pet, you pretend to be screwing—

  WANDA: Don’t they ever really screw?

  GRACE: Well, as a matter of fact, some of the sexploitation producers do insist that you actually screw, although they don’t show it on camera. There are certain things they can’t show, like a male with an erection, for example. They can show a penis but not if it’s erect.

  PETER: Talk about castration complexes.

  GRACE: The producers say this gives realism even if they don’t show it on screen. Now nobody believes this. Sometimes I think it’s easier to look as though you’re screwing if you’re not. But they get certain kicks this way. Watching, or some of them will act in their own films.