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

by Lawrence Block

  And while I was thinking that she was no swinger at all and it was good we had checked, she said how she lived with her folks and had this job with the Board of Education and had to be very careful about appearances. “I fuck and suck and everything,” she said, in this same little-girl voice, “but I don’t like to put it on paper.”

  Now I was speechless. We had this whole image of little innocent Frannie, and we were even thinking about how if she wasn’t a swinger yet it might be worth a try at getting her a little liquored up and converting her, and then she just laid it right on the line like that. I just stood there with the phone in my hand and she said after a minute that she hoped I wasn’t shocked and that she hadn’t said anything out of line, but she wanted to make everything clear.

  I said, “Oh, absolutely. And why don’t you come over tonight, and Bob and I will give you all the fucking and sucking you can possibly handle.”

  Now I had never talked over the phone like that before in my life.

  BOB: She came over that night and we had a really great time with Frannie. Even in person she was the same as she was in her letters, very shy and demure and innocent, and then she would come out with a line that was purely shocking coming from her. You wouldn’t think twice to hear your average swinger talk like that. It would either seem like nothing at all or it might have a vulgar sound to it, but from Frannie it was like hearing it in church.

  CAROL: She was a lot better looking than her picture showed.

  BOB: I’ll tell you, she didn’t look twenty-three. She could have passed easily for seventeen, maybe less than that. She didn’t wear any makeup and she had a very young face. Big wide blue eyes. She was very slim. Hardly any hips at all and cute little breasts. Very good legs and a pert rear, and always this serious little-girl voice.

  CAROL: But once things got started, she knew just what she wanted and she couldn’t get too much of it.

  BOB: She just about took charge of things. She would say who should do what, and we let her call the signals. “You get on your hands and knees,” she told Carol, and Carol did it. “And now you get on her and give it to her doggie-style,” she told me. And I did just what she ordered, and she crawled underneath and ate us both at once while we did it. We had never done it quite this way before, but believe me, it was a way to do it that we didn’t forget about in a hurry. She was a real greedy little girl, Frannie.

  CAROL: She stayed all night. Told her mother she was sleeping at a girlfriend’s house and stayed all night long. And we didn’t sleep much, either. We’d no sooner doze off than she’d be at one or the other of us and wake us all up all over again.

  BOB: She told us she only liked to swing once in a while, maybe one time a month, and only with couples, and only if she really liked them. Her entire sex life was this once-a-month swinging. She had this one ad running, and she would get dozens of replies to it every week. Plenty of them from single guys, of course, but also a great many from couples. And she hardly answered any of them because everything had to be just right about a couple before she would have anything to do with them. Then she would have her one date of the month and fit a whole month’s worth of sex into one night.

  We’ve swung with her three times since then. She doesn’t advertise any more. She has maybe a dozen couples that she will see off and on. And that’s just the way she wants it. She’s completely bisexual. There’s nothing we ever thought of doing that she doesn’t like to do. But it’s no good at all for her unless she’s with a couple. One guy alone or one girl alone—she won’t have anything to do with it.

  CAROL: Not that everybody has to be involved in the act, but she has to be together with a couple, they both have to be in the same room with her.

  BOB: We’ve been trying to figure her out, you know. It’s hard because she doesn’t want to talk about her personal life at all. My guess is that she had her first sex with a couple when she was very young. This is maybe a little more than pure guesswork. She let something slip, I don’t remember exactly what, but it gave this impression. I would even suspect it was relatives that seduced her. An aunt and uncle or a pair of older cousins or something. And then this formed her sexual attitudes, and she never changed them.

  CAROL: I like her, though. I’d see her more often, if we could. But she has this rule of no more than once a month, and about a dozen couples she goes with more or less regularly, so we don’t get to see too much of her. I told her one time she ought to marry some boy and find an extra girl for threesomes, but that wasn’t what she wanted at all. She has to be the extra girl or she’s not interested.

  • • •

  JWW: It is always interesting to speculate on the reasons why people are willing to discuss the most intimate aspects of their lives with an interviewer. After all, I take a great deal of their time probing into their sex lives and offer them no compensation for their time and trouble beyond my personal gratitude.

  (There has been one exception. For Tricks of the Trade, in which nine call girls were interviewed to create a “hooker’s handbook of sexual technique,” I had no choice but to pay the girls rather handsomely for their time. But they, after all, were professionals, and their credo that time is money operates whatever use is made of that time.)

  The most obvious explanation—that a great many persons are inclined to be genuinely cooperative—is certainly true. Swingers are especially generous in this respect, and have often expressed the thought that wider dissemination of information on the sexual underground will open more people to the possibilities of the life and will make their own lot in society less potentially troublesome. Many enthusiastic swingers are sincerely evangelistic; they often mention that they first became interested through books on the subject, and welcome a chance to contribute to this educational process.

  For others, particularly those with ambivalent feelings about the lives they are leading, the interviewer furnishes an extra ear similar in certain ways to that of a priest or psychiatrist. The confessional impulse transcends religion, and serving as the subject of an in-depth interview concerning sexual matters provides the chance to justify oneself to oneself, to obtain absolution for what one regards as sinful, and, finally, to clarify one’s thoughts by using the interviewer as a sounding board. Time after time subjects have followed general or personal observations with the notation that they have never had this particular thought before, and I don’t doubt that the interview situation does afford good opportunities for self-analysis.

  In A Married Couple, a cinéma vérité filmmaker moved his camera into the apartment of a Canadian couple and filmed several weeks of their life together, producing ultimately a remarkable ninety minutes of brutally revelatory film. At the same time, his presence served to crystallize the attitudes of the man and wife toward each other and toward their marriage. In much the same fashion, I have occasionally found myself playing a catalyst’s role in a relationship. This was particularly true in the extended, almost painfully incisive interviews which saw print as The Wife Swap Report.

  Exhibitionistic impulses also prompt some interviews to a greater or lesser extent. Of the correspondence which I receive, a certain amount invariably consists of calculatedly obscene letters detailing sexual experiences, the majority of which are clearly identifiable as fantasy or invention. In other cases, cooperative subjects are often aware of their own interest as exhibitionists. “lf factual experiences such as these are of interest to you,” a Midwesterner wrote at the conclusion of a detailed record of incestuous practices, “I would be glad to give you details and, truthfully, get a lot of pleasure doing it.” While such self-awareness is exceptional, the exhibitionistic impulse in this regard is not.

  All of the above serves as a lengthy preface to the observations that, in the case of Bob and Carol Fessenden, I was frequently made aware that our interviews provided them with a pleasurable means of reliving highly satisfactory sexual experiences. They spent a great deal of time discussing various sexual partners of theirs, much in th
e manner of their discussion of Frannie reported above. Frannie herself was discussed at greater length than I have reproduced, and with a luxury of detail which, if printed here, could only serve to embarrass Frannie, myself, and my publisher’s legal department.

  For a time I interpreted this as simple exhibitionism, but further reflection convinced me that it was something rather different. Bob and Carol were sharing Frannie in conversation as they had earlier enjoyed sharing her in the flesh, and no doubt for similar reasons. Their conversational interplay, the avidness with which they passed words back and forth, echoed their earlier physical relationship with the girl.

  • • •

  BOB: I remember one girl we met who was different from the usual run. Her name was Linda and she lived in Philadelphia, which is a long way to travel for a night. This wasn’t that unusual, though, because we often get letters from as far away as the West Coast.

  CAROL: I don’t think most people expect anything to come of it when they answer someone that far away. As a matter of fact, I think some people purposely write to faraway places so that they’ll have the excuse of being unable to travel. A lot of people just want correspondence without any meeting—you can usually spot their letters quickly enough after you get the hang of it.

  BOB: Linda wasn’t in that class. She told us that she wrote to us because she was very strongly attracted to the pictures published with our ad, and also because the wording of the ad suggested to her that we might be safe.

  CAROL: She was a virgin.

  BOB: Not that she lacked experience, but that she had never had intercourse and didn’t want to. She told us different things at different times so it’s hard to know just what her story was.

  CAROL: She said she was built too small to accommodate a male organ. That she was abnormally small. She put that in a letter. Another time she said something about having a muscular condition that made her tighten up immediately at the mere thought of intercourse.

  BOB: Carol had the idea that she wasn’t a virgin at all.

  CAROL: My guess is that someone raped her when she was just a child and it was a trauma for her, and she was deathly afraid of having anything inside her ever after. Because she made that an absolute rule before she would set up a date with us. Nothing inside her, not in front or in back either, not so much as a finger.

  BOB: I thought from her letters—we corresponded with her for quite awhile before we got together with her—I thought she might have a dislike of penises in general. That she was more of a lesbian than a bisexual but she wanted to go with men, too, because she didn’t want to face the fact that she was all the way gay.

  CAROL: If she hated penises, I’d hate to see someone who loved them.

  BOB: Oh, that’s the truth. She was a born cocksucker and couldn’t get enough of it. She would take it all the way to the hilt, you know, and that always struck me as pretty strange. I mean that she wouldn’t let anything into her anywhere else, but that she could take it clear down to the back of her throat without gagging.

  CAROL: And never spilled a drop, either.

  BOB: She had a way of using the muscles in her throat that was out of this world. Just unbelievable. I can still remember how it felt.

  CAROL: It’s a shame you couldn’t be watching yourself while she was Frenching you. The expressions on your face, you were something to see.

  BOB: We were planning a trip to New York, so we made arrangements to stop in Philadelphia and spend some time with her. She was a secretary to a lawyer and lived by herself in a pretty nice apartment. She wasn’t as young as you would have expected. The idea of her being a virgin, we immediately got the impression of someone who wasn’t much more than a kid, but I would say she was about twenty-five.

  CAROL: Maybe older than that. It was hard to tell her age, and while she said she was twenty-four I think she may have been taking off a few years. You might be surprised how many swingers will do that, especially when they get past thirty-five. The nicest people are honest that way, but a lot of them think they have to lie a few years or so in order to get in on the action.

  BOB: Of course before we could set up a date with her we had to agree absolutely to her conditions. This didn’t bother me a bit, and of course it made no difference at all from Carol’s point of view. To tell the truth, we were both more than a little intrigued. The idea that she was a virgin was something new. And there’s no denying that novelty has a lot to do with what pleasure you get out of swinging.

  CAROL: It’s not the whole thing, though. That’s the impression you get reading some of those books. In one of your books, Jack, you have this couple that tries everything and everything will be exciting to them at the beginning, and then each thing gets boring to them, until they run out of things that are new to them and they wind up getting out of swinging altogether. Now I didn’t think that was realistic from what we’ve experienced.

  JWW: It happens in certain cases.

  CAROL: I’m sure it must, and I know that might get people into swinging, but it’s not what keeps them there. There’s novelty in the different people but there are also things that you can’t have in a relationship with just two people, and those things do stay satisfying.

  JWW: That’s generally true, but there are certain people who are just hooked on novelty, and of course they’re so constituted that they can never be satisfied over an extended period of time.

  CAROL: Well, I can see how that would be true in certain cases, where it’s people with a problem in that respect. But it must be rare.

  BOB: As far as that goes, honey, think how many one-timers there are.

  CAROL: Yes, that’s true. That must be more or less of the same thing.

  One-timers, we meet them all the time but it’s more common with couples than with the bisexual girls we swing with nowadays. Of course a couple may say they are one-timers after you’ve been with them as a polite way of explaining why they would as soon not swing with you again, rather than coming out and saying they didn’t enjoy it. We have done that ourselves. The genuine one-timer is a couple that announces it in advance and never repeats. Some people call them collectors because they approach the whole thing that way, wanting to collect as many other couples as they can.

  BOB: They usually collect pictures, too. One couple told us they had a regular filing system, pictures and diary entries of every couple they swung with. You can imagine what would happen if some puritanical cop happened to raid them. But they didn’t seem at all worried.

  But to get back to Linda—

  CAROL: Yes, we really ought to get back to Linda.

  BOB: The point of it is that we were more than willing to agree to her conditions, and we assured her of this, and met her in her apartment. She said that she had to be very careful in arranging dates because some men seemed to take her virginity as a personal challenge. Either they would try to wear her down with arguments, which just spoiled her whole scene, or else they would try to force her.

  CAROL: There was a time when we suspected this was what she wanted—someone to hold her down and rape her.

  BOB: It’s possible that she does want that unconsciously, but that’s not our scene.

  CAROL: Thank heavens.

  BOB: We met with her, and she was really very sweet. She greeted us by giving us each a warm kiss at the door. She was fully bisexual in this respect. Some girls will want to do sexual things with other girls, but they draw the line at kissing.

  CAROL: I had a hard time at first until I learned to relate to other girls that way. But I can’t imagine two men kissing that way unless they were out-and-out homos. It’s interesting how there is a definite double-standard this way. And how among swinging couples there are so many more bisexual wives than there are husbands.

  BOB: Linda was bi all the way. We talked for awhile and then got in the mood, had a couple of drinks, and all got out of our clothes. She had a beautiful figure and my first impulse was that I certainly would enjoy screwing her, and then I remember
ed that I couldn’t do this. It was a very strange feeling.

  CAROL: I got this sensation of purity, that she was a virgin and had never been really possessed by a man, and I found this exciting.

  BOB: It was a sort of a test of ingenuity to see just how many ways there were to make it with her without putting it inside her. Between the thighs and under the arms and between the breasts and everyway in the world, I guess.

  CAROL: And of course her mouth.

  BOB: God, what a mouth—

  • • •

  JWW: After considerably more details concerning Linda and several other female partners of theirs, the conversation turned to the subject of permanent troilistic relationships. I discussed several of these with which I had become familiar to varying degrees. Both Bob and Carol were extremely interested and questioned me at great length.

  While they had not yet established a troilistic relationship of any permanence, they had been thinking along such lines for quite some time and hoped to establish a more or less stable ménage à trois when the right person came along.

  • • •

  BOB: What I would like is to find a girl who would really become a part of the family. Not just someone to party with regularly but to be a part of the household and live here regularly. I have seen advertisements trying to set something up along those lines but we haven’t gone so far as to place an ad of our own, and I don’t know if we will take that step or wait for something to turn up by itself. I don’t think advertising would be good because the person would have to be just right or the whole thing would not be good.

  CAROL: The closest we came to anything of the sort was with this girl I mentioned before whom we would swing with every so often. We were planning this trip to the Virgin Islands—you know, come to think of it we should have taken Linda, the Virgin Islands and all. We had two weeks, and we mentioned it to this other girl and she said she would really love to come along. She offered to pay her own way but Bob wouldn’t hear of it and insisted on picking up the whole tab.