Sex Without Strings: A Handbook for Consenting Adults (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  Table of Contents

  * * *

  But First This Word from Our Author

  Evelyn

  Christie and Vernon

  Frank

  Marv

  Kate

  Letters, Letters, Letters

  Erica

  Paul

  Alvin

  “Dear Mr. Wells . . .”

  About the Author

  Excerpt: Versatile Ladies

  Sex Without Strings

  John Warren Wells

  Lawrence Block

  * * *

  copyright © 1974, 2012, Lawrence Block

  All Rights Reserved

  But First This Word From Our Author

  In the following pages you will make the acquaintance of the following people:

  Evelyn, a divorcée, whose husband introduced her to swinging, and who is still swinging although she’s shed her husband . . .

  Christie and Vernon, who like to bring home an extra man now and then . . .

  Frank, a retired doctor who has made a permanent house call upon a young married couple . . .

  Marv, a man who has managed to swing even though his wife isn’t interested . . .

  Kate and Bob, who arrange threesomes with other couples in a most unorthodox way . . .

  Jean-Paul, a model husband at home, but a practicing sadist away from it . . .

  Lew, a uniquely gifted sexual con man . . .

  Erica, a bisexual who swings on a never-ending pendulum from man to woman and back again . . .

  Paul, who has found paradise by encouraging women to divulge their favorite fantasies . . .

  And a couple more.

  • • •

  What do all these people have in common? (Aside from the fact that they’re all in the same book, that is.)

  All of them touch in one way or another upon a subject I had the devil’s own time finding a title for. They are swingers, involved in casual sexual relationships for recreational purposes, and yet they are not in the traditional mold of couples meeting with other couples. They are people without mates, or people swinging without mates, or are sexually involved with such people, or—

  It’s somehow more complicated to write this silly introduction than it was to write the book. Anyway, you get the idea. It’s not a book about single swingers, because that term usually means nothing more than unmarried individuals who have a rather relaxed attitude toward sex. And, title notwithstanding, these folk are not solitary swingers in the sense of swinging by themselves, all alone in a room somewhere.

  Enough!

  Enough, in fact, of this introduction. I’d far rather let the subjects of these chapters have a word with you than stand around in the way.

  Evelyn

  Evelyn is a petite woman, her small, heart-shaped face framed by a mane of straight red-brown hair. Her waist is small, her hips trim, and her breasts quite large in relation to the rest of her. At first glance she looks no more than half her age, which is thirty-five. She dresses young, and although lines at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth spoil the illusion at close inspection, the result is not garish or unbecoming; her facial features and body type are definitely of the Pepsi generation.

  She was divorced about three years ago. She lives now in a small, modern house in a suburb of Pittsburgh with her two children, boys eight and ten years old. Shortly after her divorce she resumed working, and is presently employed as Gal Friday at a one-man travel agency. While her duties are largely clerical, she is learning the business and anticipates becoming a full-fledged travel agent before long, either as an associate of her present employer or by switching jobs.

  Evelyn is that much-sought commodity in the swinging world, the single female swinger. Single women, whether heterosexual or bisexual, are far more in demand than in supply. While single men have a difficult time of things, single women suffer from an embarrassment of riches. Evelyn can have as much sex as she wants, and could do so even if her appetite were on a par with that of Catherine the Great.

  Which is by no means the case. Although Evelyn’s past experiences have ranged reasonably far and wide, her sexual preferences have narrowed of late. She no longer cares for parties or crowd scenes, and is at the point where she can envision herself marrying again.

  But let’s let her tell it.

  • • •

  My husband and I got into swinging a little over two years before we were divorced. I suppose that without stretching a point you could say that we went into it in an attempt to save our marriage. We never said it aloud in those terms, but I guess that was at the root of what we were thinking. I know it was in my thoughts, certainly. That may have been an attempt on my part to rationalize what I was doing. I had a lot of inhibitions to overcome, and when we first got into it I had to give myself a noble reason for my acts. I couldn’t face up to myself and say I was balling these strangers for the hell of it.

  The whole thing was basically Stan’s idea. He talked me into it. He gave me the usual arguments that this was a way to eliminate sexual jealousy, that it satisfied a natural need for variety without disturbing the foundations of a marriage, the usual line of talk. I know that our own sexual relationship was getting stale. We very infrequently made love, and it was just not all that exciting for us when we did.

  I can more easily recognize now that the monotony of our sexual relationship was just an echo of the general feeling we had for each other. Stan and I were bored with each other after the first few years of marriage. We were a mismatch from the beginning. I had more education than he did and was interested in more intellectual things. I don’t mean I spent every night at libraries and concerts and museums. But I like to read, and Stan would say that he hadn’t read a book since school, and he’d say it proudly. We bored each other, and I think it was inevitable that this boredom would carry over into the bedroom. No matter what sort of physical innovations you try, you can’t find people sexually exciting night after night unless you continue to find them emotionally and intellectually exciting as well.

  I let myself be talked into it without too much trouble. I think that once it was clear to me that Stan didn’t secretly want me to refuse him, that he would respect me just as much or more if I went along with it, my objections melted away about then.

  Not that I stopped being nervous about it!

  Our first time was a good example of the wrong way to go about it. Stan had picked up copies of various swinger magazines and we had read through them together, but at the time I was really apprehensive about contacting anyone through the mail. It seemed like a terrible way to go about things, and I suppose in many respects it is, if you don’t know what you’re doing, but our way was worse.

  There was this fellow Stan knew at the plant, a guy named Roy. We had seen him and his wife, Judy, a couple of times, one couple going to the other’s house for drinks, and I think we were at a party with them once. So I knew them, but not well by any means. Anyway, Stan and Roy had a few beers after work one night and got to talking, and it turned out that Roy and Judy were also interested in swinging, and were also unsure about how to make contacts, and had had no experience with it either.

  So we all got together.

  I would say that it would have been better if they had been either very close friends or complete strangers, and it certainly would have helped if one couple had been experienced. As it was, the anxiety in that room was so thick you could have cut it with a knife and sprea
d it on toast. You know how there are times when people are nervous and they try to cover it by making stupid little jokes? The four of us were so nervous that we didn’t make those stupid little jokes.

  We spent the first half hour or so pretending we were having a pleasant social evening, and then we spent the next two hours talking very earnestly about the merits of what we were about to do, as if it was all going to be some deep religious experience instead of the simple business of fucking each other’s mates. We all drank more than was a particularly good idea. The vibrations in the room were not the best. Roy had a very obvious letch for me, which would have been more exciting if I’d had the slightest interest in him. But if I wanted to go to bed with a big Polack steelworker, I could go to bed with my own husband. Stan seemed to be attracted to Judy, though I can’t say why. I thought she was fat and sloppy, and she didn’t know how to dress or what to do with her hair, but she did have big tits. That’s Stan’s definition of female beauty, incidentally. He as much as told me that he married me for my tits. I’m pleased with them myself, as far as that goes, but I hate being regarded as a dumb Polish broad with her brains in her bra.

  Ultimately Stan and Judy went upstairs and fucked, and Roy and I stayed in the living room and didn’t. We tried, but the poor guy couldn’t get it up. It may have been my own lack of passion that turned him off. I don’t really know. He was really terribly hung up about the whole thing, and he kept saying this had never happened before, which probably meant that it happened a lot of the time and he had a real hang-up about it. I eventually felt sufficiently sorry for him to go down on him, to his everlasting surprise, and in less than a minute he came without even getting erect.

  He did a funny thing. He asked me if I would let Stan and Judy have the impression that we had made it in the usual way, and that it had gone fine. Which was all right with me, because I wasn’t too sure that I wanted Stan to know I had gone down on another man.

  I think both Stan and Roy were very ambivalent about oral sex. They found it very exciting but felt it was not respectable the way coitus was, that it was demeaning for both the man and the woman when an act of fellatio took place. I did it with Stan some of the time because he wanted it, but he was always reluctant to come right out and ask for it. He would make little Body Language hints in that direction. I gather Judy never did it to Roy from some things he said and from a couple of phone calls I got from him during the week following that experience. And of course Stan never performed cunnilingus upon me. Not before we began swinging, that is. Afterward we all learned to do everything. That is one very beneficial aspect of swinging, by the way; it does get rid of inhibitions for those couples who have let inhibitions keep them from a decent sex life.

  My own feelings about oral sex probably derived from Stan’s. I think I picked up his vibes on the subject. My feelings then were that I didn’t mind doing it because it gave him pleasure, and I didn’t find it distasteful, although I preferred just using the act as a prelude to regular fucking, and in any case I was revolted at the idea of swallowing the semen. I’m sure all of this was because I was predisposed to think of the act as dirty and of semen as a disgusting fluid.

  How a girl can change her mind! It took quite a bit of swinging before I turned full circle on the subject, and I had a great many cocks in my pretty little mouth before I learned that I absolutely loved to do it. Not just for the man’s benefit, although that of course plays a role, but because I simply enjoy it. A large portion of the time I would rather suck than fuck, to put it in plain language. I can come that way, although whether or not I reach orgasm in fellatio is not terribly important to me. I just dig doing it. I’m no Linda Lovelace with a clitoris in my throat, just a girl who likes it.

  Speaking of that, the whole Deep Throat business. Did you see it? I thought it was a pretty bad picture, but then I don’t usually get anything much out of pornography. I can occasionally get turned on by something I read, but movies don’t do much for me. Especially seeing a film in a theater where the bulk of the audience is middle-aged men with their raincoats covering their laps.

  The point is, Deep Throat worked commercially because it was every man’s fantasy come to life, a girl who really prefers fellatio and gets her kicks that way. Yet men prefer to believe that women like that don’t exist in real life. I was thinking about this the other day and came up with the idea that men prefer to believe that their fantasies are unattainable. Otherwise they might be faced with the possibility of attaining them someday and the poor little boys would have nothing left to fantasize about. I don’t know if my theory is valid, but I sort of like it.

  • • •

  After the icebreaking experience with Roy and Judy, Evelyn and Stan had no further contact with the couple. After a week or two of further discussion, Stan replied to several advertisements in a swinger magazine. Two of the advertisers replied, and after an exchange of letters and photos they spoke with each couple over the telephone and set up dates. With both couples things worked out quite well, and as these couples were veteran swingers in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, they in turn introduced Stan and Evelyn to a number of other couples in the Pittsburgh area. The two did not answer any further ads, but were able to function satisfactorily by means of this introductory grapevine.

  After a couple of years of this, their marriage ended in divorce.

  • • •

  There was a time when I could make myself believe that swinging ended our marriage, or hastened its ending. It certainly did not cause our divorce, though. My personal opinion is that swinging neither ruins nor saves marriages. A good marriage can possibly be improved by swinging—it can bring partners closer together—and in a bad marriage it can make a husband and wife more dramatically aware of the differences between them. But I think that those swingers who stay together would have stayed together anyway, and those who wound up getting divorces would have done so in any case.

  I know swinging intensified my awareness of the differences between Stan and myself. I think, though, that I would have grown more and more aware of those differences during the same period of time whether or not we were swinging. It did drive certain things home to me, though. I would meet men who were so much more interesting than my husband, both in and out of bed. There were times, many of them, when at the end of the evening I wanted to go home not with Stan but with the other guy, and not for sexual purposes but for conversational purposes. I felt guilty at such times, but I also felt I was being cheated out of the best part of my life.

  Another way we became more aware of our differences was the type of people each of us liked to be with and the type of swinging situation each of us preferred. As far as people were concerned, Stan obviously liked guys like himself and their dumb big-tit wives, while I liked and was most comfortable with college-educated, professional people. As for preferred situations, Stan really liked parties. “The more the merrier” was the way he felt about it. His idea of heaven was a party of about twenty couples, and a few hours spent bouncing from bed to bed without even taking the trouble to learn the name of the woman he was bouncing.

  That kind of sex bores the piss out of me, to put it as plainly as I know how. I’ll have to admit that there are rare moments when it’s fun, but I would hate to do it more than, say, once a year. I have to be interested in the person I’m in bed with. Not emotionally interested, not involved, but interested to the extent of having some sort of feeling for him, some kind of rapport. Also, one man a night is generally enough for me. I may want to make love more than once, and I can get into a certain amount of group stuff, but if a man is worth fucking at all, I feel, he’s worth spending a few hours with.

  Stan was exactly the reverse. He really never got over being a notch-cutter, and according to his lights the evening was or was not a success depending on the number of different women he had stuck his cock into. He has always considered himself a fantastic lover because he can almost always manage to do it half a dozen times a night.
From my viewpoint, he’s got quantity and quality mixed up. He’s not interested in foreplay, he’s not much interested in variations, and his main object is to get on, pump away for a couple of minutes, and get off in time to find somebody else. To me, that is the antithesis of sexuality.

  Toward the end, we didn’t have sex with each other at all. We would swing with other couples once or occasionally twice a week, and that was all the sex either of us ever got. Stan stopped approaching me for sex, which was fine with me, as far as that goes. I sensed that he didn’t want to waste his potency on me. After all, if he threw it to me on Wednesday, he might only be able to bang six girls on Saturday instead of the eight he aspired to. I really feel that was in his mind.

  The sexual aspect of our swinging experiences was gratifying for me for the most part. I didn’t like mob scenes and hated to feel like a piece of meat at big parties. When it was just us and another one or two couples, and especially if I liked the people and felt warmly towards them, I enjoyed myself very much. I felt that it was very valuable to work my way out of a lot of inhibitions I hadn’t even realized I had—like making love in the presence of others, which I was always sure at the beginning I could not possibly do, and which I found I got a special kick out of. The kick of forbidden fruit, of overriding a taboo, I guess, because now I would just as soon be alone with whoever I’m having sex with, not because I’m inhibited but because the presence of others can be distracting.

  Another taboo was the enjoyment of oral sex, which I told you about, but another part of it was that I was introduced to cunnilingus, and it was the most worthwhile introduction since Laurel met Hardy. I absolutely love it. I don’t suppose that’s unique, is it?

  I think what I like most about oral sex is that there’s so much more subtlety to it. No two people really do it exactly the same way. I’m talking about people who like to do it and know how to do it—otherwise it’s just boring. Stan, for example, learned to give head while we were swinging, I think largely because he realized it was expected of him, but he was never good at it. I used to fake orgasms just so he would stop, because he would get the rhythm wrong and eventually it just got to be monotonous and irritating.