I also wondered what it was like to make love to a girl. To stroke a woman’s breasts, to go down on her, everything. Once you are able to conceive of yourself doing a certain thing, it’s only human to wonder what it’s like. And, with nothing to push you in the other direction, the next step along the line is to desire to do it.
So while I didn’t have a desire for Jan per se, I wasn’t completely out of tune with the idea, either.
That night, though, I didn’t think I was ready for it. When parrying Jeff’s idea with a gag didn’t work, I tried again. I said I certainly had enough fun with men to get me through three or four lifetimes, and I would wait until the thrill of it wore off before I moved on to bigger and better things with girls.
Both of the men jumped on me then. Verbally, that is; I would have preferred it if they had done it physically. Jeff said it was the same smug argument that kept square married couples doing it once a week in the standard position and never swinging at all. And Paul pointed out that we had tried just about everything we could think of in the past few months, and that I had enjoyed all of it, so that there was probably a damned good chance that I would enjoy this, too. The hell of it was that both of these arguments made very good sense to me. I didn’t admit as much, but they did.
I was sort of annoyed that Jan didn’t come to my support. She was just sort of sitting on the sidelines taking it all in. The significance of this somehow failed to dawn on me at the time.
I made myself another drink, and I made it stiffer than usual. I don’t know whether I wanted the alcohol as fortification or to make it easy for me to excuse my going ahead with it.
The men went over the same arguments again. What I said finally was that they were being very selfish, just wanting us to perform for their pleasure as if we were actors on a stage. That’s a pretty stupid line in retrospect, but at the time it sounded pretty trenchant to me. “Besides,” I said, “I’m sure Jan’s completely turned off by the whole idea.”
She just smiled.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget that smile. Ever since then I’ve known what it was that the Mona Lisa was smiling about. Obviously the Mona Lisa was gay.
From her smile, I knew immediately, and I guess I knew then that I was going to go through with it. After all, it was three against one, and with those odds I would have trouble finding excuses for myself. I just looked at her, and she said something like, “What makes you so sure of that, Sheila?”
I said, “Oh, come off it. You’re not a Lesbian.”
She said you didn’t have to be all of something to enjoy a taste of it. I said I didn’t believe she knew what she was talking about.
“Oh, Sheila,” she said. “Didn’t you ever have a crush on another girl at school? Or on a teacher? Didn’t you ever fool around with your roommate in college?”
I said that I hadn’t, that I had never even thought about anything like that at the time, which was perfectly true. “And I suppose you did?” I said. I meant it to come out sarcastic, but I think it was more wistful than biting.
“Yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I did.”
“Then you were a Lesbian?”
“I didn’t say I was a Lesbian,” she said. “You don’t have to pin labels on people like that. I wasn’t a Lesbian, but during my junior year in college I had a very warm and enjoyable love affair with my roommate.”
This really shocked me. Jeff had obviously heard this before, but it was news to me, and to Paul as well.
PAUL: It was tremendously exciting to me.
SHEILA: I wouldn’t say it was exciting to me as much as it was disturbing. It shook me. I asked her what exactly she and her roommate did. Whether they just sort of kissed and like that. She said they did everything. I asked her what everything meant.
She gave me that smile again. “It seems silly for me to tell you,” she said. “Why don’t I just show you?”
I almost couldn’t believe this was Jan Creighton talking. I had known her so well, and all the time she had never given me the slightest hint that she was anything other than a hundred percent heterosexual. I had no inkling that she could have had experience like this.
I asked if she had ever done this with the girl of the other couple, the other people they had swung with before we moved in. She said she had never had relations with a girl since she was married.
“But would you want to?”
“I’d like to give it a try,” she said. “The worst that can happen is that we find out we don’t like it.”
I wasn’t about to admit it, but the way I saw it, it was just the other way around. The worst thing that could happen would be for me to find out that I did like it.
PAUL: You’re really making a thing out of this, aren’t you?
SHEILA: It was a thing. I don’t—
PAUL: I mean, for someone who’s come to dig the gay scene as much as you do—
SHEILA: But don’t you see, that’s the whole point of it!
PAUL: How?
SHEILA: I must have sensed the potential for this in myself, and I must have been repressing it. You know. I must have been secretly afraid that I would go overboard if I once started, and for that reason it was a big thing for me. Doesn’t that make sense to you?
PAUL: I suppose so.
SHEILA: And another thing you have to understand. Lesbian relations seemed like a giant step beyond what we had been doing. Swinging, the adulterous aspect of it and even the actual techniques we were using, they were what we had been brought up to regard as morally wrong, but the acts themselves seemed healthy enough. But having relations with another girl was what I had been conditioned to regard as unnatural. This was a big difference.
PAUL: That I can understand. That makes sense to me.
SHEILA: Well, thank you, kind sir.
JWW: To continue, I gather that you let the three of them coax you into having relations with Jan?
SHEILA: Oh, from the moment she gave me that smile I don’t suppose the issue was ever seriously in doubt. I was pretty well trapped. I ultimately agreed that there was no valid reason not to try it.
JWW: This was the same evening?
SHEILA: The same evening. We never abandoned the subject from the moment Jeff brought it up.
I agreed to go along with it, although I protested that I wouldn’t know what to do. Jan rode right over that. She said I didn’t have to do anything, that she would do everything and all I had to do was relax and enjoy it. If I felt in the mood to touch or kiss or caress her, I could join in the action, but all I really had to do was be there. I was glad that she said that because it seemed to me that it would be much easier to endure something than to participate actively in it. If all else failed, I could just lie there like a corpse until she gave it up as a bad job.
PAUL: You were the most active corpse in history. Instead of embalming fluid they must have used cantharides on you.
SHEILA: Well, we all make mistakes, don’t we? I have to admit, though, that it was pretty fantastic. Jan suggested that we go to one of the bedrooms by ourselves, that I might be less inhibited if the men weren’t around. I wanted to do this, but I preferred to rationalize that we were just doing this so the men could get their jollies watching us, so I said, no, we would stay right there, which is the way it happened.
We got undressed. For me, it was as if I was seeing Jan’s body for the first time, which was patently ridiculous, because ever since we had started swinging I had seen her body about as often as I saw my own. Now, though, I was seeing it as a love object, as a source of sexual pleasure and satisfaction, and this was something new.
I was embarrassed beyond belief. I even felt strange being nude in front of Jan because of what we were going to do and the way she was looking at me. I was on the couch, and she came over and sat next to me and I felt unbelievably silly. She put her hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye and told me I was beautiful.