Sometimes I have insane thoughts.
JWW: Like what?
SHEILA: Oh, the things a person thinks about. The unthinkable — I mean nothing really is unthinkable, is it? Or inconceivable.
Sometimes I imagine them all gone. Dead. Paul, the children. Always a sharp, clean death, an auto wreck, an airplane disintegrating. All of a sudden it’s over, my marriage and my family, gone.
I don’t mean that I want it to happen. God, I don’t. I hate myself for having the thought, the fantasy. And I hate the idea that you only get strong irrational fears of that sort when you secretly want them to happen. An irrational fear is an irrational desire, isn’t that what they say?
JWW: Some of the time, perhaps.
SHEILA: I think, if it happened, if something like that happened, if the marriage was over and the family was over, if my whole life was over, I think, well, what would I do? I don’t mean how would I stand the shock, that’s something else, but what would I do with the life that was left to me? What role would I play?
And I often think — and it makes sense to me, it makes logical sense in the context of the fantasy — I think that I would probably go to some big impersonal city and become a Lesbian.
Not because that’s the sort of sex I really enjoy. It isn’t a sexual thing, a sexual decision. It isn’t that at all.
She pauses, a cigarette burning unnoticed between her fingers. She furrows her brow in an attitude of extreme concentration, then abruptly lets her eyes close and her features relax. When she resumes speaking some moments later it is in this attitude. The eyes remain closed, the face in repose. Her voice has to it a detached, dreamlike quality. I find myself wondering whether this is wholly natural or if she, who indeed has a finely developed sense of theater, is in fact seeking consciously to convey a mood through an assumed pose.
SHEILA: Because, you see, it would be safe and cool and easy, so much easier. When there is a man and a woman there is a situation of conflict, give and take. Opposites. When you are a woman with a woman you remain yourself and she becomes your other self. An alter ego. An altered ego.
So there is no need to surrender any part of oneself. It is never required. You remain whole, complete...
You see, I frighten myself...
Her eyes open, her features take firmer shape. Suddenly awake and alert and businesslike, she leans over to stub out the cigarette, fingers forcefully mashing the butt in the ashtray.
SHEILA: I almost wish that machine of yours wasn’t running. Listen to the girl sounding like a philosopher. I don’t really think I’m gay. Come to that, I’m not certain that anybody really is anything. Everyone has bits of everything inside him. Labels are simpler than understanding, but they don’t do the job, do they?
Gay or not, I scare myself a little. It scared me with Jan, scared me a lot more than I would admit to Paul. If he were able to understand, and I guess he can’t, not on that point. A blind spot for him. God knows I have enough of my own...
I would never have a relationship with a woman again. I’ll admit it, I’m a coward.
JWW: Then why do you have sex with women at swinging parties?
SHEILA: Because it’s so safe. There’s no contact, no feeling, except for the physical. And I can take it, and enjoy it — because the actual things you do, the physical things, are pleasant whomever you do them with, once you get past any hang-ups you might have. And by the same token I can leave it alone, because again it’s just sheerly physical, and just as it’s guaranteed to be pleasant it’s also guaranteed to be something you can live without.
So if I’m at a party, let’s say, and for one reason or another I go down on another girl, or she on me, or whatever, I can — I was going to say have my cake and eat it, if you’ll forgive an unintentional play on words. And not a very good one either, come to think.
And I can tell myself that I’m not repressing anything, because I’m having these contacts, and also that I’m not abnormal, because I can take them or leave them alone...
Will you use all this in the book?
JWW: Would you rather I didn’t?
SHEILA: I don’t know. There’s something that I’m uneasy about, and I’m going to ask you to go now, if you won’t take that the wrong way. Because if you stay I’ll stay with this line of thought, and I don’t think I should. What I said before about looking into things too deeply.
JWW: All right.
SHEILA: It’s just laughs, that’s all. All anything is. I make it with girls at parties because it’s fun, and Paul wants me to, so why not? And I’m glad Jan moved away because we were getting involved, and who needs it?
I pack up my tape recorder. We make plans for another interview session later in the week when both she and her husband will be available. That settled, we turn to small talk, both of us relieved to have fought free of a conversation that had become mutually uncomfortable. She walks me out the door and across the lawn to my car. I am just the least bit apprehensive about leaving her alone in her present mood, and as we reach my car she either guesses or senses as much. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be all right. I’ve learned things. I’ve learned to preserve myself. I’ve become, well, very strong.”
The Swim of Things
PAUL: Sooner or later we would have looked for another couple — or couples, really. We were ready for that sort of variety, of meeting with strangers, and I think the Creightons were as well, but neither of us quite got around to suggesting it. And there were other mitigating circumstances as well...
But when we found they were moving, then there was absolutely no question about it. It was taken for granted immediately by all four of us that we would all have to find new outlets for swinging, and that we would do so, either through correspondence or by some other means. First we assured each other that we would travel across the country now and then to get together for auld lang syne, and then we hurled ourselves into one of what turned out to be a whole string of going away orgies, because it did take them quite a while to make their move from the time Jeff accepted the new position. And then, finally, we all four sat down together to read through the tabloids and the club papers and pick out ads for us all to answer...
Another night, cold and dark, with intermittent rain audible against the picture window. Paul wears a bulky Aran sweater and wide-wale corduroy slacks. Sheila’s sweater matches his; her slacks are plaid, a Black Watch variant. The mood tonight is one of jovial reminiscence. A fire burns idly in the fireplace. There is a generous tray of canapés on the coffee table — roll-ups of chicken liver and water chestnut and bacon, tiny cocktail wieners transfixed by colored plastic toothpicks, melba rounds spread with Camembert. We are drinking excellent Scotch and go through an impressive quantity of it in the course of a few hours, but no one at any point seems adversely affected by drink; the only outward sign is the absence of tension and a heightened sense of camaraderie. There is to be no thoughtful probing this evening no inquiry into needs and motives, no attempt to summon up the flavors and nuances of recollected experience. Tonight we exist and function on a far simpler plane.
PAUL: We must have thumbed through those papers and magazines until the print was gone. First we ruled out all ads that were out of our geographical area, which meant that we were eliminating a good ninety percent right off the top. And of course we crossed off ads seeking single girls, or ads placed by men looking for threesomes — in other words, we limited ourselves to couples looking for couples, couples in our age bracket who seemed to be in about the same position we were in.