PAUL: You know the drift, John, I’m sure. “Do you like to suck? I sure like to eat pussy. I wish you were here now so I could suck your pussy. I am imagining it and right now I have my tool in my hand—” And on and on until you could really vomit. One glance at a letter like that and you know the clown is a masturbator and nothing else. Never meets anybody, just beats off when he writes to you and beats off all over again if you answer him. Not that I have anything against people like that. I’m all for them finding each other, which I guess happens often enough, nowadays many of them will state in their ads that they only want correspondence. If they get their kicks this way, I don’t think it’s any of the Post Office’s business what they send through the mails.
SHEILA: Sometimes I really wonder about this country. You can send guns and weapons through the mails but not birth-control information or dirty letters.
PAUL: And big corporations can send their cruddy junk mail to me whether or not I want it, and at a rate that means I as a taxpayer am subsidizing the crap, but when some poor pervert chips away at the postal deficit by paying a full six cents to mail a dirty letter, then the public is supposedly being taken advantage of. Well, I’m part of that public, and the junk mailer certainly hurts me and takes more advantage of me than the pervert.
There is more light discussion of the Post Office and the expanding role of government. Politically, Sheila and Paul could be most precisely described as libertarian conservatives, a category into which a majority of upper-middle-class swingers probably belong. They are concerned about the scope of government and its control over the citizenry. Government spending bothers them, as do economic controls, which they regard as creeping socialism. At the same time their feelings regarding civil rights and civil liberties, as well as basic economic assistance for poverty classes, would be characterized as extremely liberal, and their Vietnam position is markedly dovish. This evening’s political comments consist mostly of gentle carping, and before long we return to the topic at hand.
SHEILA: Of our ten letters, seven brought more or less prompt replies, which we later discovered is a remarkably high average. As a general thing, fifty percent is considered good. We had done the right thing in phrasing our letters intelligently and in selecting people who were geographically close to us.
Of the seven, one couple wrote courteously to say that they had a full schedule for the time being. The courtesy of a negative reply was rare enough six years ago. It’s almost nonexistent now. The other six were all raring to go. They sent their pictures and their phone numbers and wanted to meet us.
We narrowed the group down. One couple was interracial, a white girl and a Negro man. At the time we were anxious to avoid that sort of thing—
PAUL: The prejudices you grow up with take a long time dying. Even for swingers.
SHEILA: Another couple wrote a letter that just didn’t ring true. I would be hard-pressed to say how, but it didn’t. We knew there were a lot of phonies in the swinging world, and we had the vague feeling that this was from one of them, so we passed it up.
The other couples all looked like good prospects. We picked the two closest couples, one here in K.C. and another just across the river in Missouri. One was in town and the other struck us from the photograph as slightly more attractive to us, so we tossed a coin, and Kansas City won.
PAUL: They had enclosed their phone number, so one evening we gave them a ring. We had been putting it off for several days and it was really wild. Talk about being tugged two ways at once! We were really desperate for some swinging — it had been about two months since Jeff and Jan moved away — and at the same time we had a rougher case of sexual stage fright than Fay Wray on her honeymoon with King Kong. Somehow all that we had learned from our reading didn’t seem to help in the least. It was like reading books about sky diving — they wouldn’t make it any easier to take that first step out of the plane.
SHEILA: So we stalled until we reached a point that was almost disgusting. Lying in bed together with their letters and pictures and sexing ourselves up with fantasies, and then working it off on each other. I didn’t like that at all. I suppose a civilian would think we had it all backward — that actual swapping is perverse but a little vicarious stimulation between husband and wife is just another onion in the stew of matrimony. I can’t buy that.
PAUL: It’s like jerking off, except that instead of your hand you use you wife’s vagina.
SHEILA: Jesus, what a revolting thought!
PAUL:...When we finally decided to call them, I could think of nothing else all day at the office. I really made a hash of my work, and I was so preoccupied that it was a miracle I didn’t crack up the car on the ride home. We were going to call after dinner, but by the time we had had cocktails we decided not to wait, and I made the call.
The couple we reached were Anne and Harold Kline. I introduced myself by the alias I had used in the letter and they knew at once who I was. They remembered our letter. They were both on the phone, and I got Sheila to pick up the extension in the kitchen, and we had a surprisingly relaxed four-way conversation. They asked us if Friday was all right, and we said it was, and Anne suggested we come over there, and Harold seconded the motion but got across the message that they would understand if we preferred to meet on neutral territory.
SHEILA: In a cocktail lounge, for instance, so that we could all size each other up and call off the swap graciously if we wanted.
PAUL: I would have preferred to do this. In fact Sheila and I had discussed it beforehand. But they were essentially saying that they didn’t have any reservations about swinging with us, and it didn’t seem particularly well mannered for us to express reservations about them. Especially since they were veterans and seemed sure of themselves, which made them two-up on us. So we set a date.
Somewhere in the middle of the conversation I thought to myself that Anne had a sexy voice. Poised, educated, well modulated, and equipped with a husky undertone. And then it struck me that this woman I was chatting with, this total stranger, was going to be my bed partner in three days’ time. It was shocking, and tremendously exciting...
Friday night we left our kids with a sitter and drove across town to their house. Their place was way over on the other side of the city in a section we weren’t at all familiar with, and we had a hell of a time finding it. But we got there, all right. The house was very impressive — a brick two-story home overgrown with ivy and set back on a half-acre lot. Huge oak trees, a first-class landscaping job. We hadn’t known how grand they might live; I knew Harold was a pharmacist, but that could mean anything from a glorified clerk drawing $7800 a year to a man with a chain of drugstores. We learned later that Harold owns three stores on three of the best shopping plazas in the Kansas City area, which made him a far cry from a clerk.
Their son was awake when they let us in. About fourteen years old, an alert, good-looking kid. They introduced him and he shook hands with us and went upstairs to watch television. It sort of shook us up. It really did.
SHEILA: We had had the Creightons over when our kids were in the house, of course. But Mark and Lisa were tiny then, and even if they had walked in on us they wouldn’t have known what was going on. This was a big kid, and the idea of introducing him to the folks his parents swung with—
PAUL: I think we were also more aware of their ages by meeting their son. Their ages were no secret. They were in their mid-thirties, I think thirty-six and thirty-four, which made them substantially older than us but not enough to turn us off, certainly. But when we met their boy, well, he did make them seem to be older than they looked, and it also occurred to me that we were about as close in age to the kid as we were to his parents, and that was an odd feeling.