SHEILA: With Jeff and Jan, we had had everything in common, and so we were now very conscious of differences.
PAUL: Fortunately the Klines put us at ease. We had a few rounds of drinks and began to unwind. They were very attractive people. He was losing his hair in front, but his hairline was receding neatly and evenly so that he only looked bright and distinguished, not ridiculous the way some men do when they begin to go bald. He had a good sense of humor and a knack for keeping a conversation alive.
Anne was a fair-skinned brunette with very large brown eyes and a really extraordinary figure. Most swingers begin to cut a few years off their ages once they pass the thirty mark. In Anne’s case, I would have thought it was the other way around. It was almost impossible to believe she was thirty-four years old with a fourteen-year-old son. Even up close she could have passed for a full ten years younger.
SHEILA: Easily. If I were to meet someone like that now I would be fiercely jealous, but at the time I was too young to mind. When you’re twenty-four you think you’ll be young forever.
PAUL: I noticed that Anne wasn’t drinking the same thing as the rest of us. Later on she explained that she was a health nut. Never touched alcohol or tobacco or tea or coffee or any of the other things that normal people stay alive on. And she drank — what the hell was it?
SHEILA: Vegetable juice. Carrot and parsley and celery. She had an elaborate machine to squeeze them with. And she never ate sugar or white bread or dozens of other things. Or took any kind of pill, including aspirin.
PAUL: She used to say that she only had one vice and she wanted to be able to give it all her energy.
SHEILA: The crazy things she ate and didn’t eat. I shouldn’t say crazy, should I? It certainly worked for her. If I had any sense—
PAUL: No you don’t. You’re too much of a fanatic, honey. If you quit smoking and drinking you’d go all the way and cut out sex, too, and then where would we be?
SHEILA: Dead of boredom in a week.
PAUL: You said it. Well, let’s say that I was sufficiently impressed with Anne. Her figure was great in clothes, and the bathing-suit shot they had sent us had proved she looked good out of clothes, too. There was no doubt in my mind that I was interested, and Shelia and I exchanged glances and her eyes let me know that she wasn’t averse to the idea of making it with Harold, either. So I relaxed and waited for them to take the initiative.
This took a while. I guess they wanted the kid to have a chance to get to sleep, or else they just wanted to give us all a chance to get acquainted. But around ten o’clock Anne asked if we would like to see the basement recreation room. I started to go with her, and Sheila was ready to tag along.
SHEILA: Sometimes people can be too subtle.
PAUL: And this was one of those times. But Harold took hold of her and asked her to keep him company for a few minutes, and then my genius wife got the message. And so did I.
There was a Castro convertible downstairs, all opened and ready for action — which was a good description of the state Anne was in, as far as that goes. It was really a pretty odd scene. At one moment she was this calm and cool hostess, and the next minute she was a bitch in heat. Literally. I saw the couch opened up and said something moderately clever and turned to smile at her, just the least bit afraid that maybe I had been overly risqué with her playing it so cool, and there she was with her dress pulled over her head and nothing but her underneath it. She kicked off her shoes, flopped on the bed, and started panting.
I was really stunned by all of this, and instead of rising to the occasion I stood there staring like a jerk. Not for long, though. Then I got undressed and got in bed with her.
We began touching and kissing, and at one point I was about to go down on her. Just as a matter of course, because we had all reached the point where we hardly ever had coitus without some french preparation first.
Anne didn’t want that. “No,” she said, “not that. I don’t want that. Just put it in me. Your big hard thing, put it in me and give it to me as hard as you can.”
This put me off-stride for a moment. I don’t like being told how to make love to a girl, not that bluntly; it’s a de-balling sort of thing. But I thought, hell, the customer is always right, so I got on and rode.
I was surprised. She turned out to be sensational at it — muscular control, rhythm, empathy for what her partner wanted, everything. This shouldn’t have been surprising, maybe, but the abruptness of the approach had more or less turned me off and I had estimated her to be sexually unrefined, unsophisticated, the get-on-and-do-it-and-get-off type. She wasn’t that way at all. It was just that her whole orientation was phallic. The size and rigidity of my organ was about all she cared about. And she kept talking about it constantly while I was balling her, how large it was, how firm, how marvelous it made her feel—
SHEILA: Mr. Modesty hasn’t told you this, but he happens to have a seventeen-inch penis.
PAUL: Oh, out it out.
SHEILA: With 18-karat gold trim and a two-piece charcoal filter.
PAUL: You’re a riot. I’m not boasting, not by any means. I’m about average, and so are maybe ninety eight percent of the men we’ve met, as far as that goes. The whole point was she was making all this fuss over something that wasn’t all that unusual. I wasn’t about to object, though. It was good food for the ego—
SHEILA: Poor starving little ego.
PAUL: —and as I said, she was enjoyable enough in the rack. So I stayed with her. She didn’t mind variety, as long as it came out with my plug in her socket, so we ran through a variety of positions and kept going until I ran out of gas. I had acquitted myself fairly early and I certainly hadn’t left her hung up, but there was a sort of wistful expression on her face and I had the feeling she could have kept on going for hours.
SHEILA: And meanwhile I was upstairs on the living room couch finding out why Anne liked what she liked. See, she couldn’t get it at home.
JWW: Harold was impotent?
SHEILA: In the worst way. He didn’t have one.
PAUL: Isn’t that too much?
SHEILA: Not enough is more like it. When they went downstairs he kissed me and began making love to me, and he wound up going down on me on the couch without taking off his own clothes. He was an artist at this — impotent fellows generally are, if they’re swingers, maybe because they haven’t got much else going for them.
I made it, and we sat back and had a cigarette. I asked if there wasn’t something I could do for him, and he said not now, that he was fine. I gathered that he had ejaculated while he was eating me, which happens. I made some joke to this effect, some very stupid joke about how he should have saved it until he found the proper receptacle. Just a stupid joke, and one that seemed a lot stupider when he explained that he didn’t have a penis.
PAUL: A swinger without a penis. Isn’t that incredible?
SHEILA: Oh, I don’t know. I’m a swinger without a penis.
PAUL: Just incredible. A swing-errrr without a penis/ Is like a ship/Without a sail—
SHEILA: I’ll ignore that. It wasn’t in the war. It was an accident, I think an automobile accident. He showed me what he had left, which was virtually nothing. But he still had his testicles and they still functioned, and if he became very excited sexually he was still capable of ejaculating. But of course he couldn’t have coitus, because of what he was missing.