PAUL: What you call all dressed up and no place to go.
SHEILA: That wasn’t even funny. And why joke about it?
PAUL: Because, if you really want to know, just thinking about it gives me a terminal case of the chills. Why don’t we talk about something else? Something conversationally safe, like religion or politics?
SHEILA: Castration fears, sweetie?
PAUL: No, just an inverted case of penis envy.
SHEILA: That’s funny. Well, to make a long story short—
PAUL: Which is what Harold’s accident did, God help him.
SHEILA: —he had an artificial phallus which he and Anne would use, and of course he would go down on her, but he explained that it was mainly what he was missing that made them go into swinging, more for her sake than anything else. I had never heard of anything like this at the time. Since then I’ve known plenty of couples where the husband is wholly or partially impotent, but nothing equivalent to Harold.
I asked if there was anything I could do for him, and he said the one thing that thrilled him that way was to bring a girl to orgasm. And he spent the next few hours doing that, once wearing the rubber dildo and the other times in more common ways.
On the way home we compared notes and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. At first we more or less decided not to see them again. They didn’t go for anything more elaborate than separate-room twosies, and of course there was that big gap on his part and her single-minded interest, and it hardly added up to ideal partners for us. I remember that we got mildly hysterical on the way home, comparing the two of them to Jeff and Jan. All the difference in the world. We couldn’t help laughing, and yet it wasn’t all that funny, because we thought of what it would be like to swap with them on a regular basis, you know, see them exclusively. It was a very grim idea.
PAUL: And one grim idea led to another. We felt, well, pretty damned foolish. All of this planning and scheming and driving across town to make square love with a cock-crazy health-food nut and her prickless husband, if you’ll excuse the language, but that was how we thought of them. All of that aggravation, and for what, really?
SHEILA: I was ready to give it up. Swinging, the whole scene. I had a good time with what’s-his-name, Harold, but it left a bad taste. And he was so pathetic that I couldn’t hate him or even despise him, which made it worse.
We went to bed and compared notes, and that was the big surprise, because it turned us on. We didn’t think of it as exciting, but when we talked about it we did get excited, each of us showing what we’d done earlier, and we made very good love...
And as it turned out, we saw the Klines off and on as long as we stayed in K.C. Once we had made other contacts and got involved in swinging with a wide variety of people, we grew to appreciate them in a strange way as an occasional change of pace. Oh, say we made it with them five, six times over the next year or so. Maybe only four times. They were nice people. Not natural swingers, because they were driven to it, but nice people just the same...
They begin reminiscing about other couples with whom they had relations during their stay in Kansas City. Their circle of sexual partners gradually enlarged, they explain, both through additional correspondence and through introductions arranged by past contacts. We sit in repose, smoking, drinking, nibbling at the tray of canapés, while they discuss these past sexual exploits with an air not unlike a pair of college fraternity brothers at a twentieth reunion, trading roseate memories of pranks that sound oddly unreal now.
I hear of this couple and that couple, this man and that woman. I am provided with thumbnail sketches and capsule biographies: A, married for the second time, would inherit a million-dollar landscape gardening firm if his father ever died; B, flat-chested and pear-shaped, had a mad passion for fellatio; C, a thoroughgoing bisexual, had been a virgin on her wedding night and became an all-out swinger in less than six months; D, a sound engineer at a local television studio, had some fantastic erotic tapes; E and F, according to a persistent rumor, were brother and sister now living as man and wife but no one had dared ask them about this to their faces.
I change the reels in my tape recorder, but somewhere along the way, I must confess, I fail to change the reels in my head; the words they utter are no longer recorded in my mind but pass in and out unnoticed; I tune them out. And later I wonder at this. Perhaps I have dwelled too long among the swingers. Perhaps I have listened one time too many to this sort of recital, this shockingly unshocking narrative of loveless love, of oddly sexless sex. The Klines, I muse, were at least something unusual, a man without a penis, a woman who did not deign to be cunnilingued. But now they have been discussed and released, and the others are not so distinctive; all the men have penises, all the women delight in being eaten. And both Paul and Sheila, who have heretofore impressed me as being so singularly perceptive, so gratifyingly articulate, have suddenly lost their charm, their verve, their vision. Their conversation is preoccupied with total recall of who did what and with which and to whom.
I try to blame the Scotch for all our shortcomings — the tedium of their conversation, the impatience of my response to it. But the blame will not stick. There is another element at work, another influence beyond that of alcohol.
Sheila takes up the narrative, carries it for a time, permits her husband to take over. I am barely conscious that they are talking. Later, when the tapes are transcribed, I learn the particulars of their swinging in Kansas City. This seems to have been a period when their enthusiasm was at its most unqualified. Sex was ever-new and ever-fresh, new people were always available and almost always worth the trouble, and orgasms were as lush and perfect as in the fantasy world of pornography. All the men had penises, all the women liked to be eaten—
That night I plead a headache, which is not entirely a fabrication, and leave earlier than they had expected or I had intended. My drive home is not unlike their return from Harold and Anne Kline’s. I, too, become slightly hysterical. I, too, moody and depressed, seriously contemplate abandoning a project, in this case, a book.
It is later, when I read the transcriptions of my tapes, that I take a blue pencil to my own reactions. For the tone of that night with Paul and Sheila was, I realize, very much as it ought to have been. Automatically, unconsciously, they had managed to recapture if not a mood then at least an attitude, the attitude which had characterized them during the days of experimental swinging which they had been describing. The glibness, the arch patter, the surface judgments were a bona fide if unintended recreation of their past selves.
The happy time. The first party with more than four in attendance. The first viewing of a pornographic movie. The first experiments with extrapersonal devices. The first really bad meeting, with a pair of sadomasochists who want to tie Sheila up and lash her with whips — “But, the thing of it was that this clown kept stressing that it wouldn’t leave marks or do any damage, unable to understand that it still wasn’t something Sheila had any interest in, and he was so persistent I thought I might have to knock him on his ass, but fortunately he finally got the message and backed down, and we got the hell out of there. We got home hours earlier than we planned, and there was our pimple-faced baby-sitter getting herself fucked on the living room couch. We walked in on her, and the boy turned absolutely green, and Doris burst into tears, and it was just too much after all that. We looked at each other and started laughing. We laughed our heads off, we couldn’t stop, and finally we did catch our breaths, and there was this long, stony silence, and then the girl said, “What’s so funny?” Not sarcastic or bitter but just baffled, because of course she didn’t see why we would laugh like that. And Sheila, I don’t know how she did it, but the kids had been doing it in the standard missionary posture, face to face with him on top, and what she said was, “I just never heard of doing it in that position, that’s all.” And naturally we both broke up completely, and the poor girl started bawling all over again. Crying, that is. Not balling as in making love.”