When I broached the subject to Paul and Sheila, they were at first reluctant, less I think out of a desire to avoid exposing themselves than from the conviction that their lives and selves could not be all that interesting to the rest of the world. Once I was able to assure them that their story was potentially valuable to swingers and nonswingers alike, they were enthusiastic about the project and made themselves readily available for several additional interviews.
A word on method might be pertinent here. The material which follows is in the words of Paul and Sheila Gordon. The reader will note that I have presented it in the form of interviews. While the words which appear here are given as they were spoken by the Gordons, the interviews have been edited out of sequence in order to present various material in the most useful order. Similarly, I occasionally interviewed one or the other of the two without the spouse present, and there was an inevitable duplication of material, all of which had to be boiled down and parceled up and put into usable form. Thus, while what follows is in every sense the Gordons’ story, this is not to say that it consists of a simple verbatim rendition of the interview tapes. Such a transcription would be three or four times the length of this volume and of no practical interest to anyone.
It should go without saying that Paul and Sheila Gordon go by other names in the world at large, that the names given to them and to other “characters” in this book have all been deliberately fictionalized, as have any particular data about individuals which might tend to make them recognizable. While the persons appearing in the following pages are by no means fictitious, their names and other personal details about them very definitely are.
Lives made of ticky-tacky, all looking quite the same — one wonders if this, after all, begins to explain the special phenomenon of wife-swapping. We have all heard countless variations of the joke in which a man returns one night to his tract home, loses his way, and, unable to distinguish one house from the next, goes to a neighbor’s house and sleeps with the neighbor’s wife without anyone knowing the difference. Can it be, then, that we have witnessed the ultimate triumph of the Industrial Revolution, to the point where not only our machines but also our marriages are composed of interchangeable parts?
While the notion is a tempting one, I don’t suspect it has much real validity. One finds oneself searching for the “cause” of this or that type of socio-sexual behavior, as if in fact one were dealing with a particular disease specifically caused by a particular microorganism. Behavior patterns are not so simply engendered. It has been said that the “cause” of any moment in history is nothing more or less than the sum of all the moments which have preceded it, and in this sense it would be simplistic to point at precise causes for the existence of wife-swapping, in society in general or the Gordons in particular.
On the other hand, the reader will discover for himself any number of ways in which the marital relationship of Paul and Sheila Gordon, their drives and desires and fears and hopes and needs, reflect in diverse ways any number of aspects of the society in which they — and all of us — live. If sex seems to play an overly prominent role in their lives, do they then differ greatly from the rest of us in these times of heightened sexual awareness? If they seem ever dissatisfied, anxious, groping, are we not all subject to much the same irritating nameless yearnings? Indeed, in their strengths and weaknesses alike, and in the fashion in which these traits shape their lives, Paul and Sheila are all too typical of a generation, a nation, a world.
The reader will note that I have not bothered to moralize on the lives and practices of the Gordons, having been neither inclined by temperament nor qualified by virtue to cast initial stones. The reader may judge or not, as he desires. More important, he may learn (as the author did) something about himself and the world around him by considering the way some people live.
Beginnings
A Sunday afternoon in fall. Football weather. Sheila Gordon sitting on her feet on the living room couch, dark green slacks, a gold sweater, brown suede slippers. Paul Gordon in an armchair, a drink on the table beside him, slacks, a sport shirt. The children are downstairs watching television. Periodically one appears with a nose to be wiped or a question to be answered and the conversation is held up until the child is on its way.
SHEILA: About a year after it started, after we first got involved in swinging, I remember going through a real siege of introspection. Not just me individually, it was a mutual thing. We both found ourselves immersed in a sea of questions. Where are we? How did we get here? The usual. We were honestly astonished, I think, that this had happened to us. To people like us.
PAUL: You see, we had always regarded ourselves as basically conservative types. One of the key words in the swingers’ advertisements is “liberal.” You know the drill — “modern, liberal, free-thinking couple, etc.” Of course this has nothing to do with politics. But regardless, we had always thought of ourselves as middle-of-the-road people. We hadn’t had that much sexual experience before marriage, nor had our own marriage been that highly sexed. Not that we fell asleep on the way to bed, nothing like that, but not like the stereotyped picture you might have of typical swingers who have had nothing but sex on their minds since they hit adolescence.
SHEILA: That’s how it always happens in books, isn’t it? Two oversexed kids get married and within a couple of years they’ve tried every form of screwing there is until they just don’t turn each other on any more. Then they decide that something is missing from their lives, so he has an affair with a girl in his office and she plays house with the plumber, and finally they clear the air, talk things over, and invite the next-door neighbors in for a round of musical beds.
PAUL: It does happen that way.
SHEILA: Definitely. No argument, it does. But it didn’t for us. We weren’t all that experienced when we were married. I had had one very brief and completely unsuccessful bit of sleeping with a guy I was pinned to, and Paul had had a few affairs, most of which were just one-shot things, and the two of us did make love in the few months before we got married, but that was about all, and that’s certainly less experience than the average couple brings to marriage nowadays. We had a good relationship from the start, and of course Mark and Lisa came into the picture almost immediately. Mark when we were married just over a year and Lisa fifteen months later. So in the first four years of marriage we were really too busy adjusting to changes to feel confined or frustrated or whatever. Paul kept changing jobs, and each time it meant a complete relocation for us, giving up old friends and making new ones and finding out where to shop and, oh, all the complications that accompany a move from one city to another.
So I certainly didn’t have any affairs. I wasn’t bored with my own husband, for one thing. Nor was I beset by propositions. I gained innumerable pounds with each pregnancy and wasn’t all that good about getting them off afterward, so plumbers and deliverymen were sadly immune to my raw animal magnetism.
PAUL: Once, while Sheila was pregnant with Lisa, I had relations with another woman. You couldn’t call it an affair. I was in Chicago to interview a company that had been sending out job feelers, and I was all alone there and didn’t know a soul, and Sheila and I hadn’t been able to have relations for the past month and wouldn’t for two more months. This last was more an excuse than anything else, really, although I managed to convince myself at the time that a stray piece would have considerable therapeutic value. At any rate, someone had given me this call girl’s phone number. She came to my hotel room. I was really very jittery and nervous, not that anything untoward would happen, but, I don’t know, I felt awkward about the whole thing. At first I couldn’t do anything, but the girl used a massage device to get me over the hump, if you’ll pardon the expression. The whole experience was pretty blah, but later on I found myself thinking back on it and having fantasies about the call girl. Occasionally I would think of her while I was making love to Sheila—