The happiest memories, I decide, are of those experiences which are a joy to remember but which we would not for anything care to relive — fraternity pranks, football rallies, front-line combat, early loves. One is doubly grateful for them — that they happened, and that they need never happen again.
Sooner or Later You Make Yourself Sick
PAUL: Sorry we had to cancel out last night. We tried to reach you, but you were out and we left a message with your service. I was afraid you might drive all the way out.
JWW: I thought I’d call first.
PAUL: If you had come, I guess you could have interviewed four people instead of two.
JWW: Oh?
PAUL: We had a couple over last night. New people. New to us, that is. A young couple. He’s a commercial artist. They don’t live ten minutes from us. Friends of some friends of ours.
We are lunching at a small, unprepossessing restaurant near his office. After abruptly canceling an interview scheduled for the previous evening, today Paul has called me in midmorning to request this lunch date. I expect that the cancellation and the appointment are related, and that he has chosen this way to tell me he and Sheila have decided to abandon the book project. I am prepared to encourage him to stay with it; I have found that interviewees commonly develop a form of stage fright somewhere along the line, and generally want only to be assured that they ought to go on.
His manner suggests that my suspicions will be proved correct. He talks somewhat disjointedly, with long reflective pauses between clauses and sentences.
PAUL: They were quite a bit younger than we are. Maybe twenty-three, twenty-four. Married just two years. They started, they got into swinging after just a year of marriage.
JWW: That seems to be more and more common lately.
PAUL: I would say so. Oh, a year is not a record, not by any means. Nowadays you’ll often see a couple come together originally as swingers, so that they’ll have partied together from their first date, long before they married. From what I gathered, these kids last night both had pretty active sex lives before marriage and a solid premarital relationship. And after a year of marriage they were ready to get with it.
They had a sort of semi-hippie look to them. Clean and well groomed, but the girl had that long, perfectly straight hair and they were both dressed very mod.
JWW: Must have made you feel ancient.
PAUL: Oh, maybe a little bit, but that’s not what I’m getting at. I’m not sure what I am getting at. It’s funny talking about this in public, in a public place like this. No one can hear us, I know that.
JWW: If you’d rather go somewhere else—
PAUL: No, I have only an hour. I suppose this was silly, getting you down here for nothing, but it came to me last night — that I wanted to talk to you, and just the two of us. Not that it’s anything I wouldn’t want to say to Sheila, but I wanted it to be while the ideas were fresh in my mind. I don’t know—
A waiter brings something. The conversation stalls. When we resume, Paul has organized himself.
PAUL: Last night the girl, her name was Barbara, wanted to do a sandwich. You know what that is? To be specific, she wanted me to screw her from front while her husband had her anally from the rear. She explained that she really liked to do this, it was her particular pleasure, and she offered to give Sheila some head during all this, but Sheila declined.
These people here, all around us. Assuming they’re civilians, can you imagine their reaction overhearing this conversation? Suppose they just managed to overhear it? Once they got past shock, do you know what the majority of them would think?
JWW: I suppose they would be envious to a greater or lesser degree.
PAUL: No question about it. They would think, well, here’s a man describing a really exciting experience. Really thrilling. Some of them would get physically excited thinking about it.
In a way, that’s part of my point. John, picture this. The three of us are on the bed in our bedroom. I am having relations with this Barbara. Her husband is trying to get in her from the rear, but he can’t maintain an erection. Sheila comes over and stimulates him and he tries again and can’t do it, and then the girl asks if we have a vibrator, so she and I separate and she works on him with a vibrator.
And more of this, you get the general idea, I forget exactly who does what and it doesn’t really matter, but what it adds up to is that this is a real production number. I mean we literally spend half an hour getting ready to treat this kid to her sandwich, and then we do it. Of course it’s a great bore. The poor husband has been so excessively stimulated by now that he ejaculates prematurely. The girl and I, on the other hand, can’t finish at all. We poke around for a while, then everybody showers and gets dressed and we go back downstairs.
Sheila makes coffee, we drink coffee, and we try to manage a conversation. The failure in the bedroom has us all unstrung by this point, especially the husband who can hardly avoid feeling inadequate. We fill a few minutes with talk of mutual friends. Otherwise it turns out that we don’t have very much to talk about. They’re decent enough kids, but aside from sex we have nothing in common with them, and would never have spent an evening with them except to swing together. Finally they leave, and that’s that.
And that, John, is the fantastically exciting evening that would have nine out of ten men in this room drooling if they heard about it. Do you see what I’m driving at?
JWW: I’m not sure.
PAUL: That it seems more exciting than it is. Oh, some evenings are better than others, there’s no question about it. Last night was particularly bad. What do hippies call it? Last night was a bummer. But every once in a while you get a night like that...
And even the good nights, what’s the real point of it all? Just the same old thing every time. New people, maybe some halfway new ways of having sex, but otherwise it’s all the same. Intimate relationships with people you don’t know intimately, people you don’t honestly know at all. People in many cases whom, if you did know them at all well, you wouldn’t want to talk to, let alone have relations with.
JWW: You don’t always feel this way.
PAUL: No, of course not.
JWW: On quite a few occasions you’ve told me you feel swinging is the only way for a married couple to live in today’s world. I believe you meant this when you said it.
PAUL: I did. That’s really why I wanted to talk to you today, while I still had this particular fix on the whole scene. To give you this side of it while it was fresh in my mind.
Look — every swinger has certain times when he sees nothing but the positive side of swinging, and other times when he sees the negative. I would say this is true for virtually everyone. But in the interviews we’ve had I constantly find myself taking the same position, and this is legitimate because it’s the position Sheila and I have come around to over the years. It’s the way we feel most of the time. So whenever we’re talking and that little machine is taking it all down, I slip into gear, as if I’m programmed to respond a certain way in an interview situation.
I thought right now I’d be primed to break the pattern and give you the other side of the coin.