We settle the check, walk together out of the restaurant. On the sidewalk he apologizes for dragging me to such a depressing interview. I assure him it has been time well spent. “I gave you all the bad side,” he said. “Blame it on my mood. If I told you the same story tomorrow it would sound completely different. In the right sort of mood I could make anything sound bad. And after all, we went back to swinging. We did go back to it.”
His smile stiffens slightly, “I never thought we would,” he says. “I never thought we would.”
Dropping Out and Dropping In
SHEILA: People ask if I really meant to kill myself. If you’ve ever been there you know that the question itself is no good. When you reach that state there’s no saying what you do or don’t mean. Everything gets blurred around the edges. Reality loses its definition. There are certain things that happened then — or didn’t happen — and I will never really be sure, because I can’t say positively whether they occurred or I have false memories of them. I don’t know if psychiatrists recognize the condition of temporary insanity or whether it’s just a way for murderers to get acquitted, but that’s how I would describe the state I was in, as a state of temporary insanity. So as to whether or not I intended to kill myself—
PAUL: When you were safely out of it, you certainly wanted to live.
SHEILA: I remember feeling like a very small child. Absolutely no will of my own. I remember being in bed, a hospital bed, everything white and clean, and people looking down at me. Strangers, strange faces. And all I could think was that these strangers were big people who would take care of me. They would tell me what to do and all I would have to do was obey their orders. I wouldn’t have to make any decisions. I would do as I was told and they would take care of me.
And I remember a doctor’s voice, the first words that I heard that made any impression. “You’re lucky to be alive.”
This kept ringing in my head. You’re lucky to be alive. I don’t know if this happens to everybody, but when I’m in a stress situation of one sort or another, or it may be just that my perceptions are flooey because of some drug and ordinary clichés go around in my mind until they take on a new meaning. I don’t mean that I take drugs, because I don’t, not in the hippie sense. I’ve never even had marijuana. But I’ve had pills to lose weight, and allergy pills, and once some tranquilizers, which incidentally were the worst of all in this respect. I suppose it’s a change in body chemistry; your system is suddenly playing by a different set of rules and it does something to your mind.
You’re lucky to be alive. It echoed in my mind, and I took it a step past the obvious meaning, that I had come fairly close to losing my life and that it was luck which saved me. That obviously was what the doctor was trying to get across to me.
What I also interpreted it to mean, though, was that of two possible states, alive and dead, I was alive. And that this state, being alive, was desirable. And thus I was lucky. And since I agreed with this analysis, since I felt that I was lucky to be alive, it meant that basically I was accepting life, I was responding to it affirmatively. Does this make any sense at all or was it just meaningful to me at the time? Because I think I know what I mean, but I don’t know if the distinction comes across.
PAUL: It says something about your state of mind, I think. And I know what you mean, even though I can’t say I understand the logic of how you got there.
SHEILA: I don’t suppose it matters. It was all part of a reaction, of course. And I had turned the corner. It wasn’t just a matter of wanting to go on living. I wanted to make everything right again, and clean and sane and... I don’t know. I wanted everything to be perfect.
Paul and I talked. I don’t mean that we had a significant conversation. I mean we talked. God, do you remember the way it was? Weeks and weeks of planning and talking and explaining and analyzing.
PAUL: We had never before opened up to each other that completely.
SHEILA: It was too much, really.
PAUL: We needed it at the time.
SHEILA: Yes. But you can go too far. A person needs to live a portion of his life alone...
We discuss this for a time. It is a position Sheila has taken — on other occasions — that communication must be limited, that even self-analysis can become dangerous when carried too far. And often I sensed a pull of opposing forces at work within her: on the one hand the impulse to inform and educate and display through the development of our book, and on the other hand the urge to keep some part of herself hidden from me, from Paul, from the reader, and indeed from herself.
She is a thoughtful, analytical person, considerably more so than her husband, and at the same time more defensive and secretive. Our luncheon conversation, given in the last chapter, provides an excellent illustration; Sheila would not have been inclined to initiate such an interview, but should it commence, she would have had far less difficulty marshaling her thoughts and articulating them.
She returns now to a period of time following her initial suicide attempt, when she and Paul determined to separate themselves entirely from the world of mate-swapping. The process, as she and her husband describe it, is not unlike any religious conversion — a moment, perhaps shock-inspired, of blinding revelation; an absolute and unequivocal break with the past; soul-seeking introspection; and, finally, the embracing of a new pattern of living which is nearly as extreme as the one now forsaken. It is so often thus that converts are made, and apostates as well.
PAUL: There’s a sort of daydream I always find myself having when things get out of joint. I’m sure it must be universal. Just a dream of starting over completely. That the slate is clean, that you could get a completely fresh start and be free from all the things that make your present situation unbearable.
SHEILA: The original American dream, isn’t it? A new start in a new world. Go west, young man, and all that.
PAUL: Or the attraction of confession in the Catholic Church. The idea that you can get completely clean. That you can wash off old sins and start anew.
SHEILA: With new sins.
PAUL: You know what I mean. We were like that. It wasn’t enough for us to change our sexual lives, to put a 180 degree bend in our whole approach to sex. We were like a doctor with a patient suffering from every known disease, and instead of just treating the one that would kill him first we had to treat everything at once, everything from cancer to an ingrown toenail at the same time.
SHEILA: We cut out swinging. That very nearly goes without saying. In fact we got so completely caught up in the pattern of changing our lives that we almost forgot about swinging. Forgot that we had done it, that is.
JWW: Not literally?
SHEILA: Hardly that. But it was as though the change in our personalities had been so complete that we were worlds removed from ourselves as swingers. We stopped talking about those days. Not because of a conscious desire to avoid the subject but because we honestly didn’t think about it.
PAUL: Which may simply have meant that we were repressing the thoughts themselves—
SHEILA: Well, the hell with that. It’s hard enough being responsible for one’s conscious mind. What’s that joke about a man who dreamed he was committing adultery, and his wife was jealous?
PAUL: Right. On a conscious level, we were absolute puritans.
JWW: I’m not sure I get the full picture. You say that this reformation embraced not only swinging but everything else.