PAUL: That’s right. Our whole life style.
JWW: I’m not sure if I understand what’s involved in “everything else.” As far as I can see, your only real deviation from societal norms lay in your being swingers. You weren’t criminals, you didn’t take dope, you didn’t drink—
PAUL: You’re missing the point completely.
SHEILA: Yes, you are. We became completely idealistic in the purest sense of the word. Does that give you anything, John?
PAUL: We not only gave up swinging, we gave up smoking.
SHEILA: And drinking. And aspirin, for Christ’s sake. And staying up late, and eating rich desserts, and drinking anything alcoholic, and overindulging in coffee—
JWW: Oh, now I understand.
PAUL: We started dozens of little self-improvement projects. We bought language records, we were going to broaden ourselves by learning a foreign language. And we started little programs of reading worthwhile books. We stopped spanking the children and started reasoning with them, which must have confused the hell out of them.
SHEILA: It’s easy to see it now as a period of reaction, the pendulum swinging the other way to compensate for what had gone on before. Living through it was something else again. We dropped all our friends and didn’t seem to have time to find new ones. When we did meet people, they never went out of their way to see us again. I’m sure we made people uncomfortable. Never relaxed, never had a drink, never joked, took everything so damned seriously.
PAUL: Did you happen to read The Arrangement?
SHEILA: Oh, for Christ’s sake!
PAUL: She has a problem, she can only read things that are well written. I can only tell whether or not something is interesting, and if it is, I stay with it. There was a part in this book that reminded me of us. The narrator is almost killed in an auto wreck, and then he and his wife go through this same sort of idealistic thing, fooling around with art and spiritual development and getting to know each other deeply, all of that. I understand the book’s not considered the greatest novel in the history of world literature, but that section of the book brought it all back to me...
They further define their behavior during this period, the various disciplines involved. As Paul describes the ease with which they both gave up smoking, Sheila lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. Paul takes one himself shortly thereafter. Ultimately I express interest in their sexual relationship during this period of adjustment — has swinging left them jaded? Or does sex itself seem irrelevant to their new way of living?
PAUL: At first we just left it alone.
SHEILA: It was the one subject we did not discuss. Not sex in general, we were able to talk about that, but sex as a function of our new relationship. We didn’t talk about it, nor did we do anything about it. We were very close physically and all, kissing and holding hands and sleeping in one another’s arms, but nothing sexual happened, nothing was desired on either side.
PAUL: If I thought anything, I thought it was over.
JWW: Permanently?
PAUL: I would say so. And it seems odd, thinking back on it, but I don’t believe this bothered me. I felt as though we had outgrown sex, as though we had gone beyond it.
SHEILA: This was just at first, of course.
PAUL: The first stage. Later we got off that bicycle and went for the sex-is-holy routine.
SHEILA: You’re being a little too flippant. It was more complicated. We decided to have another child.
PAUL: Heidi.
SHEILA: Obviously. There’s no point in going into our reasons for this. I think it’s obscene to explain the reasons which led to the existence of a human being.
PAUL: It’s comical and you don’t want to admit it.
SHEILA: It’s not comical.
PAUL: The hell it isn’t. Having a kid to symbolize our new way of life, our no-more-swinging way of life, and then wearing maternity clothes to—
SHEILA: Stop it!
PAUL: —to a swap session, and—
SHEILA: God damn you! You don’t have to talk about it!
PAUL: You’d rather hide it?
SHEILA: I don’t have to listen to this shit!
She storms out of the room. Paul and I sit awkwardly. He abandons his narrative, which he had taken up only to provoke his wife. He turns the conversation to some less crucial topic. We chat mindlessly for a few minutes until Sheila abruptly reappears with a fresh pot of coffee and a plate of cookies. The conversation is taken up as it was before Paul began baiting her, with no further mention of the quarrel, no apology on either side.
SHEILA: When we decided to have Heidi, when we first began making love again, I know we were both very much afraid, concerned that... well, that nothing would happen.
PAUL: Or that it wouldn’t be any good.
SHEILA: I suppose we thought we might have gotten completely jaded as a result of our experiences in swinging. In a sense, that had happened to us for a time while we were swinging, we did reach a point where we were only excited in the presence of other people.
PAUL: We were probably worried that the process wouldn’t reverse itself. All the obvious hang-ups were involved... To make a long story short, we turned out to be a hundred-percent wrong.
SHEILA: It was wonderful.
PAUL: Absolutely wonderful.
SHEILA: We were astounded at the time, but when you look back on it I don’t see how anything could have been more natural. We were incredibly close at the time, closer than we’ve ever been before or since. And I’m not criticizing our present relationship when I say that. What we have now is, I would say, an improvement on what we had then. We were too close, too earnest, too—
PAUL: Too intense.
SHEILA: That’s it.
PAUL: Because when you spend enough of your time talking about your relationship, you’re just too involved in it. People, especially people who happen to be married to each other, ought to be able to relax with their relationship. But we were in a special set of circumstances, and I guess you could say we were too close.
SHEILA: It certainly made for good sex.
PAUL: I think it’s particularly fulfilling when you’re trying to conceive a child.
SHEILA: At least it was, given our mood at the time. There was something holy about what we were doing, in our eyes, at least. And the joy of lovemaking seemed to last longer. It didn’t end with orgasm but seemed to be an on-going affair.
JWW: Did you have any difficulty in becoming pregnant?
SHEILA: None. I seem to be embarrassingly fertile.
JWW: Let me just sum up the temporal picture. About how long after you dropped out of swinging did you conceive Heidi?
PAUL: I guess it was about three months.
SHEILA: And three months after that — it was just about three months, I had just started wearing maternity clothes — why, we dropped back in again.
JWW: That seems surprising, in view of what you’ve said.
PAUL: It was surprising.
SHEILA: We didn’t expect it to happen, certainly. Or if we did suspect it secretly, it was something we didn’t think about, let alone discuss. But you have to appreciate how artificial this “arrangement” of ours was. Not artificial in the sense that we were consciously doing something phony, but in that we were not really being ourselves. We thought we were being ourselves, but it was just role playing. The people we were pretending to be were types who had no use for swinging, and we thought we would remain that way forever.
PAUL: The hell, we thought we would stay off cigarettes forever, too, as far as that goes. I stuck it out for three months and Sheila for close to four, and by then we were both ready to give up giving up smoking. It was the same thing with swinging, only we lasted a little longer.