JWW: Was it really the same thing? A habit that wouldn’t stay broken? Or was it more complicated than that?
SHEILA: Your Honor, the prosecuting attorney is leading his witness.
JWW: And you wish to record an objection?
SHEILA: I don’t know. Here’s what happened—
As she begins, Paul leaves the room briefly, returns with a freshened drink, then sits in silence listening to her version of the return to swinging. The bitterness which Sheila evidenced earlier, the uneasiness she seemed to feel at the memory of resuming swinging during her pregnancy, seems to have been entirely put aside. Her thoughts could hardly have been better organized, I realize, had she taken the trouble of writing them out beforehand.
Her ease in discussing the return to life as swingers is particularly noticeable now, while she confines herself to narrating precisely what happened rather than probing motivations. Later, when we take up those matters, she becomes somewhat less certain of herself verbally. Even then the tension evident earlier in the evening does not reassert itself, at least not visibly.
SHEILA: Like so many things, it seemed to happen out of the blue, with absolutely no warning, no advance preparation whatsoever. When we looked back on it, though, we were able to see that it had been building up for some time without our noticing it. So many things happen this way; in retrospect the signs were there all along, but you only see them after you’re past them.
On the surface, everything seemed to be fine between us. Not merely on the surface that we presented to the world but the surface which we ourselves were able to see. I was having a much easier time with pregnancy than I’d had with Mark or Lisa, hardly any morning sickness and I wasn’t gaining nearly as much weight. My mental attitude was good, too. With the first two children, much as I wanted them, I was still worried about my ability to handle the role of motherhood. Now I’d had enough experience in that role to know I could manage it at least adequately. And Paul was earning more money and enjoying firmer job security than ever before, and we were both more emotionally stable, or at least seemed to be, all of which made us both more comfortable with the whole idea of pregnancy than ever before.
In the third month, a strange thing happened. I was at my obstetrician’s office and he was giving me an internal examination. A finger wave, as they call it. Now I’ve heard thousands of jokes about women getting excited during a gynecological examination, so I suppose it must happen now and then, but actually I can’t think of anything that ought to be duller for both the patient and the doctor. At best it’s a burlesque of sex because the mood is so distinctly asexual. This particular doctor always picked that time to talk about something profoundly boring — his kid’s schoolwork or the membership policy at the country club or something equally provocative. I have a feeling he does this purposely to make it less likely that a patient will be either embarrassed or excited.
I certainly wasn’t embarrassed. I couldn’t be embarrassed by a plumber’s hand in there, much less a doctor’s.
But this time was really crazy; I got excited.
It happened without any warning, just a spontaneous feeling of passion. I got very wet and felt extremely warm there from a rush of blood to the loins. I began getting all breathless and passionate. All the standard symptoms, all perfectly suitable if I were in bed with somebody, but a little bit out of place in a doctor’s office. And it wasn’t purely physical, although it may have started that way, because I found myself looking at him and making him the specific object of my interest. He was a fairly handsome guy, dark complexion, white teeth, a sort of rugged stocky build, and all at once I was not only getting hotter than hell from the fingering but was wondering what it would be like to ball him.
If he noticed what was happening, at least he had the grace to keep it to himself. He seemed completely oblivious to it all. I think that if he’d tossed off some flip line right about then I would have gone through the floor. I’d have quietly died.
On the other hand, if he’d given me the slightest encouragement I would have raped him.
For me, that was the start. I went home and found myself thinking about it, over and over. I couldn’t push the thought out of my head. I wanted to discuss it with Paul, but of course I couldn’t. There was really no place for a discussion to go. But I went on thinking about it, very close to being obsessed with it. One night we were making love and my mind wandered, as minds are apt to do, and there was a moment when I realized that I was imagining myself making love with my doctor instead of my husband. And I felt the urge to stay with the fantasy, you see, which I could not possibly permit myself to do; after all, this was during our marriage-is-sacred stage, you see. So I broke off the fantasy, but I missed having an orgasm that night.
Then one afternoon I was feeling moody and depressed and unattractive, and I went to bed and had the fantasy that I was with my doctor, and I used my finger instead of his, and for the first time in a really long time I masturbated.
Doesn’t it make a beautiful picture? A well-adjusted young matron — and if that isn’t a dreadful word, “matron”; I get this picture of a beefy dyke guard in a woman’s prison — but a well-adjusted young married woman, then, mother of two with a third on the way, in love with her husband and through with promiscuous sex and all that, taking to her bed in the middle of the afternoon and secretly frigging herself to distraction with thoughts of pelvic examinations dancing in her head.
I felt this all-consuming guilt afterward. And I felt that everything was a farce, that I was a phony playing a phony role. All this bilge about the sanctity of our mature relationship, and after six months of it I had only succeeded in turning myself into a jerk-off.
After that there were random thoughts. Every man I saw, every person I saw, I would view as a potential sex partner. Oh, not really, not the way it sounds. Not the way it is with nymphomaniacs who stare at the crotch of every passing man and try to imagine what his organ feels like. Nothing that abnormal. just the sort of sexual speculation, the I-wouldn’t-do-anything-about-it-but-there’s-no-harm-in-window-shopping attitude that the average married person goes through all the time. Of course I speculated that way with girls as well, probably because I’d had experience in that direction as well, but otherwise it was nothing unusual. Except that it was unusual for me because we had six months of this crazy total emotional and physical fidelity.
So that was when it started for me. And it was happening about the same time for Paul. Exactly the same time, as we found out later. Again, nothing really happened. Just urges.
PAUL: I was responding to other women, that’s all. It didn’t upset me nearly as much as it did Sheila because I knew that every man does this all the time. Also it came up more gradually; I didn’t suddenly get hot in a doctor’s office. I didn’t intend to do anything about it, either. I considered it — there was a young kid in the office who made it fairly obvious that she thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread — but it never went farther than that. As far as I was concerned, all this was only evidence that I was becoming human again. I wasn’t as isolated from society as Sheila was. I was at the office seeing people every day, and I knew that every normal man my age was either cheating on his wife or else wanted to, but didn’t have the guts. The ones who weren’t doing it talked and joked about it all the time, and the ones who kept quiet were getting all the action they could handle. And these people weren’t swingers, understand, just ordinary men who would have turned green at the thought of sharing their wives with other men. Just ordinary American husbands who believe in ordinary cheating.