I thought about varying our arrangement so that each of us would have affairs on the sly. Good old standard American cheating. I suppose there’s something to be said for it, but once you’ve been a swinger it’s impossible to put up with the sort of hypocrisy that’s involved in that kind of adultery. Even if your marriage is permissive, even if you don’t feel that you’re cheating and you don’t exactly hide it from your husband or wife, it’s not as free and open as swinging.
PAUL: There’s a purely physical thing, too, and you shouldn’t leave it out. We wanted the big thrills of swinging.
SHEILA: That’s true. Even then I couldn’t help getting caught up in that sort of fantasy. Making it with girls, with two men at once, all the things we had done before. It’s almost impossible to stop yourself from responding to a situation that you’ve formed exciting and satisfying in the past. It’s hard to turn a like into a dislike. I’ve read that one of the problems in curing homosexuals — not that I think it’s something to be cured, but I know that some faggots do go to psychiatrists looking to be reconverted into heterosexuals — one of the problems is that of making a person not desire something he once desired and enjoyed.
PAUL: Like teaching a kid not to like ice cream.
SHEILA: After he’s already enjoyed it for years. That just about says it. You can decide, as Paul and I did, that pluralistic sex is no good, that it’s evil, that it’s bad for your marriage, all of that. But the hard part is telling yourself that it’s no fun, because no matter how you drill the words into yourself, you can’t erase the memory of what it was like.
JWW: And the thrill is that much better?
SHEILA: In a word, yes.
PAUL: We watched one of the late-night talk shows a couple of years ago, and one of the guests was a former drug addict and bank robber. Now he was an actor, or was trying to be. Tall, good-looking guy, very poised. He told about what he had gone through, the agonies of being addicted to heroin, the life of crime that was inevitably a part of heroin addiction. All in all he made it perfectly obvious that the life he had led was nothing but hell and that he thanked God night and day that he was out of it forever.
And the moderator asked him, I forget how he put it, but asked him if heroin was really such a kick, if it was the sort of thing he would think about with longing now, knowing what he knows now. Obviously the answer he expected was that it certainly wasn’t worth it and he doesn’t think about it at all.
The answer he got, and it was shocking and very obviously the truth, was just the opposite. The former addict got this strange expression on his face, and thought for a moment, and then said that it was the biggest kick in the world and he knew he would never get over wanting it if he lived to be a thousand years old.
I don’t mean to suggest that swinging sex and heroin are similar in any particular way. Just let’s say that I knew what the poor son of a bitch meant.
JWW: And you felt as Sheila did?
PAUL: More or less. I figured we had lived something that turned out to be a lie. I don’t think I got as emotional about it as she did, but then I didn’t happen to be pregnant. During the next week I told her we were making ourselves nervous for no reason at all, and that maybe we ought to consider going back to swinging. We started to argue, to cut each other up verbally, but then we got off that platform and managed to loosen up.
SHEILA: I said I didn’t know if Phil and Mona would go for it, and that I was a little afraid to start something with them if they wouldn’t. And I was also a little leery of getting involved with them if it turned out that we didn’t really want to go back to swinging ourselves. So Paul suggested getting together with another couple, with strangers. If we changed our minds we could just get rid of them with no hard feelings on either side, and if we decided swinging was where we belonged, well, then sometime later on we could see whether or not the Pettits might be interested.
I had any number of reservations. So, I’m sure, did Paul, although he was less shaky about things than I was. But I agreed, and we went through with it. Once you decide to do something, waiting is just agony. We didn’t draw things out this time. We had the name and phone number of a couple who were supposed to be real swingers and very warm and attractive people. They were about thirty miles from Louisville. They were one of the couples we had not quite gotten around to calling after we arrived in Louisville, although some friends had recommended them strongly, and we still had their name and address and it seemed worthwhile getting in touch. We didn’t want the aggravation and uncertainty of correspondence right now. Nor, frankly, did we want to get involved with anyone right in town, in case we found out that swinging wasn’t for us after all. You see, we had deliberately severed relations with swinging couples in Louisville, and getting back in the groove could turn out to be awkward.
We called this couple — their names were Marge and Bill — and we told them who we were and whom we knew. Surprisingly enough, they recognized our names and said they had been expecting to hear from us; some mutual friends had told them we were moving to Louisville. I spoke with Marge and gave her a quick rundown on our personal situation. She seemed to understand completely, and we found out later that they had been through something similar themselves, although they had never gone to the extreme we had. But it does seem as though most couples give up swinging sooner or later — and most of them go back to it, sooner or later.
We drove out to see them. At their suggestion, we met at the cocktail lounge of a motel not far from their home. They wanted to make it easy for us to cop out gracefully if we changed our minds.
On the way out there it felt like those first times all over again. Marge and Bill were a few years older than we were. He sold fertilizer to farmers, which may not be the most romantic business in the world but which must have paid off pretty well for him. A handsome man with a good physique. And Marge was also quite attractive — and not at all pregnant, which was the main consideration from my husband’s point of view.
PAUL: You know, from a biological standpoint there’s no reason for the male to be attracted to the pregnant female. His attentions to her can’t serve any purpose.
SHEILA: They can make her happy. And to hell with biological purpose, anyway. What’s the biological purpose of oral sex?
PAUL: It feels good.
SHEILA: I’m sorry I asked... To make a long story short, we got along famously with Bill and Marge, and there was no question but that we wanted to swing with them. They were very good at putting us at ease. We went to their place and took separate rooms.
I still felt somewhat awkward and virginal. All this changed when Bill kissed me. I went wild. We got out of our clothes and he made me lie still while he went down on me. It seems he was tremendously excited by my pregnancy and kept kissing and licking my belly. It didn’t really protrude all that much but the idea of it turned him on. Then he started frenching me in earnest. I came in Technicolor, and came again and again when he screwed me. He put me on my hands and knees and mounted me from the rear and fucked me like a stallion.
Sheila seems at first to be speaking crudely on purpose. It soon becomes clear, however, that she is barely aware of the words she is using. She is responding sexually to her own words or to the memories they evoke. Her eyes are half-lidded and her sentences come in spurts; she pauses intermittently to nibble at her lip or lick both lips with her tongue. She squirms in her chair, buttocks twitching, thighs rubbing nervously together. I feel almost as though I am intruding. I turn to Paul, who is staring fixedly at his wife; he, too, seems to be sexually affected by her account of the experience.