SHEILA: Afterward we went into the other room. I told Bill I wanted to watch Paul with Marge. This is something I wanted very much. I remember being afraid for a moment that I was having all this fun and that Paul wasn’t doing anything. I didn’t think this was so—
PAUL: Not quite.
SHEILA: —because I knew she turned him on and that she liked him, but I was worried. Also I wanted to see them, I wanted to watch them doing it.
We walked into the bedroom and it smelled like a whorehouse. The bed was all stained and everything. And he was lying on his back with his eyes closed and a dreamy expression on his face, and Marge was giving him head. She was stretched out sort of sideways and sucking him.
I got hot all over. Just instantly hot all over.
I turned to Bill. “Is your wife bi?” I asked, and he nodded, and I asked him if he thought she would mind if I joined in.
He said go ahead.
I don’t think I gave a damn if she did or not. I just had to do it. I put my face between her legs and began eating her without a word. I could taste Paul there...
Marge and Bill both used depilatories. Many swingers do; they remove all their pubic hair. She was all smooth there.
It was so good. Everything was so good.
And we did just everything. We were with them for hours and we did everything and it was fantastic. I was too involved to think. Later on we thought about it and talked about it but at the time it wasn’t even possible to think. I was too busy doing and feeling and I couldn’t think about anything else.
On the way home I said, “Well, now we know what we are.”
And Paul agreed.
And I said, “I’m glad we had the past six months. I guess we were only fooling ourselves, but I’m glad we had it the way we did. I think we learned from it, I think we grew, but I’m also glad it’s over. I’m glad we’re having another baby, but I’m glad we’re back in the swinging scene again.”
So that was that. We had dropped out, and now we dropped in again.
All Things in Moderation
JWW: When you first got involved in swinging, in swapping, I know you were quite anxious about your situation. Was there comparable anxiety when you returned to swinging after six months of abstention?
PAUL: No.
SHEILA: Not really, no. They say you never forget to swim once you learn. It’s the same with swinging. You not only don’t forget how but you don’t have any trouble relearning the right mental attitude. And you know, I was expecting the guilt, the anxiety, all of that. I was primed for it, all prepared to handle it, and then it didn’t really come.
JWW: That’s very interesting.
PAUL: And a little hard to believe.
JWW: Well, perhaps a little.
PAUL: John, did you ever quit smoking?
JWW: Oh, dozens of times. Hundreds of times, I suppose.
PAUL: For any real length of time?
JWW: Usually for a few hours or a few days. But once for over a year, and other times for periods of a month or two. Why?
PAUL: Do you know how they say that the first cigarette after a long layoff tastes terrible?
JWW: I’ve heard that often enough, but in my case it’s simply not true. The first cigarette always tastes better than any cigarette after it. It’s almost worth quitting just to start in again... You know, I’m beginning to see where this conversation is headed. Do you really think there’s much of a parallel between smoking and swinging?
SHEILA: There are obvious differences, of course. Smoking is far more dangerous physically. And swinging is illegal.
PAUL: There are also some similarities. Yes, I think the parallels are significant, John. When you smoke too much, cigarettes lose their taste; you just go on out of habit. You don’t enjoy them, but you can’t go on without them. And when you quit you get past the withdrawal period through sheer enthusiasm, but you never entirely forget how good cigarettes used to taste. You get so that you only remember the pleasant associations of smoking.
JWW: So sooner or later you start in again.
PAUL: That’s right. You may vow to cut down, or to switch to a filter or whatever, but sooner or later you go back to it. And pretty soon you return to whatever frequency is natural for you. Maybe you feel guilty about it and maybe not. I suppose you have to feel some guilt, because after all smoking is bad for you. It does all sorts of physically damaging things to a human being. Swinging, on the other hand, has no bad physical effects unless you’re dealing with the sort of compulsive nut who literally screws himself into the grave, in which case he’ll have that problem whether he’s a swinger or not. Aside from those hardship cases, it’s good exercise. It doesn’t even rot your teeth.
JWW: It might have had emotional effects though, mightn’t it? It seems to have done so the first time around.
SHEILA: But that’s a different thing, John. That only happens if you’re mentally prepared for it to happen. But there’s such a thing as adjusting yourself to swinging. And when you’re able to put it in its proper perspective, it doesn’t tear you up that way.
JWW: I’m not sure I’ll buy that.
PAUL: Why not?
JWW: Because I’ve known any number of long-time swingers, couples who have stuck with the scene to such an extent that you would have to describe them as adjusted to it. And whenever I’ve known such people for any length of time I’ve discovered that they’re subject to periods of depression, that now and then they come unglued, that they will occasionally admit they aren’t convinced that what they’re doing is right—
PAUL: No argument. Everybody lives with that. I do, Sheila does, everybody does.
JWW: Then—
PAUL: But you learn to handle it. You learn to smooth out the really bad downs and the really manic highs so that you can coast easy somewhere in the middle. Even so, now and then it gets bad. Sometimes we need a vacation from swinging, a couple of weeks where we carefully avoid extramarital sex. And by the same token, there are times when we’ll feel the need for a no-holds-barred knock-down orgy. Not as a steady diet, but to blow off steam every once in a while. You know, the ancient Greeks had a way of looking at things.
SHEILA: They certainly did.
PAUL: Seriously, they did. “All things in moderation and nothing to excess”—that’s the principle, and it’s a good one. If you look at it that way, nothing is bad in and of itself, just so long as it’s kept in proportion.
JWW: “All things in moderation” seems like an unusual motto for a swinger.
PAUL: Does it? I suppose it does, but you’d be surprised; most people with some experience and with a little depth to themselves come around to the same position, although they may not put it in the same words.
SHEILA: Nobody swings twenty-four hours a day. And nobody swings seven days a week.
PAUL: Right. That’s the whole thing. On balance, swingers are not a particularly far-out group of people — except in the sexual sphere. They’re a fairly average lot, a little more intelligent than the average, a bit better off, and a little bit better educated, but outside of that they’re very ordinary people who happen to have what nonswingers would regard as an unusual approach to sex...
The discussion covers familiar ground now — the justification of wife-swapping as a logical and intelligent behavior pattern for essentially ordinary husbands and wives, a pastime wholly consistent with the Greek concept of all things in moderation. At one point I remind Paul of our conversation of a few weeks earlier, our luncheon date during which he inveighed so unequivocally against swinging and all its insanities. He replies that he told me at the time that he was in a particular mood, and that he has never denied that swinging will look alternately good and bad depending upon one’s state of mind. Sheila adds that no regimen is assurance that a given date will not be a disappointment, and that such a disappointing date is very frequently followed by dissatisfaction with swinging itself. “You have to expect a certain amount of this,” she goes on, “and gradually you learn how to avoid the worst of it and ride with the part you can’t avoid. Like anything else, it’s a matter of learning and a matter of adjustment.”