As far as being turned on by nonswinging friends, of course that happens now and then. When it does, one thing that we always do is make an effort to find out if the other couple swings. This happens a surprising amount of the time — two swapping couples drawn together by accident, or if not exactly by accident at least with neither one having prior knowledge of the other. We’ve had it happen from time to time. If you suspect it, you sort of toss out leading questions and try to make a connection. There are ways. Some of the correspondence clubs even have little pins for swingers to wear, innocent little bits of junk jewelry that enable you to zero in on each other in a crowd like members of some secret fraternity. I think that’s a little much — I mean, you would never know what sort of creep might try to connect with you that way. But you can accomplish as much by hinting at it.
PAUL: And as Sheila said, it happens a surprising amount of the time. Sometimes in the family circle.
SHEILA: You’re not going to tell—
PAUL: Don’t you want me to? For Christ’s sake, honey, it’s not really incestuous.
SHEILA: I know, but—
PAUL: But what?
SHEILA: It seems incestuous, I guess. And I suppose that was part of the thrill at the time, and you can make of that what you will. But go ahead and tell John. By now he must be imagining something a lot more far out than what happened.
PAUL: To save time, what happened was simply that we went to Sheila’s hometown when there was a death in her family, and after the funeral we happened to meet her cousin and his wife, and they turned out to be swingers. Ralph was about the same age as Sheila and I gather they were very close as children, and there must have been an undercurrent of sexual attraction that they weren’t entirely aware of, and as a result the whole thing had a special spice for her. Frankly I can’t see anything too spicy in the idea of first cousins screwing, but I suppose they felt a lot of the old wouldn’t-the-rest-of-the-family-die-if-they-saw-us-now, that bit, and that made it very unusual for them. I didn’t get the full impact of that, but Ralph’s wife is a tiny thing with oversized breasts and a comfortably tight vagina, so I wasn’t going to complain, certainly. I enjoyed myself.
SHEILA: Didn’t you get just the slightest little forbidden-fruit kick?
PAUL: Only sympathetically, by sharing some of your fun. But not directly.
SHEILA: It’s a shame — you missed a good thing. But maybe all is not lost.
PAUL: How so?
SHEILA: Maybe your sister’s a swinger. I don’t know about the other, but she’s certainly a tiny thing with oversized breasts, and it ought to be kinky enough to make you happy.
PAUL: Let’s talk about something else, huh?
SHEILA: Seriously, you know, it’s possible that she is a swinger. Marty’s a pretty sharp guy. It’s possible.
PAUL: Anything’s possible.
SHEILA: What would you do?
PAUL: Are you crazy?
SHEILA: Well, what would you do?
PAUL: Let’s drop it.
SHEILA: Can’t you just answer the question?
PAUL: Look, stupid, I don’t want to answer the question. Oh, hell. Suppose your parents were swingers, honey.
SHEILA: That’s utterly ridiculous.
PAUL: Well, just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose they were. And suppose they turned up one day—
SHEILA: All right, you made your point.
PAUL: —and your dad put his arm around you and said—
SHEILA: Let’s drop it, Paul...
The interview breaks up shortly thereafter. The incest speculation has a deadening effect upon the conversation, with Paul and Sheila drawing into themselves. Later, on separate occasions, Paul will tell me that he should not have used the example he did, that he feels Sheila has always had profound unresolved Oedipal yearnings directed toward her father; Sheila in turn will confess that her provocation of Paul was ill-advised in view of his strong attachment to his sister, an attachment she suspects may have involved some sort of sexual experimentation in early adolescence.
In another interview, I ask whether a sexual relationship ever developed with the Pettits.
SHEILA: Oh, we should have mentioned that last time, shouldn’t we? I completely forgot. Actually, it was a funny thing. After things worked out so well with Marge and Bill, we didn’t feel anxious to rush things with Phil and Mona. We thought we would let things define themselves a little better before we made any efforts in that direction, and meanwhile we could establish contacts with some other swingers in the area, and see more of Marge and Bill. We still were very strongly attracted to the Pettits, but we realized that the original attraction was at least partly due to the fact that we were about ready to get back into swinging. By the same token, once we were back in the fold I stopped getting hot every time Dr. Mahler put his fingers up me.
I suppose we would have started something with the Pettits sooner or later, but it kind of got started for us. Phil Pettit tried to seduce me.
PAUL: I guess you gave him so much encouragement that one night he thought he was home free.
SHEILA: That was obviously what had happened. He dropped in one afternoon just after I’d sent the kids back to school with some story about being in the neighborhood. Said he had been thinking about me and just wanted to stop by and see how I was doing. Now this sort of thing is so utterly unknown among swingers that I didn’t even put two and two together. I thought he had just stopped over to say hello. The next thing I knew he was kissing me and pawing at my breasts and telling me that he loved me and his wife didn’t understand him.
PAUL: It’s hard to believe, but civilians really talk that way. “My wife doesn’t understand me” — as if that’s such a hardship to bear! There are plenty of times when I wish to hell my wife didn’t understand me.
SHEILA: I was really stunned, John! Stimulated and excited but also a little disgusted and contemptuous at the same time. I didn’t want to have a quick tumble with him, it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to avoid. But I did like him, and he was frustrated and I didn’t want to leave him hung up like that. And it wasn’t as though I intended to keep it from Paul. I planned to tell Paul right away.
So I told Phil that if he would just cut it out with the love garbage I would be perfectly delighted to go to bed with him.
That made it his turn to be stunned. He was at a loss for words, but fortunately words aren’t necessary in bed. And Phil was very good company in bed. Just straight intercourse and not too imaginative, but very nice, and I had a lovely time.
It’s funny how you feel inhibited with a nonswinger. Afterward we were lying there together sharing a cigarette, and I looked down at his penis and had a very strong desire to take it in my mouth. But I was worried that he might think this was a perversion.
PAUL: You know, swingers aren’t the only people who suck, honey.
SHEILA: I know that, but — oh, forget it. Anyway, I had to get the point across to Phil that I wasn’t interested in afternoon quickies, but that Paul and I were very definitely interested in him and Mona. I considered and rejected all sorts of subtle approaches, and then he turned to me and smiled and said we would have to do this again.
So I said, “I’m game, but not in the afternoon. How about Friday night?”
He said, “How are we going to get rid of Mona and Paul?”
“Why don’t we just let them screw each other?” I said. “Paul and I are swingers, Phil. Wife-swappers. We do this all the time.”
Well, you could have knocked him over with a feather from a hummingbird. He thought wife-swappers only existed in books. You know the pitch — we couldn’t possibly be wife-swappers because he knew us and he didn’t know any wife-swappers. Then when he finally believed it he said he was sure Mona would never go for it.