SHEILA: That’s known as Walter Mitty cheating.
PAUL: It’s disgustingly common, too. I think everyone does it at one time or another. Most swingers will tell you that they’ve gone through it before they got in the swing of things. There’s a joke you may know — a man and wife are making love, just going on and on at it, neither of them able to reach orgasm. And finally he stops and looks at her sympathetically and says, “What’s the matter, honey? Can’t you think of anybody either?”
SHEILA: Actually it’s a pretty sad story.
PAUL: Pathetic, really. But that one experience in Chicago, plus a certain amount of fantasizing, was as much cheating as either of us did. Or planned to do, I would say. We had what we both felt was a perfectly satisfactory sexual relationship. Oh, it goes without saying that the initial thrill had worn off. It always does, and it wasn’t surprising to us that it did. You can’t make love to the same person for a period of several years without having the experience lose its excitement. Even for couples who remain devotedly monogamous throughout their lives, I can’t possibly believe that the thrill doesn’t wear off.
SHEILA: We thought it was a matter of getting used to sex. We didn’t realize then that what was missing was variety.
PAUL: Or if we did realize it we didn’t think about it very much.
JWW: Then the picture I have of the two of you after approximately four years of marriage is that of a reasonably contented and well-adjusted couple with no interest in adultery beyond the fantasy level?
PAUL: That’s about it.
JWW: You had no knowledge of the existence of the swinging world?
PAUL: Well, I wouldn’t go that far.
SHEILA: It’s impossible to be wholly unaware of its existence, don’t you think? There have been just too many books and magazine articles on the subject. Even if you never buy those magazines you see the titles of the articles plastered all over the covers every time you pass a newsstand. Just the name, the word “wife-swapping.” It’s enough to let a person know what it’s all about.
PAUL: But that was really the extent of our knowledge. We didn’t know any swingers personally, we hadn’t talked about swinging between ourselves, and to be quite frank, the few articles I did read didn’t make the whole thing sound that attractive to me. This may not be typical, because I’ve met a great many couples who were in a sense introduced to swinging by books and magazines — the husband would read articles on the subject and get all excited by the idea, and things would just sort of build from there. Maybe I picked the wrong articles, but what I read didn’t excite me at all. It was like reading about tribal initiation rites among the islanders of Pungo Pungo — you know, academically interesting, but not the sort of thing you could identify with personally to any appreciable extent. These just weren’t the sort of people we knew, they weren’t people like us, so I couldn’t get interested.
SHEILA: And I really didn’t know enough about it even to go that far in my thinking. For me it was just headlines, and I never gave it much thought.
PAUL: Then we got initiated.
SHEILA: You mean seduced.
PAUL: That sounds like a pretty ridiculous expression, doesn’t it?
SHEILA: It’s what happened.
PAUL: I guess that’s true enough. If you want to get really cloak and daggerish about it, it wasn’t just a seduction. It was a conspiracy. Jeff and Jan Creighton carefully plotted things out so that they could get the two of us into bed. When they eventually told us about it, we thought it was pretty hysterical. We got a lot of laughs out of it. Another time, during one of those agonizing reappraisals a married couple is apt to have from time to time, well, we had a little trouble appreciating the humor of it all. It began to seem pretty cold-blooded...
As he begins to recount the experience with the Creightons, Sheila visibly withdraws from the conversation. She sits back on the couch, lights a cigarette, smokes it in nervous little puffs and puts it out before more than half of it has been consumed. She looks at neither her husband nor the interviewer but lets her gaze flit about the room, now at a picture on the wall, now at the bookshelves, now at the carpet. She worries her lower lip with her teeth, picks at a loose thread on the couch. And yet it is obvious that she is keeping in close touch with the conversation, for she periodically breaks in with a phrase or comment.
PAUL: This was in Kansas City. We didn’t take the Chicago offer but wound up in Kansas City, and instead of taking a house we rented an apartment just outside of the city limits. A duplex, one side of a two-story home. I had the feeling at the time that we might not be staying there too long and I felt it wouldn’t be worthwhile to go into a house if we were going to pick up and move in less than a year’s time. We had as much floor space as we would have had in a home of our own, and as a temporary thing it was quite comfortable and convenient.
The Creightons were our next-door neighbors. Our other-side-of-the-house neighbors, I should say. They had been there for a year when we moved in. Jeff was a product manager with a major company. He was two years older than I, and I was twenty-six at the time, so he would have been twenty-eight. Jan was the same age as Sheila, twenty-three.
The four of us hit it off from the beginning. They were very friendly and of course we didn’t know a soul in town, so we were glad enough to be friends. They had a kid just about the same age as ours and he must have been making about the same salary as I was, and all of this helped; the more you have in common, the easier it is to connect and get acquainted.
SHEILA: It was more than that. Rapport.
PAUL: That goes without saying. No matter how much people have in common, there’s a special chemistry that has to be present or else nothing happens. It was there. I liked Jeff from the beginning. He was a good-looking, athletic guy, dressed well without looking like a male model, spoke nicely, knew how to tell a story or listen to one. Jan was a tall girl with a really fantastic figure. The Playboy gatefold type, very voluptuous, almost overblown. The sort of figure that’s likely to come unglued when a woman’s in her thirties, but she was twenty-three then and everything was right where it was supposed to be. She had a way of looking straight into your eyes when you were talking, as if she was staring right into you and getting past what you were saying to what you were thinking about. I suppose the conventional term is bedroom eyes, but it was actually something beyond that. It wasn’t just a matter of sex. It was intimacy, in the real sense of the word. That was what she projected.
JWW: You were attracted to her. Did you think about having sex with her?
PAUL: In a way.
SHEILA: Oh? Which way did you think about?
PAUL: You know what I mean. I thought about it the way any man will think about a woman he finds attractive. I didn’t make a big fantasy thing about it, and I certainly didn’t have the slightest intention of actually going and doing anything about it. But I thought about it, imagined it, wondered what it would be like. People always do this, you know. It seems to be true that men are more predisposed to do this than women, and I can think of several reasons for this, both biological and cultural. On the cultural side, women have been more carefully conditioned to think that they can only have relations with their husbands. The notion of men cheating is less shocking somehow than of women cheating. And biologically, well, I think it’s an inherent drive that makes men want variety, a basic biological urge to have relations with and impregnate as many women as possible. I have a feeling it’s all tied up with natural selection and evolution, survival of the fittest and all of that...