The point is that I had an urge, and so did Sheila. I don’t think hers was as well defined—
SHEILA: I found Jeff attractive, that’s all. And more sympathetic than most men. Generally a man won’t really talk to another man’s wife as a person. He’ll treat her as part of a couple, not as an individual. Maybe so she won’t think he’s making a pass, or so his own wife won’t be jealous. Or because deep down inside most men simply cannot relate to most women as human beings, which is sad but true, I’m afraid. Jeff Creighton made me very conscious of myself as a woman, and I felt he liked and appreciated me. How much of that feeling was sexual I couldn’t say.
PAUL: It became sexual soon enough. We moved into that duplex in February, and in May we swapped with them. It didn’t take them very long at all.
They started things off by getting as well acquainted with us as they possibly could. It was natural for the four of us to see a lot of each other, but as time went by we were constantly thrown together. The two girls were together for a few hours every afternoon for coffee and conversation, and we got together as couples at least once a weekend and one or more nights during the week. It certainly was convenient — we would drop over there or have them over to our place without the aggravation and expense of finding a baby sitter. And you couldn’t even get a sitter on week nights, so an evening with Jeff and Jan was like free entertainment — we didn’t have to plan it in advance and it didn’t cost us anything.
Sometime in April things began to get a sexual tone to them. I don’t know exactly how it started, but it got there gradually enough.
SHEILA: Jan used to bring sex into the conversations during the afternoons. She would say that she was having her period and that Jeff just couldn’t stand waiting until she was done with it.
PAUL: Women will discuss personal things with each other that two men would never dream of bringing up. It never ceases to amaze me. Men might talk about what they do outside of marriage, but women just talk about what they do inside it.
SHEILA: Once she suggested that we ought to have a mutual agreement — Jeff would sleep with me when she had her period, and she would take care of Paul when I had it. Just a joke, all very casual, but with the obvious purpose of planting the idea in my mind.
JWW: And did the idea take hold?
SHEILA: I suppose it did. Not the idea of that sort of mutual compact, certainly. Although I have heard of quite a few cases of wives setting up something like that when they had to stop having sex because of advanced pregnancy. That’s quite common, believe it or not. People start off that way and later on get into swinging once they find out that they enjoy a little variety. But I would have to say yes, it did force me to think of Jeff as a potential sex partner. When something is brought to your attention that way it’s virtually impossible to avoid thinking about it. And if you try to banish a thought, all you do is force it all the more firmly into your consciousness.
PAUL: Jeff was a little less obvious about things. He would occasionally tell me that Jan really thought a lot of me, that she had said she really liked me and felt comfortable with me, that sort of thing. “I don’t think I’d trust the two of you together”—lines like that. And then when the four of us were together, the subject of sex seemed to get brought into the conversation more and more frequently. It just came up more and more often. Conversations would have double meanings, that sort of thing. This happens with sophisticated couples as they feel increasingly at ease with each other and of course it doesn’t necessarily mean anything in and of itself, but here it was another way of breaking the ice and conditioning us for the big step.
When that came, it was sort of a one-two combination. It started on a Friday night. We were over at their place, their side of the house, and we had had the usual quota of drinks to celebrate the fact that the work week was over. I guess I was on my way back from the john or something and I ran into Jan in the kitchen. She and I had been exchanging these looks all night long. She told me I had a spot on my tie, and I couldn’t find it. She came over to me to show me. I was staring down the front of her dress when she suddenly raised her eyes and caught mine. The next thing I knew we were kissing. I’ll never know which one of us made the first move, but it hardly mattered. She seemed to resist at first, if only for a second, and then her mouth opened and she was breathing hard and moving her body against me. It was unbelievably exciting. I knew that Sheila or Jeff could walk in at any moment and catch us, but even so I couldn’t stop kissing her. The thought that we could be caught almost added to the excitement. Then finally she pushed me away and the two of us stood staring at each other. I felt excited and guilty and foolish and drunk, everything all at once. I didn’t know what to say, and so I didn’t say anything and we drifted back to the other room.
Later that evening she would catch my eye now and then and give me a secret smile. It was... well, I suppose disconcerting was the only word for it. I didn’t know how to feel, how to react. I drank more than usual that night and passed out as soon as my head hit the pillow.
All the next day I couldn’t think about anything else. I felt guilty, not because I had particularly done anything but because I knew this would always be there between us, this attraction, whether I ever got around to doing anything about it or not. And I really wanted to make love to Jan. I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. That Saturday I was doing the usual weekend things, playing with the kids and working around the house and looking at television a little, and throughout it all I would get these vivid images of making love to Jan and I kept having erections like a teen-ager. It was really crazy.
Then they came over that night. I made everybody’s drinks a little stronger than usual, mainly because I felt the need of getting a little tight and I didn’t want to be the only one. I was really torn up, in the sense that I was afraid something was going to happen and I both wanted it to and didn’t want it to. As the evening wore on, Jan and I were more and more conscious of each other. The attraction was so strong you could feel it in the air, like static electricity.
SHEILA: The two of you were pretty obvious about it.
PAUL: I didn’t know whether we were or not. I couldn’t tell.
JWW: How did you feel then, Sheila?
SHEILA: I don’t know. A little jealous, but not entirely that, really. The calm before the storm is the cliché that comes to mind. It was like that. You know the feeling the air has on a hot day just before it pours? It was like that on an emotional level. The air was charged with something but I don’t think I knew consciously what it was. And of course it’s impossible now to know how much of this is being filled in by hindsight and how much I recognized at the time.
PAUL: I was particularly uncertain as to how I felt about Jeff. That’s where the real guilt was — not that I would be cheating on Sheila but that I would be betraying my best friend. I was making drinks when he came in, and I said something properly inane, and he said, I forget the exact words, but something to the effect that if I enjoyed kissing his wife I would probably want more than a sample.