Table of Contents
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The Way Some People Live
Beginnings
Love Thy Neighbor
Tres Gay
The Swim of Things
Sooner or Later, You Make Yourself Sick
Dropping Out and Dropping In
All Things In Moderation
The Games Swingers Play
Orgies, Nude Parties and Lust Weekends
Some Questions and Answers, Pertinent and Impertinent
About the Author
Excerpt: Wide Open: The New Marriage
The Wife-Swap Report
John Warren Wells
Lawrence Block
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copyright © 1970, 2012, Lawrence Block
All Rights Reserved
The Way Some People Live
There is a song Pete Seeger sings about little boxes made of ticky-tacky, identical ticky-tacky houses inhabited by identical ticky-tacky people. The Gordon house is a luxury-class version of just this sort of suburban sameness. It is a four-year-old split-level on a half-acre lot in a development in Morris County, New Jersey, within easy commuting range of New York City. The current market value of the house is probably around thirty-five thousand dollars. The house is made of ticky-tacky (several of the windows leak; there are ceiling cracks as the structure settles) and it does look rather like its neighbors on either side, but there is certainly nothing drab about it. On the contrary, it is representative of the good life in affluent, leisure-oriented mid-century America.
The people in the house do not look just the same as their neighbors. On balance, they look quite a bit better. Paul Gordon is thirty-two years old, tall, slender, with brown eyes and straight dark brown hair. While he is not handsome enough to model for menswear advertisements, there is a strength and vitality in his features which borders on the charismatic.
His wife, Sheila, is three years younger and several inches shorter. Her large eyes are green flecked with brown, and her hair, originally a light brown, is presently blond. She is slender almost to the point of thinness, with small breasts and boyish hips. Her face is unusually expressive, quick to indicate her mercurial changes of mood. Her upper incisors are somewhat prominent, her forehead broad and high. By no means beautiful, she is nevertheless strikingly attractive, the sort of woman men find highly desirable while never being able to explain exactly why.
There are three Gordon children, Mark and Lisa and Heidi, ranging in age from nine to four. The children are bright, active and healthy; Mark and Lisa look rather like their mother while Heidi has inherited Paul’s features. The backyard is a mare’s nest of bikes and swing sets, while the basement playroom is largely given over to their toys.
Paul is a systems analyst presently employed by a large corporation with executive offices in Manhattan. His current salary is $16,350, plus the usual array of fringe benefits and pension plans. His work occupies him five days a week from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, with another two hours a day commuting time. He characterizes himself as “a sort of efficiency expert for computers” and seems happy enough at it. One senses that it is no more than a job, that the compensation and challenge are sufficient to prevent him from feeling bored or trapped, and that the problems of the job rarely if ever occupy his mind while he is away from the office.
Sheila, like her husband, is a college graduate. Twice since graduation she has enrolled at a university to take additional courses toward a master’s degree, but both times she abandoned the project within a month or so. She talks occasionally of going back to college when the children are older, or, alternatively, of qualifying as an elementary school teacher. This seems more lip service to the feminine mystique than anything else, and if Sheila finds the role of wife and housekeeper confining, her reaction is certainly no more than typical for women in her situation, overeducated for an occupation which modern technology has in turn rendered increasingly mechanical and routine. In the main, she is happy with her role—in love with her husband, devoted to her children, secure in her home.
Little boxes on a hillside—
Ten or twenty or thirty times a year, for the past six years, Paul and Sheila Gordon have gotten together with one or more other couples for an evening of organized adultery.
• • •
The horror is that there is no horror, that the whole concept of wife-swapping has in the space of little more than a decade become a commonplace article of popular journalism, a staple for sensationalistic magazines and racy newsstand fiction. Consider the simple definition of the practice—married couples have revised their definition of the marital relationship so as to consider the exchange of partners for sexual purposes wholly compatible with the maintenance of these relationships. Such a state of affairs could hardly be less than remarkable.
And yet we scarcely find it remarkable at all. On the contrary, we are rather more likely to accept the existence of wife-swappers much as we accept the existence of electrons—we cannot see them, but we have it on good authority that they exist. We may read about them, being either titillated or enervated or bored according to our inclinations, but our involvement with them is never other than vicarious. They are certainly not the sort of people we are apt to meet on the street.
But this is manifestly not the case.
Over the past several years I have written a number of books and magazine pieces dealing with various aspects of the sexual revolution. The wife-swapping fraternity has featured prominently in my writing and research. And if one fact stands out among all others, it is simply that these swingers, these wife-swappers, are in every sense of the terms the “folks next door.” If there is one striking thing about the practice of swapping, it is the way in which it cuts across all strata of society. And if there is one striking thing about the average couple involved in this pursuit, it is how exceptionally average they are.
If this is the case, why then are wife-swappers universally regarded as a breed apart? The answer is not really that elusive. When a group is considered only in respect to that idiosyncrasy which sets it apart—whether sexual or racial or religious or whatever—the idiosyncrasy overshadows the individuals. It must be consciously borne in mind that while a man may be a homosexual or a Negro or a Mohammedan or a philatelist or a ditch digger, he is never one of these things twenty-four hours a day to the exclusion of all else.
All of which is a roundabout explanation of the genesis of this present book. I began interviewing Paul and Sheila Gordon in connection with another book dealing with various aspects of the contemporary sexual underground. I was struck at once by the special qualities of Paul and Sheila—their intelligence, their perception, and, perhaps most important of all, their ability to verbalize effectively concerning their ideas and experiences. While it is by no means rare to encounter swingers who are willing to talk about their experiences, the vast majority of them are not much good at talking about anything. The Gordons were unusually articulate subjects, and it never ceased to be a pleasure to interview them.
As it turned out, I did not make direct use of these interviews in the book I was then preparing, although the insight which I gained through my contact with Paul and Sheila did enable me to discuss other cases with greater perspective. After the book was completed, however, I found myself frequently thinking of the Gordons and wondering if there might not be some way to make use of their experiences. While musing on the inability of the average “civilian” to appreciate that swingers are the sort of people who might very well move next doo
r to him (and without affecting his property values, either), it occurred to me that a book-length study of one married couple, told almost entirely in their own words, might fill a significant gap. By far the majority of books dealing at all seriously with the wife-swapping phenomenon (as opposed to trashy novels and thinly veiled bits of pornography) employ the anthology approach: i.e., they present perhaps a dozen case histories in order to illuminate many facets of the overall subject.
This is, certainly, a useful approach, presenting the reader as it does with more than a single look at a topic. I can also state from experience that it is very useful for a writer, as it is almost always a simpler matter to select the relevant data about a dozen couples than to mine a book’s worth of material out of a single case history. In this particular instance, however, it seemed to me that a study of a single couple in more than the usual degree of depth was indicated, and that it could prove sufficiently absorbing to sustain a full-length book.
When I broached the subject to Paul and Sheila, they were at first reluctant, less I think out of a desire to avoid exposing themselves than from the conviction that their lives and selves could not be all that interesting to the rest of the world. Once I was able to assure them that their story was potentially valuable to swingers and nonswingers alike, they were enthusiastic about the project and made themselves readily available for several additional interviews.
A word on method might be pertinent here. The material which follows is in the words of Paul and Sheila Gordon. The reader will note that I have presented it in the form of interviews. While the words which appear here are given as they were spoken by the Gordons, the interviews have been edited out of sequence in order to present various material in the most useful order. Similarly, I occasionally interviewed one or the other of the two without the spouse present, and there was an inevitable duplication of material, all of which had to be boiled down and parceled up and put into usable form. Thus, while what follows is in every sense the Gordons’ story, this is not to say that it consists of a simple verbatim rendition of the interview tapes. Such a transcription would be three or four times the length of this volume and of no practical interest to anyone.
It should go without saying that Paul and Sheila Gordon go by other names in the world at large, that the names given to them and to other “characters” in this book have all been deliberately fictionalized, as have any particular data about individuals which might tend to make them recognizable. While the persons appearing in the following pages are by no means fictitious, their names and other personal details about them very definitely are.
• • •
Lives made of ticky-tacky, all looking quite the same—one wonders if this, after all, begins to explain the special phenomenon of wife-swapping. We have all heard countless variations of the joke in which a man returns one night to his tract home, loses his way, and, unable to distinguish one house from the next, goes to a neighbor’s house and sleeps with the neighbor’s wife without anyone knowing the difference. Can it be, then, that we have witnessed the ultimate triumph of the Industrial Revolution, to the point where not only our machines but also our marriages are composed of interchangeable parts?
While the notion is a tempting one, I don’t suspect it has much real validity. One finds oneself searching for the “cause” of this or that type of socio-sexual behavior, as if in fact one were dealing with a particular disease specifically caused by a particular microorganism. Behavior patterns are not so simply engendered. It has been said that the “cause” of any moment in history is nothing more or less than the sum of all the moments which have preceded it, and in this sense it would be simplistic to point at precise causes for the existence of wife-swapping, in society in general or the Gordons in particular.
On the other hand, the reader will discover for himself any number of ways in which the marital relationship of Paul and Sheila Gordon, their drives and desires and fears and hopes and needs, reflect in diverse ways any number of aspects of the society in which they—and all of us—live. If sex seems to play an overly prominent role in their lives, do they then differ greatly from the rest of us in these times of heightened sexual awareness? If they seem ever dissatisfied, anxious, groping, are we not all subject to much the same irritating nameless yearnings? Indeed, in their strengths and weaknesses alike, and in the fashion in which these traits shape their lives, Paul and Sheila are all too typical of a generation, a nation, a world.
The reader will note that I have not bothered to moralize on the lives and practices of the Gordons, having been neither inclined by temperament nor qualified by virtue to cast initial stones. The reader may judge or not, as he desires. More important, he may learn (as the author did) something about himself and the world around him by considering the way some people live.
Beginnings
A Sunday afternoon in fall. Football weather. Sheila Gordon sitting on her feet on the living room couch, dark green slacks, a gold sweater, brown suede slippers. Paul Gordon in an armchair, a drink on the table beside him, slacks, a sport shirt. The children are downstairs watching television. Periodically one appears with a nose to be wiped or a question to be answered and the conversation is held up until the child is on its way.
• • •
SHEILA: About a year after it started, after we first got involved in swinging, I remember going through a real siege of introspection. Not just me individually, it was a mutual thing. We both found ourselves immersed in a sea of questions. Where are we? How did we get here? The usual. We were honestly astonished, I think, that this had happened to us. To people like us.
PAUL: You see, we had always regarded ourselves as basically conservative types. One of the key words in the swingers’ advertisements is “liberal.” You know the drill—“modern, liberal, free-thinking couple, etc.” Of course this has nothing to do with politics. But regardless, we had always thought of ourselves as middle-of-the-road people. We hadn’t had that much sexual experience before marriage, nor had our own marriage been that highly sexed. Not that we fell asleep on the way to bed, nothing like that, but not like the stereotyped picture you might have of typical swingers who have had nothing but sex on their minds since they hit adolescence.
SHEILA: That’s how it always happens in books, isn’t it? Two oversexed kids get married and within a couple of years they’ve tried every form of screwing there is until they just don’t turn each other on any more. Then they decide that something is missing from their lives, so he has an affair with a girl in his office and she plays house with the plumber, and finally they clear the air, talk things over, and invite the next-door neighbors in for a round of musical beds.
PAUL: It does happen that way.
SHEILA: Definitely. No argument, it does. But it didn’t for us. We weren’t all that experienced when we were married. I had had one very brief and completely unsuccessful bit of sleeping with a guy I was pinned to, and Paul had had a few affairs, most of which were just one-shot things, and the two of us did make love in the few months before we got married, but that was about all, and that’s certainly less experience than the average couple brings to marriage nowadays. We had a good relationship from the start, and of course Mark and Lisa came into the picture almost immediately. Mark when we were married just over a year and Lisa fifteen months later. So in the first four years of marriage we were really too busy adjusting to changes to feel confined or frustrated or whatever. Paul kept changing jobs, and each time it meant a complete relocation for us, giving up old friends and making new ones and finding out where to shop and, oh, all the complications that accompany a move from one city to another.
So I certainly didn’t have any affairs. I wasn’t bored with my own husband, for one thing. Nor was I beset by propositions. I gained innumerable pounds with each pregnancy and wasn’t all that good about getting them off afterward, so plumbers and deliverymen were sadly immune to my raw animal magnetism.
PAUL: Once, while Sheila was pregnant with Lis
a, I had relations with another woman. You couldn’t call it an affair. I was in Chicago to interview a company that had been sending out job feelers, and I was all alone there and didn’t know a soul, and Sheila and I hadn’t been able to have relations for the past month and wouldn’t for two more months. This last was more an excuse than anything else, really, although I managed to convince myself at the time that a stray piece would have considerable therapeutic value. At any rate, someone had given me this call girl’s phone number. She came to my hotel room. I was really very jittery and nervous, not that anything untoward would happen, but, I don’t know, I felt awkward about the whole thing. At first I couldn’t do anything, but the girl used a massage device to get me over the hump, if you’ll pardon the expression. The whole experience was pretty blah, but later on I found myself thinking back on it and having fantasies about the call girl. Occasionally I would think of her while I was making love to Sheila—
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.
The Wife-Swap Report (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 1
