The Wife-Swap Report (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  Sometimes I don’t think I understand it myself.

  Reassurance—we gave each other a lot of that, Jan and I. We learned to use each other’s bodies as antidepressants. Headache, take aspirin; tension, take that gentle little blue pill; depressed, play sixty-nine with the girl next door. And it worked, but it also set up a nice guilt pattern that leaves you more depressed a few days later, with an obvious method of curing that depression, until you’re involved in the sort of vicious circle that makes you start wondering seriously if maybe deep down inside you’re basically a Lesbian.

  Sometimes I have insane thoughts.

  JWW: Like what?

  SHEILA: Oh, the things a person thinks about. The unthinkable—I mean nothing really is unthinkable, is it? Or inconceivable.

  Sometimes I imagine them all gone. Dead. Paul, the children. Always a sharp, clean death, an auto wreck, an airplane disintegrating. All of a sudden it’s over, my marriage and my family, gone.

  I don’t mean that I want it to happen. God, I don’t. I hate myself for having the thought, the fantasy. And I hate the idea that you only get strong irrational fears of that sort when you secretly want them to happen. An irrational fear is an irrational desire, isn’t that what they say?

  JWW: Some of the time, perhaps.

  SHEILA: I think, if it happened, if something like that happened, if the marriage was over and the family was over, if my whole life was over, I think, well, what would I do? I don’t mean how would I stand the shock, that’s something else, but what would I do with the life that was left to me? What role would I play?

  And I often think—and it makes sense to me, it makes logical sense in the context of the fantasy—I think that I would probably go to some big impersonal city and become a Lesbian.

  Not because that’s the sort of sex I really enjoy. It isn’t a sexual thing, a sexual decision. It isn’t that at all.

  • • •

  She pauses, a cigarette burning unnoticed between her fingers. She furrows her brow in an attitude of extreme concentration, then abruptly lets her eyes close and her features relax. When she resumes speaking some moments later it is in this attitude. The eyes remain closed, the face in repose. Her voice has to it a detached, dreamlike quality. I find myself wondering whether this is wholly natural or if she, who indeed has a finely developed sense of theater, is in fact seeking consciously to convey a mood through an assumed pose.

  • • •

  SHEILA: Because, you see, it would be safe and cool and easy, so much easier. When there is a man and a woman there is a situation of conflict, give and take. Opposites. When you are a woman with a woman you remain yourself and she becomes your other self. An alter ego. An altered ego.

  So there is no need to surrender any part of oneself. It is never required. You remain whole, complete . . .

  You see, I frighten myself . . .

  • • •

  Her eyes open, her features take firmer shape. Suddenly awake and alert and businesslike, she leans over to stub out the cigarette, fingers forcefully mashing the butt in the ashtray.

  • • •

  SHEILA: I almost wish that machine of yours wasn’t running. Listen to the girl sounding like a philosopher. I don’t really think I’m gay. Come to that, I’m not certain that anybody really is anything. Everyone has bits of everything inside him. Labels are simpler than understanding, but they don’t do the job, do they?

  Gay or not, I scare myself a little. It scared me with Jan, scared me a lot more than I would admit to Paul. If he were able to understand, and I guess he can’t, not on that point. A blind spot for him. God knows I have enough of my own . . .

  I would never have a relationship with a woman again. I’ll admit it, I’m a coward.

  JWW: Then why do you have sex with women at swinging parties?

  SHEILA: Because it’s so safe. There’s no contact, no feeling, except for the physical. And I can take it, and enjoy it—because the actual things you do, the physical things, are pleasant whomever you do them with, once you get past any hang-ups you might have. And by the same token I can leave it alone, because again it’s just sheerly physical, and just as it’s guaranteed to be pleasant it’s also guaranteed to be something you can live without.

  So if I’m at a party, let’s say, and for one reason or another I go down on another girl, or she on me, or whatever, I can—I was going to say have my cake and eat it, if you’ll forgive an unintentional play on words. And not a very good one either, come to think.

  And I can tell myself that I’m not repressing anything, because I’m having these contacts, and also that I’m not abnormal, because I can take them or leave them alone . . .

  Will you use all this in the book?

  JWW: Would you rather I didn’t?

  SHEILA: I don’t know. There’s something that I’m uneasy about, and I’m going to ask you to go now, if you won’t take that the wrong way. Because if you stay I’ll stay with this line of thought, and I don’t think I should. What I said before about looking into things too deeply.

  JWW: All right.

  SHEILA: It’s just laughs, that’s all. All anything is. I make it with girls at parties because it’s fun, and Paul wants me to, so why not? And I’m glad Jan moved away because we were getting involved, and who needs it?

  • • •

  I pack up my tape recorder. We make plans for another interview session later in the week when both she and her husband will be available. That settled, we turn to small talk, both of us relieved to have fought free of a conversation that had become mutually uncomfortable. She walks me out the door and across the lawn to my car. I am just the least bit apprehensive about leaving her alone in her present mood, and as we reach my car she either guesses or senses as much. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be all right. I’ve learned things. I’ve learned to preserve myself. I’ve become, well, very strong.”

  The Swim of Things

  PAUL: Sooner or later we would have looked for another couple—or couples, really. We were ready for that sort of variety, of meeting with strangers, and I think the Creightons were as well, but neither of us quite got around to suggesting it. And there were other mitigating circumstances as well . . .

  But when we found they were moving, then there was absolutely no question about it. It was taken for granted immediately by all four of us that we would all have to find new outlets for swinging, and that we would do so, either through correspondence or by some other means. First we assured each other that we would travel across the country now and then to get together for auld lang syne, and then we hurled ourselves into one of what turned out to be a whole string of going away orgies, because it did take them quite a while to make their move from the time Jeff accepted the new position. And then, finally, we all four sat down together to read through the tabloids and the club papers and pick out ads for us all to answer . . .

  • • •

  Another night, cold and dark, with intermittent rain audible against the picture window. Paul wears a bulky Aran sweater and wide-wale corduroy slacks. Sheila’s sweater matches his; her slacks are plaid, a Black Watch variant. The mood tonight is one of jovial reminiscence. A fire burns idly in the fireplace. There is a generous tray of canapés on the coffee table—roll-ups of chicken liver and water chestnut and bacon, tiny cocktail wieners transfixed by colored plastic toothpicks, melba rounds spread with Camembert. We are drinking excellent Scotch and go through an impressive quantity of it in the course of a few hours, but no one at any point seems adversely affected by drink; the only outward sign is the absence of tension and a heightened sense of camaraderie. There is to be no thoughtful probing this evening no inquiry into needs and motives, no attempt to summon up the flavors and nuances of recollected experience. Tonight we exist and function on a far simpler plane.

  • • •

  PAUL: We must have thumbed through those papers and magazines until the print was gone. First we ruled out all ads that were out of our geogr
aphical area, which meant that we were eliminating a good ninety percent right off the top. And of course we crossed off ads seeking single girls, or ads placed by men looking for threesomes—in other words, we limited ourselves to couples looking for couples, couples in our age bracket who seemed to be in about the same position we were in.

  SHEILA: And then we began to narrow it down. If there was no photo—some magazines would print a photograph of the wife, although that was less common then than it is now—if there was a photograph, and if the girl didn’t look appealing, we passed up that ad. If the things the couples liked to do sounded excessively perverted, we crossed them off.

  PAUL: Or if we didn’t know what their code meant.

  SHEILA: Right. I remember that some of the ads specified an interest in English culture. We didn’t know what this was because the expression was just beginning to come into the swinging lexicon. French culture meant oral and Greek culture meant anal and Prussian culture meant discipline and Roman meant orgies, and what was Egyptian? I think miscegenation. That was in use for a while and then disappeared. I don’t know how some slang terms gain acceptance among swingers and others don’t. Who decides what euphemisms swing?

  PAUL: English culture means flagellation, of course.

  SHEILA: So we wouldn’t have been interested anyway, as it turns out. There were other things, animal training for bestiality, the usual kinky things. And one couple I remember who described themselves as gourmets. I remember the phrasing: “not gourmands but gourmets.” We crossed them out. We assumed that they were Francophiles, but there was something about the phrasing that left room for doubt, so we decided the hell with them. I’m still not sure whether they were just fond of oral sex or whether they had something else going for them.

  PAUL: When we finally made our selections, we almost changed our mind and didn’t write at all.

  JWW: You thought of giving up swinging?

  SHEILA: No, never that! Quite the reverse.

  PAUL: We were going to run an ad of our own.

  SHEILA: And for the silliest possible reason. You’ll love this. We were literally terrified that we would write to someone at random and it would turn out to he someone we knew! As if there was any real likelihood of that, when we knew so few people in the area who weren’t actually in Kansas City.

  PAUL: Well, that wasn’t the really ridiculous part. The stupid thing was our feeling that this would be terrible for a friend of ours to get that sort of letter from us. We completely ignored the fact that anybody who placed such an ad would be in the very same boat with us, and hardly in the position to cast the first stone.

  SHEILA: People in the same boat shouldn’t cast the first stone—is that what you’re trying to say?

  PAUL: Ouch! Sorry about that. But I think you get the point. As a matter of fact, sooner or later quite a few swingers will have that weird experience of getting a contact through the mails from another couple they never thought of as swingers. There are just so many people involved in swapping that it has to happen now and then.

  JWW: Has it happened to you?

  PAUL: Twice, both times when we had an ad of ours answered by casual acquaintances. One time we met the couple and swung with them, and the other time they were people who didn’t appeal to us and we never answered the letter. So it’s possible that it happened more than once—we could have answered ads and had acquaintances of ours fail to answer.

  SHEILA: But we appeal to everybody, sweets.

  PAUL: Be that as it may.

  SHEILA: To get back to where we were, we finally decided that we were being stupid, but we felt it still might be a good idea to be somewhat indirect about getting acquainted. If nothing else, there was still the problem of entrapment by the Post Office finks. There was also a certain amount of danger in writing to a professional associate of Paul’s. Even if somebody else would have as much to lose from that sort of exposure, we felt nervous about giving anyone that kind of power over Paul’s career. Sending out a photograph of me was all right—not that many of Paul’s business friends had even met me. And Paul could be in the picture, too, just by turning his head so his face wouldn’t be recognizable. But we wanted to avoid putting our names on line, or our addresses.

  PAUL: We thought about a Post Office box under a phony name, until we realized how completely insane that would be if there were Post Office inspectors involved. And we also considered using a false name and giving no address, just our phone number. In fact we wrote out a few letters with that in mind but didn’t mail them. For one thing, we would be letting people about whom we knew nothing have a chance to call us up any time they wanted to. You can’t tell anything from an ad, and the last thing you would want to do is turn your telephone number over to a telephone pervert. Also, we weren’t all that sure that somebody couldn’t find out who we were from our telephone number. Information won’t give out that data, and they’ll tell you they don’t have it filed that way, but that’s nonsense. The police can always get it. As a matter of fact, it would be virtually impossible for the telephone company to establish any sort of data-processing system without listing customers by their phone numbers. And if the information exists, then the Post Office people could get it if they wanted to, and we were really leery of that.

  SHEILA: You wouldn’t believe the things we worried about it. And the precautions we took.

  PAUL: Imagine a couple where the wife wears a diaphragm and jelly and takes the Pill, and the husband wears three condoms, and then they sleep in separate beds and don’t screw. That’s how careful we tried to be about the damned thing.

  SHEILA: All the tabloids had ads from secret mail-forwarding services. For so much a week or so much a letter they would forward your mail. But we didn’t see any reason to trust them, either. I have a criminal mind, as you may have noticed, and it occurred to me that if I wanted a very simple way to get into the blackmailing business for fun and profit, why all I would have to do was open a mail-forwarding operation and read the mail before forwarding it. I don’t suppose the average person in that racket even bothers, actually, but it was enough to scare us off.

  PAUL: After all this buildup, what we did is going to sound anticlimactic. I used an alias, and as an address I gave the street address of a third-rate downtown hotel. After the letters were in the mail, I stopped at the hotel one afternoon, gave my false name to the clerk, and slipped him a couple of bucks to look out for any mail that came for me. Of course I started dropping by too soon. The clubs have to forward your letters, and sometimes they take their sweet time, and the mails are often slow, and the people who place the ads are sometimes simply deluged with correspondence, and even if they intend to answer a certain letter it may be some time before they get around to it. Once you get into the swim of things these delays don’t bother you. You have enough letters out at any given time so that you are constantly getting answers and establishing new contacts. We were just beginning and we were impatient to get with it, and so I began checking for my mail a couple of weeks before the first letters trickled in.

  SHEILA: We sent out ten letters, each with a photograph enclosed. The pictures were fairly revealing but not obscene in any sense of the word, and we were also careful not to be too outspoken in our letters. We knew that much at least from what we had read. There was not only the legal problem, but we had read that a very frank letter was unlikely to get a reply. It scared off the true swingers.

  PAUL: Because they suspected it was from a postal inspector. The Post Office finks are notorious for writing the really raunchy letters.

  SHEILA: And also because most swingers, the greater proportion of them, are not interested in meeting really crude people. And anyone who gets too intimate in correspondence with a stranger is either a barbarian or a verbal exhibitionist, and neither is much fun to have around. Incidentally, occasional correspondents will urge us to be more candid in our letters, emphasizing that nothing shocks them and giving an example of their own ability to send original p
ornography through the mails.

  PAUL: You know the drift, John, I’m sure. “Do you like to suck? I sure like to eat pussy. I wish you were here now so I could suck your pussy. I am imagining it and right now I have my tool in my hand—” And on and on until you could really vomit. One glance at a letter like that and you know the clown is a masturbator and nothing else. Never meets anybody, just beats off when he writes to you and beats off all over again if you answer him. Not that I have anything against people like that. I’m all for them finding each other, which I guess happens often enough, nowadays many of them will state in their ads that they only want correspondence. If they get their kicks this way, I don’t think it’s any of the Post Office’s business what they send through the mails.

  SHEILA: Sometimes I really wonder about this country. You can send guns and weapons through the mails but not birth-control information or dirty letters.

  PAUL: And big corporations can send their cruddy junk mail to me whether or not I want it, and at a rate that means I as a taxpayer am subsidizing the crap, but when some poor pervert chips away at the postal deficit by paying a full six cents to mail a dirty letter, then the public is supposedly being taken advantage of. Well, I’m part of that public, and the junk mailer certainly hurts me and takes more advantage of me than the pervert.

  • • •

  There is more light discussion of the Post Office and the expanding role of government. Politically, Sheila and Paul could be most precisely described as libertarian conservatives, a category into which a majority of upper-middle-class swingers probably belong. They are concerned about the scope of government and its control over the citizenry. Government spending bothers them, as do economic controls, which they regard as creeping socialism. At the same time their feelings regarding civil rights and civil liberties, as well as basic economic assistance for poverty classes, would be characterized as extremely liberal, and their Vietnam position is markedly dovish. This evening’s political comments consist mostly of gentle carping, and before long we return to the topic at hand.