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

by Lawrence Block

  We called this couple—their names were Marge and Bill—and we told them who we were and whom we knew. Surprisingly enough, they recognized our names and said they had been expecting to hear from us; some mutual friends had told them we were moving to Louisville. I spoke with Marge and gave her a quick rundown on our personal situation. She seemed to understand completely, and we found out later that they had been through something similar themselves, although they had never gone to the extreme we had. But it does seem as though most couples give up swinging sooner or later—and most of them go back to it, sooner or later.

  We drove out to see them. At their suggestion, we met at the cocktail lounge of a motel not far from their home. They wanted to make it easy for us to cop out gracefully if we changed our minds.

  On the way out there it felt like those first times all over again. Marge and Bill were a few years older than we were. He sold fertilizer to farmers, which may not be the most romantic business in the world but which must have paid off pretty well for him. A handsome man with a good physique. And Marge was also quite attractive—and not at all pregnant, which was the main consideration from my husband’s point of view.

  PAUL: You know, from a biological standpoint there’s no reason for the male to be attracted to the pregnant female. His attentions to her can’t serve any purpose.

  SHEILA: They can make her happy. And to hell with biological purpose, anyway. What’s the biological purpose of oral sex?

  PAUL: It feels good.

  SHEILA: I’m sorry I asked . . . To make a long story short, we got along famously with Bill and Marge, and there was no question but that we wanted to swing with them. They were very good at putting us at ease. We went to their place and took separate rooms.

  I still felt somewhat awkward and virginal. All this changed when Bill kissed me. I went wild. We got out of our clothes and he made me lie still while he went down on me. It seems he was tremendously excited by my pregnancy and kept kissing and licking my belly. It didn’t really protrude all that much but the idea of it turned him on. Then he started frenching me in earnest. I came in Technicolor, and came again and again when he screwed me. He put me on my hands and knees and mounted me from the rear and fucked me like a stallion.

  Sheila seems at first to be speaking crudely on purpose. It soon becomes clear, however, that she is barely aware of the words she is using. She is responding sexually to her own words or to the memories they evoke. Her eyes are half-lidded and her sentences come in spurts; she pauses intermittently to nibble at her lip or lick both lips with her tongue. She squirms in her chair, buttocks twitching, thighs rubbing nervously together. I feel almost as though I am intruding. I turn to Paul, who is staring fixedly at his wife; he, too, seems to be sexually affected by her account of the experience.

  • • •

  SHEILA: Afterward we went into the other room. I told Bill I wanted to watch Paul with Marge. This is something I wanted very much. I remember being afraid for a moment that I was having all this fun and that Paul wasn’t doing anything. I didn’t think this was so—

  PAUL: Not quite.

  SHEILA: —because I knew she turned him on and that she liked him, but I was worried. Also I wanted to see them, I wanted to watch them doing it.

  We walked into the bedroom and it smelled like a whorehouse. The bed was all stained and everything. And he was lying on his back with his eyes closed and a dreamy expression on his face, and Marge was giving him head. She was stretched out sort of sideways and sucking him.

  I got hot all over. Just instantly hot all over.

  I turned to Bill. “Is your wife bi?” I asked, and he nodded, and I asked him if he thought she would mind if I joined in.

  He said go ahead.

  I don’t think I gave a damn if she did or not. I just had to do it. I put my face between her legs and began eating her without a word. I could taste Paul there . . .

  Marge and Bill both used depilatories. Many swingers do; they remove all their pubic hair. She was all smooth there.

  It was so good. Everything was so good.

  And we did just everything. We were with them for hours and we did everything and it was fantastic. I was too involved to think. Later on we thought about it and talked about it but at the time it wasn’t even possible to think. I was too busy doing and feeling and I couldn’t think about anything else.

  On the way home I said, “Well, now we know what we are.”

  And Paul agreed.

  And I said, “I’m glad we had the past six months. I guess we were only fooling ourselves, but I’m glad we had it the way we did. I think we learned from it, I think we grew, but I’m also glad it’s over. I’m glad we’re having another baby, but I’m glad we’re back in the swinging scene again.”

  So that was that. We had dropped out, and now we dropped in again.

  All Things in Moderation

  JWW: When you first got involved in swinging, in swapping, I know you were quite anxious about your situation. Was there comparable anxiety when you returned to swinging after six months of abstention?

  PAUL: No.

  SHEILA: Not really, no. They say you never forget to swim once you learn. It’s the same with swinging. You not only don’t forget how but you don’t have any trouble relearning the right mental attitude. And you know, I was expecting the guilt, the anxiety, all of that. I was primed for it, all prepared to handle it, and then it didn’t really come.

  JWW: That’s very interesting.

  PAUL: And a little hard to believe.

  JWW: Well, perhaps a little.

  PAUL: John, did you ever quit smoking?

  JWW: Oh, dozens of times. Hundreds of times, I suppose.

  PAUL: For any real length of time?

  JWW: Usually for a few hours or a few days. But once for over a year, and other times for periods of a month or two. Why?

  PAUL: Do you know how they say that the first cigarette after a long layoff tastes terrible?

  JWW: I’ve heard that often enough, but in my case it’s simply not true. The first cigarette always tastes better than any cigarette after it. It’s almost worth quitting just to start in again . . . You know, I’m beginning to see where this conversation is headed. Do you really think there’s much of a parallel between smoking and swinging?

  SHEILA: There are obvious differences, of course. Smoking is far more dangerous physically. And swinging is illegal.

  PAUL: There are also some similarities. Yes, I think the parallels are significant, John. When you smoke too much, cigarettes lose their taste; you just go on out of habit. You don’t enjoy them, but you can’t go on without them. And when you quit you get past the withdrawal period through sheer enthusiasm, but you never entirely forget how good cigarettes used to taste. You get so that you only remember the pleasant associations of smoking.

  JWW: So sooner or later you start in again.

  PAUL: That’s right. You may vow to cut down, or to switch to a filter or whatever, but sooner or later you go back to it. And pretty soon you return to whatever frequency is natural for you. Maybe you feel guilty about it and maybe not. I suppose you have to feel some guilt, because after all smoking is bad for you. It does all sorts of physically damaging things to a human being. Swinging, on the other hand, has no bad physical effects unless you’re dealing with the sort of compulsive nut who literally screws himself into the grave, in which case he’ll have that problem whether he’s a swinger or not. Aside from those hardship cases, it’s good exercise. It doesn’t even rot your teeth.

  JWW: It might have had emotional effects though, mightn’t it? It seems to have done so the first time around.

  SHEILA: But that’s a different thing, John. That only happens if you’re mentally prepared for it to happen. But there’s such a thing as adjusting yourself to swinging. And when you’re able to put it in its proper perspective, it doesn’t tear you up that way.

  JWW: I’m not sure I’ll buy that.

  PAUL: Why not?


  JWW: Because I’ve known any number of long-time swingers, couples who have stuck with the scene to such an extent that you would have to describe them as adjusted to it. And whenever I’ve known such people for any length of time I’ve discovered that they’re subject to periods of depression, that now and then they come unglued, that they will occasionally admit they aren’t convinced that what they’re doing is right—

  PAUL: No argument. Everybody lives with that. I do, Sheila does, everybody does.

  JWW: Then—

  PAUL: But you learn to handle it. You learn to smooth out the really bad downs and the really manic highs so that you can coast easy somewhere in the middle. Even so, now and then it gets bad. Sometimes we need a vacation from swinging, a couple of weeks where we carefully avoid extramarital sex. And by the same token, there are times when we’ll feel the need for a no-holds-barred knock-down orgy. Not as a steady diet, but to blow off steam every once in a while. You know, the ancient Greeks had a way of looking at things.

  SHEILA: They certainly did.

  PAUL: Seriously, they did. “All things in moderation and nothing to excess”—that’s the principle, and it’s a good one. If you look at it that way, nothing is bad in and of itself, just so long as it’s kept in proportion.

  JWW: “All things in moderation” seems like an unusual motto for a swinger.

  PAUL: Does it? I suppose it does, but you’d be surprised; most people with some experience and with a little depth to themselves come around to the same position, although they may not put it in the same words.

  SHEILA: Nobody swings twenty-four hours a day. And nobody swings seven days a week.

  PAUL: Right. That’s the whole thing. On balance, swingers are not a particularly far-out group of people—except in the sexual sphere. They’re a fairly average lot, a little more intelligent than the average, a bit better off, and a little bit better educated, but outside of that they’re very ordinary people who happen to have what nonswingers would regard as an unusual approach to sex . . .

  • • •

  The discussion covers familiar ground now—the justification of wife-swapping as a logical and intelligent behavior pattern for essentially ordinary husbands and wives, a pastime wholly consistent with the Greek concept of all things in moderation. At one point I remind Paul of our conversation of a few weeks earlier, our luncheon date during which he inveighed so unequivocally against swinging and all its insanities. He replies that he told me at the time that he was in a particular mood, and that he has never denied that swinging will look alternately good and bad depending upon one’s state of mind. Sheila adds that no regimen is assurance that a given date will not be a disappointment, and that such a disappointing date is very frequently followed by dissatisfaction with swinging itself. “You have to expect a certain amount of this,” she goes on, “and gradually you learn how to avoid the worst of it and ride with the part you can’t avoid. Like anything else, it’s a matter of learning and a matter of adjustment.”

  A little later on, we move around to a discussion of the form their adjustment took.

  • • •

  SHEILA: After our evening with Marge and Bill, it was pretty obvious that we were due for another drastic reappraisal. Obviously we had made a mistake in our plans somewhere along the line. In Kansas City we had thought that we were all-out swingers and wanted nothing more than to let loose and kick up our heels. Then later we found out that this didn’t seem to be working, and we thought a complete renunciation of swinging was the answer, and that we would never again desire that mad involvement in sex. Well, it was easy to see that we were wrong again, so—

  PAUL: So back to the old drawing board.

  SHEILA: Right. And what we came up with fit the general principle of moderation, although I don’t think we had the tag for it at first; I think we just worked things out and then realized later on what we had come up with. The first step in the program was to avoid programming our lives too rigidly. In other words, we had to avoid absolutes and leave ourselves room to find our own way. We had to stay loose.

  Next, we realized that there was always the danger that sex would wind up playing too central a role in our lives. This was really what went wrong the first time around, that coupled with a hang-up built on the need to go a little further each time out. We decided we would absolutely limit ourselves to one swinging date a week.

  PAUL: That may not sound like much of a limit. But when you realize what some couples do, then it is. And one a week was a maximum, not a set quantity. Anytime a week went by without a date, that was perfectly fine.

  SHEILA: Of course it hasn’t happened that often. But it does happen from time to time, and we don’t let ourselves get upset about it.

  Another principle of ours was to really get to appreciate our swinging friends as individuals, so that they would be more than a collection of organs and techniques to us. This may seem in contradiction to our determination to avoid the sort of ultra-intimate relationship that we had with our first couple, Jan and Jeff. It isn’t, really. It only means that we want to be able to relate to other couples as people. You don’t have to know someone a long time to do this, don’t have to see them all that frequently. All you have to do is know them the right way.

  PAUL: Along the same lines, we stopped keeping records.

  SHEILA: Absolutely, because that was something that had really come to strike us as sick, and now that we had more perspective we saw it as a symptom of our inability to relate to people, and our failure to find any real meaning in our sexual contacts. My God, when you have to keep notes on your dates—what you did and how it felt and how many times everybody got their rocks off—it’s as though that’s the only way you can hang onto it, as though otherwise you won’t be able to remember it, or to prove to yourself that it ever really happened.

  Photographs are the same thing. We still have our Polaroid, but we use it only to take pictures of the children.

  PAUL: You’re exaggerating a little. Sometimes another couple will request that we shoot some pictures while they’re over here, or someone will get an urge to see what something looks like from a given angle. So we do take pictures now and then, and we don’t mind if the couples we swing with want to take pictures for their own benefit. But the point is that we don’t save the pictures, we don’t use them as a way of keeping a record.

  SHEILA: Once in a while we’ll save a particular snapshot because it happens to be a particularly good shot. Either it’s an attractive balance artistically or it happens to turn one or both of us on sexually, and so we’ll keep it around until we get tired of it. But no record keeping, none of that nonsense. And no record-keeper mentality, no comparisons and analysis of sexual idiosyncrasies, no keeping count of positions and strokes and orgasms and all the rest of it.

  PAUL: Because I get enough data processing at the office.

  SHEILA: Another thing we decided to do was maintain a certain number of nonswinging friends whom we would see socially. We still do this to a degree, but in actual practice it’s harder than you might think.

  JWW: Because you want to have sex with the ones you respond to, and the rest bore you?

  PAUL: Good guess, but not quite. Actually it’s not that simple. The most important thing, I guess, is that when you’re a swinger and you’re used to the relaxed, and I think, wholesome sexual attitudes of swingers, you find the average civilian pretty unpleasant company. Nonswingers are just a bore.

  SHEILA: Not because they’re, oh, square or anything like that. It must be pretty obvious that we’re not a couple of hippies ourselves. But the thing is that the sexual attitudes of civilians really get to us after a while. It’s almost as if they’re more obsessed sexually than we are, because they don’t let loose and do the things they want to do, and as a result they’re all tied into knots about it.

  PAUL: It’s the usual repression thing. The people who scream loudest about banning pornography are always the ones who get a hard-on if someone farts. The
y’re the ones who tell the dirtiest jokes—not the funniest ones, just the dirtiest.

  SHEILA: They’re also the ones who play horrid little games of kneesies with other people’s mates. The funniest feeling in the world comes when we go to a civilian party where everybody gets into the liquor pretty hard. Sometimes I like to stay sober just to watch them. The utter hypocrisy of these people, the way they think they’re being so subtle as they sneak off with one another for a fast round of stand-up necking in the bathroom or a quick mutual frigging in the shrubbery. Or maybe they’ll actually go so far as to make a date to meet some afternoon for a quickie after the kids finish their lunch and before they come home from school again. And the ones who aren’t doing anything or setting anything up are all flirting like mad, using all the double-entendre they can and giving the impression that sex is the only thing on their minds. It’s almost as if they have to do this, the men to assert their virility and the women to prove they’re desirable. It gets ridiculous sometimes; you can’t tell which ones are playing the part but really mean it as a joke and which ones are pretending to be joking but really mean it. You can’t tell, and as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really matter.

  PAUL: Not all civilians are like this, of course. Not by any means. In a way, you could say it’s as much a function of large parties with heavy drinking as it is of anything else. If you had a houseful of drunken swingers—

  SHEILA: But you wouldn’t—that’s the point, isn’t it? Swingers wouldn’t drink that heavily. Oh, we drink, we all drink, and sometimes we drink enough to feel it. But we don’t knock ourselves out with liquor in that desperate way so many Americans do nowadays. For one thing, you can’t give a great performance in bed if you’re drunk. And since swingers know that the evening is going to end in bed, and that the success of the night stands or falls upon how the sexual side of it goes, well, drunkenness is kept to a minimum.