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

by Lawrence Block

  But other people have to get stoned in order to get through one of those evenings . . .

  As far as being turned on by nonswinging friends, of course that happens now and then. When it does, one thing that we always do is make an effort to find out if the other couple swings. This happens a surprising amount of the time—two swapping couples drawn together by accident, or if not exactly by accident at least with neither one having prior knowledge of the other. We’ve had it happen from time to time. If you suspect it, you sort of toss out leading questions and try to make a connection. There are ways. Some of the correspondence clubs even have little pins for swingers to wear, innocent little bits of junk jewelry that enable you to zero in on each other in a crowd like members of some secret fraternity. I think that’s a little much—I mean, you would never know what sort of creep might try to connect with you that way. But you can accomplish as much by hinting at it.

  PAUL: And as Sheila said, it happens a surprising amount of the time. Sometimes in the family circle.

  SHEILA: You’re not going to tell—

  PAUL: Don’t you want me to? For Christ’s sake, honey, it’s not really incestuous.

  SHEILA: I know, but—

  PAUL: But what?

  SHEILA: It seems incestuous, I guess. And I suppose that was part of the thrill at the time, and you can make of that what you will. But go ahead and tell John. By now he must be imagining something a lot more far out than what happened.

  PAUL: To save time, what happened was simply that we went to Sheila’s hometown when there was a death in her family, and after the funeral we happened to meet her cousin and his wife, and they turned out to be swingers. Ralph was about the same age as Sheila and I gather they were very close as children, and there must have been an undercurrent of sexual attraction that they weren’t entirely aware of, and as a result the whole thing had a special spice for her. Frankly I can’t see anything too spicy in the idea of first cousins screwing, but I suppose they felt a lot of the old wouldn’t-the-rest-of-the-family-die-if-they-saw-us-now, that bit, and that made it very unusual for them. I didn’t get the full impact of that, but Ralph’s wife is a tiny thing with oversized breasts and a comfortably tight vagina, so I wasn’t going to complain, certainly. I enjoyed myself.

  SHEILA: Didn’t you get just the slightest little forbidden-fruit kick?

  PAUL: Only sympathetically, by sharing some of your fun. But not directly.

  SHEILA: It’s a shame—you missed a good thing. But maybe all is not lost.

  PAUL: How so?

  SHEILA: Maybe your sister’s a swinger. I don’t know about the other, but she’s certainly a tiny thing with oversized breasts, and it ought to be kinky enough to make you happy.

  PAUL: Let’s talk about something else, huh?

  SHEILA: Seriously, you know, it’s possible that she is a swinger. Marty’s a pretty sharp guy. It’s possible.

  PAUL: Anything’s possible.

  SHEILA: What would you do?

  PAUL: Are you crazy?

  SHEILA: Well, what would you do?

  PAUL: Let’s drop it.

  SHEILA: Can’t you just answer the question?

  PAUL: Look, stupid, I don’t want to answer the question. Oh, hell. Suppose your parents were swingers, honey.

  SHEILA: That’s utterly ridiculous.

  PAUL: Well, just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose they were. And suppose they turned up one day—

  SHEILA: All right, you made your point.

  PAUL: —and your dad put his arm around you and said—

  SHEILA: Let’s drop it, Paul . . .

  • • •

  The interview breaks up shortly thereafter. The incest speculation has a deadening effect upon the conversation, with Paul and Sheila drawing into themselves. Later, on separate occasions, Paul will tell me that he should not have used the example he did, that he feels Sheila has always had profound unresolved Oedipal yearnings directed toward her father; Sheila in turn will confess that her provocation of Paul was ill-advised in view of his strong attachment to his sister, an attachment she suspects may have involved some sort of sexual experimentation in early adolescence.

  In another interview, I ask whether a sexual relationship ever developed with the Pettits.

  • • •

  SHEILA: Oh, we should have mentioned that last time, shouldn’t we? I completely forgot. Actually, it was a funny thing. After things worked out so well with Marge and Bill, we didn’t feel anxious to rush things with Phil and Mona. We thought we would let things define themselves a little better before we made any efforts in that direction, and meanwhile we could establish contacts with some other swingers in the area, and see more of Marge and Bill. We still were very strongly attracted to the Pettits, but we realized that the original attraction was at least partly due to the fact that we were about ready to get back into swinging. By the same token, once we were back in the fold I stopped getting hot every time Dr. Mahler put his fingers up me.

  I suppose we would have started something with the Pettits sooner or later, but it kind of got started for us. Phil Pettit tried to seduce me.

  PAUL: I guess you gave him so much encouragement that one night he thought he was home free.

  SHEILA: That was obviously what had happened. He dropped in one afternoon just after I’d sent the kids back to school with some story about being in the neighborhood. Said he had been thinking about me and just wanted to stop by and see how I was doing. Now this sort of thing is so utterly unknown among swingers that I didn’t even put two and two together. I thought he had just stopped over to say hello. The next thing I knew he was kissing me and pawing at my breasts and telling me that he loved me and his wife didn’t understand him.

  PAUL: It’s hard to believe, but civilians really talk that way. “My wife doesn’t understand me”—as if that’s such a hardship to bear! There are plenty of times when I wish to hell my wife didn’t understand me.

  SHEILA: I was really stunned, John! Stimulated and excited but also a little disgusted and contemptuous at the same time. I didn’t want to have a quick tumble with him, it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to avoid. But I did like him, and he was frustrated and I didn’t want to leave him hung up like that. And it wasn’t as though I intended to keep it from Paul. I planned to tell Paul right away.

  So I told Phil that if he would just cut it out with the love garbage I would be perfectly delighted to go to bed with him.

  That made it his turn to be stunned. He was at a loss for words, but fortunately words aren’t necessary in bed. And Phil was very good company in bed. Just straight intercourse and not too imaginative, but very nice, and I had a lovely time.

  It’s funny how you feel inhibited with a nonswinger. Afterward we were lying there together sharing a cigarette, and I looked down at his penis and had a very strong desire to take it in my mouth. But I was worried that he might think this was a perversion.

  PAUL: You know, swingers aren’t the only people who suck, honey.

  SHEILA: I know that, but—oh, forget it. Anyway, I had to get the point across to Phil that I wasn’t interested in afternoon quickies, but that Paul and I were very definitely interested in him and Mona. I considered and rejected all sorts of subtle approaches, and then he turned to me and smiled and said we would have to do this again.

  So I said, “I’m game, but not in the afternoon. How about Friday night?”

  He said, “How are we going to get rid of Mona and Paul?”

  “Why don’t we just let them screw each other?” I said. “Paul and I are swingers, Phil. Wife-swappers. We do this all the time.”

  Well, you could have knocked him over with a feather from a hummingbird. He thought wife-swappers only existed in books. You know the pitch—we couldn’t possibly be wife-swappers because he knew us and he didn’t know any wife-swappers. Then when he finally believed it he said he was sure Mona would never go for it.

  “Oh, come off it,” I told him. “She
was practically wetting her pants dancing with my husband.”

  I suggested that he go home and talk her into it. I gave him some of the paperbacks to show her, but all he did was read them himself and call me the next day with a complicated plan. He couldn’t tell Mona himself, but he wanted me to get Paul to seduce Mona, and then they would all work it out together.

  PAUL: It struck me as unnecessarily complicated, but what the hell. I picked an afternoon, told Phil to stay away from the house, and dropped in on Mona. The poor kid happened to have picked that day to have her hair in curlers. I made a pass at her, a straight physical pass, and she turned out to be easy enough. I found out later on that she wasn’t just easy for me. She put out for deliverymen and door-to-door salesmen whenever she got the chance.

  She fucked like a mink.

  Afterward I got her hot again and told her that Sheila and I were swappers.

  “I sort of thought you were,” she said, perfectly matter-of-fact about the whole thing. “I suspected it. I’ve always wanted to try it, but do you think we can get Phil to go along with it?”

  SHEILA: So many couples go through life like that. Both of them fooling around and keeping it a secret from each other. And both of them secretly anxious to try swinging, but each one convinced the other wouldn’t go for it.

  PAUL: Once they understood what was happening, Phil and Mona were natural swingers.

  SHEILA: And improved the quality of their marriage in the process. I hate to sound like one of those messianic swingers who makes it sound like a cure-all—

  PAUL: Prevents divorce, cures cancer, cleans up pimples, ends bleeding gums—

  SHEILA: Lord, doesn’t that just have a familiar ring to it? But it does help some people stay married. Whether it’s literally true or not, both Phil and Mona are convinced that they would have eventually gotten a divorce if we hadn’t turned them on to group sex.

  PAUL: They still may, you know.

  SHEILA: It’s possible.

  PAUL: That marriage wasn’t exactly made in heaven, I don’t think.

  SHEILA: No, I don’t suppose it was.

  The Games Swingers Play

  A Sunday afternoon, the air crisp with the smell of burning leaves. Paul and Sheila are in particularly good spirits. Last night they went to another couple’s home for a party at which a total of a dozen persons were present. The evening seems to have been an unqualified success. They discuss it with a disarming lack of inhibitions, not so much as if to savor the experience as to convey to me the pleasure they took in it and the ease with which they are able to talk about it.

  I suggest that perhaps they might discuss some of the ways they keep their swapping experiences fresh and varied. To an extent swinging does represent an attempt to avoid the presumed monotony of monogamous marital relations, and I wonder aloud whether or not the same aspect of monotony does not similarly threaten swingers. Paul agrees that this is so and points to it as a factor in precipitating their original disenchantment with the life.

  • • •

  SHEILA: Of course that’s the whole point—that you have to be careful not to substitute one routine for another. You have to keep things new and varied, and at the same time you have to avoid going overboard to the point where every date has to go a step further than the preceding one. I think we discussed all this before, didn’t we? It has a familiar ring to it.

  JWW: Yes, but I was thinking of a different aspect. What I’m getting at is the question of how you manage this balance, this mutual avoidance of monotony and excess.

  SHEILA: You have to be inventive, that’s all.

  PAUL: That’s a big part of it. They say necessity is the mother of invention; well, if that’s so, then the father is monotony. But I think you make a mistake to credit inventiveness with making swinging stay interesting. More important than the new things you think of is the mental attitude you develop.

  Face it—there are only so many ways to have sex. This may be more obvious when you’re limited to the same two people in a marital relationship, but it’s just as true in an orgy. There are only so many ways, so many sensations, so many methods of obtaining that happy little orgasm. If a person becomes obsessed with the need for variety, it can only turn out to be a hang-up. It’s more important to learn to enjoy what you’ve got than to be constantly yearning for more.

  SHEILA: I think John is more interested in the actual methods of varying things. Aren’t you?

  JWW: I think it might be of interest.

  SHEILA: Well, anything to make our readers happy. It’s hard for me to believe that somebody is actually going to read all this, you know. I suppose if I really believed it I would have to weigh everything I say, or I would freeze up entirely or something . . .

  There are certain things that a great many experienced swingers will do. I suppose you could call them games. First of all there are the icebreakers, and games of this sort are a sort of swinging version of the icebreaking games that civilians use, and to tell you the truth I think they make about as much sense.

  The obvious ones, like Strip Poker or Strip Scrabble, are really too silly to talk about. I read about them all the time in phony books on swinging, but I don’t know anyone who makes much use of them. After all, once you get beyond the first stages of sexual freedom, you find out that nudity in and of itself isn’t that much of an aphrodisiac. I can’t get delirious at the thought of seeing another man’s penis, not after I’ve seen enough of them.

  There’s a swinger’s version of Post Office and one of Spin the Bottle that works pretty nicely. And I would have to admit that these games serve a purpose when you have a large number of people together for the first time. A crowd of strangers is always inhibiting to certain people, and when you use this sort of game to develop a sort of round-robin petting match, it gets people into the spirit of the thing in a gradual way. Of course the ground rules vary according to the group. Sometimes it’s just a plain kissing game with the players naked. Other times different rules will be followed.

  These games are usually used as icebreakers, but they also serve to vary the pace in groups that have been meeting together for some time. In the clubs, you know, you have to guard against falling into a set routine, and there are a lot of games that are used not because anybody’s absolutely crazy about them but just to break up the pattern.

  PAUL: Which is one of the basic problems with clubs, and a good reason not to join one.

  SHEILA: We felt that way, but not everyone does. Remember, there are advantages to a club. None of the dangers you always have in correspondence, for example. No worrying about meeting with people who will turn out to be a drag—and that happens pretty often no matter how you try to avoid it. And for some people a club helps to keep swinging in proportion.

  JWW: I’m not sure I follow that last point.

  SHEILA: Well, when you make all of your own arrangements, it’s very easy to find yourself going off the deep end, making so many swinging dates that you can’t keep up with your own schedule. Almost everyone seems to do this at one time or another, mainly because the average person can’t believe that there’s such a thing as too much sex.

  PAUL: The clubs have set meeting times—once a week, twice a month, whatever. So you can regulate yourself that way. I don’t think that means much, to tell you the truth. If people are determined to overdo it, they can still make dates on the side.

  SHEILA: From our experience, I would say that the clubs are far more oriented toward games and contests than people who meet privately on a couple-with-couple basis. Of course part of this is purely mathematical—you can’t really have much of a contest unless you have enough people to make it interesting.

  PAUL: Don’t forget Swing.

  SHEILA: I’d just as soon forget it, if you don’t mind. You know the game, don’t you, John? It’s sort of Monopoly for swingers, a commercially available board game that lends itself to a swap situation. Different cards order players to remove an article of clothing, or kiss
all the other players, or race off to the bedroom with someone. Maybe ninety percent of the swingers we know have played it at one time or the other, and except for a few novices no one has been much impressed with it.

  PAUL: It’s supposed to be funny.

  SHEILA: And it doesn’t quite make it. But as far as that goes, humor isn’t always what you want to set the stage for an erotic evening, is it? The funny thing, though, is that a lot of nonswingers seem to own and play the game. It’s sold by mail order, you see, and the various ploys are vague enough so that I suppose if you weren’t a swinger you could just interpret them as risqué. I guess the same kind of people play the silly game as listen to those tacky party records, Belle Barth and the red-haired one, I forget her name.

  PAUL: Rusty Warren.

  SHEILA: That’s the one. You know the type—the very worst kind of nonswinger.

  PAUL: We’ve heard—or maybe we’ve read—that the game is occasionally used for seduction purposes, either when a swinging couple wants to get a nonswinging couple in the mood or when somebody wants to get a civilian social group oriented in a swinging direction. Frankly, I have a hard time believing that this ever happens. I don’t despise the game quite as much as Sheila does because it doesn’t offend me. My charming wife has a tendency to take things personally.

  SHEILA: All it offends is my taste.

  PAUL: You’re just letting your experience show, honey. People who are new to swinging get a kick out of things like that. It’s largely a matter of kicking over the traces, I would guess. Everything that normal society would regard as outrageous becomes desirable for that reason . . .

  • • •

  We discuss the use of games in two-couple situations. Sheila remembers a young Southern couple whose entire approach to swap situations was humor-oriented, to such an extent that an evening in their presence was composed more of laughs than of sexual relations. We talk of the possible use of games and contests in the wild-party or orgy situation, and Paul says that they do not fit in there; if such a party is effective it works spontaneously, and if it is not, games and contests will not help it. We then turn to the subject of games and contests in the context of the swap-club experience. The Gordons belonged to a club in Louisville after a pair of bad mail-order experiences made them leery of meeting with strangers. Their club met two evenings a month at the home of one of the members. Total membership ranged from eight to twelve couples during the relatively brief period of time that Paul and Sheila belonged.