Versatile Ladies: the bisexual option (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  For the next two weeks I spent every night in her bed. All night long we would lie together. I kept wanting to touch her again but didn’t. We would lie close together and fall asleep together and wake up together. And she would talk to me for hours on end. These were not conversations. They were one-sided; she talked and I listened, trying to take it all in although it was miles over my head.

  She would tell me again and again that she had been a fool to remarry, that she should have stayed true to my father’s memory, that it was a weakness of women to need a man around and we were really better off by ourselves. And she would stroke me and tell me that the two of us would be together forever.

  I think she must have come very close to seducing me during those two weeks. Our closeness was very physical. Also she was drawing close to me after an unhappy time with a man in the same way that a lot of girls are drawn to lesbianism after the same kind of thing. I know now that my feelings toward her were definitely sexual, and I’m sure they were reciprocated. In fact I think she began to realize this, and couldn’t handle the realization, and that may have had a lot to do with the way she turned against me.

  I still have trouble understanding how that happened. I’m sure it must have happened over a period of days but in memory it’s all compressed in time until it’s just about instantaneous. One minute she loved me and the next minute I was a whore and a pervert who had taken her man away after seducing him and who would seduce her if she gave me the chance and, oh, I still can’t talk about it without getting myself all upset. I’ve been over it so any times and I still feel myself choking up inside when I remember that scene and the way it made me feel. There are some things you never really get over. You think you’re over them, but let yourself get back into the feeling of the moment and they’re as strong as ever . . .

  Essentially what happened is that she had a nervous breakdown. Whatever that means—I’m not sure I understand the term, or even if it has any real meaning medically. She certainly broke down. She worked herself up into a rage and began beating me. I just stood there and took it for the longest time because I thought I had done something horrible and must deserve it. It’s a wonder she didn’t do any real damage. She had no control and was swinging full strength at me, and she was a tall and fairly strong woman. And I was a small child. I was just eight years old then, just barely eight, and small for my age in the bargain.

  Ultimately I did run out screaming, and she came screaming out after me, both of us stark naked in the middle of the street. Some neighbors restrained her and someone called the police and they wrapped a gray gown around her and took her away in a police car. She wound up in the state hospital and stayed there for three years until her death. She died there following abdominal surgery. I was in a foster home at the time and didn’t even learn about it until weeks later. I had never been allowed to visit her—from what I understand she never recovered emotionally and spent those last three years of her life in the violent ward. And I couldn’t accept her death. I couldn’t believe it had happened. That she was really gone. It took years for me to believe it. And all along I felt responsible. That I had killed her by having sex with him, just as I had made her lose him the same way.

  It is so terrible what people do to children. I think that is the ultimate sin when all is said and done. Neurotic people who lay their own neurotic trips on small children who have no idea how to handle them. How could either of them have been so sick as to do all that to me? How could anyone take a child’s mind and act so cruelly to it?

  I can’t understand it.

  But I can understand how everything that happened afterward grew directly out of those early experiences. I don’t mean that it was inevitable. The same set of childhood experiences will have totally different effects upon two different children. Other things influence you. Your own built-in personality, the arrangement of stars and planets at your moment of birth, all sorts of things we can’t completely understand.

  For me, though, my own development was all marked out from that point on. Even with totally different occurrences in the orphanage and in foster homes, I am fairly sure I would have wound up in about the same place. It might have taken me a shorter or longer period of time to get there. I might have wound up more stable or more disturbed if I had followed a different route. But all of the roads would have led to Rome. It was all mapped out for me and I can’t see how anything would have changed it.

  • • •

  Monica spent the next eight years, from her mother’s breakdown shortly after the child’s eighth birthday to her sixteenth birthday, shuttling back and forth between the county orphanage and a series of foster homes. The process was not a happy one. It rarely is.

  The county orphanage seems to have been no worse than most institutions of its type. Like almost all of them, it was drastically understaffed and underbudgeted. The physical plant, while antiseptically clean, was emotionally sterile. Meals were high in refined starches, low in proteins, tastelessly and unimaginatively prepared. Supervision guaranteed the physical health and safety of the children while making no provision for their emotional health and security. Weekly movies, athletic equipment donated by the local Rotarians, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners—these could not change the fact that a county home is no home at all for the children who live in it.

  And the greatest faults of the orphanage were ones that no increase in appropriations could ameliorate. It is little exaggeration to say that a child is better off in the worst sort of family conditions than in a public institution. It is fashionable in the counter-culture to point out the flaws in the modern nuclear family and to insist that the passage of time will see the family unit replaced by some alternative lifestyle, perhaps a form of communal tribal living. This may or may not be so, but whatever the inadequacies of the traditional family, its superiority to institutional living is monumental and undeniable.

  Largely in recognition of this fact, the county in which Monica lived maintained a state-aided foster parent program designed to place as many orphans as possible in quasi-permanent families. True adoption for children like Monica was never in the offing; indeed, adoption of children much more than a year old is rare. Those children who were placed in foster homes almost invariably hoped ultimately to be adopted by their foster parents. Whether the foster-parent relationship did or did not work well in an individual case, actual adoption almost never occurred.

  The motives of the foster parents varied from family to family. Often a foster child was taken in as a sort of free slave, expected to earn his or her keep by working around the house, often by functioning as an unpaid baby sitter for the couple’s own younger children. Other foster parents take in children because, by judicious paring of expenses, the venture can be marginally profitable, with the cost of supporting the child lower than the sum paid by state and county for the child’s upkeep. This is especially true in rural areas, where home-grown produce greatly lowers the cost of “another mouth to feed” and where a child’s hands can be useful.

  Certainly many foster parents are sincerely motivated by a desire to provide love and comfort for children greatly in need of family life. One only wishes that such a altruism were the rule instead of the exception.

  Many of the children Monica knew were never placed in foster homes but remained constantly in the orphanage. An attractive appearance and a pleasing personality are factors that lead to adoption for one child, while a less favored orphan, perhaps far more in need of placement, is passed over. Monica, attractive and charming, was placed repeatedly in such homes. Her six placements ranged in duration from less than a month to somewhat over a year. Her failure to remain longer in any of these situations was partly a result of unsuitability of the foster parents and partly due to Monica’s own emotional state.

  Once she voluntarily asked her caseworker to return her to the orphanage; her foster parents in that instance had worked her like a draft horse and beat her for fancied acts of insubordination. Another t
ime she was returned by a couple who had decided that what they really wanted to do was adopt an infant. In the four other instances, Monica’s placement was terminated for specifically sexual reasons.

  One foster mother returned Monica because she felt, with reasonably good reason, that the girl was making a sexual play for her husband; while the man had not yet seemed to take notice of Monica’s flirting, the woman decided, probably wisely, to nip the problem in the bud. Another foster mother herself seduced Monica, found herself unable to bear the ensuing guilt, and took the girl back to the home with the simple explanation that “things were not working out well.” In a third instance, the foster father seduced Monica; the mother learned of the relationship, tolerated it for an extended period of time, and ultimately decided she could not put up with it any longer.

  The fourth situation, and one which most accurately foreshadows Monica’s subsequent sexual development, is described by Monica below.

  It is important to note that the sexual sophistication of children in the most closely-supervised orphanage is astonishingly high. Monica experienced both heterosexual and homosexual relations almost immediately upon entering the orphanage. Throughout the institution, sexual experience greatly outdistanced sexual knowledge. Sex education, like virginity, was nonexistent, to the point where children with only a vague understanding of the biological mechanics of reproduction were performing those acts which traditionally lead to reproduction.

  Sex in the orphanage, as Monica described it, was a function of neither love nor friendship. It was purely recreational, and largely exploitative. Homosexuality was more common than heterosexuality, presumably because sexually segregated sleeping arrangements facilitated the former. Older children would force younger children to submit to them, and Monica’s first experience consisted of being coerced into performing cunnilingus upon a quartet of girls several years her senior; it was, they explained, her initiation.

  Monica was not aware of any of the orphanage staff ever having sexual relations with the children. Her particular institution may have been remarkable in this respect. She says, though, that the staff was well aware of what was going on, just as guards in adult prisons are aware of homosexuality. They chose to overlook it. Indeed, it is difficult to see what else they might do.

  The point of this is that, in the incident described below, Monica was at once very much the innocent and very much the experienced child-woman. It is beyond dispute that the persons who seduced her were well aware of what they were doing, that they in fact planned it well in advance. But it is similarly indisputable that they chose well in selecting Monica, as the fulfillment of their own fantasy constituted the fulfillment of hers as well.

  • • •

  They took me home with them just before my thirteenth birthday. I remember thinking of it as a birthday present and this time I was convinced immediately that everything was going to work out. The happily-ever-after concept. I always managed to make myself believe this to an extent, even when I knew better, but with Gene and Marcie I really believed it. Everything seemed so right about it, They made a tremendous fuss over me when they picked me out and they went on making a fuss over me in the car on the way home.

  They told me from the beginning to call them by their first names. Sometimes foster parents would want you to call them Mother and Father, or other times Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So, but I had never been told to call any of them by their first names before.

  I guess they were in their late thirties or early forties. Somewhere around there. He owned a chain of three drugstores. They were both very attractive and dressed well. You could tell right off that they were successful.

  They lived in a ranch house on the outskirts of town, everything clean and modern. It must have been a fairly ordinary house but of course I thought it was a palace. I remember being completely thrilled when they took me to my room. I couldn’t get over how lucky I was.

  Just before they picked me, they returned another girl who had been with them for two weeks. This would happen all the time, people trading in children who hadn’t worked out and trying someone else. All the same I was a little worried about this because I knew that if they didn’t like me they could trade me in the same way. Sometimes people would bring back a girl and say they had decided they would rather have a boy, or else it would be a matter of the child and the foster parents simply not getting on. Or the child ran away. Some children always ran away, no matter where they were placed. They would stay for a few days and then run off.

  They told me about the other girl that first night. “Cindy was a charming girl,” they said, “but we wanted someone who would become a part of our family. We have a lot of love in us and no children of our own, and we have to be able to share that love with anyone who becomes a part of our family. And Cindy wasn’t able to share our love.”

  I decided I would be the most loving person on God’s earth. I was just terrified of blowing what looked like the all-time great opportunity.

  Right from the beginning there was a tremendous amount of kissing and hugging. Every night Marcie gave me my bath and soaped and rinsed me. She complimented me constantly, talked about how clean and fresh my skin was and how nicely my breasts were growing. She would get undressed herself when she bathed me and we would compare the size of our breasts and point out how much more pubic hair she had.

  It’s obvious now that all of this was sexual overture. It seems incredible that I didn’t recognize it as such at the time, especially because I myself was so sexually oriented and so strongly attracted to her and to Gene, too. But I was determined to repress anything I felt that way. I had blown three chances for adoption because of sexual relations and I didn’t want it to happen again. I was dying to reach out to Marcie but resolved not to.

  Gene also hugged and petted me a great deal, had me sit on his lap and stroked my hair. Other men had started out this way but I thought less of it now because he didn’t do it in a secretive manner. He didn’t do a thing when he was alone with me, just when Marcie was also in the room. And since she didn’t seen to object to it in the least, in fact she often commented favorably on how nice it was to see the two of us being affectionate, I thus decided it was paternal rather than sexual on his part.

  They didn’t know it, but they didn’t have to take their time with me. I wanted exactly what they wanted. To love them both and to make love with both of them.

  As it was, it only took them a week. Marcie came to my room at night just after my bath. She said she wanted to give me an alcohol rub so that I could sleep better. It was a warm night and she said it would refresh me and help me sleep. She was wearing a nightgown and took it off so that she would not spill rubbing alcohol on it. I wasn’t wearing anything to bed. I never did.

  She rubbed my back first of all, then turned me over and rubbed my front. All the while she talked love talk to me. How much she and Gene loved me, how I was really a part of their family, how close we would all be, how I belonged to both of them and they belonged to me. I was so completely in love at that moment that I thought I would die.

  She just gradually began making love to me. Rubbing my breasts, touching my thighs. And suddenly kissing me on the mouth and putting her tongue in my mouth. I responded instinctively, wrapped my arms around her and returned the kiss thoroughly. I think the intensity of my response shocked her a little. I guess she didn’t believe I was so ready so quickly.

  She lay down beside me and kissed me some more and felt my breasts and pussy. She asked me if I had done things with girls and we talked about that. She also asked me if I had done things with boys. I told her what I had done. She said when you really loved someone you had to be close physically, and she wanted to love me in that way. I was so happy I couldn’t stop crying. I told her I loved her and I wanted to do anything to make her happy but I was afraid afterward she would make me leave, or else Gene would. She said neither of them would ever make me leave, that they both wanted me to stay with them for ever and ever.


  Then she spent about an hour eating me from head to toe. I had always liked sex but nothing was ever like this before. I had a real orgasm for the first time. I thought only boys could come. I didn’t know girls could have anything that powerful.

  Afterward she said how nice it would be if Gene could be with us. I asked her if he would be mad. She said he loved us both and would want us to be close this way, and that he would want to be close to me, too.

  “Do you love Gene?” she asked. I said I did. “Would you like Gene to fuck you?”

  “But if he fucks me you’ll hate me,” I said. And I broke down and cried and told her about what had happened before, my mother and my stepfather, all of it. Except for one girl at the orphanage I never told anyone this story before.

  She told me Mommy and my stepfather were puritans and sick people and that she could never feel jealous that way, “Jealousy is stupid,” she said. “Would you feel jealous when Gene fucks me? It’s nothing to be jealous about. The next time he fucks me I want you lying next to me and kissing me. And tonight I want to hold you in my arms while he gives you a beautiful screwing.”

  Which is exactly what happened. Gene came in and the two of them stretched out on either side of me and played with me. I kept laughing and crying with joy. And being sure that this was a dream and I would wake up in the morning back at the orphanage. Finally Marcie did what she had said, holding me on her belly with her arms around me and her hands on my breasts while Gene screwed me. To keep from getting me pregnant he pulled out at the last minute and shot all over my belly. Marcie licked me clean like a puppy dog, and then licked her way lower and ate me again and I came again, and then they tucked me in and said they loved me and would see me in the morning. I started to cry and they got very upset and asked what was the matter. I said I didn’t want them to go away. I wanted to sleep in the same bed with them. They took me into their room and I slept in their big bed with them, and slept there every night for the rest of the time I was with them. I still had my own room, but I never once slept in my own bed again.