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

by Lawrence Block

  It was too good to last.

  If only it could have lasted. I really wonder what would have happened. Under normal circumstances I suppose that kind of experience over a period of years could be terrible for a girl. But my circumstances weren’t normal. Technically I guess you would have to say they seduced me. It wasn’t real seduction, though. I wanted it more than they did. And I loved everything about it and never felt bad about it once, not even for a minute.

  It didn’t feel like incest. Because they weren’t my mother and father in that sense. They were Gene and Marcie and we had related to each other in this way from the beginning. I’m sure they sensed that potential in me and it was one of the things that led them to pick me.

  If only it could have lasted.

  It wasn’t just the sex. We were together all the time and close all the time and it wasn’t just the sex, either. They really had a feeling for me and I had one for them. The sex was wonderful and we did fantastic things together but it wasn’t just the sex.

  Talking about it, it makes them sound like terrible perverts. If you just cover the bare facts, that’s what they come off sounding like. But they didn’t want to corrupt me or do things because they were evil or forbidden. They wanted this particular arrangement, a daughter who would be a part of their lives and be shared sexually by them. And they were at ease enough with what they wanted, especially because I was at ease with it myself, so that everything could be open and honest and loving.

  It lasted three months. Then what happened was that Cindy was placed in another foster home, and there was some sort of misunderstanding between her and her new foster parents, and she wound up telling them that Marcie and Gene had seduced her and done various things to her. I had heard all of this from them, and what happened was that they tried to have the same thing with her as they later had with me, but Cindy wasn’t the right girl for it and couldn’t handle it emotionally. She let Marcie and Gene both make love to her several times and then got very guilty about it, and they agreed to return her to the orphanage and not blame her in any way if she would promise not to say anything about what had happened. And Cindy went along with this and meant to keep her promise, but I guess she got nervous or depressed or something and had to talk about it, and once she started her foster parents managed to drag the entire story out of her, all the gory details and none of the loving undertones that made it such a different thing from what it must have sounded to them.

  They went straight to the authorities, and Gene and Marcie were arrested and I was taken into custody and badgered for hours by a couple of lawyers and a social worker. They trapped me with questions until I couldn’t help admitting what had happened. Then they told me that I would have to testify against Marcie and Gene at the trial, and I told them they couldn’t make me do it no matter what they did. Ultimately there was no trial. Gene sold his drugstores in a rush sale and they moved out of the state.

  And I was back in the orphanage.

  I was never placed in a home again. I made damned sure I wouldn’t be. When people came through, prospective foster parents, I was sullen and grumpy and made myself look ugly, and nobody showed any interest in me at all.

  • • •

  Monica left the orphanage at sixteen. Until then, she was listless, bitter, withdrawn. She was not allowed to write to Gene and Marcie or even receive mail from them; indeed, she did not know where they had moved. Gradually a certain ambivalence crept into her feelings toward them. She went on loving them but found herself blaming them for having failed to keep her with them. Even though she recognized this as irrational, it seemed to her that there should have been something they could have done. Why hadn’t they found a way to take her along when they left town? Why hadn’t they picked her instead of Cindy in the first place, so that all of this trouble could have been avoided?

  Alternately, she blamed herself. It was she who had chased her stepfather from the house, banished her mother to an insane asylum and subsequently to her death. It was her sexual nature which had ruined three foster relationships prior to this one. Obviously she was an evil girl, and her bad fortune was just punishment.

  She formed no friendships during those three years, had few conversations, became wholly asexual in her actions. She had no sexual relations with any of the other girls or boys, and did not even masturbate. She seems to have been successful in utterly repressing her sexual impulses. While they surfaced constantly in dreams, they never appear to have troubled her waking hours.

  On her sixteenth birthday she left the orphanage. Almost immediately she left the state and moved to the East Coast, where she lived first in Philadelphia and, after two and a half years, in New York. She had learned typing at the orphanage and got an office job, living cheaply at the YWCA and taking night secretarial courses at a business college.

  Twice she formed intimate non-sexual relationships with older couples, first with a woman in her office and the woman’s husband, later with her boss and his mistress. (The boss had a wife and children in Connecticut but maintained a New York apartment where he stayed four nights a week with his mistress while spending his weekends in the country. Monica assumed her boss’s wife knew of the arrangement and tolerated it.)

  Both of these relationships were quasi-parental ones. The men became her fathers, the women her mothers. She confided in each set of mock parents, sought them out in times of stress and anxiety, and loved them not individually but as a couple. These relationships never took on any overt sexual aspects.

  “I did not want sex with them,” she told me. “This was a conscious decision on my part. I definitely decided that I needed them and that sex could only ruin everything. I was attracted to both the man and the woman in both instances and I could not help wishing that a miracle could happen, but I resolved not to take a chance of ruining things. I just turned myself off sexually. If either man ever flirted with me, which happened very rarely and tentatively, I just pretended not to notice it.

  “But if there had been a big play made for me, I don’t think I could have resisted. And I’m glad that never happened because at that particular stage it was just what I didn’t need from them. I needed security, and each pair gave me that in turn, and that was what I had to have more than anything else. The feeling that I could go to them with my problems. That I could be with them and be at ease with them. That mattered to me far more than sex.”

  In Philadelphia Monica dated a boy a few years older than herself and, after a long period of courtship, had sex with him. The sex was disappointing, perhaps because of his lack of prior experience. She also had a brief affair with a married man which was sexually more satisfying but emotionally nerve-wracking, with considerable guilt on both sides. The affair terminated when she moved to New York, a move she undertook largely at the urging of her substitute parents, Monica’s co-worker and her husband. (These Philadelphia parent-figures were later replaced in New York by the boss and his mistress.)

  Over the next few years, she drifted through a series of relatively brief sexual alliances. At one point she encountered Gene, who was in town for some sort of convention. He and Marcie had since been divorced, a piece of news that shook Monica badly. She wound up getting drunk with Gene and spending the night with him in his hotel room, but was “too drunk to remember whether either of us enjoyed it or not.” The entire experience left a bad taste in her mouth.

  Her orientation toward bisexual relations with a couple returned shortly after the death of her boss. Monica was then twenty-two and felt that she had once again lost a father. She consoled the man’s mistress for quite a bit of time after the funeral but began to draw away from her out of fear that she would wind up seducing the older woman. (She had had intermittent homosexual contacts over the past few years but did not want to introduce this complication into what remained of their relationship.)

  • • •

  I was suddenly very much alone again and needed something to take the place of what I had had. There was a di
fference, and I believe it grew out of a combination of factors. I myself was older and the couples I began to become friendly with were either my own age or fairly close to it. In certain ways I still used them as parents, but all of that was happening on a much subtler and less obvious level.

  What usually seemed to happen was that I would be dating a boy and meet a couple on a double date of some sort. I then wound up hitting it off better with the couple than with the boy I was dating, and I would find excuses to see them without having him along. I would stop over because I happened to be in the neighborhood, or I would happen to have a couple of tickets to something and give them to them because I couldn’t go myself, and they would pay me back by having me over for dinner. Sometimes I would just see them a few times and other times I would get more involved with them.

  There was always sex in it, in that I was always thinking in terms of sex. Not right from the beginning, not consciously, I would really believe that I wanted friends, and that by being friends with a couple I would be safe from the sexual pressures that are present when you are in a one-to-one relationship with either a man or a woman. But the couples I sought out this way were ones to whom I was physically attracted, and as soon as we got to know each other I would find myself wanting to go to bed with either him or her. Or both of them—except I didn’t think this could happen. I liked to entertain it in fantasy and would play with myself thinking about it, or use it as a fantasy when I was having sex with someone else to increase my pleasure in the act.

  In a few instances this led to actual sex. It is really pathetically easy for a halfway attractive girl to get almost any man to make love to her. Just about all you have to do is let him know you want to. I could spend an evening sitting over coffee with a couple, and just by flashing the guy the right kind of look a couple times in the course of the evening, I could virtually guarantee that he would call me at work the next day and ask me out to lunch.

  I enjoyed this kind of sex more than otherwise. I had more fun in bed with a man if I was friendly with his wife or girlfriend. The problem was the tension it created. It tended to make other meetings with both of them uncomfortable.

  Once on an occasion of this sort I nearly had sex with one of the girls. I watched television with both of them and we had quite a bit of wine to drink, both with dinner and afterward, and I kissed him goodbye and then she walked me to the elevator, and I went to give her a sisterly kiss goodnight and something happened. It turned out to be more of a kiss than either of us intended.

  I’m sure she had been with girls before. The look of recognition that she gave me. Then she said, “I’m not ready for this, Monica.”

  I said, “I want to kiss you again.”

  But she shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s not something he would understand. And I won’t do anything that he doesn’t want, or that I have to keep a secret from him. I wish we could just be friends but I don’t think we can because I don’t think I could take it.”

  I wanted to cry. I said I knew she was right but that I wanted her to kiss me one more time. We fell into each other and went into a long clinch. We felt each other’s bodies and soul-kissed passionately. I found myself wishing he would come out into the hallway and discover us but he didn’t, and I got onto the elevator and went home. I called her a couple of days later. She was very friendly on the phone but refused to see me alone and said it made no sense for me to see them both, that it would just be frustrating for both of us. I agreed to drop the subject.

  I was obviously feeling my way toward a certain kind of sex and eventually it happened. Another couple, the girl worked in my new office and her husband was in market research. The second night I saw them the subject of the conversation got around to sex, and we talked about permissive marriages and the new morality. Once again wine loosened things up. When he went to the bathroom she sat on the couch next to me and said that her husband wanted to go to bed with me, and that she could tell I found him attractive. I was flustered and couldn’t reply. She went on to say that she had no objection if I would like to make love to him. That in the six years of their marriage he had had other girls from time to time and she did not mind in the least. In fact she approved and felt that it made for a healthier marriage for them both.

  I asked her if she had other men also. She said they had gone so far as to exchange partners with other couples on three occasions but she only did this so he could have other women. That she did not really enjoy sex with other men because various inhibitions kept her from relaxing in that situation and thus the sex was not very enjoyable. Besides she felt that it bothered her husband for her to be with other men, although he insisted this was not so.

  When he came back from the bathroom we all sat there as if nothing had been said, although I caught an exchange of looks between them which indicated that they had planned to have her broach the subject.

  I was very bold. I don’t know which had more to do with it, the wine or the excitement I felt. But I wanted everything to be right out in the open.

  I said, “Karen says it’s all right if you and I go to bed. It sounds like fun to me. How do you feel about it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s see if we turn each other on.”

  He came over and kissed me and I was on fire. He grinned at me and said that certainly answered that question.

  “Maybe you won’t like my body,” I said. And took everything off. He looked me up and down very thoroughly and then removed all his own clothes. He had a beautiful erection. I got down on my knees and kissed the tip of it, then stood up. I turned to look at Karen. She blushed and said something about going out for a pack of cigarettes. I said, “But why leave? Wouldn’t you like to watch us fuck?”

  Then I told her it would be sexier if she were naked, too. She got undressed and I looked from one of them to the other and thought how beautiful they were. I went over and kissed Phil and touched his penis. Then I told him to kiss Karen and got still more aroused watching them in each other’s arms. When they separated I went up to her and said, “Our turn now,” and before she knew what was happening I had my tongue in her mouth and my breasts pressing into hers and I was poking my pelvis against hers so that our hairs touched.

  She had never been with a girl before. She was afraid of it but Phil and I talked her into it together. We both kissed her and I kept telling her what I was going to do. I purposely used dirty words knowing that they would turn her on. I told her I would have her sucking my cunt. I was very graphic about it. Then I went down on her and ate her while Phil came up behind me and fucked me.

  I stayed there all night. The next day was Saturday and we barely got out of bed all day. She was an absolute bisexual and had never even suspected it, but by the time Saturday morning came around she damn well knew it. In no time at all I had her eating me and loving it. She didn’t have any of the problems with me that she had had with other men. I guess she didn’t feel that I was competing with her husband but that I was something different and thus no threat to her feelings for him. Whatever it was, she loved making love with me and he loved the idea of his wife with another girl, so what had started out as a plan for her helping him seduce me had turned into a case of me seducing her. Not that any of the three of us had anything to complain about.

  • • •

  Early in this relationship, Monica thought that the threesome with Karen and Phil would be permanent and exclusive. It did not turn out to be either. Karen and Phil found that they had a strong need for variety, and the success of their troilistic experience with Monica led them to desire similar experiences with other bisexual females. For her part, Monica found that sex with Karen and Phil, while enormously exciting and satisfying, still fell somewhat short of her ideal insofar as a permanent arrangement was concerned. The two were closer to each other than either was to Monica, and they intended to keep it that way. There was no suggestion that she move in with them, for example, although they did not tire of having her as an ov
ernight guest.

  This realization on Monica’s part, while at first quite disheartening, ultimately had a liberating effect. Quite consciously, Monica began “trying on” a variety of unorthodox sexual relationships, attended a few group sex parties, and ultimately narrowed her focus to threesomes. She became acquainted with the media of the sexual underground and engaged in some tentative correspondence which led to a series of one-night meetings with couples.

  For a time this proved to be both satisfying and frustrating; she almost always enjoyed herself fully but never found quite what she was looking for. It was largely as a result of this ambivalence that she consulted a psychiatrist, and through talks with him came to understand that she would never literally find Mommy and Daddy and would be happier if she did not torture herself by holding up all her sexual unions against an impossible ideal.

  She also was able to accept her bisexual nature more completely than previously.

  As Monica said, the present composition of the sexual underground is such that she has abundant opportunity to have the sort of relationship she desires as often as she could possibly desire it. For a long time, she restricted herself to one-night liaisons. Whether or not she particularly enjoyed a couple, both physically and emotionally, she made it a point to swing with them only once. This came about as a result of two currents, a desire for as much diversity of experience as possible and a fear of getting involved, this last no doubt stemming from her earlier disappointment at caring more for Karen and Phil than they cared for her. She felt it would be better “not to let myself get hurt and not to lay any trips on other people.”

  Now she has become less reluctant to meet couples a second time, although the majority of her contacts are still single visits. While she still occasionally finds herself wishing for a permanent ménage à trois which would be essentially a three-way marriage, she says she doubts she would really be able to function in that sort of situation if it should be proposed.