3 is Not a Crowd (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  BOB: I never saw her like that before.

  CAROL: I just about lost my mind. She went very, very slow with me. I stretched out with my eyes closed and she just started touching me at first, running her hands very lightly over my body from my shoulders all the way down to the soles of my feet and back again. She just touched me so gently and so lightly. It was like hypnotizing a cat by stroking its fur.

  At first I was telling myself that I didn’t mind this, just hands touching me like that, and with my eyes closed I could even pretend it was a man touching me. But she went on doing the same thing, letting her hands glide over my breasts ever so lightly, and I felt my nipples getting stiff from the contact. Now this is something that just happens, it’s a purely physical reaction that will happen to a girl whoever touches her nipples, whether she feels sexy or not. It’s a reaction, but I felt it happening, and I thought, my Lord, she’s actually getting to me.

  And I stopped wanting to pretend it was a man.

  She went on and got bolder as she went along. I just lay there like a corpse but I was getting stirrings all through my body. She held my breasts and handled them in a wonderful way. I was hot now and there was just no question about it. I was even getting moist from it.

  She started kissing me, just little kisses here and there on my body, and then she began using her tongue on my breasts, and she was fantastic at this. She knew just how to arouse me and she didn’t quit, and then she touched me between my legs, and finally she kissed her way down there and began to tongue me.

  This was something which I always enjoyed when a man did it, but she was different in doing it. You can always tell the difference whether it’s a man or a woman doing this particular thing to you. Not just the obvious differences that her hair was so soft all over my thighs and her cheeks were smooth but the technique she used, the way she knew just what to do and when to do it. The whole feeling you get is different when it’s a woman doing it. Not necessarily that it’s better, but it’s different, and this was the first time I had been with a woman and it was very new and exciting to me.

  Well, I almost lost my mind from it. She was evidently determined to teach me a lesson I would never forget. She could have just made me come right away quick, I was certainly ready for it, but instead she teased me. Not in a nasty way, but she would bring me almost to an orgasm and then she would change what she was doing so that I would cool down for a second, and then she would build me up again, and she kept doing this until I couldn’t stand it any more.

  BOB: I never saw her like that before. Kicking her feet on the floor and moaning and squirming around as though her rear end was on fire.

  CAROL: It was. I was burning. And then when I couldn’t stand another minute of it she took me all the way there and I had a climax that made me scream and scream and scream, and the next thing I knew she had moved away and Bob was on top of me hammering away at me like a madman, and I came again and again until I passed out. I literally passed out as cold as a mackerel.

  Afterward when we all calmed down a bit I asked her if she would want me to do it to her. She said that was strictly up to me and she didn’t want me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I said I didn’t really know how I felt about it but I would do it if she wanted. She said as far as she was concerned she got a great deal of pleasure out of doing it to me and that was more than enough for her. Well, I asked, did she get a climax from doing it to me? She said she didn’t, but she got pleasure out of my climax, that it was as though it was happening to her at the same time.

  I said I would like to give her a climax but I didn’t know how I felt about it, and she begged me not to rush into it because it wouldn’t be good for me that way, or for her, either, I suppose. They lived real close to us so we arranged that we would get together with them the following night by which time I would know one way or another whether that was what I wanted to do. We didn’t generally swing more than once a week but this seemed like a good time to forget about that particular little rule of ours.

  After they left Bob and I talked, and I was a little concerned that he might think I was perverted, you know, a lesbian. But he said watching me with her was the most exciting thing he had ever seen in his life and that it seemed to him as though I was more womanly than ever with her making love to me. And while I didn’t understand exactly what he meant, I did know that I felt all female when she was doing me. And what she was doing, that was female, too. When I had thought about lesbians I had always thought in terms of one of them being the man, you know, but that wasn’t what she had done. There was nothing masculine about her in any way, or about what she did.

  And I guess that was what made me decide to do the same thing to her the next night.

  BOB: She was a natural at it. She had never done this before in her life but you never would have guessed that to watch her.

  CAROL: Well, all I had to do was just what she had done to me. That’s how I started out, and then once I was involved in it, something happened. I don’t quite know how to put it but it was a case of instinctively knowing things about her body because it was a female body like my own, and what I was doing to her was as if I was doing it to myself. I could almost feel what she felt.

  I thought the part of using my mouth on her, that I would find it distasteful. I had decided that I wanted to do it anyway because I would enjoy bringing her pleasure, but I didn’t think I would enjoy my part of it, the act of performing cunnilingus. You know, it’s beginning to sound as though I keep trying things I don’t think I’m going to like and keep finding out that I like them more than I thought I would.

  BOB: That’s what happens to so many people in the course of swinging. The early experiences, as you keep extending your range and trying new things, it’s natural to approach them all with reservations, and time after time you find out that you like this new thing more than you had thought you would. With other couples, again and again the wife would tell us how much she dreaded the first time she made it with another woman, and how it turned out for the best. Except for the ones that may have been with another girl before they started swinging, but they were by far in the minority. Of the couples we have been with, I would estimate in eight out of ten cases the wife was bi, and in better than ninety percent of those cases she had her first bi experience while swinging. You never hear the word “lesbian” in this context, you know. It’s always “bi” or maybe “bi-minded.”

  CAROL: The code word in the ads is “versatile.”

  BOB: And you’re versatile.

  CAROL: And you like it that way.

  • • •

  BOB: Once again, once the ice was broken we spent all our time in the pool. We got to the point almost immediately that we would only arrange meetings where the wife was definitely bi-minded. Sometimes this would involve the two of them putting on a show, or just about as often one girl would make love to the other or they would both do a sixty-nine while the husbands had relations with them simultaneously, either one’s own wife or the other gal.

  With one couple, they wrote a very nice letter explaining that the wife was completely bi-minded but the husband was impotent. It was really a sad case because he had been a normal man in every respect and then he had gone and caught the mumps from his son, and when you get the mumps as a grown man it can have a terrible effect on you. Sometimes you become sterile or in extreme cases you lose your testicles altogether, they don’t function. This is what had happened to him. He had no ability to perform but had not lost his interest in sex. He had the interest but could do nothing about it.

  CAROL: He was a very handsome man, too, and it was sad what had happened to him.

  BOB: For this couple, swinging was a way the wife could go on having a healthy sex life and still have him be a part of it. His pleasure was to be there and watch, and also to do cunnilingus on the women. We agreed to this partly I think because it would have been cruel to turn him down in that situation and partly, too, because it sounded enjoyable to us.r />
  CAROL: And then he decided he wanted to French Bob.

  BOB: He put it in a very inoffensive way and you couldn’t really object to it, the way he put it, but it was the last thing I wanted to do. It wasn’t even a question of having to do it back to him because he got no pleasure that way whether it was done to him by a man or a woman, he said as much. I didn’t want to have any part of it, but I remembered how Carol had felt the same way with that girl the first time, and I thought, well, if you’re a swinger you ought to try everything once.

  CAROL: There are plenty of things we neither of us tried and never will.

  BOB: Within reason, that is. None of this tying people up and whipping them, but anything normal between people. And I knew Carol was bi and that didn’t make her less of a woman, so I figured if I turned out to be bi it wouldn’t make me less of a man. So I let him do it, just Frenching me without any foreplay because any touching would have been distasteful to me, and he did it, and he was good enough at it, but I couldn’t even get hard for the longest time. I didn’t want to disappoint him so I had his wife come over and I fooled with her while he did it, and I paid attention to her and more or less failed to take note of what he was doing to me, so that I could get my mind off the fact that it was a man I was having sex with. And that way I was able to have a climax, but even so it wasn’t good at all and I knew I would never want to do that again.

  • • •

  JWW: The preference for threesomes developed gradually. Bob found himself gradually getting less and less pleasure out of seeing his wife with another man, and Carol in turn found that she was taking infinitely more pleasure from her relations with bi wives than with their husbands. They noticed an increasing proportion of couple ads soliciting meetings either with couples with bisexual wives or with single bi-minded girls. At first they thought such advertisers had extra males available, extra males being a commodity in abundant supply on the swinging scene. Then they realized that the object of these ads was threesomes of two women and a man.

  Their first experience as a trio, however, came not with another woman but with another man.

  • • •

  CAROL: The phone rang one night around dinnertime and it was this fellow we had visited with in Birmingham. He was in town overnight on business and his wife wasn’t with him, and he thought we would like to try a threesome. Now we knew he was legitimate because we had swung with him and his wife before and had had a very good time with them, in fact we hoped to swing with them again. You see, a lot of single men or men whose wives won’t swing will pass themselves off as a couple and then when they come around the excuse is that she’s sick or at a funeral or something of the sort, and then they want to have a threesome with you. We’ve never been stuck that way but we’ve heard plenty of stories.

  BOB: The average swinger is a really good person, very open and aboveboard. But there are a lot of creeps, and nine out of ten times they’re married men who haven’t got the guts to get their wives to swing, or think their wives are too good for it, and they can mess things up for everybody.

  CAROL: But this fellow was all right, so I asked Bob, and he said sure, invite the guy over, but I made it for after dinner because I had lamb chops on and there was no way to stretch them.

  He came over and we had a fairly good time. The two men doubled up on me, one in back and one in front, and actually that’s about all we did, we spent most of our time sitting around and talking. I think he wanted company more than sex anyway, as far as that goes, and he said he always felt strange swinging without his wife and couldn’t really loosen up unless she was there.

  BOB: After he left, Carol and I got to talking, and I said that as far as I was concerned, I’d rather not have a scene like that again. It was all right as far as it went, but I didn’t get much out of it, although I hoped she had enjoyed herself.

  And she said that all things taken into consideration she really didn’t get that much pleasure with the other men, that for sex with men she really preferred just to do it with me, and that for her the highlight of swinging was bi-experiences with the other girl. And we tossed it around, and we came to the conclusion that as far as we in particular were concerned, the other husband was just something you put up with because he was there. That what we both really wanted more than anything else was a threesome with an extra bi-minded girl.

  CAROL: The funny thing was that we had both had this in mind but neither of us would come right out and say it. I don’t know whether it was because I was afraid I would sound like an out-and-out lesbian or what.

  BOB: I thought it would be pure selfishness on my part to suggest it, because I thought Carol would get a lot less out of swinging if there was no other man. I always took it for granted that this was a large part of her pleasure.

  Another personal reason I had for preferring a threesome to a two-couple situation was that I really did not like contact with other men. The one time with the impotent fellow was the only real experience I had, but more and more we were noticing that couples would both be bi-minded, and the man would suggest something. I always said I wasn’t interested and that was the end of that, but turning somebody down puts a damper on things, and then of course you’re not inclined to get together with that particular couple again.

  Also, even if the man isn’t bi-minded and has no interests that way, when you’re all four rolling around together there’s a certain amount of contact between you and the other man that can’t be helped. The worst part of it is that you have to keep being careful and avoiding this, so that with a lot of couples what we would ultimately wind up doing is having one of us men take a turn sitting out and watching while the other did a threesome with the two girls, and then vice versa. That way everybody can just touch whatever’s handy and not have half his mind devoted to worrying who it belongs to.

  CAROL: Once we had it out in the open, how we both felt, we knew just what we were looking for. We went through the ads again and began starting correspondence. There were single girls who would advertise to meet with either couples or single girls, and we tried some of them, but we found that quite often these girls actually were lesbians and not bi-minded. They would put up with the husband in order to get to the wife, and that wasn’t what we were interested in. Then there were other single girls who wanted to swing with couples only, and that was precisely what we wanted, and it worked out very well.

  BOB: There were also girls who were married and their husbands would come along with them or not, depending on how you wanted it. In fact, with one of these couples we arranged that Carol would go and party with them one night, just by herself, and that the other wife would come over alone herself the following night, so that we had a pair of threesomes but with the one couple the other man and I never even set eyes on each other.

  CAROL: We tried that just the once, but I didn’t enjoy swinging without Bob at all, and he didn’t like the idea of it, and we never did it again.

  BOB: It was like being the dummy all night long in a game of bridge. And not even watching the play of the hands.

  CAROL: It was really no good for either of us. Without Bob along, I felt as though I was committing adultery. I felt very uneasy about the whole thing. It didn’t seem to matter to the other wife—she had done this often in the past and was completely at ease, but I didn’t like it.

  BOB: Our first really successful threesome was one we arranged through the mails. This was with a girl named Frannie who lives right here in the Atlanta area. She’s about twenty-three. Her ad said she enjoyed the company of both men and women and wanted to meet refined couples for pleasant evenings. We wrote her a letter and enclosed photographs, and she wrote back with a picture of herself. She explained that she was a high school librarian, lived with her parents, didn’t go out much, and was very lonely.

  CAROL: It was such a straight letter that we sort of wondered if she knew what swinging was all about.

  BOB: Yes, because every once in a while there are people wh
o put an ad in the swinger magazines or answer one, and they are just lonely people who are too square to guess what swinging is all about. They want to make friends because they are lonely, and they think it’s all like pen pals or something of the sort. We had never run into this personally but we had seen ads from time to time where you could tell the person placing the ad didn’t know what it was all about. It didn’t seem this way from Frannie’s ad, but the letter she wrote gave that impression, and the fact that she was a high school librarian living with her parents.

  CAROL: Don’t forget the picture.

  BOB: The picture she sent showed this little mousy girl with granny glasses wearing a dress that didn’t give you any idea what her figure was like. Now we had sent a photo of the two of us in bathing suits, except that Carol here wasn’t wearing the top of her suit, and my trunks were skimpy and you could see the outlines of my erection through them. Nothing you can’t legally send through the mails

  CAROL: Some swingers will send pornographic pictures of themselves to other people in a first letter, and then they wonder why they get into trouble. You would think people would show a little common sense.

  BOB: Well, it looked as though Frannie was showing a little more common sense than usual, or else she just didn’t understand what it was all about. We were a little worried about having her over for the evening, and then one of us making a pass at her and that poor little kid going straight up the wall. So instead of getting on the phone and calling her, Carol wrote out another letter asking her if she had swung much in the past, trying to word it so that if Frannie wasn’t hip to this sort of thing, she would just have it all go over her head, but if she was, then she would know to let us know it.

  CAROL: Well, she called me one morning when Bob was out. She said she was Frannie, and I said hello and how I was glad to hear from her, and then she said evidently she hadn’t made herself very clear in her letter. She had this tiny shy little-girl voice.