3 is not a Crowd

Peter & Wanda & Grace

JWW: Peter and Wanda and Grace St. John share a spacious two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise near Lincoln Center, on the West Side of Manhattan. Peter is a furniture designer, and most of the furnishings in the apartment are his work. He is successful in his work, and Wanda also earns a good living as a freelance interior decorator. Her interest is period decoration, while Peter’s taste runs to the extremely modern. Grace does not work, but occasionally earns money posing for more or less pornographic photographs and acting in exploitation films and stag movies.

Peter is twenty-seven, below average in height, with blond hair and blue eyes and typical Anglo-Saxon features. He is slender and occasionally almost elfin in his movements. Wanda, Peter’s sister, is a year his senior and very much like him in appearance. She is slightly taller than he is, and her hair, blond like his, is worn long and loose. Grace is Peter’s wife. She is twenty-two, red-haired, voluptuous, and short.

Peter and Grace have been married for three years. About a year and a half ago Wanda joined them.

My interviewing of the St. Johns spanned several sessions. Grace was not always present.

PETER: Let me tell you one thing. I don’t have any real idea how people get the way they are, and I don’t think anybody else does, either. In the past twelve years or so Wanda and I between us have seen perhaps two dozen psychiatrists and psychologists and psychoanalysts, and they can help you trace things back and see the sequence in which things occurred and the way one thing may have led to another. It’s a very elaborate game, and quite often it becomes quite an absorbing one in the bargain. You learn no end of things about yourself.

But I don’t know that it answers any basic questions.

I find it just as easy — perhaps easier — to believe that we are simply born the way we are. If you can believe that a handful of genes and chromosomes determine our precise physical makeup, everything from the shapes of our noses to the patterns on our fingertips, I don’t see why it should be any harder to believe that those same genes and chromosomes determine our personalities. They are more and more coming to believe that mental illness itself is physical, either chemical or glandular or whatever the latest theory maybe. Biochemical to one degree or another. If this is so, it seems eminently reasonable to me that less radical personality traits are also biochemical, and predetermined from the moment of conception. Or from the moment of birth, if you’re astrologically inclined. Grace is, by the way. Wanda and I are not.

WANDA: All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Peter thinks we were born perverted.

PETER: Not perverted. Kinky.

GRACE: What’s the difference?

PETER: Perverted is nasty and sick. Kinky is just tons of fun.

WANDA: Then we were perverted and we gradually turned kinky.

PETER: Absolutely wrong.

WANDA: What, then?

PETER: We were born kinky, and the world turned us perverted, and now we’re just kinky again.

GRACE: Do tell.

PETER: There were just the two of us. No other brothers or sisters, that is. My mother did have another child when I was five. A stillbirth, he would have been a boy. I gather he was deformed.

WANDA: Physically kinky, dear.

PETER: Wanda and I were always very close. From the cradle, so to speak. We were so close in age, you know. Just thirteen months apart. I’m sure the parents didn’t plan it that way. I rather suspect I was a misconception.

WANDA: We were both accidents, dear. Mother told me once, in a fit of pique. We were neither of us hoped for. She would have preferred to have no children, she confided.

PETER: Filthy bitch. Can you picture the two of them together? Her with one eye on the clock, I’m sure. I’m glad they’re dead.

WANDA: Don’t say that.

PETER: Why on earth not...? Where was I? As I was saying, Wanda and I were very close. As far back as I can recall, early in childhood, I took it for granted that someday I would grow up and marry Wanda. I vaguely remember being told that I couldn’t do this, that brothers and sisters couldn’t marry one another. And this struck me as grossly unfair. Of course I was going to marry Wanda. I loved her and would marry her and we would have children together.

WANDA: Perish forbid.

PETER: Quite. Our genes aren’t that worthy of perpetuation, are they? And in combination we’d have to produce an utter monster. The thalidomide babies would pale by comparison. I did manage to impregnate Wanda once, as it happened.

WANDA: I was fifteen.

PETER: She was aborted in the third month, and I didn’t even get to see her after the operation; they shunted her right off to a funny farm. Now both my angels are on the pill, so there will be no little St. Johns. I rather wish they didn’t keep finding out new bad things about the pill.

GRACE: Oh, they’re twisting it all out of proportion. I heard that the Catholics are behind it.

PETER: All a papist plot? You really heard that? No, I’m afraid it’s more than that. I’m afraid the pill is really bad for you. Not as bad as being pregnant, but not as good as Vitamin C. Rather a shame Vitamin C doesn’t keep one from getting pregnant.

I suppose I shall eventually break down and have a vasectomy, but something within me has kept me from doing that yet. We’ll see what happens.

To continue, the first time Wanda and I had sexual relations was when she was nine and I was eight.

WANDA: We had played before this. Showed each other what we had.

PETER: Which was precious little at that age.

WANDA: We took baths together, you see, and were naked around each other rather often. And we would touch each other. I remember being absolutely fascinated by Peter’s little penis. I thought it was just the cutest thing. I don’t know whether I wanted one of my own or not.

PETER: You could always have borrowed mine. All you had to do was speak up.

WANDA: Psychiatrists suggested this, that I wanted a penis of my own, that I wanted Peter’s penis. So I can’t really say whether this was true or not because it was suggested to me so often. I know I loved to watch him urinate, and sometimes I would hold it for him when he did, and I would move it around to make little patterns in the bowl.

PETER: We could still do that, if you want.

WANDA: Do shut up.

PETER: Just as she was supposed to envy me my penis, I was supposed to be vaguely disappointed that she didn’t have one. I don’t remember any such disappointment. The theory is that a little boy looks at a little girl and is distressed to find nothing there. I don’t know where these people have been, but when I look at the juncture of a girl’s legs I don’t see nothing. I see something quite charming. A female pubis is certainly remarkable for more reasons than the absence of a penis. I found Wanda quite fascinating in that respect.

WANDA: He used to put his little finger in.

PETER: I would wash it for her when we bathed. I strongly recommend this, by the way. We were quite the cleanest little children on earth, and our genitals absolutely squeaked with cleanliness. It was no trouble getting us into the tub. I remember bathing as quite the best part of childhood.

I was eight and Wanda nine when we first began to have intercourse. A surprising number of people find this difficult to believe. I’m damned if I know why. Boys that age get erections all the time. It may be small, but it gets stiff enough, and one wouldn’t want it too big if one were going to put it into a nine-year-old girl, would one?

Wanda initiated it. I was in my room and she came in and said she had found out how people made babies. We had both had a vague idea but it was rather confused. I seem to remember the belief that there was urination involved, the male was supposed to urinate into the vagina.

WANDA: Which can be great fun, but has little to do with having babies.

PETER: She explained that she had to lie down and open her legs and I was to get on top of her and put my pee-pee into her — what did we used to call your cunt?

WANDA: I think we called mine a pee-pee, too.

PETER: Had to put my pee-pee into her pee-pee — I’m sure we had a special name for yours and I wish to hell I could remember what it was — and that then she would have a baby. So I thought it would be a great idea to try it, and she got undressed and stretched out in my bed and opened her legs, and I got on top of her, and I didn’t have an erection and couldn’t get it in.

WANDA: It was like trying to thread a needle with a strand of cooked spaghetti.

PETER: Isn’t she charming? It was oddly frustrating. We knew we were doing something wrong, leaving something out, but couldn’t imagine what. I used to get erections all the time—

WANDA: I’m sure he was born with one.

PETER: It’s possible, you know. You’re joking, but babies are born with erections all the time.

GRACE: All the time?

PETER: Frequently, idiot. I got them when Wanda and I had sex play, or when I had to urinate, or riding in a fast car. All manner of things get a little boy hard.

WANDA: Including little girls.

PETER: Including little girls. So I was used to having erections, and I knew that it felt better to have an erection than not, and that it felt particularly good when I was hard when Wanda played with me. But it didn’t seem to occur to either of us that an erection would facilitate this baby-making which we were trying to accomplish.

We squirmed around for quite some time, and it felt very nice, but I couldn’t get inside of her. Then we gave it up and lay there talking, trying to figure out what was wrong. We were lying side by side, and Wanda put her hand on my penis and just held it gently, giving it a sisterly squeeze now and then, and you shouldn’t be too astonished to hear that it became erect in due course.

It was like Archimedes in the bloody bathtub. All of a sudden I realized what we had left out. “I think it’ll go in now,” I told her, and of course she was anxious to try it.

But it wouldn’t quite, because Wanda was tight and dry and said it was hurting her. We figured out that maybe it would be easier if we wet my pee-pee, so she put spit on her hands and wet my penis, which felt quite divine. Then we tried again, and it went right into her.

Well, it was absolutely unbelievable. Quite a difference between this and a soapy hand in the bathtub. It was just incredibly sensational.

Wanda’s store of information didn’t include the fact that I was supposed to work it in and out and in and out, but I seemed to know this instinctively. I did this, and Wanda wiggled her little tail as if she had been doing this all her life, and after not too long had a climax. I was too young to be producing any sperm, but I definitely ejaculated. Seminal fluid, I suppose it was. This was the first time I had ever had an orgasm or an emission.

I didn’t know what it was. I had gathered from what she told me that something came out of the penis during intercourse but I thought it might be urine or something of the sort, and I had no idea that there was this incredibly wonderful feeling involved in the process. I had been delighted enough with the way intercourse felt, but this was an added and wholly unanticipated bonanza.

WANDA: I also had a climax. I’m certain that I did. I’ve been solemnly told that this was impossible, but I also understand it’s impossible for a bumblebee to fly, according to science. Fortunately bumblebees are not scientifically inclined and they go on flying whether they’re supposed to or not. I had a climax whether I was supposed to or not.

PETER: We were confident that Wanda was going to have a baby. There’s a joke which I can’t quite remember in which a pair of earthlings demonstrate reproduction to some Martians and the Martians are astonished that the baby doesn’t appear for nine months... I wish I remembered the joke — from what I just said you wouldn’t believe there was anything hysterical about it, would you? The point, though, is that we expected the baby to come out almost at once. When hours went by without Wanda’s giving birth, we thought we had done something wrong.

Then over the next few weeks the two of us picked up a great body of information on the subject. We both consulted with various schoolmates and asked no end of questions, and Wanda found an erotic novel that one of our parents had done a poor job of hiding—

WANDA: Not an erotic novel. Pure and simple pornography. One of those mimeographed tracts with every other word misspelled. Sadomasochistic, too. I remember the plot. A waitress finishes work and her boss takes her to a nightclub where there’s a sex performance on stage, and then her boss, who’s been feeling her under the table, hands her over to the woman and two men who have been performing. He tells them that she’s a virgin, and they strip her and torture her and force her to do all manner of things, and finally they gang fuck her, and by the time it’s over she loves it, and her boss takes her home and screws her ass off. The sadism was really very freaky, but we were most interested in the book as a source of information on how to copulate. There were some rather crude drawings in which all the men had immense penises—

PETER: Made one feel inadequate.

WANDA: One of our parents, indeed. Obviously it was our father’s. With that bitch for a wife he must have jerked off over dirty books ten times a day.

PETER: What do you suppose she jerked off over?

WANDA: I don’t know. God knows. Copies of Vogue, I suppose.

PETER: I was thinking Parke-Bernet catalogues.

WANDA: I like that much better. Isn’t that a lovely image? Masturbating over a description of a Sheraton tea caddy. Oh, I love that!

PETER: I’m trying to remember just what we learned during that period. That we couldn’t have babies, for one thing. We learned the right thing for the wrong reason — as we understood it, you couldn’t have babies unless you were married, and we already knew that you couldn’t get married until you were grown up. We also learned — perhaps we had always known this — that you couldn’t marry your sister, that brother and sister couldn’t marry. This disturbed us but I think we more or less tabled the matter, figuring that we would work something out when the time came.

We also learned any number of positions to screw in. The dirty book was particularly instructive in this respect. We learned about oral sex, which had never occurred to us, and about buggery. The book was wildly enthusiastic about buggery. They kept fucking this poor waitress up the ass, and she never did enjoy that part. It was evidently supposed to be excruciatingly painful, and we almost decided to forego the pleasure on the basis of this description.

WANDA: I said why not try it and stop if it hurts, which seemed reasonable enough. And it didn’t hurt a bit.

PETER: If I had been hung like one of those gorillas in the book—

WANDA: Oh, well, that was ridiculous. That’s the trouble with pornography, it’s positively surrealistic. If you had been built like those apes you would have disabled a brood mare, let alone your sister.

PETER: I don’t want to let alone my sister.

WANDA: Jack, we were the sexiest kinkiest little devils imaginable. It was really incredible. We had the sense to know that we weren’t supposed to be doing this, so we didn’t say anything to anyone. And kept it from our parents, which wasn’t difficult because they were hardly ever around. We would do it almost every day and we became quite accomplished. Invented positions of our own and everything. At nine years old, I was a rather artful cocksucker. Few girls can make that statement.

PETER: Few girls can make that statement at any age.

WANDA: If it weren’t for the rest of the world, I don’t think we ever would have had any trouble staying sane. As far as that goes, if we ever did have children—

PETER: No.

WANDA: Just as a hypothesis.

PETER: No. I don’t even care for the hypothesis.

WANDA: If you had children with Grace. Or if we adopted children.

PETER: No.

WANDA: Oh, shut up and let me talk, please. I don’t want children, either; this is purely hypothetical.

PETER: Go ahead.

WANDA: I would be in favor of bringing them up to screw each other. I am absolutely serious. What a sane clean healthy way to grow up! Every brother and sister want to do it. They may never realize it, but the desire is universal.

PETER: They want to screw their parents, too. Would you draw a line?

WANDA: No.

PETER: Neither would I.

GRACE: I think I would draw a line at that.

PETER: That’s your hang-up.

GRACE: I guess.

WANDA: I never wanted to screw him. Did you ever want to screw Mother?

PETER: It never occurred to me. Not until a quack shrink suggested it. My reaction, as I recall, was one of nausea. She was dead by then and I pictured myself in bed with her rotting corpse and I retched. I didn’t bother explaining the image to the quack and he was sure we were on the verge of an earthshaking breakthrough. Stupid son of a bitch!

WANDA: But if children were brought up that way—

PETER: I think they do that in some of those islands. The places Margaret Mead goes to.

WANDA: Would you want your children to screw Margaret Mead?

PETER: Only if they really loved her.

WANDA: And if she has any kids, I want them brought up Catholic.

PETER: You’re a perfect goose. You truly are.

JWW: Observations on ideal ways to raise children and the advisability of encouraging their early sexual experimentation were voiced frequently in the course of our several meetings. It may seem remarkable that persons so thoroughly opposed to the idea of having children had so much to say on the topic of raising them. I think this is less a contradiction than it seems. Both Peter and Wanda were very much aware that the subsequent emotional problems derived in large measure from the manner in which their sexual behavior was dealt with, and blame their parents for this. Furthermore, it would seem to me that by defending the position that brother-sister sexual relationships should be encouraged, they are defending their own early behavior and at once expunging any guilt they may feel for past acts and for their present situation as well.

Grace had relatively little to say on the subject of her childhood sexual experiences. She did mention that she was seduced at a very early age by a lover of her mother’s, who performed cunnilingus upon her on several occasions and induced her to masturbate him. She seems to have been five or six at the time, the relationship was undiscovered and was terminated after a very short period of time when the man abruptly disappeared. She reported no further sexual experience until initial coitus at age fifteen with a boy her own age.

This sort of childhood seduction at the hands of a male father figure is classic. It occurs with uncanny regularity in the case histories of prostitutes and female homosexuals. While it is generally acknowledged that the memory is occasionally false — that the seduction did not in fact occur — in the great majority of instances the act did seem to have taken place.

WANDA: We had been having sex for months before anyone found out. Then one afternoon one of the maids walked in on us. I had Peter’s pee-pee in my mouth at the time and was lying there with my eyes closed sucking him.

PETER: By this time we knew its right name. We didn’t still call it a pee-pee.

WANDA: And this woman walked in. Woman? She wasn’t much more than a girl herself. Maybe twenty years old, a little Irish thing fresh off the boat from County Something. She very nearly went into cardiac arrest. You can imagine the effect this had on her. In her eyes, fellatio was a mortal sin even if the two participants were husband and wife. For a girl to be sucking off her brother, that was the height of sin! Or the depth of sin, perhaps.

PETER: She beat the living shit out of us, Jack. No one ever hit us, neither our parents nor the help. It just didn’t happen. But she completely lost her cool and slapped us silly, and then she sat us down and told us at great length about Hell and how we were certain to go there. She said we would go there anyway because we were Protestants, but we would burn for eternity in the very inner circle of Hell for what we were doing, and we would have to stop immediately and never so much as touch each other again, or even touch ourselves, and if I ever touched my penis again it would shrivel up and drop off, and, oh, it just went on like this forever.

WANDA: I was terrified.

PETER: We were both terrified. I believe I was honestly less frightened of hellfire or even my cock dropping off than I was of this dried-up little bitch losing control completely and beating us to death. And we were also afraid she would tell our parents, of course.

WANDA: She couldn’t bring herself to do this, though. The words would have been too much for her to speak. Evidently she couldn’t even bear to think about it, because she left within the week, collected her wages and went away and never came back. For which I give thanks.

PETER: It might have been better if she told them.

WANDA: Are you mad?

PETER: I’m not sure it would have been worse that way. As it was, she left us in a pretty bad way. We had known for a long time that we were doing something wrong, but we had never seen anything wrong with it, and we didn’t know it was considered to be anywhere near as sinful as she led us to believe. Also, we weren’t sure whether or not any of the stuff she l said was true, such as my cock dropping off.

WANDA: It was scary.

PETER: It was. We talked about it, we talked of nothing else, and we finally decided that maybe we had better stop doing this. That sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? After all, you wouldn’t think it would be too great a hardship for children that age to get along without sex. Most of them do, after all.

WANDA: I wonder. I’ll bet a lot more children have sex at that age than anybody realizes.

PETER: It’s tempting to think so. I’m not sure it’s true.

Let’s say, though, that most children don’t. Not at that age. Not on a regular basis. But we had gotten used to it, you see, and it was — I was going to say it was like a drug, which would not be true at all. It was habit forming in quite another way. We were used to it and we loved it, and how could we suddenly stop taking baths together? Or stop wanting each other? Childhood is not the time when self-denial comes easily. It’s not the natural impulse of a child. It takes maturity to enable people to delude themselves into giving up the things they enjoy and doing things they hate. A child is made of simpler stuff. He does what he likes and doesn’t do what he doesn’t like, and what we liked to do was have sex, and until that bitch walked in on us we had been doing just fine.

WANDA: We gave it up for a while. Then we decided maybe it would be all right as long as he didn’t get inside of my vagina, so we stuck to extra-coital things. Oral and anal and manual pleasures. They were great good fun, and we evidently managed to slough off the fact that the maid had found this sort of thing even worse than screwing. You would have thought it would be the other way around, after the way she had acted.

PETER: She yelled at Wanda, “How can you put a filthy thing like that into your mouth?” Filthy? After the way Wanda washed it?

WANDA: After, I don’t know, a few months of this, one day Peter said, “You know, I really would like to fuck you, and we haven’t done it in so long.” So we did it, and from then on we resumed doing it regularly.

PETER: It’s amazing we got away with it as long as we did. After the maid discovered us, that is. We had almost three years after that. It seems incredible now that we managed for so long.

WANDA: We were very careful. And we were extremely bright children, don’t forget. And good at keeping secrets. We never did anything with any other children. Never even considered it. Never talked about anything with them. This was a completely private thing of ours and we had no intention of sharing it with anyone. Otherwise I’m sure we would have been discovered much earlier, but this way it stayed a secret.

PETER: Until she found out, that bitch.

WANDA: Mother.

PETER: That bitch.

GRACE: Was she really such a bitch or is it just the way she was with you two?

PETER: No, she really was.

WANDA: I don’t know how she found out. Whether she figured it out by herself or whether one of the servants found out and told her. But from then on nothing was ever the same.

PETER: I would prefer it if we talked about the next seven or eight years as little as possible. It was a horrible time, and in a great many ways we’re still in the process of recovering from it.

They sent us to psychiatrists, and everybody asked us questions and talked to us and showed us ink blots and otherwise conspired to drive us insane. And it’s not particularly hard to drive a person insane. I’m sure if you take any normal healthy individual and send him to a funny farm and keep him there for a few months, you’ll have a lunatic on your hands. We’ve been in a variety of those institutions, from the ones that are like country clubs except that it’s hard to get out, to others that are more like prisons. And they’re all basically the same.

The result of this, of course, is that we did become crazy. They kept us apart and filled us full of guilt and institutionalized us and shunted us to first one doctor and then another, and we both flipped out in different ways. They weren’t complete breakdowns, but some of them were pretty good ones. Wanda tried to kill herself a couple of times. She still has scars on her wrists.

WANDA: I would love not to talk about that.

PETER: Fair enough. I want to convey as much as I can of that period without going into any more detail than I have to. I think the worst of it was that they kept us apart. Each of us was literally all the other had. Not just sexually, but in every way. Wanda was my other self. We had no secrets from each other.

WANDA: It was inconceivable for us to have secrets from each other.

PETER: Absolutely. Just inconceivable. We shared everything. We were slightly telepathic.

WANDA: We still are. And I would call it more than slight.

PETER: But it doesn’t prove out on Rhine tests. It’s not true ESP in that sense. Each of us generally knows what the other is thinking, but that’s because our minds are so close, our thoughts generally follow similar lines. And we’re very sensitive to each other’s moods, we have great sympathy in the real sense of the word.

For us to be separated, for our whole relationship to be thrown at us as something hideously shameful, was catastrophic for us. In a way it was better when one or both of us was under lock and key somewhere. At least that way the separation was surgically complete. But when we were both under one roof and still forbidden to do anything, and watched over constantly, and unable to be close and at the same time unable to stop wanting to be close

WANDA: It was very hard to take.

PETER: Impossible to take. And at the same time I realize that there wasn’t much else they could do.

WANDA: Oh, the hell there wasn’t!

PETER: What could they do?

WANDA: They could have left us the hell alone.

PETER: No, not really. You could have done that, in their position. But that’s not the way they were, that’s not the way they saw things. Look, we’re far advanced from their level. We have completely different views on certain things.

WANDA: On almost everything.

PETER: Granted. From our perspective, there’s nothing wrong with a brother and sister fucking. From theirs, which I grant you is a lot of crap, there was everything in the world wrong with it. I think they sincerely wanted what was best for us. This doesn’t take away from the fact that I also think they were the world’s worst parents, but their hearts were in the right place even if their heads weren’t.

WANDA: I could argue, but the hell with it.

PETER: Exactly. The hell with it.

I suppose it goes without saying that we got together every chance we had. I think I already mentioned that I managed to impregnate Wanda on one such occasion. There were many such occasions. Not as many as we could have wished, but as often as we could manage it.

We learned to put up a pretty good front. We learned to be very distant with each other whenever there was anybody around. And of course we would assure everybody — our parents, the doctors — that we were through with each other forever, that it was a horrible childhood mistake that could have had tragic consequences if we hadn’t nipped it in the bud, and that we fully realized the error of our ways.

WANDA: Sometimes this was true. That is, sometimes we did feel this way. You get brainwashed sooner or later. But eventually we would shake loose again and be ourselves, and being ourselves meant being together.

PETER: The funny thing is that they kept packing us off to places where sex really ran rampant. At one point they tried the boarding school bit — we each went off to a school designed to deal with difficult adolescents, and Wanda had her first homosexual experience at her school, and I had mine at my school, and this was evidently something perfectly all right, since they could ignore it, they didn’t have to look at it. It was perfectly fine for me to get fucked in the ass by this big son of a bitch I couldn’t stand the sight of, but it was wrong for me to make love to a girl I loved totally.

WANDA: There was even more sex at the funny farms. I never wanted it, either. I didn’t want to be with anyone but Peter. Strangely enough I didn’t mind doing it with other girls, I liked that well enough. It wasn’t anything compared to what I had with Peter, it seemed on another level entirely, but it was warm and friendly and I didn’t dislike it. With other boys, I found it really rotten. I couldn’t relate to them at all and didn’t want to. But in some of the institutions you didn’t have much choice. It was easier to go along with it than not. You could always be raped if you held out.

PETER: Your attitudes did change, though.

WANDA: That’s true. By the time I was, I guess, around twenty, I got past this to an extent. I started sleeping with boys and had occasional affairs. But I have never been completely satisfied by any man but Peter.

PETER: Even now?

WANDA: Yes.

PETER: Even when we swing with someone?

WANDA: Even then. I’ve told you all this often enough, haven’t I?

PETER: Yes, but I thought it might be part ego-food. I didn’t entirely believe you. I mean, I’ve seen you balling other guys, and either you’re an extraordinary actress or you have orgasms.

WANDA: I come, but there’s more to satisfaction than that. You know that. It’s possible to be more satisfied sometimes when you don’t have an orgasm than other times when you do. It’s that way for you too, isn’t it?

PETER: True. Coming isn’t a guarantee that the trip was good, and vice versa.

WANDA: Well, I can come with other men, but I can’t find it completely fulfilling.

PETER: I see. I thought you meant you couldn’t come, and I found that hard to believe.

WANDA: You know me better than that. I can come looking at a candle if I put my mind to it.

PETER: How about a picture of a candle?

WANDA: Probably.

WANDA: Here’s a funny thing. After they were both dead, after we were old enough to do what we wanted to do without anyone interfering in our lives, for the first time we voluntarily separated from one another. First Peter spent some time in Sweden and then Denmark studying furniture design. By the time he came back to the States I had left New York and was living in Chicago, working for a faggot decorator during the day and taking courses at U of C nights. You might think we would have finally taken advantage of the chance we had to be together, but it took us a long time to get back together again.

PETER: I think you used the word “brainwashing” earlier. This was part of it.

WANDA: Just part of it.

PETER: The other part was that we were going through a lot of changes. On the one hand we had some personal growth and development to undergo. Career-wise, for example. I really did want to get over to Scandinavia and learn why they could make chairs there that looked so damned much better than the chairs we make over here. Wanda also wanted to get into decorating in a meaningful way.

Beyond that, we were in a stock-taking period. We needed time to figure out how we really felt about each other. Correction — we knew how we felt about each other, knew we loved each other. What we didn’t know was what we intended to do about it.

There were a lot of big questions involved. Were we going to avoid each other for the rest of our lives? Were we going to live together and make love? Were we going to try to sublimate the whole thing, remain close but cut out the sex? The answers seem easy now, but the whole point is that they were not easy then, as screwed up as we were. We’d been through a very bad time, and it took a lot of settling before we were completely over it, if indeed we ever did get completely over it.

WANDA: Right before you went to Scandinavia, right before Peter went, we came very close to getting married.

PETER: That’s right, we did.

WANDA: We talked about it, and realized that a brother and sister can’t get married, but we also realized that we didn’t have to wear signs saying that we’re brother and sister. It would have been easy enough to take out a license and find some justice of the peace nearsighted enough to miss the family resemblance. I could have worn a dark wig or something.

PETER: You wouldn’t have had to. The average minister would hardly suspect a potential bride and groom of being brother and sister. It would never occur to him.

WANDA: I wonder how often it happens. Does it ever happen? Actual marriages?

JWW: As a matter of fact, I know of a case.

PETER: It’s not surprising. It must happen rather often. Do the people you know have children?

JWW: No.

PETER: It would be interesting to know of some who do. We’re past that now, the whole question of children, but at the time it was on our minds quite a bit. Not only as a practical consideration but because we had both heard at great length how the mating of siblings inevitably produced inferior children. I understand that this doesn’t have to happen, only if both carry an unfortunate recessive gene, but it seems as though it’s likely to happen.

The effect of this was that it did lend support to the arguments that our sort of thing is unnatural, contrary to nature. Now I could never accept this intellectually — I don’t think Nature gives a damn about what people do, certainly not what they do in bed. But I suspect it was one of the things that weighed rather heavily on our minds when we talked about getting married, and when we decided instead to let ourselves drift apart, at least for the time being.

JWW: Both Peter and Wanda mentioned several times that they were no longer interested in having children, problems of inbreeding notwithstanding. They went to great lengths to insist, to themselves more than to me, that children were the last thing they wanted for any number of reasons.

The frequent intrusion of this topic in our conversations led me to suspect that the issue of issue was by no means as settled as they prefer to think. I would be not at all surprised should they someday have children, either naturally or through adoption.

PETER: When I got back to the States, I found myself living very intensely, but very much on a day-to-day basis. The only part of my life with any sense of direction was my work. I made a good business connection and began doing rather well, and I channeled a tremendous amount of energy into my work. Socially, I was very active and striking out in all directions at once. New York, for an unattached young man with a certain amount of poise and a decent income, is by no means a hard place to take. I partied a great deal, I dated what seems in retrospect a staggering number of lovely girls, and I took most of them to bed.

I hardly ever wanted to see them again. A new girl, I could always manifest enthusiasm for a new girl, but once I had spent a night with her I would lose interest. I don’t think I had any distaste for past conquests. More likely I was looking for a perfect girl and not finding her.

Before very long I began getting involved with the swinging scene. I had had a taste of this in Copenhagen. There was a party, mostly students, where everyone fucked in the same room, and by the end of the evening a good deal of group groping and cluster-fucking took place, and the usual switching of partners. I had found this enormously exciting at the time, and I don’t remember quite how I found out about the orgies around New York, but someone or other invited me to bring a girl and join the fun. I called a recent conquest, a girl I figured might be game for this sort of thing. It turned out she was an old hand at orgies and would love to try some new people — on the orgy scene, you know, you quickly tire of the same old faces. Or the same old genitalia, I should say.

I went to the orgy, the party, whatever you want to call it, and I enjoyed myself immensely. I found it an exhilarating experience and a very useful release.

There was something, I don’t know, say, an honesty to it that I found preferable to the basic hypocrisy of dating. When I took a girl out I had to pretend an interest in her that I rarely felt. I had to relate to her as a person, or at least give the appearance of relating to her as a person. Now I’ll be the first to say that a full relationship yields the best sort of sexual relationship, but how often are two people capable of that? And how many persons is one person capable of relating to in any substantial way?

In an orgy — or in the smaller swinging scenes, two or three couples — there’s no pretense. If you relate as good friends, that’s a bonus. If you don’t, if you just relate sexually, that after all is what you’re all there for. The sex is what it’s all about.

I found it very satisfying, for example, that I would tumble a girl at a party without knowing her name or her knowing mine, without either of us giving a damn. Or to carry it a step further, I remember one party where I saw a girl with long black hair and immense pear-shaped breasts kneeling on the floor, on her hands and knees actually, and going down on a fellow. This was aesthetically pleasing to begin with, the lines of her body, the way her breasts hung like ripe fruit, the way her hair flowed.

I went up behind her and took her from the rear, slipped right into her, and she went on giving full oral attention to her gentleman friend. She rotated her bottom in the nicest way. By the time I finished he had still not come, although she had, in a delicious shuddering spasm, so she went right on blowing him while I slipped out as easily as I had slipped in. And I went off to get a drink or something, and she never even knew who it was that had obliged her.

I got to talking to her later during a lull, and she was quite charming and said nothing to indicate that she knew I was her phantom lover. I almost told her but decided that I liked the idea of leaving things as they were, of having had her without her knowing it.

I could go on laying out reasons why I found orgies appealing, and they would all be true enough, but perhaps the basic one of all is the simplest and most obvious. I’m a kinky person, and when that’s what you are, group sex is sensational. It really is. It’s not just what you do or how much of it you can have, but there’s the whole sex-charged atmosphere of the scene, all those bodies, everything. When you’re not doing you can watch... It’s more fun than television, you know.

But the best part about orgies, as far as I’m concerned, is that but for attending an orgy I would not have met my beautiful and exciting wife.

GRACE: My life before I met Peter was drifting, really. That is what I did. I drifted. I never really made a decision or set out to do anything in particular. I put out for anybody who asked in high school, just did what I felt like, you know. I mean, I wasn’t much. I never thought of myself as very much at all.

PETER: You were much, baby.

GRACE: I never thought so. Nobody ever thought so. I was, you know, I was a cunt. A pair of tits and a cunt.

PETER: And so much more inside.

GRACE: I didn’t know this and neither did anybody else. And so as far as what I wanted to do with my life, well, I guess I didn’t think about it. I got through school and I drifted. The Coast, and then New York.

I was a pretty girl who put out. It’s very easy to drift when that’s what you are. There are always men around to do things for you. And it’s no hassle to make money. I was always lazy, you know, I had nothing in particular I was good at, no job I was interested in. No career, you know. And I don’t think it ever occurred to me that what I ought to do was go out and get a job. I mean, what for?

But for a girl who will do things there’s no need. Like pose for sex pictures. If you’ve got a fair face and figure you can make fifty dollars in a couple of hours of posing. You don’t even have to ball anybody. The photographer will generally make a pass if he’s straight, and I would ball him or not depending how I felt about him, but if you didn’t that didn’t mean you lost the work. It was optional — you do it if you want.

And you can get work in movies. I mean the sexploitation films, the nudies and “beavers” and like that. Let’s face it, I’m not an actress. I’m pretty pathetic, I can’t stand to see myself on the screen because of the way I deliver a line. Like completely wooden. But in these films it doesn’t make that much difference if you can act or not. The major parts, it helps, but there are always loads of minor parts for girls and they don’t expect Katharine Hepburn. You walk around with your clothes off, you pet, you pretend to be screwing—

WANDA: Don’t they ever really screw?

GRACE: Well, as a matter of fact, some of the sexploitation producers do insist that you actually screw, although they don’t show it on camera. There are certain things they can’t show, like a male with an erection, for example. They can show a penis but not if it’s erect.

PETER: Talk about castration complexes.

GRACE: The producers say this gives realism even if they don’t show it on screen. Now nobody believes this. Sometimes I think it’s easier to look as though you’re screwing if you’re not. But they get certain kicks this way. Watching, or some of them will act in their own films.

In the stag films, of course, anything goes. I’ve been in, I think, it’s six of them. What they call hardcore pornography. I have a print of one, I ought to run it for you sometime.

So this is what I did. I started off living with a guy in the city and when he split I kept the place myself. Just a couple of rooms in the East Village. The rent was like thirty dollars a month. Cheap. If I went a month without working it was no big deal. I would work for a couple of days and make a couple of hundred and that would last me a long time.

Sometimes I think that with my attitude it’s a wonder I didn’t start tricking. That I never became a whore. I did once go to bed with a man specifically for money. That was when I was living with a musician in L.A. and he said that this man had come on to him and wanted to ball me, that he would give me twenty dollars. I didn’t need the money but this man I was with, he wanted me to do it. He said he dug the whole idea, just that I should do it once. I did it to please him. It was no big deal to me one way or the other. Afterward he gave me the twenty and my man and I went right out to spend it. We spent the whole twenty on a tie for him and a scarf for me. I don’t know what happened to the scarf. I must have left it somewhere, I haven’t seen it in years.

The party scene, the orgies, it was natural that I would start getting involved with that. I was the type of girl you could invite to an orgy and figure she would probably go along with it. Just a typical stupid cunt without a thought in her head, and that nobody had to give a thought to.

PETER: The night we met. It was a small party, I think four couples and two extra girls. It’s so rare to find extra girls at those sets. That’s the way everybody I prefers it, but usually it winds up the other way around, with extra men. A man can’t get in without a girl — girls are called tickets in some circles — but sometimes a man will bring a girl who doesn’t know what kind of a party it’s going to be, and she leaves, and then you can’t really throw him out.

I’m getting away from the point. Well. I went to this set, got there a little late, and I walked into the room and looked around. Things were in the undressed-but-not-balling stage. People were sitting around talking, and on one couch I saw Grace talking to a guy with a beard. She was playing with him in a sort of casual way.

It was love at first sight.

There is no other way to explain it. I took one look at her and it was absolute magic. I fell completely in love with her. I didn’t know the first thing about her and it couldn’t have mattered less to me. I wanted her. Not just to take to bed, but to take home and keep. She could have had a husband and ten children and it wouldn’t have mattered to me, I would have taken her away from all of them and kept her for myself. It was an immediate intense attraction wholly unlike anything I had ever experienced.

I had never believed in this sort of thing. Not for a moment. But when it happens to you it doesn’t help much to tell yourself you don’t believe in it. It’s like not believing in the principle of the internal combustion engine and getting hit by a truck. You become a believer in a hurry.

I went straight over to her. I paid absolutely no attention to the guy she was handling. I looked at her, and she turned from him and looked up at me, and our eyes locked together.

GRACE: He owned me. One look, and Peter owned me.

PETER: She let go of the bearded one and stood up. She said the bedrooms were in back. I said, “No, get your clothes on, we’ll go to my place.”

GRACE: I had come with a fellow but I didn’t even bother to tell him I was leaving. I was like hypnotized. If Peter had told me to walk out the window I think I would have done it. Absolutely. I never felt anything like this before.

His apartment, I had never seen anything like it. It was this place. I couldn’t believe he lived here all by himself. It’s big enough for the three of us now and he was all alone in it. And the furnishings, and the way everything went together so perfectly. And the view across the river.

But that was just part of the setting, the magic, the whole feeling that something new was happening. It was nothing compared to Peter himself.

I was really a person to him.

I can’t explain this very well. I’m not good with words, sometimes I know what I mean and can’t get the words right. Other times I even have trouble figuring out what I mean, never mind finding words for it.

PETER: We couldn’t get enough of each other. I had trouble believing what was happening, and couldn’t possibly believe it would last. I figured that I would have to screw this marvelous girl as much as I could before the thrill wore off, because I might never experience anything like this again. We fucked incessantly. After two days it became obvious that the glow was not wearing off, and I told her she was never going to leave. She said something about going back for her things. I didn’t want her to go back. I gave her money and sent her out to buy new things, then stopped her and insisted on going out with her to pick out her clothes.

GRACE: Peter picks out all my clothes.

PETER: For two weeks we were together constantly. I was in the habit of doing most of my work at home, so they didn’t miss me at the office, but I wasn’t doing any work during those weeks. It wasn’t just bed. We talked for hours, hours on end, talked on and on about everything.

GRACE: No one had ever bothered to talk to me before. People would talk at me, but no one ever talked to me. I was just this stupid cunt and it never occurred to anybody that I would have anything to say worth listening to. In fact I never thought I had anything to say.

Peter was the first person ever to take me seriously, and because of him I finally was able to take myself seriously. I really had always believed I was stupid and shallow, and during all those years I was. Peter changed me.

PETER: Like a butterfly from its chrysalis.

GRACE: I am by no means an intelligent person. I’m not. Peter and Wanda are both brilliant, and I can’t help feeling slightly dumb in comparison to them. But I am not as stupid as I always thought I was.

I can’t believe it was all there inside me just waiting. It’s so hard to believe. And if I hadn’t met Peter it would have never come out.

PETER: I hadn’t ever really talked to anyone but Wanda.

GRACE: I never even talked to myself. Never let myself have any real thoughts. Until I met Peter.

PETER: I married her a month after I met her. We could have gotten married sooner than that but there was never time, we were always either talking or making love. Finally we got around to getting married. A month doesn’t seem like an unduly long courtship, but in our case it seemed more like a year than a month because we were interacting so intensely in every way.

Before we were married we talked about swinging, about whether or not we ought to continue to do this. At first we thought no, we didn’t need it. We had such a complete thing ourselves that it didn’t seem necessary.

That’s the goddamned Protestant ethic operating, of course. No matter how liberated you think you are, old habits of thought die hard. Necessary, for Christ’s sake. None of the best things in life are really necessary. Who the hell cares if something is a necessity or not? The fact remained that swinging was something we had both always enjoyed intensely, and why on earth should we force ourselves to give up something we both enjoyed?

GRACE: I was afraid at one point that you would want me less if you went with other girls. Or that you wouldn’t want me if I went with other men. But that was just stupid. And when we realized that what we had been thinking was stupid we made a date to party with another couple that Peter knew.

PETER: This was before the wedding. I felt it would be worthwhile to find out how it went before going any further. It seemed obvious that we were going to resume swinging to one extent or another sooner or later, and if it was going to change our feelings about each other in any way, it seemed sensible to find this out before we were married, not after. I was confident that it wouldn’t change anything but it was only common sense to check it out.

GRACE: It didn’t change a thing. It got us over being anxious about the subject, that’s all. We had a good time with the other couple and then we came home and had a good time with ourselves, and nothing was changed.

PETER: I didn’t call Wanda until after we were married. We flew down to San Juan for a week-long honeymoon, and after we were back I called Wanda in Chicago. I had been putting this off longer than I should have. Obviously I was apprehensive as to how she would take it. We had been in touch from time to time since I returned to the States, mostly over the phone because neither of us has ever been much at writing letters.

I called her finally and told her.

WANDA: I was very happy for him. That was my immediate reaction. Also I was happy that he had been able to find someone with whom he could have a complete relationship, not only for his sake but for my own. It seemed to mean that I had the same thing to look forward to. In other words, if he could love someone other than me, I could perhaps love someone other than him.

I wished them well and spoke briefly with Grace and went out shopping for a wedding present. And then about ten days later a strange thing happened. I became desperately depressed. I started crying hysterically in the middle of the afternoon and had to go home from my job and take to my bed like a Victorian lady with the vapors. And for the next week I was in an amazing state. Enormous anxieties — I couldn’t cross a street without being firmly convinced that a car would careen wildly around the comer and mash me to the pavement. I worried about everything. Earthquakes, for God’s sake. I was in Chicago and I was afraid there was going to be an earthquake. This might make sense in California — everybody knows the whole place is falling into the ocean, but Chicago?

I was by no means blind to the reason for all this. It was clear enough.

It was Peter. He was in love and he was married and I didn’t have him any more.

In a sense I hadn’t had him in a long time. I hadn’t had him with me. But that was just temporary, you know, and whether I knew it consciously or not I was always certain inside that sooner or later we would get back together again. And even if we were apart we had continued to belong to each other, he was still a part of me, and now he was gone and it was like losing a part of myself. He was still the only thing I had to hang on to, the only constant in my life, and now he was gone and I didn’t know how to handle it.

I wanted to see them but I didn’t know if they would want to see me. I wasn’t sure what I should do, and I kept waiting for things to get better, and they kept getting worse instead of better.

I couldn’t function. I quit my job and stayed in my apartment day after day. It was all I could do to force myself to go out now and then and have something to eat. I had no interest, no appetite.

I wanted to kill myself. I had been vaguely suicidal from time to time in the past, but those occasions were always impulsive adolescent things. Now I was thinking about it, dwelling on it at great length. The main thing that stopped me, outside of that instinct for self-preservation which is what keeps us all taking one breath after another, was the thought of what this would do to Peter. If he knew my death was suicide he would inevitably blame himself for it and it would probably ruin his marriage, even his whole life. I couldn’t have that. I couldn’t louse up his life as well as taking my own.

There’s a saying to the effect that thoughts of suicide help people get through a lot of bad nights. This was true enough in my case. I think the solemn contemplation of suicide helped me realize that what I might as well do was go on living, and I tried to do this.

When I was in somewhat better shape, I decided to go to New York for a week and visit the two of them. I had to face them, I had to meet Grace. I didn’t know if she knew anything about me or not, the role Peter had played in my life and I in his. I also had to see how I felt about Peter now.

GRACE: Of course I knew everything about Wanda. Except that I didn’t know how Peter felt about her.

PETER: I didn’t know myself.

GRACE: As far as how I felt about her, in the first place I was terrified of her. Not that she would take Peter away. I didn’t think of that very much. But I was sure that she would hate me, and if she didn’t like me I felt it might affect how Peter felt about me. And also I knew how much Peter loved her and I wanted her to like me and approve of me because she was a part of Peter’s life and I wanted to share Peter’s life completely.

As far as how I felt about the two of them having sex together for so many years, I don’t think I thought there was anything wrong with it. I had never had any brothers or sisters and had never thought much about that kind of thing. As far as whether or not it was right or wrong, if Peter thought something was right, then it was right for me.

I must sound pretty simple-minded when I say something like that, but it was the way I felt. It’s mostly the way I feel now. I tend to take Peter’s word for things. I know I’m not his equal in most ways, or Wanda’s equal—

WANDA: Oh, come off it, honey. You still downgrade yourself all the time. You’ve got a good enough mind. Don’t keep putting yourself down.

GRACE: Well, I’m the only one around here who can cook worth a damn. That ought to count for something.

JWW: Wanda stayed for only a week on that first trip to New York. She had wanted to stay at a hotel but Peter and Grace were both adamant in insisting she stay with them.

The week seems to have gone rather well. Wanda was relieved to discover that she liked Grace very much and that the girl seemed to be perfect for Peter. She was also happy to find that she and Peter were still close and that the marriage did not seem to have changed his feelings for her, or hers for him.

Sex played no part whatsoever in the week’s entertainment. It was on everyone’s mind to a considerable extent, but no one considered saying or doing anything about it. Peter and Wanda seem to have wanted each other during the week, but in a somewhat remote fashion.

Grace liked Wanda at once and found herself more at ease with her than she had expected to be. She saw Wanda as a sort of female version of Peter and was attracted to the qualities she found so attractive in her husband.

The visit went very well, to the relief of all three. But they were also all somewhat relieved when the week ended and Wanda returned to Chicago.

PETER: It was about a year before we saw Wanda again. In the meantime, our life together went along magnificently. Grace and I never stopped being good together. If anything we improved in every respect, physically and emotionally, everything. The improvement would have been more noticeable if things hadn’t been so perfect from the beginning.

She began taking odd jobs of work from time to time. She was hesitant about this, not knowing how I would take it. She didn’t want to bring it up for that reason. God knows we didn’t need the money, but she felt she ought to be doing something now and then, contributing somehow.

But she needed a certain amount of life apart from me, however much we had going for us together. At first she tried the usual sort of housewife busy work. She took a couple of courses at the New School. This bored her to tears. She tried painting, then took some sculpting classes. She went to concerts while I was working. She enjoyed some of this and hated some of it, but what she really wanted was now and then to do what she had done — to pose for a photographer or act in a movie.

And I felt she ought to try it. I certainly wasn’t going to be jealous because she fucked some moron in a stag film. When we swung, which we did on the average of once every two weeks, I enjoyed watching her with other men. Jealousy is for insecure people.

WANDA: I guess I should have been jealous then, because I was certainly insecure. I went back to Chicago convinced that all I had to do was find a man who would be for me what Grace was for Peter. Suffice it to say that I didn’t find one, although God knows I auditioned enough candidates for the role. I wound up in a very messy affair with a married man and succeeded in breaking up his home, although by the time things got to that stage I had already realized that he and I couldn’t possibly work together. He left his wife and children and then I broke up with him, and ultimately he came to my apartment with a gun.

I don’t know if he intended to use it, or if he would have gone through with it, but who can say for sure? I went out through a window while he was banging on the door and used a neighbor’s phone to call the police.

After that I felt I had to get out of Chicago. Nothing was going right and I no longer felt good about the city. I was too completely alone and at too many loose ends. I wanted to go back to New York. There didn’t seem to be any reason to stay away. I was in touch with Peter and Grace — I would call them or they would call me several times a month. I never planned on living here with them but I felt it would be good for me to be in the same city. If nothing else, it would save on the phone bills.

They insisted I stay here at least until I could find a suitable apartment. I didn’t put up much of an argument. I always hated hotels.

This time we were all more immediately relaxed with each other. My trip earlier had gotten us past the reunion bit and the introduction bit both at once, and now Grace and I were almost old friends. Neither of us saw the other as a threat. I settled in and started apartment hunting and began to realize how impossible the housing shortage has become around here. I was quite honestly anxious to get a place of my own, but it was impossible to find anything decent.

PETER: I was conscious of a real yen for Wanda from the minute I picked her up at the airport. When I kissed her hello it was all I could do to keep my tongue in my own mouth.

WANDA: I felt the same way.

PETER: This would have disturbed me a year earlier. Now it amused me. I think that’s the best way to put it. I had come to take my own reactions to virtually all situations a good deal more casually. I enjoyed observing myself, my reactions to one thing or another.

WANDA: You grew up a lot. Marriage to Grace had quite an effect on you.

PETER: There’s no question about it. The detached view didn’t make the yen go away, however. I couldn’t put it out of my mind. Every time I saw Wanda I wanted her. I wondered whether part of this might not be habit — I had been in the habit of wanting her, and we hadn’t been with each other sexually in so long.

GRACE: I had this feeling that something was building up with the two of them. But I wasn’t sure if maybe it wasn’t all in my mind. Anyway, I liked having Wanda around. I felt almost like a sister to her. When I was a kid I used to imagine what it would be like to have a big sister.

WANDA: I wonder if I would have eventually made a move of my own. I had decided definitely not to, but a few more days of frustration might have made me change my mind. Because I definitely wanted Peter and there was no way to avoid realizing as much. The bill of goods I had half-managed to sell myself — that somewhere out there was a man for me — I didn’t believe this any more. I had tried enough men to convince me it just wouldn’t work that way. There was a man for me, but he happened to be my brother.

I slept late one morning, and when I woke up Grace had left. Peter told me over breakfast that she had gone to pose for some pictures. I knew vaguely that she was a model but had no idea just what sort of work she did, fashion or what, and I said something to this effect. Peter got up from the table and came back with a small stack of photographs. He flipped them onto the table and told me to have a look.

I was genuinely shocked. They were all deliciously pornographic. Grace with a man, Grace with a man and another girl, Grace with two men, Grace with a girl, with, as they say, nothing left to the imagination.

I looked up at Peter and he was grinning. “You let her do this?”

“Why not?” he said. “She enjoys it. Easy work, good pay, no withholding taxes.” But didn’t he mind?

He said he didn’t, and then he began to explain that he and Grace were in the habit of swinging with other couples. I was shocked all over again. Swinging was not a wholly new idea to me, I had been to fairly freewheeling parties myself, but I wasn’t prepared for such a revelation concerning my little brother and his wife. It stunned me and I didn’t know how to react.

PETER: You were remarkably cool about it.

WANDA: I didn’t feel remarkably cool. I felt very strange. And confused. I didn’t know whether or not this meant that Peter and I could be lovers again.

I excused myself and went into the bathroom to take a shower. I was standing under the hot water spray still a little shaky from what I had learned when the shower door opened and Peter stepped in beside me.

He said, “Do you remember when we used to take baths together, Sis? I always enjoyed that.”

I said, “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Sure,” he said. He took a bar of soap and rubbed it over my breasts. “I’m washing my sister,” he said. “I’m soaping you up.”

I stood there and he worked the soap over my breasts and down across my belly. He lathered my pubic hair. I was trembling from head to foot. I wanted him so intensely I couldn’t bear it. He kept soaping me all over.

We got out of the shower. We didn’t even dry ourselves off. We went straight into my bedroom, all wet and slippery, not giving a damn about anything but our need for each other.

I came the instant he entered me. And when it was finally over and I lay gasping for breath with his head pillowed on my breast, I felt the most overwhelming relief. We had needed each other for so long, so very long.

And no other man ever made me feel this way. I had always thought that this was so, but it had been so long since I had been with Peter that I sometimes wondered if I wasn’t remembering it as having been better than it really was. But no, we were something special together.

PETER: It was her reaction to the pictures that made me go into the shower with her. I knew we both wanted each other and that we were going to have each other sooner or later, and this seemed as good a time as any.

WANDA: I asked if he would tell Grace. He said he didn’t know. I told him I couldn’t come between them.

“No one can come between Grace and me,” he said. “And no one can come between us, either.”

PETER: I knew I would have to tell Grace sooner or later. But I found myself putting it off. I was afraid she might not be able to handle it.

This might seem strange, in view of the fact that we both embraced swinging wholeheartedly and with no feelings of jealousy on either side. But this was different. Swinging, after all, is essentially loveless sex, variety for its own sake, an occasional romp that has no emotional implications. Wanda and I were not only balling. We were also in love, and I was afraid Grace would feel threatened.

So for longer than I had intended Wanda and I would get together when Grace was out of the apartment. You know, thinking back on it, I wonder if the idea of having each other on the sly didn’t hold some nostalgic appeal of its own. We had had to sneak around when we were kids, and maybe we were recapturing some of that special excitement. It was our secret and we were having fun with it.

After about a month I told Grace.

GRACE: I was just numb. Peter and I were alone when he told me. I just stood there and listened to him say that he had started sleeping with his sister again. I felt as though the bottom was falling out of my life. The floor was falling and I was in the middle of the air.

I said that I guessed he wouldn’t want me around any more and I would leave whenever he wanted.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I’ll never let you go. I told you that the night I met you, that I wanted to take you home and never let you go.”

“But you love her,” I said. “You always loved her, and you married me because you couldn’t have her anymore, and now you have her back again and you don’t need me.”

“Of course I need you,” he said. “I need you now more than ever.”

I didn’t know whether I should believe him or not. I thought maybe he was saying this because he didn’t want to hurt me. I started to cry and Peter began making love to me. It went through my mind that this would be the last time we would ever make love.

PETER: It wasn’t, was it?

GRACE: But I thought it would be. And then afterward while I was lying there feeling all warm and together, Peter explained how he felt about me and about Wanda. I tried to think out how I felt about it. I didn’t mind if he was with other girls when we swung, and he didn’t mind if I was with other men. And I knew how deeply he and Wanda loved each other, and I was glad for this because it is beautiful to love someone that deeply.

It also came to me that it would be good for us all to be all three living together. Because Wanda gives Peter something that I can’t give him. The two of them, the way their minds work together, the conversations they have. I’m not putting myself down, honestly, but it would have to be boring for Peter to have nobody brighter than me to talk to for the rest of his life. I know you enjoy talking to me, Peter, but you know you can have a different kind of conversation with Wanda and that you have a need for it.

WANDA: When I returned home that day Peter was out and Grace was starting dinner. She came out from the kitchen to make a pair of drinks. We went over to the window to study the view, and she quietly told me what Peter had told her. I knew he was going to tell her but I didn’t know when.

I turned to her and my eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Grace, you must hate me very much,” I said. “But Peter loves you. His love for me doesn’t affect his love for you.”

She said she knew, and that everything was going to be all right.

We hugged each other, and it came to me that I wanted to kiss her.

We kissed.

I had had relations with girls at school and in mental institutions, and I think I may have said earlier that I was able to enjoy this. In fact for a long period of time I could relax more in sex with a girl than with a boy, any boy except Peter. But I had never felt comfortable kissing other girls. Somehow that seemed abnormally intimate, while a nice lazy sixty-nine was purely physical fun.

But I enjoyed kissing Grace. It started out as a warm sisterly embrace, and before either of us knew quite what the hell was happening it turned sexy. She put her tongue in my mouth.

GRACE: I didn’t plan it. It just happened.

WANDA: And I remember having the thought, This completes it, this closes the circle.

Of course I knew Grace had been with girls before. After all, I had seen those pictures. I suppose they must have put the idea of making love to her into my head, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

We went into her bedroom and got into the bed she shared with Peter. We rolled around in each other’s arms like a couple of giggling schoolgirls. I couldn’t get over how beautiful she was and how smooth her skin was. At one point we both said, “No wonder Peter loves you.” We both said it at precisely the same time and became hysterical about it.

It was so nice. When Grace comes she tastes like raw egg white.

GRACE: Oh, stop.

WANDA: Well, you do.

PETER: When I got home they were sitting together on the couch. I hadn’t known just what to expect, just how the confrontation would go, although I was hoping for the best. But I was immensely relieved to see them so much at peace with one another.

I said something like, “Well, you girls must have had a lot to talk about.”

And Wanda said, “We talked a little. But mostly we just balled each other.”

JWW: Since then the St. Johns have slept three in a bed, with no holds barred sexually. Grace and Wanda seem to complement one another well and Peter is devoted to both of them.

Swinging continues to play a part in their lives. The frequency of their sexual encounters with others is lower now and seems to have leveled off at one such meeting a month, with another single, couple, or group. Their participation in group sex is far more recreational than compulsive, and all three said they could get along without it easily enough but see no reason to deny themselves something they all find pleasurable. Peter mentioned that he would especially like to swing some time with a brother and sister combination. They have heard of a mother-daughter team with something of a reputation in East Coast swinging circles but have not yet been able to arrange a meeting with them.

All are very happy with the situation as it stands, and expect to continue in this fashion for the rest of their lives. Peter insists not only that it is natural for a brother and sister to have sex, but that it is unnatural for them not to. “If they had only left us alone to do as we wanted,” he says, “we could have been spared no end of grief. But I can’t feel too badly about it. At least it all worked out for us, for all of us.”