3 is not a Crowd

Bob & Carol & Whoever’s Handy

JWW: Bob and Carol Fessenden live in a split-level suburban house on the outskirts of Atlanta. Bob is a successful salesman of life insurance and mutual funds and an avid golfer. Carol paints in oils and acrylics, large geometrical abstractions characterized by a bold use of color. She has won prizes in shows throughout the Southeast and has sold several canvases through a local gallery.

At thirty-four, Bob looks like a former college football player who has managed to stay in better than average shape over the years. He has broad shoulders, a firm grip, and a salesman’s open face and easy smile. His hair is beginning to thin on top. He wears his sideburns fashionably long and dresses very well; like his wife, he buys his clothes in New York.

Carol is three years younger than her husband. She is small and dark, with strong features and bright brown eyes. While she too is a stylish dresser, her standard at-home garb consists of a peasant blouse with a scoop neckline and a pair of skintight paint-spattered blue jeans. She enjoys going barefoot around the house, and announced that she likes to do her housework in the nude.

The Fessendens have been married for ten years. In the second year of their marriage Carol gave birth to a Mongoloid idiot with other congenital defects as well. The child was placed in an institution and they have had no contact with it. Although they were assured that their chances of having additional normal children were as good as those of any other couple, the two decided the risk was too great to be undertaken, and Carol had her fallopian tubes tied shortly thereafter.

The Fessendens differ from other couples studied in the foregoing pages in several respects. At the time that I was able to see them, they had not formed a permanent troilistic relationship, although it was their hope to do so eventually. The other threesomes all came about through the interplay of personalities which ultimately led to a triangular relationship. With Bob and Carol, experiences with swinging led them to a preference for threesomes; thus the third party is chosen to fit the role rather than the role being designed to ft the person.

At one point I was prompted by these differences to omit Bob and Carol’s story from this book and confine it to the three threesomes already discussed. Further reflection convinced me that these very differences might serve to give the reader greater perspective on the topic of troilism.

A final argument clinched it — after all, the advertisements which the Fessendens run regularly in several swingers’ club bulletins invariably contain the phrase which serves as this volume’s title.

BOB: I guess we got into swinging in pretty much the same way most couples do. This was about three years ago, so we had been married seven years. That’s standard, isn’t it? The seven-year itch and all that.

CAROL: Except that it didn’t take you seven years to get the itch.

BOB: I don’t suppose it usually does. The average American male simply isn’t built for a steady diet of monogamy. Look at the animal kingdom. In most species, the male’s object is to knock up as many females as he possibly can. If you were a farmer and you had a bull that would only cover one particular cow, that bull would be hamburger overnight. Man is just another animal with an overdeveloped brain, and more often than not that brain gets in his way. It lets him think up rules for himself that go against his own basic animal nature.

CAROL: And if my husband’s got one thing, it’s a healthy animal nature.

BOB: Well, I’m proud of it. But the trouble is that we can’t go and live on desert islands. We’re all creatures of society. And the way society is structured, a man and a woman get married and live happily ever after. I guess it’s not hard to see that more people get married than live happily ever after. But for all its faults, marriage is necessary to our society. It’s the way things are. Sometimes I find myself sympathizing with these kids who want to tear the whole social order apart and build it over again. I’m not too crazy about the drugs they use or the way they wear their hair, but I find myself agreeing with them more than the average person in my position would probably do.

CAROL: I think swingers are generally more liberal that way. Not that their politics tend to be extreme, but that they are readier to appreciate someone else’s point of view than the run-of-the-mill civilian.

BOB: But when all is said and done, I don’t believe anybody’s going to tear down our social order. It’s changing, God how it’s changing, but certain things remain constant. And one of them is marriage. I know that, given the way things are, I wouldn’t be happy if I weren’t married.

Well, all of this is a roundabout way of getting to the point, which is that I did have a couple of affairs not too long after we were married. We were both very depressed after the baby was born and things turned out as they did, and Carol and I weren’t getting along as well as we had been, and I found myself on the prowl. I had a fling with a secretary in my regional office, and a brief affair with a policy-holder, and I spent one night with a high-class hooker at a convention in Miami Beach.

CAROL: I more or less knew he was catting around and I almost decided to have it out with him once or twice, but I swallowed my pride and kept it to myself. I knew it was common enough for men to cheat on their wives. My own parents were divorced because my father had another woman and my mother found out and made him give her a divorce. And several times after that my father told me privately that he had never wanted the divorce, that he loved Mother and wanted to stay with her and the other woman in his life never meant anything to him. He did subsequently remarry, but what he had always wanted was to stay with my mother. She never did marry again, so what did she get out of the whole thing? Just a life of loneliness, and that wasn’t what I wanted. It hurt me that Bob had to have somebody else, but I was determined that I wasn’t going to be a fool and ruin my life over it. I just waited for him to get it out of his system, and after awhile, just as I had known he was catting around, I also knew when he had stopped.

Then he started to get interested in swinging.

He was very cute about it. He brought home books and magazines on the subject and just happened to leave them around. Early in our life together he had brought home a cheap novel and just happened to leave it open to a page with an oral sex scene on it, and of course I read the scene. I had never done that to him before, but I was bright enough to take the hint and although we never mentioned the book I knew that he had left it for me with just that in mind, and he knew that the book had been where I got the idea.

So when these swinger magazines began turning up around the house, it wasn’t hard to guess what he had in mind.

I was terribly shocked. I knew the bare minimum about swinging, or wife-swapping as it was generally called in the magazine articles. I had read a little about it in women’s magazines, nothing very detailed or accurate, and then there were the standard nightclub jokes, usually some variation of the idea of a suburban party where the husbands draw keys from a hat or something like that.

None of this had ever seemed real to me. I could just imagine a group of our friends at the country club swapping wives and going to each other’s homes that way. It was so completely impossible. I never took it seriously. I supposed there were people who would do this, but certainly not nice people, not normal people.

And the idea that Bob would want me to have relations with other men. This really shocked me. I was a virgin when I met Bob, although I did sleep with him before we were married. He had had plenty of experience before he met me, which I felt was desirable, but I was always just as glad that I had been pure for him.

BOB: You never felt you’d missed out on anything?

CAROL: Oh, sometimes. In a vague general way. But I didn’t sit around sulking, and for the most part I was glad of the way things had happened. And I never considered having an affair after we were married. I did think about it when you were running around — the idea that sauce for the goose might be sauce for the gander, that it would be a way of getting even with you. But it seemed a childish way to do it. What would I be proving? And there was nobody I knew that I wanted to go to bed with anyway.

But now, seeing these books and magazines, I didn’t know what to think. I wanted to talk to him about it but I didn’t know how to begin or what to say or what I would say if he came right out and said this was what he wanted. So I put off talking to him, and in the meantime I read the books and articles.

Well, this did make a slight difference in my thinking. For one thing, it gave me a much better idea of what swinging was all about. I was thinking just in terms of games with the keys at this point, of swapping partners with friends of ours, and so I had a very narrow view of the swinging scene. I learned for the first time, for instance, that the typical swinging date was with some strangers you met through the mail, and that you went to their house or they came to your house and you had a pleasant social evening and then switched partners. This somehow made it seem far more palatable to me. I couldn’t see myself getting involved in this with someone I knew socially, but with a stranger who was in the same boat, I could see how that might work.

I also began to realize that the average swinging couple were people in the same general situation as us. Couples who had been married for a few years or more and who had gradually had the excitement go out of their sexual life. And I couldn’t deny that this was happening with us. In the books, couple after couple told the same opening story, the same pattern. I thought about how much less often we had sex these days and how so much of the time it was just the same as always. The freshness and excitement wasn’t completely gone, but it was going fast.

Now some of the books he had left around for me were nothing much more than pornography. Very crudely written and obviously stories some writer had made up. They pretended to be case histories but you could tell that they weren’t. And there was one that was supposed to be the autobiography of a swinger, but it was just one sex scene after the other with lots of description. Some, though, you could tell were true. They might have excessive descriptions because I guess that’s how books are sold, but the truth rang true. One was a book about swinging by a married couple in California who were swingers themselves, and who told their own story as well as the stories of some other people they knew.

And in this book in particular I was impressed over and over by the way couples explained that swinging not only brought excitement into their lives but improved their marriages. I had a little trouble believing this at first. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

One other thing I’ll have to admit is that the books got me hot. Partly the sexy descriptions themselves, and partly the whole idea of doing this, of swinging with another couple. I got very hot, and I would find myself thinking about this more and more, and when Bob got home I met him at the door wearing a sheer nightgown and carrying two martinis, and we had the drinks in the bedroom and I just about raped him.

BOB: She was really wild.

CAROL: It was the best we had been together in ages, and I wasn’t fool enough to doubt that it was reading those books that had made the difference. So while he was lying there getting his breath back to normal, I asked him just what he had in mind with the swinger books.

BOB: I guess I hemmed and hawed.

CAROL: I just guess you did.

BOB: Well, I was still recovering from your greeting, and the question took me by surprise.

CAROL: I told him I had read all the books, and that I wondered if that was really what he wanted for us to do. He said he just thought the books were interesting, that the whole idea was interesting. I said it looked to me as though he was more than just interested.

BOB: I asked her how she felt about it. She said she didn’t know because it was such a completely new idea to her. She wanted to know if I wouldn’t be unhappy at the idea of her with another man.

CAROL: He said he would be pleased for me to be enjoying myself that way. And that it would be better for both of us to do this sort of thing openly than to carry on affairs on the sly.

BOB: To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Carol being with somebody else. It did bother me to a degree, but I found the whole idea of swinging so exciting, so attractive in so many ways, that I wanted to give it a try and see what my feelings would be.

CAROL: We talked about all of this for hours. It was at this time Bob confessed to me about his three affairs, although the one night with the prostitute... you couldn’t really call that an affair. But in a way that part bothered me the most, that he would need variety so much that he would have to pay money to a whore who would just go through the motions of sex with him.

BOB: That gal went through some pretty good motions, honey.

CAROL: I was glad that we were talking about these things because they had been on my mind for so long. And talking this way made us both feel closer and more loving. We wound up that night getting some of the magazines, including a club bulletin that I had not yet seen, and we went through them looking at the advertisements and just speculating which ads we might answer if we did decide to give this a try. There were several ads that looked promising, couples around our own age and in this area who seemed to want the kind of thing that we wanted, a quiet evening of two couples.

BOB: I suggested that maybe we might get in touch with one of them and explain that we were newcomers, and that we would like to get together with them and discuss things, but with no strings attached. That way if either of us felt that it went against the grain, or if something about the other couple didn’t appeal to us, we would have a ready-made out.

CAROL: I liked that idea. We decided to sleep on it, and we made love for a second time that night, which was something we hadn’t done in I don’t know how long. The next day I got so excited thinking about the whole thing that I surprised Bob by writing a letter to the couple that sounded best from their ad. I had it all ready when he came home, along with snapshots of ourselves.

And we sent it off — you probably know how that works, you put your letter in an unaddressed envelope and then put that in another envelope and mail it to the club, along with a dollar forwarding fee. The clubs make their money forwarding letters, and some of the better ones do make an effort to police their lists and clear out objectionable people.

We sent the letter off, and after that we were tremendously anxious to hear from the couple we wrote to. Bob would call me every day when the mail came to ask if I had gotten a letter from them. And finally — it took about two weeks — we received a letter from this couple in Charleston with a photograph of the two of them and a very nice letter.

Now it’s only since then that I’ve realized how lucky we were.

BOB: Absolutely a first class case of beginner’s luck. We sent out one letter and got an answer to it, and it doesn’t usually work that way. A large percentage of the ads are just from jerks who want to get letters, or people who back out at the last moment. Or else an advertiser will get swamped with letters and he can’t possibly answer them all. Or you’ll get an answer, but it’s an old or unattractive or vulgar couple, or a single man posing as a couple, or any of a number of things that can go wrong. But we lucked out. This couple was truly charming, and reading their letter I was impressed how much like us they were. They had been married about as long, and he had a Chevrolet agency in Charleston, and they had been swinging for a little less than a year. He was a tall good-looking guy and she was a knockout blonde built like something straight out of the pages of Playboy. She was just wearing the bottom half of a bikini in the photo they sent along.

CAROL: Bob was practically drooling.

BOB: Let’s just say I was impressed. I was even more impressed by the letter because it was obvious that these were intelligent and civilized people. They understood completely that we wanted a no-strings arrangement and suggested that we come to their house so that we could leave easily if that was what we wanted.

As far as I was concerned, I knew that I wanted us to swing with them.

CAROL: I felt pretty much the same way, but I was a little less certain.

BOB: They included their phone number, so I called Ray and we set up a date for that Saturday. We went there and got along fine. There was no pressure and it was perfectly enjoyable right from the beginning. Ray and I compared notes, and it turned out coincidentally enough that he played defensive tackle for South Carolina about the same time I played for Georgia Tech, which meant we were probably on the same field at the same time, although we had never known each other. Carol also got along very well with Ray’s wife, Irene.

CAROL: We had a signal worked out. If I decided yes, I would say something to Bob about did he remember to leave a light on in the house so that burglars wouldn’t know we were out. And if I decided no I would remind him he had a golf date in the afternoon. At one point I almost forgot the whole thing because I was enjoying the conversation so much, and I forgot what brought it up but here I was jabbering away about Bob’s golf game, and Bob gave me a look—

BOB: I thought she was building up to call the whole thing off, and I couldn’t believe it because she was having so much fun.

CAROL: And in the middle of the sentence I realized what I was saying, and I stopped cold and said, “But that reminds me, Bob — did you leave a light on for the burglars?”

BOB: At which point the conversation stopped cold, and Ray and Irene looked as though they thought they had a couple of nuts on their hands. I just started laughing. “That means she’s decided she wants to swing,” I announced to everybody. “We were going to be subtle as hell about it, but my wife got carried away.”

Actually, this helped break the ice because it gave us all something to laugh about. And there was music playing, and Ray asked Carol to dance, and I danced with Irene, and things just went naturally from there. They had a couple of kids but had boarded them with Irene’s mother for the evening, which was their standard arrangement whenever they went swinging, whether they had a couple to their house or went somewhere else.

Well, it was a great evening. It was even better than I had expected, and Irene was as imaginative in bed as she was beautiful. Finally we drove home and got so excited telling each other about the evening that we stopped at a motel on the way and made love, and then made love all over again when we got home.

JWW: For the next few months, Bob and Carol followed a typical routine for new swingers. After their first markedly successful experience, they began answering a great many ads and setting up dates once a week. Some of these meetings were occasionally less than ideal but were never disappointing enough to cool their enthusiasm for swinging. They saw the Charleston couple several more times, had repeat dates with some of the other couples, and limited themselves to single meetings with those couples with whom they had less rapport.

On the second date with Ray and Irene, Ray suggested that all four undress in the same room together and watch a stag film. Bob and Irene petted during the movie, as did Ray and Carol, and when the film ended, the lovemaking was confined to one room rather than the couples going to separate bedrooms. From that time on, this became Bob and Carol’s preferred mode of swinging.

CAROL: Once you become used to this, to all being together it’s not nearly as enjoyable to separate and couple off. In a funny way it gets so that it almost feels like cheating on your mate to be off by yourself at a time like that. You get a much greater feeling of closeness when you all stay together and have sex openly in front of one another.

BOB: You also have the fun of watching, and I mean wholesome watching, not the peeping Tom variety. You participate and watch at the same time.

CAROL: I really enjoy watching Bob with another woman. I had thought that this would be something to really bring out the jealous streak in me. That’s not what happened at all. I get a real charge out of it.

Also, when you are together like that, you sort of change partners over and over again. You make love to each other in addition to the other couple. This also gives more of a feeling of togetherness. And there are all sorts of physical things about the four of you together, like a man may kiss one girl while he has relations with another, or different things of that sort which are outside of the usual and add a lot of spice to an evening.

BOB: Or the two girls may put on a show, for instance.

CAROL: Do you remember the first time that happened?

BOB: Did you think I would ever forget?

CAROL: And how I didn’t like the idea one bit. And if it had just been thrown out to me as an idea, or if that girl had just come over and made a pass at me, I think I would have run out of the house screaming.

BOB: It was our house. Where would you have gone to?

CAROL: Anywhere, anywhere at all.

BOB: And how far could you run? You were stark naked at the time, the way I remember it.

CAROL: I still almost ran, and naked or clothed would have made no difference at all. But fortunately they used the gradual approach. Even so, I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but I wasn’t as shocked as I might have been.

BOB: The way it happened was we had this couple over, real nice people and very experienced swingers. They had been to orgies, scenes of twenty couples or more.

CAROL: We never did try anything like that.

BOB: We were never with more than one couple at a time, never have been, and as enthusiastic as some people are over those mob scenes I never had the slightest interest in them. The whole idea of crowds rubs me the wrong way.

But we had this couple over and had a real good time. He was a skinny guy but fairly muscular, and she was a little old redhead, also on the skinny side, with deep eyes that could stare clear through you. And we had a good time with them, and there we were just lying around in the buff while they were telling us some of their experiences.

And he was saying that one of the things he really enjoys is watching two girls make love.

CAROL: And I said, “Oh, you mean lesbians.”

BOB: And he says not lesbians at all, but just two women who like to do this as a sort of exhibition. They don’t have to be lesbians, he says, but just to enjoy this sort of thing a little bit.

And Carol said that she couldn’t see how a normal woman could let herself do that.

CAROL: And the girl said that she was a normal woman, she certainly considered herself a normal woman, and she happened to like it. And then she gave me a long look and all of a sudden I knew we weren’t talking about something they had seen at a party. We were talking about here and now, about this redheaded girl and me.

And I got this shiver all through me.

So I said, “Look, are you trying to tell me you’d like to make love to me?”

“That’s what I’m saying,” she said.

“I’m not like that,” I said.

She gave me a big smile. She asked me if I had ever tried it, and I said no, I never had.

“Well,” she said, “you might enjoy it.”

“I couldn’t,” I said. “I would freeze up.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know,” I said. “I couldn’t touch you or do any of those things to you. I just couldn’t.”

I felt like crying. I really did.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, “you don’t have to do a thing. All you have to do is close your eyes and let me fool with you a little, and I won’t do anything that you won’t like. You can trust me that far, can’t you?”

I said I guessed I could, but would she really want to do this to me? She said it always got the men really charged up and she didn’t mind at all. But did she really want to, I wanted to know. Yes, she said, it was something that she enjoyed now and then if the other wife was someone who appealed to her, and she thought I was very beautiful and she knew she would enjoy it, and she guaranteed I would enjoy it, too.

Now you have to remember and bear in mind that not ten minutes ago I had been watching this girl and my husband making love to beat the band, so I knew she was normal, a normal woman. She was no out-and-out lesbian, I could know that much. And Bob here kept urging me to go along with it. I could see how excited he was about it.

BOB: It wasn’t hard to see. I had read about this in all the books, two of the girls putting on a show, and I had always found it very stimulating to think about it. I understood that it was very common at swinging sessions. In fact, Carol didn’t know it, but we had had overtures made to us before in this respect. Once a man asked me if Carol would go for it, and I told him I didn’t think so. And another time I noticed a gal said something to Carol with a sort of double meaning, waiting to see if she would pick up on it, but she didn’t and they let it lay.

CAROL: So to make a long story short I decided I would go along with it, but honestly not expecting to get anything out of it myself, because it had never even been in my mind that this was something that I or any other normal woman could enjoy. I had never really given the whole thing enough thought to form an opinion. But I would go along with it once and see if it was something I could put up with for Bob’s benefit.

Which just goes to show you how well I didn’t know myself, because it’s putting it mildly to say I got a lot more than I expected.

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.

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 who 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.

And while I was thinking that she was no swinger at all and it was good we had checked, she said how she lived with her folks and had this job with the Board of Education and had to be very careful about appearances. “I fuck and suck and everything,” she said, in this same little-girl voice, “but I don’t like to put it on paper.”

Now I was speechless. We had this whole image of little innocent Frannie, and we were even thinking about how if she wasn’t a swinger yet it might be worth a try at getting her a little liquored up and converting her, and then she just laid it right on the line like that. I just stood there with the phone in my hand and she said after a minute that she hoped I wasn’t shocked and that she hadn’t said anything out of line, but she wanted to make everything clear.

I said, “Oh, absolutely. And why don’t you come over tonight, and Bob and I will give you all the fucking and sucking you can possibly handle.”

Now I had never talked over the phone like that before in my life.

BOB: She came over that night and we had a really great time with Frannie. Even in person she was the same as she was in her letters, very shy and demure and innocent, and then she would come out with a line that was purely shocking coming from her. You wouldn’t think twice to hear your average swinger talk like that. It would either seem like nothing at all or it might have a vulgar sound to it, but from Frannie it was like hearing it in church.

CAROL: She was a lot better looking than her picture showed.

BOB: I’ll tell you, she didn’t look twenty-three. She could have passed easily for seventeen, maybe less than that. She didn’t wear any makeup and she had a very young face. Big wide blue eyes. She was very slim. Hardly any hips at all and cute little breasts. Very good legs and a pert rear, and always this serious little-girl voice.

CAROL: But once things got started, she knew just what she wanted and she couldn’t get too much of it.

BOB: She just about took charge of things. She would say who should do what, and we let her call the signals. “You get on your hands and knees,” she told Carol, and Carol did it. “And now you get on her and give it to her doggie-style,” she told me. And I did just what she ordered, and she crawled underneath and ate us both at once while we did it. We had never done it quite this way before, but believe me, it was a way to do it that we didn’t forget about in a hurry. She was a real greedy little girl, Frannie.

CAROL: She stayed all night. Told her mother she was sleeping at a girlfriend’s house and stayed all night long. And we didn’t sleep much, either. We’d no sooner doze off than she’d be at one or the other of us and wake us all up all over again.

BOB: She told us she only liked to swing once in a while, maybe one time a month, and only with couples, and only if she really liked them. Her entire sex life was this once-a-month swinging. She had this one ad running, and she would get dozens of replies to it every week. Plenty of them from single guys, of course, but also a great many from couples. And she hardly answered any of them because everything had to be just right about a couple before she would have anything to do with them. Then she would have her one date of the month and fit a whole month’s worth of sex into one night.

We’ve swung with her three times since then. She doesn’t advertise any more. She has maybe a dozen couples that she will see off and on. And that’s just the way she wants it. She’s completely bisexual. There’s nothing we ever thought of doing that she doesn’t like to do. But it’s no good at all for her unless she’s with a couple. One guy alone or one girl alone — she won’t have anything to do with it.

CAROL: Not that everybody has to be involved in the act, but she has to be together with a couple, they both have to be in the same room with her.

BOB: We’ve been trying to figure her out, you know. It’s hard because she doesn’t want to talk about her personal life at all. My guess is that she had her first sex with a couple when she was very young. This is maybe a little more than pure guesswork. She let something slip, I don’t remember exactly what, but it gave this impression. I would even suspect it was relatives that seduced her. An aunt and uncle or a pair of older cousins or something. And then this formed her sexual attitudes, and she never changed them.

CAROL: I like her, though. I’d see her more often, if we could. But she has this rule of no more than once a month, and about a dozen couples she goes with more or less regularly, so we don’t get to see too much of her. I told her one time she ought to marry some boy and find an extra girl for threesomes, but that wasn’t what she wanted at all. She has to be the extra girl or she’s not interested.

JWW: It is always interesting to speculate on the reasons why people are willing to discuss the most intimate aspects of their lives with an interviewer. After all, I take a great deal of their time probing into their sex lives and offer them no compensation for their time and trouble beyond my personal gratitude.

(There has been one exception. For Tricks of the Trade, in which nine call girls were interviewed to create a “hooker’s handbook of sexual technique,” I had no choice but to pay the girls rather handsomely for their time. But they, after all, were professionals, and their credo that time is money operates whatever use is made of that time.)

The most obvious explanation — that a great many persons are inclined to be genuinely cooperative — is certainly true. Swingers are especially generous in this respect, and have often expressed the thought that wider dissemination of information on the sexual underground will open more people to the possibilities of the life and will make their own lot in society less potentially troublesome. Many enthusiastic swingers are sincerely evangelistic; they often mention that they first became interested through books on the subject, and welcome a chance to contribute to this educational process.

For others, particularly those with ambivalent feelings about the lives they are leading, the interviewer furnishes an extra ear similar in certain ways to that of a priest or psychiatrist. The confessional impulse transcends religion, and serving as the subject of an in-depth interview concerning sexual matters provides the chance to justify oneself to oneself, to obtain absolution for what one regards as sinful, and, finally, to clarify one’s thoughts by using the interviewer as a sounding board. Time after time subjects have followed general or personal observations with the notation that they have never had this particular thought before, and I don’t doubt that the interview situation does afford good opportunities for self-analysis.

In A Married Couple, a cinéma vérité filmmaker moved his camera into the apartment of a Canadian couple and filmed several weeks of their life together, producing ultimately a remarkable ninety minutes of brutally revelatory film. At the same time, his presence served to crystallize the attitudes of the man and wife toward each other and toward their marriage. In much the same fashion, I have occasionally found myself playing a catalyst’s role in a relationship. This was particularly true in the extended, almost painfully incisive interviews which saw print as The Wife Swap Report.

Exhibitionistic impulses also prompt some interviews to a greater or lesser extent. Of the correspondence which I receive, a certain amount invariably consists of calculatedly obscene letters detailing sexual experiences, the majority of which are clearly identifiable as fantasy or invention. In other cases, cooperative subjects are often aware of their own interest as exhibitionists. “If factual experiences such as these are of interest to you,” a Midwesterner wrote at the conclusion of a detailed record of incestuous practices, “I would be glad to give you details and, truthfully, get a lot of pleasure doing it.” While such self-awareness is exceptional, the exhibitionistic impulse in this regard is not.

All of the above serves as a lengthy preface to the observations that, in the case of Bob and Carol Fessenden, I was frequently made aware that our interviews provided them with a pleasurable means of reliving highly satisfactory sexual experiences. They spent a great deal of time discussing various sexual partners of theirs, much in the manner of their discussion of Frannie reported above. Frannie herself was discussed at greater length than I have reproduced, and with a luxury of detail which, if printed here, could only serve to embarrass Frannie, myself, and my publisher’s legal department.

For a time I interpreted this as simple exhibitionism, but further reflection convinced me that it was something rather different. Bob and Carol were sharing Frannie in conversation as they had earlier enjoyed sharing her in the flesh, and no doubt for similar reasons. Their conversational interplay, the avidness with which they passed words back and forth, echoed their earlier physical relationship with the girl.

BOB: I remember one girl we met who was different from the usual run. Her name was Linda and she lived in Philadelphia, which is a long way to travel for a night. This wasn’t that unusual, though, because we often get letters from as far away as the West Coast.

CAROL: I don’t think most people expect anything to come of it when they answer someone that far away. As a matter of fact, I think some people purposely write to faraway places so that they’ll have the excuse of being unable to travel. A lot of people just want correspondence without any meeting — you can usually spot their letters quickly enough after you get the hang of it.

BOB: Linda wasn’t in that class. She told us that she wrote to us because she was very strongly attracted to the pictures published with our ad, and also because the wording of the ad suggested to her that we might be safe.

CAROL: She was a virgin.

BOB: Not that she lacked experience, but that she had never had intercourse and didn’t want to. She told us different things at different times so it’s hard to know just what her story was.

CAROL: She said she was built too small to accommodate a male organ. That she was abnormally small. She put that in a letter. Another time she said something about having a muscular condition that made her tighten up immediately at the mere thought of intercourse.

BOB: Carol had the idea that she wasn’t a virgin at all.

CAROL: My guess is that someone raped her when she was just a child and it was a trauma for her, and she was deathly afraid of having anything inside her ever after. Because she made that an absolute rule before she would set up a date with us. Nothing inside her, not in front or in back either, not so much as a finger.

BOB: I thought from her letters — we corresponded with her for quite awhile before we got together with her — I thought she might have a dislike of penises in general. That she was more of a lesbian than a bisexual but she wanted to go with men, too, because she didn’t want to face the fact that she was all the way gay.

CAROL: If she hated penises, I’d hate to see someone who loved them.

BOB: Oh, that’s the truth. She was a born cocksucker and couldn’t get enough of it. She would take it all the way to the hilt, you know, and that always struck me as pretty strange. I mean that she wouldn’t let anything into her anywhere else, but that she could take it clear down to the back of her throat without gagging.

CAROL: And never spilled a drop, either.

BOB: She had a way of using the muscles in her throat that was out of this world. Just unbelievable. I can still remember how it felt.

CAROL: It’s a shame you couldn’t be watching yourself while she was Frenching you. The expressions on your face, you were something to see.

BOB: We were planning a trip to New York, so we made arrangements to stop in Philadelphia and spend some time with her. She was a secretary to a lawyer and lived by herself in a pretty nice apartment. She wasn’t as young as you would have expected. The idea of her being a virgin, we immediately got the impression of someone who wasn’t much more than a kid, but I would say she was about twenty-five.

CAROL: Maybe older than that. It was hard to tell her age, and while she said she was twenty-four I think she may have been taking off a few years. You might be surprised how many swingers will do that, especially when they get past thirty-five. The nicest people are honest that way, but a lot of them think they have to lie a few years or so in order to get in on the action.

BOB: Of course before we could set up a date with her we had to agree absolutely to her conditions. This didn’t bother me a bit, and of course it made no difference at all from Carol’s point of view. To tell the truth, we were both more than a little intrigued. The idea that she was a virgin was something new. And there’s no denying that novelty has a lot to do with what pleasure you get out of swinging.

CAROL: It’s not the whole thing, though. That’s the impression you get reading some of those books. In one of your books, Jack, you have this couple that tries everything and everything will be exciting to them at the beginning, and then each thing gets boring to them, until they run out of things that are new to them and they wind up getting out of swinging altogether. Now I didn’t think that was realistic from what we’ve experienced.

JWW: It happens in certain cases.

CAROL: I’m sure it must, and I know that might get people into swinging, but it’s not what keeps them there. There’s novelty in the different people but there are also things that you can’t have in a relationship with just two people, and those things do stay satisfying.

JWW: That’s generally true, but there are certain people who are just hooked on novelty, and of course they’re so constituted that they can never be satisfied over an extended period of time.

CAROL: Well, I can see how that would be true in certain cases, where it’s people with a problem in that respect. But it must be rare.

BOB: As far as that goes, honey, think how many one-timers there are.

CAROL: Yes, that’s true. That must be more or less of the same thing.

One-timers, we meet them all the time but it’s more common with couples than with the bisexual girls we swing with nowadays. Of course a couple may say they are one-timers after you’ve been with them as a polite way of explaining why they would as soon not swing with you again, rather than coming out and saying they didn’t enjoy it. We have done that ourselves. The genuine one-timer is a couple that announces it in advance and never repeats. Some people call them collectors because they approach the whole thing that way, wanting to collect as many other couples as they can.

BOB: They usually collect pictures, too. One couple told us they had a regular filing system, pictures and diary entries of every couple they swung with. You can imagine what would happen if some puritanical cop happened to raid them. But they didn’t seem at all worried.

But to get back to Linda—

CAROL: Yes, we really ought to get back to Linda.

BOB: The point of it is that we were more than willing to agree to her conditions, and we assured her of this, and met her in her apartment. She said that she had to be very careful in arranging dates because some men seemed to take her virginity as a personal challenge. Either they would try to wear her down with arguments, which just spoiled her whole scene, or else they would try to force her.

CAROL: There was a time when we suspected this was what she wanted — someone to hold her down and rape her.

BOB: It’s possible that she does want that unconsciously, but that’s not our scene.

CAROL: Thank heavens.

BOB: We met with her, and she was really very sweet. She greeted us by giving us each a warm kiss at the door. She was fully bisexual in this respect. Some girls will want to do sexual things with other girls, but they draw the line at kissing.

CAROL: I had a hard time at first until I learned to relate to other girls that way. But I can’t imagine two men kissing that way unless they were out-and-out homos. It’s interesting how there is a definite double-standard this way. And how among swinging couples there are so many more bisexual wives than there are husbands.

BOB: Linda was bi all the way. We talked for awhile and then got in the mood, had a couple of drinks, and all got out of our clothes. She had a beautiful figure and my first impulse was that I certainly would enjoy screwing her, and then I remembered that I couldn’t do this. It was a very strange feeling.

CAROL: I got this sensation of purity, that she was a virgin and had never been really possessed by a man, and I found this exciting.

BOB: It was a sort of a test of ingenuity to see just how many ways there were to make it with her without putting it inside her. Between the thighs and under the arms and between the breasts and everyway in the world, I guess.

CAROL: And of course her mouth.

BOB: God, what a mouth—

JWW: After considerably more details concerning Linda and several other female partners of theirs, the conversation turned to the subject of permanent troilistic relationships. I discussed several of these with which I had become familiar to varying degrees. Both Bob and Carol were extremely interested and questioned me at great length.

While they had not yet established a troilistic relationship of any permanence, they had been thinking along such lines for quite some time and hoped to establish a more or less stable ménage à trois when the right person came along.

BOB: What I would like is to find a girl who would really become a part of the family. Not just someone to party with regularly but to be a part of the household and live here regularly. I have seen advertisements trying to set something up along those lines but we haven’t gone so far as to place an ad of our own, and I don’t know if we will take that step or wait for something to turn up by itself. I don’t think advertising would be good because the person would have to be just right or the whole thing would not be good.

CAROL: The closest we came to anything of the sort was with this girl I mentioned before whom we would swing with every so often. We were planning this trip to the Virgin Islands — you know, come to think of it we should have taken Linda, the Virgin Islands and all. We had two weeks, and we mentioned it to this other girl and she said she would really love to come along. She offered to pay her own way but Bob wouldn’t hear of it and insisted on picking up the whole tab.

BOB: It didn’t cost that much more for three than for two, and she didn’t have money to throw away.

CAROL: Those were two good weeks. It was interesting, because when you swing with someone just for a night it’s really all sex. You may get to know each other fairly well or you may not, but either way there’s no time when sex isn’t the whole reason the three of you are together. But with two weeks at our disposal we couldn’t be in bed every minute of the time.

BOB: We did pretty well, though.

CAROL: Oh, we did every damn thing, but we also spent time on the beach or I would take her shopping or we would be at a restaurant or a nightclub, and it was a case of living together more than just having sex for the three of us. And we had thought about a permanent threesome before this, but now it really seemed attractive to us.

BOB: It wouldn’t have been right with this girl, though. She was fine to swing with and even fine for two weeks, but by the end of the two weeks we were beginning to feel the strain. We still see her, and would take a vacation with her again as far as that goes. But as far as making it permanent, I don’t think it would ever work out.

CAROL: No, not with her.

BOB: You would have to have absolutely the perfect girl. And it couldn’t be the sort of thing in the case you were talking about, where both the women are the man’s wives. Not that he’s married to both of them, but that it’s the same as if he were. I’ve got one wife and that’s Carol and she’s all the wife I need.

CAROL: I don’t mind sharing Bob, but I wouldn’t want to feel like part of a harem. I like it the way it is, with me being his wife and something special to him.

BOB: It’s more that we would want a girl we could both love. That she would be more or less the center of the triangle, if that’s the word for it.

CAROL: The apex.

BOB: That’s the word I was trying for. The apex of the triangle.

CAROL: You know, there’s a game swingers play called Center of Attraction. You choose by drawing lots or spinning a bottle or something like that, and the person chosen is the center of attraction, and lies passive while everybody else in the game makes love to her at once.

BOB: Or to him, as the case may be.

CAROL: Well, at large parties I understand it’s usually a woman that gets chosen, because all the women will be bi, whereas most of the men will not be. But anyway that’s how the game works.

We will play it at threesomes, not bothering to spin a bottle but taking turns. When it’s Bob’s turn the other girl and I will love him up for fifteen minutes or a half hour or however long we decide, and then it’s my turn and so forth. But what we found, we enjoy it most when it’s the girl’s turn, and Bob and I more or less make love to her as a team. Each sucking one of her breasts and so forth.

And I think that fits in with what Bob said about the extra girl being the apex of the triangle.

BOB: We’ve talked about what the perfect girl would be like. It would be best if she were a good deal younger than we are, and the less experience she has the better. We would want to take over her whole life and shape it so that she would be able to fit in perfectly with us. When a girl is older or has experience it’s harder to make her fit in.

CAROL: We had the idea of getting some younger girl as household help and seeing how she might work out. It would have to be a case of seducing her gradually and we would probably go through a lot of maids before we found the right one, but we think it might work sooner or later.

BOB: We had it in mind to hire a young colored girl, but that would be taking a big chance.

CAROL: Not that we consider ourselves prejudiced that way. We may be Southerners, but some people are a lot more open-minded down here than the average Yankee suspects. We do have certain prejudices which are more a case of being old-fashioned in some ways than anything else, but we don’t have prejudices where sex is concerned. For example, we have swung with colored several times and never found anything to object to on those occasions.

BOB: We never swung with a colored couple.

CAROL: Well, I beg your pardon, but we did.

BOB: They were interracial. She was colored but he wasn’t.

CAROL: Yes, that’s true. Never when the man was colored, although if it had come up I think we would have.

BOB: I don’t know if that’s so. But with colored girls, we certainly have no objection. And I think it would be easy to get one who would go along with it. They have a freer attitude that way, and getting a girl from some back-country town, that wouldn’t be hard to do.

CAROL: But if anyone found out—

BOB: Yes, that’s where the problem lies. It would have to be kept absolutely secret, and if anyone found out it would be the end of my career and the end of living anywhere in this area. As far as that goes it’s important to keep swinging a secret anyway, but you could have people suspect a great deal or even know for sure and they would tend to shrug it off. For the ones who never spoke to you after they heard about it, you would have others who were swingers themselves or thought it was a good idea.

Once it’s a question of race, though, down here that’s like waving a red flag at a bull. We consider ourselves flaming liberals on racial matters, but even so I have to admit that I would not want Carol to make love to a colored man. I might have gone through with it anyway when we were swinging with couples. Or I might not. But I know I wouldn’t have liked it at all.

Our neighbors, though. The people of the community. Now if I were seeing some colored gal on the sly that would be one thing, and most of them, the men that is, would be inclined to wink at it. But for the two of us to have a colored girl in our house and be having sex with her, no, they wouldn’t care for that. Maybe you could get by with it in New York, but Atlanta isn’t New York.

CAROL: We also have been thinking about getting a European girl as a domestic. They have employment agencies in New York that specialize in that, either from Ireland or Scandinavia, mostly. The Scandinavians are supposed to be very liberal on sex and we will probably get around to making inquiries one of these days. Again, you couldn’t expect to hit the jackpot on the first nickel, and we might have some disappointments, but with a Scandinavian girl, a young one, I think it just might work out.

BOB: Of course you’ve got to bear in mind, John, that we think about no end of things and make plans and all, and nothing ever comes of it. We enjoy the planning but we don’t actually do everything we have in mind, not by any means. I think we might up and get started on this, but we’ve been talking about it for a long while and haven’t done a thing about it up to now.

CAROL: I think we will, though.

BOB: Maybe.

CAROL: I think I’ll write a letter tomorrow. I wonder if you get to look at a photograph of the girl or you just take what they send you?

BOB: What I was getting at, about how we like to plan a number of things, some of which we know there’s hardly a chance in the world that we’ll do—

CAROL: You’re not going to tell him?

BOB: Why not?

CAROL: I don’t know.

BOB: We’re telling everything else. And this isn’t even something we’ve done yet, and probably never will, so what’s the point in keeping shut about it?

CAROL: I don’t know.

BOB: Don’t you want me to say anything?

CAROL: Well, you already said enough so that John here will only suspect worse than anything you could possibly say, so why don’t you go ahead? You might as well tell him what it is.

BOB: Well, there is this charity in New York where you can adopt a foster child in another country. You pay them $192 a year and they take care of the child, pay for food and clothing and put a roof on their hut and all the other things that the child needs. And from time to time they send you reports on how the child is doing, and pictures of her, and you can write her a letter once a month and she writes letters to you once a month which they translate and send to you.

CAROL: And we adopted one a year ago. A daughter, obviously.

BOB: We didn’t have anything in mind but to do a good deed for someone. We believe in charity, but just giving money to some big organization, you don’t feel you’re making a real contribution. All you’re doing is throwing one drop into a big bucket, and you keep feeling that if the government really wanted to cure cancer they would do better taking the money out of taxes than having all these charities. But something like this, you participate, and you see the results of what you’re doing. When you send a check to the cancer society you don’t know if it does any good or not, but here we know that one particular child won’t go hungry and will have clothes to wear.

CAROL: She’s eleven years old. She lives in Colombia, in South America—

BOB: Oh, Christ, he knows where Colombia is. He wasn’t going to think you meant Colombia, Missouri.

CAROL: Her name is Estrellita, which means Little Star. She’s part Indian and has the most beautiful face. Black shoe-button eyes and straight hair and the most beautiful innocent face you ever saw.

BOB: And now and then Carol and I will talk about seeing if we can’t bring her up here to live with us. Not right away but when she’s a little older. You know, the advantages of living in America, and of being able to have a decent life—

CAROL: Of course you can imagine what would happen if we had her here.

BOB: Well, when you stop and think, what would be so bad about that?

CAROL: I didn’t say anything would be bad about it.

BOB: The chances are strong that we’ll never go through with it. That we won’t ever take it past the stage of something to talk about. But if we ever did, I think it would be ideal. For her and for us. I think it would work out to be a perfect relationship, if we ever did anything about it.