The Wife-Swap Report

The Swim of Things

PAUL: Sooner or later we would have looked for another couple — or couples, really. We were ready for that sort of variety, of meeting with strangers, and I think the Creightons were as well, but neither of us quite got around to suggesting it. And there were other mitigating circumstances as well...

But when we found they were moving, then there was absolutely no question about it. It was taken for granted immediately by all four of us that we would all have to find new outlets for swinging, and that we would do so, either through correspondence or by some other means. First we assured each other that we would travel across the country now and then to get together for auld lang syne, and then we hurled ourselves into one of what turned out to be a whole string of going away orgies, because it did take them quite a while to make their move from the time Jeff accepted the new position. And then, finally, we all four sat down together to read through the tabloids and the club papers and pick out ads for us all to answer...

Another night, cold and dark, with intermittent rain audible against the picture window. Paul wears a bulky Aran sweater and wide-wale corduroy slacks. Sheila’s sweater matches his; her slacks are plaid, a Black Watch variant. The mood tonight is one of jovial reminiscence. A fire burns idly in the fireplace. There is a generous tray of canapés on the coffee table — roll-ups of chicken liver and water chestnut and bacon, tiny cocktail wieners transfixed by colored plastic toothpicks, melba rounds spread with Camembert. We are drinking excellent Scotch and go through an impressive quantity of it in the course of a few hours, but no one at any point seems adversely affected by drink; the only outward sign is the absence of tension and a heightened sense of camaraderie. There is to be no thoughtful probing this evening no inquiry into needs and motives, no attempt to summon up the flavors and nuances of recollected experience. Tonight we exist and function on a far simpler plane.

PAUL: We must have thumbed through those papers and magazines until the print was gone. First we ruled out all ads that were out of our geographical area, which meant that we were eliminating a good ninety percent right off the top. And of course we crossed off ads seeking single girls, or ads placed by men looking for threesomes — in other words, we limited ourselves to couples looking for couples, couples in our age bracket who seemed to be in about the same position we were in.

SHEILA: And then we began to narrow it down. If there was no photo — some magazines would print a photograph of the wife, although that was less common then than it is now — if there was a photograph, and if the girl didn’t look appealing, we passed up that ad. If the things the couples liked to do sounded excessively perverted, we crossed them off.

PAUL: Or if we didn’t know what their code meant.

SHEILA: Right. I remember that some of the ads specified an interest in English culture. We didn’t know what this was because the expression was just beginning to come into the swinging lexicon. French culture meant oral and Greek culture meant anal and Prussian culture meant discipline and Roman meant orgies, and what was Egyptian? I think miscegenation. That was in use for a while and then disappeared. I don’t know how some slang terms gain acceptance among swingers and others don’t. Who decides what euphemisms swing?

PAUL: English culture means flagellation, of course.

SHEILA: So we wouldn’t have been interested anyway, as it turns out. There were other things, animal training for bestiality, the usual kinky things. And one couple I remember who described themselves as gourmets. I remember the phrasing: “not gourmands but gourmets.” We crossed them out. We assumed that they were Francophiles, but there was something about the phrasing that left room for doubt, so we decided the hell with them. I’m still not sure whether they were just fond of oral sex or whether they had something else going for them.

PAUL: When we finally made our selections, we almost changed our mind and didn’t write at all.

JWW: You thought of giving up swinging?

SHEILA: No, never that! Quite the reverse.

PAUL: We were going to run an ad of our own.

SHEILA: And for the silliest possible reason. You’ll love this. We were literally terrified that we would write to someone at random and it would turn out to he someone we knew! As if there was any real likelihood of that, when we knew so few people in the area who weren’t actually in Kansas City.

PAUL: Well, that wasn’t the really ridiculous part. The stupid thing was our feeling that this would be terrible for a friend of ours to get that sort of letter from us. We completely ignored the fact that anybody who placed such an ad would be in the very same boat with us, and hardly in the position to cast the first stone.

SHEILA: People in the same boat shouldn’t cast the first stone — is that what you’re trying to say?

PAUL: Ouch! Sorry about that. But I think you get the point. As a matter of fact, sooner or later quite a few swingers will have that weird experience of getting a contact through the mails from another couple they never thought of as swingers. There are just so many people involved in swapping that it has to happen now and then.

JWW: Has it happened to you?

PAUL: Twice, both times when we had an ad of ours answered by casual acquaintances. One time we met the couple and swung with them, and the other time they were people who didn’t appeal to us and we never answered the letter. So it’s possible that it happened more than once — we could have answered ads and had acquaintances of ours fail to answer.

SHEILA: But we appeal to everybody, sweets.

PAUL: Be that as it may.

SHEILA: To get back to where we were, we finally decided that we were being stupid, but we felt it still might be a good idea to be somewhat indirect about getting acquainted. If nothing else, there was still the problem of entrapment by the Post Office finks. There was also a certain amount of danger in writing to a professional associate of Paul’s. Even if somebody else would have as much to lose from that sort of exposure, we felt nervous about giving anyone that kind of power over Paul’s career. Sending out a photograph of me was all right — not that many of Paul’s business friends had even met me. And Paul could be in the picture, too, just by turning his head so his face wouldn’t be recognizable. But we wanted to avoid putting our names on line, or our addresses.

PAUL: We thought about a Post Office box under a phony name, until we realized how completely insane that would be if there were Post Office inspectors involved. And we also considered using a false name and giving no address, just our phone number. In fact we wrote out a few letters with that in mind but didn’t mail them. For one thing, we would be letting people about whom we knew nothing have a chance to call us up any time they wanted to. You can’t tell anything from an ad, and the last thing you would want to do is turn your telephone number over to a telephone pervert. Also, we weren’t all that sure that somebody couldn’t find out who we were from our telephone number. Information won’t give out that data, and they’ll tell you they don’t have it filed that way, but that’s nonsense. The police can always get it. As a matter of fact, it would be virtually impossible for the telephone company to establish any sort of data-processing system without listing customers by their phone numbers. And if the information exists, then the Post Office people could get it if they wanted to, and we were really leery of that.

SHEILA: You wouldn’t believe the things we worried about it. And the precautions we took.

PAUL: Imagine a couple where the wife wears a diaphragm and jelly and takes the Pill, and the husband wears three condoms, and then they sleep in separate beds and don’t screw. That’s how careful we tried to be about the damned thing.

SHEILA: All the tabloids had ads from secret mail-forwarding services. For so much a week or so much a letter they would forward your mail. But we didn’t see any reason to trust them, either. I have a criminal mind, as you may have noticed, and it occurred to me that if I wanted a very simple way to get into the blackmailing business for fun and profit, why all I would have to do was open a mail-forwarding operation and read the mail before forwarding it. I don’t suppose the average person in that racket even bothers, actually, but it was enough to scare us off.

PAUL: After all this buildup, what we did is going to sound anticlimactic. I used an alias, and as an address I gave the street address of a third-rate downtown hotel. After the letters were in the mail, I stopped at the hotel one afternoon, gave my false name to the clerk, and slipped him a couple of bucks to look out for any mail that came for me. Of course I started dropping by too soon. The clubs have to forward your letters, and sometimes they take their sweet time, and the mails are often slow, and the people who place the ads are sometimes simply deluged with correspondence, and even if they intend to answer a certain letter it may be some time before they get around to it. Once you get into the swim of things these delays don’t bother you. You have enough letters out at any given time so that you are constantly getting answers and establishing new contacts. We were just beginning and we were impatient to get with it, and so I began checking for my mail a couple of weeks before the first letters trickled in.

SHEILA: We sent out ten letters, each with a photograph enclosed. The pictures were fairly revealing but not obscene in any sense of the word, and we were also careful not to be too outspoken in our letters. We knew that much at least from what we had read. There was not only the legal problem, but we had read that a very frank letter was unlikely to get a reply. It scared off the true swingers.

PAUL: Because they suspected it was from a postal inspector. The Post Office finks are notorious for writing the really raunchy letters.

SHEILA: And also because most swingers, the greater proportion of them, are not interested in meeting really crude people. And anyone who gets too intimate in correspondence with a stranger is either a barbarian or a verbal exhibitionist, and neither is much fun to have around. Incidentally, occasional correspondents will urge us to be more candid in our letters, emphasizing that nothing shocks them and giving an example of their own ability to send original pornography through the mails.

PAUL: You know the drift, John, I’m sure. “Do you like to suck? I sure like to eat pussy. I wish you were here now so I could suck your pussy. I am imagining it and right now I have my tool in my hand—” And on and on until you could really vomit. One glance at a letter like that and you know the clown is a masturbator and nothing else. Never meets anybody, just beats off when he writes to you and beats off all over again if you answer him. Not that I have anything against people like that. I’m all for them finding each other, which I guess happens often enough, nowadays many of them will state in their ads that they only want correspondence. If they get their kicks this way, I don’t think it’s any of the Post Office’s business what they send through the mails.

SHEILA: Sometimes I really wonder about this country. You can send guns and weapons through the mails but not birth-control information or dirty letters.

PAUL: And big corporations can send their cruddy junk mail to me whether or not I want it, and at a rate that means I as a taxpayer am subsidizing the crap, but when some poor pervert chips away at the postal deficit by paying a full six cents to mail a dirty letter, then the public is supposedly being taken advantage of. Well, I’m part of that public, and the junk mailer certainly hurts me and takes more advantage of me than the pervert.

There is more light discussion of the Post Office and the expanding role of government. Politically, Sheila and Paul could be most precisely described as libertarian conservatives, a category into which a majority of upper-middle-class swingers probably belong. They are concerned about the scope of government and its control over the citizenry. Government spending bothers them, as do economic controls, which they regard as creeping socialism. At the same time their feelings regarding civil rights and civil liberties, as well as basic economic assistance for poverty classes, would be characterized as extremely liberal, and their Vietnam position is markedly dovish. This evening’s political comments consist mostly of gentle carping, and before long we return to the topic at hand.

SHEILA: Of our ten letters, seven brought more or less prompt replies, which we later discovered is a remarkably high average. As a general thing, fifty percent is considered good. We had done the right thing in phrasing our letters intelligently and in selecting people who were geographically close to us.

Of the seven, one couple wrote courteously to say that they had a full schedule for the time being. The courtesy of a negative reply was rare enough six years ago. It’s almost nonexistent now. The other six were all raring to go. They sent their pictures and their phone numbers and wanted to meet us.

We narrowed the group down. One couple was interracial, a white girl and a Negro man. At the time we were anxious to avoid that sort of thing—

PAUL: The prejudices you grow up with take a long time dying. Even for swingers.

SHEILA: Another couple wrote a letter that just didn’t ring true. I would be hard-pressed to say how, but it didn’t. We knew there were a lot of phonies in the swinging world, and we had the vague feeling that this was from one of them, so we passed it up.

The other couples all looked like good prospects. We picked the two closest couples, one here in K.C. and another just across the river in Missouri. One was in town and the other struck us from the photograph as slightly more attractive to us, so we tossed a coin, and Kansas City won.

PAUL: They had enclosed their phone number, so one evening we gave them a ring. We had been putting it off for several days and it was really wild. Talk about being tugged two ways at once! We were really desperate for some swinging — it had been about two months since Jeff and Jan moved away — and at the same time we had a rougher case of sexual stage fright than Fay Wray on her honeymoon with King Kong. Somehow all that we had learned from our reading didn’t seem to help in the least. It was like reading books about sky diving — they wouldn’t make it any easier to take that first step out of the plane.

SHEILA: So we stalled until we reached a point that was almost disgusting. Lying in bed together with their letters and pictures and sexing ourselves up with fantasies, and then working it off on each other. I didn’t like that at all. I suppose a civilian would think we had it all backward — that actual swapping is perverse but a little vicarious stimulation between husband and wife is just another onion in the stew of matrimony. I can’t buy that.

PAUL: It’s like jerking off, except that instead of your hand you use you wife’s vagina.

SHEILA: Jesus, what a revolting thought!

PAUL:...When we finally decided to call them, I could think of nothing else all day at the office. I really made a hash of my work, and I was so preoccupied that it was a miracle I didn’t crack up the car on the ride home. We were going to call after dinner, but by the time we had had cocktails we decided not to wait, and I made the call.

The couple we reached were Anne and Harold Kline. I introduced myself by the alias I had used in the letter and they knew at once who I was. They remembered our letter. They were both on the phone, and I got Sheila to pick up the extension in the kitchen, and we had a surprisingly relaxed four-way conversation. They asked us if Friday was all right, and we said it was, and Anne suggested we come over there, and Harold seconded the motion but got across the message that they would understand if we preferred to meet on neutral territory.

SHEILA: In a cocktail lounge, for instance, so that we could all size each other up and call off the swap graciously if we wanted.

PAUL: I would have preferred to do this. In fact Sheila and I had discussed it beforehand. But they were essentially saying that they didn’t have any reservations about swinging with us, and it didn’t seem particularly well mannered for us to express reservations about them. Especially since they were veterans and seemed sure of themselves, which made them two-up on us. So we set a date.

Somewhere in the middle of the conversation I thought to myself that Anne had a sexy voice. Poised, educated, well modulated, and equipped with a husky undertone. And then it struck me that this woman I was chatting with, this total stranger, was going to be my bed partner in three days’ time. It was shocking, and tremendously exciting...

Friday night we left our kids with a sitter and drove across town to their house. Their place was way over on the other side of the city in a section we weren’t at all familiar with, and we had a hell of a time finding it. But we got there, all right. The house was very impressive — a brick two-story home overgrown with ivy and set back on a half-acre lot. Huge oak trees, a first-class landscaping job. We hadn’t known how grand they might live; I knew Harold was a pharmacist, but that could mean anything from a glorified clerk drawing $7800 a year to a man with a chain of drugstores. We learned later that Harold owns three stores on three of the best shopping plazas in the Kansas City area, which made him a far cry from a clerk.

Their son was awake when they let us in. About fourteen years old, an alert, good-looking kid. They introduced him and he shook hands with us and went upstairs to watch television. It sort of shook us up. It really did.

SHEILA: We had had the Creightons over when our kids were in the house, of course. But Mark and Lisa were tiny then, and even if they had walked in on us they wouldn’t have known what was going on. This was a big kid, and the idea of introducing him to the folks his parents swung with—

PAUL: I think we were also more aware of their ages by meeting their son. Their ages were no secret. They were in their mid-thirties, I think thirty-six and thirty-four, which made them substantially older than us but not enough to turn us off, certainly. But when we met their boy, well, he did make them seem to be older than they looked, and it also occurred to me that we were about as close in age to the kid as we were to his parents, and that was an odd feeling.

SHEILA: With Jeff and Jan, we had had everything in common, and so we were now very conscious of differences.

PAUL: Fortunately the Klines put us at ease. We had a few rounds of drinks and began to unwind. They were very attractive people. He was losing his hair in front, but his hairline was receding neatly and evenly so that he only looked bright and distinguished, not ridiculous the way some men do when they begin to go bald. He had a good sense of humor and a knack for keeping a conversation alive.

Anne was a fair-skinned brunette with very large brown eyes and a really extraordinary figure. Most swingers begin to cut a few years off their ages once they pass the thirty mark. In Anne’s case, I would have thought it was the other way around. It was almost impossible to believe she was thirty-four years old with a fourteen-year-old son. Even up close she could have passed for a full ten years younger.

SHEILA: Easily. If I were to meet someone like that now I would be fiercely jealous, but at the time I was too young to mind. When you’re twenty-four you think you’ll be young forever.

PAUL: I noticed that Anne wasn’t drinking the same thing as the rest of us. Later on she explained that she was a health nut. Never touched alcohol or tobacco or tea or coffee or any of the other things that normal people stay alive on. And she drank — what the hell was it?

SHEILA: Vegetable juice. Carrot and parsley and celery. She had an elaborate machine to squeeze them with. And she never ate sugar or white bread or dozens of other things. Or took any kind of pill, including aspirin.

PAUL: She used to say that she only had one vice and she wanted to be able to give it all her energy.

SHEILA: The crazy things she ate and didn’t eat. I shouldn’t say crazy, should I? It certainly worked for her. If I had any sense—

PAUL: No you don’t. You’re too much of a fanatic, honey. If you quit smoking and drinking you’d go all the way and cut out sex, too, and then where would we be?

SHEILA: Dead of boredom in a week.

PAUL: You said it. Well, let’s say that I was sufficiently impressed with Anne. Her figure was great in clothes, and the bathing-suit shot they had sent us had proved she looked good out of clothes, too. There was no doubt in my mind that I was interested, and Shelia and I exchanged glances and her eyes let me know that she wasn’t averse to the idea of making it with Harold, either. So I relaxed and waited for them to take the initiative.

This took a while. I guess they wanted the kid to have a chance to get to sleep, or else they just wanted to give us all a chance to get acquainted. But around ten o’clock Anne asked if we would like to see the basement recreation room. I started to go with her, and Sheila was ready to tag along.

SHEILA: Sometimes people can be too subtle.

PAUL: And this was one of those times. But Harold took hold of her and asked her to keep him company for a few minutes, and then my genius wife got the message. And so did I.

There was a Castro convertible downstairs, all opened and ready for action — which was a good description of the state Anne was in, as far as that goes. It was really a pretty odd scene. At one moment she was this calm and cool hostess, and the next minute she was a bitch in heat. Literally. I saw the couch opened up and said something moderately clever and turned to smile at her, just the least bit afraid that maybe I had been overly risqué with her playing it so cool, and there she was with her dress pulled over her head and nothing but her underneath it. She kicked off her shoes, flopped on the bed, and started panting.

I was really stunned by all of this, and instead of rising to the occasion I stood there staring like a jerk. Not for long, though. Then I got undressed and got in bed with her.

We began touching and kissing, and at one point I was about to go down on her. Just as a matter of course, because we had all reached the point where we hardly ever had coitus without some french preparation first.

Anne didn’t want that. “No,” she said, “not that. I don’t want that. Just put it in me. Your big hard thing, put it in me and give it to me as hard as you can.”

This put me off-stride for a moment. I don’t like being told how to make love to a girl, not that bluntly; it’s a de-balling sort of thing. But I thought, hell, the customer is always right, so I got on and rode.

I was surprised. She turned out to be sensational at it — muscular control, rhythm, empathy for what her partner wanted, everything. This shouldn’t have been surprising, maybe, but the abruptness of the approach had more or less turned me off and I had estimated her to be sexually unrefined, unsophisticated, the get-on-and-do-it-and-get-off type. She wasn’t that way at all. It was just that her whole orientation was phallic. The size and rigidity of my organ was about all she cared about. And she kept talking about it constantly while I was balling her, how large it was, how firm, how marvelous it made her feel—

SHEILA: Mr. Modesty hasn’t told you this, but he happens to have a seventeen-inch penis.

PAUL: Oh, out it out.

SHEILA: With 18-karat gold trim and a two-piece charcoal filter.

PAUL: You’re a riot. I’m not boasting, not by any means. I’m about average, and so are maybe ninety eight percent of the men we’ve met, as far as that goes. The whole point was she was making all this fuss over something that wasn’t all that unusual. I wasn’t about to object, though. It was good food for the ego—

SHEILA: Poor starving little ego.

PAUL: —and as I said, she was enjoyable enough in the rack. So I stayed with her. She didn’t mind variety, as long as it came out with my plug in her socket, so we ran through a variety of positions and kept going until I ran out of gas. I had acquitted myself fairly early and I certainly hadn’t left her hung up, but there was a sort of wistful expression on her face and I had the feeling she could have kept on going for hours.

SHEILA: And meanwhile I was upstairs on the living room couch finding out why Anne liked what she liked. See, she couldn’t get it at home.

JWW: Harold was impotent?

SHEILA: In the worst way. He didn’t have one.

PAUL: Isn’t that too much?

SHEILA: Not enough is more like it. When they went downstairs he kissed me and began making love to me, and he wound up going down on me on the couch without taking off his own clothes. He was an artist at this — impotent fellows generally are, if they’re swingers, maybe because they haven’t got much else going for them.

I made it, and we sat back and had a cigarette. I asked if there wasn’t something I could do for him, and he said not now, that he was fine. I gathered that he had ejaculated while he was eating me, which happens. I made some joke to this effect, some very stupid joke about how he should have saved it until he found the proper receptacle. Just a stupid joke, and one that seemed a lot stupider when he explained that he didn’t have a penis.

PAUL: A swinger without a penis. Isn’t that incredible?

SHEILA: Oh, I don’t know. I’m a swinger without a penis.

PAUL: Just incredible. A swing-errrr without a penis/ Is like a ship/Without a sail—

SHEILA: I’ll ignore that. It wasn’t in the war. It was an accident, I think an automobile accident. He showed me what he had left, which was virtually nothing. But he still had his testicles and they still functioned, and if he became very excited sexually he was still capable of ejaculating. But of course he couldn’t have coitus, because of what he was missing.

PAUL: What you call all dressed up and no place to go.

SHEILA: That wasn’t even funny. And why joke about it?

PAUL: Because, if you really want to know, just thinking about it gives me a terminal case of the chills. Why don’t we talk about something else? Something conversationally safe, like religion or politics?

SHEILA: Castration fears, sweetie?

PAUL: No, just an inverted case of penis envy.

SHEILA: That’s funny. Well, to make a long story short—

PAUL: Which is what Harold’s accident did, God help him.

SHEILA: —he had an artificial phallus which he and Anne would use, and of course he would go down on her, but he explained that it was mainly what he was missing that made them go into swinging, more for her sake than anything else. I had never heard of anything like this at the time. Since then I’ve known plenty of couples where the husband is wholly or partially impotent, but nothing equivalent to Harold.

I asked if there was anything I could do for him, and he said the one thing that thrilled him that way was to bring a girl to orgasm. And he spent the next few hours doing that, once wearing the rubber dildo and the other times in more common ways.

On the way home we compared notes and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. At first we more or less decided not to see them again. They didn’t go for anything more elaborate than separate-room twosies, and of course there was that big gap on his part and her single-minded interest, and it hardly added up to ideal partners for us. I remember that we got mildly hysterical on the way home, comparing the two of them to Jeff and Jan. All the difference in the world. We couldn’t help laughing, and yet it wasn’t all that funny, because we thought of what it would be like to swap with them on a regular basis, you know, see them exclusively. It was a very grim idea.

PAUL: And one grim idea led to another. We felt, well, pretty damned foolish. All of this planning and scheming and driving across town to make square love with a cock-crazy health-food nut and her prickless husband, if you’ll excuse the language, but that was how we thought of them. All of that aggravation, and for what, really?

SHEILA: I was ready to give it up. Swinging, the whole scene. I had a good time with what’s-his-name, Harold, but it left a bad taste. And he was so pathetic that I couldn’t hate him or even despise him, which made it worse.

We went to bed and compared notes, and that was the big surprise, because it turned us on. We didn’t think of it as exciting, but when we talked about it we did get excited, each of us showing what we’d done earlier, and we made very good love...

And as it turned out, we saw the Klines off and on as long as we stayed in K.C. Once we had made other contacts and got involved in swinging with a wide variety of people, we grew to appreciate them in a strange way as an occasional change of pace. Oh, say we made it with them five, six times over the next year or so. Maybe only four times. They were nice people. Not natural swingers, because they were driven to it, but nice people just the same...

They begin reminiscing about other couples with whom they had relations during their stay in Kansas City. Their circle of sexual partners gradually enlarged, they explain, both through additional correspondence and through introductions arranged by past contacts. We sit in repose, smoking, drinking, nibbling at the tray of canapés, while they discuss these past sexual exploits with an air not unlike a pair of college fraternity brothers at a twentieth reunion, trading roseate memories of pranks that sound oddly unreal now.

I hear of this couple and that couple, this man and that woman. I am provided with thumbnail sketches and capsule biographies: A, married for the second time, would inherit a million-dollar landscape gardening firm if his father ever died; B, flat-chested and pear-shaped, had a mad passion for fellatio; C, a thoroughgoing bisexual, had been a virgin on her wedding night and became an all-out swinger in less than six months; D, a sound engineer at a local television studio, had some fantastic erotic tapes; E and F, according to a persistent rumor, were brother and sister now living as man and wife but no one had dared ask them about this to their faces.

I change the reels in my tape recorder, but somewhere along the way, I must confess, I fail to change the reels in my head; the words they utter are no longer recorded in my mind but pass in and out unnoticed; I tune them out. And later I wonder at this. Perhaps I have dwelled too long among the swingers. Perhaps I have listened one time too many to this sort of recital, this shockingly unshocking narrative of loveless love, of oddly sexless sex. The Klines, I muse, were at least something unusual, a man without a penis, a woman who did not deign to be cunnilingued. But now they have been discussed and released, and the others are not so distinctive; all the men have penises, all the women delight in being eaten. And both Paul and Sheila, who have heretofore impressed me as being so singularly perceptive, so gratifyingly articulate, have suddenly lost their charm, their verve, their vision. Their conversation is preoccupied with total recall of who did what and with which and to whom.

I try to blame the Scotch for all our shortcomings — the tedium of their conversation, the impatience of my response to it. But the blame will not stick. There is another element at work, another influence beyond that of alcohol.

Sheila takes up the narrative, carries it for a time, permits her husband to take over. I am barely conscious that they are talking. Later, when the tapes are transcribed, I learn the particulars of their swinging in Kansas City. This seems to have been a period when their enthusiasm was at its most unqualified. Sex was ever-new and ever-fresh, new people were always available and almost always worth the trouble, and orgasms were as lush and perfect as in the fantasy world of pornography. All the men had penises, all the women liked to be eaten—

That night I plead a headache, which is not entirely a fabrication, and leave earlier than they had expected or I had intended. My drive home is not unlike their return from Harold and Anne Kline’s. I, too, become slightly hysterical. I, too, moody and depressed, seriously contemplate abandoning a project, in this case, a book.

It is later, when I read the transcriptions of my tapes, that I take a blue pencil to my own reactions. For the tone of that night with Paul and Sheila was, I realize, very much as it ought to have been. Automatically, unconsciously, they had managed to recapture if not a mood then at least an attitude, the attitude which had characterized them during the days of experimental swinging which they had been describing. The glibness, the arch patter, the surface judgments were a bona fide if unintended recreation of their past selves.

The happy time. The first party with more than four in attendance. The first viewing of a pornographic movie. The first experiments with extrapersonal devices. The first really bad meeting, with a pair of sadomasochists who want to tie Sheila up and lash her with whips — “But, the thing of it was that this clown kept stressing that it wouldn’t leave marks or do any damage, unable to understand that it still wasn’t something Sheila had any interest in, and he was so persistent I thought I might have to knock him on his ass, but fortunately he finally got the message and backed down, and we got the hell out of there. We got home hours earlier than we planned, and there was our pimple-faced baby-sitter getting herself fucked on the living room couch. We walked in on her, and the boy turned absolutely green, and Doris burst into tears, and it was just too much after all that. We looked at each other and started laughing. We laughed our heads off, we couldn’t stop, and finally we did catch our breaths, and there was this long, stony silence, and then the girl said, “What’s so funny?” Not sarcastic or bitter but just baffled, because of course she didn’t see why we would laugh like that. And Sheila, I don’t know how she did it, but the kids had been doing it in the standard missionary posture, face to face with him on top, and what she said was, “I just never heard of doing it in that position, that’s all.” And naturally we both broke up completely, and the poor girl started bawling all over again. Crying, that is. Not balling as in making love.”

The happiest memories, I decide, are of those experiences which are a joy to remember but which we would not for anything care to relive — fraternity pranks, football rallies, front-line combat, early loves. One is doubly grateful for them — that they happened, and that they need never happen again.