The Wife-Swap Report

Dropping Out and Dropping In

SHEILA: People ask if I really meant to kill myself. If you’ve ever been there you know that the question itself is no good. When you reach that state there’s no saying what you do or don’t mean. Everything gets blurred around the edges. Reality loses its definition. There are certain things that happened then — or didn’t happen — and I will never really be sure, because I can’t say positively whether they occurred or I have false memories of them. I don’t know if psychiatrists recognize the condition of temporary insanity or whether it’s just a way for murderers to get acquitted, but that’s how I would describe the state I was in, as a state of temporary insanity. So as to whether or not I intended to kill myself—

PAUL: When you were safely out of it, you certainly wanted to live.

SHEILA: I remember feeling like a very small child. Absolutely no will of my own. I remember being in bed, a hospital bed, everything white and clean, and people looking down at me. Strangers, strange faces. And all I could think was that these strangers were big people who would take care of me. They would tell me what to do and all I would have to do was obey their orders. I wouldn’t have to make any decisions. I would do as I was told and they would take care of me.

And I remember a doctor’s voice, the first words that I heard that made any impression. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

This kept ringing in my head. You’re lucky to be alive. I don’t know if this happens to everybody, but when I’m in a stress situation of one sort or another, or it may be just that my perceptions are flooey because of some drug and ordinary clichés go around in my mind until they take on a new meaning. I don’t mean that I take drugs, because I don’t, not in the hippie sense. I’ve never even had marijuana. But I’ve had pills to lose weight, and allergy pills, and once some tranquilizers, which incidentally were the worst of all in this respect. I suppose it’s a change in body chemistry; your system is suddenly playing by a different set of rules and it does something to your mind.

You’re lucky to be alive. It echoed in my mind, and I took it a step past the obvious meaning, that I had come fairly close to losing my life and that it was luck which saved me. That obviously was what the doctor was trying to get across to me.

What I also interpreted it to mean, though, was that of two possible states, alive and dead, I was alive. And that this state, being alive, was desirable. And thus I was lucky. And since I agreed with this analysis, since I felt that I was lucky to be alive, it meant that basically I was accepting life, I was responding to it affirmatively. Does this make any sense at all or was it just meaningful to me at the time? Because I think I know what I mean, but I don’t know if the distinction comes across.

PAUL: It says something about your state of mind, I think. And I know what you mean, even though I can’t say I understand the logic of how you got there.

SHEILA: I don’t suppose it matters. It was all part of a reaction, of course. And I had turned the corner. It wasn’t just a matter of wanting to go on living. I wanted to make everything right again, and clean and sane and... I don’t know. I wanted everything to be perfect.

Paul and I talked. I don’t mean that we had a significant conversation. I mean we talked. God, do you remember the way it was? Weeks and weeks of planning and talking and explaining and analyzing.

PAUL: We had never before opened up to each other that completely.

SHEILA: It was too much, really.

PAUL: We needed it at the time.

SHEILA: Yes. But you can go too far. A person needs to live a portion of his life alone...

We discuss this for a time. It is a position Sheila has taken — on other occasions — that communication must be limited, that even self-analysis can become dangerous when carried too far. And often I sensed a pull of opposing forces at work within her: on the one hand the impulse to inform and educate and display through the development of our book, and on the other hand the urge to keep some part of herself hidden from me, from Paul, from the reader, and indeed from herself.

She is a thoughtful, analytical person, considerably more so than her husband, and at the same time more defensive and secretive. Our luncheon conversation, given in the last chapter, provides an excellent illustration; Sheila would not have been inclined to initiate such an interview, but should it commence, she would have had far less difficulty marshaling her thoughts and articulating them.

She returns now to a period of time following her initial suicide attempt, when she and Paul determined to separate themselves entirely from the world of mate-swapping. The process, as she and her husband describe it, is not unlike any religious conversion — a moment, perhaps shock-inspired, of blinding revelation; an absolute and unequivocal break with the past; soul-seeking introspection; and, finally, the embracing of a new pattern of living which is nearly as extreme as the one now forsaken. It is so often thus that converts are made, and apostates as well.

PAUL: There’s a sort of daydream I always find myself having when things get out of joint. I’m sure it must be universal. Just a dream of starting over completely. That the slate is clean, that you could get a completely fresh start and be free from all the things that make your present situation unbearable.

SHEILA: The original American dream, isn’t it? A new start in a new world. Go west, young man, and all that.

PAUL: Or the attraction of confession in the Catholic Church. The idea that you can get completely clean. That you can wash off old sins and start anew.

SHEILA: With new sins.

PAUL: You know what I mean. We were like that. It wasn’t enough for us to change our sexual lives, to put a 180 degree bend in our whole approach to sex. We were like a doctor with a patient suffering from every known disease, and instead of just treating the one that would kill him first we had to treat everything at once, everything from cancer to an ingrown toenail at the same time.

SHEILA: We cut out swinging. That very nearly goes without saying. In fact we got so completely caught up in the pattern of changing our lives that we almost forgot about swinging. Forgot that we had done it, that is.

JWW: Not literally?

SHEILA: Hardly that. But it was as though the change in our personalities had been so complete that we were worlds removed from ourselves as swingers. We stopped talking about those days. Not because of a conscious desire to avoid the subject but because we honestly didn’t think about it.

PAUL: Which may simply have meant that we were repressing the thoughts themselves—

SHEILA: Well, the hell with that. It’s hard enough being responsible for one’s conscious mind. What’s that joke about a man who dreamed he was committing adultery, and his wife was jealous?

PAUL: Right. On a conscious level, we were absolute puritans.

JWW: I’m not sure I get the full picture. You say that this reformation embraced not only swinging but everything else.

PAUL: That’s right. Our whole life style.

JWW: I’m not sure if I understand what’s involved in “everything else.” As far as I can see, your only real deviation from societal norms lay in your being swingers. You weren’t criminals, you didn’t take dope, you didn’t drink—

PAUL: You’re missing the point completely.

SHEILA: Yes, you are. We became completely idealistic in the purest sense of the word. Does that give you anything, John?

PAUL: We not only gave up swinging, we gave up smoking.

SHEILA: And drinking. And aspirin, for Christ’s sake. And staying up late, and eating rich desserts, and drinking anything alcoholic, and overindulging in coffee—

JWW: Oh, now I understand.

PAUL: We started dozens of little self-improvement projects. We bought language records, we were going to broaden ourselves by learning a foreign language. And we started little programs of reading worthwhile books. We stopped spanking the children and started reasoning with them, which must have confused the hell out of them.

SHEILA: It’s easy to see it now as a period of reaction, the pendulum swinging the other way to compensate for what had gone on before. Living through it was something else again. We dropped all our friends and didn’t seem to have time to find new ones. When we did meet people, they never went out of their way to see us again. I’m sure we made people uncomfortable. Never relaxed, never had a drink, never joked, took everything so damned seriously.

PAUL: Did you happen to read The Arrangement?

SHEILA: Oh, for Christ’s sake!

PAUL: She has a problem, she can only read things that are well written. I can only tell whether or not something is interesting, and if it is, I stay with it. There was a part in this book that reminded me of us. The narrator is almost killed in an auto wreck, and then he and his wife go through this same sort of idealistic thing, fooling around with art and spiritual development and getting to know each other deeply, all of that. I understand the book’s not considered the greatest novel in the history of world literature, but that section of the book brought it all back to me...

They further define their behavior during this period, the various disciplines involved. As Paul describes the ease with which they both gave up smoking, Sheila lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. Paul takes one himself shortly thereafter. Ultimately I express interest in their sexual relationship during this period of adjustment — has swinging left them jaded? Or does sex itself seem irrelevant to their new way of living?

PAUL: At first we just left it alone.

SHEILA: It was the one subject we did not discuss. Not sex in general, we were able to talk about that, but sex as a function of our new relationship. We didn’t talk about it, nor did we do anything about it. We were very close physically and all, kissing and holding hands and sleeping in one another’s arms, but nothing sexual happened, nothing was desired on either side.

PAUL: If I thought anything, I thought it was over.

JWW: Permanently?

PAUL: I would say so. And it seems odd, thinking back on it, but I don’t believe this bothered me. I felt as though we had outgrown sex, as though we had gone beyond it.

SHEILA: This was just at first, of course.

PAUL: The first stage. Later we got off that bicycle and went for the sex-is-holy routine.

SHEILA: You’re being a little too flippant. It was more complicated. We decided to have another child.

PAUL: Heidi.

SHEILA: Obviously. There’s no point in going into our reasons for this. I think it’s obscene to explain the reasons which led to the existence of a human being.

PAUL: It’s comical and you don’t want to admit it.

SHEILA: It’s not comical.

PAUL: The hell it isn’t. Having a kid to symbolize our new way of life, our no-more-swinging way of life, and then wearing maternity clothes to—

SHEILA: Stop it!

PAUL: —to a swap session, and—

SHEILA: God damn you! You don’t have to talk about it!

PAUL: You’d rather hide it?

SHEILA: I don’t have to listen to this shit!

She storms out of the room. Paul and I sit awkwardly. He abandons his narrative, which he had taken up only to provoke his wife. He turns the conversation to some less crucial topic. We chat mindlessly for a few minutes until Sheila abruptly reappears with a fresh pot of coffee and a plate of cookies. The conversation is taken up as it was before Paul began baiting her, with no further mention of the quarrel, no apology on either side.

SHEILA: When we decided to have Heidi, when we first began making love again, I know we were both very much afraid, concerned that... well, that nothing would happen.

PAUL: Or that it wouldn’t be any good.

SHEILA: I suppose we thought we might have gotten completely jaded as a result of our experiences in swinging. In a sense, that had happened to us for a time while we were swinging, we did reach a point where we were only excited in the presence of other people.

PAUL: We were probably worried that the process wouldn’t reverse itself. All the obvious hang-ups were involved... To make a long story short, we turned out to be a hundred-percent wrong.

SHEILA: It was wonderful.

PAUL: Absolutely wonderful.

SHEILA: We were astounded at the time, but when you look back on it I don’t see how anything could have been more natural. We were incredibly close at the time, closer than we’ve ever been before or since. And I’m not criticizing our present relationship when I say that. What we have now is, I would say, an improvement on what we had then. We were too close, too earnest, too—

PAUL: Too intense.

SHEILA: That’s it.

PAUL: Because when you spend enough of your time talking about your relationship, you’re just too involved in it. People, especially people who happen to be married to each other, ought to be able to relax with their relationship. But we were in a special set of circumstances, and I guess you could say we were too close.

SHEILA: It certainly made for good sex.

PAUL: I think it’s particularly fulfilling when you’re trying to conceive a child.

SHEILA: At least it was, given our mood at the time. There was something holy about what we were doing, in our eyes, at least. And the joy of lovemaking seemed to last longer. It didn’t end with orgasm but seemed to be an on-going affair.

JWW: Did you have any difficulty in becoming pregnant?

SHEILA: None. I seem to be embarrassingly fertile.

JWW: Let me just sum up the temporal picture. About how long after you dropped out of swinging did you conceive Heidi?

PAUL: I guess it was about three months.

SHEILA: And three months after that — it was just about three months, I had just started wearing maternity clothes — why, we dropped back in again.

JWW: That seems surprising, in view of what you’ve said.

PAUL: It was surprising.

SHEILA: We didn’t expect it to happen, certainly. Or if we did suspect it secretly, it was something we didn’t think about, let alone discuss. But you have to appreciate how artificial this “arrangement” of ours was. Not artificial in the sense that we were consciously doing something phony, but in that we were not really being ourselves. We thought we were being ourselves, but it was just role playing. The people we were pretending to be were types who had no use for swinging, and we thought we would remain that way forever.

PAUL: The hell, we thought we would stay off cigarettes forever, too, as far as that goes. I stuck it out for three months and Sheila for close to four, and by then we were both ready to give up giving up smoking. It was the same thing with swinging, only we lasted a little longer.

JWW: Was it really the same thing? A habit that wouldn’t stay broken? Or was it more complicated than that?

SHEILA: Your Honor, the prosecuting attorney is leading his witness.

JWW: And you wish to record an objection?

SHEILA: I don’t know. Here’s what happened—

As she begins, Paul leaves the room briefly, returns with a freshened drink, then sits in silence listening to her version of the return to swinging. The bitterness which Sheila evidenced earlier, the uneasiness she seemed to feel at the memory of resuming swinging during her pregnancy, seems to have been entirely put aside. Her thoughts could hardly have been better organized, I realize, had she taken the trouble of writing them out beforehand.

Her ease in discussing the return to life as swingers is particularly noticeable now, while she confines herself to narrating precisely what happened rather than probing motivations. Later, when we take up those matters, she becomes somewhat less certain of herself verbally. Even then the tension evident earlier in the evening does not reassert itself, at least not visibly.

SHEILA: Like so many things, it seemed to happen out of the blue, with absolutely no warning, no advance preparation whatsoever. When we looked back on it, though, we were able to see that it had been building up for some time without our noticing it. So many things happen this way; in retrospect the signs were there all along, but you only see them after you’re past them.

On the surface, everything seemed to be fine between us. Not merely on the surface that we presented to the world but the surface which we ourselves were able to see. I was having a much easier time with pregnancy than I’d had with Mark or Lisa, hardly any morning sickness and I wasn’t gaining nearly as much weight. My mental attitude was good, too. With the first two children, much as I wanted them, I was still worried about my ability to handle the role of motherhood. Now I’d had enough experience in that role to know I could manage it at least adequately. And Paul was earning more money and enjoying firmer job security than ever before, and we were both more emotionally stable, or at least seemed to be, all of which made us both more comfortable with the whole idea of pregnancy than ever before.

In the third month, a strange thing happened. I was at my obstetrician’s office and he was giving me an internal examination. A finger wave, as they call it. Now I’ve heard thousands of jokes about women getting excited during a gynecological examination, so I suppose it must happen now and then, but actually I can’t think of anything that ought to be duller for both the patient and the doctor. At best it’s a burlesque of sex because the mood is so distinctly asexual. This particular doctor always picked that time to talk about something profoundly boring — his kid’s schoolwork or the membership policy at the country club or something equally provocative. I have a feeling he does this purposely to make it less likely that a patient will be either embarrassed or excited.

I certainly wasn’t embarrassed. I couldn’t be embarrassed by a plumber’s hand in there, much less a doctor’s.

But this time was really crazy; I got excited.

It happened without any warning, just a spontaneous feeling of passion. I got very wet and felt extremely warm there from a rush of blood to the loins. I began getting all breathless and passionate. All the standard symptoms, all perfectly suitable if I were in bed with somebody, but a little bit out of place in a doctor’s office. And it wasn’t purely physical, although it may have started that way, because I found myself looking at him and making him the specific object of my interest. He was a fairly handsome guy, dark complexion, white teeth, a sort of rugged stocky build, and all at once I was not only getting hotter than hell from the fingering but was wondering what it would be like to ball him.

If he noticed what was happening, at least he had the grace to keep it to himself. He seemed completely oblivious to it all. I think that if he’d tossed off some flip line right about then I would have gone through the floor. I’d have quietly died.

On the other hand, if he’d given me the slightest encouragement I would have raped him.

For me, that was the start. I went home and found myself thinking about it, over and over. I couldn’t push the thought out of my head. I wanted to discuss it with Paul, but of course I couldn’t. There was really no place for a discussion to go. But I went on thinking about it, very close to being obsessed with it. One night we were making love and my mind wandered, as minds are apt to do, and there was a moment when I realized that I was imagining myself making love with my doctor instead of my husband. And I felt the urge to stay with the fantasy, you see, which I could not possibly permit myself to do; after all, this was during our marriage-is-sacred stage, you see. So I broke off the fantasy, but I missed having an orgasm that night.

Then one afternoon I was feeling moody and depressed and unattractive, and I went to bed and had the fantasy that I was with my doctor, and I used my finger instead of his, and for the first time in a really long time I masturbated.

Doesn’t it make a beautiful picture? A well-adjusted young matron — and if that isn’t a dreadful word, “matron”; I get this picture of a beefy dyke guard in a woman’s prison — but a well-adjusted young married woman, then, mother of two with a third on the way, in love with her husband and through with promiscuous sex and all that, taking to her bed in the middle of the afternoon and secretly frigging herself to distraction with thoughts of pelvic examinations dancing in her head.

I felt this all-consuming guilt afterward. And I felt that everything was a farce, that I was a phony playing a phony role. All this bilge about the sanctity of our mature relationship, and after six months of it I had only succeeded in turning myself into a jerk-off.

After that there were random thoughts. Every man I saw, every person I saw, I would view as a potential sex partner. Oh, not really, not the way it sounds. Not the way it is with nymphomaniacs who stare at the crotch of every passing man and try to imagine what his organ feels like. Nothing that abnormal. just the sort of sexual speculation, the I-wouldn’t-do-anything-about-it-but-there’s-no-harm-in-window-shopping attitude that the average married person goes through all the time. Of course I speculated that way with girls as well, probably because I’d had experience in that direction as well, but otherwise it was nothing unusual. Except that it was unusual for me because we had six months of this crazy total emotional and physical fidelity.

So that was when it started for me. And it was happening about the same time for Paul. Exactly the same time, as we found out later. Again, nothing really happened. Just urges.

PAUL: I was responding to other women, that’s all. It didn’t upset me nearly as much as it did Sheila because I knew that every man does this all the time. Also it came up more gradually; I didn’t suddenly get hot in a doctor’s office. I didn’t intend to do anything about it, either. I considered it — there was a young kid in the office who made it fairly obvious that she thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread — but it never went farther than that. As far as I was concerned, all this was only evidence that I was becoming human again. I wasn’t as isolated from society as Sheila was. I was at the office seeing people every day, and I knew that every normal man my age was either cheating on his wife or else wanted to, but didn’t have the guts. The ones who weren’t doing it talked and joked about it all the time, and the ones who kept quiet were getting all the action they could handle. And these people weren’t swingers, understand, just ordinary men who would have turned green at the thought of sharing their wives with other men. Just ordinary American husbands who believe in ordinary cheating.

I didn’t plan to do anything about it, not then. But I guess I took it for granted that I would be like them sooner or later, that something would come along and I would take advantage of it. I wouldn’t say that I planned it, but I was set up so that something along those lines would not have surprised me.

SHEILA: Especially with me pregnant.

PAUL: You mean because of the first time?

SHEILA: I wasn’t even thinking of that. Something else. You see, Paul happens to be turned off by pregnant women, which I guess is perfectly understandable unless one happens to be a pregnant woman oneself, in which case it becomes utterly incomprehensible. You know that garbage about a woman’s true beauty emerging during pregnancy? That crap about pregnant women glowing, about their radiant eyes and all the rest? It may make good propaganda, but my husband was never taken in by it.

I don’t believe the propaganda myself, but neither can I see why pregnant women should be seen as sexually revolting. Oh, I can understand a man losing interest in his wife when she reaches the stage where she can’t see her feet without a mirror. A woman’s figure can become grotesque, at least from a sexual standpoint, and that might put a man off. But Paul, at least in this pregnancy, more than in the others, I think—

PAUL: Definitely.

SHEILA: —just seemed to be sexually turned off by the simple thought of my being pregnant. In the third month, now, I showed a little, but not enough to make much difference. He was able to respond strongly to no end of women who were a good deal fatter year in and year out than I was during early pregnancy.

PAUL: You’re getting hung up on trivia.

SHEILA: You’re right. The point is that we were both just about ready, whether we knew it or not. Paul was developing a wandering eye and was at the same time having trouble getting up an interest in me, and I mean that literally. And I was trying to keep the situation in hand, and I mean that literally, too.

So we were set up. If Phil and Mona had been a pair of aggressive swingers, or if they had been swingers at all, they could have gotten to us in no time at all. Our mood was right, and God knows the mutual attraction was there. As it was, they merely brought things into focus for us without having any idea themselves of what was happening.

JWW: Phil and Mona?

SHEILA: Phil and Mona Pettit. They were very nearly our only friends in Louisville at the time. Phil was a copywriter at the advertising agency that handled the company Paul was working for, and the Pettits lived just a block or two away from us. We didn’t see them too often — at this stage of the game we didn’t see anyone very often, you’ll remember — but we did get together fairly frequently.

They were attractive people. Phil was about my height with very broad shoulders and a heavy frame. “Built like a fireplug” is the usual description, I guess. Thick, dark eyebrows and almost olive skin.

I just this minute realized that he looked like Dr. Mahler.

JWW: Your obstetrician?

SHEILA: Isn’t that fantastic? They didn’t look alike exactly, but they were the same type. A description of one of them would be a good physical description of the other. Now, does that mean that my desire for Phil made me respond to Dr. Mahler’s fickle finger, or was it the other way around? Or did I simply have a thing for that type of male? And does anybody really care?

PAUL: If you’re taking a poll—

SHEILA: All right, love. The point is that they were an attractive couple. Mona was short and slim and cuddly, with small, precise features and fantastic blue eyes. The type of girl men feel protective toward. Soft voiced, too, and, if the truth b known, not exactly the brightest girl on God’s earth. But a nice enough girl for all that.

We got a sitter one Saturday night and joined the Pettits for dinner at an Italian place just outside of town. It was one of those evenings when everybody is sufficiently determined to have a good time, to the point where you have fun even if nothing that great is happening. We were all playing to each other and connecting neatly, and this made a mediocre meal into a gourmet feast and a third-rate Chianti into the finest wine ever.

Whether it was fine wine or not, we drank a lot of it. Two bottles for the four of us, along with Manhattans before dinner and cordials afterward. The restaurant had a broken-down three-piece band. I think it was an accordion and two hurdy-gurdys. The music was no better than the food or the wine, but like them it seemed better than it was, and we did a little dancing.

Naturally enough, we changed partners. We had done this before with the Pettits and never thought anything of it. But this time we had all been interconnecting in a definitely sexual way. No obvious flirting, but plenty of subtle stuff. When we were dancing, Phil got to me immediately. A full physical response that left me weak in the knees. I don’t know if he had any idea what he was doing to me, but I could tell what I was doing to him, because he was sporting a full-fledged erection. I tried to rub against him subtly enough so that he wouldn’t think I was doing it on purpose but effectively enough to make him come in his pants, if you’ll excuse the expression. I didn’t quite manage it.

PAUL: Mona and I were getting along pretty well. Not as well as they were, because I was too tall and she was too short. Nor did I have any great desire to rub either of us into an orgasm on the dance floor. But I must admit I was making plans to see her privately. I was pretty sure I could score with her, and I had to admit that I wanted to.

SHEILA: He didn’t have to admit it — it was obvious.

PAUL: No more obvious than you and Phil.

SHEILA: I guess neither of us are remarkably subtle. As I said before, if Phil and Mona had been swingers, we would have swung that night. I’m sure of it. But they weren’t, and after we left the Italian place things cooled down a great deal. We stopped off at their place for a nightcap, then headed back to our own house.

While Paul was taking the sitter home, I remembered the time we came home from a swinging session and caught our sitter in bed with a boy. Somehow this set up some mental short circuit for me, and when Paul got back I accused him of making a play for our sitter. It wasn’t exactly an accusation. Sort of a half-joking “What took you so long?” approach, which he would normally have laughed off, especially since that particular baby sitter was an absolute pig.

But instead of laughing it off he made a nasty crack about me and Phil. He said if he ever screwed our sitter he’d do it lying down, not standing up on a dance floor. So I came back with a line about him and Mona. I don’t remember what I said.

That did it. I think that must have been the first time we had a real argument since we dropped out of the swinging scene. I’m not exaggerating — I honestly think that was the first time. But it was a beaut.

He accused me of wanting to make it with Phil, and I admitted it, and told him he’d been flirting with Mona all evening, and asked him how many secretaries he was screwing at the office, and he asked me if I was carrying on with any plumbers and TV repairmen, and we were very sarcastic and nasty with one another. The odd thing is that neither of us raised our voice anywhere along the line. It wasn’t that kind of fight. No losing of tempers, just plenty of malice for all.

It led to a big what-have-we-come-to scene. I told Paul we hadn’t changed at all, that we still wanted other people. He said maybe it was just temporary. We went to bed. We tried to make love, and at one point I started to respond and he asked me point blank whether I was thinking about him or Phil. I wasn’t really thinking of anyone or anything, but I told him Phil, and instead of getting mad he just laughed.

We couldn’t quite make it that night.

I didn’t know what to do. The things that go through a person’s mind — I started considering an abortion, a divorce. I began being very sorry that we had decided to have Heidi. I don’t know why, because I can’t for the life of me figure out what I suspected she might have to do with all this. I don’t suppose I was being very rational.

I thought about varying our arrangement so that each of us would have affairs on the sly. Good old standard American cheating. I suppose there’s something to be said for it, but once you’ve been a swinger it’s impossible to put up with the sort of hypocrisy that’s involved in that kind of adultery. Even if your marriage is permissive, even if you don’t feel that you’re cheating and you don’t exactly hide it from your husband or wife, it’s not as free and open as swinging.

PAUL: There’s a purely physical thing, too, and you shouldn’t leave it out. We wanted the big thrills of swinging.

SHEILA: That’s true. Even then I couldn’t help getting caught up in that sort of fantasy. Making it with girls, with two men at once, all the things we had done before. It’s almost impossible to stop yourself from responding to a situation that you’ve formed exciting and satisfying in the past. It’s hard to turn a like into a dislike. I’ve read that one of the problems in curing homosexuals — not that I think it’s something to be cured, but I know that some faggots do go to psychiatrists looking to be reconverted into heterosexuals — one of the problems is that of making a person not desire something he once desired and enjoyed.

PAUL: Like teaching a kid not to like ice cream.

SHEILA: After he’s already enjoyed it for years. That just about says it. You can decide, as Paul and I did, that pluralistic sex is no good, that it’s evil, that it’s bad for your marriage, all of that. But the hard part is telling yourself that it’s no fun, because no matter how you drill the words into yourself, you can’t erase the memory of what it was like.

JWW: And the thrill is that much better?

SHEILA: In a word, yes.

PAUL: We watched one of the late-night talk shows a couple of years ago, and one of the guests was a former drug addict and bank robber. Now he was an actor, or was trying to be. Tall, good-looking guy, very poised. He told about what he had gone through, the agonies of being addicted to heroin, the life of crime that was inevitably a part of heroin addiction. All in all he made it perfectly obvious that the life he had led was nothing but hell and that he thanked God night and day that he was out of it forever.

And the moderator asked him, I forget how he put it, but asked him if heroin was really such a kick, if it was the sort of thing he would think about with longing now, knowing what he knows now. Obviously the answer he expected was that it certainly wasn’t worth it and he doesn’t think about it at all.

The answer he got, and it was shocking and very obviously the truth, was just the opposite. The former addict got this strange expression on his face, and thought for a moment, and then said that it was the biggest kick in the world and he knew he would never get over wanting it if he lived to be a thousand years old.

I don’t mean to suggest that swinging sex and heroin are similar in any particular way. Just let’s say that I knew what the poor son of a bitch meant.

JWW: And you felt as Sheila did?

PAUL: More or less. I figured we had lived something that turned out to be a lie. I don’t think I got as emotional about it as she did, but then I didn’t happen to be pregnant. During the next week I told her we were making ourselves nervous for no reason at all, and that maybe we ought to consider going back to swinging. We started to argue, to cut each other up verbally, but then we got off that platform and managed to loosen up.

SHEILA: I said I didn’t know if Phil and Mona would go for it, and that I was a little afraid to start something with them if they wouldn’t. And I was also a little leery of getting involved with them if it turned out that we didn’t really want to go back to swinging ourselves. So Paul suggested getting together with another couple, with strangers. If we changed our minds we could just get rid of them with no hard feelings on either side, and if we decided swinging was where we belonged, well, then sometime later on we could see whether or not the Pettits might be interested.

I had any number of reservations. So, I’m sure, did Paul, although he was less shaky about things than I was. But I agreed, and we went through with it. Once you decide to do something, waiting is just agony. We didn’t draw things out this time. We had the name and phone number of a couple who were supposed to be real swingers and very warm and attractive people. They were about thirty miles from Louisville. They were one of the couples we had not quite gotten around to calling after we arrived in Louisville, although some friends had recommended them strongly, and we still had their name and address and it seemed worthwhile getting in touch. We didn’t want the aggravation and uncertainty of correspondence right now. Nor, frankly, did we want to get involved with anyone right in town, in case we found out that swinging wasn’t for us after all. You see, we had deliberately severed relations with swinging couples in Louisville, and getting back in the groove could turn out to be awkward.

We called this couple — their names were Marge and Bill — and we told them who we were and whom we knew. Surprisingly enough, they recognized our names and said they had been expecting to hear from us; some mutual friends had told them we were moving to Louisville. I spoke with Marge and gave her a quick rundown on our personal situation. She seemed to understand completely, and we found out later that they had been through something similar themselves, although they had never gone to the extreme we had. But it does seem as though most couples give up swinging sooner or later — and most of them go back to it, sooner or later.

We drove out to see them. At their suggestion, we met at the cocktail lounge of a motel not far from their home. They wanted to make it easy for us to cop out gracefully if we changed our minds.

On the way out there it felt like those first times all over again. Marge and Bill were a few years older than we were. He sold fertilizer to farmers, which may not be the most romantic business in the world but which must have paid off pretty well for him. A handsome man with a good physique. And Marge was also quite attractive — and not at all pregnant, which was the main consideration from my husband’s point of view.

PAUL: You know, from a biological standpoint there’s no reason for the male to be attracted to the pregnant female. His attentions to her can’t serve any purpose.

SHEILA: They can make her happy. And to hell with biological purpose, anyway. What’s the biological purpose of oral sex?

PAUL: It feels good.

SHEILA: I’m sorry I asked... To make a long story short, we got along famously with Bill and Marge, and there was no question but that we wanted to swing with them. They were very good at putting us at ease. We went to their place and took separate rooms.

I still felt somewhat awkward and virginal. All this changed when Bill kissed me. I went wild. We got out of our clothes and he made me lie still while he went down on me. It seems he was tremendously excited by my pregnancy and kept kissing and licking my belly. It didn’t really protrude all that much but the idea of it turned him on. Then he started frenching me in earnest. I came in Technicolor, and came again and again when he screwed me. He put me on my hands and knees and mounted me from the rear and fucked me like a stallion.

Sheila seems at first to be speaking crudely on purpose. It soon becomes clear, however, that she is barely aware of the words she is using. She is responding sexually to her own words or to the memories they evoke. Her eyes are half-lidded and her sentences come in spurts; she pauses intermittently to nibble at her lip or lick both lips with her tongue. She squirms in her chair, buttocks twitching, thighs rubbing nervously together. I feel almost as though I am intruding. I turn to Paul, who is staring fixedly at his wife; he, too, seems to be sexually affected by her account of the experience.

SHEILA: Afterward we went into the other room. I told Bill I wanted to watch Paul with Marge. This is something I wanted very much. I remember being afraid for a moment that I was having all this fun and that Paul wasn’t doing anything. I didn’t think this was so—

PAUL: Not quite.

SHEILA: —because I knew she turned him on and that she liked him, but I was worried. Also I wanted to see them, I wanted to watch them doing it.

We walked into the bedroom and it smelled like a whorehouse. The bed was all stained and everything. And he was lying on his back with his eyes closed and a dreamy expression on his face, and Marge was giving him head. She was stretched out sort of sideways and sucking him.

I got hot all over. Just instantly hot all over.

I turned to Bill. “Is your wife bi?” I asked, and he nodded, and I asked him if he thought she would mind if I joined in.

He said go ahead.

I don’t think I gave a damn if she did or not. I just had to do it. I put my face between her legs and began eating her without a word. I could taste Paul there...

Marge and Bill both used depilatories. Many swingers do; they remove all their pubic hair. She was all smooth there.

It was so good. Everything was so good.

And we did just everything. We were with them for hours and we did everything and it was fantastic. I was too involved to think. Later on we thought about it and talked about it but at the time it wasn’t even possible to think. I was too busy doing and feeling and I couldn’t think about anything else.

On the way home I said, “Well, now we know what we are.”

And Paul agreed.

And I said, “I’m glad we had the past six months. I guess we were only fooling ourselves, but I’m glad we had it the way we did. I think we learned from it, I think we grew, but I’m also glad it’s over. I’m glad we’re having another baby, but I’m glad we’re back in the swinging scene again.”

So that was that. We had dropped out, and now we dropped in again.