Peggy and I had never really considered swinging, although we had discussed it from time to time, mostly in the vein of isn’t it weird what some sickies will do? I would have liked to give it a try myself at the time but I didn’t even have the nerve to so much as suggest it to her, and I don’t think in retrospect that she would have gone along or that I would have felt like following through with it if she did. I enjoyed entertaining the notion in the realm of fantasy, but I doubt I’d really have cared to carry through on that particular fantasy.
After all of this got going, and I started reading about swinging, I thought how tremendously different what we’ve got is from the trios that the swingers get involved in. Now on a purely physical level I can see nothing but plusses in swinging. Not merely the idea of injecting some variety into a marriage, but because possibilities for fun do increase as the number of persons increases. Simple arithmetic.
But these people are balling strangers, and I’m not putting this down, but I’m contrasting it with what we’ve got. The three of us, you see, are very much in love. Completely in love, and it’s more than a matter of each of us loving both of the others, but that we love us as a trio, if you know what I mean. We love the whole usness of us.
I’m sure that swingers who make the trio scene enjoy themselves no end, and if they’re true swingers, if they’ve got past the usual hang-ups, it must be very good for them. But I think they’re missing a tremendous amount if they don’t try and get into a permanent trio scene, a loving relationship where there’s no hustle and no exploitation and where there’s an emotional basis to it all that goes beyond good clean sex. I’m not knocking good clean sex, I have nothing at all against it, but there’s so much more that can enhance it.
Maybe I’m projecting too much, feeling that everybody would be better off doing what we’re doing. It’s such a total groove for us that I can’t fucking avoid the belief that it would be good for everybody, and maybe that’s an oversimplification. Different strokes for different folks, after all.
But we sure are having a gas of a time.
Peter & Wanda & Grace
JWW: Peter and Wanda and Grace St. John share a spacious two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise near Lincoln Center, on the West Side of Manhattan. Peter is a furniture designer, and most of the furnishings in the apartment are his work. He is successful in his work, and Wanda also earns a good living as a freelance interior decorator. Her interest is period decoration, while Peter’s taste runs to the extremely modern. Grace does not work, but occasionally earns money posing for more or less pornographic photographs and acting in exploitation films and stag movies.
Peter is twenty-seven, below average in height, with blond hair and blue eyes and typical Anglo-Saxon features. He is slender and occasionally almost elfin in his movements. Wanda, Peter’s sister, is a year his senior and very much like him in appearance. She is slightly taller than he is, and her hair, blond like his, is worn long and loose. Grace is Peter’s wife. She is twenty-two, red-haired, voluptuous, and short.
Peter and Grace have been married for three years. About a year and a half ago Wanda joined them.
My interviewing of the St. Johns spanned several sessions. Grace was not always present.
PETER: Let me tell you one thing. I don’t have any real idea how people get the way they are, and I don’t think anybody else does, either. In the past twelve years or so Wanda and I between us have seen perhaps two dozen psychiatrists and psychologists and psychoanalysts, and they can help you trace things back and see the sequence in which things occurred and the way one thing may have led to another. It’s a very elaborate game, and quite often it becomes quite an absorbing one in the bargain. You learn no end of things about yourself.
But I don’t know that it answers any basic questions.
I find it just as easy — perhaps easier — to believe that we are simply born the way we are. If you can believe that a handful of genes and chromosomes determine our precise physical makeup, everything from the shapes of our noses to the patterns on our fingertips, I don’t see why it should be any harder to believe that those same genes and chromosomes determine our personalities. They are more and more coming to believe that mental illness itself is physical, either chemical or glandular or whatever the latest theory maybe. Biochemical to one degree or another. If this is so, it seems eminently reasonable to me that less radical personality traits are also biochemical, and predetermined from the moment of conception. Or from the moment of birth, if you’re astrologically inclined. Grace is, by the way. Wanda and I are not.
WANDA: All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Peter thinks we were born perverted.
PETER: Not perverted. Kinky.
GRACE: What’s the difference?
PETER: Perverted is nasty and sick. Kinky is just tons of fun.
WANDA: Then we were perverted and we gradually turned kinky.
PETER: Absolutely wrong.
WANDA: What, then?
PETER: We were born kinky, and the world turned us perverted, and now we’re just kinky again.
GRACE: Do tell.
PETER: There were just the two of us. No other brothers or sisters, that is. My mother did have another child when I was five. A stillbirth, he would have been a boy. I gather he was deformed.
WANDA: Physically kinky, dear.
PETER: Wanda and I were always very close. From the cradle, so to speak. We were so close in age, you know. Just thirteen months apart. I’m sure the parents didn’t plan it that way. I rather suspect I was a misconception.
WANDA: We were both accidents, dear. Mother told me once, in a fit of pique. We were neither of us hoped for. She would have preferred to have no children, she confided.
PETER: Filthy bitch. Can you picture the two of them together? Her with one eye on the clock, I’m sure. I’m glad they’re dead.
WANDA: Don’t say that.
PETER: Why on earth not...? Where was I? As I was saying, Wanda and I were very close. As far back as I can recall, early in childhood, I took it for granted that someday I would grow up and marry Wanda. I vaguely remember being told that I couldn’t do this, that brothers and sisters couldn’t marry one another. And this struck me as grossly unfair. Of course I was going to marry Wanda. I loved her and would marry her and we would have children together.
WANDA: Perish forbid.
PETER: Quite. Our genes aren’t that worthy of perpetuation, are they? And in combination we’d have to produce an utter monster. The thalidomide babies would pale by comparison. I did manage to impregnate Wanda once, as it happened.
WANDA: I was fifteen.
PETER: She was aborted in the third month, and I didn’t even get to see her after the operation; they shunted her right off to a funny farm. Now both my angels are on the pill, so there will be no little St. Johns. I rather wish they didn’t keep finding out new bad things about the pill.
GRACE: Oh, they’re twisting it all out of proportion. I heard that the Catholics are behind it.
PETER: All a papist plot? You really heard that? No, I’m afraid it’s more than that. I’m afraid the pill is really bad for you. Not as bad as being pregnant, but not as good as Vitamin C. Rather a shame Vitamin C doesn’t keep one from getting pregnant.
I suppose I shall eventually break down and have a vasectomy, but something within me has kept me from doing that yet. We’ll see what happens.