PETER: The funny thing is that they kept packing us off to places where sex really ran rampant. At one point they tried the boarding school bit — we each went off to a school designed to deal with difficult adolescents, and Wanda had her first homosexual experience at her school, and I had mine at my school, and this was evidently something perfectly all right, since they could ignore it, they didn’t have to look at it. It was perfectly fine for me to get fucked in the ass by this big son of a bitch I couldn’t stand the sight of, but it was wrong for me to make love to a girl I loved totally.
WANDA: There was even more sex at the funny farms. I never wanted it, either. I didn’t want to be with anyone but Peter. Strangely enough I didn’t mind doing it with other girls, I liked that well enough. It wasn’t anything compared to what I had with Peter, it seemed on another level entirely, but it was warm and friendly and I didn’t dislike it. With other boys, I found it really rotten. I couldn’t relate to them at all and didn’t want to. But in some of the institutions you didn’t have much choice. It was easier to go along with it than not. You could always be raped if you held out.
PETER: Your attitudes did change, though.
WANDA: That’s true. By the time I was, I guess, around twenty, I got past this to an extent. I started sleeping with boys and had occasional affairs. But I have never been completely satisfied by any man but Peter.
PETER: Even now?
WANDA: Yes.
PETER: Even when we swing with someone?
WANDA: Even then. I’ve told you all this often enough, haven’t I?
PETER: Yes, but I thought it might be part ego-food. I didn’t entirely believe you. I mean, I’ve seen you balling other guys, and either you’re an extraordinary actress or you have orgasms.
WANDA: I come, but there’s more to satisfaction than that. You know that. It’s possible to be more satisfied sometimes when you don’t have an orgasm than other times when you do. It’s that way for you too, isn’t it?
PETER: True. Coming isn’t a guarantee that the trip was good, and vice versa.
WANDA: Well, I can come with other men, but I can’t find it completely fulfilling.
PETER: I see. I thought you meant you couldn’t come, and I found that hard to believe.
WANDA: You know me better than that. I can come looking at a candle if I put my mind to it.
PETER: How about a picture of a candle?
WANDA: Probably.
WANDA: Here’s a funny thing. After they were both dead, after we were old enough to do what we wanted to do without anyone interfering in our lives, for the first time we voluntarily separated from one another. First Peter spent some time in Sweden and then Denmark studying furniture design. By the time he came back to the States I had left New York and was living in Chicago, working for a faggot decorator during the day and taking courses at U of C nights. You might think we would have finally taken advantage of the chance we had to be together, but it took us a long time to get back together again.
PETER: I think you used the word “brainwashing” earlier. This was part of it.
WANDA: Just part of it.
PETER: The other part was that we were going through a lot of changes. On the one hand we had some personal growth and development to undergo. Career-wise, for example. I really did want to get over to Scandinavia and learn why they could make chairs there that looked so damned much better than the chairs we make over here. Wanda also wanted to get into decorating in a meaningful way.
Beyond that, we were in a stock-taking period. We needed time to figure out how we really felt about each other. Correction — we knew how we felt about each other, knew we loved each other. What we didn’t know was what we intended to do about it.
There were a lot of big questions involved. Were we going to avoid each other for the rest of our lives? Were we going to live together and make love? Were we going to try to sublimate the whole thing, remain close but cut out the sex? The answers seem easy now, but the whole point is that they were not easy then, as screwed up as we were. We’d been through a very bad time, and it took a lot of settling before we were completely over it, if indeed we ever did get completely over it.
WANDA: Right before you went to Scandinavia, right before Peter went, we came very close to getting married.
PETER: That’s right, we did.
WANDA: We talked about it, and realized that a brother and sister can’t get married, but we also realized that we didn’t have to wear signs saying that we’re brother and sister. It would have been easy enough to take out a license and find some justice of the peace nearsighted enough to miss the family resemblance. I could have worn a dark wig or something.
PETER: You wouldn’t have had to. The average minister would hardly suspect a potential bride and groom of being brother and sister. It would never occur to him.
WANDA: I wonder how often it happens. Does it ever happen? Actual marriages?
JWW: As a matter of fact, I know of a case.
PETER: It’s not surprising. It must happen rather often. Do the people you know have children?
JWW: No.
PETER: It would be interesting to know of some who do. We’re past that now, the whole question of children, but at the time it was on our minds quite a bit. Not only as a practical consideration but because we had both heard at great length how the mating of siblings inevitably produced inferior children. I understand that this doesn’t have to happen, only if both carry an unfortunate recessive gene, but it seems as though it’s likely to happen.
The effect of this was that it did lend support to the arguments that our sort of thing is unnatural, contrary to nature. Now I could never accept this intellectually — I don’t think Nature gives a damn about what people do, certainly not what they do in bed. But I suspect it was one of the things that weighed rather heavily on our minds when we talked about getting married, and when we decided instead to let ourselves drift apart, at least for the time being.
JWW: Both Peter and Wanda mentioned several times that they were no longer interested in having children, problems of inbreeding notwithstanding. They went to great lengths to insist, to themselves more than to me, that children were the last thing they wanted for any number of reasons.
The frequent intrusion of this topic in our conversations led me to suspect that the issue of issue was by no means as settled as they prefer to think. I would be not at all surprised should they someday have children, either naturally or through adoption.
PETER: When I got back to the States, I found myself living very intensely, but very much on a day-to-day basis. The only part of my life with any sense of direction was my work. I made a good business connection and began doing rather well, and I channeled a tremendous amount of energy into my work. Socially, I was very active and striking out in all directions at once. New York, for an unattached young man with a certain amount of poise and a decent income, is by no means a hard place to take. I partied a great deal, I dated what seems in retrospect a staggering number of lovely girls, and I took most of them to bed.
I hardly ever wanted to see them again. A new girl, I could always manifest enthusiasm for a new girl, but once I had spent a night with her I would lose interest. I don’t think I had any distaste for past conquests. More likely I was looking for a perfect girl and not finding her.
Before very long I began getting involved with the swinging scene. I had had a taste of this in Copenhagen. There was a party, mostly students, where everyone fucked in the same room, and by the end of the evening a good deal of group groping and cluster-fucking took place, and the usual switching of partners. I had found this enormously exciting at the time, and I don’t remember quite how I found out about the orgies around New York, but someone or other invited me to bring a girl and join the fun. I called a recent conquest, a girl I figured might be game for this sort of thing. It turned out she was an old hand at orgies and would love to try some new people — on the orgy scene, you know, you quickly tire of the same old faces. Or the same old genitalia, I should say.