PETER: I was conscious of a real yen for Wanda from the minute I picked her up at the airport. When I kissed her hello it was all I could do to keep my tongue in my own mouth.
WANDA: I felt the same way.
PETER: This would have disturbed me a year earlier. Now it amused me. I think that’s the best way to put it. I had come to take my own reactions to virtually all situations a good deal more casually. I enjoyed observing myself, my reactions to one thing or another.
WANDA: You grew up a lot. Marriage to Grace had quite an effect on you.
PETER: There’s no question about it. The detached view didn’t make the yen go away, however. I couldn’t put it out of my mind. Every time I saw Wanda I wanted her. I wondered whether part of this might not be habit — I had been in the habit of wanting her, and we hadn’t been with each other sexually in so long.
GRACE: I had this feeling that something was building up with the two of them. But I wasn’t sure if maybe it wasn’t all in my mind. Anyway, I liked having Wanda around. I felt almost like a sister to her. When I was a kid I used to imagine what it would be like to have a big sister.
WANDA: I wonder if I would have eventually made a move of my own. I had decided definitely not to, but a few more days of frustration might have made me change my mind. Because I definitely wanted Peter and there was no way to avoid realizing as much. The bill of goods I had half-managed to sell myself — that somewhere out there was a man for me — I didn’t believe this any more. I had tried enough men to convince me it just wouldn’t work that way. There was a man for me, but he happened to be my brother.
I slept late one morning, and when I woke up Grace had left. Peter told me over breakfast that she had gone to pose for some pictures. I knew vaguely that she was a model but had no idea just what sort of work she did, fashion or what, and I said something to this effect. Peter got up from the table and came back with a small stack of photographs. He flipped them onto the table and told me to have a look.
I was genuinely shocked. They were all deliciously pornographic. Grace with a man, Grace with a man and another girl, Grace with two men, Grace with a girl, with, as they say, nothing left to the imagination.
I looked up at Peter and he was grinning. “You let her do this?”
“Why not?” he said. “She enjoys it. Easy work, good pay, no withholding taxes.” But didn’t he mind?
He said he didn’t, and then he began to explain that he and Grace were in the habit of swinging with other couples. I was shocked all over again. Swinging was not a wholly new idea to me, I had been to fairly freewheeling parties myself, but I wasn’t prepared for such a revelation concerning my little brother and his wife. It stunned me and I didn’t know how to react.
PETER: You were remarkably cool about it.
WANDA: I didn’t feel remarkably cool. I felt very strange. And confused. I didn’t know whether or not this meant that Peter and I could be lovers again.
I excused myself and went into the bathroom to take a shower. I was standing under the hot water spray still a little shaky from what I had learned when the shower door opened and Peter stepped in beside me.
He said, “Do you remember when we used to take baths together, Sis? I always enjoyed that.”
I said, “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Sure,” he said. He took a bar of soap and rubbed it over my breasts. “I’m washing my sister,” he said. “I’m soaping you up.”
I stood there and he worked the soap over my breasts and down across my belly. He lathered my pubic hair. I was trembling from head to foot. I wanted him so intensely I couldn’t bear it. He kept soaping me all over.
We got out of the shower. We didn’t even dry ourselves off. We went straight into my bedroom, all wet and slippery, not giving a damn about anything but our need for each other.
I came the instant he entered me. And when it was finally over and I lay gasping for breath with his head pillowed on my breast, I felt the most overwhelming relief. We had needed each other for so long, so very long.
And no other man ever made me feel this way. I had always thought that this was so, but it had been so long since I had been with Peter that I sometimes wondered if I wasn’t remembering it as having been better than it really was. But no, we were something special together.
PETER: It was her reaction to the pictures that made me go into the shower with her. I knew we both wanted each other and that we were going to have each other sooner or later, and this seemed as good a time as any.
WANDA: I asked if he would tell Grace. He said he didn’t know. I told him I couldn’t come between them.
“No one can come between Grace and me,” he said. “And no one can come between us, either.”
PETER: I knew I would have to tell Grace sooner or later. But I found myself putting it off. I was afraid she might not be able to handle it.
This might seem strange, in view of the fact that we both embraced swinging wholeheartedly and with no feelings of jealousy on either side. But this was different. Swinging, after all, is essentially loveless sex, variety for its own sake, an occasional romp that has no emotional implications. Wanda and I were not only balling. We were also in love, and I was afraid Grace would feel threatened.
So for longer than I had intended Wanda and I would get together when Grace was out of the apartment. You know, thinking back on it, I wonder if the idea of having each other on the sly didn’t hold some nostalgic appeal of its own. We had had to sneak around when we were kids, and maybe we were recapturing some of that special excitement. It was our secret and we were having fun with it.
After about a month I told Grace.
GRACE: I was just numb. Peter and I were alone when he told me. I just stood there and listened to him say that he had started sleeping with his sister again. I felt as though the bottom was falling out of my life. The floor was falling and I was in the middle of the air.
I said that I guessed he wouldn’t want me around any more and I would leave whenever he wanted.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I’ll never let you go. I told you that the night I met you, that I wanted to take you home and never let you go.”
“But you love her,” I said. “You always loved her, and you married me because you couldn’t have her anymore, and now you have her back again and you don’t need me.”
“Of course I need you,” he said. “I need you now more than ever.”
I didn’t know whether I should believe him or not. I thought maybe he was saying this because he didn’t want to hurt me. I started to cry and Peter began making love to me. It went through my mind that this would be the last time we would ever make love.
PETER: It wasn’t, was it?
GRACE: But I thought it would be. And then afterward while I was lying there feeling all warm and together, Peter explained how he felt about me and about Wanda. I tried to think out how I felt about it. I didn’t mind if he was with other girls when we swung, and he didn’t mind if I was with other men. And I knew how deeply he and Wanda loved each other, and I was glad for this because it is beautiful to love someone that deeply.
It also came to me that it would be good for us all to be all three living together. Because Wanda gives Peter something that I can’t give him. The two of them, the way their minds work together, the conversations they have. I’m not putting myself down, honestly, but it would have to be boring for Peter to have nobody brighter than me to talk to for the rest of his life. I know you enjoy talking to me, Peter, but you know you can have a different kind of conversation with Wanda and that you have a need for it.