There were any number of things I wanted to ask her, but it was no time to talk. I got out of my clothes, and while I made love to her I imagined Jeff with Sheila, and the whole experience was exciting in ways I couldn’t even begin to understand...
We did finally get dressed and go back to the party. I would have barged right on in, but Jan stopped me and knocked on the door, and I guess that gave them time to get their clothes on. Jeff opened the door. “I hope you kids had as much fun as we did,” he said, grinning.
Until he said that I don’t think I completely believed that he and Sheila had really done it. Hearing him say it gave me a very funny feeling.
Then he said that he was sure we would have a lot of questions, that he knew there must be a lot we would all have to talk about, but that it would keep until morning and that Sheila and I would probably want to be alone for the time being. He told us everything was going to be great and not to worry about a thing, and then he and Jan went out the door and left us alone with each other.
SHEILA: Neither of us knew what to say.
PAUL: That’s an understatement We got through it by saying as little as possible. We just went upstairs and got undressed and into bed.
SHEILA: I could smell her on him. Her perfume. More than that — her smell. I asked him if she was better than me. “Just different,” he said, and I knew exactly what he meant. Because Jeff was different from him, and it was different being with Jeff than with Paul. Not better or worse. Different.
I said, “But it was more exciting, wasn’t it?” He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I knew it was more exciting for him because it had been more exciting for me. Four years of making love to each other and to no one else — it isn’t a question of getting stale, of the romance going out of a marriage. It’s just that you can’t possibly have that first-time thrill when you’re doing it with someone for the five-hundredth time. So I knew.
We didn’t talk, but we were close together. We held each other, and he told me he loved me, and I guess I cried a little. And then — and this may seem strange — then we made love.
PAUL: That happens more often than you might think.
SHEILA: It almost always happens with people who go into swapping with their eyes open, as a matter of fact. In our situation I think it was a little unusual.
PAUL: It probably was.
SHEILA: It was also very satisfying. I don’t remember what I thought at the time. I probably thought about myself with Jeff and about Paul with Jan, but I don’t honestly remember. But it was very exciting and satisfying.
JWW: And in the morning?
PAUL: By a sort of unvoiced agreement, neither of us mentioned it in the morning. This was pretty weird, actually. I kept finding myself wondering if it really happened or if maybe I dreamed the whole thing.
SHEILA: I had the feeling that you might have blacked it all out. We were all drinking fairly heavily, and I thought maybe I remembered it all and you didn’t.
PAUL: That’s a funny notion.
SHEILA: Hysterical.
PAUL: Well, to get back to the subject, we didn’t really discuss it at all until the Creightons came over. They turned up on our doorstep in the middle of the afternoon. We sent the kids outside to play and Sheila put up a pot of coffee, and they filled us in on the whole situation. For the most part they just talked and we listened, throwing in an occasional question here and there. Jeff carried the conversation, with Jan functioning as a sort of echo.
SHEILA: We were only the second couple they had done this with. Now this is funny — at the time I was really surprised to learn that they had ever done this before, which shows how naive I was. But later I was more surprised to think that they had carried out this elaborate seduction with so little experience as swingers. In any case, we were the second couple on their list. The first couple had been the previous occupants of our apartment, believe it or not. There had been no seduction then. The other couple had been reading about wife-swapping, and the four of them got to talking about it and studying books on it, and they decided to give it a try. All open and aboveboard, and pleasing for all concerned, except that the other couple had moved to the West Coast after a few months of fun and games.
What they did, mainly, was explain the effect that swinging with this other couple had had on their marriage. They went to great lengths to sell us on the idea that swapping did more to hold a marriage together than to break it up. They emphasized that swinging with the other couple had livened up their own sexual relationship, that it had kept them from getting urges for affairs with outsiders — all the standard rationalizations that swingers have. Maybe “rationalizations” is a bad term, because most of these arguments are true enough, and quite valid. The only thing is that they don’t really explain why people stay with swinging.
JWW: Which is?
SHEILA: Because it is exciting...
PAUL: They didn’t just talk to us. They also left us a satchel full of literature. They were more anxious to pass out pamphlets than the religious nuts who go around ringing doorbells, and the books and magazines they gave us were a hell of a lot more interesting. There were the usual books on swapping, plus a variety of swap-club magazines and newsletters.
JWW: Then the Creightons had been active in swap clubs?
PAUL: No, they hadn’t. They had sent for the literature just as a matter of interest, and after their friends moved out they had planned to try to find new friends through correspondence, but they had never quite gotten around to taking the plunge. It’s a big step, you know, actually writing letters and arranging a meeting with total strangers. I’m sure they would have gone through with it sooner or later, but then we moved in next door to them, and they were strongly attracted to us, and so they decided to see if they couldn’t get something started with us before they got involved in correspondence.
SHEILA: Remember, this was back in the days when the postal inspectors did a lot of entrapment of swingers. That’s stopped now, but at the time it was a very good reason for staying away from the correspondence clubs.
JWW: How did you react to all of this?
PAUL: It was almost too much to absorb. At first it really wasn’t a question of reacting. We were too busy trying to digest all this information, to figure out what sort of people our friends were and what sort of world this society of swingers was. We talked to them all afternoon, had dinner, put the kids to bed, then had them come over and talk to us some more. And then we stayed up half the night reading the books and magazines and discussing what we read, and, inevitably, getting excited from the reading and conversation and making love.
JWW: Just the two of you, that is.
PAUL: Yes.
SHEILA: That whole night and the next few evenings as well served as a tremendous emotional catharsis for us. I think over the year or two prior to that time we had begun shutting each other out. People tend to do this, you know. Even in a good marriage there’s a tendency to build walls between the partners, to lead semiprivate lives. This experience, jarring as it was, got us to open up to one another and talk about a lot of things we had barely thought about before. Our whole ideas, not only concerning sex, but about, oh, lots of things — marriage, love, life.
I was able for the first time to talk about the affair I had had before I began going with Paul. There were aspects to that affair, I won’t go into them now, but they needed talking about and I had kept it all locked inside. And Paul told me about the girl in Chicago, which was something he really had to get out in the open but which he could not possibly have talked about before this. Nor could I have listened, as far as that goes.