3 is Not a Crowd (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 10

  PETER: You could always have borrowed mine. All you had to do was speak up.

  WANDA: Psychiatrists suggested this, that I wanted a penis of my own, that I wanted Peter’s penis. So I can’t really say whether this was true or not because it was suggested to me so often. I know I loved to watch him urinate, and sometimes I would hold it for him when he did, and I would move it around to make little patterns in the bowl.

  PETER: We could still do that, if you want.

  WANDA: Do shut up.

  PETER: Just as she was supposed to envy me my penis, I was supposed to be vaguely disappointed that she didn’t have one. I don’t remember any such disappointment. The theory is that a little boy looks at a little girl and is distressed to find nothing there. I don’t know where these people have been, but when I look at the juncture of a girl’s legs I don’t see nothing. I see something quite charming. A female pubis is certainly remarkable for more reasons than the absence of a penis. I found Wanda quite fascinating in that respect.

  WANDA: He used to put his little finger in.

  PETER: I would wash it for her when we bathed. I strongly recommend this, by the way. We were quite the cleanest little children on earth, and our genitals absolutely squeaked with cleanliness. It was no trouble getting us into the tub. I remember bathing as quite the best part of childhood.

  I was eight and Wanda nine when we first began to have intercourse. A surprising number of people find this difficult to believe. I’m damned if I know why. Boys that age get erections all the time. It may be small, but it gets stiff enough, and one wouldn’t want it too big if one were going to put it into a nine-year-old girl, would one?

  Wanda initiated it. I was in my room and she came in and said she had found out how people made babies. We had both had a vague idea but it was rather confused. I seem to remember the belief that there was urination involved, the male was supposed to urinate into the vagina.

  WANDA: Which can be great fun, but has little to do with having babies.

  PETER: She explained that she had to lie down and open her legs and I was to get on top of her and put my pee-pee into her—what did we used to call your cunt?

  WANDA: I think we called mine a pee-pee, too.

  PETER: Had to put my pee-pee into her pee-pee—I’m sure we had a special name for yours and I wish to hell I could remember what it was—and that then she would have a baby. So I thought it would be a great idea to try it, and she got undressed and stretched out in my bed and opened her legs, and I got on top of her, and I didn’t have an erection and couldn’t get it in.

  WANDA: It was like trying to thread a needle with a strand of cooked spaghetti.

  PETER: Isn’t she charming? It was oddly frustrating. We knew we were doing something wrong, leaving something out, but couldn’t imagine what. I used to get erections all the time—

  WANDA: I’m sure he was born with one.

  PETER: It’s possible, you know. You’re joking, but babies are born with erections all the time.

  GRACE: All the time?

  PETER: Frequently, idiot. I got them when Wanda and I had sex play, or when I had to urinate, or riding in a fast car. All manner of things get a little boy hard.

  WANDA: Including little girls.

  PETER: Including little girls. So I was used to having erections, and I knew that it felt better to have an erection than not, and that it felt particularly good when I was hard when Wanda played with me. But it didn’t seem to occur to either of us that an erection would facilitate this baby-making which we were trying to accomplish.

  We squirmed around for quite some time, and it felt very nice, but I couldn’t get inside of her. Then we gave it up and lay there talking, trying to figure out what was wrong. We were lying side by side, and Wanda put her hand on my penis and just held it gently, giving it a sisterly squeeze now and then, and you shouldn’t be too astonished to hear that it became erect in due course.

  It was like Archimedes in the bloody bathtub. All of a sudden I realized what we had left out. “I think it’ll go in now,” I told her, and of course she was anxious to try it.

  But it wouldn’t quite, because Wanda was tight and dry and said it was hurting her. We figured out that maybe it would be easier if we wet my pee-pee, so she put spit on her hands and wet my penis, which felt quite divine. Then we tried again, and it went right into her.

  Well, it was absolutely unbelievable. Quite a difference between this and a soapy hand in the bathtub. It was just incredibly sensational.

  Wanda’s store of information didn’t include the fact that I was supposed to work it in and out and in and out, but I seemed to know this instinctively. I did this, and Wanda wiggled her little tail as if she had been doing this all her life, and after not too long had a climax. I was too young to be producing any sperm, but I definitely ejaculated. Seminal fluid, I suppose it was. This was the first time I had ever had an orgasm or an emission.

  I didn’t know what it was. I had gathered from what she told me that something came out of the penis during intercourse but I thought it might be urine or something of the sort, and I had no idea that there was this incredibly wonderful feeling involved in the process. I had been delighted enough with the way intercourse felt, but this was an added and wholly unanticipated bonanza.

  WANDA: I also had a climax. I’m certain that I did. I’ve been solemnly told that this was impossible, but I also understand it’s impossible for a bumblebee to fly, according to science. Fortunately bumblebees are not scientifically inclined and they go on flying whether they’re supposed to or not. I had a climax whether I was supposed to or not.

  PETER: We were confident that Wanda was going to have a baby. There’s a joke which I can’t quite remember in which a pair of earthlings demonstrate reproduction to some Martians and the Martians are astonished that the baby doesn’t appear for nine months . . . I wish I remembered the joke—from what I just said you wouldn’t believe there was anything hysterical about it, would you? The point, though, is that we expected the baby to come out almost at once. When hours went by without Wanda’s giving birth, we thought we had done something wrong.

  Then over the next few weeks the two of us picked up a great body of information on the subject. We both consulted with various schoolmates and asked no end of questions, and Wanda found an erotic novel that one of our parents had done a poor job of hiding—

  WANDA: Not an erotic novel. Pure and simple pornography. One of those mimeographed tracts with every other word misspelled. Sadomasochistic, too. I remember the plot. A waitress finishes work and her boss takes her to a nightclub where there’s a sex performance on stage, and then her boss, who’s been feeling her under the table, hands her over to the woman and two men who have been performing. He tells them that she’s a virgin, and they strip her and torture her and force her to do all manner of things, and finally they gang fuck her, and by the time it’s over she loves it, and her boss takes her home and screws her ass off. The sadism was really very freaky, but we were most interested in the book as a source of information on how to copulate. There were some rather crude drawings in which all the men had immense penises—

  PETER: Made one feel inadequate.

  WANDA: One of our parents, indeed. Obviously it was our father’s. With that bitch for a wife he must have jerked off over dirty books ten times a day.

  PETER: What do you suppose she jerked off over?

  WANDA: I don’t know. God knows. Copies of Vogue, I suppose.

  PETER: I was thinking Parke-Bernet catalogues.

  WANDA: I like that much better. Isn’t that a lovely image? Masturbating over a description of a Sheraton tea caddy. Oh, I love that!

  PETER: I’m trying to remember just what we learned during that period. That we couldn’t have babies, for one thing. We learned the right thing for the wrong reason—as we understood it, you couldn’t have babies unless you were married, and we already knew that you couldn’t get married until you were grown up. We also learned—perh
aps we had always known this—that you couldn’t marry your sister, that brother and sister couldn’t marry. This disturbed us but I think we more or less tabled the matter, figuring that we would work something out when the time came.

  We also learned any number of positions to screw in. The dirty book was particularly instructive in this respect. We learned about oral sex, which had never occurred to us, and about buggery. The book was wildly enthusiastic about buggery. They kept fucking this poor waitress up the ass, and she never did enjoy that part. It was evidently supposed to be excruciatingly painful, and we almost decided to forego the pleasure on the basis of this description.

  WANDA: I said why not try it and stop if it hurts, which seemed reasonable enough. And it didn’t hurt a bit.

  PETER: If I had been hung like one of those gorillas in the book—

  WANDA: Oh, well, that was ridiculous. That’s the trouble with pornography, it’s positively surrealistic. If you had been built like those apes you would have disabled a brood mare, let alone your sister.

  PETER: I don’t want to let alone my sister.

  WANDA: Jack, we were the sexiest kinkiest little devils imaginable. It was really incredible. We had the sense to know that we weren’t supposed to be doing this, so we didn’t say anything to anyone. And kept it from our parents, which wasn’t difficult because they were hardly ever around. We would do it almost every day and we became quite accomplished. Invented positions of our own and everything. At nine years old, I was a rather artful cocksucker. Few girls can make that statement.

  PETER: Few girls can make that statement at any age.

  WANDA: If it weren’t for the rest of the world, I don’t think we ever would have had any trouble staying sane. As far as that goes, if we ever did have children—

  PETER: No.

  WANDA: Just as a hypothesis.

  PETER: No. I don’t even care for the hypothesis.

  WANDA: If you had children with Grace. Or if we adopted children.

  PETER: No.

  WANDA: Oh, shut up and let me talk, please. I don’t want children, either; this is purely hypothetical.

  PETER: Go ahead.

  WANDA: I would be in favor of bringing them up to screw each other. I am absolutely serious. What a sane clean healthy way to grow up! Every brother and sister want to do it. They may never realize it, but the desire is universal.

  PETER: They want to screw their parents, too. Would you draw a line?

  WANDA: No.

  PETER: Neither would I.

  GRACE: I think I would draw a line at that.

  PETER: That’s your hang-up.

  GRACE: I guess.

  WANDA: I never wanted to screw him. Did you ever want to screw Mother?

  PETER: It never occurred to me. Not until a quack shrink suggested it. My reaction, as I recall, was one of nausea. She was dead by then and I pictured myself in bed with her rotting corpse and I retched. I didn’t bother explaining the image to the quack and he was sure we were on the verge of an earthshaking breakthrough. Stupid son of a bitch!

  WANDA: But if children were brought up that way—

  PETER: I think they do that in some of those islands. The places Margaret Mead goes to.

  WANDA: Would you want your children to screw Margaret Mead?

  PETER: Only if they really loved her.

  WANDA: And if she has any kids, I want them brought up Catholic.

  PETER: You’re a perfect goose. You truly are.

  • • •

  JWW: Observations on ideal ways to raise children and the advisability of encouraging their early sexual experimentation were voiced frequently in the course of our several meetings. It may seem remarkable that persons so thoroughly opposed to the idea of having children had so much to say on the topic of raising them. I think this is less a contradiction than it seems. Both Peter and Wanda were very much aware that the subsequent emotional problems derived in large measure from the manner in which their sexual behavior was dealt with, and blame their parents for this. Furthermore, it would seem to me that by defending the position that brother-sister sexual relationships should be encouraged, they are defending their own early behavior and at once expunging any guilt they may feel for past acts and for their present situation as well.

  Grace had relatively little to say on the subject of her childhood sexual experiences. She did mention that she was seduced at a very early age by a lover of her mother’s, who performed cunnilingus upon her on several occasions and induced her to masturbate him. She seems to have been five or six at the time, the relationship was undiscovered and was terminated after a very short period of time when the man abruptly disappeared. She reported no further sexual experience until initial coitus at age fifteen with a boy her own age.

  This sort of childhood seduction at the hands of a male father figure is classic. It occurs with uncanny regularity in the case histories of prostitutes and female homosexuals. While it is generally acknowledged that the memory is occasionally false—that the seduction did not in fact occur—in the great majority of instances the act did seem to have taken place.

  • • •

  WANDA: We had been having sex for months before anyone found out. Then one afternoon one of the maids walked in on us. I had Peter’s pee-pee in my mouth at the time and was lying there with my eyes closed sucking him.

  PETER: By this time we knew its right name. We didn’t still call it a pee-pee.

  WANDA: And this woman walked in. Woman? She wasn’t much more than a girl herself. Maybe twenty years old, a little Irish thing fresh off the boat from County Something. She very nearly went into cardiac arrest. You can imagine the effect this had on her. In her eyes, fellatio was a mortal sin even if the two participants were husband and wife. For a girl to be sucking off her brother, that was the height of sin! Or the depth of sin, perhaps.

  PETER: She beat the living shit out of us, Jack. No one ever hit us, neither our parents nor the help. It just didn’t happen. But she completely lost her cool and slapped us silly, and then she sat us down and told us at great length about Hell and how we were certain to go there. She said we would go there anyway because we were Protestants, but we would burn for eternity in the very inner circle of Hell for what we were doing, and we would have to stop immediately and never so much as touch each other again, or even touch ourselves, and if I ever touched my penis again it would shrivel up and drop off, and, oh, it just went on like this forever.

  WANDA: I was terrified.

  PETER: We were both terrified. I believe I was honestly less frightened of hellfire or even my cock dropping off than I was of this dried-up little bitch losing control completely and beating us to death. And we were also afraid she would tell our parents, of course.

  WANDA: She couldn’t bring herself to do this, though. The words would have been too much for her to speak. Evidently she couldn’t even bear to think about it, because she left within the week, collected her wages and went away and never came back. For which I give thanks.

  PETER: It might have been better if she told them.

  WANDA: Are you mad?

  PETER: I’m not sure it would have been worse that way. As it was, she left us in a pretty bad way. We had known for a long time that we were doing something wrong, but we had never seen anything wrong with it, and we didn’t know it was considered to be anywhere near as sinful as she led us to believe. Also, we weren’t sure whether or not any of the stuff she l said was true, such as my cock dropping off.

  WANDA: It was scary.

  PETER: It was. We talked about it, we talked of nothing else, and we finally decided that maybe we had better stop doing this. That sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? After all, you wouldn’t think it would be too great a hardship for children that age to get along without sex. Most of them do, after all.

  WANDA: I wonder. I’ll bet a lot more children have sex at that age than anybody realizes.

  PETER: It’s tempting to think so. I’m not sure it’s true.


  Let’s say, though, that most children don’t. Not at that age. Not on a regular basis. But we had gotten used to it, you see, and it was—I was going to say it was like a drug, which would not be true at all. It was habit forming in quite another way. We were used to it and we loved it, and how could we suddenly stop taking baths together? Or stop wanting each other? Childhood is not the time when self-denial comes easily. It’s not the natural impulse of a child. It takes maturity to enable people to delude themselves into giving up the things they enjoy and doing things they hate. A child is made of simpler stuff. He does what he likes and doesn’t do what he doesn’t like, and what we liked to do was have sex, and until that bitch walked in on us we had been doing just fine.

  WANDA: We gave it up for a while. Then we decided maybe it would be all right as long as he didn’t get inside of my vagina, so we stuck to extra-coital things. Oral and anal and manual pleasures. They were great good fun, and we evidently managed to slough off the fact that the maid had found this sort of thing even worse than screwing. You would have thought it would be the other way around, after the way she had acted.

  PETER: She yelled at Wanda, “How can you put a filthy thing like that into your mouth?” Filthy? After the way Wanda washed it?

  WANDA: After, I don’t know, a few months of this, one day Peter said, “You know, I really would like to fuck you, and we haven’t done it in so long.” So we did it, and from then on we resumed doing it regularly.

  PETER: It’s amazing we got away with it as long as we did. After the maid discovered us, that is. We had almost three years after that. It seems incredible now that we managed for so long.

  WANDA: We were very careful. And we were extremely bright children, don’t forget. And good at keeping secrets. We never did anything with any other children. Never even considered it. Never talked about anything with them. This was a completely private thing of ours and we had no intention of sharing it with anyone. Otherwise I’m sure we would have been discovered much earlier, but this way it stayed a secret.