The Wife-Swap Report (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Read online

  SHEILA: We thought it was a matter of getting used to sex. We didn’t realize then that what was missing was variety.

  PAUL: Or if we did realize it we didn’t think about it very much.

  JWW: Then the picture I have of the two of you after approximately four years of marriage is that of a reasonably contented and well-adjusted couple with no interest in adultery beyond the fantasy level?

  PAUL: That’s about it.

  JWW: You had no knowledge of the existence of the swinging world?

  PAUL: Well, I wouldn’t go that far.

  SHEILA: It’s impossible to be wholly unaware of its existence, don’t you think? There have been just too many books and magazine articles on the subject. Even if you never buy those magazines you see the titles of the articles plastered all over the covers every time you pass a newsstand. Just the name, the word “wife-swapping.” It’s enough to let a person know what it’s all about.

  PAUL: But that was really the extent of our knowledge. We didn’t know any swingers personally, we hadn’t talked about swinging between ourselves, and to be quite frank, the few articles I did read didn’t make the whole thing sound that attractive to me. This may not be typical, because I’ve met a great many couples who were in a sense introduced to swinging by books and magazines—the husband would read articles on the subject and get all excited by the idea, and things would just sort of build from there. Maybe I picked the wrong articles, but what I read didn’t excite me at all. It was like reading about tribal initiation rites among the islanders of Pungo Pungo—you know, academically interesting, but not the sort of thing you could identify with personally to any appreciable extent. These just weren’t the sort of people we knew, they weren’t people like us, so I couldn’t get interested.

  SHEILA: And I really didn’t know enough about it even to go that far in my thinking. For me it was just headlines, and I never gave it much thought.

  PAUL: Then we got initiated.

  SHEILA: You mean seduced.

  PAUL: That sounds like a pretty ridiculous expression, doesn’t it?

  SHEILA: It’s what happened.

  PAUL: I guess that’s true enough. If you want to get really cloak and daggerish about it, it wasn’t just a seduction. It was a conspiracy. Jeff and Jan Creighton carefully plotted things out so that they could get the two of us into bed. When they eventually told us about it, we thought it was pretty hysterical. We got a lot of laughs out of it. Another time, during one of those agonizing reappraisals a married couple is apt to have from time to time, well, we had a little trouble appreciating the humor of it all. It began to seem pretty cold-blooded . . .

  • • •

  As he begins to recount the experience with the Creightons, Sheila visibly withdraws from the conversation. She sits back on the couch, lights a cigarette, smokes it in nervous little puffs and puts it out before more than half of it has been consumed. She looks at neither her husband nor the interviewer but lets her gaze flit about the room, now at a picture on the wall, now at the bookshelves, now at the carpet. She worries her lower lip with her teeth, picks at a loose thread on the couch. And yet it is obvious that she is keeping in close touch with the conversation, for she periodically breaks in with a phrase or comment.

  • • •

  PAUL: This was in Kansas City. We didn’t take the Chicago offer but wound up in Kansas City, and instead of taking a house we rented an apartment just outside of the city limits. A duplex, one side of a two-story home. I had the feeling at the time that we might not be staying there too long and I felt it wouldn’t be worthwhile to go into a house if we were going to pick up and move in less than a year’s time. We had as much floor space as we would have had in a home of our own, and as a temporary thing it was quite comfortable and convenient.

  The Creightons were our next-door neighbors. Our other-side-of-the-house neighbors, I should say. They had been there for a year when we moved in. Jeff was a product manager with a major company. He was two years older than I, and I was twenty-six at the time, so he would have been twenty-eight. Jan was the same age as Sheila, twenty-three.

  The four of us hit it off from the beginning. They were very friendly and of course we didn’t know a soul in town, so we were glad enough to be friends. They had a kid just about the same age as ours and he must have been making about the same salary as I was, and all of this helped; the more you have in common, the easier it is to connect and get acquainted.

  SHEILA: It was more than that. Rapport.

  PAUL: That goes without saying. No matter how much people have in common, there’s a special chemistry that has to be present or else nothing happens. It was there. I liked Jeff from the beginning. He was a good-looking, athletic guy, dressed well without looking like a male model, spoke nicely, knew how to tell a story or listen to one. Jan was a tall girl with a really fantastic figure. The Playboy gatefold type, very voluptuous, almost overblown. The sort of figure that’s likely to come unglued when a woman’s in her thirties, but she was twenty-three then and everything was right where it was supposed to be. She had a way of looking straight into your eyes when you were talking, as if she was staring right into you and getting past what you were saying to what you were thinking about. I suppose the conventional term is bedroom eyes, but it was actually something beyond that. It wasn’t just a matter of sex. It was intimacy, in the real sense of the word. That was what she projected.

  JWW: You were attracted to her. Did you think about having sex with her?

  PAUL: In a way.

  SHEILA: Oh? Which way did you think about?

  PAUL: You know what I mean. I thought about it the way any man will think about a woman he finds attractive. I didn’t make a big fantasy thing about it, and I certainly didn’t have the slightest intention of actually going and doing anything about it. But I thought about it, imagined it, wondered what it would be like. People always do this, you know. It seems to be true that men are more predisposed to do this than women, and I can think of several reasons for this, both biological and cultural. On the cultural side, women have been more carefully conditioned to think that they can only have relations with their husbands. The notion of men cheating is less shocking somehow than of women cheating. And biologically, well, I think it’s an inherent drive that makes men want variety, a basic biological urge to have relations with and impregnate as many women as possible. I have a feeling it’s all tied up with natural selection and evolution, survival of the fittest and all of that . . .

  The point is that I had an urge, and so did Sheila. I don’t think hers was as well defined—

  SHEILA: I found Jeff attractive, that’s all. And more sympathetic than most men. Generally a man won’t really talk to another man’s wife as a person. He’ll treat her as part of a couple, not as an individual. Maybe so she won’t think he’s making a pass, or so his own wife won’t be jealous. Or because deep down inside most men simply cannot relate to most women as human beings, which is sad but true, I’m afraid. Jeff Creighton made me very conscious of myself as a woman, and I felt he liked and appreciated me. How much of that feeling was sexual I couldn’t say.

  PAUL: It became sexual soon enough. We moved into that duplex in February, and in May we swapped with them. It didn’t take them very long at all.

  They started things off by getting as well acquainted with us as they possibly could. It was natural for the four of us to see a lot of each other, but as time went by we were constantly thrown together. The two girls were together for a few hours every afternoon for coffee and conversation, and we got together as couples at least once a weekend and one or more nights during the week. It certainly was convenient—we would drop over there or have them over to our place without the aggravation and expense of finding a baby sitter. And you couldn’t even get a sitter on week nights, so an evening with Jeff and Jan was like free entertainment—we didn’t have to plan it in advance and it didn’t cost us anything.

  Sometime in April things began to get a
sexual tone to them. I don’t know exactly how it started, but it got there gradually enough.

  SHEILA: Jan used to bring sex into the conversations during the afternoons. She would say that she was having her period and that Jeff just couldn’t stand waiting until she was done with it.

  PAUL: Women will discuss personal things with each other that two men would never dream of bringing up. It never ceases to amaze me. Men might talk about what they do outside of marriage, but women just talk about what they do inside it.

  SHEILA: Once she suggested that we ought to have a mutual agreement—Jeff would sleep with me when she had her period, and she would take care of Paul when I had it. Just a joke, all very casual, but with the obvious purpose of planting the idea in my mind.

  JWW: And did the idea take hold?

  SHEILA: I suppose it did. Not the idea of that sort of mutual compact, certainly. Although I have heard of quite a few cases of wives setting up something like that when they had to stop having sex because of advanced pregnancy. That’s quite common, believe it or not. People start off that way and later on get into swinging once they find out that they enjoy a little variety. But I would have to say yes, it did force me to think of Jeff as a potential sex partner. When something is brought to your attention that way it’s virtually impossible to avoid thinking about it. And if you try to banish a thought, all you do is force it all the more firmly into your consciousness.

  PAUL: Jeff was a little less obvious about things. He would occasionally tell me that Jan really thought a lot of me, that she had said she really liked me and felt comfortable with me, that sort of thing. “I don’t think I’d trust the two of you together”—lines like that. And then when the four of us were together, the subject of sex seemed to get brought into the conversation more and more frequently. It just came up more and more often. Conversations would have double meanings, that sort of thing. This happens with sophisticated couples as they feel increasingly at ease with each other and of course it doesn’t necessarily mean anything in and of itself, but here it was another way of breaking the ice and conditioning us for the big step.

  When that came, it was sort of a one-two combination. It started on a Friday night. We were over at their place, their side of the house, and we had had the usual quota of drinks to celebrate the fact that the work week was over. I guess I was on my way back from the john or something and I ran into Jan in the kitchen. She and I had been exchanging these looks all night long. She told me I had a spot on my tie, and I couldn’t find it. She came over to me to show me. I was staring down the front of her dress when she suddenly raised her eyes and caught mine. The next thing I knew we were kissing. I’ll never know which one of us made the first move, but it hardly mattered. She seemed to resist at first, if only for a second, and then her mouth opened and she was breathing hard and moving her body against me. It was unbelievably exciting. I knew that Sheila or Jeff could walk in at any moment and catch us, but even so I couldn’t stop kissing her. The thought that we could be caught almost added to the excitement. Then finally she pushed me away and the two of us stood staring at each other. I felt excited and guilty and foolish and drunk, everything all at once. I didn’t know what to say, and so I didn’t say anything and we drifted back to the other room.

  Later that evening she would catch my eye now and then and give me a secret smile. It was . . . well, I suppose disconcerting was the only word for it. I didn’t know how to feel, how to react. I drank more than usual that night and passed out as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  All the next day I couldn’t think about anything else. I felt guilty, not because I had particularly done anything but because I knew this would always be there between us, this attraction, whether I ever got around to doing anything about it or not. And I really wanted to make love to Jan. I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. That Saturday I was doing the usual weekend things, playing with the kids and working around the house and looking at television a little, and throughout it all I would get these vivid images of making love to Jan and I kept having erections like a teen-ager. It was really crazy.

  Then they came over that night. I made everybody’s drinks a little stronger than usual, mainly because I felt the need of getting a little tight and I didn’t want to be the only one. I was really torn up, in the sense that I was afraid something was going to happen and I both wanted it to and didn’t want it to. As the evening wore on, Jan and I were more and more conscious of each other. The attraction was so strong you could feel it in the air, like static electricity.

  SHEILA: The two of you were pretty obvious about it.

  PAUL: I didn’t know whether we were or not. I couldn’t tell.

  JWW: How did you feel then, Sheila?

  SHEILA: I don’t know. A little jealous, but not entirely that, really. The calm before the storm is the cliché that comes to mind. It was like that. You know the feeling the air has on a hot day just before it pours? It was like that on an emotional level. The air was charged with something but I don’t think I knew consciously what it was. And of course it’s impossible now to know how much of this is being filled in by hindsight and how much I recognized at the time.

  PAUL: I was particularly uncertain as to how I felt about Jeff. That’s where the real guilt was—not that I would be cheating on Sheila but that I would be betraying my best friend. I was making drinks when he came in, and I said something properly inane, and he said, I forget the exact words, but something to the effect that if I enjoyed kissing his wife I would probably want more than a sample.

  I was just stunned. Literally that, because I didn’t know how to react. He said what an angry man would say in his place, and yet he didn’t seem angry. I started to apologize or explain it away as the result of liquor, but he didn’t let me get started. He put a hand on my arm and gave me a smile. “Save it,” he said. “Jan and I are too broad-minded to be jealous. The two of you like each other. She’d like to go to bed with you. You’d like to go to bed with her. That’s fine with me.” I just stood there with my mouth open while he moved past me and went on back to the living room.

  I took my time fixing the drinks, trying to digest what Jeff had said. All I could think was that he was giving me carte blanche to make love to his wife, and it was as though once he had given his permission no other considerations could possibly stand in the way. The fact that my own wife might object, or that it might put a crimp in our marriage, somehow didn’t enter into things. I could only think that Jan and I wanted to make love and that nothing stood in our way.

  When I returned to the living room there was slow music playing on the hi-fi and Jan and Jeff were dancing together. Sheila was sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette. I put my drink down and held out my arms for her and we danced. I felt very warm toward her, very warm toward everyone. I knew something extraordinary was going to happen but I couldn’t think too clearly about just what it would be. I was very happy and exuberant, I remember.

  As the record ended, Jeff and Jan moved alongside us. Jan said, “Why don’t we try changing partners?”

  The phrase rang in my head, over and over. Why don’t we try changing partners? It was more than double-entendre. It was just a direct sexual suggestion, and at the moment I was all for it. At any rate, I began dancing with her and Jeff danced with Sheila.

  Jan danced with her whole body. We pressed together at once, and I felt the pressure of her large breasts and the heat of her loins, and I got excited immediately. She began breathing heavily. I was afraid she would notice that I had an erection, and at the same time I wanted to press it against her, to let her know how I was responding to her. Then she touched it with her hand and whispered, “Oh, how nice!” and started rubbing herself against me. I danced her off into a corner and kissed her, and this time her mouth opened immediately and we kissed deeply, furiously.

  SHEILA: I could see what they were doing. Not all the details, but I could certainly see that they were involved in more than a friendly session
of social dancing. I’ve always wondered how I would have reacted if I had been cold sober. The drinks did make a difference. They gave everything an unreal feeling. It’s hard to explain just how I felt about it. I was angry, and hurt, and oddly excited, and—well, confused, as much as anything else. I was sort of waiting for Jeff to cue me as to how I should be reacting. His wife was making out with my husband, and if he had gotten furious I would have done the same. I waited for him to lead so that I could follow.

  PAUL: When the record ended Jan said she had to check the children. “I’m afraid to go there alone,” she said. “All the way next door. You don’t mind if I borrow your husband, do you, Sheila?” We didn’t wait for an answer. I went along with her and we went out the door and let it close after us. The fresh air sobered me for an instant, and I almost turned and went back inside, but then she was in my arms and I was kissing her again. She was very passionate.

  We went into their half of the house. There wasn’t even any pretense of checking the children. She led me upstairs to their bedroom and we kissed again. Of course I knew we were going to make love. I couldn’t really believe it, but I knew it.

  We sort of tumbled onto their bed, clothes and all. There was really no time for foreplay. The whole thing was far too urgent. We just got enough clothes off to get at each other, and then I was on her and inside of her and I thought, God, it’s actually happening after all, then I couldn’t even think any more . . .

  SHEILA: When they walked out of the house together I couldn’t believe it. I honestly couldn’t believe it. I stood staring after them, and then I turned and stared at Jeff. It’s as if I was incapable of reacting on my own.

  He said, “Do you know where they’re going, Sheila?”

  I shook my head.

  “They’re going to bed,” he said.