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

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  SHEILA: Of our ten letters, seven brought more or less prompt replies, which we later discovered is a remarkably high average. As a general thing, fifty percent is considered good. We had done the right thing in phrasing our letters intelligently and in selecting people who were geographically close to us.

  Of the seven, one couple wrote courteously to say that they had a full schedule for the time being. The courtesy of a negative reply was rare enough six years ago. It’s almost nonexistent now. The other six were all raring to go. They sent their pictures and their phone numbers and wanted to meet us.

  We narrowed the group down. One couple was interracial, a white girl and a Negro man. At the time we were anxious to avoid that sort of thing—

  PAUL: The prejudices you grow up with take a long time dying. Even for swingers.

  SHEILA: Another couple wrote a letter that just didn’t ring true. I would be hard-pressed to say how, but it didn’t. We knew there were a lot of phonies in the swinging world, and we had the vague feeling that this was from one of them, so we passed it up.

  The other couples all looked like good prospects. We picked the two closest couples, one here in K.C. and another just across the river in Missouri. One was in town and the other struck us from the photograph as slightly more attractive to us, so we tossed a coin, and Kansas City won.

  PAUL: They had enclosed their phone number, so one evening we gave them a ring. We had been putting it off for several days and it was really wild. Talk about being tugged two ways at once! We were really desperate for some swinging—it had been about two months since Jeff and Jan moved away—and at the same time we had a rougher case of sexual stage fright than Fay Wray on her honeymoon with King Kong. Somehow all that we had learned from our reading didn’t seem to help in the least. It was like reading books about sky diving—they wouldn’t make it any easier to take that first step out of the plane.

  SHEILA: So we stalled until we reached a point that was almost disgusting. Lying in bed together with their letters and pictures and sexing ourselves up with fantasies, and then working it off on each other. I didn’t like that at all. I suppose a civilian would think we had it all backward—that actual swapping is perverse but a little vicarious stimulation between husband and wife is just another onion in the stew of matrimony. I can’t buy that.

  PAUL: It’s like jerking off, except that instead of your hand you use you wife’s vagina.

  SHEILA: Jesus, what a revolting thought!

  PAUL: . . . When we finally decided to call them, I could think of nothing else all day at the office. I really made a hash of my work, and I was so preoccupied that it was a miracle I didn’t crack up the car on the ride home. We were going to call after dinner, but by the time we had had cocktails we decided not to wait, and I made the call.

  The couple we reached were Anne and Harold Kline. I introduced myself by the alias I had used in the letter and they knew at once who I was. They remembered our letter. They were both on the phone, and I got Sheila to pick up the extension in the kitchen, and we had a surprisingly relaxed four-way conversation. They asked us if Friday was all right, and we said it was, and Anne suggested we come over there, and Harold seconded the motion but got across the message that they would understand if we preferred to meet on neutral territory.

  SHEILA: In a cocktail lounge, for instance, so that we could all size each other up and call off the swap graciously if we wanted.

  PAUL: I would have preferred to do this. In fact Sheila and I had discussed it beforehand. But they were essentially saying that they didn’t have any reservations about swinging with us, and it didn’t seem particularly well mannered for us to express reservations about them. Especially since they were veterans and seemed sure of themselves, which made them two-up on us. So we set a date.

  Somewhere in the middle of the conversation I thought to myself that Anne had a sexy voice. Poised, educated, well modulated, and equipped with a husky undertone. And then it struck me that this woman I was chatting with, this total stranger, was going to be my bed partner in three days’ time. It was shocking, and tremendously exciting . . .

  Friday night we left our kids with a sitter and drove across town to their house. Their place was way over on the other side of the city in a section we weren’t at all familiar with, and we had a hell of a time finding it. But we got there, all right. The house was very impressive—a brick two-story home overgrown with ivy and set back on a half-acre lot. Huge oak trees, a first-class landscaping job. We hadn’t known how grand they might live; I knew Harold was a pharmacist, but that could mean anything from a glorified clerk drawing $7800 a year to a man with a chain of drugstores. We learned later that Harold owns three stores on three of the best shopping plazas in the Kansas City area, which made him a far cry from a clerk.

  Their son was awake when they let us in. About fourteen years old, an alert, good-looking kid. They introduced him and he shook hands with us and went upstairs to watch television. It sort of shook us up. It really did.

  SHEILA: We had had the Creightons over when our kids were in the house, of course. But Mark and Lisa were tiny then, and even if they had walked in on us they wouldn’t have known what was going on. This was a big kid, and the idea of introducing him to the folks his parents swung with—

  PAUL: I think we were also more aware of their ages by meeting their son. Their ages were no secret. They were in their mid-thirties, I think thirty-six and thirty-four, which made them substantially older than us but not enough to turn us off, certainly. But when we met their boy, well, he did make them seem to be older than they looked, and it also occurred to me that we were about as close in age to the kid as we were to his parents, and that was an odd feeling.

  SHEILA: With Jeff and Jan, we had had everything in common, and so we were now very conscious of differences.

  PAUL: Fortunately the Klines put us at ease. We had a few rounds of drinks and began to unwind. They were very attractive people. He was losing his hair in front, but his hairline was receding neatly and evenly so that he only looked bright and distinguished, not ridiculous the way some men do when they begin to go bald. He had a good sense of humor and a knack for keeping a conversation alive.

  Anne was a fair-skinned brunette with very large brown eyes and a really extraordinary figure. Most swingers begin to cut a few years off their ages once they pass the thirty mark. In Anne’s case, I would have thought it was the other way around. It was almost impossible to believe she was thirty-four years old with a fourteen-year-old son. Even up close she could have passed for a full ten years younger.

  SHEILA: Easily. If I were to meet someone like that now I would be fiercely jealous, but at the time I was too young to mind. When you’re twenty-four you think you’ll be young forever.

  PAUL: I noticed that Anne wasn’t drinking the same thing as the rest of us. Later on she explained that she was a health nut. Never touched alcohol or tobacco or tea or coffee or any of the other things that normal people stay alive on. And she drank—what the hell was it?

  SHEILA: Vegetable juice. Carrot and parsley and celery. She had an elaborate machine to squeeze them with. And she never ate sugar or white bread or dozens of other things. Or took any kind of pill, including aspirin.

  PAUL: She used to say that she only had one vice and she wanted to be able to give it all her energy.

  SHEILA: The crazy things she ate and didn’t eat. I shouldn’t say crazy, should I? It certainly worked for her. If I had any sense—

  PAUL: No you don’t. You’re too much of a fanatic, honey. If you quit smoking and drinking you’d go all the way and cut out sex, too, and then where would we be?

  SHEILA: Dead of boredom in a week.

  PAUL: You said it. Well, let’s say that I was sufficiently impressed with Anne. Her figure was great in clothes, and the bathing-suit shot they had sent us had proved she looked good out of clothes, too. There was no doubt in my mind that I was interested, and Shelia and I ex
changed glances and her eyes let me know that she wasn’t averse to the idea of making it with Harold, either. So I relaxed and waited for them to take the initiative.

  This took a while. I guess they wanted the kid to have a chance to get to sleep, or else they just wanted to give us all a chance to get acquainted. But around ten o’clock Anne asked if we would like to see the basement recreation room. I started to go with her, and Sheila was ready to tag along.

  SHEILA: Sometimes people can be too subtle.

  PAUL: And this was one of those times. But Harold took hold of her and asked her to keep him company for a few minutes, and then my genius wife got the message. And so did I.

  There was a Castro convertible downstairs, all opened and ready for action—which was a good description of the state Anne was in, as far as that goes. It was really a pretty odd scene. At one moment she was this calm and cool hostess, and the next minute she was a bitch in heat. Literally. I saw the couch opened up and said something moderately clever and turned to smile at her, just the least bit afraid that maybe I had been overly risqué with her playing it so cool, and there she was with her dress pulled over her head and nothing but her underneath it. She kicked off her shoes, flopped on the bed, and started panting.

  I was really stunned by all of this, and instead of rising to the occasion I stood there staring like a jerk. Not for long, though. Then I got undressed and got in bed with her.

  We began touching and kissing, and at one point I was about to go down on her. Just as a matter of course, because we had all reached the point where we hardly ever had coitus without some french preparation first.

  Anne didn’t want that. “No,” she said, “not that. I don’t want that. Just put it in me. Your big hard thing, put it in me and give it to me as hard as you can.”

  This put me off-stride for a moment. I don’t like being told how to make love to a girl, not that bluntly; it’s a de-balling sort of thing. But I thought, hell, the customer is always right, so I got on and rode.

  I was surprised. She turned out to be sensational at it—muscular control, rhythm, empathy for what her partner wanted, everything. This shouldn’t have been surprising, maybe, but the abruptness of the approach had more or less turned me off and I had estimated her to be sexually unrefined, unsophisticated, the get-on-and-do-it-and-get-off type. She wasn’t that way at all. It was just that her whole orientation was phallic. The size and rigidity of my organ was about all she cared about. And she kept talking about it constantly while I was balling her, how large it was, how firm, how marvelous it made her feel—

  SHEILA: Mr. Modesty hasn’t told you this, but he happens to have a seventeen-inch penis.

  PAUL: Oh, out it out.

  SHEILA: With 18-karat gold trim and a two-piece charcoal filter.

  PAUL: You’re a riot. I’m not boasting, not by any means. I’m about average, and so are maybe ninety eight percent of the men we’ve met, as far as that goes. The whole point was she was making all this fuss over something that wasn’t all that unusual. I wasn’t about to object, though. It was good food for the ego—

  SHEILA: Poor starving little ego.

  PAUL: —and as I said, she was enjoyable enough in the rack. So I stayed with her. She didn’t mind variety, as long as it came out with my plug in her socket, so we ran through a variety of positions and kept going until I ran out of gas. I had acquitted myself fairly early and I certainly hadn’t left her hung up, but there was a sort of wistful expression on her face and I had the feeling she could have kept on going for hours.

  SHEILA: And meanwhile I was upstairs on the living room couch finding out why Anne liked what she liked. See, she couldn’t get it at home.

  JWW: Harold was impotent?

  SHEILA: In the worst way. He didn’t have one.

  PAUL: Isn’t that too much?

  SHEILA: Not enough is more like it. When they went downstairs he kissed me and began making love to me, and he wound up going down on me on the couch without taking off his own clothes. He was an artist at this—impotent fellows generally are, if they’re swingers, maybe because they haven’t got much else going for them.

  I made it, and we sat back and had a cigarette. I asked if there wasn’t something I could do for him, and he said not now, that he was fine. I gathered that he had ejaculated while he was eating me, which happens. I made some joke to this effect, some very stupid joke about how he should have saved it until he found the proper receptacle. Just a stupid joke, and one that seemed a lot stupider when he explained that he didn’t have a penis.

  PAUL: A swinger without a penis. Isn’t that incredible?

  SHEILA: Oh, I don’t know. I’m a swinger without a penis.

  PAUL: Just incredible. A swing-errrr without a penis/ Is like a ship/Without a sail—

  SHEILA: I’ll ignore that. It wasn’t in the war. It was an accident, I think an automobile accident. He showed me what he had left, which was virtually nothing. But he still had his testicles and they still functioned, and if he became very excited sexually he was still capable of ejaculating. But of course he couldn’t have coitus, because of what he was missing.

  PAUL: What you call all dressed up and no place to go.

  SHEILA: That wasn’t even funny. And why joke about it?

  PAUL: Because, if you really want to know, just thinking about it gives me a terminal case of the chills. Why don’t we talk about something else? Something conversationally safe, like religion or politics?

  SHEILA: Castration fears, sweetie?

  PAUL: No, just an inverted case of penis envy.

  SHEILA: That’s funny. Well, to make a long story short—

  PAUL: Which is what Harold’s accident did, God help him.

  SHEILA: —he had an artificial phallus which he and Anne would use, and of course he would go down on her, but he explained that it was mainly what he was missing that made them go into swinging, more for her sake than anything else. I had never heard of anything like this at the time. Since then I’ve known plenty of couples where the husband is wholly or partially impotent, but nothing equivalent to Harold.

  I asked if there was anything I could do for him, and he said the one thing that thrilled him that way was to bring a girl to orgasm. And he spent the next few hours doing that, once wearing the rubber dildo and the other times in more common ways.

  On the way home we compared notes and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. At first we more or less decided not to see them again. They didn’t go for anything more elaborate than separate-room twosies, and of course there was that big gap on his part and her single-minded interest, and it hardly added up to ideal partners for us. I remember that we got mildly hysterical on the way home, comparing the two of them to Jeff and Jan. All the difference in the world. We couldn’t help laughing, and yet it wasn’t all that funny, because we thought of what it would be like to swap with them on a regular basis, you know, see them exclusively. It was a very grim idea.

  PAUL: And one grim idea led to another. We felt, well, pretty damned foolish. All of this planning and scheming and driving across town to make square love with a cock-crazy health-food nut and her prickless husband, if you’ll excuse the language, but that was how we thought of them. All of that aggravation, and for what, really?

  SHEILA: I was ready to give it up. Swinging, the whole scene. I had a good time with what’s-his-name, Harold, but it left a bad taste. And he was so pathetic that I couldn’t hate him or even despise him, which made it worse.

  We went to bed and compared notes, and that was the big surprise, because it turned us on. We didn’t think of it as exciting, but when we talked about it we did get excited, each of us showing what we’d done earlier, and we made very good love . . .

  And as it turned out, we saw the Klines off and on as long as we stayed in K.C. Once we had made other contacts and got involved in swinging with a wide variety of people, we grew to appreciate them in a strange way as an occasional change of pace. Oh, say we made it with them fi
ve, six times over the next year or so. Maybe only four times. They were nice people. Not natural swingers, because they were driven to it, but nice people just the same . . .

  • • •

  They begin reminiscing about other couples with whom they had relations during their stay in Kansas City. Their circle of sexual partners gradually enlarged, they explain, both through additional correspondence and through introductions arranged by past contacts. We sit in repose, smoking, drinking, nibbling at the tray of canapés, while they discuss these past sexual exploits with an air not unlike a pair of college fraternity brothers at a twentieth reunion, trading roseate memories of pranks that sound oddly unreal now.

  I hear of this couple and that couple, this man and that woman. I am provided with thumbnail sketches and capsule biographies: A, married for the second time, would inherit a million-dollar landscape gardening firm if his father ever died; B, flat-chested and pear-shaped, had a mad passion for fellatio; C, a thoroughgoing bisexual, had been a virgin on her wedding night and became an all-out swinger in less than six months; D, a sound engineer at a local television studio, had some fantastic erotic tapes; E and F, according to a persistent rumor, were brother and sister now living as man and wife but no one had dared ask them about this to their faces.

  I change the reels in my tape recorder, but somewhere along the way, I must confess, I fail to change the reels in my head; the words they utter are no longer recorded in my mind but pass in and out unnoticed; I tune them out. And later I wonder at this. Perhaps I have dwelled too long among the swingers. Perhaps I have listened one time too many to this sort of recital, this shockingly unshocking narrative of loveless love, of oddly sexless sex. The Klines, I muse, were at least something unusual, a man without a penis, a woman who did not deign to be cunnilingued. But now they have been discussed and released, and the others are not so distinctive; all the men have penises, all the women delight in being eaten. And both Paul and Sheila, who have heretofore impressed me as being so singularly perceptive, so gratifyingly articulate, have suddenly lost their charm, their verve, their vision. Their conversation is preoccupied with total recall of who did what and with which and to whom.