John Warren Wells

The Wife-Swap Report

The Way Some People Live

There is a song Pete Seeger sings about little boxes made of ticky-tacky, identical ticky-tacky houses inhabited by identical ticky-tacky people. The Gordon house is a luxury-class version of just this sort of suburban sameness. It is a four-year-old split-level on a half-acre lot in a development in Morris County, New Jersey, within easy commuting range of New York City. The current market value of the house is probably around thirty-five thousand dollars. The house is made of ticky-tacky (several of the windows leak; there are ceiling cracks as the structure settles) and it does look rather like its neighbors on either side, but there is certainly nothing drab about it. On the contrary, it is representative of the good life in affluent, leisure-oriented mid-century America.

The people in the house do not look just the same as their neighbors. On balance, they look quite a bit better. Paul Gordon is thirty-two years old, tall, slender, with brown eyes and straight dark brown hair. While he is not handsome enough to model for menswear advertisements, there is a strength and vitality in his features which borders on the charismatic.

His wife, Sheila, is three years younger and several inches shorter. Her large eyes are green flecked with brown, and her hair, originally a light brown, is presently blond. She is slender almost to the point of thinness, with small breasts and boyish hips. Her face is unusually expressive, quick to indicate her mercurial changes of mood. Her upper incisors are somewhat prominent, her forehead broad and high. By no means beautiful, she is nevertheless strikingly attractive, the sort of woman men find highly desirable while never being able to explain exactly why.

There are three Gordon children, Mark and Lisa and Heidi, ranging in age from nine to four. The children are bright, active and healthy; Mark and Lisa look rather like their mother while Heidi has inherited Paul’s features. The backyard is a mare’s nest of bikes and swing sets, while the basement playroom is largely given over to their toys.

Paul is a systems analyst presently employed by a large corporation with executive offices in Manhattan. His current salary is $16,350, plus the usual array of fringe benefits and pension plans. His work occupies him five days a week from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, with another two hours a day commuting time. He characterizes himself as “a sort of efficiency expert for computers” and seems happy enough at it. One senses that it is no more than a job, that the compensation and challenge are sufficient to prevent him from feeling bored or trapped, and that the problems of the job rarely if ever occupy his mind while he is away from the office.

Sheila, like her husband, is a college graduate. Twice since graduation she has enrolled at a university to take additional courses toward a master’s degree, but both times she abandoned the project within a month or so. She talks occasionally of going back to college when the children are older, or, alternatively, of qualifying as an elementary school teacher. This seems more lip service to the feminine mystique than anything else, and if Sheila finds the role of wife and housekeeper confining, her reaction is certainly no more than typical for women in her situation, overeducated for an occupation which modern technology has in turn rendered increasingly mechanical and routine. In the main, she is happy with her role — in love with her husband, devoted to her children, secure in her home.

Little boxes on a hillside—

Ten or twenty or thirty times a year, for the past six years, Paul and Sheila Gordon have gotten together with one or more other couples for an evening of organized adultery.

The horror is that there is no horror, that the whole concept of wife-swapping has in the space of little more than a decade become a commonplace article of popular journalism, a staple for sensationalistic magazines and racy newsstand fiction. Consider the simple definition of the practice — married couples have revised their definition of the marital relationship so as to consider the exchange of partners for sexual purposes wholly compatible with the maintenance of these relationships. Such a state of affairs could hardly be less than remarkable.

And yet we scarcely find it remarkable at all. On the contrary, we are rather more likely to accept the existence of wife-swappers much as we accept the existence of electrons — we cannot see them, but we have it on good authority that they exist. We may read about them, being either titillated or enervated or bored according to our inclinations, but our involvement with them is never other than vicarious. They are certainly not the sort of people we are apt to meet on the street.

But this is manifestly not the case.

Over the past several years I have written a number of books and magazine pieces dealing with various aspects of the sexual revolution. The wife-swapping fraternity has featured prominently in my writing and research. And if one fact stands out among all others, it is simply that these swingers, these wife-swappers, are in every sense of the terms the “folks next door.” If there is one striking thing about the practice of swapping, it is the way in which it cuts across all strata of society. And if there is one striking thing about the average couple involved in this pursuit, it is how exceptionally average they are.

If this is the case, why then are wife-swappers universally regarded as a breed apart? The answer is not really that elusive. When a group is considered only in respect to that idiosyncrasy which sets it apart — whether sexual or racial or religious or whatever — the idiosyncrasy overshadows the individuals. It must be consciously borne in mind that while a man may be a homosexual or a Negro or a Mohammedan or a philatelist or a ditch digger, he is never one of these things twenty-four hours a day to the exclusion of all else.

All of which is a roundabout explanation of the genesis of this present book. I began interviewing Paul and Sheila Gordon in connection with another book dealing with various aspects of the contemporary sexual underground. I was struck at once by the special qualities of Paul and Sheila — their intelligence, their perception, and, perhaps most important of all, their ability to verbalize effectively concerning their ideas and experiences. While it is by no means rare to encounter swingers who are willing to talk about their experiences, the vast majority of them are not much good at talking about anything. The Gordons were unusually articulate subjects, and it never ceased to be a pleasure to interview them.

As it turned out, I did not make direct use of these interviews in the book I was then preparing, although the insight which I gained through my contact with Paul and Sheila did enable me to discuss other cases with greater perspective. After the book was completed, however, I found myself frequently thinking of the Gordons and wondering if there might not be some way to make use of their experiences. While musing on the inability of the average “civilian” to appreciate that swingers are the sort of people who might very well move next door to him (and without affecting his property values, either), it occurred to me that a book-length study of one married couple, told almost entirely in their own words, might fill a significant gap. By far the majority of books dealing at all seriously with the wife-swapping phenomenon (as opposed to trashy novels and thinly veiled bits of pornography) employ the anthology approach: i.e., they present perhaps a dozen case histories in order to illuminate many facets of the overall subject.

This is, certainly, a useful approach, presenting the reader as it does with more than a single look at a topic. I can also state from experience that it is very useful for a writer, as it is almost always a simpler matter to select the relevant data about a dozen couples than to mine a book’s worth of material out of a single case history. In this particular instance, however, it seemed to me that a study of a single couple in more than the usual degree of depth was indicated, and that it could prove sufficiently absorbing to sustain a full-length book.

When I broached the subject to Paul and Sheila, they were at first reluctant, less I think out of a desire to avoid exposing themselves than from the conviction that their lives and selves could not be all that interesting to the rest of the world. Once I was able to assure them that their story was potentially valuable to swingers and nonswingers alike, they were enthusiastic about the project and made themselves readily available for several additional interviews.

A word on method might be pertinent here. The material which follows is in the words of Paul and Sheila Gordon. The reader will note that I have presented it in the form of interviews. While the words which appear here are given as they were spoken by the Gordons, the interviews have been edited out of sequence in order to present various material in the most useful order. Similarly, I occasionally interviewed one or the other of the two without the spouse present, and there was an inevitable duplication of material, all of which had to be boiled down and parceled up and put into usable form. Thus, while what follows is in every sense the Gordons’ story, this is not to say that it consists of a simple verbatim rendition of the interview tapes. Such a transcription would be three or four times the length of this volume and of no practical interest to anyone.

It should go without saying that Paul and Sheila Gordon go by other names in the world at large, that the names given to them and to other “characters” in this book have all been deliberately fictionalized, as have any particular data about individuals which might tend to make them recognizable. While the persons appearing in the following pages are by no means fictitious, their names and other personal details about them very definitely are.

Lives made of ticky-tacky, all looking quite the same — one wonders if this, after all, begins to explain the special phenomenon of wife-swapping. We have all heard countless variations of the joke in which a man returns one night to his tract home, loses his way, and, unable to distinguish one house from the next, goes to a neighbor’s house and sleeps with the neighbor’s wife without anyone knowing the difference. Can it be, then, that we have witnessed the ultimate triumph of the Industrial Revolution, to the point where not only our machines but also our marriages are composed of interchangeable parts?

While the notion is a tempting one, I don’t suspect it has much real validity. One finds oneself searching for the “cause” of this or that type of socio-sexual behavior, as if in fact one were dealing with a particular disease specifically caused by a particular microorganism. Behavior patterns are not so simply engendered. It has been said that the “cause” of any moment in history is nothing more or less than the sum of all the moments which have preceded it, and in this sense it would be simplistic to point at precise causes for the existence of wife-swapping, in society in general or the Gordons in particular.

On the other hand, the reader will discover for himself any number of ways in which the marital relationship of Paul and Sheila Gordon, their drives and desires and fears and hopes and needs, reflect in diverse ways any number of aspects of the society in which they — and all of us — live. If sex seems to play an overly prominent role in their lives, do they then differ greatly from the rest of us in these times of heightened sexual awareness? If they seem ever dissatisfied, anxious, groping, are we not all subject to much the same irritating nameless yearnings? Indeed, in their strengths and weaknesses alike, and in the fashion in which these traits shape their lives, Paul and Sheila are all too typical of a generation, a nation, a world.

The reader will note that I have not bothered to moralize on the lives and practices of the Gordons, having been neither inclined by temperament nor qualified by virtue to cast initial stones. The reader may judge or not, as he desires. More important, he may learn (as the author did) something about himself and the world around him by considering the way some people live.

Beginnings

A Sunday afternoon in fall. Football weather. Sheila Gordon sitting on her feet on the living room couch, dark green slacks, a gold sweater, brown suede slippers. Paul Gordon in an armchair, a drink on the table beside him, slacks, a sport shirt. The children are downstairs watching television. Periodically one appears with a nose to be wiped or a question to be answered and the conversation is held up until the child is on its way.

SHEILA: About a year after it started, after we first got involved in swinging, I remember going through a real siege of introspection. Not just me individually, it was a mutual thing. We both found ourselves immersed in a sea of questions. Where are we? How did we get here? The usual. We were honestly astonished, I think, that this had happened to us. To people like us.

PAUL: You see, we had always regarded ourselves as basically conservative types. One of the key words in the swingers’ advertisements is “liberal.” You know the drill — “modern, liberal, free-thinking couple, etc.” Of course this has nothing to do with politics. But regardless, we had always thought of ourselves as middle-of-the-road people. We hadn’t had that much sexual experience before marriage, nor had our own marriage been that highly sexed. Not that we fell asleep on the way to bed, nothing like that, but not like the stereotyped picture you might have of typical swingers who have had nothing but sex on their minds since they hit adolescence.

SHEILA: That’s how it always happens in books, isn’t it? Two oversexed kids get married and within a couple of years they’ve tried every form of screwing there is until they just don’t turn each other on any more. Then they decide that something is missing from their lives, so he has an affair with a girl in his office and she plays house with the plumber, and finally they clear the air, talk things over, and invite the next-door neighbors in for a round of musical beds.

PAUL: It does happen that way.

SHEILA: Definitely. No argument, it does. But it didn’t for us. We weren’t all that experienced when we were married. I had had one very brief and completely unsuccessful bit of sleeping with a guy I was pinned to, and Paul had had a few affairs, most of which were just one-shot things, and the two of us did make love in the few months before we got married, but that was about all, and that’s certainly less experience than the average couple brings to marriage nowadays. We had a good relationship from the start, and of course Mark and Lisa came into the picture almost immediately. Mark when we were married just over a year and Lisa fifteen months later. So in the first four years of marriage we were really too busy adjusting to changes to feel confined or frustrated or whatever. Paul kept changing jobs, and each time it meant a complete relocation for us, giving up old friends and making new ones and finding out where to shop and, oh, all the complications that accompany a move from one city to another.

So I certainly didn’t have any affairs. I wasn’t bored with my own husband, for one thing. Nor was I beset by propositions. I gained innumerable pounds with each pregnancy and wasn’t all that good about getting them off afterward, so plumbers and deliverymen were sadly immune to my raw animal magnetism.

PAUL: Once, while Sheila was pregnant with Lisa, I had relations with another woman. You couldn’t call it an affair. I was in Chicago to interview a company that had been sending out job feelers, and I was all alone there and didn’t know a soul, and Sheila and I hadn’t been able to have relations for the past month and wouldn’t for two more months. This last was more an excuse than anything else, really, although I managed to convince myself at the time that a stray piece would have considerable therapeutic value. At any rate, someone had given me this call girl’s phone number. She came to my hotel room. I was really very jittery and nervous, not that anything untoward would happen, but, I don’t know, I felt awkward about the whole thing. At first I couldn’t do anything, but the girl used a massage device to get me over the hump, if you’ll pardon the expression. The whole experience was pretty blah, but later on I found myself thinking back on it and having fantasies about the call girl. Occasionally I would think of her while I was making love to Sheila—

SHEILA: That’s known as Walter Mitty cheating.

PAUL: It’s disgustingly common, too. I think everyone does it at one time or another. Most swingers will tell you that they’ve gone through it before they got in the swing of things. There’s a joke you may know — a man and wife are making love, just going on and on at it, neither of them able to reach orgasm. And finally he stops and looks at her sympathetically and says, “What’s the matter, honey? Can’t you think of anybody either?”

SHEILA: Actually it’s a pretty sad story.

PAUL: Pathetic, really. But that one experience in Chicago, plus a certain amount of fantasizing, was as much cheating as either of us did. Or planned to do, I would say. We had what we both felt was a perfectly satisfactory sexual relationship. Oh, it goes without saying that the initial thrill had worn off. It always does, and it wasn’t surprising to us that it did. You can’t make love to the same person for a period of several years without having the experience lose its excitement. Even for couples who remain devotedly monogamous throughout their lives, I can’t possibly believe that the thrill doesn’t wear off.

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.