3 is not a Crowd

JERRY: Not long after all of this between the three of us took shape, I began to be interested in knowing a little more about other people in the same approximate situation. After all, misery isn’t the only thing that loves company. So does ecstasy. I wanted to know what sort of adaptation other trios made, and what motivated them.

I picked up a lot of books on the subject, and of course a large proportion of them were just hoked-up pornography. No case histories in any real sense of the term, and excessive descriptions designed to turn the reader on, and most of them not doing the job very well, either. The typical 42nd Street crap.

But I also picked up some books that seemed legitimate enough, including yours, several of yours, which is how I happened to write to you in the first place, as you know. And for the most part I read about trios that came about as a result of swinging.

Peggy and I had never really considered swinging, although we had discussed it from time to time, mostly in the vein of isn’t it weird what some sickies will do? I would have liked to give it a try myself at the time but I didn’t even have the nerve to so much as suggest it to her, and I don’t think in retrospect that she would have gone along or that I would have felt like following through with it if she did. I enjoyed entertaining the notion in the realm of fantasy, but I doubt I’d really have cared to carry through on that particular fantasy.

After all of this got going, and I started reading about swinging, I thought how tremendously different what we’ve got is from the trios that the swingers get involved in. Now on a purely physical level I can see nothing but plusses in swinging. Not merely the idea of injecting some variety into a marriage, but because possibilities for fun do increase as the number of persons increases. Simple arithmetic.

But these people are balling strangers, and I’m not putting this down, but I’m contrasting it with what we’ve got. The three of us, you see, are very much in love. Completely in love, and it’s more than a matter of each of us loving both of the others, but that we love us as a trio, if you know what I mean. We love the whole usness of us.

I’m sure that swingers who make the trio scene enjoy themselves no end, and if they’re true swingers, if they’ve got past the usual hang-ups, it must be very good for them. But I think they’re missing a tremendous amount if they don’t try and get into a permanent trio scene, a loving relationship where there’s no hustle and no exploitation and where there’s an emotional basis to it all that goes beyond good clean sex. I’m not knocking good clean sex, I have nothing at all against it, but there’s so much more that can enhance it.

Maybe I’m projecting too much, feeling that everybody would be better off doing what we’re doing. It’s such a total groove for us that I can’t fucking avoid the belief that it would be good for everybody, and maybe that’s an oversimplification. Different strokes for different folks, after all.

But we sure are having a gas of a time.

Peter & Wanda & Grace

JWW: Peter and Wanda and Grace St. John share a spacious two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise near Lincoln Center, on the West Side of Manhattan. Peter is a furniture designer, and most of the furnishings in the apartment are his work. He is successful in his work, and Wanda also earns a good living as a freelance interior decorator. Her interest is period decoration, while Peter’s taste runs to the extremely modern. Grace does not work, but occasionally earns money posing for more or less pornographic photographs and acting in exploitation films and stag movies.

Peter is twenty-seven, below average in height, with blond hair and blue eyes and typical Anglo-Saxon features. He is slender and occasionally almost elfin in his movements. Wanda, Peter’s sister, is a year his senior and very much like him in appearance. She is slightly taller than he is, and her hair, blond like his, is worn long and loose. Grace is Peter’s wife. She is twenty-two, red-haired, voluptuous, and short.

Peter and Grace have been married for three years. About a year and a half ago Wanda joined them.

My interviewing of the St. Johns spanned several sessions. Grace was not always present.

PETER: Let me tell you one thing. I don’t have any real idea how people get the way they are, and I don’t think anybody else does, either. In the past twelve years or so Wanda and I between us have seen perhaps two dozen psychiatrists and psychologists and psychoanalysts, and they can help you trace things back and see the sequence in which things occurred and the way one thing may have led to another. It’s a very elaborate game, and quite often it becomes quite an absorbing one in the bargain. You learn no end of things about yourself.

But I don’t know that it answers any basic questions.