3 is not a Crowd

PETER: When I got back to the States, I found myself living very intensely, but very much on a day-to-day basis. The only part of my life with any sense of direction was my work. I made a good business connection and began doing rather well, and I channeled a tremendous amount of energy into my work. Socially, I was very active and striking out in all directions at once. New York, for an unattached young man with a certain amount of poise and a decent income, is by no means a hard place to take. I partied a great deal, I dated what seems in retrospect a staggering number of lovely girls, and I took most of them to bed.

I hardly ever wanted to see them again. A new girl, I could always manifest enthusiasm for a new girl, but once I had spent a night with her I would lose interest. I don’t think I had any distaste for past conquests. More likely I was looking for a perfect girl and not finding her.

Before very long I began getting involved with the swinging scene. I had had a taste of this in Copenhagen. There was a party, mostly students, where everyone fucked in the same room, and by the end of the evening a good deal of group groping and cluster-fucking took place, and the usual switching of partners. I had found this enormously exciting at the time, and I don’t remember quite how I found out about the orgies around New York, but someone or other invited me to bring a girl and join the fun. I called a recent conquest, a girl I figured might be game for this sort of thing. It turned out she was an old hand at orgies and would love to try some new people — on the orgy scene, you know, you quickly tire of the same old faces. Or the same old genitalia, I should say.

I went to the orgy, the party, whatever you want to call it, and I enjoyed myself immensely. I found it an exhilarating experience and a very useful release.

There was something, I don’t know, say, an honesty to it that I found preferable to the basic hypocrisy of dating. When I took a girl out I had to pretend an interest in her that I rarely felt. I had to relate to her as a person, or at least give the appearance of relating to her as a person. Now I’ll be the first to say that a full relationship yields the best sort of sexual relationship, but how often are two people capable of that? And how many persons is one person capable of relating to in any substantial way?

In an orgy — or in the smaller swinging scenes, two or three couples — there’s no pretense. If you relate as good friends, that’s a bonus. If you don’t, if you just relate sexually, that after all is what you’re all there for. The sex is what it’s all about.

I found it very satisfying, for example, that I would tumble a girl at a party without knowing her name or her knowing mine, without either of us giving a damn. Or to carry it a step further, I remember one party where I saw a girl with long black hair and immense pear-shaped breasts kneeling on the floor, on her hands and knees actually, and going down on a fellow. This was aesthetically pleasing to begin with, the lines of her body, the way her breasts hung like ripe fruit, the way her hair flowed.

I went up behind her and took her from the rear, slipped right into her, and she went on giving full oral attention to her gentleman friend. She rotated her bottom in the nicest way. By the time I finished he had still not come, although she had, in a delicious shuddering spasm, so she went right on blowing him while I slipped out as easily as I had slipped in. And I went off to get a drink or something, and she never even knew who it was that had obliged her.

I got to talking to her later during a lull, and she was quite charming and said nothing to indicate that she knew I was her phantom lover. I almost told her but decided that I liked the idea of leaving things as they were, of having had her without her knowing it.

I could go on laying out reasons why I found orgies appealing, and they would all be true enough, but perhaps the basic one of all is the simplest and most obvious. I’m a kinky person, and when that’s what you are, group sex is sensational. It really is. It’s not just what you do or how much of it you can have, but there’s the whole sex-charged atmosphere of the scene, all those bodies, everything. When you’re not doing you can watch... It’s more fun than television, you know.

But the best part about orgies, as far as I’m concerned, is that but for attending an orgy I would not have met my beautiful and exciting wife.

GRACE: My life before I met Peter was drifting, really. That is what I did. I drifted. I never really made a decision or set out to do anything in particular. I put out for anybody who asked in high school, just did what I felt like, you know. I mean, I wasn’t much. I never thought of myself as very much at all.

PETER: You were much, baby.

GRACE: I never thought so. Nobody ever thought so. I was, you know, I was a cunt. A pair of tits and a cunt.

PETER: And so much more inside.