3 is not a Crowd

CAROL: No, not with her.

BOB: You would have to have absolutely the perfect girl. And it couldn’t be the sort of thing in the case you were talking about, where both the women are the man’s wives. Not that he’s married to both of them, but that it’s the same as if he were. I’ve got one wife and that’s Carol and she’s all the wife I need.

CAROL: I don’t mind sharing Bob, but I wouldn’t want to feel like part of a harem. I like it the way it is, with me being his wife and something special to him.

BOB: It’s more that we would want a girl we could both love. That she would be more or less the center of the triangle, if that’s the word for it.

CAROL: The apex.

BOB: That’s the word I was trying for. The apex of the triangle.

CAROL: You know, there’s a game swingers play called Center of Attraction. You choose by drawing lots or spinning a bottle or something like that, and the person chosen is the center of attraction, and lies passive while everybody else in the game makes love to her at once.

BOB: Or to him, as the case may be.

CAROL: Well, at large parties I understand it’s usually a woman that gets chosen, because all the women will be bi, whereas most of the men will not be. But anyway that’s how the game works.

We will play it at threesomes, not bothering to spin a bottle but taking turns. When it’s Bob’s turn the other girl and I will love him up for fifteen minutes or a half hour or however long we decide, and then it’s my turn and so forth. But what we found, we enjoy it most when it’s the girl’s turn, and Bob and I more or less make love to her as a team. Each sucking one of her breasts and so forth.

And I think that fits in with what Bob said about the extra girl being the apex of the triangle.

BOB: We’ve talked about what the perfect girl would be like. It would be best if she were a good deal younger than we are, and the less experience she has the better. We would want to take over her whole life and shape it so that she would be able to fit in perfectly with us. When a girl is older or has experience it’s harder to make her fit in.

CAROL: We had the idea of getting some younger girl as household help and seeing how she might work out. It would have to be a case of seducing her gradually and we would probably go through a lot of maids before we found the right one, but we think it might work sooner or later.

BOB: We had it in mind to hire a young colored girl, but that would be taking a big chance.

CAROL: Not that we consider ourselves prejudiced that way. We may be Southerners, but some people are a lot more open-minded down here than the average Yankee suspects. We do have certain prejudices which are more a case of being old-fashioned in some ways than anything else, but we don’t have prejudices where sex is concerned. For example, we have swung with colored several times and never found anything to object to on those occasions.

BOB: We never swung with a colored couple.

CAROL: Well, I beg your pardon, but we did.

BOB: They were interracial. She was colored but he wasn’t.

CAROL: Yes, that’s true. Never when the man was colored, although if it had come up I think we would have.

BOB: I don’t know if that’s so. But with colored girls, we certainly have no objection. And I think it would be easy to get one who would go along with it. They have a freer attitude that way, and getting a girl from some back-country town, that wouldn’t be hard to do.

CAROL: But if anyone found out—

BOB: Yes, that’s where the problem lies. It would have to be kept absolutely secret, and if anyone found out it would be the end of my career and the end of living anywhere in this area. As far as that goes it’s important to keep swinging a secret anyway, but you could have people suspect a great deal or even know for sure and they would tend to shrug it off. For the ones who never spoke to you after they heard about it, you would have others who were swingers themselves or thought it was a good idea.

Once it’s a question of race, though, down here that’s like waving a red flag at a bull. We consider ourselves flaming liberals on racial matters, but even so I have to admit that I would not want Carol to make love to a colored man. I might have gone through with it anyway when we were swinging with couples. Or I might not. But I know I wouldn’t have liked it at all.

Our neighbors, though. The people of the community. Now if I were seeing some colored gal on the sly that would be one thing, and most of them, the men that is, would be inclined to wink at it. But for the two of us to have a colored girl in our house and be having sex with her, no, they wouldn’t care for that. Maybe you could get by with it in New York, but Atlanta isn’t New York.