3 is Not a Crowd (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) by Lawrence Block & as John Warren Wells

Author:Lawrence Block & as John Warren Wells [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Lawrence Block
Published: 2012-07-27T04:00:00+00:00

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.

I find it just as easy—perhaps easier—to believe that we are simply born the way we are. If you can believe that a handful of genes and chromosomes determine our precise physical makeup, everything from the shapes of our noses to the patterns on our fingertips, I don’t see why it should be any harder to believe that those same genes and chromosomes determine our personalities. They are more and more coming to believe that mental illness itself is physical, either chemical or glandular or whatever the latest theory maybe. Biochemical to one degree or another. If this is so, it seems eminently reasonable to me that less radical personality traits are also biochemical, and predetermined from the moment of conception. Or from the moment of birth, if you’re astrologically inclined. Grace is, by the way. Wanda and I are not.

WANDA: All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Peter thinks we were born perverted.

PETER: Not perverted. Kinky.

GRACE: What’s the difference?

PETER: Perverted is nasty and sick. Kinky is just tons of fun.

WANDA: Then we were perverted and we gradually turned kinky.

PETER: Absolutely wrong.

WANDA: What, then?

PETER: We were born kinky, and the world turned us perverted, and now we’re just kinky again.

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