The Wife-Swap Report (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) by Block Lawrence & Wells as John Warren

Author:Block, Lawrence & Wells, as John Warren [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Lawrence Block
Published: 2012-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

Sooner or Later You Make Yourself Sick

PAUL: Sorry we had to cancel out last night. We tried to reach you, but you were out and we left a message with your service. I was afraid you might drive all the way out.

JWW: I thought I’d call first.

PAUL: If you had come, I guess you could have interviewed four people instead of two.

JWW: Oh?

PAUL: We had a couple over last night. New people. New to us, that is. A young couple. He’s a commercial artist. They don’t live ten minutes from us. Friends of some friends of ours.

• • •

We are lunching at a small, unprepossessing restaurant near his office. After abruptly canceling an interview scheduled for the previous evening, today Paul has called me in midmorning to request this lunch date. I expect that the cancellation and the appointment are related, and that he has chosen this way to tell me he and Sheila have decided to abandon the book project. I am prepared to encourage him to stay with it; I have found that interviewees commonly develop a form of stage fright somewhere along the line, and generally want only to be assured that they ought to go on.

His manner suggests that my suspicions will be proved correct. He talks somewhat disjointedly, with long reflective pauses between clauses and sentences.

• • •

PAUL: They were quite a bit younger than we are. Maybe twenty-three, twenty-four. Married just two years. They started, they got into swinging after just a year of marriage.

JWW: That seems to be more and more common lately.

PAUL: I would say so. Oh, a year is not a record, not by any means. Nowadays you’ll often see a couple come together originally as swingers, so that they’ll have partied together from their first date, long before they married. From what I gathered, these kids last night both had pretty active sex lives before marriage and a solid premarital relationship. And after a year of marriage they were ready to get with it.

They had a sort of semi-hippie look to them. Clean and well groomed, but the girl had that long, perfectly straight hair and they were both dressed very mod.

JWW: Must have made you feel ancient.

PAUL: Oh, maybe a little bit, but that’s not what I’m getting at. I’m not sure what I am getting at. It’s funny talking about this in public, in a public place like this. No one can hear us, I know that.

JWW: If you’d rather go somewhere else—

PAUL: No, I have only an hour. I suppose this was silly, getting you down here for nothing, but it came to me last night—that I wanted to talk to you, and just the two of us. Not that it’s anything I wouldn’t want to say to Sheila, but I wanted it to be while the ideas were fresh in my mind. I don’t know—

• • •

A waiter brings something. The conversation stalls. When we resume, Paul has organized himself.

• • •

PAUL: Last night the girl, her name was Barbara, wanted to do a sandwich.

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