The Lifestyle (11 page)

“So—what do you think of them?” I asked.

“We don’t judge people,” Joe replied. “But I will say this. There’s a big difference between being open about your sexuality and being maybe too fond of it. That’s what I’m reading so far.” He creased his cheek and wavered his hand to indicate that he thought swinging might be a bit dicey. “I’m not sure when it comes to kinkiness. It depends what’s in the head—motivation, compulsion, that sort of stuff.”

“Last night, two rooms down from us—” Doris rolled her eyes to the spinning fans, then looked back through palm fronds in the direction of their block of rooms, where most of the lifestylers were still in dreamland, eight-thirty being the crack of dawn on a swing vacation. “I could only imagine what was going on in there,” she whispered. “They were sure hollering.”

“The women were,” I said.

“Yeah! God, did you hear it? Wasn’t that something? It was like opera.”

“Personally, I think people can fool themselves on all kinds
of levels,” Joe said. “This could be one of them. Not that I’m not curious how they handle all the issues though. Like there’s just basics I don’t know how they overcome. Jealousy’s a big one. Also, I didn’t even know this stuff was going on. But I was talking to the manager, Pascal, he says there’s a zillion people doing it—the whole place is gonna be taken over in the fall by swingers. So, why is that now? It’s like it’s come from out of nowhere.”

“Actually,” Doris said, “I’m noticing these women are all very extroverted—and they’re all in professions.”

“Yeah, but that teacher gal—the nuclear guy’s wife—you know what she was telling me? She dresses up—they go out and just pick up a guy in his twenties. She likes ’em young. Then she goes and teaches little kids Monday morning. The whole morality issue—how can they reconcile it?”

“S
ometimes the nude must go naked and the naked must go nude,” Chuck declared, sitting among a dozen lifestylers under one of the palm umbrellas that lined the clothing-optional beach.

“Don’t confuse me now!” Carla called back to him from the shore’s edge. “I’m trying to get this right here. I don’t get asked this every day.”

She drew her legs up from the sand and placed her elbows on her knees and the heels of her hands against her temples. A few feet from where I sat beside her a flock of pelicans rose and fell in the waves of the Sea of Cortes, keeping their beady eyes on Carla, who’d been moodily tossing them crusts of her sandwich. She was a man-sized Westerner, as much a presence on the sand as she probably was in the corporate office where she ordered around personnel. She wore two-inch dangling earrings, a thin necklace, a thinner waist chain that caught the sun just above her belly button, two ankle bracelets, and bright red polish on all twenty nails. When she’d shown up that morning on the beach Joe and Doris had opened their eyes wide at the way she adorned and sexualized her naked but definitely not nude body.

“I suppose, when it comes right down to it,” Carla finally told me, “an immoral act’s gotta be something you do that’s gonna benefit you which you
know
is gonna hurt someone else. That’s my definition of an immoral act. Seeing as I’m being quoted.”

She turned around from the water and mussed up her short,
wet hair. “Ed!” she said to her husband, seated on a lounge chair behind us. “I get that right from your point of view?”

“It ain’t quite ‘If it feels good do it,’” said Ed, a craggy-featured construction boss. “But then you never did do unto others what you didn’t want others to do unto you. Why I’m a fortunate man.”

“Correct,” Carla replied. Then she swiveled around and yanked on my ear. “Moral’s what other people put in here. Being kind’s what we’re born with here.” She pressed her forefinger against my chest, then repeated the gesture on her own reddening breast. “Uh, oh. Gimme back my suntan oil, Bill!” she yelled to an ad executive she’d slept with last night.

Wearing only a blue yachting cap, skinny Bill stood up from where he was massaging oil onto his wife’s bottom beside the umbrella and ambled obediently over to Carla. “There’s another question you should write about when you look at morals,” he said, lathering up his hands with Paba 21 and smoothing them over Carla’s shoulders and breasts. “When you look at morals, you have to look inside the person telling you what’s moral. Nine out of ten times what moralists say is not what they’re thinking of doing.” He squatted and kneaded the lotion down over Carla’s belly and onto her thighs. “Look around here. Eyes are the window to the soul. Everyone is saying exactly what they’re thinking, doing what they’re saying.”

“Ask me, that’s why the moral majority’s pissed off all the time,” Ed reasoned, moving from his lounge and sitting beside Carla. He too lathered up his hands and began to massage his wife’s lower back. “They
want
to do it but they ain’t allowed—even to say so.”

“Oh, they’re doin’ it, they’re doin’ it,” Carla laughed. “Most moralists are not only mean—they’re unscrupulous.”

I shifted my eyes to Chuck, the New York school principal, who lay on a plastic lounge chair sipping a Cuba Libre beside his wife of twenty years, a counselor named Leah. Both
were bemusedly contemplating Carla—their favorite among the threescore lifestylers scattered around the disks of shade provided by the thatch umbrellas posted along the shore. Chuck and Leah had recently accompanied our tour leader, Joyce, on the most orgiastic Lifestyles holiday—the Houseboat Getaway—but they were soft swingers. As they’d told me last night at the disco, they liked to watch other couples make love and often made love while watching, but they didn’t exchange partners. Like the six other couples around them who had coalesced into an intimate clique since landing in Loreto a couple of days before, they were trim and good-looking. Leah had a curly, thick mane of red hair and narrow, refined eyes that squinted at the world with pleasant intelligence. Chuck, at first glance, seemed like a ferociously intimidating schoolmaster—tall and black-bearded, with dark eyes that focused on you intently when you talked—although more often than not he was searching his mind for the maximum riddling direction he could yank a conversation.

“Oh, is it
my
turn now?” he asked when he noticed my gaze on him. “God made man and man made religion! See that cloud over there?” He hitched his head at a big cumulus, kicked up probably by the hurricane passing south near Acapulco and towering like a Himalayan peak over the arid Island of Carmen. “See that under it?” He meant the white mist trailing from the cloud’s middle as it passed over the island. “Is that an immoral act? Quick!”

Everyone in our circle of naked couples looked to see what he was talking about, including Joe and Doris who, while not far enough away from the group to be out of earshot, kept at a safe distance. I watched Carla narrowing her eyes at the cloud and island, trying to bring them into focus without her glasses. “What in hell you talking about, Chuck?”

“Desire and gratification!” said Chuck, grandly sweeping his arm across the water. “‘Generate me!’ says the land. ‘Here
I come!’ says the cloud. And that’s without the benefit of religious morality, societal morality—”

“But what about that indiscriminate aspect of sex without morality?” Joe piped up from the southwest point of the compass. Everybody turned and held up hands to block the sun to look at him. “Can’t it just be a lot of strangers groping in the clubs you were talking about?”

“Oh, I agree, that’s exactly what it
can
be,” said Leah. “I don’t know about them being immoral, but they certainly just fuck and don’t even know each other’s name. They don’t even talk. It’s just ‘Hello,’ touch-touch, fuck; ‘Hello,’ touch-touch, fuck. That’s the main reason we don’t switch partners.”

“That’s the main reason you go to clubs!” cracked Ed.

Leah leaned forward and slapped his shoulder.

“For a fringe element it can be like that,” Mark, the fast-food distributor, informed Joe. “Arms and legs waving out of a pile—that’s the stereotype. The vast majority aren’t orgiasts.”

“Just the vast minority,” his wife Julia laughed. “No, we pretty much stay to ourselves in that kind of environment,” she reassured Joe. “The club we go to, the main thing is just display—people dressing up. It’s really the erotic value we’re after—for each other—that’s really what it is.”

“I don’t understand what your moral problem is anyway,” said Greer, Bill’s wife, a golden-tanned executive in her late thirties who was getting fed up with my constant call for commentary. Over dinner the previous night she’d told me she was a strict moralist in all ways but one and thought the drug dealers in her neighborhood should be executed. Like many of the lifestyle tourists on the beach, Greer voted Republican. “The people who are involved in this are consenting, responsible adults,” she said. “Nobody is being forced or coerced into anything. It doesn’t have to be defended on moral grounds. Defending myself is the last thing I feel like doing on vacation.”

“We have a lot of fun at our club because we
know
everybody,” Carla remarked to me, as Bill worked the oil around her ankles and between her toes. “I come from two abusive marriages which were really immoral. Don’t
tickle
me!” She put her arm around Bill’s waist and pulled him back. “I can tell you there isn’t a thing Ed’s gonna make me do I don’t feel comfortable with.” She put her other arm around Ed. “You want to write a book, write it straight. Don’t worry about the moral criticism. Just tell em we wear saucers in our lips. They’ll think it’s holy business.”

From the direction of what the swingers called “the prude beach,” General Joyce presently leaped through a border of feather shrubs in a splash of white sand and came running toward us waving her bathing-suit top above her head. “I got the scoop on the togas, guys!” she yelled. “I got the scoop on the togas!”

She pulled up breathless beneath our umbrella, the center one on the beach. “Ricco’s working on it right now!” she shouted left. “At four o’clock I’m gonna pick up the togas!” she shouted right.
“Everybody
—meet at the pool to get your toga at four!”

As there’d been some question of whether the seamstresses in Loreto could supply the togas for the disco party tonight, there were cheers up and down the beach.

“How big are the pieces of material?” Leah asked.

“Well now,” Joyce said coyly, “I don’t know. But they are see-through, you know. Muslin.”

“Can we wear ’em to dinner?” Bill asked.

“Hey, no sheet, no eat,” Greer said. “Come on, Joyce—talk to Pascal, the restaurant’s Italian.”

“That’s right, and we’re pre-Italian,” argued Chuck.

“I just got through giving this guy a definition of immorality and you want me to impose myself on those who don’t want to see me in a restaurant?” Carla asked. She leaned forward,
picked up the last crust of her sandwich from the sand, and roundhoused it into the water, causing a near riot among the pelicans.

“See them birds,” Ed said. “You show up in a toga at Caruso’s, you’re looking at the staff’s reaction.”

Carla stood up, brushed the sand from her broad cheeks, and yanked hard at Ed and Bill. “Know what reaction I want from you two? You’re gonna help me wash this grease off.”

As I watched Carla walk arm in arm with her men into the water, her hands on their bottoms, their hands on hers, I thought of why there was not one swinger on the beach who was out of the closet, despite their claim to being free and honest spirits. “Open to life, the joys of sensuality and deeply felt relationships,” Bob McGinley had once described his clients to me. But I’d learned how greatly they feared a society that considered them as living at the bottom of a moral pit. They knew that when mainstream media discussed swingers it was usually not as “a recognizable part of the rich mosaic of human sexuality,” as the evolutionary biologist Robin Baker wrote, but to call them grotesque, obese, and deranged. In its 1993 article on the Lifestyles convention, “Strange Bedfellows,”
GQ
led off by describing a friendly male participant as “resembling nothing so much as a flirtatious iguana.” Swingers at the ’94 convention persuaded the
Details
columnist Anka that she was “in front of the hippo cage at the San Diego Zoo.” And the British edition of
Marie Claire
spiced its own report of a convention by calling lifestyle women “slightly mad, like Stepford Wives.” The swingers at the Eden knew that their marital morals, if ever confessed, would make them into laughing stocks or worse.

From the very first time I started sounding out the reaction to a book on the lifestyle it became apparent to me that trying
to discuss swingers without condemning them the way I had in 1989 made most editors and journalists suspect I was working on a profoundly immoral project. Not only was co-marital sex viewed as a perversion leading to death and hell, but swingers wore no saucers in their lips that made them ethnically exotic and forgivable to liberals. Nor were there any “rogue genes” journalists and their bosses could point to that could earn swingers recognition as “naturally” occurring minorities. Unlike gays and lesbians, playcouples cannot be considered sexually self-segregating; hence their moral threat to tens of millions of heterosexuals who are susceptible to being seduced into their ways; hence the conflicted attention shown them by the press, which at all times reflects societal norms. Religious or not, most people raised in the traditions of our Judeo-Christian-Muslim culture believe they have a good idea of what would happen to society if all their neighbors suddenly began behaving like the naked playcouples pictured in
Marie Claire
.