Take My Wife Please!

on a final visit to free-loving sandstone, dan gets jealous when another guy's wife is unfaithful to him

The story so far: In the April 1977 issue, Dan Greenburg wrote about his weekend visit to Sandstone, the idyllic mountaintop retreat in Topanga, California, just north of Los Angeles, where few, if any, clothes are worn and where it is thought a fine thing to have one close Primary sexual relationship and several Secondary ones anywhere on the premises.

Greenburg took part in an all-day sensitivity-training workshop in which members of all sexes got to fondle one another and feel OK about it, and later on, he had a few one-on-one romantic interludes. He was sad to leave, wondered why he hadn't gotten into any group-sex situations in the coyly named Ballroom, wondered even more how he would have felt if he'd brought along a close Primary relationship and had to deal with jealousy and, mainly, he wished that he could return before very long.

Some months later, Greenburg got his wish. Playboy heard rumors that Sandstone was closing and sent him skying back to the West Coast to cover what many felt might be the end of an era. Here, then, is his story, as he lived it and wrote it.

I'd met Dianne on the last day of my previous visit to Sandstone. I'd been lying out on the sun deck of the main building with a number of people, admiring the view of the valley below us and generally resting up from the amorous fun of the previous night, when I first saw her--an (continued on page 225)Take My Wife-Please!(continued from page 131) extraordinary-looking girl with a pretty, slightly Oriental face, long dark hair and bangs and a fine slim body being tragically wasted by not being caressed.

She was speaking to a young, swarthy, soft-spoken man who turned out to be her husband and she kept looking in my direction. From the snatches of conversation that floated my way, I soon realized she was speaking about me and about a number of things I had written.

I had a choice: Either keep leaning farther and farther forward to hear what she was saying, risking falling off the sun deck and down the mountain, or else be blunt about trying to catch what she was saying. I chose bluntness.

I got up, strode over to them and said, with what I hoped was merry nonchalance: "Go on talking, pretend I'm not here." Instead of laughing, they obeyed my instructions: They went on talking and pretended I wasn't there, but they stopped talking about me. I stood there a while longer, feeling like a complete schmuck, then walked away. Later I saw Dianne alone, reading tarot cards. I asked her to read them for me and she did--incredibly shyly, eyes averted from mine. Despite her shyness, I definitely felt she was intrigued with me, but she and her husband had to leave in a little while to attend a party down the mountain. They planned to return to Sandstone later that night. She hoped I'd still be there.

At Sandstone, the presence of hubbies is not the deterrent to having carnal knowledge of Jewish writers that it is in most other places, so I stuck around till almost midnight before I finally gave up and left.

Not long after my return to New York, I got a letter from Dianne that had been forwarded from the Playboy offices in Chicago. The letter said she had gone back to Sandstone very late that night and was disappointed not to find me. I kicked myself for not having waited another hour, at least. The letter went on to say that she was shy in general but was particularly shy with me because she knew something of me through my writing and because I seemed to see right through her.

"I play shadow a lot," she continued, "though at Sandstone I'm opening up, socially and sexually. I've learned to trust more people and have found people truly worthy of trust there. When I first started going, I couldn't believe that I could be open, nude, sensual, sexual, and still be able to be selective and say no and have it be accepted graciously. I'm trying to learn to be a little more sexually aggressive when I'm turned on. I try to hide it if I'm sexually attracted to someone. I think I'll put them off.

"I'd like to see you again," she concluded. "I go up to Sandstone about once a month with Bill--my best friend, lover, gadfly, partner in crime, husband. We live in the San Francisco Bay area. I work as a computer technician full time and as a craftswoman and designer (macramé wall hangings and jewelry lately) part time. Bill is a communications engineer. I've never identified with being a groupie. But I definitely feel something I haven't felt before."

I kicked myself a lot more for not sticking around that night, had a few fast fantasies and wrote to her, saying how sorry I was to have missed her and that I hoped to see her if and when I ever returned to Sandstone.

Her second letter was a bit more specific:

"I had some light fantasies about you," she said. "You have such sweet kisses in my fantasies--butterfly soft and with much warmth. I fantasize we are in a Japanese hot tub and we are embracing. From time to time, we pass a tiny ice cube over our bodies--it must be a fantasy; the ice cube rarely melts. The sensation of tiny cold with so much hot water is so exciting.... I agree to be tied with something soft but firm on my wrists. Then you tease, lick, kiss me all over until I cry for mercy."

I spent a lot of time having Japanese fantasies about hot tubs, tiny ice cubes, teasing, licking, cries for mercy. My work was beginning to suffer. Dianne's next letter went into great detail about her most recent visit to Sandstone:

"The energy level was on full blast--a voyeur's wet dream. I had never seen so many group scenes. One man was playing a woman like a cello and she was making heavenly music. I watched one woman take one after another of a line of men. Two women were acting out their fantasies of having many men in one evening. I have never made love with so many people as I did that weekend. I was superaroused."

I spent a goodly amount of time fantasizing about women being played like cellos and taking on entire regiments of men, all of them me. Shortly after Halloween, Dianne wrote to tell me how she and Bill had had temporary caps in the shape of fangs made for them by their freaky dentist and had gone to Sandstone that weekend in costume:

"You would not believe how turned on people were to me," she said. "First they would kiss me and tongue my teeth. Before long, they would try to suck them out of my mouth. A couple of kinkier folks wanted me to go down on them with fangs on--I was very careful and only lightly touched my teeth to them. They came instantly."

My fantasies were so cluttered by then with hot tubs, tiny ice cubes, women being played like cellos and fangs that I could scarcely move around in them. Yet another letter from Dianne--this one signed Puss-puss--defined where this allegedly shy young woman was at about sex:

"I really like sex--alone, with someone else or in groups. I like women and I like men, but I don't like everybody. Usually, the only people I fuck with are my friends--people I know and trust. Have no fear--I like you. And even though you are probably as crazy as I am or crazier, I trust you."

I hungered to frolic crazily with Dianne, with or without fangs, ice cubes or cellos, at Sandstone or anywhere on earth, but I still doubted it would ever happen.

Then Playboy called to say Sandstone might be closing and to ask if I wanted to go back and find out why. I phoned Dianne and told her I hoped she'd meet me there. Perhaps, had it not been Christmas weekend, she might have gone to Sandstone alone and we might have had a reasonably ordinary affair. Since it was Christmas, she and Bill went down together and a quite different sort of experience ensued. But I suspect you will be able to see that as we go along.

It developed that Sandstone was not going to be open for business on Christmas Eve, when I was scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles, but it would reopen at noon on Christmas Day. Dianne and Bill arranged to meet me at the Los Angeles airport at 7:45 on Christmas Eve, along with a girlfriend of theirs whom I shall call Anna, and we four would have dinner and fritter away the night together in some fashion before going up to Sandstone on the following afternoon. It wasn't crystal-clear to me precisely what my role was to be in all of this.

"Listen," I said to Dianne on the phone, "is Anna supposed to be my date, or what?"

"We all are," Dianne replied. Ominously, I felt at the time.

•

I step off the plane in L.A. at 7:45 P.M. on Christmas Eve and Dianne is waiting for me at the gate. She is taller than I remembered--about six feet in her boots--and when we kiss hello, it is strange, because, though we have become outrageously intimate in letters, we have not done more than speak shyly in the flesh.

Bill and Anna are waiting for us inside the terminal. We are all nervous, the more so because nobody will admit it, and we make lots of self-conscious jokes while waiting for my baggage to arrive and then later, while dining in a seafood restaurant on the ocean, all done up with Christmas decor and seeming as out of place as Christmas decor always seems to me in tropical climes. Nothing particularly sexual is said during dinner and I am utterly baffled about what the segue is going to be into whatever it is that we are supposed to be doing afterward.

What we do afterward is to drive to Anna's house, to matter-of-factly have Anna convert the convertible sofa in the living room into a bed and then say good night to her and watch her disappear into her bedroom with Bill. Dianne and I get into bed and, self-consciously at first, make love till four A.M. L.A. time, which is seven A.M. my time, and I do as well as it is possible for me to do knowing that Dianne's husband is in the next room, listening to her orgasmic screaming, which is at first not so hot and then, after a while, a good deal better.

The next morning, we get up to the discovery that there is no food for breakfast and that during my flight from New York, my flask of liquor has broken inside my suitcase and saturated my socks and underwear with vodka.

•

We are driving up to Sandstone on Christmas Day, Dianne and Bill and I. Anna has not accompanied us, as she has to pack for a trip to Tahiti, but I needn't worry--I called Sandstone and a friend there has arranged a "biological balance" for me--which does not mean a 150-pound frog to play teeter-totter with me but, rather, a mate of the opposite sex, which is required of everyone who expects to be admitted to the grounds.

It occurs to me to say to Dianne and Bill that it is a shame that, since Sandstone may be closing this week and this may be my last visit, I will never have the experience of being there with a Primary and of working through my jealousy when she makes it with another guy. I don't know why I have said this. Having a woman of mine make it with another guy and working through my jealousy about it are right up there on my list of things to do after going sky diving with a pillowcase.

"Yeah," says Bill, "it's too bad you're going to miss that experience."

"Yeah," I say, and then add with a chuckle: "Unless, of course, I develop a Primary relationship this weekend."

We drive up the frightening but picturesque roads that lead through the mountains to Sandstone and arrive there just before dusk. The place is just as I'd remembered it--the large main building built around the goldfish pond, the fountain in the pond still the noisiest thing on the grounds. The views of the mountains all around us and of the ocean in the distance are still spectacular. I spot several people I'd met on my earlier visit and feel very much at home.

It is certainly not warm out, but Dianne and Bill invite me into the outdoor Jacuzzi and, throwing caution and my clothing to the winds, I slip out of the chilly late-afternoon December air and into the hot waters of the Jacuzzi. Here is who is in the Jacuzzi with me: Dianne, Bill, Annette--whom I'd spent some time with on my last visit; a blonde girl who is introduced as Lee from Philadelphia; a sweet, outgoing guy named Conan, who is a surfer, and Angela, his Primary. Conan is exactly what you would expect a Southern California surfer to look like: long blond hair, incredibly muscular body, sensational tan. Before Conan took the name Conan from a comic-book hero, word is that he was a brilliant medical student. Then, goes the story, he did a lot of acid, it messed up his head and he gave up medicine to become a surfer. I have never asked Conan if all this is true--it's a perfect story and if it's made up, I don't want to know about it.

Conan's girlfriend, Angela, is bouncy and funny in a Louise Lasser kind of way. When she hears I'm up here to do a story about Sandstone's rumored closing, she pretends to pout--she was going to write one, too, she says, and if she tells me her title, I must promise not to steal it.

"What's your title?" I say.

"Sandstone Goes Down for the Third Time," she says.

The view from the outdoor Jacuzzi is of the mountains and, way down in the distance, of the Pacific. The sun begins to set, periodically looking over its shoulder to see if we're picking up on the exquisite shades of orange and pink and purple it is cooking up in the process. We are. Dianne puts her arms around me and, though hubby Bill is scarcely an arm's length away, we begin to hug and kiss. I have had nothing to drink or to smoke, but I am feeling high and a little dizzy.

By and by, Bill and Annette and Conan and Angela and Lee from Philadelphia slip out of the Jacuzzi and go inside. Dianne and I remain in the water and, as the sky turns to a very deep purple, we continue to kiss and hug. Where last night's lovemaking with Dianne was new and exciting and passionate, what is happening now is soft and gentle and unbearably sweet.

We finally get out of the water to go inside, only to linger on the deck to do more nuzzling and fondling and kissing and hugging. There is something going on here that is a wee bit more than raw sex and it seems to have been sneaking up on us for several hours and, what with the presence of Bill and the context of Sandstone and everything else, the Lord only knows what would be appropriate for me to feel about the whole thing.

We go inside and sit down on one of the couches opposite the fireplace in the huge open beam-ceilinged living room. Dianne disappears and comes back wearing jokey black stockings and a black garter belt and spiked heels. We sit and talk awhile, feeling very mellow about each other, and then someone tells Dianne that Conan is looking for her downstairs, that he wants to practice the belly-dancing act I've heard they are preparing. Dianne goes downstairs and is gone for well over half an hour. At length, I get up and ask a young lady who's just come upstairs if she has seen Dianne.

"Oh, yeah," she says. "I've seen her, all right. Five of us have been watching her and Conan making it for the last half hour. When they were done, we all applauded--it was an incredible show."

At first I am unable to deal with the feeling that spreads over me, because it doesn't seem like anything I owned or needed or expected to be buying, especially now, especially here in this very special context. What the feeling is is jealousy. And loss. And sadness. And anger. And betrayal. And rage. And, mainly, jealousy. And it all seems highly unlikely and highly inappropriate, and yet there it is. What I am feeling is ridiculous. Listen, I tell myself, if you can put what you are feeling into a sentence, you will see how foolish this is and you will stop it. I put it into a sentence. The sentence is this: Bill's wife is being unfaithful to me. It is funny. It does not make me laugh.

I sit down on the couch again and wish they allowed liquor up here and consider going out to the car and opening my suitcase and sucking on my socks to get the last bit of vodka out of them, and I try to make some sense out of all this. Well, I tell myself, you did say that you were sorry to be missing out on the experience of jealousy, and now here it is, we had some left after all, it was way in the back, behind the other merchandise, you're lucky to find any, there's been such a run on it lately, such a demand, but congratulations and wear it in the best of health.

Well, I say, now that I have reasoned the situation out, now that I know it is inappropriate to be jealous in this context, now that I have evaluated the thing as a mature adult, I will be able to act as a mature adult and function in a manner that is appropriate to the situation and to my being a mature adult. What I will do is I will ignore Dianne the rest of the weekend and I will make a big thing out of making love to all the other attractive women in the place whenever she's around and not to her, and that is the mature, adult thing that I have decided to do.

Dianne comes back into the room, still wearing her stockings and garter belt and heels, which I no longer find either amusing or attractive, and sits down beside me on the sofa and puts her arms around me and nuzzles my neck.

"I have something to tell you," she says. "I was just downstairs with Conan. We made love. I didn't know what he had in mind when he called me down there--I thought he wanted to practice our belly-dancing act. But then he wanted to make it and I wasn't going to, and then I just sort of gave into it. I don't know why I'm even telling you this, but, for some really crazy reason, I feel like I was unfaithful to you. Isn't that crazy?"

I turn around to look at her and she puts her arms around me and I feel a rush of warmth and I tell her how I had planned to ignore her the rest of the weekend and blatantly make it with other girls in her presence. She smiles and I decide that she is really a fairly terrific woman, after all. But I am still sticking to my plan.

There is a marvelous gourmet-type dinner, which Dianne and I and Bill eat seated on the couch. While we eat, I ask Bill if he ever feels jealous.

"Never," he says. "Well, mostly never. I mean, jealousy implies ownership, and you can't own anybody. Sometimes, though, there is a time thing. Like, if Dianne is with a lover of hers back home and she is supposed to come back that night and she doesn't, or if there is a special occasion, a special holiday, like Christmas, and if I have planned to be with her then and she has made other plans, well, like, then I might feel a little bad, yeah. But, otherwise, I love her enough to want her to be happy and do whatever it is that turns her on."

I tend to believe that is how Bill really thinks. I have heard other people at Sandstone say the same thing--almost the same words, in fact. This means either that they are like-minded or that they are repeating it by rote in hopes that they will convince themselves they really feel it. I suspect that most of them really feel it. I suspect they are made of sterner stuff than I am.

At the conclusion of dinner, a young lady who has had her name legally changed to Sky and who has a brown dog up at Sandstone by the name of Brown Dog and who is wearing only a white-rabbit-fur vest, lies down on the living-room carpet not far from the Christmas tree and two or three close friends begin to fondle her in a leisurely manner. Dianne turns to me and takes my hand and stands up.

"Come on," she says. "Sky looks like she needs some help."

We go over and sit down next to Sky on the carpet. I do not know Sky, but I decide that this may not be a relevant consideration. I begin to fondle her along with the others: first her face, and then her breasts, and then on down into the bush, where--surprise, surprise--I find two other hands already busily at work.

Paul Paige, the Gestalt therapist and marriage counselor and ex-Marine who up till now has been Sandstone's director, looks benevolently in our direction.

"The record for the number of people on the water bed down in the Playroom is nine," he says. "Who thinks we can break it?"

Not knowing or caring whether he means breaking the record or the water bed itself, Sky and friends of Sky get up and amble downstairs to the Playroom and onto the water bed in question and we count ourselves. There are 11 of us on the bed in the vast dimly lit room lined with king-sized mattresses, and we quickly get down to business.

I have been on the old Queen Elizabeth in a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean and on the S.S. Jerusalem and the S.S. Negbah in storms on the Mediterranean Sea in which there was a definite feeling that we were going to capsize, but I would like to tell you that tonight, on this water bed with 11 people humping to different drummers on different sections of the water, I am having a far rockier experience.

At some point in the proceedings, it seems to me I see a familiar face--the blonde girl whom I met in the Jacuzzi, Lee from Philadelphia, who I've just been told is my official biological balance tonight. I reach out to kiss her and say, "I believe you're my date tonight."

"Oh, no," she says, "I don't think so."

"Aren't you Lee from Philadelphia?" I say, cradling her in my arms.

"No," she says, "my name is Norma."

"Well, Norma, what the hell," I say, and begin foreplay with her, anyhow.

Norma and I get into it as heavily as if she were my date and before long various members of the Water Bed Eleven begin to disperse and all that is left at the line of scrimmage is the bodies of Norma, Dianne and this reporter. We continue for a time in a spirited fashion, and then we finish and Dianne drifts upstairs and Norma and I continue awhile alone.

At a certain point, the building begins shaking. Norma and I stop what we are doing and look nervously upward. We are not that far from the San Andreas Fault, and the tremor we have just felt is maybe nine on the Richter scale, but what it finally turns out to be is not an earthquake, after all, but the people upstairs, who are fucking so hard that they have, in true Hemingway fashion, made the earth move.

I duck into the least open of the door-less bathrooms for an impromptu try at a private poop--Sandstone feels as strongly about openness in toilet as openness in sex--and am no sooner settled than in walks Sky, who smiles at me and asks if she can use the shower. I say sure and she gets into the shower. Although I am relentlessly sentimental about poops in private, I am almost able to rationalize that I am alone until Sky, in her shower, begins to chant a succession of sustained Omlike notes. I hastily finish up and hightail it out of there.

When I go back up to the living room, I see the real Lee from Philadelphia and note that she and the false Lee from Philadelphia look alike not even remotely, and it is very male-chauvinist-piggy of me to have made the mistake. The real Lee from Philadelphia turns out to be a very amusing person--most people here at Sandstone are unusually bright and most have nice senses of humor--and we sit down on the carpet and are soon joined by Dianne and Bill.

I am sitting on the carpet, wearing my Jockey shorts, with my head on Dianne's breasts, joking with Bill and Lee and Dianne. Dianne has changed out of her stockings and garter belt and heels and into high black-leather boots with four-inch heels and a heavy leather butch belt. Her legs are bent at the knees and her knees are spread, so that my view through them is as through a giant Winston Churchill V-for-victory sign. All at once, there appears before me and Dianne the head of a young man we haven't noticed before, framed in the V of Dianne's knees. He peers in at us and says to Dianne as follows:

"Excuse me, do you mind?"

"Do I mind what?" says Dianne.

"Do you mind?" is the sort of thing one might say to indicate that one wishes to play through on a golf course or in a supermarket or to suggest that the person in the row ahead of one at the theater should remove her hat, but the young man peering in at us through Dianne's knees is using it to indicate that he wishes to perform cunnilingus on her.

I find the query altogether unsettling: "Do you mind?" raises the question of whether or not one would mind what should be not minded but relished. ("Excusez-moi, mademoiselle, ze chef has prepared for you ze breast of oriole stuffed wiz chestnuts in ze sauce of flaming Grand Marnier--do you mind?") It demeans not only the asker but the askee, the implication being not only that the cunnilinguist is inept but that his client is so undiscriminating that she probably wouldn't mind.

The young man repeats his question. Dianne, acting, perhaps, out of politeness, perhaps out of inertia, indicates that she doesn't particularly mind and the young man buries his face busily in her groin. Perhaps he really is inept, or perhaps Dianne is either not in the mood or simply rude, or both, but no further notice is taken of the guy for the next ten minutes or so by either Dianne or her husband or Lee or me. Dianne continues to joke with us as before, apparently oblivious to the industrious slurping being perpetrated at the bottom of the V. At length, having been totally unapplauded for his performance, the hapless performer stands up to even further lack of ovation and skulks away.

I am to see similar episodes involving other inept performers in further situations this weekend and I am to hear this selfsame piteous phrase, "Do you mind?" from all of them. They hang around at the fringes of somebody else's feast, like the jackals I've seen watching lions feed in Kenya, waiting for the scraps of a meal they didn't feel entitled to be invited to initially. I suspect that jackals are no more relished at Sandstone than they are in Kenya.

After the jackal departs, Dianne pulls off my undershorts and Lee tosses them across the living room to a girl named Nancy--a perky psychology student from Antioch who is doing field research working at Sandstone as a cook--who first plays catch with them, then puts them around her neck, and that is the last I see of them all night. I have begun to nibble on Lee, as much to please her as to displease Dianne. (What, you thought all this healthy sexual activity had cured me of my baby rage at Dianne for fucking Conan?)

After a suitable period of nibbling, Lee suggests that we and Dianne and Bill go downstairs, where we proceed to spend the next hour or two taking turns massaging and being massaged, being worked on with scented oils, getting as slippery as hunks of raw calves' liver in pans of pure Wesson Oil. Lee decides it is time to go back to Philadelphia and leaves. Bill and I remark on what a nice girl she was.

"I particularly enjoyed that threesome we had with her on the water bed," says Dianne.

"We didn't have that threesome with Lee on the water bed," I say, amazed that Dianne may be a bigger male-chauvinist pig than even I. "We had that threesome with Norma."

There is a definite air of abandon and excess here this weekend that is different from what I felt on my previous visit. I chalk it up to the last-fling mood of the members due to the seemingly impending closing.

Why is Sandstone closing--assuming it is? If it is, the reason has to do with the following, depending on whom you get your information from: The word is that the owner-investor board of directors feels that Sandstone isn't bringing in enough on its investment. One way to bring in more money is to make Sandstone more commercial, expand the facilities, add more buildings, make it two or three times its present size, make it into what many of the members contemptuously call a sexual Disneyland.

Most members of Sandstone feel that what they are a part of is a human-potential-movement growth-and-development center that only incidentally includes sexual activities. ("Do you realize," at least three members say to me at different points throughout the weekend, "that some people come up here to get laid?" "You're kidding me," I reply.)

At any rate, the members feel that their image in Los Angeles is that of a fuck farm now and they have already begun to attract an unsavory element: On a recent weekend, a male guest got so upset by the fact that his girlfriend was interested in making it with other men that he punched her out in the bathroom. The members feel that to expand the facilities and the membership as the investors intend would be to kill off whatever sense of intimacy and family still remains. It is hard to argue with this view.

The original Sandstone ranch at this writing is up for sale for about $650,000. The members tried to see if they could get together enough to buy the place and chipped in between $500 and $2500 per couple. This would have enabled them to borrow $200,000, which wasn't enough, so the latest development is that the members have bought a new property in Chatsworth, California, which opened in August 1977 under the name Sandstone III Club.

An attractive black-haired woman named Morgan, who tells me she is a fellow writer and does mainly sonnets, has been living at Sandstone for several weeks now and would like to see the place become a health and healing center more than a sex center.

"Look," says Morgan, "in the human-potential movement, sex is out now, anyway. Everyone's bored with it. And Sandstone isn't taken seriously down the hill anymore. People just want to come up here to swap wives. The other day, I saw somebody I didn't know in the living room in a bathrobe and I thought, What the hell is that stranger doing in a bathrobe in my living room?"

Morgan sighs.

"This place is not the real world, you know. After I'd been here for two weeks, I took my first trip down the hill to a restaurant and it felt so strange--I couldn't figure out at first why none of the people in the restaurant were naked."

•

Saturday night's activities end about 3:30 A.M. on Sunday. Bill and I sleep on opposite sides of Dianne, cuddled up in the cozy compartment in the Ballroom called the Cave.

•

Early Sunday morning, I am awakened by somebody giving me a quick peck on the lips and racing off. All I see as I open my bleary eyes and try to focus is the blurred shape of a fast-disappearing female with short dark hair--the Phantom Kisser.

Sunday is traditionally a quiet day at Sandstone, everyone resting up, nursing sexual hangovers from the excesses of the night before. Dianne and Bill and I help ourselves to the unbelievably good cheese-and-mushroom omelets dished up by Joe the cook, who is not only a cook, he tells us, but a performer who has recently auditioned for something on TV called The Gong Show, wherein amateurs proceed to do their acts onstage until a panel of celebrities feels they are so awful that they sound a gong to make them stop.

"The act I auditioned," says Joe, "starts off with me dressed in a breakaway tux, singing, doing an impression of Louis Armstrong. Then I rip off the breakaway tux and I'm in my leisure suit, and I begin singing in my regular voice. They never called me back after my audition, but I think I know why. My act was too professional for them."

We carry plates of Joe's fantastic professional food out onto the sun deck. As I pass Paul Paige, wearing only a shirt, he asks if I have managed to locate my missing undershorts. I say I haven't. He roars with laughter. Pointing at my nakedness, he quips, "I see you're letting it all hang out now."

Breakfast on the sun deck is quite pleasant till the sun slips behind a cloud bank, and then it gets very chilly. Dianne and Bill and I decide that a swim in the heated indoor pool might be just the ticket for a chilly Sunday afternoon. We make our way to the pool house, which is deserted and still, and slide into the body-temperature water and paddle about.

I am feeling sweet things about Dianne, having cuddled with her all night and forgiven her finally for her unfaithfulness, but caressing her in front of Bill is still giving me pause. It is true that Bill has given me tacit permission to do whatever I please with her, has implicitly said, like some literal Henny Youngman, "Take my wife--please," and yet.... And yet what? And yet in some sections of our culture, not more than, oh, I don't know, 99 44/100 percent of them, making love to another man's wife, especially in his presence, is thought to be, well, rather poor form.

There is, of course, also the possibility, no matter how remote, that Bill will suddenly have a momentary attack of amnesia, forget that he is at Sandstone, where alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations are suspended on wives and he will become vexed enough with me to crush my skull into Kitty Litter.

To openly romance Bill's wife in front of Bill is also to evoke those ancient demons from baby years when there was only one woman in the world and her name was Mommy, and though you and Mom had this terrific naughty, delicious thing going on, there was a definite realization that she was still lavaliered to that 12-foot deep-voiced, scratchy-faced tower of terror called Daddy and that he was not likely to be thrilled at finding himself aced out of Mom's affections by any three-year-old cuckolder of a kid.

Hi, Bill, howya doin', buddy? I half-paddle, half-pull myself and Dianne over to where Bill is resting against the side of the pool and place one friendly, reassuring hand on his hairy chest--howya dom', guy?, whattayasay there, pal?--as with the other arm I encircle Dianne's shoulders and begin to nibble wetly around the base of her neck and hair. The hand on Bill is to show him it's OK, he's part of it, no cuckolding going on here, for God's sake--a sort of lightning rod to draw off any sudden dangerous flashes of energy, should they strike. It is strange, grounding myself on the husband while energizing the wife. Very eerie. Very exciting. Not only to break taboos but to slice them open and probe their hot and pulsing insides while they're still alive and wiggling.

Determined to make Bill feel even more a part of the proceedings, I place Dianne's warm, wet body between us in the water and put both hands on Bill's shoulders, hugging her between us like a piece of lunch meat--a Dianne sandwich. The exercise continues to be alternately arousing and deflating and we continue disporting ourselves thus for an indeterminate length of time, watches being among the many things we have left behind with our clothes and our traditional moral codes.

When the tips of our fingers have puckered into little white raisins, we leave the pool and pop into the sauna, where, once again, I marvel at the willingness of people to go into hot, tiny, airless spaces without even being led there at gunpoint, and then we return to the main-building living room.

On the stereo is a weird German album they were playing last night, a strange combination of electronic sounds approximating cars whizzing past on the highway, accompanied by a German vocal group singing what sounds like "Fun, fun, fun on ze autobahn."

On the couches and in the chairs, people chat or read or merely doze. Behind one of the couches are two huge poufs filled with shredded polyurethane foam. Dianne and Bill and I sink down onto the poufs and relax. Soon Bill and I find ourselves caressing Dianne alternately and then together. And soon, while I continue to caress her, he begins making love to her. I am feeling very weird, indeed. In the background, the surrealistic German electronic cars are whizzing past us on the highway and the vocal group is chanting, "Fun, fun, fun on ze autobahn," and Bill is humping this woman whom I no longer seem to be able to identify, and pretty soon the entire image blurs and it's a little difficult to see....

Oh, yes, just take a look through the binoculars here: There you are, that group right over there, very unusual to find this particular species these days, but that's the female there with the longer hair, you see, and the one with the mane and the horns there is her mate, and that other fellow is the, well, temporary lover, I suppose you'd call him. Now the mate is servicing her, and now it looks like, oh, good, you're going to get a chance to see this, it's the lover now who's taken over and is servicing her. Odd, isn't it? but her mate seems to be aware of what the other one is doing, and yet he isn't the least bit.... Normally, of course, there'd be a frightful row, usually resulting in a fight to the death, but, for some reason, this particular species appears to accept it. Rare breed, actually, found chiefly in this particular range of mountains. Dying out, though, it seems. Shouldn't wonder, actually....

At some point in the afternoon, Anna arrives to take Dianne and Bill back down the mountain and out to the airport for their flight home. I feel a great sadness beginning as Bill goes to pack and Dianne and I go downstairs to take a farewell shower together.

In the shower, with the steam enclosing us in a surreal fog and the needles of hot water stinging our backs and rumps, Dianne and I hold each other closely for perhaps the last time.

"It's silly," I say, "but, for some reason, I felt this weekend that it was you and I who were the couple and not you and Bill."

"I know," she says. "When we were making love in the living room and Bill got in between us, I thought suddenly, Who's that?"

We have been in the shower a long time, longer than people are supposed to be in showers. Anna and Bill appear, clothed and packed and irritated that Dianne is still not dressed. I feel guilty, Dianne feels harassed. Shooing them away, Dianne begins to dress. I tell her I felt they were the mommy and the daddy, coming to scold us for tarrying. Dianne says she felt it was we who were the mommy and the daddy and they were the restless children we sent out to play. All in all, I find her fantasy the healthier one.

At length, we are dressed. I walk out to the parking lot with them, hug and kiss Anna and Bill and Dianne goodbye, but they are, to all intents and purposes, already gone and so am I, the business of formal leave-taking not being the strong suit of anybody present. I wave goodbye to their car as it starts down the mountain in the gathering gloom and I climb back up to the main house, suddenly feeling the effect of a weekend of almost continuous lovemaking and a total of about 20 minutes' sleep.

Within the hour, darkness has descended and all guests but me have departed, leaving Sandstone in the hands of a skeleton crew of a half dozen of its staff and friends. Nancy the cook is there, and Joe the cook, and Conan and Angela, and Sky in her white-rabbit-fur vest. We eat a small, sedate dinner in the living room and I try to articulate to them the strangeness I am feeling. It is old stuff to these seasoned veterans, of course, they have heard it all before, but still they are patient and gentle. Nancy produces my Jockey shorts and reveals she hid them last night at Paul Paige's suggestion, his feeling being that I would have a freer time here without them (it apparently never occurred to him that I might own more than the one pair). Sky reveals to me that she was the Phantom Kisser who awakened me so sweetly early this morning.

Somewhere the strange German electronic album is still playing: "Fun, fun, fun on ze autobahn," with the electronic cars whizzing past. I gaze at the huge foam-filled pouf where we'd spent much of the afternoon and I feel very empty. That night, I curl up and sleep alone in the Cave.

The following morning, I awake to badness. War has broken out inside my body: The stomach is having a food fight and thinking of settling it by heaving everything up through the throat. The musculature has decided to recall all the muscles and is in the process of yanking them in and rolling them into a ball, except that they won't come loose and a bunch of them are snagged around my forehead and neck so tightly I can hardly see.

Outside, it is raining hard enough to restrict visibility to about six inches. It looks like the second Deluge and anybody with any sense is scrambling around for an ark.

What has happened? Are my physical agony and the outside weather due to normal physical and meteorological causes, or is all of this somehow related to psychological and/or divine retribution for wholesale breakage of socioreligious taboos?

Somehow, I succeed in getting my things and my body out to my rented car and make it all the way down the treacherous, nearly washed-out mountain roads and down the freeway to the airport and all the way home on the plane to New York without further mishap before God has decided to pull something cute on me, like a little Jonah-in-the-whale number in the 747.

A few days later, a letter arrives from Dianne. She says she misses me and fears that the weekend might have messed up my head. (Like the acid did with Conan? Can you see me as a New York equivalent of Conan, water-skiing through the sewage in the Hudson, towed by a garbage barge?)

"You may feel some changes in your attitude about your daily routines, your friends, your relationships," Dianne's letter continues. "Reflect on all you've experienced, but be aware that your sociological clock has been greatly accelerated and your capacity for change has expanded and is speeded up. And, most important--that the people around you have not adjusted to the speeding yet. It will take a while for you to assimilate it all, but it will take longer for other people in your life to accept these changes in you." Dianne stops being a cosmic fortune cookie for a moment and adds, "Wouldn't I make a dandy guru?"

You're right, Dianne, my sociological clock has speeded up. Or slowed down. Or something. And my attitude about my daily routines and friends and relationships isn't what it was before. I haven't yet been able to find the strange German album with the electronic cars on it in New York and none of my ladyfriends have husbands to bring on dates with them, but once or twice, while making love, I've tried humming "Fun, fun, fun on ze autobahn." Somehow, it's not the same.

" 'The energy level was on full blast--a voyeur's wet dream. I had never seen so many group scenes.' "