The Lifestyle (18 page)

“You’re asking how do we reconcile it?” Rita said to me in the quiet restaurant where we’d sat down for a snack. She was forty-five, with the complexion and flaxen hair of a Swedish model, the waist of a woman in her twenties, and the unreconstructed breasts of an erotic statue. Yet she was curiously prim: she wore no makeup except for a wash of pink blush on her lips and on previous evenings, had dressed in a knee-length skirt, silk, sleeveless blouse, and flat leather sandals. Not for her the bra-and-garter get-ups that were standard fare at swinger dances. Perhaps that was because she and her husband, Palmer, were members of the Mormon church.

“I’m wondering how people can act in a way that their spiritual belief system tells them is not the way to act,” I said, since I knew that at home Rita and Palmer were engaged in long-term affairs with two couples in their club and that they sought out casual encounters all the time.

“I think they believe they can make up for it later,” Rita said. “Forgiven later. I know I’m like that.”

“The traditional message of the church is that people can be forgiven if they go to church and repent—if they do penance, all sins are forgiven,” Palmer said. He had the emphatic syntax of a physician-specialist who was used to heading a hospital wing and giving talks to lecture-rooms full of his colleagues. He too was attractive, with a square jaw, a full head of hair, and gold-framed glasses that enlarged his sky-blue eyes.

“But isn’t this
the
ultimate forbidden behavior for a Mormon?” I asked Rita and Palmer. It sounded as if they had struggled to reconcile the contradictions in their prayers, as
have many religious people with unconventional sex lives, but the evening before I had seen the Mormon pair entering their room with two couples. That gathering, I was sure, would have been considered demonic beyond forgiveness to the members of their congregation.

“On the surface it’s forbidden,” Palmer said, “but yet for centuries most of society has been doing it anyway. As a matter of fact, you go back to the early days of the church, they were polygamous. Some of the church founders had two or three wives—obviously when they got together they had two or three wives at the same time, they got to have their own little swinging party. In Latter-Day Saints they stopped polygamy only because the federal government said if you don’t stop, we will destroy you.”

“And I don’t believe it’s as forbidden a sin as with a victim,” Rita said. “I mean you have people here of age, and they’re all agreeing to do this. In our society adultery is sort of part of the institution of marriage—so that when you get married you also join the club of adultery, just like swingers belong to swing clubs. The thing about this that contrasts with adultery is that it’s the couple that makes the mutual decision. They believe that this is more acceptable than adultery; I can still love and care for my partner and I wouldn’t go behind my partner’s back. So as far as Christian morality goes, I would still like to think I can do this and still be the kind of person that I am: I offer help to the people around me, I give to charities, I volunteer all the time. But we live in a society that says I am an evil person because of this one area, when in my heart I know that I am really not. I know I’m still involved in the church and with the people there I like to be involved with, and can be the way I like to be and all of the other things that make up the virtues of being a Christian person. Will He really punish me for this time here? Probably in reality there’s a little doubt in my mind. But are all of these people that have this
aberrant lifestyle, will they
all
be punished too, even though they have hearts that are really good, yet they have this one thing that makes them take liberties with their faith?”

“You know that this is purely hedonistic,” I said.

“I guess by definition it is,” replied Rita.

“So then you have to deal with the following: if there’s a God, then it’s our duty on earth to know Him—God is the goal,” I said. “Does that mean that involving yourself totally in the flesh takes you in the wrong direction from God?”

“Well, I think it does in the sense that it is a material involvement,” Rita said, “but whether it pulls you in that direction more is the same as should be asked of many material things. It depends on how you handle it in the context of your other life responsibilities. Anybody really involved in this shouldn’t let everything else go, should make sure their family is well taken care of, and that they are a unit and there’s love, that you make wages and everybody has money and all the necessities of life. They’re sort of all part of the same thing; the family situation can be just as threatened by people who read the Bible all together but who really aren’t living together as a family unit.”

“Ultimately, maybe there’s no hard answer,” I said. “We’ll have to wait for the moment of death.”

“Well, I think you’ve put your finger on it,” Palmer said. “A lot of this has to do with the way people think they’ll be judged by God. People think that when you die, you’re gonna go to judgment, you’re gonna be judged on what you did good, and what you did bad, what you didn’t do that you should have done, and what you did do that you shouldn’t have. They think, that’s it: God’s gonna add up the good things you did and the bad things, and it’s gonna come to a grand total, and see where you fit in the grand scheme of things. But I don’t think that’s all it.”

“Yeah!” Rita agreed enthusiastically, taking Palmer’s hand.

“I truly believe that the rules that the Lord has down for us,” Palmer went on, covering his wife’s hand with his own, “about being honest, and virtuous, and courageous and kind, meek and humble—they’re all designed to help you find the way to be like—well, you’re supposed to be like God. Jesus Christ said ‘Be like my Father.’ All these rules are set down to find how to be like God, how to be Godly. But I think on the Judgment Day, you’re not going to be judged on all the things you’ve done sexually, you’re going be judged on how close you are to God, how good have you become, what kind of a person are you. There are going to be some people who’ve done a lot of good things, who have put their money here in this and that, but they never really got themselves as close as they should to becoming God.”

“People feel they can buy their way to goodness, for instance,” Rita said. “I know in our church that’s a big component of showing that you’re a good person.”

“That’s my point, you’re going be judged on who you are,” Palmer said. “You can’t take your money and bribe God. All you’re going to be is you at the end of the day. What are you? Are you a loving, kind person who would love to serve anybody and help anybody in need; would you go that extra mile to help anybody that was in need, would you be like your Father, or would you just whip out your checkbook and say, ‘I can help you with your need but I can’t really stick around’?”

“So why did sex get thrown into that mix?” I asked. “Why are you an evil person if you’re involved in this lifestyle, or something like it? I think it’s extraordinary, from the point of view of other Mormons, that you two could possibly be in this. I still can’t get over that you still consider yourselves Mormons.”

“Well, our church would not approve,” Rita laughed. “Someday we’ll have a coming-out party. Our church is opposed to teaching about birth control or anything about your own sexuality, unless it’s within marriage. But there is that
foundation of polygamy, so in a way they’ve gone back on their original teachings.”

“I’ll tell you my perspective,” Palmer said. “You use the word
why
. I’ve always been interested in why since I’ve been quite young. I always was resistant to the rules unless I knew why they were there; I wanted a good reason. The only exception was the church. Legal rules, I knew if I broke them I’d go to jail. School rules, if I broke them and I got away with breaking them, I’d just do what I wanted to. The only rules I never questioned were the church’s. I believed in God, and I still do as much as I did then.

“But at one point in time I began to talk to myself and say, ‘The more serious rules in our society, religious rules and cultural rules that have been around for a long time, why are they that way?’ I think of God, I don’t think He’s somebody that just makes up rules and says you follow them for no reason, I think He’s got a reason for what he does. He’s the most reasonable person out there. By following the rules, there’s some specific, expected results both for individuals, families, and societies in general. And I think those rules are there for those results.

“For example, most people today eat ham or pork, no problem. But it was forbidden in the early church, because Moses said you don’t do it. The Jews didn’t and they still don’t. But in reality, why was that? Now we know why it was forbidden. Because they didn’t know what to do with trichinosis. You eat pork that hasn’t been adequately cooked and you get trichinosis and your body gets this disease, you get really sick. And so the only way to avoid that was to say, ‘You don’t eat it.’

“And so I think in all these sexual cases the rules have been designed to make sure that society moves forward, children are raised in a proper environment, and families continue to have relationships. The elders knew the only way to have children brought up in a proper environment was to have a father and
mother who were together and bonded and committed to raising them. You do that by having a marital situation where you have a child born into that marriage. But where you have willy-nilly sex before marriage, then you really don’t get a bonding relationship of man and woman. Many times you get children out of wedlock, which in the past presented a problem. So I think the rules against fornication arose to ensure that children had a good chance of being raised in a situation where they had a happy, healthy, stable environment.

“And the other thing is, they didn’t have any methods of birth control, except withdrawal, and that’s not very reliable. How could you maintain a society if you’re swapping wives and you’re not sure who’s getting pregnant with who? You really couldn’t have that kind of thing and maintain the security of the family and the future of the people.

“But that brings us to the other thing, which is the emotional problems. Jealousy is one of the biggest problems in this lifestyle. There’s no way you can be a jealous person and be in this lifestyle. Rita and I, for example, jealousy at the beginning was a real issue. We’ve worked through it to the point where we don’t experience it, or if we do we sit down and talk about it. In reality, so many people in our society have a significant jealous aspect that they could not go around swapping, even if one day they said, ‘Sure, let’s go do it.’ The next day they’d feel so jealous, it would destroy their marriage. Fidelity was established by God to maintain the integrity of the marriage and to sustain it, because God knew the emotions of the men and women He created.

“If you put all those things together, how is God gonna say, ‘You can go have sexual intercourse outside your immediate marriage as long as you’re using condoms all the time, as long as you ensure the paternity of your children, as long as you ensure that everybody’s emotional needs are taken care of, and as long as you ensure that there’s no hurtful results, and that it
will enhance your marriage.’ Well, that requires too much maturity. It’s easier just to say, ‘Don’t!’ My own opinion, not as a Mormon or a physician but just as a civilian who’s seen couples come and go in this lifestyle, is that God was right when He said ‘Don’t.’”

“There’s a lot of people who benefit from the lifestyle,” Rita said. “It increases their self-image, it spices their marriage. But it would be counterproductive to the majority of people. That’s my view.”

“We agree on that,” Palmer said. “Those that want to go against the prohibitions and get out there on the edge, they’ll do it anyway. For everybody else, there should be these brakes that make them think long and hard before taking the chance.”

Outside the Diamond Eden’s colonial lobby entrance stood a twenty-foot-tall, three-pronged saguaro, the middle finger of which had exploded into rampant fruit sometime during the day. Several flowerlike pods, red as a mandrill’s backside, now oozed a kind of Varathane oil that dripped the currantlike seeds over the thick, ripe petals. Long, sticky strings hung partway to the flagstone driveway. The obscene sight was not wasted on a couple of dozen swingers who, walking from the cool of the lobby into the massive night heat of the outdoors, paused on the hot stones in their gauzy togas and marveled at the plant.

“Ain’t it from outer taste, though?”

“Too
crude!”

“The impossible dream to me.”

“Maybe that thing should charge us just for looking at it.”

“I’d sue the damn thing for false advertising!”

“Noble Venus!” Chuck toasted the vaginate flowers with a beer bottle.

“Hey, how much you allowed to drink with your condition, Chuck?” Carla asked maternally, since Chuck had put away a bottle of wine at dinner.

“Only time I drink is when I exercise my pantheistic enjoyments on these kinds of nights,” he replied as we crossed the driveway on the way to the thumping beat emanating from the disco. “My chances of living are the same as you guys’—you might get hit by a garbage truck in three to five years.”