Cassie was so sophisticated and nonchalant about it, taking for granted that Brady and I were game for it, that I just let it happen. Brady certainly was game for it. It was going to be the eighties after all. Everyone was going to be free and easy and devil may care. It would be the sixties again, done right. A chance for exercising "all you need is love" without the backdrop of a tragic war in Vietnam.
We were at the University of Delaware in Newark, still defining our dreams for the future. Brady was in graduate school, nearing the completion of his MBA. I had suspended my studies for this one last push to get Brady established. I needed two more years for my teaching certificate, and I'd have my chance when Brady was set up in business. His prospects were bright. Brady was one of the best salesmen I knew. It had been Brady who had sold me on Cassie's idea.
Cassie was in her junior year in interior design. It was Cassie and I who were friends. I worked as a secretary in the fine arts department—working nine to five for that last push to get Brady his MBA. Cassie was a DuPont, which really meant something here in Delaware. Beyond that, she was a fashion plate and as thin and blonde and sophisticated as they get. I had to constantly watch my weight, while she gorged herself when we lunched together. But that's another story in itself. Suffice to say that it was symbolic of our relationship, though, and how I let her take the lead. Cassie lived life to the hilt without a hint of a problem. I always seemed on the edge of being something that wasn't quite good enough.
I think some of what prompted me to go with the flow on this New Year's Eve idea was that Brady jumped at the idea. I worshipped Brady at the time. I couldn't imagine how I'd managed to land him. He was a dreamboat and a half and all of the girls in college had set their cap for him.
"That's a man who's going to go far," I remember a professor saying one day as Brady was walking out of a math class we shared. "Whoever manages to hitch to that wagon is going to have a good life." Although I'd been attracted to Brady, it wasn't until that point—from something a woman professor said—that I became willing to do anything that he wanted as long as there was a hope that I could get hitched to that wagon.
Of course I let him have his way with me when he got around to asking me out—in the backseat of his Mustang convertible down by the Delaware Canal below Wilmington. He asked me if I'd like to see where F. Scott Fitzgerald's house was, and it turned out that now it was in an industrial area with vast parking lots deserted on weekend nights and had become a favorite make-out spot. He hadn't asked me if it was my first time and I didn't volunteer that it was. It wasn't the last time that my reticence on that subject would back me into a corner.
The sex was good, though, even though Brady was all about getting his own pleasure. After that first time, I found pleasure in it to—especially in a little kinky fetish of his.
He'd done the right thing when I thought I'd gotten pregnant, but there always seemed to be a sense of resentment underlying our lives when it turned out I wasn't. This inexplicably was followed by a sense of greater separation between us when I finally was, which happened too soon for his plans.
"It almost spoiled my plans for a business career, with an MBA and all," he'd said when I first told him I might be pregnant. "And now it doesn't look like—"
"We'll be fine," I'd said, interrupting him because I didn't want anything I did to be a reason that he didn't go far in business, as the professor had predicted. "I'll put my schooling on hold. I can get a job at the university," I'd said. "We'll get you through graduated school first and then I'll go back for my teaching certificate."
That's where I met Cassie—at the university. She was a star student, and I was working in the fine arts dean's office. So, it was me who brought Brady and Cassie together. There were occasions later when Brady reminded me of that, as if it explained away everything else.
Cassie was a newlywed too, which is probably why we got along so well and became friends. It certainly wasn't because we were alike in any way. And, typical of Cassie, she'd landed the biggest catch in the university. Pete was the star player on the university football team, an all-American halfback, which was saying a lot for a smaller university like Delaware to be blessed with. He was as confident of himself and his worth as Cassie was. And he was known to have tried out all of the top women at the university from the entire cheerleading squad down to the homecoming queen and, it was rumored, that math professor as well.
And somehow Cassie had gotten him to propose the summer between his junior and senior year and they'd been married the same September weekend Brady and I had been. Of course her wedding had been the best that DuPonts could muster up and Brady and I were married before a justice of the peace.
Four months later, we were moving into a new decade, the 1980s, and when the four of us had met for lunch to go off for Thanksgiving break, where I met Pete for the first time, Cassie had suggested that we celebrate the New Year in style. We found that both couples were still going to be in Newark for New Year's. I had to work, of course—New Year's Eve was on a Monday that year, and the university didn't give us the day off just because we'd be off on Sunday and then on Tuesday again. And Pete wasn't doing well in his studies and had a lot of classwork to make up because his own football season was being expanded beyond that of the university's team by his all-star status.
We were discussing what we each expected the eighties to be like, and Cassie and Brady were talking about a new era of free love and doing "what came natural." This led to talking about swinging and what we all thought about it. Cassie and Brady thought it was just nifty and, I'll have to say, it seemed to me like it would just be a continuation of the seventies for them. I had felt Brady chomping at the bit about the monogamous life ever since we'd gotten married, and god knows Cassie wasn't shy about talking about the attributes of every good-looking man she saw. Pete kept pretty silent on the subject, but he had a reputation as a womanizer and user and Pete kept pretty silent about nearly everything.
Pete scared me a bit. He was tall and beefy—not fat, very muscular. Sort of overpowering. And brooding. He didn't come across as all that bright, supported by the trouble he was having with his studies. But Brady assured me that he had to be smart to be as good a football player as he was. He had to learn and retain many play scenarios and formations. He was sort of like a volcano—reserved on the outside but giving the sense of seething inside, able to break out in violence at any moment. It both frightened and attracted me.
Brady said that was what made Pete a great football player. What I wondered, though, was what about it made him such a ladies' man. Was it just because he was an all-American jock? Thinking about it scared me, though, so I tried not to. Cassie's suggestion, enthusiastically backed by Brady, though, forced me to think about the possibilities.
Of the four, I was the weak link. I could talk about the swinging life with bravado, but I hadn't lived it. Brady had been my only lover. I hadn't told him that, because I sensed he wanted to have been the man I'd wanted out of all other possibilities. And he was. It just wasn't because I'd tried them all out sexually.
Cassie's suggestion was that, since all of us were stuck in Newark for New Year's Eve, since both couples were struggling financially and couldn't afford to buy tickets to a blow-out party, and since it was a decade being rung in—one that we all agreed would be a free and easy decade sexually—and since we all had great bodies (which I'll have to admit I found flattering for Cassie and Brady to say in my case—the other three certainly had 10 bodies), why didn't we welcome in the decade by partying together and trading partners as the new decade dawned?
And by that, she meant, at the stroke of midnight Brady would be fucking her and Pete would be fucking me. Cassie and Brady discussed it so openly that my eyes went to Pete. But he seemed to be distracted, his eyes following the figure of a waitress as she moved between the tables. No interest in me at all, I thought, so Cassie and Brady could fantasize all they wanted.
I thought at the time it was a joke and it would never happen, but at 9:00 p.m. on Monday, December 31st, 1979, there Cassie and Pete were at our apartment door, carrying a casserole dish as their contribution to a late dinner and a cheap bottle of champagne.
Cassie was dressed to the nines, something considerable cleavage and thighs, like she was going to the DuPont Country Club or the DuPont Hotel for New Year's festivities. Pete was in a DU sweatshirt, baggy shorts drooping below his knees, and sneakers without socks. Cassie was all bubbly and smart talking. Pete was brooding and quiet. He went straight for our bedroom and switched on the TV to click between the New Year's Eve football games.
I should mention that our apartment was the attic of a single house. The staircase was at one end and came up into a long room that started off dining room, ran into living area and then was screened off for Brady's study cubicle. The kitchen was in a dormer off the back of the house, to the right of the entrance into the apartment. Beyond the long living room was a bath in the dormer to the right and then our bedroom. The TV was in the bedroom, against the window wall and facing the bed, close enough to be reached when sitting at the foot of the bed. It was in there mostly because Brady didn't want the distraction of having it in the living room near where he had to study.
Even then I assumed that the swinging business was all a joke and that we were just having dinner together, would go and all sit on the bed and watch Dick Clark bring in the New Year and then Pete and Cassie would go home and Brady, wound up by cheap champagne, would ravish me on the bed. Which was fine with me. I even was looking forward to that little fetish of his. I'd grown to enjoy it.
I knew that Cassie would come looking like a fashion plate, so I had taken some of the money I siphoned off my overtime to cover gifts and things I didn't want Brady to see the bill for and bought myself a matching silk blouse and skirt that had looked a lot better on me in the mirror at the department store than it did in the mirror on the back of our bedroom door.
Dinner was fine. Even the cheap wine Brady had pulled out for dinner was fine. The conversation at dinner was fine and free. No mention was made of anyone trading partners later. The Grasshoppers we had after dinner were fine. Brady was on a kick of celebrating with the cocktail that was a third Crème de menthe, a third white Crème di cacao, and a third cream. He thought it made us sophisticated. He referred to it as our NYC cocktail. Even the one joint we passed around was fine, although I was already getting a little woozy by then.
Twenty minutes before twelve—before the onset of the 1980s—we repaired to the bedroom and sat along the foot of the bed like birds on a power line, watching Dick Clark trying to make it seem like everything was just too exciting for words and that we were building up to something.
We
