2. Swingin' Sex? I Don't Think So

It all started the way it always does: innocently enough. I was sitting in my apartment, having a sensible lunch of crackers and sardines, when I got a call from an acquaintance. A friend of his had just gone to Le Trapeze, a couples— only sex club, and was amazed. Blown away. There were people naked— having sex—right in front of him. Unlike Samp;M clubs, where no actual sex occurs, this was the real, juicy tomato. The guy's girlfriend was kind of freaked out—although, when another naked woman brushed against her, she "sort of liked it." According to him.

In fact, the guy was so into the place that he didn't want me to write about it because he was afraid that, like most decent places in New York, it would be ruined by publicity.

I started imagining all sorts of things: Beautiful young hardbody couples. Shy touching. Girls with long, wavy blond hair wearing wreaths made of grape leaves. Boys with perfect white teeth wearing loincloths made of grape

leaves. Me, wearing a super-short, over-one-shoulder, grape-leaf dress. We would walk in with our clothes on and walk out enlightened.

The club's answering machine brought me back to reality with a thump.

"At Le Trapeze, there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet," said a voice of mdeterminate gender, which added that there was "a juice bar and a hot and cold buffet" — things I rarely associate with sex or nudity. In celebration of Thanksgiving, "Oriental Night" would be held on November 19. That sounded interesting, except it turned out that Oriental Night meant oriental food, not oriental people.

I should have dropped the whole idea right then. I shouldn't have listened to the scarily horny Sallie Tisdale, who in her yuppie-porn book, Talk Dirty to Me, enthuses about public, group sex: "This is a taboo in the truest sense of the word. . If sex clubs do what they aim to do, then a falling away will happen. Yes, as is feared, a crumbling of boundaries. . The center will not hold." I should have asked myself, What's fun about that?

But I had to see for myself. And so, on a recent Wednesday night, my calendar listed two events: 9:00 p.m., dinner for the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, Bowery Bar; 11:30 p.m., Le Trapeze sex club, East 27th Street.