The Wife-Swap Report

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There is a song Pete Seeger sings about little boxes made of ticky-tacky, identical ticky-tacky houses inhabited by identical ticky-tacky people. The Gordon house is a luxury-class version of just this sort of suburban sameness. It is a four-year-old split-level on a half-acre lot in a development in Morris County, New Jersey, within easy commuting range of New York City. The current market value of the house is probably around thirty-five thousand dollars. The house is made of ticky-tacky (several of the windows leak; there are ceiling cracks as the structure settles) and it does look rather like its neighbors on either side, but there is certainly nothing drab about it. On the contrary, it is representative of the good life in affluent, leisure-oriented mid-century America.

The people in the house do not look just the same as their neighbors. On balance, they look quite a bit better. Paul Gordon is thirty-two years old, tall, slender, with brown eyes and straight dark brown hair. While he is not handsome enough to model for menswear advertisements, there is a strength and vitality in his features which borders on the charismatic.

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