Лоуренс Блок - Catch and Release

Lust. That’s our subject, isn’t it? And do you suppose there’s a physiological explanation for one’s tendency to natter on and on in one’s senior years? Is there a gene that turns us into garrulous old farts?

My point, to the extent that I have one, is this: As a physician, as a trusted medical practitioner, as a putative authority on matters of the human anatomy, I was taken into the confidence of my patients and thus made more aware than most people of the infinite variety and remarkable vagaries of human sexuality. I saw more penises than Catherine the Great, more vaginas than Casanova. Saw them up close, too, with no fumbling around in the dark. Told husbands how to satisfy their wives, women how to get pregnant.

Why, I knew an older man who had a half dozen women, widows and spinsters, who came to him once a month on average to be masturbated. The old duffer didn’t call it that, and I don’t even know if he thought of it in those terms. He was treating them, he confided, for hysteria, and the treatment employed an artificial phallus hygienically hooded with a condom. He wore rubber gloves, did this doctor, and seemed genuinely offended at the hint that he might be getting more than a fee for his troubles. As to my suggestion that he might send them home with dildoes and a clue as to how best to employ them, he grimaced at the very idea. “These are decent women,” he told me, as if that explained everything. And perhaps it did.

I have become inclined, through observation both personal and professional in nature, to grant considerable respect to the sex drive. The urgency of its imperative is undeniable, the variety of its manifestation apparently infinite. I will furnish but one example of the latter: One patient of mine, a lesbian, married another woman in a ceremony which, if unsanctioned by the state, was nevertheless as formal a rite as any I’ve attended. My patient wore a white gown, her spouse a tuxedo.

After a few years they parted company, without having to undergo the legal rigors of a divorce. My patient began living as a man, and eventually took hormone treatments and counseling and underwent sex-change surgery. And so, quite unbeknownst to her, did her former marriage partner. They are now pals, working out at the gym together, going to ball games together, and looking for nice feminine girls to hook up with and marry.

Infinite variety...

But, entertaining as their saga may be, I wouldn’t call it lust. Lust is desire raised to a level that prompts unacceptable behavior — how’s that for a definition? And I can think of no clearer example of that than a fellow I’ll call Gregory Dekker.

Dekker was a serial rapist. That’s spelled with an S, not a C, lest you imagine some lunatic having it off with a bowl of Cream of Wheat, or working his way one by one through a box of Cheerios. His sexual desire was strong, though probably not abnormally so, and he satisfied it in one of two ways — by rape or by masturbation. And, when he masturbated, the images in his mind were rape fantasies.

Rape, we are often assured, is not truly sexual in nature. Rape is a violent expression of hostility toward women, and has nothing at all to do with desire. The rapist is wielding his phallus as a weapon — a sword, a club, a gun that fires seminal bullets. He is getting even with his mother for real or imagined abuse.

What crap.

Oh, surely hostility may play a part in his makeup. And surely there are some rapists who are acting out their primal dramas. But, if the chief aim of the act is to inflict pain and damage, why choose such an uncertain weapon? Why reach for a gun so apt to jam or misfire?

Rape, you see, requires an erect penis. And a successful rape culminates in orgasm and ejaculation. And who would imagine that all of this takes place in the absence of sexual desire?

Rape, I submit, is often nothing more or less than the sexual activity of a sociopath, a man lacking conscience who, as he might tell you, quite sensibly seeks to satisfy himself sexually without having to resort to candy or flowers, sweet words and false promises. He doesn’t have to take his chosen partner to dinner or a movie, doesn’t have to feign interest in her conversation, doesn’t even have to tell her she looks nice. Why, he proves she looks good to him, good enough to throw down and ravish. Isn’t that compliment enough?

I’ve no clear idea what makes a person grow up sociopathic. Is it in the genes? The upbringing? I don’t have the answer. Nor, in fact, do I know much about Gregory Dekker in particular. He was never a patient of mine.

Susan Trenholme was, however.

She was a remarkably ordinary young woman, neither beautiful nor plain. Her hair was light brown, not quite blond, and her figure was womanly, and fuller than she’d have preferred; she was always trying new diets and over-the-counter appetite suppressants, all in an effort to lose five pounds over and over again. She was, I suppose, no more neurotic in this area than most young women; if they were as obsessed about their height, they’d all put on weighted boots and suspend themselves from the ceiling.

Susan met a young man in college and lived with him for two years. They drifted apart, and she was twenty-six years old and living alone when Gregory Dekker caught up with her in the parking lot of her apartment complex, knocked her to the ground, fell on her, and told her not to struggle or make a sound or he’d kill her.

Looking into his eyes, she knew he was serious. And she became convinced that, whether she cried out or remained silent, whether she struggled or acquiesced, her fate was sealed. He would kill her anyway once he’d had his pleasure with her.

In fact she had grounds for this assessment, beyond what she was able to read in his eyes. A rapist whose description matched her assailant had committed a string of rapes in the area within the past several months, and had left his two most recent victims for dead; one recovered, one was dead on arrival at a nearby hospital. Unlike the monster in your story, Soldier, Gregory Dekker was not given to lust-murder; he killed only to avoid being caught.

And he would have been easy to pick out of a lineup. If Susan Trenholme looked ordinary, Gregory Dekker surely did not. Whatever the cause — a drunken obstetrician misusing his forceps, a mother who dropped him on his face in infancy — Dekker was an heroically ugly young man. His schoolmates, perhaps inevitably, called him Frankenstein, and they had reason. Extensive facial and dental surgery would have helped, no doubt, but his parents couldn’t have afforded it, if they even thought of it.

Dekker probably assumed he could never have a woman other than by force. He was almost certainly wrong in that assessment. Some women find ugly men particularly attractive, and others respond to qualities other than appearance. I knew one woman, for example, who held that there was no such thing as an ugly millionaire.

Well, Dekker was no millionaire, nor did he have other attractive qualities, so perhaps rape was a sound choice for him. In any event, it worked. When he wanted a woman, he took her. Sometimes this happened in the course of his work, which was burglary; he broke into homes and offices, grabbed cash or something readily converted thereto, and fled. If there was a woman on the premises, and if he liked her looks, he would take her as automatically as he would take her jewelry.

In Susan’s case, he saw her at a supermarket, followed her to her car, then tailed her in his car and assaulted her, as I’ve said, in her parking lot. And would very likely have left her there, dead or dying, if she hadn’t taken action.

She didn’t resist, didn’t cry out. On the contrary, she did everything she could to make things easier for him, and, after he had entered her, she wriggled pleasurably beneath him and began uttering little moans and yelps of pleasure.