William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Then there was the married woman who fell in love with her fourteen-year-old foster son. Her husband divorced her. She wanted to marry the boy. He wanted to marry her. When she became pregnant with his child, they threw her in jail for years. Dan Smooth could not understand why.

The curiosity of small children regarding bodily functions frequently presents an erotic component. Smooth’s niece, Darcy, had become fascinated with urination at the age of four. Whenever he came to Atlanta to visit his sister, Darcy wanted to play with him, and he was simultaneously thrilled and frightened by the complicity he read in her smile. If he let himself go, he just might remember something from his own childhood which would draw him into the mirror, where, astonished and conquered by something about himself he’d never before noticed, he’d cry: Aha! — but that never happened. Darcy liked to be carried piggyback. When he lifted her up on his shoulders, she’d wrap her legs tightly around his neck and begin rubbing against him. Sometimes he’d have to go to the toilet, and Darcy cried when he closed the door. He actually had to lock her out. — It’s just a phase that all children go through, his sister said curtly. — When Darcy was five he visited his sister for Christmas, and Darcy’s older sister got the flu, so they left Smooth to babysit while they went to the doctor. Darcy was sitting in his lap watching a cartoon on television, for this happened long before videos, and her body was very little and smooth and soft, and her breath smelled like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She was wearing a red and green plaid dress for Christmas. The hem of it had ridden above her chubby knees. She clamped her thighs around his leg and began to slowly ride him up and down, pretending to look at the television. He did not know what to do. Suddenly she turned her head, and in her eyes he saw that look of darkly shining consciousness, which he had the incredible faith or arrogance to label the look of original sin. He swallowed. Grown women had on occasion looked at him that way, and accordingly infected him with their desire, but never so intensely as this. He did not know what was going to happen, but he knew that whatever happened he would never ever mention to Darcy’s parents. Darcy turned her head back, but she was gazing not at the television anymore, but at her own squiggling crotch. The red and green dress had now retreated into her lap so that he could see her white underpants. Slowly his hand began to move. Smooth could not stop it, and did not want to. His hand descended through the air, inch by inch, and came to rest on Darcy’s soft, pink thigh. The little girl put her hand on his hand and giggled. Then she began to hump his leg faster. His hand swam slowly up her thigh, and now it rested on her panties and he could feel how she was hot and damp there through the flimsy cotton. She opened her legs wider and with both hands pushed his palm firmly against her mound.

Over a beer in a quiet bar, he told a doctor in San Francisco about it — about that much, at least. The doctor regarded him with the same alertly bristling skepticism of any good policeman, knowing or suspecting the rest, and Smooth, not yet hardened, choked out: I didn’t do anything. But she wanted it, you see. I am sure that she wanted it.

The doctor said nothing.

Smooth said: Is that normal?

Of course what you’re telling me is not normal, the doctor said carefully.

Could the kid have wanted it?

Dan, said the doctor, these are dangerous speculations to follow. You know very well that children don’t necessarily know what they want, and that what they want isn’t necessarily good for them. Furthermore, while I’m not a specialist, I would say that if she was consciously aroused and seeking to arouse you as you describe — in other words, if you’re not fudging a little — then she’s already been a victim of abuse. Her father, perhaps…

I know Max pretty well, said Smooth. And he doesn’t bear that mark.

Child abusers don’t bear a mark, Dan. You can’t tell. I could be one, or for that matter you could be one. Do you understand me?

But it’s not very good science, you know, Smooth insisted. If they don’t want it, then you can’t do it to them, because it’s abuse. If they do want it, then they must have been abused. That’s what you’re saying, right?

If ten minutes before dinner your niece wanted to gorge on candy and ice cream, would you let her?

Maybe on special occasions I would.

Dan, Dan!

Why is having sex necessarily bad for a child?

Oh, come off it, Dan! the doctor shouted angrily, and in his face for the first time Smooth saw the look that he would see in the faces of others for the rest of his life.

When I was a boy, I used to jerk off, Smooth said. You know that old saying: Ninety percent of all teenage boys masturbate, and the other ten percent are lying. And when my Daddy caught me, he tied my hands behind my back. I had to sleep on my side for a good two years. When I asked him why it was wrong to jerk off, he got angry, you see, the same as you’re angry now, and he said that it was a sin and that it would make my pimples worse and that it would weaken my eyesight and maybe I’d even go crazy. Now, was any of that true?

Don’t be so hard on your father, Dan, said the doctor with an ingratiating laugh. You’re my age. We grew up before the sexual revolution. And your father — well, everybody thought that then.

But was it true?

Of course it wasn’t true. But that has nothing to do with—

Yes it does. If a child wants or needs to masturbate, you’re saying that that’s harmless, right?

Yes, Dan, said the doctor grimly.

No matter what the age of the child?

No matter what the age of the child.

Then if a child wants to have an orgasm, and you help the child have an orgasm—

And did you have an orgasm when you stuck it up her, Dan? said the doctor wearily. How loudly did she scream? How much did she bleed?

He never saw that doctor again. The next year he didn’t visit his sister, and the year after that Darcy was seven, and in the middle of the night, when he was asleep in the guestroom, Darcy crept in and almost silently closed the door behind her.

Let’s speak of accidents. One sunset at a gasoline station in El Cerrito, they gave Tyler a restroom key and when he turned it in the door a woman’s voice cried: Uh-uh- uh! He stood outside, a little ashamed. — Sorry, he said to her when she came out. I didn’t see anything. — That’s okay. You responded real quick. — Wasn’t Dan Smooth in equal measure a bystander and victim of God’s tricks?

She was wearing her pink nightgown with the dinosaurs on it. He could see its paleness in the dark. Her breath smelled like toothpaste and tomato soup. Gazing at him wisely with shining eyes, she put her finger to her lips as she got into his bed. Instantly she was in his arms, holding him tight as she rubbed up against him, and his penis was hard. He rolled her onto her back, and his hand was on her underpants just like before, and then his middle finger had gone inside her panties, and he brought his hand to his mouth and sucked his middle finger to get it wet and then slipped it between the lips of the child’s vulva, the soft and ever so delicate lips which were to render those of any mature woman so comparatively coarse forever, so rough and hairy and repulsive to him. What was the meaning of how he felt? He was sure that he hadn’t sought this out. He was equally sure that to deny and reject this experience was to do wrong both to Darcy and to himself. He knew that in a moment he was going to slip the panties from the hips of this softly giggling girl. The doctor was wrong. She had never screamed and she had never bled. But then he was equally sure that he was going to send Darcy away. He groaned with anguish, looking into her eyes. Then the doctor’s words crawled inside his skull again like hungry insects, and he thought: I am not sure. I cannot be sure. And to do this and not to be sure is to do wrong.