Lawrence Block - Speaking of Lust

“What a horrible story,” the policeman said.

“ Dreadful,” the priest agreed, wringing his hands, and the doctor nodded his assent.

“ I’m sorry,” said the soldier. “I apologize to you all. As I said, it wasn’t my own story, for which I must say I’m heartily grateful, nor was it a story I heard directly, and I daresay I’m grateful for that as well. It may have been embroidered along the way, before it was told to me, and I suspect I added something in the telling myself, inferring what went through the poor bastard’s mind. If I were a better storyteller I might have made a better story of it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told it in the first place.”

“ No, no!” the doctor cried. “It wasn’t a bad story. It was gripping and fascinating and superbly told, and whatever license you took for dramatic purposes was license well taken. It’s a wonderful story.”

“ But you said-“

“ That it was horrible,” the priest said. “So Policeman said, and I added that it was terrible.”

“ You said dreadful,” said the doctor.

“ I stand corrected,” the priest said. “Horrible, dreadful-both of those, to be sure, and terrible as well. And, as you said in your prefatory remarks, awful and wonderful. What do you make of young Luke, Soldier? Was he in fact a casualty of war?”

“ We gave him a gun and taught him to kill,” the soldier said. “When he did, we pinned medals on his chest. But we didn’t make him like it. In fact, if his instructor had suspected he was likely to have that kind of a visceral response to firing at the enemy, he might never have been assigned to combat duty.”

The doctor raised an eyebrow. “Oh? You find a lad who qualifies as Expert Rifleman and you shunt him aside for fear that he might enjoy doing what you’ve just taught him to do, and do so well? Is that any way to fight a war?”

“ Well, perhaps we’d have taken a chance on him anyway,” the soldier conceded. “Not so likely in a peacetime army, but with a war going on, yes, I suppose we might have applied a different standard.”

“ What passes for heroism on the battlefield,” said the priest, “we might otherwise label psychosis.”

“ But the question,” the soldier said doggedly, “is whether he’d have found the same end with or without his military service. The bullet that killed that first sniper put him on a path that led to the jail cell where he emasculated himself. But would he have gotten there anyway?”

“ Your lot didn’t program him,” the policeman said. “You didn’t have a surgeon implant a link between his trigger finger and his dick. The link was already in place and the first killing just activated it. Hunting hadn’t activated it, though who’s to say it wouldn’t have if he got a cute little whitetail doe in his sights?”

The priest rolled his eyes.

“ Sooner or later,” the policeman said, “he’d have found out what turned him on. And I have to say I think he must have at least half-known all along. You say he didn’t have sadistic sexual fantasies before the first killing, but how can any of us know that was the case? Did he state so unequivocally in this confession he wrote out? And can we take his word? Can we trust his memory?”

“ Sooner or later,” the doctor said, “his marital sex life would have slowed, for one reason or another.”

“ Or for no reason at all,” the policeman said.

“ Or for no reason at all, none beyond familiarity and entropy. And then he’d have found a fantasy that worked. And someone some day would have paid a terrible price.”

“ And the origin of it all?” the soldier wondered.

“ Something deep and unknowable,” the doctor said. “Something encoded in the genes or inscribed upon the psyche.”

“ Or the soul,” the priest suggested.

“ Or the soul,” the doctor allowed.

There was a rumbling noise from the direction of the fireplace, and the doctor made a face. “There he goes again,” he said. “I suppose I should be tolerant of the infirmities of age, eh? Flatulent senescence awaits us all.”

“ I think that was the fire,” the policeman said.

“ The fire?”

“ An air pocket in a log.”

“ And the, ah, bouquet?”

“ The soldier’s pipe.”

The doctor considered the matter. “Perhaps it is a foul pipe I smell,” he allowed, “rather than an elderly gentleman’s foul plumbing. No matter. We’ve rather covered the subject of lust, haven’t we? And I’d say our stories have darkened as we’ve gone along. I’ve lost track of the hand. Shall we gather the cards and deal again?”

“ We could,” the priest said, “but have you nothing to offer on the subject, Doctor?”

“ The subject of lust?”

The priest nodded. “One would think your calling would give you a useful perspective.”

“ Oh, I’ve seen many things,” said the doctor, “and heard and read of many others. There’s nothing quite so extraordinary as human behavior, but I guess we all know that, don’t we?”

“ Yes,” said the priest and the policeman, and the soldier, busy lighting his pipe, managed a nod.

“ As a matter of fact,” the doctor said, “there was a story that came to mind. But I can’t say it’s the equal to what I’ve heard from the rest of you. Still, if you’d like to hear it…”

“ Tell it,” said the priest.

As a medical man (said the doctor) I have been privy to a good deal of information about people’s sex lives. When I entered the profession, I was immediately assumed to know more about human sexuality than the average layman. I don’t know that I actually did. I didn’t know much, but then it’s highly probable my patients knew even less.

Still, one understands the presumption. A physician it taught a good deal about anatomy, and the average person knows precious little about his or her own anatomical apparatus, let alone that of the opposite sex. Thus, to the extent that sex is a physiological matter, a doctor might indeed be presumed to know something about it.

So much of it, though, is in the mind. In the psyche or in the soul, as we’ve just now agreed. There may well be a physical component that’s at the root of it, a wayward chromosome, a gene that leans to the left or to the right, and a new generation of doctors is almost certain to know more than we did, but will they be revered as we were?

I doubt it. For years people gave us more respect than we could possibly deserve, and now they don’t give us nearly enough. They see us as mercenary pill-pushers who do what the HMOs tell us to do, no less and no more. Lawyers sue us for malpractice, and we respond by ordering unneeded tests and procedures to forestall such lawsuits. Every time a fellow physician anesthetizes a pretty patient and gives her a free pelvic exam, why, the whole profession suffers, just as every cleric gets a black eye when one of the priest’s colleagues is caught playing Hide the Host with an altar boy.

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.