Lawrence Block - Speaking of Lust

“And that’s it?” said the soldier.

The priest nodded. “More or less,” he said.

“ More or less,” echoed the doctor. “Is it more or is it less? Never mind. Lust, eh? Well, I suppose it was lust that got them started, but it sounds to me more like a love story than one of unbridled sexual passion. It’s not lust that keeps two people together for-what did you say? A decade and a half? No, that’s how long they were married. He was thirteen when she gave him his first kissing lesson and thirty-six or so when he told you about it, so that’s twenty-three years. If there’s some kind of lust that lasts for twenty-three years, I’d like a case of it sent to my quarters.”

“ And I’m not sure where the sin comes in,” the soldier said. “Unless the incest itself is the sin, and I suppose your church might call it that, but I don’t know that I would. Whom did they harm? And where’s the dissolute life to which sin’s presumed to lead? They became model citizens, from the sound of things. They had a secret, but what couple doesn’t have a few secrets, and who’s to say they do them any harm?”

A snore came from the old man seated by the fire.

“ My sentiments exactly,” said the doctor. “What I can’t figure out is why the fellow had that conversation with you. Incidentally, is it all right for you to recount it to us? You told him you’d consider yourself bound by the seal of the confessional.”

“ As you three don’t know the people involved,” the priest said, “and as I’ve changed their names, I don’t feel I’ve violated a confidence. The Church might see it differently, but I’ve long since ceased to be bound by what the Church thinks. My own conscience is clear on this subject, if on few others.” He turned to the policeman. “You haven’t said anything,” he said.

“ It’s a good story,” the policeman said. “There’s one question that occurs to me, though, but you may not know the answer.”

“ Ask it.”

“ I was wondering,” the policeman said, “whether anybody ever gave that girl a paraffin test.”

The priest smiled.

On the eve of their wedding (the priest continued) Carolyn cooked an elaborate dinner. Afterward they sat with cups of strong coffee, and she said she had something to tell him, something she was afraid to tell him. “If you’re going to marry me,” she said, “you should know this.”

From the time she was eleven years old, she said, their father had taken to coming into her room while she was sleeping. He initiated a pattern of sexual abuse which progressed gradually from inappropriate touches and caresses while she slept, or feigned sleep, to acts which required her to be awake and an active participant. For the last three years of the man’s life, the repertoire included sexual intercourse, and the man did not use a condom. She lived in fear that he would make her pregnant, but he managed on each occasion to withdraw in time, depositing his sticky gift on her belly.

Toward the end, though, he seemed to be considering impregnating her, and more than once said he wondered what kind of a mommy she’d make.

She hated him, and wanted to kill him. She hated her mother as well. Early on she had told the woman that he was coming to her room, that he was touching her. The woman refused to take it in. He’s your father, she was told. He loves you. You’re imagining things.

And so, on that Saturday night, while her father sat in front of the television set in a drunken slack-jawed stupor, she got the handgun from the drawer where he kept it, thrust the barrel into his open mouth, and pulled the trigger. When her mother came in to see what had happened, she leveled the gun and shot the woman three times. Then she wiped her own fingerprints from the gun, placed it in her father’s dead hand, and curled his fingers around it.

Then she went off to meet her brother, and arrived just a few minutes late. And, having just committed a double murder, and sure she’d be found out and sent to prison, she blotted it all from her mind and gave herself over to a last night of joy and consummation with her beloved brother.

But of course she was never found out. The murder-suicide scene she’d staged was good enough to pass muster, and no one ever took a good hard look at her alibi. Her friend, Sandy, kept her secret; it wouldn’t do to let out that Carolyn had been out cavorting with a boyfriend, nor would Sandy’s parents be comfortable with the knowledge that their daughter had facilitated such deception. So why not keep that little secret? Carolyn surely had enough tragedy in her life, with her father having killed her mother and himself. She didn’t need to have her sex life exposed to public scrutiny.

Nor did Billy’s alibi get much attention. He crawled into his tent after taps and crawled out of it at reveille. Case closed.

And so, on the eve of his wedding, William Thompson learned for the first time that his father was not a murderer and that his sister was.

The following day they were married.

“And lived happily ever after,” said the doctor. “A curious business, incest. More common, it turns out, than we used to think. No end of fathers, it turns out, lurch into their daughters’ beds. And they’re not always hillbillies or immigrants or welfare cases, either. It happens, as they say, in the best of families. As for brothers and sisters, well, what’s that but a childhood game carried to its logical conclusion?”

“ Playing doctor,” the soldier said.

“ Quite so. It must happen often, and who’d ever report it? If the two are close in age, if there’s no force or intimidation involved, where’s the abuse? It may be forbidden, they may be transgressors, but what’s the harm?”

“ I wonder how often they actually marry,” the policeman said.

“ Not too often,” the doctor said. “I can’t imagine marrying my sister, but then I can’t imagine fucking her, either. Truth to tell, I can’t imagine anyone fucking her.”

“ If you had a better-looking sister…”

“ Then it might be a different story,” the doctor allowed. “Speaking of stories, that’s a good one, Priest. How did it turn out?”

“ I don’t know that it did,” the priest said. “Two years or so after our conversation, Carolyn gave birth to a daughter. I christened the child, and she certainly looked like her parents, for all that you can tell when they’re that small.”

“ So they rolled the dice,” the soldier said. “Although I suppose someone else might have been the father. Artificial insemination and all that.”

“ Or else they’d have been swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool,” said the doctor, “and that’s dangerous, but not always disastrous. On the one hand you’ve got the Jukes and the Kallikaks, those horrible examples they tell you about in high school biology class, and on the other hand you’ve got all the crowned heads of Europe.”

“ When we have more time,” the policeman said, “you can tell me which is worse. Any more to the story, Priest?”

The priest shook his head. “I was transferred shortly thereafter,” he said, “and lost track of them. I hope things turned out well for them. I liked them.”

“ And I like your story,” the policeman said. “Lust. I could tell a story about lust.”

The others sat back, waiting.

I’m not much of a storyteller (said the policeman) and I don’t know much about sin. Not that I’m free from it myself, but that I was not trained to think in those terms. My frame of reference is the law, the criminal code specifically. I can tell you whether or not an act is lawful, and, if it’s not, I can correctly label it a violation or a misdemeanor or a felony. And even then my classification will not apply universally, but only in the jurisdiction where I lived and worked.