Lawrence Block - Speaking of Lust

“I dealt, didn’t I?” the soldier said. He looked at his cards, shook his head. “What do you figure I had in mind? I pass.”

The policeman, sitting to the dealer’s left-East to his South-nodded, closed his eyes, opened them, and announced: “One club.”

“ Pass,” said the doctor.

The priest said, “You bid a club, partner?” And, without waiting for a response, “One heart.”

The soldier passed. You could tell he was a soldier, as he wore the dress uniform of a brigadier general in the United States Army.

“ A spade,” the policeman said. He too was in uniform, down to the revolver on his hip and the handcuffs hanging from his belt.

The doctor, wearing green scrubs, looked as though he might have just emerged from the operating room. He was silent, looking off into the middle distance, until the priest stared at him. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I pass.”

“ Two spades,” said the priest, with a tug at his Roman collar.

“ Pass,” said the soldier.

“ Four spades,” the policeman said, and glanced around the table as if to confirm that the bidding was over. The doctor and priest and soldier dutifully passed in turn. The doctor studied his cards, frowned, and led the nine of hearts. The priest laid down his cards-four to the king in the trump suit, five hearts to the ace-jack-and sat back in his chair. The policeman won the trick with the ace of hearts from dummy and set about drawing trump.

Play was rapid and virtually silent. A fire crackled on the hearth, and the clock on the mantel chimed the quarter hour. Smoke drifted to the high ceiling-from the doctor’s cigar, the priest’s cigarette, the soldier’s stubby briar pipe. Books, many of them bound in full leather, filled the shelves on either side of the fireplace, and one lay open in the lap of the room’s only other occupant, the old man who sat by the fire. He had been sitting there when the four began their card game, the book open, his eyes closed, and he was there still.

“ Four spades bid, five spades made,” the policeman said, gathering the final trick. The priest took up his pencil and wrote down the score. The policeman shuffled the cards. Ther soldier cut them, and the policeman scooped them up and began to deal. He opened the bidding with a diamond, and the doctor doubled. The priest looked at his cards for a long moment.

“ Lust,” he said.

The others stared at him. “Is that your bid?” his partner said. “Lust?”

The priest stroked his chin. “Did I actually say that?” he said, bemused. “I meant to pass.”

“ Which made you think of making a pass,” the doctor suggested, “and so you spoke as you did.”

“ Hardly that,” the priest said. “I was thinking of lust, but I assure you I entertained no lustful thoughts. I was thinking of lust in the abstract, the sin of lust.”

“ Lust is a sin, is it?” said the soldier.

“ One of the seven cardinal sins,” the priest said.

“ Lust is desire, isn’t it?”

“ A form of desire,” the priest said. “A perversion of desire, perhaps. Desire raised to sinful proportions.”

“ But it’s a desire all the same,” the soldier insisted. “It’s not an act, and a sin ought to be an act. Lust may prompt a sinful act, but it’s not a sin in and of itself.”

“ One can sin in the mind,” the policeman pointed out. “On the other hand, you can’t hang a man for his thoughts.”

“ Hanging him is one thing,” said the doctor. “Sending him to Hell is another.”

“ The seven deadly sins are all in the mind,” the priest explained. “Pride, avarice, jealousy, anger, gluttony, sloth, and lust.”

“ Quite a menu,” the soldier said.

“ Sin is error,” the priest went on. “A mistake, a tragic mistake, if you will. Out of pride, out of anger, out of gluttony, one commits an action which is sinful, or, if you will, entertains a sinful thought. Thus any sinful act a man might commit can be assigned to one of these seven categories.”

“ Without a certain amount of lust,” the doctor said, “the human race would cease to exist.”

“ You could make the same argument for the other six sins as well,” the priest told him, “because what is any of them but a distortion of a normal and essential human instinct? There is a difference, I submit, between the natural desire of a man for a maid and what we would label as sinful lust.”

“ What about the desire of a man for a man?” the doctor wondered. “Or a maid for a maid?”

“ Or a farmer’s son for a sheep?” The priest sat back in his chair. “We call some desires normal, others abnormal, and much depends on who’s making the call.”

The discussion was a lively one, and ranged far and wide. At length the policeman held up a hand. “If I may,” he said. “Priest, you started this. Unintentionally, perhaps, by voicing a thought when you only meant to pass. But you must have had something in mind.”

“ An altar boy,” suggested the doctor. “Or an altered boy.”

“ Nun of the above,” the soldier put in.

“ You should show the cloth a measure of respect,” the priest said. “But I did have something in mind, as a matter of fact. Something that came to me, though I couldn’t tell you why. Rather an interesting incident that took place some years ago. But we’re in the middle of a game, aren’t we?”

A gentle snore came from the old man dozing beside the fire. The four card players looked at him. Then the policeman and the doctor and the soldier turned their gaze to the priest.

“ Tell the story,” the policeman said.

Some years ago (said the priest) I came to know a young couple named William and Carolyn Thompson. I say a young couple because they were slightly younger than I, and I was not quite forty at the time, which now seems to me to be very young indeed. Let’s say that he was thirty-six when I met them, and she thirty-eight. I may be off slightly in their ages, but not in the age difference between them. She was just two years the elder.

They were an attractive couple, both of them tall and slender and fair, with not dissimilar facial features-long narrow noses and penetrating blue eyes. I’ve noticed that couples grow to resemble one another after they’ve been together a long time, and I suspect this is largely the result of their having each learned facial expressions from the other. The same thing happens on a larger scale, doesn’t it? The French, say, shrug and grimace and raise their eyebrows in a certain way, and their faces develop lines accordingly, until a national physiognomy emerges. Have you observed how older persons will look more French, or Italian, or Russian? It’s not that the genes thin out in the younger generations. It’s that the old have had more time to acquire the characteristic look.

The Thompsons had been married for a decade and a half, long enough, certainly, for this phenomenon to operate. And, spending as much time as they did together (living in a small house in one of the northwestern suburbs, working side by side in their shop) they’d had ample opportunity to mirror one another. Still, the resemblance they bore was more than a matter of shared attitudes and expressions. Why, they looked enough alike to be brother and sister.

As indeed they were.

William and Carolyn attended my church, though not with great regularity. I’d heard their confessions from time to time, and neither of them disclosed anything remarkable. I didn’t really get to know them until Bill and I were brought into contact in connection with a community action project. We got accustomed to having a few beers after a meeting, and we became friends.

One afternoon he turned up at the rectory and asked if we could talk. “I don’t want to make a formal confession,” he said. “I just need to talk to someone, but it has to be confidential. If we just go over to Paddy Mac’s and have a beer or two, could our conversation still be bound by the seal of the confessional?”