“ 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.
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?