Rape, you see, requires an erect penis. And a successful rape culminates in orgasm and ejaculation. And who would imagine that all of this takes place in the absence of sexual desire?
Rape, I submit, is often nothing more or less than the sexual activity of a sociopath, a man lacking conscience who, as he might tell you, quite sensibly seeks to satisfy himself sexually without having to resort to candy or flowers, sweet words and false promises. He doesn’t have to take his chosen partner to dinner or a movie, doesn’t have to feign interest in her conversation, doesn’t even have to tell her she looks nice. Why, he proves she looks good to him, good enough to throw down and ravish. Isn’t that compliment enough?
I’ve no clear idea what makes a person grow up sociopathic. Is it in the genes? The upbringing? I don’t have the answer. Nor, in fact, do I know much about Gregory Dekker in particular. He was never a patient of mine.
Susan Trenholme was, however.
She was a remarkably ordinary young woman, neither beautiful nor plain. Her hair was light brown, not quite blond, and her figure was womanly, and fuller than she’d have preferred; she was always trying new diets and over-the-counter appetite suppressants, all in an effort to lose five pounds over and over again. She was, I suppose, no more neurotic in this area than most young women; if they were as obsessed about their height, they’d all put on weighted boots and suspend themselves from the ceiling.
Susan met a young man in college and lived with him for two years. They drifted apart, and she was twenty-six years old and living alone when Gregory Dekker caught up with her in the parking lot of her apartment complex, knocked her to the ground, fell on her, and told her not to struggle or make a sound or he’d kill her.
Looking into his eyes, she knew he was serious. And she became convinced that, whether she cried out or remained silent, whether she struggled or acquiesced, her fate was sealed. He would kill her anyway once he’d had his pleasure with her.
In fact she had grounds for this assessment, beyond what she was able to read in his eyes. A rapist whose description matched her assailant had committed a string of rapes in the area within the past several months, and had left his two most recent victims for dead; one recovered, one was dead on arrival at a nearby hospital. Unlike the monster in your story, Soldier, Gregory Dekker was not given to lust-murder; he killed only to avoid being caught.
And he would have been easy to pick out of a lineup. If Susan Trenholme looked ordinary, Gregory Dekker surely did not. Whatever the cause-a drunken obstetrician misusing his forceps, a mother who dropped him on his face in infancy-Dekker was an heroically ugly young man. His schoolmates, perhaps inevitably, called him Frankenstein, and they had reason. Extensive facial and dental surgery would have helped, no doubt, but his parents couldn’t have afforded it, if they even thought of it.
Dekker probably assumed he could never have a woman other than by force. He was almost certainly wrong in that assessment. Some women find ugly men particularly attractive, and others respond to qualities other than appearance. I knew one woman, for example, who held that there was no such thing as an ugly millionaire.
Well, Dekker was no millionaire, nor did he have other attractive qualities, so perhaps rape was a sound choice for him. In any event, it worked. When he wanted a woman, he took her. Sometimes this happened in the course of his work, which was burglary; he broke into homes and offices, grabbed cash or something readily converted thereto, and fled. If there was a woman on the premises, and if he liked her looks, he would take her as automatically as he would take her jewelry.
In Susan’s case, he saw her at a supermarket, followed her to her car, then tailed her in his car and assaulted her, as I’ve said, in her parking lot. And would very likely have left her there, dead or dying, if she hadn’t taken action.
She didn’t resist, didn’t cry out. On the contrary, she did everything she could to make things easier for him, and, after he had entered her, she wriggled pleasurably beneath him and began uttering little moans and yelps of pleasure.
And she proceeded to do what countless of her sisters have done, not on the gritty pavement of a parking lot but in the sweet embrace of the marriage bed. To wit, she faked an orgasm.
It must have surprised the daylights out of her partner. I don’t know what sort of fantasy life Gregory Dekker may have led, but he wouldn’t have been the first rapist to persuade himself that a potential victim actually longed for his embrace, that a woman taken initially by force might be rendered passionate by his lovemaking, and might enjoy it as much as he did. None had shown any sign of enjoying his attentions in the past, but who was to say that his luck might not change?
If he’d entertained such fancies, he must have thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Because here was this creature, moaning and twisting in his arms, and ultimately wrapping her legs around him and crying out Yes! and telling him, as he lay exhausted in her arms, what a great lover he was and how she’d always dreamed of a man like him and a moment like this.
Did it enter his mind that she was putting on an act? Even if he believed her, wouldn’t it be safer in the long run to bash her head in or break her neck?
He may have thought so, but she tried not to give him time for thought. She kept cooing at him, telling him how wonderful he was, talking about the extent of her excitement and satisfaction, running a loving hand over his distorted features, raising her head to kiss his misshapen mouth.
And then, as if unable to help herself, she fell upon him and behaved, well, like an impressionable White House interne.
By the time she was finished, she had effectively saved her life. Dekker believed what she wanted him to believe-that he’d excited and satisfied her and left her begging for more. And beg she did, wanting to know if she would see him again, if they could do this with some frequency. And wouldn’t it be even more wonderful in a bedroom, with the lights lowered and soft music playing, and the comfort of a mattress and clean cotton sheets?
They made a date for the following night. He was to come to her apartment at nine. He got there at eight and rang her bell at ten, confident by then that she hadn’t set up a police ambush. She met him with a drink in hand and soft music playing, telling him truthfully enough that she’d been worried he wasn’t going to come.
He made an excuse, but later, at the evening’s end, he told her how he’d staked out her building to see if any cops showed. “Just give me a minute,” he told her, “and I’ll hook your phone lines up again. I pulled them before I came in, in case you were planning to make a call.”
“ I wouldn’t do that,” she said.
“ Well, I know that now,” he said. “But I had to be sure.”
Before he left she made him a cup of cocoa. After he left she stood at the sink, rinsing the cup, and pondering the curious situation she was in. Her rapist was her lover, and she was fixing cocoa for him.
He saw her the next night, and the night after that. When he came over the following day he had a sheepish expression on his face. She wanted to ask him what was the matter, but she waited, and he got around to it on his own.
“ I may not be much good to you tonight,” he said. “On account of what came up this afternoon.”
“ Oh?”
He was working, he said, prowling apartments, seeing what he could pick up, and this woman walked right in on him. “Last thing I wanted,” he said, “but there she was, you know?” And he got this little-boy smirk on his face.
She let her excitement show in her face. “Tell me,” she said.
“ Well, I did her,” he said.
“ Tell me!”
“ What, you want the gory details? You know something, Susie? You’re as bad as I am. What I did, I was behind the bedroom door, you know, waiting for her, and she walks through and bingo, I got one hand over her mouth and the other grabbing her tits. Little tits, way smaller than yours, but they were nice.”