The Other Side of Desire (13 page)

Most of the group fell somewhere closer to the middle of a continuum: a continuum on which normal occupied a broad and blurry band. And thinking about all the men he’d worked with during the past fourteen years, including the retired accountant, Liddle said, “The difference between me and my guys is a very, very thin line.”

Liddle was a marathoner; he’d run Boston in three and a half hours. In his mid-fifties, his deeply sculpted and lined face, and his long, angular body, gave him a look of strength and stoicism. But a muted anxiety lay just beneath his self-restraint, an anxiety not only about the state of his men but about the state of all men, and about himself. It emerged when he spoke about pornography and its proliferation online. Internet porn was “overwhelming, desensitizing.” It was “a launching pad for molestation.” It was “a nightmare.”

“No!” he said, when I asked whether the images might be a way for his men to deal safely with harmful desires: let them masturbate to the pictures and let the longings subside. “That’s like an alcoholic saying, ‘I’ll only have a couple of drinks, I’ll only have low-alcohol beer.’” For those in his groups, he felt that even images of adults were dangerous; the legal would only lead to the illicit. But his fear extended beyond his men, beyond what they’d done and might do again with the underage. Pornography, for him, stood for something ungovernable, something threatening within male desire. He saw the threat everywhere, in movies, in video games, in advertisements. “The meta-message in our society is rape,” he said. It was unclear whether he meant the word to be taken literally or as a suggestion of all that was aggressive, uncontrolled, damaging. “There’s so much out there that isn’t responsible. I never allow myself to visit a porn Web site.” He’d put a block on his computer to prevent it. He wouldn’t let himself so much as fantasize about adult strangers. “I have very clear boundaries for myself. If I have deviant thoughts on the train, I think, How comfortable would I be with telling my wife what I’m thinking? How comfortable would I be with telling my kids? That’s how I block myself off.” Beyond the bounds of his marriage, all desire was deviant, ominous, liable to lead anywhere.

ONE
evening Liddle sent me by e-mail a parable he’d written. It was called “Desire.”

There once was a very gifted sculptor who came to a city and was allowed to come in to create his art. He began to work on a beautiful piece of marble he had obtained from a local quarry. While he was carving the stone, a rich patron came by and wanted the piece for his own house. The artist agreed and worked day and night for several weeks to complete the statue for the patron.

Once it was completed, the patron arranged for a large gala for the unveiling of the artwork. He invited the entire town to come to his house. As the moment approached to reveal the statue, there was much anticipation in the minds of the townspeople. The velvet covering was pulled back and there was a gasp of horror from the onlookers.

Each one of the people looking upon the artwork saw something different, something unspeakable. One person saw a man and a child having sexual contact, another saw two men engaged in sex, another saw a woman and an animal in sexual congress, and one saw a man exposing his phallus. Each was sure this was what the piece of art portrayed.

The townspeople reacted by blaming the artist and patron for what they saw. But none of them would talk about what they believed they saw in the marble. They turned on the artist and the patron and forced them to flee the city. Once they were gone, the townspeople destroyed the statue, yet the thoughts and images remained in their hearts.

 

SOMETIMES
when I sat in Roy’s kitchen in the evening, with the sky dark outside the windows and the light low over the table and the walls close, I was repelled by his story. I was repelled when I learned about the Internet screen name he’d used—“Freakypeephole”—though he had an explanation: the antidrug anthem he’d written back in the seventies, the song that had brought him his few minutes of airtime, was called “Freaky People.” He’d tried for this as his screen name, but it was already taken, and his server had supplied the alternative—he’d accepted Freakypeephole, as a joke, well before his crime. And I was repelled, above all, by his dissembling over Faith’s being twelve. The delayed revelation brought home all the more that she had been exactly my daughter’s age. The thought of a grown man with my bird-boned, barely pubescent daughter was enough to make my body curl in on itself and enough to make me murderous.

Yet there was excitement in Roy’s memories of his aunt. The idea of the slightly older girl beckoning him to the sun room was enviable in itself; that the girl was his mother’s sister added a particular electricity. And his stepdaughter’s education in the back parking lot; her letting the boy slide her pants over her hips—this was the standard stuff of pornography.

“I was flabbergasted,” the owner of the telecommunications repair company said. “I told him, ‘Roy, why’d you go off and do something so stupid?’”

I asked the owner about his use of the word “stupid”—it seemed to diminish the crime.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m not going to get philosophical, because I’m not smart enough. And I’m not trying to get myself or yourself in trouble. But we’re human beings. Everybody has these thoughts. The only thing that separates him from you and me is we didn’t act on them.”

For the state, Liddle’s boss had been watching over and treating men like Roy for twenty years. Before that, he’d been a therapist for child victims of sexual assault. “We want them to be the few, the perverted, the far away,” he said about the perpetrators. “We want there to be the clear line. We want there to be the sloped forehead. It just doesn’t exist.”

A volume of the
Archives of Sexual Behavior
, the world’s leading journal of research on sexuality, held an essay by Richard Green, a psychiatrist at the Imperial College School of Medicine in London and a professor emeritus at UCLA. He wrote about a study of around two hundred male university students. “Twenty-one percent reported some sexual attraction to small children. Nine percent described sexual fantasies involving children, five percent admitted to having masturbated to sexual fantasies of children and seven percent indicated they might have sex with a child if not caught.” The researchers, Green went on, remarked that “given the probable social undesirability of such admissions, we may hypothesize that the actual rates were even higher.” And Green wrote of work done by Kurt Freund: forty-eight Czech soldiers were hooked to a plethysmograph. Viewing a series of slides, “twenty-eight of forty-eight showed penile response to female children age four to ten.”

Not many studies had been done, as though to spare everyone the truth. But to think about the Internet or to consider legal history was to deal with something inescapable. Typing in “preteen porn” on AOL’s search engine brought a list of sites covering thousands of pages. And until the late nineteenth century in England, the legal age of sexual consent was ten.

“THEY
are not monsters. They are us,” Joan Tabachnick said. She was the director of public education for Stop It Now!, a national organization devoted to the prevention of child sexual abuse. “It’s so much easier to think only of the most sadistic, the most dangerous pedophile. It’s very comfortable. It’s very uncomfortable to say, ‘I know what it means to look at my child as a sexual being—I know what it means to want to touch my child.’”

Words like these made empathy for Roy come all the more readily. And this could lead to minimizing what he had done and attempted to do. But then I would think of the first babysitter who’d taken care of my daughter. I learned about Caroline’s past years after she’d left us to become a prison guard. I learned about her past as she told me about her training, about a morning at the Corrections Academy field when she’d clutched her pistol and done what the staff commanded: turned the target’s black silhouette into someone she wanted to shoot.

“Are you a pussy or what?” the trainers screamed at classmates around her. “Aim! Shoot the fucking gun! It’s your family, he’s coming into your house. What you gonna do?” It was pouring. A bank of dark mud rose behind the targets, a place for the bullets to bury themselves. Her new uniform was soaked and clung to her skin. She tried, at first, to control her crying, then realized gratefully that it didn’t matter, that no one could tell with the rain. Scarcely an inch taller than five feet, she stood with the target twenty feet away and her instructor spitting, “Who are you home with?”

“It’s just me and my kids.”

“So what the fuck are you going to do?”

“I’m going to kill him.”

I asked whose face and body she had conjured in place of the black silhouette. We sat in her dining room; on the wall above her hung a portrait of a dreadlocked woman. Caroline’s own hair surrounded her light brown face in dreadlocks curled so tightly they looked like braided extensions. Her voice was as careful and tight as her hair. She said that she pictured her stepfather.

“No one’s known what an encounter was really like. How he would start. What he would do. No one, no one. Because no one really cares to hear. My sister would never; she would die. My mother would probably—no one wants to know that.”

Her family was not, she wished to make clear, a chaotic ghetto stereotype. They had lived in the projects, but her mother had kept their home immaculate and made biscuits and gravy from scratch every weekend. Her stepfather worked steadily and later became a union official. He raised Caroline from the age of one, and throughout her childhood she believed he was her natural father, as he was her younger brothers’ and infant sister’s. A photograph, taken on a sun-blanched, tree-lined sidewalk when Caroline was around eight, showed him with her and a group of her friends, all gathered close. With a small Afro and fleshy cheeks, he smiles and looks like the kind of man who would lift his eight-year-old stepdaughter onto his shoulders and tour her around their apartment, so she could do what she loved—touch the ceiling and gaze down, from her great height, on the top of the refrigerator.

She was eight when, on her parents’ bed, with her mother out on errands and she and her brothers snuggled up to watch television, he started by asking her to scratch his head, to tend his Afro. He asked her to massage his back. In all of this she took pleasure, in the parting and oiling of his hair and the spreading of lotion on his skin, until he told her brothers to leave the room and instructed her to rub his chest. She complied uneasily, moving her hand in tiny circles. “Lower,” he said. “Lower, lower, lower.”

He led her hand to his penis. Over the next days he forced her mouth. Soon he was turning her facedown on her bed, pulling off her clothes, examining her body silently. He would part her legs; wordlessly he would stroke her back; he would rub himself against her. Whenever she tried to curl or cover herself, he clamped his fingers painfully on her shoulder.

In the sun-blanched photograph, Caroline, wearing a red skirt and black blouse, tugs at a red scarf with both hands, tugs in opposite directions across her throat in symbolic strangling—or mere fidgeting. In another picture, one of the many her stepfather posed and took, she smiles in the park, wearing black patent leather shoes and a white Easter hat, a miniature patent leather pocketbook swinging from her shoulder. Sometimes on Saturday mornings, if her mother went out early to do the laundry, he would wake Caroline, lifting her abruptly out of bed to begin. In one photograph she sleeps beneath a green-and-red striped blanket, head turned to the side and resting on her hand, mouth slack and features serene, hair covered in a pink kerchief.

“I never used to make any sound,” she remembered. She stayed quiet through anal rapes that went on, sometimes as frequently as several times in a week, for four years. Trying to soothe at least the physical pain she lived with, she would often spread strips of wet tissue paper between her buttocks as she lay alone in her room. She made sure to wash her bloodstained underwear herself. She would ask her mother not to go to the grocery store or else to let her come along, but she was careful never to beg, for fear that her stepfather would catch on and, as he had once threatened to do, kill her. Then, with the arrival of her first period, she gained what she’d thought of as a grown-up’s resolve. Her stepfather had never raped her vaginally; she decided that at least she would try to keep him from ever doing that. And she told herself she was too old now for what he had been doing.

While he listened to jazz one evening in the living room, and while her mother read the Bible in bed and Caroline washed dishes, she planned her words. She went back and forth in her mind about whether to use the word “rape.” She walked up and down the hall, from the kitchen to her parents’ bedroom door and back again, unable to say anything. At last, she stood beside the bed and told her mother, “Daddy’s been having sex with me.” When her mother asked if she knew what she was saying, Caroline touched her mouth, then touched her buttocks.

Her stepfather was arrested by housing project police and beaten within her earshot. A prosecutor steered her and her mother away from criminal charges, warning them that it would be her word against his and lamenting the outcome in advance. “I never thought,” Caroline told me, “that I’d be—how many years later? I’m almost forty years old—still thinking about this. I never thought it would last this long.”

She had three children of her own, a son in college and two younger twin daughters in a junior high school program for the gifted. As for herself, she said, “Just take something with very intricate parts and just shake the whole thing up and flip it upside down and stand it up. I mean, you’re not going to have a clue.” She talked about sometimes still missing her stepfather, about feeling somehow rejected by him, and she described a life so permeated by a sense of her own strangeness that, despite the success of her kids, she felt utterly uncertain of her judgments about everything. “All the norms that you’re taught are taken away from you,” she explained the effect of those four years. “It makes everything foreign.”