The Professor and the Prostitute (2 page)

Well, that's a writer for you—never satisfied. As Philip Roth has written, “If you want to be reminded of your limitations virtually every minute, there's no better occupation to choose. Your memory, your diction, your intelligence, your sympathies, your observations, your sensations—never enough.”

One last word. I mentioned that I wanted to explore, in my pieces, the question of whether I myself could do the things my characters did. Whether the reader could. Today, these questions seem almost quaint to me, but at the time I began to write about murder and madness, I was under the sway of that pop psychology tenet that holds that the murderer, the swindler, the matricide and patricide, even the infanticide, are people “just like us.” We all harbor aggressive thoughts, feelings of entitlement, surges of wrath and rage, goes that argument. And thus we too might one day, under certain stresses, experience fates like those of some of the people described in this book.

My investigations taught me otherwise. Often, when I'd begin researching a story about some startling act committed by an apparently upstanding middle-class citizen, an act of self- or other-directed destruction, it would appear that the aberrent deed that had captured my interest had happened out of the blue. But delving invariably revealed that my protagonists had a history of psychological instability. They acted, not out of the blue, but out of markedly gray troubled pasts. They suffered from psychiatric diseases like mania, severe depression, or drug abuse, or classic emotional character disorders, like sociopathy or hysteria.

No doubt there is, somewhere, a fine humanitarian impulse behind our willingness to believe that those who are violent toward themselves or others are people just like us. But to some extent we hold this belief out of ignorance of how certain personality disorders and psychiatric illnesses can foreshadow chaos and catastrophe. The stories in this book shed light on this matter and attempt to convey all I have learned, in the course of writing them, about the psychological forces behind tragic and mystifying events.

THE PROFESSOR AND THE PROSTITUTE

Boston, Massachusetts

1983

From the moment I first heard about the case of William Douglas, a professor at a medical school in Boston accused of murdering a young prostitute with whom he had fallen in love, I was intrigued. Naturally, I wondered if the professor had killed the prostitute. But more than that, I wondered about the love affair. I found the notion of a respectable man losing his heart to a hooker fascinating
.

I wouldn't be the first writer to do so. The love of a professor for a prostitute had inspired Heinrich Mann's
The Blue Angel.
Dostoyevsky had written about a scholar's passion for a prostitute in
Notes from the Underground,
then returned to the subject two years later, creating a similar entanglement for Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment.
Anatole France, Somerset Maugham, Émile Zola, and a host of other writers had also addressed the matter, probing in powerful novels and short stories the love of reputable males for reprobate females. There is something about such relationships that tantalizes the imagination
.

No doubt this is because they speak to a secret part of ourselves, a place where reason disappears and fantasy takes over. To love a prostitute, to enter her world of unbridled sexuality, is an archetypal
fantasy for men, just as to be a prostitute, to be free of the inhibitions of society, is an archetypal one for women
.

In April 1983, I determined to write about Douglas and went to New England to research the story and attend the trial. Shortly after I started, Douglas, who had been maintaining his innocence for over a year, unexpectedly confessed to having killed his prostitute-sweetheart, Robin Benedict. The murder mystery was solved. But I continued my exploration, for to me there had all along been something far more compelling about the story than knowing whether or not the professor had killed the prostitute. It was the drama of fantasy made real
.

The Professor in Nighttown

One night in March 1982, William Henry James Douglas, a professor of anatomy and cellular biology at Tufts University's School of Medicine in Boston, decided, as he often did when he worked late into the night, that he was too keyed up to go directly home and to bed. His work was intricate, demanding. He needed to relax; he needed a drink. Sex. A way of losing the self by embracing another.

A different man might have gone home, poured himself a Scotch, and, placing a needy, affectionate hand on his wife's sleeping body, awakened her to his troubles and his longing. But for Douglas, such an act was out of the question. He and Nancy, married for two decades and the parents of three children, hadn't made love in years. Indeed, he felt he no longer loved her, at least not in the romantic way he yearned to be in love. And when, recently, Nancy had taken a night job in a nursing home, he hadn't tried to discourage her, hadn't even raised the slightest objection. What difference did it make when they no longer even slept in the same room?

Forty years old and feeling that life had passed him by, Douglas packed up his briefcase, shut the door to his malodorous laboratory, and hurried through the empty, echoing corridors of the medical school. He would go to a bar, he decided. Maybe even get himself a prostitute. It wouldn't be the first time. And where was the harm, as long as Nancy and the children didn't know?

A few moments later, he was strolling down the streets of Boston's red-light district, known as the Combat Zone, an area of strip joints, peep shows, and pornographic bookshops, of garish, multicolored light bulbs and crude signs advertising such attractions as “Live Acts Live!” and “Nude College Girls!”

The Zone is a small area, a mere four blocks or so. And it is so close to Boston's new cultural center and to several of the city's most prominent hotels that ordinary citizens frequently wend their way through. But its natural denizens are pushers, pimps, and prostitutes, and they are so frenzied that even the police who patrol the area speak of them with a certain amount of astonishment. “Sometimes I don't believe the kinds of characters we've got here,” one member of the squad that polices the mean streets said to me. “I wish I could show you the footage we shot of activities in the Zone, things like the frames where one girl, pissed off at a customer, stands in the parking lot arguing with him and then suddenly grinds out her cigarette in his cheek.” He went on to mention that muggings and knifings, beatings and thefts, were commonplace, and that even killings were not entirely rare.

Bill Douglas wasn't fearful. Perhaps he felt his bulk protected him. He was tall and weighed close to 275 pounds. Or perhaps he felt at ease because he knew the Zone well. It abuts the soaring, sterile architecture of the medical school, and ever since he'd joined Tufts a few years before, he'd made frequent forays into the area. Whatever the reason, he shuffled slowly down one of the Zone's side streets, peering into the most popular hangouts, and finally slipped into a bar called Good Time Charlie's.

When I visited Charlie's, I was struck by the fact that despite its cheerful, backslapping name, it was extremely dreary. The customers, chiefly young sailors or seedy, down-at-the-heels foreigners, looked more lonesome than libidinous. Downcast, they drooped forlornly over their drinks, sipping steadily and eyeing with a minimum of interest the topless and bottomless dancers bumping and grinding mechanically to the sounds of a distant jukebox. Even when a tune ended and the dancers, in whatever state of undress they found themselves, climbed down from the overhead runway and perambulated through the smoky bar to put fifty cents in the jukebox, they—and the nearness of their naked flesh—did not seem to arouse the lethargic, lonely drunks.

Of course, the dancers weren't much to look at. They were, for the most part, bony or flabby or haggard. Nor were most of the prostitutes who frequented the bar particularly appealing. They were getting on in years; their expressions were obscured beneath heavy coats of makeup; their clothes were garish. But oddly, here and there, were some young prostitutes who were fresh-faced, beautifully built, handsomely dressed.

I'd come to Charlie's with a friend, a prosperous, proper Bostonian who'd never been in a Zone bar before but had agreed to accompany me for my safety's sake and also, I suppose, out of curiosity. All evening, as I interviewed the bartender and several prostitutes who had known Robin Benedict, my friend kept saying, “How could a man like Douglas—an academic—be attracted to women like these? Sex, yes. But attracted?
Involved?
” He was disdainful, uncomprehending. Yet, before the night was out, he would alter his views. One of the handful of beautiful, well-groomed prostitutes approached him, and soon he was buying her drinks and listening to the story of her life.

She was young, dressed in an Ultrasuede suit, wore her hair in a librarian's twist, and spoke impeccable Boston English. Once, when she got up for a moment, my friend whispered to me, “I'm getting a bit of insight into your professor now.”

The woman who'd picked up my friend was called, she told him, Sabrina, and when he asked her what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like Charlie's, she said—and he liked believing her—that she was here just temporarily. As soon as she got a bit of a nest egg together, she'd be going back to her studies, finishing her M.A. in anthropology at Boston University. My friend was fascinated and talked with her animatedly, only to be bitterly disappointed when the manager of Good Time Charlie's suddenly arrived, and, worried that we might be detectives, shooed Sabrina out of the bar.

Robin Benedict must have been a lot like Sabrina. Certainly, she was beautiful, slim and willowy with wide dark eyes, luxuriant, raven-colored hair, and smooth pale skin with an underglow of topaz and tourmaline. She dressed conservatively, wearing slacks or skirts with matching blazers. And she had a lively, outgoing manner, a high-spirited way of putting shy men at ease.

Douglas, a diffident man and always something of an observer from the sidelines, may have noticed these appealing traits about Robin and, attracted by them, put down his drink and tried to strike up a conversation with her. Or she may have addressed him first, sliding onto a barstool alongside him and offering him the usual Good Time Charlie's invitation to sex, “Hey, honey, lookin' to go out tonight?”

What is certain is that within minutes of their first conversation, Robin Benedict took William Douglas to a trick pad she had rented on Boston's fashionable Beacon Street.

I'd always thought of Beacon Street as the home of Boston's most affluent Brahmins, and certainly it retains that reputation in the national consciousness. But while the old, elegant town houses still line the street, most are no longer occupied by individual families. They have been converted into compact condominiums, headquarters for college associations, or small, shabbily decorated furnished apartments. Students and young, poorly paid professionals rent the apartments, but so too—often without the other occupants' realizing it—do prostitutes. Apparently they have many johns with a sexual preference for erotic activity at a good address.

William Douglas had sex on Beacon Street with Robin Benedict that night, staying with her for half an hour and paying her the obligatory $50. Then he went home to the suburbs.

Perhaps, when he got there, he looked in on his sleeping children, fifteen-year-old Billy, fourteen-year-old Pammy, and twelve-year-old Johnny, and afterward had his favorite late-night snack, milk and cookies. Or perhaps he went into his bedroom, delved into the recesses of his closet, and got out his pornography collection, books and magazines with titles like
Gang Up on Gail, Little Sarah's Slave Training, Forced to Submit
, and
Illustrated Gang War Torture
, stacks of ads recommending massage parlors and escort services, and folders of newspaper articles about prostitutes.

Robin returned to Good Time Charlie's. Possibly when she did she stopped for a minute to talk with the only close girlfriend she had there, another prostitute named Savitri Bisram. Perhaps Robin and Savi relaxed for a few moments, giggling about the fat man's funny speech and his unfortunate looks. Douglas had a hesitant way of expressing himself, a recessed chin, thin lips, and, for all his girth, tiny hands and feet. But more probably Robin simply sauntered into Good Time Charlie's, surveyed the men at the bar, and found herself another john. Robin sometimes made as much as $1,200 a night. “Her typical workday,” Douglas would later say, his words betraying a certain amount of grudging admiration, “was from three-thirty or four o'clock in the afternoon until at least three and usually until four in the morning.”

The home to which Douglas returned that night was in Sharon, Massachusetts, a neat, relatively new suburb, popular with liberal, community-minded young families. Douglas's house was on Sandy Ridge Circle, a well-landscaped street a few minutes' drive from the center of town. Here the houses, many with bay windows, fireplaces, and broad porches, have basketball nets in the driveways and bicycles, tricycles, and automotive toys scattered on the lawns. Sharon, and in particular Sandy Ridge Circle, is a fine place to bring up children.

Bill and Nancy had moved there as soon as he'd received his appointment at Tufts in 1978. It was only about a thirty-minute drive to the medical school, and it had a good school system. Bill Douglas worried about things like that. He placed great store in education.

He'd come by his the hard way. The child of lower-class parents—his mother, an immigrant from Germany, had been a maid, his father a plumber—he'd had to work during his high school days in upstate New York and to attend a less than distinguished government-subsidized teachers' college, Plattsburgh State, in Plattsburgh, New York. While he was in college, his father died in a construction accident. There was no money for graduate school. Bill finished Plattsburgh, married Nancy, a heavyset, plain young woman, and settled down to life as a small-town high school science teacher. He had gone as far academically as he could afford to go. But after a year or two of teaching, he applied for and managed to obtain a National Science Foundation fellowship for a year of postgraduate study at Yale.