The Professor and the Prostitute (5 page)

Ray called Robin's mother and tried to get her telephone number. But Shirley Benedict wouldn't give it to him, not even when he told her he thought J.R. was a pimp. Finally, friends got him a number for her at an apartment she was sharing with J.R., Savi Bisram, and Savi's two-year-old son, Taj—whose father was J.R. This odd extended family was living in the suburbs of Boston.

Robin was abrupt with Ray. She told him that she didn't “need any more men friends.”

Shortly afterward, he heard that she had been seen working in the Combat Zone. He asked a mutual friend to go there and check out the rumor. The friend went, saw Robin, and tried to speak with her. She pretended she didn't know him.

By then she was making $1,000 a night. And soon she would meet Bill Douglas, and would once again—for a short time, at least—be treated like a queen.

Throughout the spring and early summer of 1982, Douglas's infatuation with Robin grew. But if he was high on love, he was often high on something else, too. One night, about a month and a half after he started seeing her, Robin introduced him to cocaine. She herself was a steady user; from the beginning, he had been paying for her supply. Now he began to pay for his own supply as well, and often, when they met late at night, they would do the drug together. Robin, he would eventually tell the police, using words a child might use to describe a mother's grooming, “was very strict” about their habit and “would always check her nose and my nose very thoroughly because she didn't want to go back to the bar and have anyone see any traces.”

In this and other ways, Douglas found himself drawn deeper and deeper into Robin's world. He loved it. He met two other young prostitutes with whom she shared the Beacon Street trick pad and got to know them, talking to them about their lives and why they had gone into the business of sex. He studied the culture of Robin and her friends as he might study a new scientific field, noticing small details, learning the lingo, calling the prostitutes by the term they themselves used—“working girls”—and remembering with fascination such tidbits as the fact that one of Robin's girlfriends only liked driving red cars and that some prostitutes, Robin among them, were too fastidious to sleep where they worked.

He didn't know that Robin had a pimp—at least, not in those glory days. What was on his mind then was simply being able to spend as much time with her as he could. And he began to see her, not just at night, but in the afternoons before she started hustling, meeting her for a meal at a nearby Howard Johnson's. He also changed his schedule at Tufts, arranging to do his research in the truly small hours of the morning so that he could stay in his lab until she finished her work. He didn't care that this was often not until 2:30
A.M.
or even later. Whenever she finished, he would go to her and often stay with her until 4 or 5
A.M.
What he wanted was to be the last man she saw at night and to be with her every night.

He called her “Treasure.” He called her “Precious Lady.” And he began to shower her with gifts. Money. Records. Clothes. One night he even invented a delicious game of grab bag. He filled an envelope with slips of paper, on which he named various treats, and let her pull out a slip before they made love. She had long, tapered nails that she loved to keep exquisitely manicured, and he wrote on one of the slips: “Nails by Dorothy as often as you want them!” She had thick, flowing hair that needed constant attention, and he wrote on another slip: “A hair permanent at a salon of your choice as often as you wish!” On another slip he offered: “One complete set of super expensive cosmetics of your choice!” On another, “One bike of your choice!” It was the kind of game a father, used to the entertainments at children's parties, would have devised.

In his letters, now, he was using a coy lovers' code. He'd end his epistles with “QH's,” meaning “quick hugs,” and tell Robin how much he longed for “Velamint transfers”—the exchange, his lips to hers, of the little mint candies. And he'd draw cartoons on the bottom of his notes, the way adolescents do, round moonfaces of himself downcast followed by a plus sign and Robin's face. The sad Douglas face, plus the face of Robin, equaled, he drew, a happy Douglas face.

But if for the most part the letters were childish, the sentiments banal, there was some indication that in some small way, the emotionally stunted professor was at last beginning to experience an authentic romantic attachment. Once in a while, here and there, he would write of love not just in abstractions and clichés, but he would fleetingly describe personal experiences, particularized disappointments or triumphs. And when he did, he seemed to be on the verge of finding an individual, private voice for his feelings.

In May, when he was on a trip to Saskatoon, he wrote Robin that he sorely missed her and his children, implying that the affection he bore toward each was equal. He also—sounding like any married man carrying on an adulterous affair—complained about the difficulties of arranging time with his sweetheart. “My lab group at Tufts had a cookout for one of my postdoctoral fellows.… I wanted to ask you if you could go with me to this party … but Nancy would not tell me until the last minute if she was going or not (she did not) and I did not want to ask you at the last minute. Next lab party I am just going to ask you and not tell her about the party.” Rather touchingly, he described an accolade he'd received at the cookout, as if to hint to Robin that despite his drawbacks, he was not an altogether unworthy man. “One of my graduate students,” he wrote, boasting ever so indirectly, “showed up in a sweatshirt. On the front of the shirt was the skyline of Boston with many of the skyscrapers. Across the buildings was written in large capital letters—WHJD —. [The graduate student] suggested that all lab members in William Henry James Douglas's lab get one.”

At last, in the summer of 1982, he started to lose weight. “He did it on the strangest diet you ever saw,” one of his colleagues told me. “He went on eating all the stuff he liked—hot dogs, cheese and crackers, ice cream, cookies. And he even drank beer. But he lost a lot of weight. I figure he was taking Benzedrine.” No matter. Robin had told him he was gross, and in an effort to please her he began to shed the cage of fat that had for years imprisoned him.

Darkness Within

Being in love is never a simple matter. But for a man like the professor, always constrained, always interested in maintaining appearances, being in love was particularly complex. A part of him balked at adoring Robin. A part of him despised himself for it.

One night in the fall of 1982 this self-hatred surfaced, was articulated. But no one, not even Douglas himself, recognized its symptoms or understood the frightening future the words foreboded. That night he'd arranged, as was his habit, to be Robin's last date, the lover she saw when she was finished with all her other johns, the man she came home to after work, so to speak. He occupied himself in his lab at Tufts, waiting for her to telephone and say that she was free, and when she did, he hurried to her. They made love. He gave her $100. And afterward they left her trick pad, a new one she had just rented, and, in the cool, crisp dawn, went for a stroll.

They were just past Robin's building when suddenly the young woman, her arm tucked familiarly into Douglas's, noticed Detective Dwyer's car parked just down the street. “Maybe they won't notice us,” she said. “Let's keep walking.” But she warned Douglas that if they were noticed, and if the police detained them, he should not under any circumstances reveal that he had given her money. If he didn't admit to having paid her, she might be harassed but she couldn't be arrested. “No matter how hard they press you,” Robin coached him, “just don't say anything about money.”

They continued walking, trying to stay calm, but seconds later Dwyer and his partner, Mark Malloy, leaped out of the car. Dwyer took Robin aside and Malloy began interrogating Douglas. “Are you married?” he asked.

Douglas said he was, and Malloy said, “Well, this is going to make a nice stink in the papers, isn't it?”

Douglas began to shake.

“How much money did you give her?” Malloy demanded.

He forced himself to say “None,” and he even maintained that Robin worked for him over at the medical school and couldn't possibly be a prostitute.

He was proud of himself, then, and prouder still when Dwyer, too, began to press him. He didn't cave in, not even when Dwyer said, “Come on, we know you were in that apartment with her,” and insisted on taking him and Robin back to it.

There, Dwyer looked the apartment over and, certain of the purpose for which Robin was using it, told her she would have to move out of this place, too. Then he told Douglas to wise up. Robin was not only a hooker, he informed him, but she had a pimp. “Every cent you give her is going to her pimp,” he said.

Douglas refused to believe him. “You don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

“Oh, I don't, huh?” Dwyer got out a photograph and tried to show it to him. He wouldn't look at it. Then Dwyer uttered a name, Clarence J. Rogers. That was Robin's pimp, he said. But Douglas just kept repeating that it was impossible and that Robin wasn't even a prostitute. Maybe they had her mixed up with someone else.

Much later Dwyer would say, “He was adamant. He wouldn't budge. I think he didn't want to know she had a pimp. I mean, she just ran roughshod over him and he just followed her around, like she had him by the nose.… He was totally, totally infatuated.”

It certainly looked that way. But infatuation was only one of the emotions that Douglas harbored toward Robin. It would turn out that he himself was responsible for Malloy and Dwyer's having parked on Marlborough Street at that time on that night. It would turn out that just before leaving Tufts to be with Robin, he had telephoned the police and made a complaint about the trafficking in prostitution that was going on in her building. Disguising his voice, he had said to the officer who answered the phone that prostitutes working out of the building were ruining the neighborhood. “Bringing in undesirable elements” were the words he used. And before he hung up, he insisted, “I want it stopped.”

By then, Douglas had ample reason to resent Robin, who was costing him so much money. But in fact, although no one knew it at the time, he had been surreptitiously calling her activities to the attention of the police from the very first days of his involvement with her. And as a result Robin, from those very first days, kept getting arrested.

Douglas brought about her first arrest just weeks after they started seeing one another. He notified the police that she was with a john in her car. They came careening after her in a vice squad vehicle and, establishing that she'd solicited the fellow, a young music student, hauled them both down to court. Soon afterward she was arrested a second time. And a third. And a fourth. Other working girls didn't get arrested so frequently, she'd complain to Douglas, who would listen, sympathetic and consoling, never acknowledging his role in the proceedings.

Why would a man seek to get the woman with whom he was infatuated in trouble with the police? Detective Dwyer, discussing the matter with me months after it had been discovered, said, “Most likely, Douglas wanted to see Robin busted because he was jealous of the other men she saw and figured that if she kept getting arrested, she'd have to give up prostitution. Then she'd be his alone.” But Dwyer, a straightforward, reasonable man, was seeking a rational explanation for something that was far from rational. He failed to fathom Douglas's tortured, complex personality. Not that it is easy to do. It would take someone as attuned to the darkness within the human soul as Dostoyevsky, who wrote in
Notes from the Underground
, the story of an intellectual who falls in love with a prostitute, that he tormented himself with the question, “Should I not begin to hate her, perhaps, even tomorrow, just because I had kissed her feet today?”

William Douglas, by the fall of 1982, had come to hate himself, to view himself, in his own words, as an “undesirable element.” But he had also, virtually from the day he fell in love with Robin—from the first day he had, so to speak, kissed her feet—begun to hate her.

To be on the receiving end of obsessive love can be flattering, at least at first. Thus, it is often only after a long while that, when courted by an obsessive lover, even a mature and sophisticated woman recognizes the threat implicit in such love. Robin was only twenty and, while sexually wise beyond her years, still relatively inexperienced romantically. All through the early months of her relationship with Douglas, she not only didn't know he was causing her arrests, but had no comprehension of the complexity of his feelings toward himself or toward her. Emotionally naive, she had no inkling that he loved her in any but a unidimensional, storybook way. Moreover, she was vain and believed herself entitled to love. Small wonder, then, that although she was cynical in her own behavior, she imagined others as sincere, as feeling exactly what they said they felt. She saw proof of Douglas's fond feelings in his generosity. One day she wanted a MasterCard, and he willingly lied to bank officials, saying she was his employee, so she could get one. Another time she wanted a safe place to stash her cocaine, so he rented a safety deposit box in both their names. And when she needed a new car, he bought her the very one she coveted—a silver Toyota Starlet. Star was the name many pimps gave their most lucrative girls, but she didn't tell Douglas this.

She found proof of his devotion in other ways, too. He was always willing to help her out, to carry her belongings whenever she had to move, to pick up her mail at the post office box she maintained, to go to court and lend her moral support whenever she got arrested. One time when he came he vouched for her, telling the judge, just as he had told Dwyer and Malloy, that it was preposterous for anyone to call her a prostitute since she made her living by doing scientific illustrations for him at the medical school.