This is a novella, “Speaking of Lust,” written as the foundation of an anthology with the same title. Its only other appearance was as a stand-alone story in a UK paperback.
It’s a return to a very old-fashioned type of storytelling, with four archetypal characters interrupting their endless bridge game to recount stories from their own experience. Boccaccio, Chaucer—the form has a long history, and I had great fun with my attempt at it.
SPEAKING OF LUST
By Lawrence Block
“I dealt, didn’t I?” the soldier said. He looked at his cards, shook his head. “What do you figure I had in mind? I pass.”
The policeman, sitting to the dealer’s left---East to his South---nodded, closed his eyes, opened them, and announced: “One club.”
“Pass,” said the doctor.
The priest said, “You bid a club, partner?” And, without waiting for a response, “One heart.”
The soldier passed. You could tell he was a soldier, as he wore the dress uniform of a brigadier general in the United States Army.
“A spade,” the policeman said. He too was in uniform, down to the revolver on his hip and the handcuffs hanging from his belt.
The doctor, wearing green scrubs, looked as though he might have just emerged from the operating room. He was silent, looking off into the middle distance, until the priest stared at him. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I pass.”
“Two spades,” said the priest, with a tug at his Roman collar.
“Pass,” said the soldier.
“Four spades,” the policeman said, and glanced around the table as if to confirm that the bidding was over. The doctor and priest and soldier dutifully passed in turn. The doctor studied his cards, frowned, and led the nine of hearts. The priest laid down his cards---four to the king in the trump suit, five hearts to the ace-jack---and sat back in his chair. The policeman won the trick with the ace of hearts from dummy and set about drawing trump.
Play was rapid and virtually silent. A fire crackled on the hearth, and the clock on the mantel chimed the quarter hour. Smoke drifted to the high ceiling---from the doctor’s cigar, the priest’s cigarette, the soldier’s stubby briar pipe. Books, many of them bound in full leather, filled the shelves on either side of the fireplace, and one lay open in the lap of the room’s only other occupant, the old man who sat by the fire. He had been sitting there when the four began their card game, the book open, his eyes closed, and he was there still.
“Four spades bid, five spades made,” the policeman said, gathering the final trick. The priest took up his pencil and wrote down the score. The policeman shuffled the cards. Ther soldier cut them, and the policeman scooped them up and began to deal. He opened the bidding with a diamond, and the doctor doubled. The priest looked at his cards for a long moment.
“Lust,” he said.
The others stared at him. “Is that your bid?” his partner said. “Lust?”
The priest stroked his chin. “Did I actually say that?” he said, bemused. “I meant to pass.”
“Which made you think of making a pass,” the doctor suggested, “and so you spoke as you did.”
“Hardly that,” the priest said. “I was thinking of lust, but I assure you I entertained no lustful thoughts. I was thinking of lust in the abstract, the sin of lust.”
“Lust is a sin, is it?” said the soldier.
“One of the seven cardinal sins,” the priest said.
“Lust is desire, isn’t it?”
“A form of desire,” the priest said. “A perversion of desire, perhaps. Desire raised to sinful proportions.”
“But it’s a desire all the same,” the soldier insisted. “It’s not an act, and a sin ought to be an act. Lust may prompt a sinful act, but it’s not a sin in and of itself.”
“One can sin in the mind,” the policeman pointed out. “On the other hand, you can’t hang a man for his thoughts.”
“Hanging him is one thing,” said the doctor. “Sending him to Hell is another.”
“The seven deadly sins are all in the mind,” the priest explained. “Pride, avarice, jealousy, anger, gluttony, sloth, and lust.”
“Quite a menu,” the soldier said.
“Sin is error,” the priest went on. “A mistake, a tragic mistake, if you will. Out of pride, out of anger, out of gluttony, one commits an action which is sinful, or, if you will, entertains a sinful thought. Thus any sinful act a man might commit can be assigned to one of these seven categories.”
“Without a certain amount of lust,” the doctor said, “the human race would cease to exist.”
“You could make the same argument for the other six sins as well,” the priest told him, “because what is any of them but a distortion of a normal and essential human instinct? There is a difference, I submit, between the natural desire of a man for a maid and what we would label as sinful lust.”
“What about the desire of a man for a man?” the doctor wondered. “Or a maid for a maid?”
“Or a farmer’s son for a sheep?” The priest sat back in his chair. “We call some desires normal, others abnormal, and much depends on who’s making the call.”
The discussion was a lively one, and ranged far and wide. At length the policeman held up a hand. “If I may,” he said. “Priest, you started this. Unintentionally, perhaps, by voicing a thought when you only meant to pass. But you must have had something in mind.”
“An altar boy,” suggested the doctor. “Or an altered boy.”
“Nun of the above,” the soldier put in.
“You should show the cloth a measure of respect,” the priest said. “But I did have something in mind, as a matter of fact. Something that came to me, though I couldn’t tell you why. Rather an interesting incident that took place some years ago. But we’re in the middle of a game, aren’t we?”
A gentle snore came from the old man dozing beside the fire. The four card players looked at him. Then the policeman and the doctor and the soldier turned their gaze to the priest.
“Tell the story,” the policeman said.
#
Some years ago (said the priest) I came to know a young couple named William and Carolyn Thompson. I say a young couple because they were slightly younger than I, and I was not quite forty at the time, which now seems to me to be very young indeed. Let’s say that he was thirty-six when I met them, and she thirty-eight. I may be off slightly in their ages, but not in the age difference between them. She was just two years the elder.
They were an attractive couple, both of them tall and slender and fair, with not dissimilar facial features---long narrow noses and penetrating blue eyes. I’ve noticed that couples grow to resemble one another after they’ve been together a long time, and I suspect this is largely the result of their having each learned facial expressions from the other. The same thing happens on a larger scale, doesn’t it? The French, say, shrug and grimace and raise their eyebrows in a certain way, and their faces develop lines accordingly, until a national physiognomy emerges. Have you observed how older persons will look more French, or Italian, or Russian? It’s not that the genes thin out in the younger generations. It’s that the old have had more time to acquire the characteristic look.
The Thompsons had been married for a decade and a half, long enough, certainly, for this phenomenon to operate. And, spending as much time as they did together (living in a small house in one of the northwestern suburbs, working side by side in their shop) they’d had ample opportunity to mirror one another. Still, the resemblance they bore was more than a matter of shared attitudes and expressions. Why, they looked enough alike to be brother and sister.
As indeed they were.
William and Carolyn atte
nded my church, though not with great regularity. I’d heard their confessions from time to time, and neither of them disclosed anything remarkable. I didn’t really get to know them until Bill and I were brought into contact in connection with a community action project. We got accustomed to having a few beers after a meeting, and we became friends.
One afternoon he turned up at the rectory and asked if we could talk. “I don’t want to make a formal confession,” he said. “I just need to talk to someone, but it has to be confidential. If we just go over to Paddy Mac’s and have a beer or two, could our conversation still be bound by the seal of the confessional?”
I told him I didn’t see why not, and that I would certainly consider myself to be so bound.
The tavern we went to, a busy place in the evening, was dark and quiet of an afternoon. We sat off by ourselves, and Bill told me his story.
He grew up in another city on the other side of the country. He had an older sister---Carolyn, of course, but that revelation was to come later---and lived with her and his mother and father in a pre-war brick house in one of the older suburbs. He and his sister took after their mother, who was tall and blond. Their father was tall, too, but dark-complected, and heavily built.
His sister taught him to dance, took him shopping, and clued him in on all the things a young boy was supposed to learn. She comforted him, too, when he got a beating from their father. The man was a drinker, he said, and sometimes when he drank Bill would piss him off without knowing what he’d done wrong. Then he’d catch it.
One night when he was thirteen years old he said or did something to upset the man and got a few whacks with a belt as punishment. Afterward, his sister came to his room. He had been crying, and he was a little ashamed of that, too, and she told him he’d had a punishment he hadn’t deserved, so now he was going to get a reward. Just as she’d taught him how to dance, now she would teach him how to kiss.
“So you’ll know what to do when you’re out with a girl,” she said.
She sat next to him on his bed and they kissed. They’d kissed each other before, of course, but this was entirely different. Do you know how an unexciting activity may be said to be “like kissing your sister”? This was not like kissing your sister.
Over the next several months, the kissing lessons continued. She always initiated them, coming into his room when he was doing his homework, closing the door, sitting on his bed with him. This was very exciting for him, especially when she let him touch her breasts, first through her clothing, then with his hand inside her blouse. When she would leave his room, finally, he would relieve himself.
He was so occupied one day when, having recently left his room, she returned to it, opening his door without knocking and catching him in the act. He covered himself at once, but she had seen him, and she asked him what he had been doing.
“Nothing,” he said.
“You were touching yourself,” she said. “Right? But you shouldn’t have to do that, Billy.”
He said he couldn’t help it. He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t help it.
“I’m not saying it’s wrong,” she said, “but you shouldn’t have to do it yourself.”
She did it for him. And, from then on, that was how their sessions concluded, with her hand doing what his hand had previously done, and making a far more satisfying job of it. When they hadn’t had time together during the day, she would make a point of slipping into his room at night after he’d gone to bed. He would usually pretend to sleep, and without a word she would satisfy him with her hands and return just as silently to her own room.
One night she used her mouth. The next day he asked her if she would do that again, and she said, “Oh, you mean you weren’t really sleeping?”
Their play continued, and over time she led him on a veritable Cook’s tour of sexuality, which eventually included every act either of them could think of short of actual coition. Their pleasure was hampered only by the fear of discovery, and on more than one occasion they narrowly escaped having a parent walk in on them. Thus they limited themselves to relatively brief encounters, and had to avoid crying out in fulfillment. Quick and quiet, that was the nature of their coupling.
Not surprisingly, they dreamed of being able to spend an entire night together in safety and privacy. The sister raised the subject often, telling him just what she would like to do to him, and what she would have him do to her.
“Maybe when we’re older,” she said. “When we’re both out of the house. Unless you find somebody else by then.”
But there would never be anybody else, he assured her. She was the only one he wanted.
What she didn’t point out in response, and what he knew without being told, was that what he wanted, what they both wanted, could never be. They were brother and sister. They could never be man and wife.
He couldn’t imagine himself with anyone else, couldn’t bear the thought of her in someone else’s arms. She was his and he was hers. How could he marry another woman, a stranger?
“I thought of becoming a priest,” he told me. “If I couldn’t have her, then it would be easier if I never had to have anyone. Then the absurdity of the notion struck me. I was in bed with my sister, I was committing all kinds of sins with her, and the fact that I wouldn’t be able to go on committing them forever made me think I had a vocation. But I swear it seemed perfectly logical to me at the time.”
One day she had an idea. He was still a member of a Boy Scout troop, although he’d become less active. The troop had a camping weekend scheduled. Suppose he signed up for it? And suppose she drove to the encampment and picked him up down the road around the time the troop’s bugler blew Taps and turned in for the night? They could go to a motel---she’d take care of booking a room---and they could have a whole night together and get him back to camp before Reveille.
That’s what they did. On Friday night, he waited until his tent mate was sleeping, then slipped out and trotted down the road to where she was waiting. It was all set for the following night, she told him. The room was booked, and she’d bought some massage oil and something provocative to wear. She wished they could go there now, but she had to get home. She had an excuse lined up for her absence the following night, but not tonight, and she had to get home.
They got into the back of the car and she brought him off quickly with her lips and fingers. Then he went back to his tent and lay grinning in the darkness, thinking of his tent mate and the other boys, thinking what they were missing.
The following night, Saturday night, he feigned sleep himself so that his tent mate would finally shut up, and then had to lie there listening while the other boy brought himself to lonely fulfillment. Then, when the boy’s breathing deepened in sleep, he crept out and hurried to the appointed spot. The car wasn’t there waiting for him, and he worried that she wasn’t coming, worried that she’d come and gone, worried that something somehow had gone wrong.
Then the car appeared, and minutes later they were at the motel. She had already checked in, signing a false name on the register and paying in cash. She drove straight to the unit, unlocked the door, and led him inside.
She apologized for having been late. “Mama wanted help folding laundry,” she said, “and I told her I was expected at Sandy’s, and she said Sandy could wait. And then he came home, and the two of them started going at it, and that gave me a chance to slip out. Oh, but I don’t want to waste time talking. I want to do everything. We don’t have to be quiet for once and I want to make noise. I want to make you scream.”
They both made noise, although no one screamed. They made love with the tireless enthusiasm of youth, and toward dawn she sighed and swore she couldn’t help herself and threw herself astride him and took him deep within herself.
Years later he would recall thinking that this was it, that they’d crossed a line. Up until then they had done everything but, and now they had done it all.
Before the sun was up she dropped him off where she’d picke
d him up, then headed for her friend’s house. “Sandy thinks I’m at a motel with a frat boy,” she said. “Little does she know. But she’ll let me in, and cover for me.”
His tent mate stirred when he returned, wanted to know where he’s been. The latrine, he said. The other boy went back to sleep.
He lay there and watched through the tent flap as dawn broke. He was a boy---fourteen now, he’d had a birthday since that first kissing lesson---but he felt like man. I just got laid, he told himself. I fucked my sister. A man, yes, and a sinner.
He wondered what his punishment would be.
Within hours, he found out.
Shortly after breakfast, after they’d divided into groups for morning activities, a Sheriff’s Office car pulled into the camp grounds. A tall man wearing sunglasses got out and talked to the scoutmaster. Then the two men walked to where Billy was sitting, trying to undo a bad knot in the lanyard he was making. It was kid stuff, entwining the plastic lacing to make a lanyard, and pretty tame compared to fucking your sister in a motel room, but if you were going to do it you might as well get it right.
The scoutmaster hunkered down beside him, his red face troubled, the perspiration beading on his large forehead. The Sheriff, or whoever he was, stood up straight as a ramrod. And the scoutmaster explained that there had been some trouble, that Billy was an orphan now, that both of his parents were dead.
Of course he couldn’t take it in. He was numb with shock. How could they be dead? He found out gradually, with no one eager to tell him too much too soon. They were shot, he learned, his mother three times, twice in the chest and once in the face, his father once, the bullet entering his open mouth and exiting through the back of his skull. Death for both was virtually instantaneous. They didn’t suffer, he was told.
And finally he was told who had done it. His father had come home drunk, and evidently there had been an argument. (He nodded as he took this in, nodded unconsciously, because this was something he already knew. But he wasn’t supposed to know it, because who could have told him? He’d been at the camp the whole time.)