“NOW slowly open your eyes.”
They returned from the field of tall grass to the faces of the others. Liddle sometimes asked them for introductions, though the faces stayed mostly the same. They went around the circle. “I was convicted of two counts of sexual assault four, and three counts of risk of injury to a minor, and enticing a minor over the Internet,” Roy began. He forced himself not to mumble. Facing up to what he had done was a requirement for graduating from treatment. And he hoped this might lead—especially if he had Liddle’s recommendation—to a judge’s reducing his term of probation.
The treatment was grounded in an idea that seemed simple: to acknowledge both his crime and the anarchy of lust that lay within him was the first step toward his finding self-control. So the ability to confront himself, and to be candid with Liddle about his desires, was a requisite if he wanted to do anything outside the bounds of his probation restrictions: visit his parents over the state line, or go to a bowling alley or a movie or a family function, anyplace where he might come in contact with kids under sixteen. Any family gathering he attended had to be adults-only; he needed to leave right away if kids showed up. In his state, the group leaders and probation officers worked in tandem, weighing how well they could trust the men, and the therapists could be as cautious, as suspicious, as the probation officers. Together, Liddle and Roy’s PO set the limits on his existence. And unless he got Liddle’s recommendation and this led to a judge’s mercy, it seemed Roy would be existing this way for the rest of his life.
“I was sentenced,” he went on with his introduction, “to twenty years suspended after thirty days, with thirty-five years probation. My offense behaviors I engaged in were touching my wife’s daughter and her best friend sexually, touching them through their clothing between their legs, around their waist, moving my hand into the top of their waistband. I moved my hand under their shorts up to their panty lines. I used games that were called Chase and Spider to manipulate them into feeling safe with me.” His voice lowered, sped up. He rushed on into the next part, into the online messages he’d sent to Faith, suggesting what they might do.
HE told me his story time and again, in detail he withheld from the group, as we sat at his kitchen table or in an empty conference room at his job. He was still a supervisor at the telecommunications repair company. In a squat suburban building just off a highway, at worktables in vast, orderly rooms, he and his team leaned over high-tech consoles and microprocessors with multicolored flashing diodes. They fixed the circuitry or, depending on Roy’s decision, redesigned it. With the permission of Liddle and the probation department, he was allowed to work around computers as long as he never went online outside the watch of a colleague.
Everyone at his job was aware of his crime. He’d made a point of being open, of answering questions. The company’s owner, who’d hired Roy several years ago, had testified on his behalf at his sentencing. “You’re talking about a person I know,” the owner told me. “A stranger, I would write them off, I wouldn’t talk to them, I wouldn’t see them, if they did one-tenth of what he did.” And for Roy, within the squat building, it wasn’t only the owner who forgave him. As I drove with him to work one winter morning, he said that he was engaged to be married again—to a bookkeeper at the company, a colleague since before his arrest. A few weeks earlier, at a Christmas Eve dinner at his house, he’d hidden a ring in the chocolate cake he served for dessert.
“THEY’RE starting to develop. Look at their behinds. Look at my daughter, how pretty she’s going to be when she grows up.” Telling me about his crime at the well-polished kitchen table in his neatly kept wooden house, he always began with the words of Faith’s mother, Jackie, at the beach. “I’m going to have problems with her when she grows up. Sexually. With boys. I know I’m going to have a problem with her.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Look at you.”
“Please. If she ends up like me I’m going to have to shoot myself.”
He’d known Faith and her older brother from the time they were born. Their father had been a friend of Roy’s since kindergarten and, for years, a member of Roy’s band, until Jackie left him for Roy when the kids were around four and six. Roy had no children of his own. Faith and her brother lived with their father, but they spent lots of time at the house Roy shared with their mother. The boy, a prodigy on the drums, jammed in the basement with Roy on guitar. The time Roy spent with Faith was more childlike. But after that vacation at the shore, the games they played—often with her best friend, Elizabeth, too—grew sexualized at some level within his mind.
During Chase, he and the girls would turn off most of the lights. They plugged in a strobe light from his band equipment or a lamp that cast the shapes of moons on the walls, in blues and yellows and greens. His marriage was starting to come apart. Sometimes his wife was home, having shut herself in their bedroom for the evening. Sometimes she was out on her own. He raced after the girls through the house, through the colored beams.
“I remember times they would want to play Chase with me. I’d be sitting on the couch on Friday night, watching TV. I didn’t want to play with them. I was beat. And they’d come pulling on me. They were the ones that talked me into it. And I remember they’d go into their room and put their bathing suits on. I never told them to do that. And they’re running around the house shaking their butts at me.”
In Spider, each player had to sit motionless; if you moved at all you got pinched. The touching occurred during both games, and the dutiful confession Roy delivered to the group implied that the touching was blatantly, consciously sexual on his part. But the truth, he felt, was more complex, more elusive. He believed that a change had occurred with Jackie’s words on the beach, that he’d never before seen his stepdaughter as sexual, that a new awareness had penetrated at that moment, but he wasn’t at all certain that his own thinking, during the games, was permeated by desire.
He was obsessively introspective about all that had happened. He thought back to his anger at his wife, his fleeting idea that if she was going to leave him taking care of her kids, then he was “going to get something out of this, too.” Yet he recalled no lustful intent at that stage, not even any dalliance with fantasy. “I don’t think I ever touched them in their private areas,” he said, drawing a distinction between those areas and the edges of underwear. “Grabbing them, pulling them, knocking them down. Them jumping on me. It was still just teasing and playing with them. It wasn’t like I wanted to have sex with them. Is there a difference?”
LATELY he’d had fairly open conversations with his family about his crime. Male relatives had talked about their nieces entering adolescence and starting to flirt with them. “And they said, ‘Roy, when that happened, we stopped playing with them the same way. We wouldn’t let them jump all over us anymore—it scared the daylights out of us. After a certain age, it was no. No to this. No to that. ’Cause things can go a little too far.’”
Listening, I thought of the way Faith’s father had spoken to me on the phone one afternoon about his daughter. He was confirming details about what had happened when suddenly he interrupted himself to say how beautiful Faith was, even more gorgeous now than a couple of years ago when Roy had been arrested. “She’s killing me,” he said. “When I hug her I give her these half-ass hugs.” Then, without segue, he volunteered that he never looked at pornographic magazines. “I can appreciate the body, but…” His voice trailed off, sounding indifferent. He seemed to want to prove that eros had no hold over him. It was as though the erotic power of his daughter made desire itself uncomfortable, unbearable.
And I thought of my own twelve-year-old daughter, who, along with her younger brother, still loved to be chased through our apartment in a game they called Fee Fi Fo Fum. I, the monstrous giant, chanted the nonsense syllables and twisted her name to fit the rhyme: “I smell the blood of…” I dove for her across the couch. She rolled off the cushions and out of reach, shrieking and giggling as she sprinted down the hall
from the living room to the master bedroom with me right behind. She darted around the bed. Her body danced on one side while I, on the other, calculated the right moment to lunge. She taunted me, laughing, breathless, telling me I could never catch her, never cook her, never eat her, that this was the night I would starve. And then I made my move. I grabbed her by the wrist, clutched her by the waist. I lifted her into the air and threw her onto the bed. “Now I am cooking you!” I roared. “And then I will devour you!” She cowered in delight.
Constantly Roy tried, but there were so many things he couldn’t sort out. How much of the touching had been errant, inadvertent, amid playful mauling? How far beyond the normal had things gone at that stage? Had he gone beyond the normal at all? The questions made him reel; he couldn’t settle on single answers. “But was there sexuality behind the games?” he asked himself aloud while we talked—and answered immediately, “Yes.”
THE erotic became explicit, he said, when they were in separate rooms, at separate computers. The layout of the house mirrored the one he owned now, many towns away: a series of rooms along a narrow hall, a basement crowded with his guitars and keyboards and recording equipment. His stepdaughter was twelve, though he preferred, when talking to me and perhaps to himself, to say that she was by then fourteen, maybe thirteen. During his introductions in group, he didn’t mention how old she was at this point in his story, so for a short while I didn’t know her true age. When I read an old article from a local newspaper about the case and told him that it put her age at twelve, he insisted that the article was mistaken. Only after I had asked him a third or fourth time did he call me one morning: he had just phoned his sister and “found out” that the newspaper was right.
When she was twelve, one evening she sent him an instant message. She asked what he was doing. He sat in his office; she was in her bedroom down the hall. He told her he was working on band contracts. She wrote that she was bored, that none of her friends were online. He replied that her brother had been giving their mother trouble, that she was completely different, that she was “a really good little girl.”
“She came right back to me and said: ‘Roy, you don’t know me. I’m not a good girl, I’m a bad girl.’”
He’d always been attracted to the dissolute in the women he dated. He’d been infatuated with the wild streak in Jackie as she had left her husband for him. “I wrote back to her, ‘What are you doing?’
“‘I’m not going to tell you.’
“It just drew me in. You couldn’t have drawn me in any faster. I still remember it. Not excited as in arousal excited, but excited as in I’ve got to know more. Major adrenaline rush. I felt myself go flush. I felt like I got hot. I told her, ‘Gotta get back to work.’ She came back on a couple of times with little blurbs like, ‘Hurry up and get done, I need somebody to talk to,’ and I just ignored those comments because I was already overloaded.
“I finished the contracts I was doing. I got off the computer right after that, and I went immediately downstairs and started playing. That’s what I always do when something’s really got me; I need to shut it off. I had to shut that off at that moment. I had to calm it down. Put my headphones on. Had my guitar. Sat and played and sang. I have this jazz routine I like doing. I do a jazz version of ‘Blue Skies.’ ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’—it’s a slow jazz tune. I have a quick foxtrot version of ‘I’m in the Mood for Love.’ And ‘When Sonny Gets Blue’—it’s a pretty tune. I have about an hour’s worth of music. I just have to concentrate on the chord changes and the progressions, and it clears my mind.
“The only problem is,” he almost shouted to me across his kitchen table, “it didn’t help.”
SOON he loaded his computer with a software program that would allow him to monitor Faith’s online conversations. Alone in the house, he stepped back and forth along the hall, between rooms, between computers, making sure his system worked, that she wouldn’t be able to detect him reading what she wrote. And the next time she came over and logged on and began chatting with Elizabeth, their words ran across his screen.
“They started talking about school and the boys in school, and Elizabeth said, ‘I can’t believe you were in the back parking lot with’—I can’t remember the kid’s name. It was like watching a story. A sexual story, from what Faith started doing, kissing him, to him feeling her, to it just kept progressing. It was like a movie.” He followed the progress for weeks, months. He would masturbate after she signed off. “It had your mind so cranked you had to have some relief. I wasn’t having sex with my wife. At any point I thought this girl was going to have sex with this boy. That’s how intense this was. She told Elizabeth he had her pants off. It really got my motor going. I thought she was going to come on and write that she actually had intercourse with this kid in the back parking lot at school.”
He didn’t worry that she would walk down the hall and find him reading her words. “Impossible, because my computer didn’t face the door, and it would have taken a split second to shut it off. Nobody could catch me, nobody. I’m too good. I’m too good with computers. When I shut the computer off everything was erased. There was no trackable record on those PCs. It was wrong. So wrong. I put myself in such a bad situation, and I just fell into it. I guess that’s how a drug addict gets. Once you’ve fallen into that, it’s almost like that’s it: now you’ve got it in your head, and it’s not going to go away.”
The instant-messaging between him and Faith went on between his monitoring. “She would sign on and see that my computer was online, and she’d say something to me. That’s how the conversations started. And I would flip it. She didn’t start it sexually. I always flipped it. She didn’t do it. She was a kid.
“I said, ‘Have you been getting into trouble?’ And she said, ‘What do you mean by that?’
“‘I don’t know. You’re growing up now. You’re starting to turn into a woman.’
“‘What do you mean by that?’
“‘I don’t know.’
“‘How are you looking at me?’
“‘I’m looking at you as a girl turning into a woman.’
“‘What do you mean by that?’
“‘You’re going to be really attractive when you grow up.’
“‘Do you like me that way?’
“‘I’m not your father.’”
He suggested that, in front of him, she take off pieces of clothing. She asked what he wanted to see, said no to each request. Online conversation by online conversation, they went back and forth, she asking, he requesting, she saying no, desire surging within him until he suggested that they have sex. She refused.
It was months before her thirteenth birthday when he wrote that he was going to step out of his office and into the kitchen to get a soda. This time, he said that if she wanted to see what he wished to do with her, she should walk into his office and click on a window that would be on his screen. She left her computer and walked to his. When the window opened, a video showed “a man rubbing his penis on a girl’s vagina that’s been shaved,” he told me. A moment later, they passed in the hall. He remembered her calling him “disgusting” and each of them hurrying back to their own PCs. Petrified that she would report him, he begged her over the Internet to meet him on the stairs to the basement music room, promising that he would stay at the bottom. He pleaded his apology as she sat at the top of the stairs. Then she was gone.
AT her father’s house, she told her stepmother. Her father was away on a business trip. Her stepmother sent her back to Roy’s home so that, assuming he would make his requests yet again, she could print out his words for evidence. The transcript the police read went, in part, like this:
“what do u want again”
“any small thing you want to do”
“like what”
“let me see you”
“what”
“bottom half”
“no. what else”
“in panties”
“y can’t you do th
is stuff with my mom. she’s like me and she actually is ur own age”
“i just want to do something with you anything”
He was arrested. In court, he pleaded under the Alford Doctrine, acknowledging that the evidence against him was enough to prove his guilt, and—with decades of probation and the prospect of twenty years in prison if he violated its terms—he had been going to Liddle’s sessions now for a year and a half. “I’m so embarrassed,” he told me. “I can’t believe I did this. I just don’t know how I got myself there. I really don’t. It makes me sick.” And he looked that way—ill, aghast, mortified—whenever he finished his story.
“YOU will see people of varying ages.” A woman, one of Liddle’s colleagues, stood over Roy, reading from a set of instructions. He sat behind a gray laptop that rested on a metal desk in a small office in the probation building. Her long blond hair fell over a loose sweater. He would be shown one hundred and sixty images on the laptop screen, she informed him. Her voice stayed level, her face expressionless. “Imagine being sexual with the models in the slides.”
He wore a black blazer, a tie, sharply pressed khakis. From here he was headed straight to a meeting at work. She told him to score each picture, typing one for “disgusting” up through seven for “highly sexually arousing.” He should advance through the images by clicking the return key.
She showed him a practice set: a blond woman in prim white lingerie; a clean-cut man in a plaid shirt and khakis; a boy, who looked to me around twelve, straddling a bicycle with a book bag over his shoulder; a girl around the same age wearing a straw hat and eating strawberries; a pudgy little girl, maybe four, in a blue one-piece swimsuit…Liddle’s colleague asked Roy if he was ready. Sitting perfectly upright, always demonstrating his obedience, he said that he was. He was left alone with the photographs.
The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing Page 10