Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (40 page)

I counted back. On Friday morning Caroline and I had gone to the rental agency. The girl behind the counter had said that the repairman would try to come by that afternoon. The unattractive girl, who was also his girlfriend. Then Caroline and I went shopping. We’d stayed away much longer than usual, because neither of us felt like going back to the house right away. We had wandered around the market and before that we went to have lunch somewhere. I couldn’t remember whether the water was already fixed when we got back, but the Saturday after that the boys had been spraying the girls on the diving board, so it was by then, in any case.

Then I thought about that Saturday evening. About the night on the beach. In front of the men’s room in the restaurant I had run into the repairman. I remembered the tattoo on his sweaty arm. On his other arm he had a cut. Three red stripes … His ugly girlfriend was crying out on the patio.
Maybe they’d just had a fight. Perhaps he’d been feeding her some line about why he’d been away for so long. Who knows, maybe she’d smelled it on him. Maybe she’d seen the cuts on his arm. And maybe, because after all she was a woman, too, she had immediately recognized them as scratches that could only be inflicted by a woman’s nails.

A girl’s nails, I corrected myself.

The Monday morning after I’d looked at the site, I suddenly saw the TV comedian sitting in my waiting room again. The same comedian who had said a year ago that I could stuff it up my ass and that he would never come back here again. I hadn’t taken a good look at the list of patients my assistant had drawn up for that morning—or rather, I had stopped looking over the list in advance months ago; I “took things as they came,” as they say.

“I went to another doctor for a while,” he said, once he was sitting across from me in my office. “But I found him—how shall I put it—just a bit too chummy. More chummy than you are, in any case.”

I looked at his round, not-unhandsome face. He looked healthy. The AIDS infection had apparently been a false alarm.

“Well, I’m pleased that you—”

“And there was something else,” he interrupted. “Something
about the way he acted made alarm bells ring. I don’t know whether you’ve ever experienced it—I’m sure you have—but there are people who go to great lengths to show how terribly tolerant they are of homosexuals. That they think it’s all completely
normal
. Even though it’s not normal at all. I mean, if it’s so normal, why did it take me five years to work up the nerve to tell my parents? That was what irritated me about that new doctor. He started in one time, for no good reason, talking about Gay Pride, how fantastic it was that all that was allowed in this town. Even though, as a homosexual, the one thing that disgusts me most are all those pumped-up male bodies dancing on a boat with only a shoestring between their buttocks. But that never occurs to some people, some
tolerant
people, that you as a homosexual might not think that’s so great.”

I said nothing, just nodded and worked my face into a smile. The clock across from my desk said that five minutes had already gone by, but it made no difference: I had plenty of time.

“Listen,” the comedian went on. “It’s great that we all have equal rights these days, sure. On paper. But that doesn’t mean you have to think it’s
charming
. People make that mistake. They’re afraid to be discriminating. That’s why they laugh even more loudly when an invalid in a wheelchair tells a joke. The joke isn’t funny, and besides, you can barely understand it. The invalid has an untreatable progressive illness. When he laughs at his own joke, the drool runs down his chin. But we laugh along with him. What was it again, Marc—you have a son and a daughter, don’t you?”

“Two daughters.”

“So would you think it was charming if one of your two daughters, or both of them, turned out to be lesbian?”

“As long as they’re happy.”

“Marc, come on! Don’t try clichés like that on me. That’s exactly the reason why I came back to you. Because you’ve never tried to hide it. Your aversion. Well, maybe ‘aversion’ is putting it too strongly. But you know what I mean. Am I right or not?”

I smiled again: a real smile this time.

“See?!” the comedian said. “I knew it. But why is it, then, that I feel so much more comfortable with you than with people who try so hard to find homosexuals
charming
?”

“Maybe because you don’t find them charming yourself,” I said.

The comedian began laughing loudly, then grew serious again.

“I guess ‘charming’ is the key word here,” he said. “It wasn’t particularly easy for my parents to accept that from me. To accept my boyfriend. To, as you said before, only care about my happiness. But they really don’t think it’s
charming
. No parent thinks it’s charming. Have you ever heard a father or mother say that about their son or daughter, that they found it so
charming
when they heard about it? That they were so pleased and relieved to find out that their son or daughter, thank God, at least wasn’t
heterosexual
? I mean, I’m a comedian. In my shows I’ve always tried to deal with that side of it, too. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to take myself seriously. Well, seriously … you know what I mean.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean. So what else can I do for you?”

He sighed deeply. “My prostate,” he said. “It only drips lately, no powerful jet anymore. I thought … well, you know what I thought.”

I looked at the comedian’s hairy butt on my examining table. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help but think of the words of my professor of medical biology. “I’m only going to say it once,” Aaron Herzl had told us. “If God had meant for a man to introduce his sex organ into the anal opening, he would have made that opening larger. I intentionally use the word ‘God’ here, but I could also have said ‘biology.’ There’s an idea behind everything. A plan. Things we shouldn’t eat stink or taste bad. And then there’s pain. Pain tells us that it’s not a good idea to stick a fountain pen in our eye. The body gets tired and tells us we should take a rest. The heart can only pump out so much oxygen to all the body’s extremities.” Here Professor Herzl took off his glasses; for a full minute he had let his gaze wander over the seats in the auditorium. “I’m not out to pass moral judgment here,” he went on. “Everyone should be able to do what they want in all freedom, but a swollen dick penetrating the anus hurts.
Don’t do that
, the pain says.
Pull it out now, before it’s too late
. The body has a tendency to listen to pain. That’s biology. We don’t jump out of a window on the seventh floor, not
unless
we want to destroy that body.”

It happened quite suddenly. I guess I must have been repressing it, or maybe I’d simply forgotten, but now, suddenly, I remembered what Herzl had said after that. First I felt my eyes grow misty, then—there was no stopping it—my lower lip began quivering.

“Everything about a small child is smaller. Everything. That, too, is biology. Little girls can’t get pregnant. As far as that goes, they’re conversely identical to woman over forty.
Keep off, biology says. There is no biological sense in having sex with a girl who is not yet sexually mature. Once again, the opening is too small. And then there is the hymen. One of the most wonderful inventions biology has bestowed on us. Almost enough to make you believe in the existence of a god.” There was some chuckling in the auditorium. Most of the students were grinning; a small minority were not.

“I’d like to once again summon up the image of a big, swollen dick. The male sex organ in erect state. When a dick like that tries to enter the too-narrow opening of a sexually unripe girl, there is, first of all, pain. Don’t do that, the girl herself probably says as well. In our society, the arrangement is that men who try to penetrate little girls, or boys, are locked up. Our moral code in this regard is so pronounced that, even within prison walls, child molesters’ lives are worth nothing. Thieves and murderers consider themselves
superior
to child molesters. And for good reason. They react elementally. In fact, they react the way all of us should react. The way we reacted once, long, long ago, in the days when biology was still more powerful than the rule of law.
Get rid of it! Get rid of that trash! Destroy those freaks!
”

Now the auditorium was deathly silent. The proverbial pin. The breath that was held longer than was good for you.

“It’s not my intention to advance solutions to this moral dilemma,” Herzl said. “I simply want to get you to think first before you blindly accept the moral codes of your own day as being the only proper moral codes. Therefore, by way of conclusion, here is a simple hypothetical case that I’d like you all to think about for next week.”

By now I had been standing at the examining table too long. More time had passed than the comedian could be expected
to consider normal. I had washed my hands. I had pulled on the rubber gloves. Something had to happen. The examination. The internal examination of the prostate by way of the anus. But I could no longer interrupt my own train of thought. I had to keep going first. All the way to the end. I took a deep breath. To gain time, I placed one hand on a hairy buttock and took a deep breath.

“We consider an adult who tries to impose himself sexually on a child to be abnormal,” Professor Aaron Herzl had said. “Someone with a deviation. A patient in need of treatment. There begins the dilemma, and the question for next week. Because
what
treatment is required here? Before going into detail, I first want you to ask yourselves the following: Of those present here today, ninety-one percent feel attracted to members of the opposite sex, nine percent to those of their own sex. Less than one percent feel sexually attracted to children, so fortunately, I can assume that there is no one like that present here today.” Laughter from the auditorium, slightly uneasy laughter that tried to sound relieved. “But let’s turn the whole thing around. Let us, the better to understand this example, imagine that our own sexual proclivity were to be banned. That we would be arrested if caught having sexual intercourse with an adult of the opposite sex. That we would then be locked up for years in a prison or clinic. And that during that period of detention we would be talked to by a psychologist or psychiatrist. We have to convince that psychologist or psychiatrist that we are willing to work on our own cure. In the end, we have to make that other person believe that we
have been
cured. So that the psychologist can write a report that says we no longer pose a risk to society. That we, as men, have kicked the habit of feeling attracted to women, or as women to men. Meanwhile,
however, we know better. We know that that’s impossible. That we cannot be ‘cured.’ All we want is to get out as quickly as possible and once again hook up with women and men.”

I moved my hand one inch farther over the comedian’s buttock. As though I were going to
do
something. What came after this was a part of the lecture that I could no longer remember clearly, but that undoubtedly had to do with the “curing” of child molesters. All I could remember was the pan of mussels at the end.

“Take, for example, a pan of mussels,” Herzl had said. “Before you on the table is a lovely pan of cooked mussels. Healthy mussels. Tasty mussels. But if everything is as it should be, we have learned not to eat those few mussels that don’t open of their own accord. Because they can make us sick. I want you to think about those mussels as you think about next week’s assignment. Those mussels themselves are sick. Some of them are even already dead. Are we going to apply force to break open that mussel and eat it, anyway? Are we going to make it converse with a prison psychologist for two years, and then put it in our mouth, anyway, because the prison psychologist has assured us that the mussel is by now edible? Or do we throw it away? See you next week.”

The comedian shifted on the exam table. He lifted his head and glanced over his shoulder. At me. I saw the startled look in his eye.

“Marc,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

I tried to grin, but it hurt somewhere. There was a dry click somewhere at the back of my jaw. “What could be wrong?” I asked.