“It was the logical extension, he said, of the homosexual acts. After the experience in California, he knew all there was to know about homosexual ‘love.’ The anticipatory thrill—the sick thrill, he called it again and again—overrode every deliberative, intellectual consideration, every image of it he could—or wanted to—call up in advance. It couldn’t stop him. I asked him once, only once, if there weren’t some emotional satisfaction in relating to another human being. He said no. It was a sordid, furtive negotiation, an exercise in animalism, thoroughly devoid of feeling. And he believed that all homosexuals really knew it. Still, the anticipation, the sick thrill—a rare, supreme kind of pleasure, he called it, too—drove him on. There was pleasure, pure pleasure, in doing the thing he hated most.”

Leland asked, “Would you believe me if I said that I don’t know if I understand that? I just don’t know.”

Roberts nodded. He ran his hand over his head. “Colin was honest enough to acknowledge that there was physical gratification in any contact of the sex organs—this from a man whose childhood had been surrounded by a ponderous sexual mystique. He saw no reason to concern himself overmuch with why he came to believe that homosexuality was the lowest of man’s behavior. He knew that there were alternatives to our culture, that homosexuality had been practiced by the elite of other societies—just as, by the way, your wife told me this evening that she knew that there were women who thrived on the kind of life that had been destroying her. The thing that astonished and dismayed Colin was that additional, anticipatory sick thrill in what he found himself choosing to do. He said that he could have stood on a crowded trolley, played with himself, anything, and achieved the same physical pleasure—but it wouldn’t have been the same. It sickened Colin, not the capacity for self-destruction, but the absolute, undeniable appetite for it.”

Leland had been thinking of what he had said about not knowing if he understood the pleasure. Karen had said that she had been looking for romance. Was that in any way the same? Leland could remember returning from the war and realizing that his wife had been to bed with another man, and not being able to stop himself from making love to her again—he had wanted to stop. She had not loved him in the way he had loved her. It was all changed now, but tonight, at this moment, he could reach out and touch those days with his hand.