The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing

by Daniel Bergner

  The Other Side of Desire

  Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing

  Daniel Bergner

  Contents

  Introduction

  I. The Phantom of the Opera

  II. The Beacon

  III. The Water’s Edge

  IV. The Devotee

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Daniel Bergner

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  “What,” the people I write about often ask, “are you doing here with me?” I heard the question in Angola Prison, Louisiana’s maximum security penitentiary, where I followed the lives of men sentenced to stay locked up until their deaths, with no chance of parole. I heard it in Sierra Leone, in West Africa, where I attached myself to missionaries and mercenaries and child soldiers amid the most brutal war in recent memory. And I heard it as I sought the stories—of eros, obsession, anarchy, love—that fill The Other Side of Desire.

  It was four years ago that I entered the worlds of the people whose lives form the spine of this book. There was an advertising executive who celebrated the most conventional kind of female beauty in the billboards he created, who felt no attraction to the models he cast, and who was drawn erotically, inescapably, to amputees; there was a clothing designer and rare female sadist who searched for transcendent connection with those she wounded and enslaved; there was a traveling salesman and devoted husband whose fetish brought him extreme ecstasy and crippling abasement; and there was a band leader transfixed by his young stepdaughter.

  How do we come to have the particular desires that drive us, how do we become who we are sexually, whether our lusts are common or improbable? How much are we born with and how much do we learn from all that surrounds us, how much can we change and how much is locked unreachably, permanently within? These questions were part of what pulled me toward my four central characters—and toward a set of scientists immersed in studying eros. And then there was the question of how we live with our longings. A speech therapist for stroke victims, a tiny woman with a doll’s round face, with black button eyes and a slender, fragile nose, told me that if a dominant lover whispered in her ear in the right way, she could reach orgasm without touch. She wanted to be harmed. But she was tortured by her desire—she was an Orthodox Jew; her grandparents had been slaughtered in the Holocaust; and she couldn’t reconcile the cravings of eros with the cruelty her family had suffered. What do we do with the desires we cannot bear, the desires we or the society around us strain to restrict or strangle, whether the wanting is unusual or as typical as the yearning for new lovers that can turn otherwise happy marriages into arrangements that sometimes feel as agonizing as actual imprisonment? And what is the relationship between the physical and the transcendent, between the surfaces of the body and the wish to melt the bounds of self, between the forces of lust and our striving for love?

  Some in these stories feared they would be shunned if their private selves were known—I have changed some names and a very few identifying details in order to protect them. As for the question they asked, my answer is, always, this: I am here with you, at the far edges of experience, in the hope that your stories illuminate truths shared by all of us.

  PART I

  THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

  JACOB MILLER LOVED TORONTO. HE THOUGHT OF it every day. He was American, and lived in a snowy American city, but a Canadian flag, with its broad bars of red and its red maple leaf, hung in his home office. A printout of the flag, on a sheet of computer paper, was taped to the wall between his kitchen and dining room. Pasted to the rear window of his car, a flag decal hinted at his love. When he dressed casually in wintertime, he favored a letterman’s-style jacket. The leaf, big and bright, adorned the back.

  If he’d won the lottery, he would have retired and moved to Toronto. If he could have designed his own world, that city would have occupied his entire planet. “When we had our son, I wanted what I call a T-R name,” he said, laughing at himself. “Tristan. Troy. Trice. I didn’t tell my wife why. I didn’t tell her, ‘Because it would remind me of Toronto.’ She said, ‘I’m not naming him Tristan, kids are going to make fun of him. I’m not naming him Troy.’ She said, ‘What kind of name is Trice?’”

  Toronto was a realm where everyone was accepted. On Yonge Street, during a visit in his twenties, twenty years in the past, he’d seen the kids in their punk gear, the parents pushing strollers, the beggars with their cups, the prostitutes in their spandex, the gays hand in hand, all intermixed, passing each other on the sidewalk, tolerating each other, yes, but more than that, seeming tacitly to welcome each other. He’d filled the beggars’ cups. Toronto, he felt, was a place even for monsters, a city for men such as himself.

  JACOB owned a tidy wooden house not far from downtown in the city where he’d grown up. In the living room, plants cascaded from the mantelpiece; a flat-screen TV was mounted above the greenery. The furniture was soft and stylish. A small white-haired dog trotted across the carpet. The ashes of another, a terrier-beagle he still mourned a decade after its death, sat on a shelf in a box painted gold.

  In the driveway, in the months when it wasn’t covered in snow, he played basketball with his eight-year-old son, his only child. Ben was dark-haired, frail. They shot at a portable hoop Jacob had bought, lowered to a height the boy could manage. Jacob himself had never been much for sports, but Ben had lately taught him to play Pig. “It’s easy, Pop!” he’d cried out. “It’s easy!” So they shot and talked, shot and talked. Ben had suffered a stroke during his fifth month in the womb and had cerebral palsy. In the winter months, Jacob was teaching him to ski.

  He’d been married to Ben’s mother for sixteen years. He’d thought her beautiful when they met; he thought her beautiful now. “I’ve had men say to me, ‘You’re a lucky guy.’” She had a profusion of black hair and smooth olive skin and large dark eyes. She was petite and full-breasted. She’d come from a small town, and he took her, on their first date, to a restaurant she saw as dazzling. Over a dinner much more expensive than she was used to, he learned about her job for an airline, at a ticket counter, which allowed her to fly for free. This struck him as glamorous. And he told her about his success as a salesman. “This gorgeous woman,” he remembered. “She put me on a pedestal, and I put her on a pedestal.”

  He still felt they were wonderfully matched. “We’re home-body people,” he said, listing the things they loved to do together: sit on the porch and watch Ben ride his bicycle or his electric scooter; go to craft shows and collect southwestern ceramics decorated with a flute-playing figure called Kokopelli. After sixteen years, they still called each other from work three or four times a day.

  Jacob had put together this life of comfort and love despite at least two relevant obstacles. One was a learning disability so extreme that, in his mid-forties, he could read sentences and calculate numbers no better than most fourth-graders. He’d been given special glasses as a child, with cardboard frames and one green and one red lens. For much of each school day, he’d been made to wear this clownish gear.

  The remedy hadn’t worked; the only way he’d kept up at all was that classmates read his assignments into a reel-to-reel, and at night he lay in bed, listening. When Jacob was in his late thirties, the head psychiatrist at the hospital of Johns Hopkins University had used him to instruct his students. With Jacob’s consent, the psychiatrist had placed him within a U of sixty pu
pils, and asked him to imagine having seventeen apples and giving away five—how many would he have left? Jacob couldn’t answer. There were more questions like it, and a simple paragraph he stumbled through and couldn’t comprehend. Then, after the stymied gasps of the psychiatrists-in-training, the head made his point about people’s ability to overcome. For Jacob was prosperous, thriving in his job. He kept his customers, across a vast swath of territory along the Great Lakes, unfailingly supplied in the goods he handled, and he supervised a team of junior salespeople. Painstakingly, he managed never to jumble his accounts. He could have carried out his business almost entirely by phone and the Internet, but, always anxious that no one should be unhappy with him, he drove for hours and hours each day to present himself in person, a slightly short, husky man, neatly dressed in a jacket and turtleneck or tie—just to shake hands and chat for a few minutes, just to ask his customers if they had any complaints and reassure them that he would make all adjustments.

  The second obstacle had to do with sex.

  Jacob was, in psychiatric terms, a paraphiliac, the word being an amalgam of two ancient roots, para meaning “alongside” or “beyond” and philia meaning “love.” The focus of his love, the focus of his desire, fell outside the normal zones. He was drawn to women’s feet. The feet were the breasts, the legs, the buttocks, the genitals. He wanted, dizzyingly, to touch them, hold them, gaze upon them, lick them, suck them, press his cock against them, slide his cock across them, have a woman position her feet together—the sides of the paired arches forming a kind of footcunt—so he could fuck them.

  I should make two things clear about terminology. First, some among the psychiatric experts on sex—the sexologists, as the descendants of Kinsey are called—would have insisted that Jacob wasn’t a paraphiliac, that, rather, he had a paraphilia, the difference being one of identity versus affliction. Either he was defined by the paraphilia or it was something far from his center, something visited upon him, locked to him, asserting itself dictatorially within him, but defining him no more than anyone can be defined by a disease.

  Second, Jacob would never have used a word like “fuck,” let alone “cunt.” He was a somewhat shy and very decorous man. He said “intercourse” if he had to say anything at all.

  Decorous and dizzy, he felt mortified by his longing. A strange and nearly complete substitution had occurred, leaving him, he felt, infinitely different from other men. He cared about faces, and a woman’s figure wasn’t irrelevant. When he spoke about his wife’s beauty, he meant what other men do. But without the feet there was no palpable desire. When he recalled his first date with his wife, he couldn’t remember what she’d been wearing in the usual sense. It seemed that from the ankles up all had been attractive but vague. Yet he recalled, vividly, her open-toed shoes with modest heels and a beige leather strap crossing just above the base of her toes.

  His erotic distortion made him hideous in his eyes. He clung to the concept of affliction but plummeted into the vortex of identity. Yet there were psychiatrists and psychologists, clinicians and researchers, who believed that he had a gift. For intensity, they told me, there was no comparison between the experience of someone like Jacob and the experience of those they termed “the normophilic.” For sheer driven need, for keen and exalted erotic hunger, for the loss of consciousness that typical desire and typical sex may never provide or may offer only at the instant of orgasm and even then not quite completely despite the brain’s dimness and the involuntary cries, for true negation of control and obliteration of self, Jacob had been granted something superior. He owned the chance for ecstasy.

  NEXT to the second-grade classroom of Jacob’s childhood was a cubby area where the kids had tugged off their rubber snow boots; sometimes their socks slipped off in the process. It was his earliest memory of the yearning which, as a child, he’d had no reason to think strange. The closest he came to touching, back then, was with a boy who played at his house. For a few years it was boys’ feet that transfixed him; with puberty the effect switched over to girls. One afternoon he scurried frantically to set something, anything, high in his closet while the boy was out of the room. He tossed a ball up onto a shelf, then told his friend he couldn’t reach it. The boy said he would try. Jacob told him to take off his shoes and to put his foot in the stirrup formed by his hands.

  Jacob recognized his difference when, seeing the pictures of naked women that stirred other boys, he felt nothing. A retreat from the world, an isolation that had begun with the red and green lenses, deepened. His grandmother’s house had always been his refuge. When the days of clownish headgear grew unbearable, he sometimes sprang out of his chair and out of the classroom, crashed out the school’s side doors, and staggered through the snow on the school’s sloping field, making it to the road and running up the long hill to her home. She was somewhat strange herself, an old woman who drove a red Cadillac but kept her house frigid and sat in the dark to cut her bills, and she guarded him fiercely, refusing to send him back to school despite his parents’ pleas.

  And later, when he was in his teens, she called him constantly to her house to make repairs. She pointed out a crack in the plaster of her ceiling, directed him to get her ladder, and handed him a roll of scotch tape. Crazy though he felt she was, he taped the fissure as he was told. “No one could have fixed that ceiling like you!” she exclaimed. It was the same with installing storm windows every autumn: “No one can put up storm windows like you!” And cutting her grass: “You’re the only one who can mow that lawn!”

  The first girl he fell in love with walked into his life with her grandmother. He was working in a sporting goods store, having dropped out of college because every assignment was beyond him. Standing beside her grandmother, the girl asked to try on a pair of Nike Cortez. It was the style he had on, his favorite sneaker: low and simple and streamlined, with a thin, serrated sole that resembled a long row of tiny teeth. And she wanted the very color scheme he was wearing: white with a red Nike swoosh. He didn’t have a fetish for shoes in themselves, but her choice seemed to him a sign. He was a romantic man, a sentimental man. A hint of destiny seemed to lie in their taste in sneakers.

  He learned, too, the size and width of her feet. He’d always liked large feet; just to hear the words “size eight” or “size nine” could make him hard. Hers were a seven and a half, but wide. He sat on the salesman’s low stool; she placed her feet, one after the other, on the inclined platform between his legs. He slid the heels over her white sweat socks, tightened and tied the laces. She paced around, declared that they fit, tried on other styles, returned to her original choice, then lingered, chatting, apologizing: “I know you have to get going.” Her pale, pretty, tentative face spoke to him of tenderness, empathy. He told her he didn’t have to go at all, and as the conversation veered she mentioned that she lived with her grandmother.

  “I live with my grandmother.” He had recently moved into her frigid, comforting house.

  “Get out!”

  “I do, I do! I’m telling you the truth!” But when at last she left with her sneakers—her name was Sara—he was sure he would never see her again.

  He remembered: “Her grandmother and her were joined at the hip, exactly like my grandmother and I were. Her grandmother was petite, the same as mine. And she was extremely frugal, just like mine.”

  He didn’t yet know these details when he spotted her a week later in the store, again with the old woman, and heard himself, witless: “You’re back.”

  “I came back to see you.”

  He turned right away to the woman, asking for their phone number, then blurted out an invitation to both of them, wondering if he could take them to dinner. They said he should come to their house instead. His first date with Sara—she was fifteen, he was twenty-one—was a kind of threesome. The grandmother cooked meat and mashed potatoes while he sat with the granddaughter in a porch room, her feet bare. They joked about their width. “Platypus feet,” he said, “you have platypus
feet,” the two of them laughing, giggling. Her toes formed a perfect staircase, each one, from big toe to pinkie, successively smaller, defining a gentle descent.

  When her grandmother called them in to eat he raced up and down his mind’s corridors, peering into corners, searching for something to distract him from his desire, something to diminish it. The old woman’s voice, like a glancing eye on the brink of noticing his perversion, had pierced his brain. He could find no distraction. His brain was a void, except for the one thing he wanted to escape.

  But at the table he managed to function, and afterward, as he and Sara watched TV, she placed her feet on an ottoman. In her toes and tendons and arches and heels was concentrated all the combined power of all the more common erotic parts upon more common men. The staircase was his ideal, and the platypus-like width made her his version of a swimsuit model, and hesitantly he took her feet, each in turn, in his hands, and while she pretended to focus on the television he began to massage them—delicately, adoringly—as though nothing else existed in the world.

  JACOB was Jewish, and when he confided his love to his grandmother she asked about the girl’s religion. The answer wasn’t the right one. But soon his grandmother, who hated dogs and wanted them nowhere near, came to love the mutt—the terrier-beagle whose ashes now rested on his living room mantel—that he and Sara bought together after spotting it in a pet shop cage during a stroll at a mall. By that point he had moved into his own apartment, and one morning his grandmother phoned, demanding that he come over right away. She’d seen a mouse and declared herself scared to death. “Bring the hunt!” she ordered, using the Yiddish word for dog.