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

by Daniel Bergner

  To Roy, the sessions offered no relief. After the discussions of dynamic risk factors and SUDs, Liddle tended to ask the men what deviant thoughts they’d had during the week just past. In over a year with the group, I never once heard the men speak more than a few words about desiring the young. “If we talked in there about what was really going through our minds,” the poet once told me, “we’d all be wearing ankle bracelets.” And Liddle didn’t press. In response to the few words that were spoken, he quickly reviewed “thought broadcasting.” Liddle, Roy said, “asks for deviant fantasy but he doesn’t really want it.”

  The therapist talked with me about eliciting candor—but a candor that was delicately calibrated. Wrenching confessions, he felt, could destroy the composure he wanted to instill in the men. Too much honesty could stoke illicit fantasies. The men were forbidden to talk with one another outside the meetings. Liddle wished to “build up their sense of decency” and teach them to believe in their own capacity for restraint. In the windowless room, he allowed nothing to breach the atmosphere of control.

  Roy had never so much as given the group any detail about the content of Faith’s online talks with her friend. He had never really told his story. To imply that she’d played any small part in what had happened was forbidden. To call any attention to the fact that she had walked toward his computer when he’d invited her to see what he wished to do—this would have been the ultimate sin. In the back room, there were child victims and adult perpetrators. Nothing even slightly more nuanced was permitted, for fear that the men would justify their crimes to themselves. The men were trained to come down on each other for the faintest sign of deflecting responsibility. Roy kept his memories to himself.

  Then, soon after the polygraph test, and after his wife had applied to be trained as an ancillary supervisor, it came out—indirectly, during a discussion in group—that she and Roy hadn’t told her parents about his crime. Liddle worried that, had she completed the training without this deception emerging, they could have been at any sort of family function with her parents, and, if young girls were around, her priority would have been to keep Roy’s secret rather than to tell her parents they had to leave. Despite being his entrusted supervisor, she might have allowed him to stay.

  But the deception itself was even worse. Liddle saw a man in denial, a man failing the program’s fundamental requirements of honesty and self-confrontation, a man who should have delivered, in group, a simple, undetailed admission of his fantasies, and who should have been clear about the situation with his in-laws. In the evasion of candor, Liddle sensed the threat of anarchy.

  His fear was compounded by an answer on another questionnaire: Roy was having sex with his wife several times each week. This seemed to Liddle a sign of excessive urgency. Roy told me that he was sexually satisfied, that his wife was taking care of all his needs. Liddle mentioned to me that he was considering trying to convince Roy to take medication to reduce, though not eliminate, his sex drive. There would be no legal requirement that Roy agree. But Liddle’s influence over what he could and could not do, over the rest of his life, might persuade him.

  The therapist held off on medication. He limited himself to taking away Roy’s privileges—the visits to his family, the bowling, the movies, the kite-flying. The prospect of performing his music was now beyond discussion. Except for work, Roy would remain inside his house. Eros would be kept within.

  ONE night, shortly before his privileges were taken away, Roy and his wife had launched a vast, luminous gold-and-red kite at the town beach. Usually after dusk the beach was empty. But a group of kids—“a mob,” it seemed to him—came running toward them, boys and girls who looked between the ages of four and twelve. By his agreement with Liddle and the probation department, he was simply supposed to tell the kids to keep their distance, to tell them they might get tangled in the heavy lines. The mere presence of the underage didn’t mean he had to leave the waterfront. But everything had begun at the edge of the water. The words of Faith’s mother had come with the sound of the surf. And now he panicked. He handed the unwieldy lines to his wife and, whether dreading some imagined probationary infraction or terrified of something inside himself, he raced away.

  He rushed for the waist-high fence that divided the beach from the parking lot. But he couldn’t get his bearlike body over it. He got stuck, sitting on the wire, crushing it, caught between the shore and the pavement. He couldn’t get free.

  PART IV

  THE DEVOTEE

  WHEN SHE WAS A GIRL, LAURA AND HER FRIENDS rode their horses through the Pennsylvania countryside, rode Western and bareback, rode through woods and cornfields. The woods seemed to belong to no one. The cornfields churned around them like windswept lakes. They galloped through the afternoons till it was time for dinner. Her father was a truck driver. The family, with five kids, lived on a scrap of farmland with a pond, a few cows, some corn.

  She had an implausible dream. It was something she kept to herself. She wanted to be a psychiatrist, dreamed of it even before she reached high school. “Oh gosh,” she remembered decades later, “I always thought that the way we think and behave is so fascinating. It is so complex. I thought what a great thing to be able to do, to figure that out. Every kid growing up knows what a doctor and a lawyer is, but to me it was just like, who would want to be a doctor or a lawyer? I want to be a psychiatrist—wouldn’t that be intriguing! In high school I would go to the library and read. Some Freud. A lot of self-help books. Some Jung.”

  No one in her family had gone to college. Few of the girls she spent time with had plans to. She knew her family couldn’t afford it. She didn’t think she was smart enough, anyway. She was fast in her typing course, fast and accurate; she figured she’d be a secretary. Behind psychiatry, her second fantasy was to be a model. People said she should be. She had a cascade of blond hair, full lips, eyes that were a crystal blue. But she knew she was too short. She thought: I’m going to get married and work in an office, because that is realistic.

  In her junior year, she started going to parties with a good-looking, weed-smoking senior. He’d been staring at her from the end of one of the long tables in their home economics class. They married as soon as she graduated. He joined the Air Force; she got pregnant. She followed him wherever he was stationed, from Delaware to England to Texas, caring for their son, sometimes babysitting for extra money, sometimes working at the PX on base. In San Antonio, she found a job as a secretary for a company that made eyeglasses. About college and psychiatry, she felt the way she always had: “That is for other people. That is somebody else’s dream.”

  One wet Friday morning, as she drove to work, her Mustang ran out of gas on a highway that looped around the city. The pavement was slick, and the traffic was stalled.

  A thousand and more miles away, in Manhattan, Ron sketched scenes that sold liquor: couples falling in love, parties at the beach, gatherings in a loft, excursions on a yacht. He was in advertising, an art director; he conjured billboards and posters. He created the concepts and, with a photographer, cast the models. He searched for young women to fill his tableaux of love, of high spirits, of sophistication, women who would infuse any viewer with longing and envy.

  He had grown up in Queens, in neighborhoods of small apartment buildings and little clapboard houses with dormers and low stoops. In backyards of concrete and on the pavement of the street, he and his friends had sprayed one another with water guns, played stickball and roller-skate hockey. They drew giant chalk squares with numbered boxes and dead-man zones for games of skully—they knelt on the asphalt and flicked their bottle caps till their mothers, leaning out from windows and shrieking their names, called them home for dinner. La-Guardia Airport was close by. The gates and runways were unguarded; they staged war games throughout the terminals and on the tarmac.

  But one afternoon he found himself riding his bicycle furtively along tree-lined streets. He sped around corners with the sense that everyone, every adult and every
one his own age, was staring through the back of his head, seeing what he was imagining. At the library, he jammed his red one-speed into the rack, and, eyes averted, he stepped past the librarian and sidled between the dark wooden tables.

  ABOUT that Friday morning, Laura told things this way: “I said good-bye to my husband while he was sleeping in bed, and I left the house and got into my car. I was in a hurry, and that gauge wasn’t very accurate. So I was like, I think I have enough to get to work, I should be all right, I’ll get gas on my lunch hour. Everything was backed up on the freeway. My engine died, and I pumped and cursed and got it going again just long enough to steer onto the side. I got out, and this lady, this rich, classy lady, pulled over in a Lincoln. She told me she could take me to the nearest station, which was right off the next exit. The man inside told me to leave a three-dollar deposit for the can.

  “The lady was really friendly. She said she would take me back. She dropped me off, and I thanked her, and I walked around to the side of my car where the gas tank was. The traffic was moving along by then, and I realized it was too dangerous, because I was standing slightly out into the lane. I hesitated. I knew it was too dangerous, but I didn’t know what to do. I hesitated for that second, having those thoughts, and then I got hit.

  “All I remember is being thrown through the air. And then when I woke up I heard all these people around me, and I was laying there on the side of the road, and I was trying to get up, and they were like, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ and I was thinking my legs were broken, in my mind my legs were broken, and I grabbed onto a lady’s coat, and I said, ‘Please help me.’

  “She told me an ambulance was coming. I really didn’t know what had happened. They put me in those inflatable things so you don’t bleed to death. And then I was in the emergency room, and the doctors were coming in, and they were touching and twisting my legs, and I was saying to myself, I was struck and my legs were broken, I was struck and my legs were broken. They kept twisting. It seemed like forever, like hours and hours. Oh my gosh I was in such pain. Why were they doing this? It went on and on, and I never looked down, and then one doctor stood over me, and he said, ‘I need to tell you that your legs were severely crushed, and you need to go into surgery right away.’

  “They put a mask over my mouth and told me to take three breaths. That was it until I woke up again. And then I would not look down. The doctors said I almost died. They said they had never seen anyone’s blood pressure fall so low and still live, that it was a miracle I was still there, if it had been any longer I would have bled to death. I couldn’t even look. Everything was a fog. I was so heavily medicated I would go in and out of consciousness. I remember somebody saying, ‘I cannot believe she has no other injury or trauma on her body.’ All I had was a couple of stitches up here on my head and a black-and-blue mark under my eye. Nothing else was wrong. They did all the tests they could, and there was nothing.

  “I never watched them change the dressings. They said, ‘You’re going to have to do this yourself,’ but I wouldn’t pay any attention. They did it twice a day, and I would shut my eyes or keep them somewhere else in the room. They had told me right away after the surgery, but you can’t grasp that. You can’t one day be walking and the next—you can’t accept it. You can’t face it. You know it intellectually, but you block it off. For two weeks I never once looked down.

  “They had told me they couldn’t save them, but the first time I acknowledged it was when they sent me to rehab, because I had to get out of bed. Yet even still, even though I knew it was true, I was so drugged up it was almost a dream.

  “And I remember Scott—that’s my son—asking, ‘Will Mommy’s legs grow back?’ and my mom saying, ‘No, honey, they won’t.’ He didn’t say anything. And I remember lots of people there; the guy who drove the ambulance and someone who saw the accident came to see how I was doing. I remember the look on my husband’s face. And I remember all the flowers, so many flowers they overfilled the room. I wished I had died. I thought, Why didn’t they just let me die? Because one morning I was walking, and when I looked down my legs were gone.”

  LATER Ron would wonder if he’d been made an unknowing subject of a secret army experiment. He would warn himself he was being paranoid, then wonder if he was being perfectly rational, given the sorts of things the army and the government were capable of carrying out. He saw himself, too, as suffering from what he called “the Godzilla syndrome”—radiation from nuclear testing had skewed his psyche.

  But on that boyhood afternoon when he made his swift way past the librarian, he was simply terrified. He picked out the volumes of the encyclopedias and piled them on a table.

  His first crush had come years earlier, when he was five years old. The woman ran a clothing shop with her sister, a few blocks from his home. Walking with his mother, he tugged and schemed daily to steer her in that direction. Whenever he succeeded, he gazed between the dresses and bras in the window to glimpse his first love. She had black hair and wore stubby black shoes—like a nun, he thought. One of the shoes, with a higher heel and thicker sole than the other, was built to compensate for a short leg.

  It was the leg, a consequence of polio, that mesmerized him. By the time of his trip to the library, Ron had taken to erasing or scratching out limbs on pictures of women. In the encyclopedias he hoped for something less makeshift, less messy, more real. He chose the volumes holding articles on amputation. He picked, too, the ones that included polio and any other crippling disease he could name. He searched for articles on rehabilitation, thinking that this subject might provide the photographs or illustrations he’d anticipated. But, except for a picture of an iron lung, he found nothing. The images had been razored out. It was his first clue that he wasn’t completely alone.

  The clue didn’t have much effect. As a teenager, he went out with the normal in body, while his yearnings were for the disabled. One of his father’s favorite words seemed to be “gimp”; he certainly wasn’t going to open up to his parents. An older girl, legs in braces—another polio victim—propelled herself through the neighborhood on crutches. He knew when she would be coming home from school, knew where she lived. He made sure to cross her path, to pass by her house; he never approached her. And a girl with cerebral palsy went to his own school, where each day she was tormented, called spastic and “Judy Cooty.” He tried to defend her, but that was all. For dates he chose the kinds of girls his friends desired. Pressed against them, “I closed my eyes and imagined that they didn’t have a leg or an arm.”

  He went to college, studied to be an architect but immersed himself in fine art, married a woman he’d met in a drawing class, felt profoundly allied with her, loved the fact that as they walked through the Louvre they both revered Gericault over da Vinci, the Raft of the Medusa over the Mona Lisa, but blamed her for the feeling that there was nothing profound—that there was almost nothing at all—between them in bed. Soon they divorced. And meanwhile he began his career in advertising, his celebration of quotidian beauty, his evocation of Everyman’s ideal and elicitation of Everyman’s longing. He drew and cast and produced perfect scenes populated by perfect women, who could stir in him no wanting, whose beauty to him was abstract, who made him feel dead.

  BENEATH the wish to die lay determination. Laura was driven by devotion to her five-year-old son, “the cutest blond-haired curly kid you ever saw.” And she was driven by the staff. They seemed to have only one focus, to be capable of only one concern: to get her onto prosthetics, to get her walking, to fit her back inside her life. In the rehabilitation rooms of the hospital they strapped her to weights, pushed her to strengthen her upper body, taught her to understand the movements her legs could still perform. Both legs had been amputated about ten inches below her hips.

  Almost half her body had vanished. She felt alone not only in the world that she knew awaited her but even within the hospital walls. She was surrounded, at rehabilitation, by patients at least twice her age, victims of stroke an
d degenerative disease. “I’m twenty-five years old,” she recalled thinking. “How many years do I have to live this way? How many years are left? How am I going to raise my child? How am I going to walk? How am I going to have sex? Who is—All this stuff is running through my head every day from the minute I wake up, and every morning it’s, ‘Eight o’clock! Get your mat!’ I’m crumbling inside, I’m crushed to the very core, and they’re saying, ‘Eight o’clock! Get your mat! Eight o’clock! Get your mat!’”

  There was no psychological counseling to speak of. She heard no answers to most of the questions that woke and whispered and screamed with her own waking, nothing beyond meaningless reassurances from those who knew her: she was strong, she’d always had spirit, she would get through this. Through to what? What did “through” mean? This wasn’t temporary. She wasn’t traveling backward in time. Could she? Was she? Are Mommy’s legs going to grow back?

  She obeyed the eight o’clock orders, wheeled herself to rehab. Prosthetics were made and fitted; she steadied herself on the parallel bars. “‘Pick up your right leg slowly,’” they instructed. She picked it up, put it down. Sensation traveled to her stump. “‘Pick up the foot again.’” And it was as though there were a foot—vaguely. The prosthetic communicated, dimly, to what remained of the limb. She registered the surface underneath, its degree of hardness, flatness, reliability.

  But this was not the ad that ran on TV, the one with the silky playground basketball player lifting off for a jump shot on his artificial legs. His amputations were below the knee. For ease of adapting, for fullness of function, for balance and mobility, the player’s body was closer to whole than it was to Laura’s. And there was nothing magical about the prosthetics she’d been given, nothing bionic, little of what people imagined science could offer. It wasn’t that she’d been given anything substandard. It was that the miraculous didn’t exist. The legs were limited in what they could be commanded to do. Technology couldn’t replace muscles and nerves. It could allow for bending but it couldn’t replicate the complexity of a knee, and it couldn’t provide anything more than crude control over the artificial joint.