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

by Daniel Bergner

  His first love after his marriage came through his camera. He approached Elise on a crosstown bus, asked if she would consider posing. As a child she’d been one of the last in her hometown to contract polio. She’d been out of school, not feeling well, when the vaccine was given, and her parents had never bothered to have her inoculated. Now she was studying for a master’s degree in social work. Petite, with high cheekbones and a dimpled chin, a small lush mouth and long lush hair, she wore steel braces on both useless legs.

  He photographed her only once in almost a year. They spent their time enmeshed in each other’s bodies, she comfortable in hers because he was so ardent with his, and immersed in debating the merits of his mainstream ambitions versus hers, after she graduated, to rehabilitate prisoners. She lived in the East Village, in her sister’s apartment, on a block that served as a base for the Hell’s Angels. A few of the gang surrounded him early on, grabbed him, asked if he was seeing Elise. “You mess her up and we’ll kill you,” one of them warned. Ron photographed her only once, because her face was almost always bruised, an eye sometimes black. Her husband beat her.

  Though she stayed with her sister, she and her husband were still involved. Ron saw her when her husband traveled. Her husband never discovered the affair; the beatings weren’t on Ron’s account. Ron never knew the reason, knew only that Elise tolerated it, allowed it. He thought she believed it was what she had coming, as a cripple, that she believed she could do no better, felt she was lucky to have a husband at all. But he never tried to convince her to divorce, to be with him. Later, after they had drifted apart, he was desperate to find her, see her, persuade her. He called, but the phone was disconnected. He went to the apartment; the Hell’s Angels told him the sisters had moved away. He assumed Elise was still married, but he kept searching. He tried to locate the sister. He called the bureau of prisons in Elise’s home state, where he guessed Elise might have gone, and begged for a list of their social workers. He hired a private detective.

  During their time together, he said, he had fallen for her “in a way that went far beyond my fascination.” The word—“fascination”—was the term men like Ron sometimes used, men drawn to the disabled. “The attraction,” he remembered, “became this wonderful overlay to what we had.” They had opened up to each other, she released by the improbable direction of his desire and he by holding, and being held fiercely by, a figure from his dreams. But he hadn’t been ready, and his dream had disappeared, and the private detective could not find her. He hadn’t been ready at all, not to be permanent and public with a woman who looked like she did. He was barely willing to admit what he wanted to himself. Clandestine, ashamed, his ambivalence seemed to have affirmed her shame, her feeling that her husband was her due. With her braces, her beauty, her black eyes, she was gone.

  He went to two psychologists, and in their offices avoided the subject, the elemental aspect of himself, that had driven him to seek their help. With the first therapist he filled the sessions with the failings of his ex-wife. But the second seemed to intuit his evasions. He asked about the camera Ron always carried, wondered what he took pictures of. “And?” the therapist pressed gently. “And? And?”

  He persisted until Ron confided everything, then asked Ron if he hurt anyone, if he hurt himself. So there was, the psychologist advised, no reason for self-reproach, no reason for reluctance. It was far from that simple. Yet the therapist’s logic began to unburden him as he went on photographing and sleeping with women he met around the city.

  Katherine had hooks for hands and one prosthetic leg—a pornographic fantasy, but there wasn’t much between them in bed: “She would never take off her nightgown. She was a lot more inhibited about her body than Elise.” It was her determination that enthralled him. She wanted to become an occupational therapist, but to be certified she had to lift an impossible weight. She went to court, proved the requirement unnecessary and prejudicial, got her license, and started her career. He remembered, too, the way she ate olives with pits when they went to a favorite Greek restaurant. “Not an easy thing for anyone to do gracefully,” he laughed. “But somehow she did.”

  Melinda he met on the street while walking after lunch. She was with a friend who assumed that Ron, intruding himself and explaining that he wanted to do a portrait, was really interested in her. Melinda was, after all, just a paraplegic in a wheelchair. The friend volunteered that she had always wanted to be a model, that it would be great if he could take some head shots. He did a session for both of them, gave the pretty would-be model the pictures she needed, then focused his lens on the woman who entranced him.

  Sylvia was South American, an accountant with a serene oval face, a close-mouthed smile, lustrous black hair. She sobbed uncontrollably after she and Ron first made love. Her legs, wasted by disease, could support her only with a lattice-work of steel bars and leather straps. She lived alone in a hotel, never spoke of family or friends, and when she visited Ron’s apartment always tuned the radio to an oldies station. She wanted the love songs of earlier decades, the serenades of doowop. One day, when he called her, the woman at the hotel’s front desk, who usually took his messages, asked him to come over. She told him, when he arrived, that his girlfriend had killed herself.

  Elizabeth was the valedictorian of her Ivy League class, and Ron happened to hear her commencement address. “She was about as close as I expected to come to the ideal woman,” he remembered. “She was smart, she was cute, and she had no legs.” That evening after the graduation, he called the dorms, reached someone who knew her, learned that she had already left for the summer. But he was told, too, that she would be back for law school in the fall. He phoned her then, praised her speech, persuaded her to go out on a date. She met him at the campus gates with three of the university’s football players standing beside her wheelchair.

  The campus wasn’t wheelchair-accessible, and a squad of athletes was assigned to carry her up stoops and bear her up flights of stairs. In this case, though, they were there for protection. What kind of creep or lunatic would want to date a woman with no legs? But when she met him, he seemed safe and sane enough. She told the players they could go. He wheeled her out the gates.

  She had grown up in small Southern towns with an affliction that shortened her legs and froze her joints at the ankles, knees, hips. Twenty-some operations by the time she was thirteen—surgeons breaking bones, cutting tendons, reattaching ligaments—didn’t bring mobility to her legs. Then a doctor suggested amputation; her real legs would never be any use to her, but she might walk with prosthetics. She went through another surgery, woke with her legs removed, and never could train herself to walk well on artificial limbs. She told Ron she didn’t regret the amputation. She said that whenever she saw paraplegics with their legs, she thought only of their stupidity—they were burdened with so much meaningless weight.

  Intellectual, imperious, self-sufficient, she captivated him, and after a few months together, he tried what he never had with any girlfriend. He possessed, by then, a degree of self-acceptance. The psychologist had helped, and so had finding a group of similar men, who called themselves “devotees.” They met, as a kind of support group, at the home of a former Korean War pilot who had lately befriended a veteran of the Algerian resistance. She’d blown off her legs while trying to blow up a French building.

  What he tried was telling Elizabeth about his desire for the disabled and above all for amputees. She seemed incredulous, rapt, then grateful, released. She posed for him in ways that alluded to the erotic power she’d just discovered. In one portrait, her abbreviated body sits draped in red fabric: her stumps, covered in sheer black nylons and partially concealed in shadow, might easily be overlooked. But on second glance they emerge: paired secrets, half-hidden parts, objects of shame and allure, transfixing.

  They married after he’d carried her up the three flights of stairs to his apartment for three years. “My friends were like a Greek chorus. Charlie Crane, who I lived with for t
wo years, who I worked with for fifteen years, who I traveled with all the time, was absolutely rabid. He just flat-out said, ‘Why would you want someone with no legs? I can’t go out with you anymore. I don’t want to deal with it, I can’t deal with it, it’s ugly.’ Charlie’s girlfriends, you could look through their heads, but they were tall and skinny. They had long legs and big breasts and blond hair.”

  Others kept their quiet distance and faded away. “They just didn’t want to be seen with her. It just didn’t fit the image they wanted.” And Elizabeth was adept at making them uneasy. She insisted on wearing miniskirts and on never wearing prosthetics. At a Christmas party, as she sat on a couch with her stumps protruding, someone asked if she would cover herself with a blanket. For the beach she chose bikinis, never anything that even intimated an effort to conceal. She liked Ron to carry her across the sand to the water, to put her down at the edge of the surf. And in a car one intoxicated evening, she sent shudders through his friends by vaulting herself from the backseat into the front, launching her body like some sort of tree-jumping animal.

  “You have to develop the same thick skin they have,” he said about being with Elizabeth and the lovers who had come before her. “Society sees you like you’re driving around in a junk car. A woman with a disability is like that. Everyone stares. And everyone wants to ask, ‘Why are you with a defective person?’”

  “WHEN people hear we split up, they think, This happened to you, so your husband left you. But I was the one who filed,” Laura said. “He might have left me emotionally, but I was the one who filed for divorce. And that took a lot of guts. I had a son to raise and no legs and no education except a high school diploma and no one to be with. I was alone, and that was the way it was going to be. That was over.”

  She moved back to Pennsylvania and found a government job as an administrative assistant. At night she found reassurance and self-revulsion with men she met in bars, men she felt would have her: “Losers—no job, no car, drugs, no money.” And she searched online, during all the idle hours her bureaucratic job provided, through the sites that came up when she typed in “disability.” There were nonprofits offering advocacy, businesses selling equipment, leagues organizing handicapped sports, groups fund-raising for Third World amputees, campaigns against land mines led by Lady Di. She read nearly every sentence, as though somewhere through the links she clicked on, somewhere in the flood of unfiltered words, would be a phrase of wisdom or a breakthrough of science that would change what was unchangeable.

  Then she landed on an advertisement for models at a site run by Carol Davis Productions. “It was the first time I’d heard of it. It was, wow, this is bizarre. Maybe years earlier it would have been, this is perverse, disgusting. But it wasn’t that. I was intrigued. I didn’t understand. You mean they’re attracted to amputee women? And why wouldn’t anyone have told me about this? None of the physical therapists. None of the surgeons or prosthetists. It was weird to me, these men, but a million things were running through my head. I was kind of happy, excited. Maybe I wouldn’t have to be alone. I started checking other sites. What’s the psychological part? Is this an attraction like to large breasts or blond hair? Is this the same thing? How does a person get this way? Why was this? Did something happen to them in their childhood? And I was mad. I was pissed. How could I not have known about this? Every professional I had come into contact with hadn’t let me know.”

  She sent a message to Carol Davis, who’d lost a leg herself, and they e-mailed back and forth. Soon Laura was being photographed and videoed: playing wheelchair basketball, swimming, operating the hand controls on the van she’d learned to drive, snorkeling, parasailing, trying to monoski. She was flying around the country for the shoots and taking in sixty thousand dollars for her share of the sales.

  In none of the images was she dressed in anything less than a bathing suit. The porn on sites like Davis’s could look demure, even quaint—except that, for the customers, the points of craving were often on full display. Still, there seemed to be a difference between this and conventional porn. In some of the videos the models were fully clothed, their amputations covered; the images were simply of them confronting challenges. That was the attraction: Laura shooting baskets or attempting to ski.

  She mentioned, to a few friends, that she’d been doing some modeling.

  “What kind of modeling?”

  “Disabled-woman modeling,” she answered.

  “For what?”

  “Well, to show that we’re like everybody else, that we can be accepted as who we are.”

  “That’s good.”

  “That we can be accepted not just as disabled.”

  “That’s great.”

  “That we can be sexual.”

  “Oh.”

  They wondered who the videos were for, and she explained that health professionals would use them for training. “But,” she forced herself to add, “there are also people, mostly men, who like women with disabilities, amputees especially.”

  “You mean?”

  “Attracted to them.”

  Her friends were open with their thoughts: that this was strange, that it was sick. They told her they worried about her self-esteem, worried that she was letting herself be used. One day Laura’s brother, who was a UPS driver, had a package spill open on his truck. The package held magazines bound for a devotee. They didn’t include any pictures of Laura, and he kept his discovery of the phenomenon to himself until one day Laura worked up her courage and asked him, as if casually, if he’d ever heard of such men. She’d never gone this far with her family. She’d never spoken about her modeling. She figured that her brother, the one she felt was the smartest of her siblings, would be the most sympathetic. He told her about the package. He told her it was revolting. With her family, that was the last time she raised the subject.

  Online, in amputee chat rooms, some of the women warned that devotees were stalkers, predators. She learned, too, how specific their preferences could be, that some wanted SAEs, single arm amputees with the amputation above the elbow; that others hoped for women like Laura, DAKs, with double leg-amputations above the knee; that some liked single left-leg stumps the best; that others dreamed of perfect scars.

  Sometimes she agreed with her friends, her brother. It was sick. And it was frightening. And it was infuriating to think that men could have their favorites in this way, that they could choose between calamities that had wrecked women’s lives. But was a preference for a single arm really all that different from a preference for a certain color hair, a certain tone of skin or shape of face or type of body? And weren’t there creeps among men of all kinds?

  “A big chunk of my life, I kind of wanted to be a model. But I wasn’t tall enough and all that, and it’s funny how it turned out. I lost my legs, and there I was. What it did for me, it made me feel good about myself.”

  BEYOND the comical thoughts of secret government studies and nuclear fallout, Ron wondered about scientific reasons. There were few studies, and their science was suspect. It was safe to say that most devotees had been drawn to the disabled since childhood, since before they’d felt the attraction as palpably sexual, that most were men, that there were gays as well as straights among them. It was safe to say that some were aroused, too, by the thought of being amputees themselves, but that this desire was probably a distinct paraphilia, one that enticed and tormented a few men to the point that they carried out their longings, cutting off their legs with chain saws or contracting with surgeons—there was a willing and well-known doctor in Scotland—to perform the operations. It was clear that, like Ron, most devotees were glad to have their arms and legs, and that many, like him, were attracted to women without limbs both by visually charged lust and by emotionally infused admiration for the way the women coped. And it was clear that no one had a clue about the desire’s source.

  Was some sort of displaced castration fantasy involved? Or a not-so-sublimated wish to commit violence against women, to
cut, to dismember, to destroy? Was there a yearning to play savior? A need for control? Ron had his own half-joking theory built on thoughts of evolution, of ancestral adaptation: his desire derived from the prehistoric savannah, where predatory animals had learned to recognize crippled prey as the easiest to catch and kill. “Am I the lion going after the lame antelope? How primitive is this? There’s so much that’s primal in our sexual nature. But when people say to me, ‘You go after disabled women because they’re easy to get,’ I have to tell them, ‘They’re not easy to get. Trust me. They’re much more reticent, very much more resistive. They’ve got this whole attitude: what do you want me for? And they’ve got this independence they’ve had to fight to achieve.’”

  In the end, Ron didn’t believe that cause could be accounted for. Rather than talk about reasons, he preferred to quote the sixteenth-century philosopher Montaigne: “It is a common proverb in Italy that he does not know Venus in her perfect sweetness who has not lain with the cripple.” The legs of the lame or of the amputated, Montaigne wrote, required less bodily “nourishment” and so left more sustenance for the genitals. The vagina was more “vigorous” in crippled women.

  Krafft-Ebing had given a more simple blessing. After examining and taking the history of a thirty-year-old civil servant who yearned for women with a left-footed limp, women whose deformity would match that of a girl he’d played with when he was seven, the doctor wrote: “I enlightened the patient on the subject, and told him that it was difficult, if not absolutely impossible, for medical science to obliterate a fetishism so deeply rooted by old associations, but expressed the hope that if he made a limping maid happy in wedlock, he himself would find happiness also.”