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

by Daniel Bergner

  But, for Ron, the words from past centuries were only somewhat more satisfying than the search for explanations. And what he wanted anyway, far more than psychology or history, was the revelation of art, a way to evoke his erotic vision in images. Then, at a Manhattan museum, he rediscovered Bellmer, whose work he’d first been staggered by in college. He confronted what the surrealist had called his “plastic anagrams,” the photographs of his dismembered dolls. Ron stood before the broken doll at the base of the stairs, the doll with two pairs of legs and groins in the aftermath of passion and in the aftermath of rape. Bellmer had been fascinated by anagrams, by the connections and meanings latent within words. Beil, the word for ax in German, became lieb, the word for love, he pointed out in one of his essays. And lieb in turn became leib, the word for body. He sensed the oracular in such rearrangements, truths of the human psyche lying dormant and waiting in plain sight to be found. Through his dolls, he felt he could do the same with the body. The body parts were the letters, and their violent reordering would reinvent the body’s language and unmask its messages and lead to a shaman’s wisdom.

  Ron wondered if he could do the same without the dolls. Until he stood facing Bellmer’s photographs, his own were fairly standard portraits—flattering, sentimental—of women with disabilities. The braces and hooks and stumps gave the images an unsettling edge, but the abnormalities were treated discreetly, kept at an emotional periphery. Now a brazen impulse took hold. “I plugged into the sense of disarticulation in the dolls, the idea of plastic anagrams. If I could meet Bellmer today, I would ask why he used the dolls. Perhaps the answer is that he couldn’t deal with a human being. He was exploring elements of sexuality that people can’t normally handle. The dolls were symbolic. And by using dolls he could get away with making them young, putting them in that time of almost unfettered sexuality.”

  Bellmer seemed to have traveled far on a journey toward something primitive, and the photographs stirred, in Ron, a barely articulate erotic understanding and artistic ambition. “The elemental body” was the phrase that came to him. “There’s something about making love to a legless woman—there’s nothing in the way. It’s a clear path, it’s very primal to me.” There was an artistic depth he might reach, he thought, through the bodies that held such power over him.

  The first body he used belonged to a prostitute who went by the name Johnny Bardot. Until she’d been pushed in front of a subway, she’d been a madam at a high-priced bordello on the Upper East Side. Now she was turning tricks, working from a wheelchair on the streets west of Times Square. A friend of Ron’s delivered her to him.

  The friend, whom Ron had met through men like the Korean War pilot who had created a kind of community around their desire, was the sort of devotee who sent some amputees and their advocates into missions of warning and outbursts of rage. He traveled the world, searching for amputee women, and approached almost every one that he saw. The approaches weren’t impolite; he would have seemed a harmless player, Ron thought, had his target been women with all their limbs; instead he seemed almost criminal, striking up conversations in train stations and at prosthetics conventions. He noticed Johnny Bardot one night from his car, knew right away that Ron would want to photograph her, and set up a meeting.

  Ron paid her for her time. He sold the pictures on a devotee Web site and gave her the profits, several thousand dollars. What he got in return was a living version of Bellmer’s dolls.

  The photographs are at once visionary and political. In one—probably the most conventionally pornographic of the series—Bardot sits on an impeccably smooth gray floor. She wears a white corset that laces up the back. The stays cling to her body, which she kept in shape with a fanatical routine of modified push-ups and crunches. She looks back over one shoulder at the camera, her face framed and shadowed by her profusion of hair, which enwraps her cheekbones and chin and tumbles over her shoulders in loose curls of oak and gold. A white bow, a tribute to Bellmer, lies slightly off-center on her head, seeming to slide down the shimmering ringlets. She smiles minimally, seductively. Her lower body, the legs amputated close to the hips, is clothed in white stockings. Her back is arched; her ass, broad and round, is cocked toward the viewer and sits on the flawless gray surface. All is flawless, except for the absence of legs. Yet within the way of seeing dictated by the picture, within the aesthetic created by the gray that rises from the floor and forms, too, the backdrop of the image, so that Bardot seems to be posing in her own ethereal world—within the photograph, the absence of legs is not a flaw at all.

  Curving delicately at its end and sheathed in white, the right stump, the only one visible because of the camera’s angle, suggests the shape and perfection and allure of an egg—the stump is beautiful in itself. But the absence of legs also accentuates the sexual. Bardot’s posture—back arched, ass cocked—provokes thoughts of her being locked to a man’s lap, and the thoughts are not of strangeness; the thoughts are not repellent, not even remotely. It is easy to imagine that the experience of having her in this way would be far more primitive, more pure, more powerful than being straddled by a typical woman.

  In another photograph her deconstruction is as gentle as it is violent. Sitting in an antique chair whose legs draw elegant curves, she wears an old-fashioned white undergarment. The bodice is tight, the thigh-length skirt spreads in a bloom of crinoline. She faces the camera, her features almost completely obliterated by shadow, only a sliver of nose and half of her lips illuminated in a way that speaks of sadness and keen vulnerability and a longing for the touch of an exquisite, tender lover.

  It seems she has found him. She wears one prosthetic leg and extends it toward the viewer: toward that touch, that lover. A wide band of lace adorns that artificial thigh, and she offers it to the slow and tender man, the man who will, at every moment, treat her vulnerability as precious; she asks him silently to slide the lace down and off her leg.

  She wants him, as well, to remove the leg itself. The other prosthetic already lies on the floor below the chair. He has taken it in his hands and taken it off and placed it aside. He has done this just as he might unlace or unbutton an article of her clothing and slip it away from her skin. Removing the first prosthetic is like the start of a deep undressing. Removing the other will be the completion. She sits within the bloom of crinoline with one leg gone and the other waiting. She asks him to go that far because he goes so softly.

  Yet he is tearing her apart, tearing her limb from limb. That is the impulse lurking within his softness, and the result, no matter how slowly and gently he proceeds, is that one leg has been pulled off and the other is about to follow. This is their desire: his bringing destruction, her being destroyed, decomposing, taking on a more primal form. This is their inexorable mission as they make love.

  But unlike Bellmer’s images, the portraits of Bardot have a political purpose, a “usefulness” as Bellmer contemptuously put it, that accompanies the artistic vision. These are statements of enlightened outcry at the same time that they are invocations of darkness. They say: Look at this woman. She is an amputee, someone from whom you would avert your eyes, but she is beautiful, complex, as fully human as anyone you know. Look. Stare. Take her in. Allow her in. Allow her to be.

  And in some of the pictures, the message is yet more bold. There is no plea to be seen, recognized, permitted her humanity. There is presumption and self-advertisement: I am splendid by any standard, and you will look, stare, want. For all her welcoming of destruction, the photographs proclaim a liberation, a refusal to be reduced, an exultant strength.

  Johnny Bardot, whose real name was Janet, bought heroin with the money Ron paid her. She had always used. But now dependency deepened, addiction took hold, and sometimes she couldn’t be photographed when they had arranged to work. She was nodding out. Always she had assumed any pose he described. She had never protested; body and being had been pliant. Now she deteriorated to the point that she couldn’t perform. Willingness became vacancy. The len
s couldn’t find the life within her. And eventually she disappeared. But until then, she was much more than a model; she was an actress capable of embodying all the layers, all the contradictions he hoped to render. She poses, in one frame, with a pair of dark wooden crutches. She wears antiquated prosthetics that lace up along the thighs. One of the laces is loose, and part of the knee on the other leg is missing. Plainly the contraptions can’t work, but their leather and laces are beautiful, and she is determined to use them. She leans forward and tries to rise out of a chair, to lever herself onto the crutches with her thick, muscled arms. Her head tilts almost coquettishly, and her oakand-gold hair tumbles to that side, but there is nothing coquettish about her effort. She is fragile and stubborn, helpless and self-sufficient, broken and complete. She is lovely, and it is hard not to fall in love.

  THE jazz club was down a set of difficult stairs, impossible with a wheelchair. The maître d’ told him where to go, and he wheeled Laura down the block. At times, she didn’t wear her prosthetics, though she was proficient on them—they were awkward and exhausting. He wheeled her around the corner and through the front doors of an apartment building. They rode the building’s elevator down, navigated a basement corridor, entered the back door to the club’s kitchen. He wheeled her between the flaming stoves and mammoth refrigerators, between the chopping and sautéing, through the swinging doors and into the club. This, if you were in a wheelchair, was the only way.

  After nineteen years, Ron’s marriage to Elizabeth was falling apart. “Not because we were a devotee and an amputee,” he said, “but because we were a man and a woman. Our marriage failed for the same screwed-up reasons that half of all marriages do.” He’d seen images of Laura on Carol Davis’s Web site, and Davis had relayed his request that she model. At the start, she was, for him, simply a replacement for Johnny Bardot. And he, for her, was someone to avoid dating. Intrigued as she was by what compelled devotees, and open as she was to the idea of their desire, she had decided she didn’t want to come any closer than conversation; she had told herself she didn’t want to be touched by anything more than a photographer’s lens. She bent her rule, she remembered, “because Ron was successful, a big-city person, intelligent, educated.” Hours before their evening at the jazz club, they’d finished an all-day shoot, a session with a modern dancer, an attempt to replicate the delicate lines of Degas despite the stolid thickness of stumps and the weight of prosthetics.

  The bassist Ron Carter was playing that night. Carter’s girlfriend lived in Ron’s small building, but even without that, the musician might have recognized him—Ron was a regular at his gigs. Carter nodded and steered his band into “Blue Monk” as Ron wheeled Laura to a table. He knew it was Ron’s favorite. The bass climbed the song’s staircase of notes, skipping upward and then, distracted, stopping to dance on the steps before reaching the top.

  At the shoot earlier that day, Ron had been “this neurotic photographer who was driving me insane,” Laura recalled. “Pacing back and forth in this loft he’d rented, pacing and yelling. He hated what the stylist was doing with my hair. He thought it was too severe. He’d never worked with her before, and he was freaking out. ‘What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?’ Over and over. Chaos. The costumes wouldn’t sit right. He was chain-smoking and swearing. No one could find the electrical outlets. And we were waiting for the dancer. He’d hired someone from the Dance Theater of Harlem, but at the last minute he had to go with the troupe to Washington to perform for the president, and we were waiting for his replacement. It was mayhem. Ron was not a human being.”

  He became one as Carter plucked his bass, performing subtle, lilting acrobatics. And afterward, with the months of phone calls and e-mails between New York and Pennsylvania, Ron’s being a devotee put her off less and less. “We started to talk all the time, and I was thinking, This is so wonderful. He was the first man I could totally relate to. I didn’t have to hide any of my dreams. I was thinking, This is the neatest thing in the world. I could tell he was everything I wanted, a friend and a companion and someone who accepted me totally for myself.” She cut herself off as she spoke to me. “This is going to make me cry.”

  She sat, her voice breaking, in the living room of the house they’d bought together a year earlier, five years after they’d met. It was a few minutes’ drive from downtown in a Pennsylvania city, in a community of quiet lanes and cul-de-sacs, of well-pruned shrubs and sloping lawns. The one-story house had a stone façade and a small swimming pool where, in the summer, Laura did laps to exercise her arms and “limblets”—the word she preferred to “stumps.” Inside, all was sleek and modern. She sat on a square-backed couch, with her prosthetics off. Lately she had been learning to use a new pair. Their technology was more advanced; they would give her, eventually, a bit more agility. But the process would take half a year, and she swore that this was the last time she would put herself through it, no matter what improvements science offered. Her legs leaned, at the moment, against the wall in the bedroom she shared with Ron.

  He rubbed her neck as her voice gave way. “When I met her, she was right on the cusp of things.”

  “In his eyes, I was what he was looking for. But he was what I was looking for. I was coming out. I was changing.”

  “It sounds kind of silly, but she was a bud about to bloom.”

  “It’s true. It was like perfect timing. I wanted somebody responsible and worldly, somebody to talk to, somebody—not to take care of me but to be nurturing. And until Ron I never had a relationship like that.”

  “She was out there alone.”

  “I was striving, but I didn’t have any support. I didn’t have any self-esteem. Part of me knew there was something better inside me, but I didn’t have anyone to help me develop it.”

  Now she had graduated from college and was halfway to a master’s in social work. She planned to counsel the disabled. “Everything I’ve ever wanted to do I’m doing now. I wanted to own a house like this. I wanted to model. I wanted a college education. And I wanted to be a psychologist, and now, in a way, I’m going to be.”

  She worked, as part of her master’s program, at a state-funded mental health center that helped patients to find the right kind of care. The center was part of a movement in the field; it was known as a “consumer organization”—the staff were or had once been mental health patients themselves. They knew what it was to be as lost as Laura when she’d overdosed on Valium and spent ten days in a psychiatric ward.

  Everyone else in the squat building of small offices had their whole bodies. Yet Laura seemed by far the most stable. The unkempt director talked incessantly about the great psychologists she’d studied with, about the great athletic achievements of her adult sons, about her own “giant balls” in standing up to practitioners who refused to listen to their patients. The center’s secretary, a chiseled ex-marine in a pressed polo shirt, said repeatedly, quietly, methodically, “I have a car now,” as though to convince himself of his recovery from the desolation that had hold of him. Another staffer wore her hair in a rat’s tail that dangled rakishly below her psychedelic skullcap. She had no top teeth and, openly lesbian, liked to flirt with Laura. “I love those photographs,” she said. “My wife and I are re-decorating, and I’m going to put one up, a sexy one; I’m going to blow it up big. Laura, when are you graduating? When are we celebrating? When are we going skinny-dipping? I want to touch those legs.”

  In her office, Laura sat at a clutterless glass desk and took calls from the desperate. On the cork board behind her she’d tacked a poster of Freud declaring, “I’ve changed my mind, don’t tell me about your mother…recover!” But with her clients she had unlimited patience. She listened for an hour and a half to a paranoid schizophrenic recounting a feud with his neighbor over a woodpile. Later she visited a lockdown ward of psychotics and tried to persuade the staff to take guidance from the patients on their treatment. This was her mission: caregivers should see patients as equals. The de
lusional man raging about the woodpile might well know what was best for his own care. She brought all she’d been through to her work, all the times she’d been dismissed as a cripple by the people in charge of her rehabilitation, all the times she’d been unheard, invisible.

  Near the poster of Freud was a photograph of Laura perched on a kitchen counter in a short red dress. “I like that picture,” she said. “It’s saucy.” Home was decorated with large, framed portraits: of her, of Johnny Bardot. In one, Laura sits in a silvery-pink satin dress, leaning forward with an elbow on one thigh and her chin on her fist. Her half-smile hints at self-satisfaction, defiance. She spreads her prosthetic knees and pushes the satin down between them, flaunting, concealing, taunting. But the expression on her face is more powerful than the flirtation with the fabric. Eros assumes a different form than it does in the portraits of Bardot. The sensibility has shifted with the muse. Laura radiates intelligence. Self-possession emanates more than the desire to be possessed.

  Laura stands, in another photograph, wearing a two-piece gown, bodice and skirt, from centuries ago. The scarlet material is trimmed in gold brocade. From her waist the skirt billows outward, broad as a spinnaker, and grazes the floor in a huge circle. It fastens in front by a series of cobalt buttons, and she is about to start closing it, but for the moment it gapes open: a vertical window, eight or ten inches wide, runs from her waist to the floor. The gold brocade lines the opening like a ceremonial decoration, a veneration of what lies within. But nothing lies within. Inside the vast regal tent of the garment is darkness.