Because of the lighting and pose, Laura’s body seems to end at the belly, to have no stumps at all. The opening exposes a pure emptiness. It is unclear how she is standing, what keeps her upright. The cavern beneath the skirt is illumined just enough to suggest that she isn’t wearing her prosthetics. She stands on no legs, suspended, magical.
And that magic, along with her strong jawline turned in profile, endows her with omnipotence. The cavern is at once a universe and a womb. The vertical opening is a vaginal slit, and to slip through it, to slide the body inside the scarlet walls of the tent, to wait inside while she fastens the skirt and encloses you, swallows you, would be to live out the primal fantasy of entering the vagina not only with the penis but with everything from the skull to the toes: to be ensconced, to be consumed. The photograph’s viewer, not its subject, is at risk of disintegrating, coming apart, deliquescing in the lightless world he has longed for, turning to liquid in the womb. Laura, with her half-body, will remain more than intact, more than whole.
SHE wore a ring with a white gold band and a diamond in a high setting. After six years together, they were engaged to be married. They were planning a honeymoon in Italy, including Venice, where, somehow, he would help her manage the city’s steeply arched bridges, its narrow and crooked stairs, its keeling pavement, its crowded alleys, its water taxis, and where, somehow, he would help her into a gondola that would take them gliding at night along the fire-lit canals.
Their lives were merged. She was his muse, who brought life to his dreams, and he had brought life to hers. They were merged “in the million ways that make up a relationship,” he said in their kitchen, as they prepared a Sunday breakfast of eggs and bagels for themselves and me.
“We have all the regular things that keep people together,” she added, wheeling herself around the island counter and setting the table.
“And like the cherry on the sundae is that she’s a double amputee, which brings me such happiness and pleasure and joy.” He spoke plainly, and she didn’t wince at his words. His attraction was an accepted fact between them, one they were accustomed to acknowledging, and though she didn’t smile at his praise and his gratitude, his way of saying that he felt extremely lucky to have found a woman he melded with so well and for whom he felt such desire, it wasn’t hard to imagine that she did sometimes smile at such phrases. Earlier that morning I had heard their voices across the hall in their bedroom. I had woken to their laughter.
She put out butter and jelly, and he served the eggs, and we sat down to eat. They talked about the way some in the amputee community called the attraction disgusting. “If it’s disgusting,” Laura asked, “what are they saying about themselves?”
She mentioned an article we’d all read in a magazine for the disabled. It spoke of the ways that doctors and psychologists and physical therapists often compounded the shame of amputees by pushing them into prosthetics not so much for the sake of independence as to spare everyone else the sight of their disfigurement. The writer recounted the stay of a quadrilateral amputee in a rehabilitation center, where she was all but forced to wear purely cosmetic legs and arms, and to cover herself in loose, long-sleeved clothing.
In reply, Ron described the relief of a friend when Elizabeth, who never wore prosthetics, had been replaced in his life by Laura. And Laura talked about the different reactions she encountered during her day, depending on whether she had put on her artificial legs. Her words made me think of something else she’d once told me, that she was proud of her life and in love with Ron, but that the truth was she felt plagued by wondering if she could win a normal man. She knew that such thinking was perverse. She knew that it spoke of self-loathing, that normal was a worthless notion, that it held only the power she allowed it. She knew better, knew she should purge her longing, but couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t get rid of this desire.
Yet I had heard her laughter float across the hall from a master bedroom with leopard-print pillowcases and a leopard-print comforter, laughter that was light and warm, the laughter of being beloved. And then she had emerged, resplendent, wearing a man’s white dress shirt, to make breakfast with her fiancé.
After we ate, they led me out from the kitchen into the garage. They showed me a contraption: two bicycles connected side by side. She didn’t have the balance to ride on her own, and a typical tandem, one rider behind the other, wouldn’t offer enough stability, either. He’d come across the side-by-side design in an old disability magazine, ordered the connector, and gone to a local bike shop for help in attaching it. But the device wouldn’t fit with any of the shop’s bicycles. Ron was about to give up when he wondered if using old-fashioned bikes might be a solution. He found a pair on eBay, and returned to the shop, where the mechanic, sympathetic to the project because his mother was blind, set to work again. And this time, all went smoothly. The contraption was perfect.
Suddenly Ron and Laura were peddling and coasting beside each other, flying through their own breeze, bound together, free.
There was only one problem. Soon he was gasping for breath. He wasn’t as strong, wasn’t in her kind of shape. He needed to stop, to turn around, when she wasn’t at all ready, when she was barely breathing hard, when she was exhilarated. She wanted to go on and on.
Acknowledgments
This is a book of trust. To all the people who taught me with the stories of their lives—the people who fill these pages and the many more who fill my thinking—thank you for your trust and your teaching. And thank you to the scientists and therapists who gave their time so generously to educate me.
Among my sources of learning is the photography of Ron Parisi, whose story I tell in “The Devotee.” His work can be found at www.ronparisi.com.
This is also a book that required a great deal of faith. For that and for all her guidance, I have long been very lucky to have Suzanne Gluck as my agent—and I am lucky to have William Morris’s Sarah Ceglarski, Raffaella De Angelis, Tracy Fisher, Erin Malone, and Cathryn Summerhayes on my side.
Then there is Lee Boudreaux. When we first met, I thought, I want her for my editor. My instincts were only half right, in that I guessed only half of what a wonderful editor she would be. And Dan Halpern, along with Rachel Bressler, Alison Former, Abby Holstein, Van Luu, Michael McKenzie, Greg Mortimer, Allison Saltzman, and the sales team (whose readings, starting with Jeanette Zwart’s, were so thoughtful) have made Ecco a perfect home.
Ilena Silverman, my editor at the New York Times Magazine, gave this book its beginning and offered crucial friendship throughout its writing.
For friendship, faith, guidance, my endless gratitude to Samantha Gillison, John Gulla, William Hogeland, Roland Kelts, George Packer, Ayesha Pande, and Elissa Wald.
And then:
KSF, you are in every word.
Nancy, without you, there would be no words.
And Natalie and Miles, who changed my life, without you there wouldn’t be much of anything at all.
About the Author
DANIEL BERGNER is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of two books of nonfiction—In the Land of Magic Soldiers, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and winner of an Overseas Press Club Award and a Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage; and God of the Rodeo, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Bergner’s writing has also appeared in Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones, Talk, the New York Times Book Review, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times.
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ALSO BY DANIEL BERGNER
FICTION
Moments of Favor
NONFICTION
God of the Rodeo:
The Quest for Redemption in
Louisiana’s Angola Prison
In the Land of Magic Soldiers:
A Story of White and Black in
West Africa
Credits
Jacket design by Allison Saltzman<
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Jacket photograph by Rosemary Porter
Copyright
THE OTHER SIDE OF DESIRE. Copyright © 2009 by Daniel Bergner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Mobipocket Reader December 2008 ISBN 978-0-06-175985-7
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The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing Page 19