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

by Daniel Bergner

  “Sometimes it’s seamless,” she said, “and sometimes it’s, Oh fuck oh shit.”

  “We forgive each other.”

  “I love being in a relationship where I care about Ben to the nth degree.”

  Lately they had begun wounding and debasing each other in public, at parties thrown by friends they’d met at clubs or through the Baroness. “We love the public degradation of it. The audience adds to the humiliation.” So going to parties meant packing gear: “The first few times, it was like we needed a checklist. Clothespins. Ankle restraints. Wrist restraints. Ball weights. Leash. Collar. Gag. Masks. Opera-length rubber gloves. Carabiners. Flogger. Whip. Lighter. Locks. Keys. It’s great to go fetish-shopping at Home Depot. Three sets of keys each for six regular and four mini locks—one set on a rubber band around the wrist, another set in the bag, another in a coat pocket. You don’t want the love of your life chained up and no way to release her at the end of the night. All that equipment and you’re decked in latex and then, ‘Shit, we forgot cigarettes,’ and we can’t go into our corner deli looking like that. But all the preparation is worth it. The humiliation is so sensual.”

  Their play, their lovemaking, could go on for hours and hours. Still, when it was all over, when the submissive had stopped crying out in abject ecstasy, recovery wasn’t as difficult as it might seem. “There’s a feeling of complete exhaustion and exhilaration,” she said. “It’s not like I have to crawl out of a hole that’s six feet under.” And he: “I just curl up in her lap.”

  They had a saying, a vow they’d taken: “Everything always.” Not with anyone else—they were faithful to each other—but between themselves. And not if it meant exposure within their other lives. They feared for her job if anyone at her organization found out. They feared for his commissions. People might be intrigued, might feel a tremor of self-recognition, that they possessed at least an element of similar yearning. But few would admit it. Most would react badly. Most wouldn’t want them around. Even in downtown Manhattan, where they lived, they rarely walked outside for any distance in their latex, out of worry that the clothes would give them away to strangers on the street.

  They felt that the Baroness truly was, for them and even more for the many others who were more secretive, more fearful, a beacon. The name she’d given herself, the boutique she owned, the way she appeared every day and night on the streets of Manhattan—Eliza and Ben saw her as a herald for the gift that, despite their fears, they felt lucky to have received. “It is difficult to live this way,” he said. “There are social obstacles. But if someone said, ‘I can take care of this perversion, you won’t even miss it’—no way. This brings us too much. We wouldn’t trade this for the world.”

  “PEOPLE don’t believe it’s an equal partnership,” Mark said of his marriage to the Baroness. “They assume I play the role of a submissive.”

  He didn’t, he told me. He had fallen in love with a woman with another name; he had married a woman who showed no signs of what she would become. The first time she used a whip he was stunned. It was in their living room, with Luminous, who had once been the highest-ranked chess player in the state of Arkansas, receiving her lashes. It was difficult for Mark to watch, to realize “that the woman I love has an interest in treating people this way. But it also seemed like a fluke, like it would be just that once. Had I known it was the start of a trend maybe I would have said something. Every year she seemed to enjoy inflicting a little more pain, taking a little more blood.” He remembered his jealousy when she’d carved the V into Luminous’s back. It had seemed so intimate.

  She was his when it came to conventional sex. And gradually he had come to terms with her needing something more. “I think of it as two aspects of the woman I love. If she enjoys dispensing pain and humiliation, I’m glad that there is someone to take it. I have zero interest. I’m an outsider in her world. I’ve become acclimated. But I have no real friends in the S-M scene because that is what they have in common. It is still foreign to me. I still don’t understand it. The more equal I feel with someone, the closer I feel.”

  ONE evening the Baroness invited me to drinks with her oldest friend. She had known Celeste for almost twenty-five years, since they’d met while working on costumes for a Broadway musical. At the quiet wine bar where we talked, Celeste wore black pants, a lavender cardigan, a necklace of small glass balls. Her voice was as delicate as the glass. Her brown hair was cropped short in the aftermath of cancer treatments that had accomplished what they could. She had a brain tumor; she was dying.

  “The Baroness and Mark were the second people I told.” She talked about her years of friendship with the Baroness, years of going to plays and the opera. And she talked about the Baroness’s recent loyalty, her frequent visits, her willingness not to turn away from weakness and death. Celeste mentioned, too, that the Baroness had dispatched one of her submissives to help her with chores around her apartment. “I wouldn’t have gotten through it without this woman sitting here as my friend.”

  “She has a brain tumor, she can’t be trusted,” the Baroness said, smiling, deflecting some of the sentiment.

  Then Celeste said abruptly, “I’m not sure I’m over the shock yet. She was, before, extremely antiviolence. She couldn’t even stand it if I got angry. She hits people. She hurts people. I was really, really shocked to see what she was doing to Luminous; it made me want to throw up. There were times, after her change, when I thought I could not be her friend. She was cutting and branding him. I couldn’t deal with that. It wasn’t him specifically, it was that she was doing this to another human being.”

  The Baroness stiffened. Her metallic eye shadow did nothing to brighten her wounded eyes. The conflagration of her hair seemed to collapse, the colors fading.

  “I saw Charles, who is black, chained and serving as a slave at her apartment,” Celeste went on in her fragile voice. “And when I protested, she said, ‘This is sexy.’”

  “As it was.”

  “And she talks about liking intelligence in her slaves.”

  “As I do.”

  “But doesn’t it get in the way of their intelligence when they cower in front of you?” Celeste turned from me to face her friend.

  “All their potential is wasted until they become who they are.”

  “Don’t you destroy intelligence by tearing people down?”

  “Have I mentioned”—the Baroness glanced at me—“that she has a brain tumor and can’t be trusted?”

  They laughed together.

  “It’s scary,” Celeste said. “She really is happier as the Baroness.”

  FOR her Valentine’s night party the Baroness wore pink latex gauntlets that rose to her shoulders and a black latex dress with a high sheen. Her hair was sculpted into a flaming arch. It was early. The bar she and her flock took over on the first Sunday of every month wasn’t half-full. Two middle-aged men, both in latex bodysuits, chatted about the routes they’d taken to reach here. One had come from Pennsylvania, the other from New Jersey, and they complained mildly about the weather and the traffic as they might have done if this were a holiday gathering and they were relatives with little else to discuss. They’d both wound up in the Holland Tunnel; they compared their luck in the different lanes they’d chosen.

  Then they were distracted. A lithe woman in her early twenties had climbed up onto the small stage. She spoke to the Baroness, who sipped a cocktail. They walked over to a chair her submissives carried from her apartment each month on these occasions. It looked like an old-fashioned electric chair. Made of wood, it was large and sturdy, straight-backed and spare. The woman, curly blond hair cut short and wearing only an ivory-colored slip, knelt backward on the seat. The Baroness locked her wrists tightly to large screw eyes. The woman’s neck hung over the back. Her ankles were soon immobilized, and her waist was pinned by heavy tape, wrapped round and round from waist to wood.

  The Baroness stepped about twelve feet from the chair and used a backhanded technique. Each
lash against the woman’s shoulders brought a gasp, a cry. Then the Baroness set aside the whip to attach dozens of clothespins to the woman’s neck and shoulders and arms, and a metal clip to her tongue, which now protruded unnaturally, painfully, from her mouth. After more lashes, one of the Baroness’s submissives removed the clothespins. A chain of welts decorated the flesh. Someone raised the woman’s slip to expose more skin, which, with more flogging, began to bleed.

  The Baroness paused again. “I try to force myself to slow down, to make it last,” she told me afterward. “Especially with someone like that who wants it so badly, so openly.” She approached the woman and stroked her lightly under the chin and along the neck. The woman laid her head to the side, worshipful. Her clipped tongue lolled. Around it her mouth tried to smile. Her eyes gazed supplicatingly at the Baroness, who gazed back like a lover in the midst of intercourse, positioned on top, ceasing her thrusts to look tenderly, almost pityingly at her partner before bringing them both to climax.

  She resumed, slowly at first and then, after a few lashes, more quickly, harder. The woman’s lower back and buttocks were streaked red, and between the streaks the skin looked as though a bulb were shining from underneath; it glowed a dark, garish pink. The gasps and cries became agonized, sensual groans. The Baroness’s eyes had a manic flatness, a half-seeing focus. The whip struck and struck. She was silent, in a trance.

  Afterward she moved close again. I watched with Sam, who had recently begun to receive her lashings and whose wife had the ladder of scars that the Baroness adored. The Baroness placed her fingers on the wounds she’d just made. Her eyes were closed. She touched gently, almost without pressure, slowly shifting her fingertips. The heat from the damaged skin spread through her hand the way a child’s fever floods the lips of a kissing mother. Her eyes remained peacefully shut. The woman was still. The fingertips traced the topography of lacerations. “That’s the Baroness,” Sam said. “She nurtures you.”

  PART III

  THE WATER’S EDGE

  AFTER HIS METAMORPHOSIS, ROY SAT, ONE MORNING each week, in a windowless room. It had a blue industrial carpet, a blackboard, a circle of brown cushioned office chairs. A faint hum came from the air ducts. To reach the room from the waiting area, on the second floor of the probation building, Roy and the other men walked down a series of corridors and around a series of turns that felt like a path through a maze. The room was wedged in a back corner.

  Roy burrowed through his mind relentlessly, trying to unbury an explanation for his being here, in the circle of twelve chairs. It seemed to him that he’d been, just yesterday, a normal man, approaching forty. “I was typical,” he told me plaintively. “Typical. With the same fantasies generally that general men have.”

  He’d run a crew of computer technicians, repairing telecommunications equipment for Wall Street trading firms. In his off hours he’d led a wedding band that played the Plaza. He sang Frank Sinatra and Barry White with such agility, such precise and layered mimicry, that to listen to his CDs, the recordings he’d once mailed out to the couples thinking of booking him, was to mistake his versions for the real thing.

  You’ll never find

  As long as you live

  Someone who loves you

  Tender like I do

  Barry White’s low, late-night croon slid from Roy’s lips as though the black balladeer inhabited him. Roy was, in a sense, a failed musician. His career had peaked when he was a teenager; a song he’d written and recorded, an antidrug anthem with a disco beat, was played a few times on one of New York City’s major radio stations. For his own music, that had been the beginning and the end. But his imitative talent was so extreme as to be original. He was somehow not a failure at all. His replications held an ineffable richness that belonged to the known singers but that he, magically, owned. Something otherworldly, a kind of emotional, artistic channeling, happened when he sang.

  In what time work and music allowed, Roy flew kites—kites bigger than most living rooms. One was an airborne acoustic guitar in bright yellow. Another was a floating box of Cray-ola crayons. At night he launched a kite outfitted with strobe lights that pulsed the colors of the rainbow over the earth below. To the gargantuan bodies he attached streamers and spinners, spiked balls and “watermelon tails,” jellyfish tentacles and “space socks” that trailed more than a hundred feet behind. His kites could perform ballets with him holding the lines.

  In the aftermath of his metamorphosis, he could recall no history of longing for young girls. He’d had no criminal record of any kind. “Not even a speeding ticket,” he said. His transformation, it seemed to him, had begun abruptly one summer, on vacation at the beach. His second wife had pointed out her eleven-year-old daughter’s body. Roy and his wife were standing on the sand; his stepdaughter, Faith, and her best friend, Elizabeth, played several yards in front of them at the edge of the surf. “Look at those girls,” Roy remembered his wife saying. “They’re changing already. You can see their bodies changing.”

  LIKE Nabokov’s Humbert, he sometimes felt that his adult entrancement had its seed in childhood desire. Everyone knows Humbert’s Lolita but few remember his Annabelle, though she enters on page one, introduced to explain, at least partially, his later crimes. “In point of fact,” Humbert says, linking his craving for Lolita to the infatuation he’d felt, decades earlier, on the cusp of adolescence, “there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child.” The memory of his pubescent love, the still-palpable recollection of urgent, exquisite fondling in the garden while Annabelle’s parents were inside playing cards, leaves him with a lifelong yearning to recapture that sweetness, that desperation, that intensity, and to consummate what youth had thwarted. Lolita, whom Humbert pursues in his late thirties, is the incarnation of erotic nostalgia.

  Roy’s Annabelle was his aunt, his mother’s much younger sister, thirteen when Roy was eleven. One summer night, on vacation with his mother’s family, while the adults played cards in the kitchen, his aunt asked him to come into the sun room. And there, evening by evening, they progressed from displaying to touching to her straddling him, their groins bare. She slid and rubbed herself across his cock. “I think that’s what was always in my head with Faith,” he said. He’d longed to have again that trembling childhood thrill.

  But the explanation didn’t come close to satisfying him. His soft, smooth face and easy, band leader’s smile often collapsed in confusion. He was round in the middle and broad in the shoulders—bearish in a way that was more panda-like than threatening. In the back room at the end of the maze, near him along the circle of chairs, sat an elderly man with a graceful wave of white hair combed back from his forehead. There was a well-scrubbed man in his mid-thirties, his forehead shiny, the pale blue check in his button-down shirt matching the blue of his eyes.

  They were there for group counseling as part of their probation. They had spent time in jail or prison: a few weeks; several years. The man with the wave of white hair had fondled the vagina of his grandniece again and again when the girl was seven, eight. He’d kissed her chest, had her hold his penis. As an adult, David, the man in the checked shirt, had given a blow job to his eleven-year-old brother. Later, he’d taken his six-year-old daughter to a motel room along with his brother, who was by then sixteen. He’d grown obsessed by a fantasy. Now he started to make it real. He persuaded them both to undress. David urged his brother to have sex with his daughter, only desisting “seconds away from something really, really bad happening,” when his brother began to cry.

  “What possessed me?” Roy demanded over and over in the group sessions and alone with himself. The question churned through the minds of most of the men. David, a published poet, said he felt like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  “Could anybody end up getting into this mess?” Roy asked.

  “BEGIN breathing slowly and deeply,” Patrick Liddle, the group’s therapist, its leader, instructed the men. It was the way he oft
en started. They sat with their hands on their thighs, their eyes closed. “Inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth.” He taught them to meditate. He spoke in a soothing monotone, the voice he used with them always, no matter how disquieted, how uneasily self-aware their crimes made him feel. “Pay attention to your breath. Is each breath reaching down to your upper chest? Your lower chest? Your abdomen? Let the breathing deepen.”

  He was silent a long while, then resumed. “Focus your awareness in your feet. Just be aware of how they feel.” Part of his job was to give the men ways to keep their lives under control, to keep themselves from transgressing again. The meditation was one method. “Now center your attention on the steady beating of your heart.” Liddle wore fashionably tailored suits and shoes polished to a soft gloss. The clothes were part of the program. His boss set the dress code, to lend some measure of esteem to those in treatment, to elevate men who could hardly have fallen lower. For the therapists themselves, the clothes helped to lessen the taint of what they were dealing with.

  “Picture in your mind a large open field covered in deep grass up to your waist. A light, warm breeze is blowing. Feel the breeze on your skin. Each thought that enters your mind becomes a brightly colored balloon; watch them float; just let them go.” Roy and the others sat perfectly still. Their fingers curled gently. Their jaws were slack, their mouths slightly open. They seemed almost to be sleeping, and like sleeping men anywhere, they looked almost like children.