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

220 Pages·2009·0.74 MB·English

by  Daniel Bergner

T H E OT H E R

S I D E O F

Desire

D E S I R E

FOU R JO U RN E YS
INTO TH E
FAR R E ALM S O F
LUST AN D LO N G I N G
D B
ANIEL ERGNER

CO NTENTS
Introduction v
I. The Phantom of the Opera 1
II. The Beacon 47
III. The Water’s Edge 97
IV. The Devotee 161
Acknowledgments 207
About the Author
Other Books by Daniel Bergner
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION
“What,” the people I write about often ask, “are you doing here
with me?” I heard the question in Angola Prison, Louisiana’s
maximum security penitentiary, where I followed the lives of
men sentenced to stay locked up until their deaths, with no
chance of parole. I heard it in Sierra Leone, in West Africa,
where I attached myself to missionaries and mercenaries and
child soldiers amid the most brutal war in recent memory. And
I heard it as I sought the stories—of eros, obsession, anarchy,
love—that fill The Other Side of Desire.
It was four years ago that I entered the worlds of the people
whose lives form the spine of this book. There was an adver-
tising executive who celebrated the most conventional kind of
female beauty in the billboards he created, who felt no attrac-
tion to the models he cast, and who was drawn erotically, in-
escapably, to amputees; there was a clothing designer and rare
female sadist who searched for transcendent connection with
those she wounded and enslaved; there was a traveling sales-
man and devoted husband whose fetish brought him extreme
vi • INTRODUCTION
ecstasy and crippling abasement; and there was a band leader
transfixed by his young stepdaughter.
How do we come to have the particular desires that drive us,
how do we become who we are sexually, whether our lusts are
common or improbable? How much are we born with and how
much do we learn from all that surrounds us, how much can
we change and how much is locked unreachably, permanently
within? These questions were part of what pulled me toward my
four central characters—and toward a set of scientists immersed
in studying eros. And then there was the question of how we live
with our longings. A speech therapist for stroke victims, a tiny
woman with a doll’s round face, with black button eyes and a
slender, fragile nose, told me that if a dominant lover whispered
in her ear in the right way, she could reach orgasm without touch.
She wanted to be harmed. But she was tortured by her desire—
she was an Orthodox Jew; her grandparents had been slaugh-
tered in the Holocaust; and she couldn’t reconcile the cravings
of eros with the cruelty her family had suffered. What do we do
with the desires we cannot bear, the desires we or the society
around us strain to restrict or strangle, whether the wanting is
unusual or as typical as the yearning for new lovers that can turn
otherwise happy marriages into arrangements that sometimes
feel as agonizing as actual imprisonment? And what is the re-
lationship between the physical and the transcendent, between
the surfaces of the body and the wish to melt the bounds of self,
between the forces of lust and our striving for love?
Some in these stories feared they would be shunned if their
private selves were known—I have changed some names and
a very few identifying details in order to protect them. As for
the question they asked, my answer is, always, this: I am here
with you, at the far edges of experience, in the hope that your
stories illuminate truths shared by all of us.
PART I
T
HE PHANTOM OF
THE OPERA

J

JACOB MILLER LOVED TORONTO. HE THOUGHT OF
it every day. He was American, and lived in a snowy American
city, but a Canadian flag, with its broad bars of red and its red
maple leaf, hung in his home office. A printout of the flag, on
a sheet of computer paper, was taped to the wall between his
kitchen and dining room. Pasted to the rear window of his car,
a flag decal hinted at his love. When he dressed casually in
wintertime, he favored a letterman’s-style jacket. The leaf, big
and bright, adorned the back.
If he’d won the lottery, he would have retired and moved
to Toronto. If he could have designed his own world, that city
would have occupied his entire planet. “When we had our son,
I wanted what I call a T-R name,” he said, laughing at himself.
“Tristan. Troy. Trice. I didn’t tell my wife why. I didn’t tell
her, ‘Because it would remind me of Toronto.’ She said, ‘I’m
not naming him Tristan, kids are going to make fun of him.
I’m not naming him Troy.’ She said, ‘What kind of name is
Trice?’”