The Other Side of Desire (11 page)

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.”

A
FTER 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 often 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.

“NOW
slowly open your eyes.”

They returned from the field of tall grass to the faces of the others. Liddle sometimes asked them for introductions, though the faces stayed mostly the same. They went around the circle. “I was convicted of two counts of sexual assault four, and three counts of risk of injury to a minor, and enticing a minor over the Internet,” Roy began. He forced himself not to mumble. Facing up to what he had done was a requirement for graduating from treatment. And he hoped this might lead—especially if he had Liddle’s recommendation—to a judge’s reducing his term of probation.

The treatment was grounded in an idea that seemed simple: to acknowledge both his crime and the anarchy of lust that lay within him was the first step toward his finding self-control. So the ability to confront himself, and to be candid with Liddle about his desires, was a requisite if he wanted to do anything outside the bounds of his probation restrictions: visit his parents over the state line, or go to a bowling alley or a movie or a family function, anyplace where he might come in contact with kids under sixteen. Any family gathering he attended had to be adults-only; he needed to leave right away if kids showed up. In his state, the group leaders and probation officers worked in tandem, weighing how well they could trust the men, and the therapists could be as cautious, as suspicious, as the probation officers. Together, Liddle and Roy’s PO set the limits on his existence. And unless he got Liddle’s recommendation and this led to a judge’s mercy, it seemed Roy would be existing this way for the rest of his life.

“I was sentenced,” he went on with his introduction, “to twenty years suspended after thirty days, with thirty-five years probation. My offense behaviors I engaged in were touching my wife’s daughter and her best friend sexually, touching them through their clothing between their legs, around their waist, moving my hand into the top of their waistband. I moved my hand under their shorts up to their panty lines. I used games that were called Chase and Spider to manipulate them into feeling safe with me.” His voice lowered, sped up. He rushed on into the next part, into the online messages he’d sent to Faith, suggesting what they might do.

HE
told me his story time and again, in detail he withheld from the group, as we sat at his kitchen table or in an empty conference room at his job. He was still a supervisor at the telecommunications repair company. In a squat suburban building just off a highway, at worktables in vast, orderly rooms, he and his team leaned over high-tech consoles and microprocessors with multicolored flashing diodes. They fixed the circuitry or, depending on Roy’s decision, redesigned it. With the permission of Liddle and the probation department, he was allowed to work around computers as long as he never went online outside the watch of a colleague.

Everyone at his job was aware of his crime. He’d made a point of being open, of answering questions. The company’s owner, who’d hired Roy several years ago, had testified on his behalf at his sentencing. “You’re talking about a person I know,” the owner told me. “A stranger, I would write them off, I wouldn’t talk to them, I wouldn’t see them, if they did one-tenth of what he did.” And for Roy, within the squat building, it wasn’t only the owner who forgave him. As I drove with him to work one winter morning, he said that he was engaged to be married again—to a bookkeeper at the company, a colleague since before his arrest. A few weeks earlier, at a Christmas Eve dinner at his house, he’d hidden a ring in the chocolate cake he served for dessert.

“THEY’RE
starting to develop. Look at their behinds. Look at my daughter, how pretty she’s going to be when she grows up.” Telling me about his crime at the well-polished kitchen table in his neatly kept wooden house, he always began with the words of Faith’s mother, Jackie, at the beach. “I’m going to have problems with her when she grows up. Sexually. With boys. I know I’m going to have a problem with her.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Look at you.”

“Please. If she ends up like me I’m going to have to shoot myself.”

He’d known Faith and her older brother from the time they were born. Their father had been a friend of Roy’s since kindergarten and, for years, a member of Roy’s band, until Jackie left him for Roy when the kids were around four and six. Roy had no children of his own. Faith and her brother lived with their father, but they spent lots of time at the house Roy shared with their mother. The boy, a prodigy on the drums, jammed in the basement with Roy on guitar. The time Roy spent with Faith was more childlike. But after that vacation at the shore, the games they played—often with her best friend, Elizabeth, too—grew sexualized at some level within his mind.

During Chase, he and the girls would turn off most of the lights. They plugged in a strobe light from his band equipment or a lamp that cast the shapes of moons on the walls, in blues and yellows and greens. His marriage was starting to come apart. Sometimes his wife was home, having shut herself in their bedroom for the evening. Sometimes she was out on her own. He raced after the girls through the house, through the colored beams.

“I remember times they would want to play Chase with me. I’d be sitting on the couch on Friday night, watching TV. I didn’t want to play with them. I was beat. And they’d come pulling on me. They were the ones that talked me into it. And I remember they’d go into their room and put their bathing suits on. I never told them to do that. And they’re running around the house shaking their butts at me.”

In Spider, each player had to sit motionless; if you moved at all you got pinched. The touching occurred during both games, and the dutiful confession Roy delivered to the group implied that the touching was blatantly, consciously sexual on his part. But the truth, he felt, was more complex, more elusive. He believed that a change had occurred with Jackie’s words on the beach, that he’d never before seen his stepdaughter as sexual, that a new awareness had penetrated at that moment, but he wasn’t at all certain that his own thinking, during the games, was permeated by desire.