The Other Side of Desire (2 page)

“His name is Max,” Jacob said.

“Just bring the
hunt
!”

He did, the mouse disappeared, and from then on she wanted the dog to visit all the time and deemed both Jacob and Sara heroes for owning it: “No one can scare mice like that
hunt
!”

Sara’s grandmother was grateful for the stability he offered; Sara’s high school friends struck her as wild. Her grandmother wanted only to know that he would be a gentleman, that he and Sara weren’t doing anything they shouldn’t during their hours in the TV room after the meals she prepared. He gave her his word, and for three years he kept it. His palms and fingers and lips and tongue traveled from her feet to her breasts and back again, the care of the trip upward masking the urgency of the trip down. Preserving her virginity wasn’t a problem for him. He came explosively, in secret, in the bathroom, never confessing his desire. But with all the attention to her body, all the signals he sent surging through her calves and thighs and breasts, chastity became a problem for her. She begged him for sex; he held off until she turned eighteen, then entered her with her feet in his hands or glimpsed in the corners of his eyes or—he needed this at the very least—pictured in his mind.

She was still in high school when she began to talk about marriage. He insisted that they live together first, needing to be sure that all wouldn’t unravel. When she started college, she took up with a new set of friends, began smoking marijuana, grew distant from him. “I started to feel like a sugar daddy,” he recalled. One day he turned a street corner and saw her hand in hand with someone else. Sara’s grandmother was as desolate as he was when they separated. She asked if he wanted to move in with her. For several weeks he ate her dinners, watched her television, slept under her roof.

And more than twenty years later, as I sat in his living room, he asked if I’d like to see Sara’s picture, and darted upstairs to slide it from wherever he kept it hidden. It was a small print with the posed and creamy look of a yearbook portrait. Her shoulder-length brown hair was carefully yet simply styled; her pale skin looked flawless to the point of appearing almost blurred; her smile was bright but seemed on the verge of collapse, like the smiles of so many teenage girls when faced with a photographer’s scrutiny and the prospect of a yearbook’s permanence. I couldn’t think of much to say as we gazed at her face together, but he filled the silence. “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about her. I had a psychologist once who told me, ‘Jacob, there’s a lid for every pot.’ There’s my lid.” He struggled to express exactly why, and returned, again and again, to their common love of their grandmothers, as though Sara was linked so strongly to the solace his grandmother had given him growing up that he needed nothing, in addition, besides the rush of attraction—and the perfection of her feet had offered him that. “There’s my lid,” he said again, then pleaded, “Don’t make me cry here.”

It wasn’t clear with whom he was pleading: I wasn’t talking, and the photograph seemed far too inexpressive to elicit tears. Yet he was seeing things I could not see, feeling things he could not communicate. His grandmother had been a woman of ultimate understanding, intuiting his shame and protecting him from the world that inflicted it. The miswiring of his brain had held him back a year in elementary school and made his advancement afterward a matter of sheer mercy, but she had provided a realm where this was irrelevant, and where his ability to scotch-tape a ceiling was a princely virtue. He never told her anything about the second way his brain had betrayed him, about the fact that he wasn’t driven at all to place himself inside a vagina but was desperate instead to be between a pair of feet, about the way his brain seemed to have set on the hood of his penis a pair of red-and-green glasses, about the way sex flooded him with self-loathing. He had no reason to think she had gleaned even a hint of it. Yet her acceptance and admiration had always been so unconditional and complete that they could seem to include his secret.

A few times, in the four and a half years he and Sara had been together, as he licked and kneaded her feet yet again, she whispered, teasing, “I think you like my feet better than anything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I think,” she breathed, “you’ve got a problem.” But she whispered it sweetly, as though suggesting that she didn’t mind, and the flood of self-loathing was drowned in a tide of gratitude.

“Don’t make me cry here,” he repeated in his living room, and turned, and stepped past the printout of the Canadian flag and up the stairs to return her portrait to its dark, sacred place.

IN
winter, Jacob tried not to listen to the weather report. A blizzard might easily bring a foot of snow, or over a foot, or two or three feet in the serious storms. The blizzards came one after another, and he couldn’t bear the word. “Imagine if snowfall was measured in breasts and you were the only man with that sick desire,” he tried to explain. “If you had to hear the weatherman saying,
breasts, breasts, breasts, breasts, breasts
, and you were the only one who knew. You’d kept it hidden since you were a kid.”

With each passing year, through his late twenties and into his thirties, the craving, compounded by the secrecy, grew in strength. “You have to laugh,” he said, and did, at himself. “People don’t realize it. How many times that word comes up. If you said, ‘Jacob, I’m renovating my house, how many square feet do you think the study needs to be?’ I’d think, Square feet, I wouldn’t mind looking at some square feet.”

The winter was difficult, too, because guests at his house thought they should take off their shoes or boots. It was simple courtesy. “‘Not in my house,’ I’ll say. ‘We don’t do that.’

“‘Oh, I don’t want to mess up your floor.’

“‘Don’t worry about it.’

“‘But it’s no trouble, really. I don’t want to track up your carpet.’

“‘No, no, please, we’ll clean it up, we don’t mind, we clean all the time, we’ll vacuum the carpet. Please.’”

But late spring was the worst of all, with its sudden sandals and flip-flops, its abrupt emergence of feet that seemed especially bare for being untanned. Once, driving, with the traffic clogged at a construction site, a car came to a stop next to him. The young woman in the passenger seat had her feet up on the dash, and he exploded within seconds, scarcely touching himself. Sometimes he didn’t need any contact with his penis at all. He could reach orgasm simply from the feel of feet in his palms or against his tongue, or from the sight of a high arch or a broad instep.

Television besieged him. On a cop show, a tough female detective warned a suspect, “I’m going to stick my size eight where the sun don’t shine.” It seemed that every movie had a scene with bare feet. Yet sitting in a doctor’s office he picked up a magazine that listed Hollywood celebrities according to their best body part. “They had every part but one,” he remembered, feeling utterly alone. He understood that the existence of pornographic Web sites catering to his desire could only mean that there were other men like himself, but the others, he was sure, had milder, more passing interests. No other mind was so thoroughly scrambled as his own. “My point,” he said, after describing the magazine that hadn’t praised the feet of a single movie star, “is that obviously it’s not acceptable.” He paused, then asked me, “Do you think your wife would accept it?

“I’ll be honest with you,” he answered himself. “I wouldn’t
want
my wife to accept it.”

He confided in no one. He conducted surveys. They would begin with a photograph in the sports section, a college or high school girl on a softball field or basketball court; he’d always been taken with the idea of athletic feet. Working from the caption, he would call information for the girl’s number. The survey stuck to a script: “Hello, I’m calling from Nike, and we’re putting out a new sneaker. We’re doing a sixty-second survey today. Would you mind answering a few questions?…Do you wear sneakers?…Do you play sports?…Can you tell me what size you are?…Are your feet narrow or wide?…Now, if you saw two girls sucking on each other’s toes, would you find that disgusting or would you find that funny?” He thanked them politely as soon as he’d come, felt beset by guilt as soon as he’d hung up.

In restaurants, he sometimes knocked a woman’s dangled pump from her toes as he edged between tables. When he apologized, the woman would give her reassurance: “Don’t worry, it’s nothing.” But it wasn’t nothing. “No matter where you go,” he said, “there are people, and people have feet. Unless I lived in a center for amputees. That would be peace.”

The ads for massage parlors filled the back pages of the city’s alternative magazine, and he’d stared at them countless times, warning himself, “You can’t do that, you can’t just pay your money and take a girl’s body, you can’t.” But in his late thirties, he found himself in a dimly lit greeting room. Six young women stood in front of him—in stilettos, in lesser heels, in sandals—instructing him to choose. His eyes scanned faces and swooped toward the floor; he picked a woman with toes that formed the staircase of his fantasy.

He followed her along a corridor into a small room of their own. “Okay,” she said, turning to face him, “whatever you want.”

He didn’t answer.

“I’m going to give you a condom.”

He stayed silent.

“Is it a blow job you’re interested in?”

“No, I’m not interested in that.”

“You’re not?” Her voice climbed slightly.

“No.”

“Well, what interests you then?”

He couldn’t speak. She held the condom out toward him a second time.

“We’re not going to need that.”

Something shifted in her eyes. “You paid me sixty dollars, what are we going to do?”

“Take your shoes off.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry.”

She did as she was told, and stood in her bare feet.

“Now lie back on the bed.”

He let down his pants. She asked if she should undress; he whispered that she didn’t have to. His hands and mouth had begun.

“You got to be kidding,” she said. “You’re paying me to do this?”

He couldn’t force himself to pull his lips away to answer. But he lifted them away to put his cock where he’d always dreamed of sliding it. The sensation swallowed him, spirited him into unconsciousness.

“I’m going to give you my card,” she said, afterward. “Anytime you want to come back, please, you let me know. You’re going to be my favorite customer.”

THE
guilt he felt for renting her body; the humiliation of her words,
You’re going to be my favorite customer
; the relentless urge to have her again; the jolt of panic that came with learning, some weeks later, that the place had been raided, that he could have been among the men rounded up—all of this pushed him toward treatment.

He’d been in therapy before, the standard sessions of talking. Nothing had changed, except that he had tried to tell his wife. The therapist had demanded it, saying she could not work with him if he didn’t, and so one October night, as they were driving home on an empty highway after a dinner with friends, he forced himself to speak, relieved at least to have his face in darkness and his eyes fixed on the road. But he used general phrases, “I have a sexual problem,” “I have a sexual addiction,” and his wife started crying, asking only if he’d had an affair. It wasn’t an unlikely fear: he avoided sex with her, as he always had, out of dread that he would reveal the hideous need at his core. He assured her he hadn’t. He alluded to the Internet, the telephone, barely mentioning the word “feet.” Sobbing, she said she didn’t understand. He told her he didn’t either. He invited her to join him with the therapist, but she refused, didn’t talk to Jacob for two days, and when the silence was over it was almost as though, on that desolate October highway, nothing had been said.

Now, after his session with the prostitute, he flew to Baltimore to seek the help of a psychiatrist who, he’d read, was among the greatest experts in the country on sexual disorders. Fred Berlin worked in a vast and grand Victorian house, with a façade of rust-colored bricks and turrets at the corners. It stood on a hill above the harbor. The stoop was high, the outer vestibule was towering and dark, the massive wooden front doors were elaborately carved. There was no sign on any exterior wall of the building, nor on the doors nor below the doorbell, to name what was inside. Once, he’d seen nearly all his patients at his office at the hospital of Johns Hopkins University, and he still taught at Hopkins and did rounds at the hospital (where, after becoming Berlin’s patient, Jacob would help the head psychiatrist to instruct his students). But the university, it seemed to Berlin, had grown terribly uncomfortable with his practice—most of which involved not only the aberrant but the criminal—so he had moved his main work away from the campus to this private castle.

Inside, the floorboards had a soft gleam, as did the banisters, which were capped at each landing by an intricate wooden sphere. All was dim and quiet and burnished. But the immense waiting room held plants and small trees with leaves the size of platters; they stretched their anarchic limbs toward each other and over the backs of the plush couches. A glass coffee table was supported not by legs but by part of a contorted tree trunk, aggressively gnarled and adding to the suggestion of encroaching jungle.

There was, too, a seven-foot-high grandfather clock that stood in one corner. Within the glass case the brass pendulum swung along its gentle, unremitting arc, its face bearing the Hopkins seal. It sometimes seemed that this steadiness, this emblem of prestige, tamed the plant life. At other times, when a waiting patient decided to turn on the large television, and to turn the volume up high, the wordless battle between the jungle and the clock felt irrelevant. All was consumed by the human need to drown out one’s inner voices with the blaring voices of TV.

The offices Berlin shared with his few partners were furnished with antiques. Stately desks and lush, splendid chairs filled the rooms. He’d done much of the decorating himself, and took pride in the ambience of age and grandeur. But one object didn’t fit. A detailed model of a sports stadium, made of wood and metal, sat on a desk in a room used for evaluations—the stadium of the University of Pittsburgh, where he’d played football during his freshman year on a team that starred a future NFL Hall-of-Famer and that finished the season ranked second in the nation. Berlin had been a bench-sitting linebacker, but the memory of going out for the team, of taking on that challenge four decades ago, still fed his resilience, his determination to be kind toward those whom others would only condemn.