The Other Side of Desire (5 page)

Berlin, thinking about the experience of men like the gynecologist, told me: “I guess the distinction I’d make would be between eating to satisfy an intense hunger versus eating to enjoy the taste of food. These guys, on the Lupron, are not responding to a hunger to have sex, but sex can still feel good; they can still enjoy that taste.”

He couldn’t know whether Jacob, on Lupron, would feel any wish at all for sex, any inclination to eat for taste, with hunger gone. But he felt compelled to prescribe the drug. He felt certain that he should wipe out the hunger, though Jacob had harmed no one.

ONE
evening, several years after meeting Berlin and starting Lupron, Jacob led a support group for the bipolar and the depressed. He’d founded the group himself, with the help of his city’s mental health association, and he’d since become president of the association’s board. Tonight, with the March snowbanks high, he laid out pizzas and cookies and pamphlets on a Formica table. He always left home early for the twice-monthly group meetings, allowing enough time to buy food and get everything neatly set up before the members arrived. The thirty or so pamphlets, along with booklets and flyers, explained an array of emotional disorders and their possible remedies, from aromatherapy to treatment with electroshock. In the few years since he’d started the group, Jacob had never missed a meeting. In the worst blizzards, he’d dug out his car and made it to the office building that had donated a basement conference room to his cause. Shoveling out his driveway, he was pushed on by the worry that a lone member would be waiting in the snowy parking lot, despondent, abandoned.

Four long beige tables were arranged in a square, and tonight all of the twenty-five chairs were taken. “We have a fairly large group this evening,” Jacob said, beginning efficiently within a few minutes of the scheduled time, “so we’re going to have to stay on track.” The members introduced themselves, going around the square, and so did two visitors, psychology majors from a nearby college. Then a woman spoke of skipping her pills and becoming delusional and seeing knives that tried to coax her to cut herself to shreds. “I wasn’t like this four years ago till I had the car accident,” she said. “People at work say, ‘Can’t you just snap out of it?’”

“People just can’t understand it,” Jacob affirmed quietly, soothingly.

Another woman wondered aloud about electroshock, first for the woman seeing knives, then for herself. Jacob confided to everyone that he’d had the therapy. “It’s not what it was. It’s not the barbaric treatment you see in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
or
A Beautiful Mind
.”

Verging on catatonic, with matted blond hair, a college-age girl complained about the group sessions her therapist had told her to attend at a state facility “with people less fortunate than me.” It was clear that she couldn’t bear to sit with patients she saw as more lost than herself. “I just want to skip past this phase and be normal,” she said, her voice a hollow monotone. “Do I need to go?”

“Yes,” Jacob answered. “Yes, yes you do. It’s important to get out of the house. It’s important not to isolate.” He took off his watch and set it in front of him, mindful of the time so that everyone who wished would have the chance to speak.

“Today is my birthday,” a man who was attending for the first time shared. “And this group is my treat to myself. I am in some pain, I am in some pain.”

“Happy birthday,” Jacob said softly, when the man had finished explaining the harrowing emotional journey that had led him here.

“Happy birthday,” the group echoed, welcoming him.

A bipolar man said that his medication was running low, that there were problems with his insurance. A woman offered some of her pills. “No,” Jacob cautioned. “See me after. I’ll point you in the right direction. We can get that problem addressed.”

Someone asked about the Vagus Nerve Stimulator, and Jacob explained how it worked. The battery-powered generator was implanted in the chest; electrodes were threaded to the neck, to where the vagus nerve ran up into the brain stem; the pulsations of current seemed to temper depression.

“I’ve joined a writing group,” a young woman announced. “I’m working on three novels, and I’ve got some short stories.” She allowed that she didn’t fully trust her current optimism, that she wondered if she was entering a manic phase.

“Manic!” people called out, laughing knowingly. “Manic!”

“The first time I became manic,” a partially toothless black woman joined in, “this was a good ways back, I was hitchhiking down the main drag in Houston dressed—how do you call it?—voluptuous, on my way to a lip-synching contest, thinking that’s how I can make some money. And the police picked me up for a hooker. So there I was in the clink, saying, ‘I’m not a hooker, I’m a lip-syncher.’”

“Well, there’s
your
novel,” a man said.

Everyone howled.

“It’s just nice to be around people who get it,” a woman said.

“Happy birthday,” the newcomer mouthed, wishing it to himself, welcoming himself.

JACOB
had created this twice-monthly world, and he conducted it as though his own agony was in the past. No one in the group knew that he was so tortured by his sexuality that he chose to eliminate it. No one knew that the electroshock he’d described, which he’d had both before and since Berlin, was an attempt to get free of a keen and relentless depression with sex enmeshed at its source.

Berlin had been right in at least one way. Lupron’s attack on testosterone, on this single hormone, had been an attack on his thoughts. It wasn’t only that physical arousal seemed to fade from possibility. The fantasies evanesced as well, along with the constant awareness of feet, the constant susceptibility to desire. A profound shift in consciousness occurred, as though the mind had emptied itself of eros.

Yet the emptying wasn’t quite complete. Eros lingered and lurked, allowing him hours of numb tranquility and then edging forward to seize him with a yearning that was no less painful for being slightly abstract. A commercial on TV contained a scene of barefoot teenagers. A young saleswoman asked to measure his son’s feet when Jacob took him to buy ski boots. At such moments his longing was perhaps even greater than it had once been, because the possibility of release was remote. He wasn’t going to masturbate at the first opportunity, as he would have in the past. He wasn’t going to explode without touch. He no longer grew hard easily, and he wouldn’t permit himself to work himself up. He forbade himself to masturbate. Seeing the barefoot teenagers on TV, he slammed his fist down onto his coffee table.

Sex with his wife was gone entirely. He didn’t know what she understood about the desire he drugged into submission. He’d always evaded candor, and Berlin, at their first long meeting, had advised that he keep things vague. She seemed to collude in his omissions.

He had tried Viagra in high doses. It didn’t help. Jacob thought that if he focused on his wife’s feet, if he gazed at them and caressed and clutched them, he would generate enough craving to overcome the Lupron and grow hard, especially if he added Viagra. But he wanted nothing to do with these grotesque pleasures, and the Lupron diminished his drive sufficiently so that he could succeed in self-denial. He didn’t gaze, didn’t caress. Her feet remained under the covers when they attempted to make love. He stayed soft. They stopped trying.

It was Greg Lehne and another of Berlin’s colleagues, Kate Thomas, who told me that people like Jacob are not merely cursed, that they possess a special capacity for ecstasy. “There’s no comparison between what they experience and normal sexuality,” Lehne said. “It’s a hyper-positive sexual experience.” And Thomas added, “I don’t think we, in our sex lives, have a hint of what they feel.” One explanation, in Jacob’s case, was that in his second-grade classroom his anxiety about being called on reached the level of full-blown panic attacks—as he’d aimed his eyes downward, his fear was reconfigured as sexual arousal that was equally extreme. But Lehne stressed that this was only theory; the reasons, in all cases, remained mysterious.

With a paraphilia that was harmless, Lehne and Thomas felt that their primary role was to listen; their hope for the patient was self-acceptance. Cure—in the form of the transformation of desire—might never be possible, but a measure of peace could be reached. To treat someone like Jacob meant trying to lift the shame and to incorporate the focus of desire into the marriage.

Why couldn’t his wife’s feet be shown and gazed upon, flaunted and craved, offered and touched? Why couldn’t these gestures and responses sometimes be part of foreplay and other times lead to the pairing of her feet and to his penetrating between them? Weren’t analogous things done with breasts and buttocks? Weren’t they put on display in all manner of clothes and swimsuits and lingerie, to be stared at and reached for? Why couldn’t feet be objectified and included in the erotic life—and in the love live—of a couple, just as the common secondary sexual characteristics were incorporated between so many men and women?

“‘I’ve got three shit dates lined up in one weekend.’” Winston Wilde, a psychologist in Los Angeles, told me that a patient, a coprophiliac, had just spoken these words to him. Wilde didn’t disparage his patient’s wish to be smeared with or eat a partner’s feces. He quoted the man in a celebratory, even exultant tone, as an emblem of therapeutic success. “A big aspect of sex therapy is permission-giving,” he said. “It’s important to give an education. Sometimes people’s whole lives can change if you direct them to an Internet site. I always like to normalize their situation.”

Berlin didn’t talk much in terms of “permission-giving.” It was hard to imagine him advertising a patient’s “shit dates” as evidence of successful therapy. He did hope that one day he would be able to help Jacob and his wife toward erotic intimacy, but the eros he envisioned seemed to have nothing to do with feet. For all the compassion in his thinking, Berlin seemed no more willing to accept Jacob’s desire than Jacob was himself. When I asked him, at one point, about the possibility of encouraging Jacob and his wife to include her feet as a spark to intimacy, he didn’t really answer the question, and when I pressed, he said, “I think Jacob is somewhat content not having sex at all and doesn’t necessarily feel deprived.”

I’d heard nothing like this from Jacob. I’d heard him describe slamming his fist onto his coffee table. I’d heard him tell about trying to go off Lupron against Berlin’s advice. He’d stopped the medication for a short period, but self-revulsion over his desire had chased him back onto the drug. Knowing about this attempt, Berlin nevertheless suggested that Jacob didn’t mind living without sex. It sometimes seemed he was driven, consciously or not, to medicate aberrant lust out of Jacob’s life.

Then Jacob decided to try once more to go without the injections. He pushed the experiment to a year, but still couldn’t bring himself to open up to his wife about his longing. “Because it’s not normal! Because it’s not right! Because I love her!” he answered when I asked, again, why. He would not taint her with his perversity, include her in his monstrosity; instead, he mortified himself all the more with a series of prostitutes until he crawled back to Berlin and the Lupron.

After this second attempt, Berlin spoke to me in more ambivalent terms about Jacob’s treatment. “Because his situation is less dangerous than others’, because it poses little threat, it’s harder to make a decision about what should be done, about whether to medicate or not.” But in the end, Berlin believed it was necessary, that it was the less painful option for his patient. He spoke about “freeing up the mind from sex. When we’re young, eliminating sex may be inconceivable, but when we’re older we may find that it’s more peaceful, that companionship is more fulfilling. If we’re hungry we want to eat, but if we’re not we may not miss it.”

Berlin talked as well about anti-androgens as an antidote, for patients like Jacob, to the tendency to “objectify women”—talk that sounded enlightened. But did Jacob objectify any more than any man? Or did a difference like his simply spotlight what was universal? To be drawn to a woman’s feet, to isolate such an odd body part, was, it could seem, to dissect her, to give physical attraction a brutal primacy. To be lured by breasts or legs or buttocks was to have base desire softened by convention, blurred by normality—the body was left intact, along with the possibility of loving a woman’s soul. The distinction was arbitrary. Jacob’s desire put all desire under a glaring light, and the view, I sensed, made Berlin uncomfortable.

He had fought through all kinds of discomfort in his career. His compassion for sex offenders had brought vilification. His children had been teased by classmates because their father stood up for serial killers. But it was as though the stark physicality of desire, the animal aspect of it, was too much to face. He needed sex to be soulful, “human.” Jacob’s eros seemed to frighten him. Jacob was, in Berlin’s eyes, thoroughly human. His lust was not.

“YOU’RE
making me cry,” Jacob said one afternoon. We sat in a restaurant in one of the other snowy cities along his salesman’s route. The decor had a pioneer theme. Wagon wheels and paintings of buffaloes hung on walls made of knotted wooden planks. The waitresses wore gingham, and the shelves and buckets in the gift shop were filled with statuettes of cowboys and Native American chiefs. It was lunchtime, and the place was packed with men and women in crisp, informal work clothes: khakis, sensible skirts, sports jackets, high-collared blouses. Nothing in the way they looked suggested that their lives bore much similarity to Jacob’s. And maybe very few of them were holding secretly anything like his agony. Yet Jacob dressed like them, worked in business like many of them, lived in a comfortable, modest home like many of them, and it was easy to think that many of them were consumed by invisible battles with their erotic selves, their central selves. The husband whose longing for other women had reached the point of daily pain; the wife whose yearning for someone or something else was just as excruciating; the middle-aged man who had never told anyone that he was gay and felt that it was far too late to reveal himself now; the young woman who craved violence in the faultlessly tender arms of her fiancé—they all ate their french fries amid the wagon wheels.