The Other Side of Desire (10 page)

“I remember being happy for the first time. There are moments when you know you’re truly happy. I’d just taken about sixty Seconal, and I thought I’d succeeded. But then I didn’t die. Some of this stuff is so embarrassing. I went down a tunnel. It’s so clichéd, and the last thing I want to be is common. There was a white light at the end, a triangle glowing white, and a conversation with some sort of being, invisible, at the center. Basically I was told that I couldn’t leave because I hadn’t realized my purpose in life. I said, ‘Tell me what it is. I’ll do it, and I’ll be right back.’ And the voice said, ‘No, you have to find out.’ And I felt myself being pulled back out through the tunnel.”

Decades passed, decades of too many drugs, decades of designing costumes for movies and the theater (she had taught herself to sew at one of the British orphanages, and in San Francisco as a teenager she had made clothing and sold it on the streets), blurred decades of incidents impossible for her to place in time, partly, she felt, because the electroshock treatments had damaged her hold on chronology, but partly, too, it seemed, because an indifference to time fit with her sense of who she was and how she’d become herself—
sui generis
—with feeling that she had simply arisen. In the mid-seventies she moved to Manhattan. Two decades later, at a birthday party of hers—her birthday was on Halloween—a guest arrived dressed in rubber and carrying a bullwhip. He held out the whip toward her.

By that point she’d been married to Mark for almost ten years and with him for thirteen. They’d met at Chemical Bank’s headquarters, where he was a corporate photographer. He’d just moved to New York from Wisconsin, where he’d grown up as the son of a man who built water-softening machines and sold them himself across the Midwest. Her boyfriend at the time, who worked in Mark’s department, stood her up for lunch one day. She had come to the office wearing “the most conservative clothes she could put together,” Mark remembered. “A white blouse with big sleeves, a huge collar, a short white skirt. Far from corporate.”

They were drawn to each other right away, he to her boldness, to a woman he called “the only person I’ve ever met who is completely unfettered by convention,” and she to his stability, to a man she saw as “my rock.” Knowing her affection for the thirties and forties, he proposed to her at the Rainbow Room, between dances to the swing band, and they honeymooned in Paris, where he discovered his love for taking pictures of dogs. He began with a beagle that he noticed trying to drink from a bottle of beer. Soon he was photographing pugs and labs and dachshunds in adorable poses, tongues out, ears cocked, eyes plaintive, heads tilted fetchingly. “We are passionate about pets,” his Web site would later announce. “And we love nothing more than finding and capturing the unique character of each one we meet.”

After their honeymoon, they settled down in the East Village. Their erotic life was traditional, with a coil of desire tightened by the months when she traveled to make costumes for films and they were apart. Then, at her Halloween birthday party, the guest offered his whip.

“I believe I literally took several steps backward. I put up a barrier. I knew it—I knew that if I touched it I would be doomed. Nothing happened that night. But we got to know each other. I carved a V into his back shortly afterward. With a pin, but I do mean carved as opposed to scratched. With a fair amount of blood. We learned a lot together, he and I. It was on his body that I learned to use a whip the way it should be used. It’s one of the ways that I’m a geek. I like to do something over and over until I’m good at it. It should feel like touching.”

Early in her education, her birthday guest, whom she later named Luminous, took her to the city’s best-known S-M club. What she lacked, then, in skill, she made up for in unrestrained lust. “Everyone is going to be talking about you,” her partner promised at the end of the evening. About “safe, sane, consensual,” she made it plain from the start that she didn’t observe rules.

Before Luminous arrived in her life, she’d had some inkling of her unconventional yearnings. She remembered excitement, long ago, as she’d watched an old black-and-white movie: a British sailor bound to the mast and flogged. After his arrival, she felt she had found out something central about herself and, in expressing what had lain dormant for so long, that she “became a more balanced person, a nicer person.” And the question of purpose, posed by the voice within the white triangle, was answered. “I can give people their dreams. I have the power to change people. I get to do so much good.” She could liberate “the core of being” in the city’s masochists just as her own sadism had been freed. She could save them from the unhappiness and self-destruction that had besieged so much of her life. She could be, she said, “a beacon” to people like the Girl and Greg and Genevieve and Elvis and the countless others she had lured into confronting their desires for the first time or into receiving what they had needed.

The clothing she designed was part of her plan to unbury the erotic truth in those who had endured thwarted lives. She saw the city as filled with women and men waiting, consciously or unconsciously, for such unburying. They were like homosexuals who suppressed their desire and distorted or destroyed the rest of themselves as well. The same was true for the masochist. The same had been true for her. She envisioned a multiplying flock finding their way to her, and the latex was one of the ways she pulled them in. The lubrication of the body that was required to slide the garment over the skin; the sudden encasement; the immaculate smoothness of this second flesh; its gleam, for she had her submissives shine every item in the boutique; the material’s capacity to create something sleek from the contours of any person of any shape; the way the wearer’s nerve endings responded if so much as the back of a fingernail was dragged lightly over the surface, a response somehow twice as electric as if the same gesture was carried out directly upon the skin—before anything explicit had transpired, her customers were already in a state of partial surrender.

OUTSIDE
New York’s annual Black and Blue Ball, the sidewalk and street were thronged with guests and onlookers, photographers, security guards. When the Baroness emerged from a taxi with Kathleen on a braided leather leash hooked to a collar, it seemed that everyone coalesced. The Baroness wore a floor-length gown of amethyst-colored latex with a pattern of ruffles cascading down the back and a train that Kathleen lifted off the pavement. Cameras flashed and people called out to her and someone from the ball’s staff guided her away from the main line and directly toward the door.

Inside, amid the crush of men in top hats and tails and women in black wigs and rubber corsets and men naked but for leather jock straps and women clothed only in thin leather bands, guests paid homage to the Baroness. The loud pulse of dance music made their words difficult to hear, but again and again, on all fours, they kissed the toes or heels of her shoes or, heads bent and bodies bowed, pressed their lips to the back of her hand. It didn’t matter if they were leashed to another master. White men being led by black women; bare-chested women crawling alongside male owners or female dominatrixes—they showed their reverence for the Baroness without objection from those controlling them.

The ball was less an occasion for play than a yearly convocation and night of greeting. Up on the brass-railed balcony above the dance floor, the Baroness ran into David, who approached her without any gesture of deference. Once, they had tried to develop a way of talking with their whips, each on separate rooftops; they had imagined a Morse code of whip-cracking. His face was haggard and, in a tank top, his arms were like wires—he had AIDS—but he could stand in the middle of Union Square Park and make the windows of the surrounding buildings, sixty yards away, rattle as the end of his whip broke the sound barrier.

Below the balcony, an MC interrupted the dancing to announce that Carrie, one half of the lesbian couple that hosted the ball, had just given birth to a baby boy. David drifted away and Eliza and Ben drifted over.

They were long and narrow, with dark hair and faces that seemed to belong on the covers of magazines. She worked as a fund-raiser, he as an architect. Sheathed in the Baroness’s latex, Eliza in red, Ben in black, she wearing six-inch heels and he platform boots, they might have been a pair of cartoon heroes ready to kick their way through animated adventures. But their adventures were erotic.

Eliza hadn’t always looked so arresting, not in this way. She’d had childhood arthritis. She’d used a walker and crutches and a cane through adolescence, spent her summers at a place she called “cripple camp,” endured her own terrifying oddity growing up in the Maine town where her father owned a hardware store. “I felt no control over my body,” she remembered the years of illness that hadn’t ended until her late teens or early twenties. “I was sick, the pain was constant, and this is part of what that did to me: I don’t want to be powerless; how can I have power? This is one way to experiment with that. There are times when I’m totally dominant. But there are other times when I’m completely submissive. I want that intimacy, that pain. I want to feel: I’ve been here before but not like this.”

I’ve been here before but not like this
—her words echoed the psychological theory that we eroticize what has frightened us, shamed us, wounded us. In this way we attempt to escape our deepest hurt and confusion. Eliza didn’t dismiss explanations the way the Baroness did. She saw her arthritis as central to her sexuality, not only because it had made her long for both power and pain but because the strangeness of her young body and the alienation it had caused her made it easier to embrace difference now. She sought it out. And when she thought of her friends from cripple camp there seemed a high percentage who later found themselves on alternate sexual paths.

Ben couldn’t conjure explanations, only early beginnings: the basement game he’d devised for himself and his neighborhood friends at the age of four or five, ending always with his imprisonment in an old unused diaper bin; the game in the woods at the age of twelve or thirteen, culminating with his being tied to a tree and two or three girls jabbing him with sticks.

Through his twenties he’d been in love with a documentary filmmaker. “She was very liberal politically but personally very conservative.” He’d endured their vanilla sex life by spending his early morning hours staring at S-M Web sites. A chance meeting with a professional dominatrix, a Japanese woman who was a graphic designer by day, pulled him past fantasy. He booked a session at the dungeon where she worked.

“The Baroness will call bullshit on all professionals,” he said. “For her it’s a purely human relationship. But they do offer an opportunity for guys who have this predilection, guys who are driven crazy, guys who are just, like, I really want to figure out who I am.”

The session with the graphic designer helped Ben in the figuring out, and by the time he met Eliza at a bar, his yearning leaped out in the first flirtation. “If I have to have vanilla sex one more time,” he told her, “I’m going to shoot myself.” Without knowing exactly what he meant, she sensed he was what she needed. She’d been dating a man who wanted to marry her, and whom she couldn’t love because of something she felt missing in bed between them.

Now they spent their nights and weekends at play with each other. “When we first got together we were two subs,” he said. “Clearly someone’s got to top. And once we started doing it, it expanded our experience.” This kind of versatility, too, the Baroness held in some disdain. But one recent evening he had burned thirty welts into Eliza’s buttocks with a cigarette. On another night he had come as, lightly, she whipped his penis. “It was so demeaning and so hot,” he said.

To be the one in control was far more demanding. “You might commit yourself to carrying out a certain form of bondage,” he explained. “And then you think, I want to do
that
, but now she is all tied up this way and in order to get there I have to get her out, and it becomes inorganic. You want everything to flow. It requires choreographing. Like throwing a dinner party: come in, how are you, let me take your coat, sit down, something to drink. But if you walk in and right away there’s a three-course meal sitting in front of you and it’s only six-thirty: no. Things have to make sense next to each other, to emerge from each other.”

“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.