The Other Side of Desire (20 page)

For a photograph, he bound her torso and buttocks tightly, asymmetrically, over and over and over with twine. She curls on a bed so that, from the back, her head, arms, legs are all out of view. What’s left for the camera are uncanny, anarchic risings of flesh extruding around the string, a crazed flowering of flesh, an abstract sculpture made from the most figurative of objects, the human body, an attempt to reach beneath the conscious to the unnamable.

But while she was model and muse, Zurn had her own voice. Her novella
Dark Spring
was, she said, “the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood.” Ten and eleven and twelve years old as the story unfolds, the girl fantasizes about kidnappers binding her fiercely and raping her with a knife, penetrating her with the blade. She is “honored” by all they do.

“Scenes of madness, of torture, of ecstasy were drawn by Bellmer with the sensitivity of a musician, the precision of an engineer, the brusqueness of a surgeon,” Zurn declared. “If we watch him at work, his hand seems weightless. One wants to know if it is tense against the paper, or if this pleasing line is a piece of sorcery from the void…. Whoever is sketched by him shares with him the abhorrence of self. It is impossible for me to render him greater praise.”

The girl and her violent fantasies, the adult and her urge to be annihilated through her lover’s art—Zurn was the proof, in blood and muscle and brain, of Bellmer’s vision of eros. But neither character nor author, it seemed, could survive the desire they had opened up in themselves. At the novella’s end, the girl kills herself, and soon after the book was published, Zurn committed suicide exactly as her character does: jumping from a window, destroying her body on the ground below, leaving herself broken like one of Bellmer’s dolls.

ON
his lunch hour, between sketching scenes to sell liquor and hiring conventionally pretty women to inhabit them, Ron walked the city with his camera. Manhattan seemed a dreamscape dominated by the vertical: not only the buildings but the crowds of pedestrians formed a world that was relentlessly straight up and down. “A disabled person,” he said, “is a break in that strict verticality, a diagonal in that mass.”

He sought out the diagonals to photograph, taking the images, at first, covertly, aiming his lens swiftly on the streets. In one picture, a woman propels herself along the sidewalk amid a stream of shoppers, propels herself partly on legs with braces, partly on crutches. Her bare muscled arms in a sleeveless dress, her in-twisting feet in elegant shoes, her slender hips thrust outward by her skewed stride, her chest leaning, almost lunging far forward of her legs, the angles of body parts accentuated by the straightness of the crutches—the entire effect is of a mime or a dancer expressively bent, except that this figure is more bent and expressive than a healthy body could ever manage. She is sculptural: contorted, animated, allusive, mesmerizing.

Another photograph captures a crippled woman through eyes other than his own. His quick focusing and clicking was meant simply to record the woman as she maneuvered herself off a curb on crutches. But without intending to, he included in the frame an onlooker standing behind his subject. Ron’s lens focuses in one direction, reverently, on the woman making her way off the sidewalk, while the bystander stares in the opposite direction, her eyes angling downward at the subject’s lower legs, at the deformation or absence that is cut out of the frame, that the photograph does not reveal. The bystander’s gaze is far from reverent. Her fingers touch her lips in horror.

His first love after his marriage came through his camera. He approached Elise on a crosstown bus, asked if she would consider posing. As a child she’d been one of the last in her hometown to contract polio. She’d been out of school, not feeling well, when the vaccine was given, and her parents had never bothered to have her inoculated. Now she was studying for a master’s degree in social work. Petite, with high cheekbones and a dimpled chin, a small lush mouth and long lush hair, she wore steel braces on both useless legs.

He photographed her only once in almost a year. They spent their time enmeshed in each other’s bodies, she comfortable in hers because he was so ardent with his, and immersed in debating the merits of his mainstream ambitions versus hers, after she graduated, to rehabilitate prisoners. She lived in the East Village, in her sister’s apartment, on a block that served as a base for the Hell’s Angels. A few of the gang surrounded him early on, grabbed him, asked if he was seeing Elise. “You mess her up and we’ll kill you,” one of them warned. Ron photographed her only once, because her face was almost always bruised, an eye sometimes black. Her husband beat her.

Though she stayed with her sister, she and her husband were still involved. Ron saw her when her husband traveled. Her husband never discovered the affair; the beatings weren’t on Ron’s account. Ron never knew the reason, knew only that Elise tolerated it, allowed it. He thought she believed it was what she had coming, as a cripple, that she believed she could do no better, felt she was lucky to have a husband at all. But he never tried to convince her to divorce, to be with him. Later, after they had drifted apart, he was desperate to find her, see her, persuade her. He called, but the phone was disconnected. He went to the apartment; the Hell’s Angels told him the sisters had moved away. He assumed Elise was still married, but he kept searching. He tried to locate the sister. He called the bureau of prisons in Elise’s home state, where he guessed Elise might have gone, and begged for a list of their social workers. He hired a private detective.

During their time together, he said, he had fallen for her “in a way that went far beyond my fascination.” The word—“fascination”—was the term men like Ron sometimes used, men drawn to the disabled. “The attraction,” he remembered, “became this wonderful overlay to what we had.” They had opened up to each other, she released by the improbable direction of his desire and he by holding, and being held fiercely by, a figure from his dreams. But he hadn’t been ready, and his dream had disappeared, and the private detective could not find her. He hadn’t been ready at all, not to be permanent and public with a woman who looked like she did. He was barely willing to admit what he wanted to himself. Clandestine, ashamed, his ambivalence seemed to have affirmed her shame, her feeling that her husband was her due. With her braces, her beauty, her black eyes, she was gone.

He went to two psychologists, and in their offices avoided the subject, the elemental aspect of himself, that had driven him to seek their help. With the first therapist he filled the sessions with the failings of his ex-wife. But the second seemed to intuit his evasions. He asked about the camera Ron always carried, wondered what he took pictures of. “And?” the therapist pressed gently. “And? And?”

He persisted until Ron confided everything, then asked Ron if he hurt anyone, if he hurt himself. So there was, the psychologist advised, no reason for self-reproach, no reason for reluctance. It was far from that simple. Yet the therapist’s logic began to unburden him as he went on photographing and sleeping with women he met around the city.

Katherine had hooks for hands and one prosthetic leg—a pornographic fantasy, but there wasn’t much between them in bed: “She would never take off her nightgown. She was a lot more inhibited about her body than Elise.” It was her determination that enthralled him. She wanted to become an occupational therapist, but to be certified she had to lift an impossible weight. She went to court, proved the requirement unnecessary and prejudicial, got her license, and started her career. He remembered, too, the way she ate olives with pits when they went to a favorite Greek restaurant. “Not an easy thing for anyone to do gracefully,” he laughed. “But somehow she did.”

Melinda he met on the street while walking after lunch. She was with a friend who assumed that Ron, intruding himself and explaining that he wanted to do a portrait, was really interested in her. Melinda was, after all, just a paraplegic in a wheelchair. The friend volunteered that she had always wanted to be a model, that it would be great if he could take some head shots. He did a session for both of them, gave the pretty would-be model the pictures she needed, then focused his lens on the woman who entranced him.

Sylvia was South American, an accountant with a serene oval face, a close-mouthed smile, lustrous black hair. She sobbed uncontrollably after she and Ron first made love. Her legs, wasted by disease, could support her only with a lattice-work of steel bars and leather straps. She lived alone in a hotel, never spoke of family or friends, and when she visited Ron’s apartment always tuned the radio to an oldies station. She wanted the love songs of earlier decades, the serenades of doowop. One day, when he called her, the woman at the hotel’s front desk, who usually took his messages, asked him to come over. She told him, when he arrived, that his girlfriend had killed herself.

Elizabeth was the valedictorian of her Ivy League class, and Ron happened to hear her commencement address. “She was about as close as I expected to come to the ideal woman,” he remembered. “She was smart, she was cute, and she had no legs.” That evening after the graduation, he called the dorms, reached someone who knew her, learned that she had already left for the summer. But he was told, too, that she would be back for law school in the fall. He phoned her then, praised her speech, persuaded her to go out on a date. She met him at the campus gates with three of the university’s football players standing beside her wheelchair.

The campus wasn’t wheelchair-accessible, and a squad of athletes was assigned to carry her up stoops and bear her up flights of stairs. In this case, though, they were there for protection. What kind of creep or lunatic would want to date a woman with no legs? But when she met him, he seemed safe and sane enough. She told the players they could go. He wheeled her out the gates.

She had grown up in small Southern towns with an affliction that shortened her legs and froze her joints at the ankles, knees, hips. Twenty-some operations by the time she was thirteen—surgeons breaking bones, cutting tendons, reattaching ligaments—didn’t bring mobility to her legs. Then a doctor suggested amputation; her real legs would never be any use to her, but she might walk with prosthetics. She went through another surgery, woke with her legs removed, and never could train herself to walk well on artificial limbs. She told Ron she didn’t regret the amputation. She said that whenever she saw paraplegics with their legs, she thought only of their stupidity—they were burdened with so much meaningless weight.

Intellectual, imperious, self-sufficient, she captivated him, and after a few months together, he tried what he never had with any girlfriend. He possessed, by then, a degree of self-acceptance. The psychologist had helped, and so had finding a group of similar men, who called themselves “devotees.” They met, as a kind of support group, at the home of a former Korean War pilot who had lately befriended a veteran of the Algerian resistance. She’d blown off her legs while trying to blow up a French building.

What he tried was telling Elizabeth about his desire for the disabled and above all for amputees. She seemed incredulous, rapt, then grateful, released. She posed for him in ways that alluded to the erotic power she’d just discovered. In one portrait, her abbreviated body sits draped in red fabric: her stumps, covered in sheer black nylons and partially concealed in shadow, might easily be overlooked. But on second glance they emerge: paired secrets, half-hidden parts, objects of shame and allure, transfixing.

They married after he’d carried her up the three flights of stairs to his apartment for three years. “My friends were like a Greek chorus. Charlie Crane, who I lived with for two years, who I worked with for fifteen years, who I traveled with all the time, was absolutely rabid. He just flat-out said, ‘Why would you want someone with no legs? I can’t go out with you anymore. I don’t want to deal with it, I can’t deal with it, it’s ugly.’ Charlie’s girlfriends, you could look through their heads, but they were tall and skinny. They had long legs and big breasts and blond hair.”

Others kept their quiet distance and faded away. “They just didn’t want to be seen with her. It just didn’t fit the image they wanted.” And Elizabeth was adept at making them uneasy. She insisted on wearing miniskirts and on never wearing prosthetics. At a Christmas party, as she sat on a couch with her stumps protruding, someone asked if she would cover herself with a blanket. For the beach she chose bikinis, never anything that even intimated an effort to conceal. She liked Ron to carry her across the sand to the water, to put her down at the edge of the surf. And in a car one intoxicated evening, she sent shudders through his friends by vaulting herself from the backseat into the front, launching her body like some sort of tree-jumping animal.

“You have to develop the same thick skin they have,” he said about being with Elizabeth and the lovers who had come before her. “Society sees you like you’re driving around in a junk car. A woman with a disability is like that. Everyone stares. And everyone wants to ask, ‘Why are you with a defective person?’”

“WHEN
people hear we split up, they think, This happened to you, so your husband left you. But I was the one who filed,” Laura said. “He might have left me emotionally, but I was the one who filed for divorce. And that took a lot of guts. I had a son to raise and no legs and no education except a high school diploma and no one to be with. I was alone, and that was the way it was going to be. That was over.”

She moved back to Pennsylvania and found a government job as an administrative assistant. At night she found reassurance and self-revulsion with men she met in bars, men she felt would have her: “Losers—no job, no car, drugs, no money.” And she searched online, during all the idle hours her bureaucratic job provided, through the sites that came up when she typed in “disability.” There were nonprofits offering advocacy, businesses selling equipment, leagues organizing handicapped sports, groups fund-raising for Third World amputees, campaigns against land mines led by Lady Di. She read nearly every sentence, as though somewhere through the links she clicked on, somewhere in the flood of unfiltered words, would be a phrase of wisdom or a breakthrough of science that would change what was unchangeable.