The Other Side of Desire by Daniel Bergner

Author:Daniel Bergner [Bergner, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780060885571
Amazon: 0060885572
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2010-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

LATELY he’d had fairly open conversations with his family about his crime. Male relatives had talked about their nieces entering adolescence and starting to flirt with them. “And they said, ‘Roy, when that happened, we stopped playing with them the same way. We wouldn’t let them jump all over us anymore—it scared the daylights out of us. After a certain age, it was no. No to this. No to that. ’Cause things can go a little too far.’”

Listening, I thought of the way Faith’s father had spoken to me on the phone one afternoon about his daughter. He was confirming details about what had happened when suddenly he interrupted himself to say how beautiful Faith was, even more gorgeous now than a couple of years ago when Roy had been arrested. “She’s killing me,” he said. “When I hug her I give her these half-ass hugs.” Then, without segue, he volunteered that he never looked at pornographic magazines. “I can appreciate the body, but…” His voice trailed off, sounding indifferent. He seemed to want to prove that eros had no hold over him. It was as though the erotic power of his daughter made desire itself uncomfortable, unbearable.

And I thought of my own twelve-year-old daughter, who, along with her younger brother, still loved to be chased through our apartment in a game they called Fee Fi Fo Fum. I, the monstrous giant, chanted the nonsense syllables and twisted her name to fit the rhyme: “I smell the blood of…” I dove for her across the couch. She rolled off the cushions and out of reach, shrieking and giggling as she sprinted down the hall from the living room to the master bedroom with me right behind. She darted around the bed. Her body danced on one side while I, on the other, calculated the right moment to lunge. She taunted me, laughing, breathless, telling me I could never catch her, never cook her, never eat her, that this was the night I would starve. And then I made my move. I grabbed her by the wrist, clutched her by the waist. I lifted her into the air and threw her onto the bed. “Now I am cooking you!” I roared. “And then I will devour you!” She cowered in delight.

Constantly Roy tried, but there were so many things he couldn’t sort out. How much of the touching had been errant, inadvertent, amid playful mauling? How far beyond the normal had things gone at that stage? Had he gone beyond the normal at all? The questions made him reel; he couldn’t settle on single answers. “But was there sexuality behind the games?” he asked himself aloud while we talked—and answered immediately, “Yes.”

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