Free The Other Side of Desire by Daniel Bergner

itself.
    Sam was a contractor to the wealthy, the well known. He had waves of unkempt, shoulder-length brown hair and a way of wearing his T-shirts that communicated an indifferent self-assurance. As an offering, he did carpentry in the boutique, which had opened not long ago; he had made the elegantly curved counter, and he waited for the harm she might give. Susan, his wife, taught science in the New Jersey public high school from which she’d graduated twelve years earlier. She had jet-black hair, a delicate nose, full lips, a slender body; the Baroness used her for a model.
    The couple had never lacked for heat between them. The first time they’d slept together, on a summer night, he’d gone to his freezer and taken out the tangerine sections he kept frozen there to run over a lover’s nipples and thighs till they melted and were eaten. Later they’d seen the Baroness interviewed on HBO and ventured to her shop to buy each other latex outfits. A three-way flirtation had begun, and along the way the Baroness learned that Susan had endured a childhood illness that had left her back heavily scarred. Hearing about them, seeing them, the Baroness was enamored of those marks. “I’m somebody she looks up to, somebody she trusts,” the Baroness said to me. “Everybody else tries to tell her, ‘It’s okay, they’re not too bad.’ I want to make her a dress to show off her back. I like the marks of life. Hers are massive. Marvelous, thick, like a ladder. You could climb down her back on those scars.” And Susan told me that the Baroness was beginning to transform her.
    Even those who hadn’t entered the Baroness’s world, even near strangers, seemed to feel altered by her attention. A crippled teenage boy drove his motorized wheelchair along the blocks near her boutique. His neck sagged, his head keeled, his knees leaned together. His wrist was inverted over the chair’s little black driving knob. But when he saw the Baroness stepping toward him in her sidewalk-length leather coat, with her purple spiked heels, her fireball of hair, which sometimes contained a streak of white or magenta to complement the flames, her many silver rings, two or three to a finger, and her sleek iron cane, which she carried as an accessory and which looked like a gallant’s sword, all obliterating her age, making the nascent pouches of her face irrelevant, making any measure of prettiness irrelevant, substituting flagrance for conventional standards so that, even in the East Village, where the outlandish was banal, every eye turned toward her—when he saw her approaching his face brightened and, though perhaps it wasn’t possible, his neck seemed to straighten slightly, his head to lift.
    “Hello, Baroness.”
    “Hello.”
    It was the same with the woman who walked with forearm crutches, the same with another woman, who seemed not quite homeless but plainly dislodged, as disheveled in her mind as in her hair and clothes.
    “Hello, Baroness.”
    “Hello.”
    Sometimes, on the streets in the evening, she stopped to chat. Then the forearm crutches seemed momentarily unnecessary; the dishevelment disappeared, replaced by intriguing idiosyncrasy.
    The effect might have been due to her flaunting her difference, to their recognizing a champion misfit. But she claimed another power. She said it was because she was willing to look at them. Most people averted their eyes from the crippled and avoided the lost. She, strutting loudly in her spiked heels along a line as straight as her iron cane, gazed not only into their eyes but at their bodies and into their minds. To do anything less, to pretend not to notice, was, she felt, to cause shame rather than diminish it. She was willing to see them, without fear, exactly as they were, and that freed them, for a few seconds, to be themselves.
     
     
    ONE torrential Saturday afternoon the Baroness took me upstate for an overnight gathering hosted by her friend Master R. I picked her up outside