Exit to Eden (27 page)

The cart came to a halt at a pair of gates beside a lighted glass booth. We were between two banks of electronic scanners. And I saw another higher fence beyond.

"There's nothing like time to ponder big decisions," I said, still laughing.

"You can walk back," she said. She was really shaky. Her eyes were glittering under the shadow of the hat brim. "Nobody will think you tried to run away or stole the clothes. I'll call from the booth right there."

"Are you crazy? I'm going with you," I said. I went to kiss her.

"Go on," she said to the driver, giving me a hard shove in the chest.

******

The plane was a turbo jet monster, engines roaring as we drove up. She jumped out before we stopped and started up the metal steps. I had to run to catch up with her again—I think she moved faster than any woman I'd ever seen—the goons coming behind us with the bags.

The interior was all brown and gold plush, luxurious, some eight or so club chairs arranged in a half circle in the salon. There was a bedroom opening off to the back, and a full-scale billiard room with a big TV monitor to the front.

Two older men, both very properly dressed in ugly dark suits, were talking in Spanish to each other in hushed voices over their drinks. They both started to rise but Lisa gestured for them to sit down.

Before I could say or do anything she slipped into the single seat between the pair and the windows, leaving me no choice but to sit opposite her a miserable four feet away.

A voice crackled over the speaker system: "Ready for takeoff. Call for Lisa on line one."

I could see the phone light blinking silently beside her. And the little intercom she opened with a touch of her hand.

"Take off, we're ready," she said. "Buckle up, Mr. Slater." She turned to the pane of thick, murky glass.

The voice came again over the whine of the engines. "They say it's urgent, Lisa, would you pick up line one?"

"Can I get you a drink, sir?" The flight attendant bent down close to my ear.

The two Latin Americans—I was sure that is what they were —had turned a little more sharply to face each other, the conversation rising to shut everything out.

"Yeah," I said disgustedly, glaring at the two lumpy men and Lisa sitting next to them. "Scotch, if you've got a single mash, two fingers with a little ice."

"I'll call them later," Lisa said into the intercom. "Go." She turned her head to the window and pulled her hat down over her eyes.

By the time we landed, I was ready to murder somebody. I was also a little drunk. She wouldn't move out of that window seat next to the two creeps from Argentina, and I nearly tore the felt on the pool table playing eight ball with myself while the flight attendant, who looked good enough to rape, kept filling my glass.

La Poupée
, a terrific surreal French movie that I used to love, starring a dead Czech actor whom I also used to love, kept blazing silently away, ignored by everybody, on the giant picture screen.

But as soon as we set foot outside the New Orleans airport (naturally it was raining, it is
always
raining in New Orleans), the two Argentinians vanished, and we were sliding
alone
into the back of a ludicrously enormous silver stretch limousine.

She sat smack in the middle of the gray velvet seat staring at the blank little television set in front of her, with her knees very close together, hugging my book like it was a teddy bear, and I put my arms around her and knocked off her hat.

"We're going to be at the hotel in twenty minutes, stop it," she said. She looked terrible and beautiful, I mean like somebody at a funeral looks terrible and beautiful.

"I don't want to stop it," I said, and I started kissing her, opening her mouth, my hands all over, feeling her through the velvet, through the thick seams of the pants and the heavy sleeves of the jacket, and then reaching inside and pulling open her vest.

She turned towards me, pressed her breasts against me and there came that fatal voltage, that annihilating heat. I was rising up, pulling her up and against me and then we went down together full length on the seat. I was tearing at her clothes, or just sort of pushing them and shoving them, trying not to really hurt them but to get them open and I got a real taste of how hard it is to get a man's shirt off a woman or to really feel a woman through a man's shirt.

"Stop," she said. She had pulled her mouth away and she turned to the side, her eyes shut, panting as if she had fallen down from running. I tried to lift up a little so as not to hurt her with my weight, and I kissed her cheekbone and her hair and her eyes.

"Kiss me, turn around, kiss me," I said, and then I forced her head towards me, and that current started again. I was going to come in my pants.

I sat up and kind of turned her around and she scrambled into the corner, her hair spilling out of the twist.

"Look what you did," she said under her breath, but it didn't mean anything.

"This is like fucking high school, goddamn it," I said.

I looked out at the sagging, dilapidated Louisiana landscape, the vines covering the telephone wires, the broken-down motels melting into the grass, the rusted fast food stands. Every emblem of modern America looked like a missionary outpost here, a piece of junk left over from a colonization attempt that had failed over and over again.

But we were almost into the city proper, and I love the city proper. She had her brush out of the overnight bag. And she whipped at her hair, her face flushed, the pins flying out as she brushed her hair free. I loved seeing it come down like a shadow enfolding her.

I grabbed her and started kissing her again, and this time she backed up, pulling me with her, and it seemed we were circumnavigating the whole car for a few minutes, me kissing her and kissing her, and just eating the inside of her mouth.

She kissed like no woman I'd ever kissed. I couldn't figure out exactly what it was. She kissed like she'd just discovered it or something, like she'd fallen from another planet where they never did it, and when she shut her eyes and let me kiss her neck, I had to stop again.

"I feel like I want to tear you to pieces," I said clenching my teeth, "I want to just break you into pieces, I want to just get inside."

"Yes," she said. But she was trying to button her shirt and her vest.

We were lumbering along Tulane Avenue in that silent unreal way limousines travel, like they are tunneling unseen through the outside world. And at Jeff Davis, we turned left, heading for the Quarter more than likely, and I grabbed her again, gauging, well, at least another delicious dozen kisses, and when she pulled away this time, we were in those narrow claustrophobic little streets of row houses, heading towards the heart of the old town.

When we went into the office of the hotel, she was all lovely with her hair pushed back over her shoulder and the hat askew and her shirt collar undone, but she was trembling so badly she could hardly hold the pen.

She wrote Lisa Kelly in a scrawl like an old lady would write it and when I fought with her about who was going to use whose American Express card, she got all flustered and shut up, like she wasn't sure what she wanted to happen. I won and they took my American Express card.

The place she'd chosen was perfect, a renovated Spanish townhouse about two blocks from Jackson Square, and we had the servants' quarters cottage in back. The purple flagstones were uneven the way they always are in these old New Orleans courtyards and the garden was a thicket of enormous, wet, gleaming, green banana trees and pink oleander and jasmine crawling over the brick walls with a few electric lights here and there like lanterns.

The fountain nymph was covered with green moss and the water choked with irises, but I loved it. The thump of a jukebox came from somewhere on the block: "Beat It" by Michael Jackson, which brought back the real life I'd left in California a little more vividly than anything else around here. And there was a nearby racket of restaurant pots and pans and the smell of coffee.

She was shaking even worse when we got to the door, and I just held onto her for a moment, the tight rain pelting us, the little yard a kind of symphony of water sounds with the rain on the banana leaves and the roof and the plants, as two of the most beautiful mulatto children I'd ever seen in the whole world put the bags inside.

I didn't know whether these kids were girls or boys, and I still don't know. They were wearing khaki shorts and white T-shirts and they had waxy oily skin and dark liquid eyes like the Hindu princesses in Indian paintings, and they glided almost sleepily into the big whitewashed room with one load of bags after another until they had it in a heap.

Her luggage was the kind you have when you travel private planes, all matched caramel leather with gold initials on it, and she had about as much as people used to take with them on the grand tour of the Continent in 1888.

I gave the kids five bucks and they said something in voices you only hear in New Orleans, real soft and French and lyrical and almost drugged out, and they went off looking like old men for one second when they smiled back at me.

She was staring into the room as though it were a cave full of bats.

"You want me to carry you over the threshold?" I asked.

She looked at me as if I'd startled her. And something surfaced in her for a moment, a wild look I couldn't interpret. I felt the heat again. I didn't wait for her to answer. I scooped her up and carried her inside.

She positively blushed. She started laughing and trying to conceal it, like she wasn't supposed to, or something.

"So laugh," I said as I set her down. I smiled at her and I winked at her, like I had at all those women in the garden pavilion back on the island. Only this was from the heart.

Then I made myself stop looking at her long enough to look around.

Even in these old servants' quarters the ceilings soared to fourteen feet. The mahogany four-poster was immense and there was an old silk wedding tester over it complete with cherubs and cabbage roses and old stains, as if the rain had seeped into it somewhere along the line. You couldn't have gotten a bed like that into most of the houses I'd lived in.

And there was a mirror that rose all the way from the marble mantel to the ceiling, and a couple of high-backed walnut rocking chairs on the edges of a worn Persian rug. Big, wide, uneven cypress boards, floor flush with the flags outside and french doors all the way down the length of the room just the way they had been in her room at The Club.

The bath and the kitchen broke the spell a little, same white tile and chrome fixtures, microwave oven, electric coffeepot you find in any luxury motel. I shut the doors.

It wasn't hot enough for the air conditioning and the smell of the rain was exquisite, so I turned off the machine and I went outside and closed up all the big green shutters over the french doors so that nobody could see us if they wanted to. And then I went inside and opened all the glass doors that nobody opens with the air conditioning anymore, and latched the shutters and opened the slats and at once the room was warmer, steamier, sweeter. The noise of the rain was really loud. I locked the main door.

She was standing with her back to the lamp, just staring at me.

She was damp and mussed. Her lipstick was a little smeared and her shirt was open all the way into the vest and she had taken off her shoes so that she looked sort of fragile.

I came towards her and put my arm around one of the pillars of the bed and just studied her, letting the lust come up, double, triple, until it was molten lava again.

So here we were and there weren't any trainers or any handlers and no buttons to summon help and just the two of us in this room. And I knew she was thinking about it just like I was thinking about it.

But what did she want? And what did I want? That I tear her clothes off? That I rape her? That I act out some little tableau of revenge for all the things she'd done to me? They say when a man is really sexually aroused he doesn't "think." Well, I was thinking of every moment with her, of the sports arcade and the harness and the way the blindfold felt when she put it over my eyes, and the belts, and her naked breasts, how hot they were, and what I'd said to her in the limousine, that I wanted to break her open, get inside of her. Only I hadn't meant rape when I'd said that. Was I going to let her down?

I wanted to say something, but there weren't any words. It was that baffling desire I'd had before in her rooms at The Club to confide something to her. I think I wanted to invade her, but not with meanness, not with cruelty, not with violence, not with Strength, but with something else, more vital and more important and private than that.

She made some little uncertain movement towards the bed. And I could feel her heat again, see it dancing under her skin, and her pupils were kind of dancing in the same way as she looked at me.

I went towards her and I took her head in both my hands, and I just kissed her, the same open-mouth, wet kind of slow kiss we'd been doing over and over, and she went limp against me, moaning out loud and I knew everything was going to be perfect.