Exit to Eden (42 page)

"Well, that shows you the magnitude of it. They didn't want you to know what I'd done. You trained Elliott and you sent him to us They probably didn't want anybody to know. It was crazy of me to think they'd call you."

I sipped the white wine, trying not to feel sick from last night's drunk and the long ride to the airport—I had made myself go to the airport as soon as I confirmed that he was on the incoming flight—trying to let the food and the wine do what they were supposed to do. Elliott and I had not discovered this place and it was just around the corner, really good veal, Elliott would have loved it.

Martin drank his coffee and tried not to make a face.

"Ah, New Orleans," he shook his head, the smile easy, wonderful. "Coffee and chicory." He made a mock scowl.

"I'll get them to bring you some good coffee," I said.

"No, you won't. We masochists love wretched coffee." His left hand squeezed just a little tighter. "Tell me about Elliott. Tell me the whole thing."

"I don't know what went wrong. I don't know how it ever went so far. It was like something happened to me and I didn't have any control, I just lost all control. I betrayed everything I believed in, everything I taught others to believe."

"Lisa, talk to me. Make sense."

"I busted him out, Martin. I got his clothes out of storage. I told him to get dressed. I got him on the plane with me. I led him to believe this was 'done' at The Club, that you could take a slave out and bring him back. I came here to New Orleans and for five days… I don't know… maybe longer… we just, we just did things. We went dancing and we made out and we even went to Dallas for a while and… God, there were so many things we never got to do…" I stopped. It was happening again.

I was losing the damned thread of it in a dissolve of emotion.

"I did a terrible thing," I said. "I broke his contract. I betrayed him, Martin, and I betrayed The Club and I betrayed you."

He narrowed his eyes and it seemed the politest of gestures. The way he let the other person know that he was really listening, though his face was as placid and accepting as ever.

"Where is Elliott now?" he asked.

"At The Club. They came and got him and took him back. It was incredible. They were like a pair of cops, Richard and Scott. I mean they looked like they worked for the fucking FBI. The board of directors is up in arms. Of course they are saying I'm not fired. Mr. Cross said if there is one person who is indispensable around here, it is Lisa. They just want me to come back. They took Elliott back and God knows what's going on in his head."

Suddenly I couldn't talk. My voice just gave out, like someone had put a hand on my throat. I didn't look at him. I looked at the silver-edged plate. I wanted to reach for the wine, but I couldn't. It seemed impossible to even do that.

"Why did you stop?" he asked. Warm dry fingers. He lowered his head slightly to look into my eyes.

"Help me, Martin," I whispered.

"I'm no doctor, Lisa. You know that. But I'm a good listener and I want you to take it from the top, and tell me everything, every last detail."

I nodded. But that was almost too painful to contemplate, recapturing those five days, making anybody understand them. Crying again. In this place. Cried in the Court of Two Sisters. Cried in the motel. Crying in this place. That's more crying than I have done in ten years.

"Martin, I want you to tell me something first." I took his hand now in both of mine. "With all my heart I have to know this."

I could see the worry in his face, but he didn't look as scared as Elliott had when I cried in the Court of Two Sisters. Elliott had looked like he was going to pass out.

"Is what we do right, Martin? Or is it evil? Are we the good thing that we tell ourselves we are, are we the healthy thing we say we are to others? Or are we some evil, twisted thing that never should come to be? Are we bad?"

He looked at me for a long moment, obviously suppressing his surprise at the question, and if he was offended he concealed that as well.

"Lisa, you are asking me this?" he answered slowly. "The night you first came to The House in San Francisco, I told you how I felt about all this."

"I have to hear it again, Martin, please, as if I never understood before."

"Lisa, as far as I'm concerned, The House is proof of my refusal to be a bad person—my refusal to be made to look bad, feel bad, or sound bad because of the brand of sex that I want. You know that."

"But is it bad or good, what we do?" I asked again.

"Lisa, we have taken the search for exotic sex out of the bars and off the streets and out of the shabby rip-off hotel rooms; we've taken it away from the hard-bitten prostitutes and the tough little hustlers, and all those who made criminals and beggars out of us in the past. How could that not be a good thing? But you understood this when you first came to The House, and nothing has changed since then. The Club itself is a masterpiece built upon the same principles with stunning controls, and it's never failed anyone who ever passed through its gates."

"Well, it failed Elliott Slater," I said.

"Hmmm. I wonder. But what's happened to change you so that you don't believe in what we've done?"

"That's just it. I don't know! I don't for the life of me understand. Everything just fell to pieces. One moment I knew where I belonged and who I was, and the next moment I wasn't anybody I knew and I didn't understand anything that was going on."

He watched me. He waited. But I knew if I said anything it would be the same stuttering repetition. He said begin. How to begin?

"Lisa," he said patiently, "it's been years since we really talked, years since that first night when we got together in the basement den and I explained to you about The House. But I remember you as you were then perfectly. You were a lovely young girl, though nothing as pretty as you are now. And there was something so wise and almost seraphic about your face that I wound up talking to you that night the way I've talked to very few people in my life."

"I remember that night," I said.

I wanted him to bring it back, the wonder, the sense of discovery, the great reassuring illusion of The House, of something already realized, established.

"I talked to you about love and about ideals," he said, "and about my belief that some day people everywhere would stop leaving the crucial business of aberrant sex to riffraff and policemen."

I nodded.

"I remember I asked you if you could love the people who came to my house," he said. "Do you remember your reply? You told me that in a very real way you loved all the sexual adventurers who didn't hurt others, that it was impossible for you to feel any other way towards them. You felt love and pity for the old flasher in the park who opens his coat, the guy on the bus who rubs against the pretty girl, never daring to speak to her. You felt love for the drag queens and the transvestites and the transsexuals. You said that you were they and they were you. It had been that way ever since you could remember."

He pushed the coffee cup to the side and leaned a little closer across the table.

"Well, when you told me that," he said, "I thought here is a girl who is as romantic as I am, and fifty times as innocent as I ever was, and possibly a little bit crazy. I could see that a powerful sexuality had shaped you, perhaps even embittered you. But that you'd managed to invest it with an almost unaccountable spirituality. Yet I couldn't quite believe you that night."

Lovely words. But for me it was more the way I'd described it to Elliott, that some vital imprinting had never taken place, some message about sex being bad had failed over and over to reach its destination in my head.

"But two years later," he went on, "when you had been working at The House every weekend, when you knew the 'guests' as well as I did, I knew that you'd meant exactly what you'd said. It wasn't only that you could act out a scenario of dominance and submission with flawless conviction. It was that you loved. You really loved. Nothing sexual disgusted you or confused you or turned you off. Only real violence, real hurt, the real destruction of another's body and will were your enemies, the same as they were mine. You were just what you said you were. But it is entirely conceivable, entirely, that a love like that could not endure forever."

"But no, it's not that," I said. "It wasn't like they changed or I changed in that way. It was like something altogether inexplicable intervened."

He drank a little of the wine that had gone untouched during the meal, and lifted the bottle to fill the glass again.

"All right, then," he said. "Just start talking about the first moment when things went bad. And let me listen as I have to a thousand stories."

I put my hands to my head and I leaned forward on the table and let my eyes close.

"I think in some way it started when I was on vacation," I said. "When I was on the way home, and I holed up in this luxury hotel in Dallas and I was watching this movie on video disc. It was about the gypsies in New York—it was called
Angelo, My Love
—and they were so alive, these gypsies… they were so undeniably wholesome no matter what they did. You know, they stole and they bullshitted and they lied, but they lived within this incredibly vital closed society and there was a gorgeous continuity to their lives. You didn't want anything to happen to them to ever make them be part of the herd."

"The way you were at The Club."

"Well, normally, I would have thought so. That's their world and this is mine. But it didn't feel like that anymore. It was like they had something that I never had. It was like when I was a kid and I wanted this, you know, the secret life, our life, and I thought, God, maybe I'll never have it. It will always be fantasies in my head, you know. That desperate feeling."

"Of course."

"Well, anyway. I was in this hotel and I was crazy to get back to The Club. I had to get inside The Club. And then this photograph, this picture in the file of Elliott. I mean this has nothing to do with the movie, you understand, but when I saw it something snapped in my head."

"Keep talking."

"You know, I've always concurred that women aren't visually stimulated the way men are. You know, that old argument, but when I saw this picture. Just this picture…"

It was getting dusk. And we were still talking.

We had drifted from one little place to the next, having a drink here, a cup of coffee there. And now we were walking back through the streets to the hotel, and the whole city was glowing in the waning sun, the way only New Orleans can. Maybe in Italy the light is this color, I didn't know at this exact moment.
Why think of Venice when you are in New Orleans
? But it was too beautiful now, the soft variegated walls of the old building, the chalky green paint on the long shutters, the purple flagstones with their tracery of green moss.

And I was still spilling out all the things that had gone on, the things that Elliott had said, every stupid detail. The way we danced, those long, long talks. And the lovemaking. About the house that he had said we would buy, the programs we watched on TV, and the cornball things that happened.

Martin had his arm around me, his raincoat and his jacket and sweater over the other arm, all the dark San Francisco layers having come off one by one in the balmy heat, though he had never complained about it.

He had listened and listened, stopping only now and then to ask the oddest questions.

Like, "At the Marriott, what were the songs they played?" And "Which Warriors game was it?" How the hell would I know which Warriors game it was. And "What part of the book did he read to you by the pool?" And "How did it make you feel when he smiled like that?"

Whenever I got upset he'd wait and then coax gently.

But I was winding down now, and it had been exhausting, frightening, reliving it.

We came to the hotel and went into the long dark ground-floor bar. We ordered our drinks, his usual white wine, my usual Bombay gin with ice and we went out into the little courtyard and sat down at one of the little wrought iron tables. The yard was empty.

"I just don't know how I could have done it," I was saying. "I know the reason for the rules better than anybody else knows it. I made the rules. I invented the whole thing. But that isn't the worst part. The worst part is that if I went back there, if he was all right—reoriented, integrated, whatever the hell terminology we have to adopt for this situation—I think I'd go crazy the minute I saw him. I don't think I could stand any of it again, not a single solitary aspect of it. And that is what I just can't understand. That's why I can't go back, patch it up, go back and talk as Richard and Scott keep telling me to do, work it out. I know I'll go mad if I see Elliott, if I see that place. I'll go stark raving mad. No question about it."

I looked at him, the way that he sat with his right hand curled just under his lip, his eyes narrow and accepting as before, his long, lanky body so relaxed in the wrought iron garden chair as if he was perfectly at home and could go on listening forever.

"You know, it was the damnedest thing about him," I said. "It was as if he could do anything. He was so damned sensual. I mean plain sensual. You wouldn't believe the way he ate, for instance. He didn't just eat. It was like he was inhaling the food, making love to it. It was the same way when we danced. Oh, you wouldn't have believed that. People were stepping back just to watch us. I didn't know what we were doing. I didn't care. I'd never danced like that. And the sex, it was like he could play any way that he wanted. It had been heavy S&M and then it could be on the natch and it was so hot, it was like when you get a shock from static electricity. Yet it was so, so…"