S.E.C.R.E.T.: An Erotic Novel (7 page)

I sat down and opened the booklet.

What followed was a list of questions, with space between each for the answers. The
questions made me dizzy with their specificity. Just as I tested the pen, there was
a soft knock at the door.

“Come in?”

Danica’s black bob peered around the door. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “Matilda
said you wanted some tea?”

“Oh, thanks.”

She entered and gently placed a silver tea set in front of me.

“Danica, have you done this? This
thing
?”

She smiled a big smile.

“Nope. See?” she said, holding up her bare wrist. “No bracelet for me. That’s how
you know. Matilda says I may never need to join if I play my cards right from the
start with my boyfriend. Plus, you have to be, like, old—over thirty. But I think
it’s really cool,” she added, every inch the
twenty-one-or-two-year-old she probably was. “Just answer honestly, Cassie. Everything
after that will be easy. That’s what Matilda always says.”

Then she turned and walked out, closing the door behind her and leaving me alone again
with the questionnaire and my racing mind.
You can do this, Cassie
. And so I began.

And on and on and on.
Do you enjoy sex on your period? Dirty talk? S&M? Bondage? Lights on or off?
 … This was what I had been most afraid of: feeling over my head. It was like those
awful dreams of surprise quizzes that I was plagued by after I left university. I
had had exactly
one
sex partner. I had no idea about penis preference, and anal sex was an exotic, remote
idea, up there with tattooing my face and shoplifting. But I had to answer honestly.
What’s the worst thing that could happen? That they would discover my complete sexual
ineptitude and usher me to the door? Thinking about that made the rest of the exercise
seem ludicrously fun. After all, what did I have to lose? After all, wasn’t I here
because of my sexual inexperience?

I started with the simplest question, the first one, which was easy enough—
One
. I have had
one
lover. Scott. One. And only one. As for my physical type, I thought of all the movie
stars and musicians that I found attractive and surprised myself by filling the entire
space with names and ideals. Then I moved on to the next question: vaginal orgasms?
I skipped it. I had no idea. The one about erogenous zones almost had me scanning
the bookshelf for a dictionary. I couldn’t answer that. Nor the next one, nor the
one about being with women. I answered the rest as best I could. Finally I turned
to the last page in the booklet, where there was a blank space for me to add any other
thoughts.

I put down my pen and closed the booklet. Even writing what I had made me feel a little
unburdened.

I didn’t hear Matilda slip back into the room.

“How did you do?” she asked as she returned to her desk and sat down.

“Not very well, I’m afraid.”

She picked up the booklet. I had the strongest urge to rip it from her hands and hold
it to my chest.

“You know, it’s not the kind of test you can fail,” she said, a sad smile crossing
her face as she quickly scanned my answers. “All right, then. Cassie, come with me.
Time to meet the Committee.”

I felt welded to my big comfortable chair. I knew that if I crossed the threshold
of this room, another chapter of my life would unfold. Was I ready?

Strangely, I was. With each gesture, it felt more doable. Maybe that’s what the ten
steps would feel like. I kept reminding myself that nothing bad was happening to me.
Quite the opposite. I felt like layers of ice were falling away.

We left the room together and crossed the reception area, where Danica hit another
button beneath her desk. The giant white doors at the end parted to reveal a large
oval table made of glass, around which about a dozen women sat chatting loudly. The
room was windowless, and also white, with a few colorful paintings similar to the
ones in the lobby. There was a portrait at the far end, above a wide mahogany console,
of a beautiful dark-skinned woman with a long braid falling forward over her shoulder.
We entered the room and the women fell silent.

“Everybody, this is Cassie Robichaud.”

“Hi, Cassie,” they sang.

“Cassie, this is the Committee.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“Sit here next to me, my dear,” said a small Indian woman, easily in her sixties,
wearing a vivid sari and a very kind smile. She pulled out a chair and patted it.

“Thank you,” I said, and sank into the seat. I wanted to look everyone in the face,
and at the same time to look at no one. I alternated between clasping my hands tightly
in my lap and firmly sitting on them, trying hard to keep myself from fidgeting like
a teenage girl.
You are thirty-five, Cassie, grow up
.

As Matilda introduced each woman, her voice sounded far away and underwater. My eyes
floated from face to face, lingering, as I tried to memorize their names. I noted
how each was a different kind of beautiful.

There was Bernice, a red-headed black woman, round, short and busty. She was young.
Maybe thirty. There were
a couple of blondes, one tall named Daphne, with straight long hair, and the other
named Jules, with short perky curls. There was a curvy brunette woman named Michelle,
with an angelic face, who clasped her hands over her mouth like I had done something
adorable at a dance recital. She leaned over and whispered to a woman sitting across
from me named Brenda, who had a toned, athletic body and was dressed in gym clothes.
Roslyn with the long auburn hair was next to her. She had the biggest brown eyes I’d
ever seen. There were also two Hispanic women sitting side by side, identical twins.
Maria had a look in her eyes that was determined; Marta seemed more serene and open.
It was then that I noticed each of the women at the table wore a familiar gold charm
bracelet.

“And finally, next to you is Amani Lakshmi, who has been on the Committee the longest.
In fact, she was my guide, as I will be yours,” said Matilda.

“So very nice to meet you, Cassie,” she said with a slight accent, lifting her slender
arm to shake my hand. I saw that she was the only one in the room wearing two bracelets,
one on each wrist. “Before we start, do you have any questions?”

“Who’s the woman in the painting?” I heard myself say.

“Carolina Mendoza, the woman who made all of this possible,” Matilda said.

“Who still does,” added Amani.

“Yes, that’s true. As long as we have her paintings, we have the means to continue
S.E.C.R.E.T. in New Orleans.”

Matilda explained how she met Carolina more than thirty-five years earlier, back when
she was an arts administrator for the city. Carolina was an artist, originally from
Argentina. She fled in the ’70s, just before the military crackdown made it impossible
for artists and feminists to create and speak freely. They met at an art auction.
She was just beginning to show her work, large vivid canvases and murals that weren’t
typical of the paintings women were doing at the time.

“Are these her paintings? And the ones in the lobby?” I asked.

“Yes. Which is why security is so tight here. Each is worth millions. We have a few
more in storage in the Mansion.”

Matilda explained how she and Carolina began to spend time together, something that
surprised Matilda because she hadn’t made a new friend in a long time.

“It wasn’t a sexual relationship, but we talked an awful lot about sex. After a while
she trusted me enough to share her world with me, a secret world where women gathered
to talk about their deepest desires, their most hidden fantasies. Remember, it wasn’t
common back then to talk about sex. Let alone how much you liked it.”

At first Carolina’s group was informal, Matilda said, a gathering of artist friends,
and local offbeat characters, which have always been aplenty in New Orleans. Most
were single, some were widows, a few were long married, some of them happily so, she
said. Most were successful and over thirty. But there was something missing from their
marriages, their lives.

Matilda became her exclusive art broker and Carolina’s paintings began selling for
sky-high prices. Eventually she sold several to the American wife of a Middle-Eastern
oil sheik for tens of millions of dollars. She bought the Mansion next door, then
put the rest of her fortune into a trust that funded their burgeoning sexual collective.

“Ultimately we realized we wanted to
experience
our sexual fantasies—all of them. And these scenarios cost money. Finding men, and
sometimes women, the
right
men and women, to fulfill these fantasies, required recruiting. And … training. That’s
how S.E.C.R.E.T. began.

“After we all helped one another experience
our
sexual fantasies, we began recruiting one person every year upon whom we would bestow
this gift—the gift of complete sexual emancipation. As current chair of the Committee,
it was my duty to choose this year’s recruit. According to our mandate, she must,
in turn, choose us.”

“That’s your cue, Cassie,” said Brenda.

“Me? Why?”

“For several reasons. We have been watching you for a while now. Pauline made the
suggestion after seeing you at the restaurant. She didn’t leave her notebook on purpose,
but we couldn’t have planned it better. We had already discussed you a couple of times.
It all worked out rather well.”

This stunned me for a moment, that I’d been watched, checked out … for what? Signs
of abject loneliness? I felt a flash of anger.

“What are you saying exactly? That you saw I was some pathetic, lonely waitress?”
I looked accusingly around the room.

Amani reached out and held my arm, while some of the women murmured reassurances:
“No” and “It’s not like that” and “Oh, honey, that’s not what we meant.”

“Cassie, it’s not an insult. We operate from a spirit of love and support. When someone
shuts down their sexual self prematurely, it’s often not noticeable to them. But other
people pick up on it. It’s like you’re operating with one less sense. Only you don’t
know it. Sometimes people in that kind of retreat need an intervention of sorts. That’s
all. That’s what I meant. We found you. We picked you for this. And now we’re offering
you a chance at a new beginning. An awakening. If you want it. Do you want to join
us and begin your journey?”

I was stuck on how they had been
monitoring
me.
How?
I had always thought I camouflaged my loneliness, my accidental celibacy. Then I
remembered my brown clothing, my messy ponytail, my awful shoes, my slouch, my cat,
my trudge home at dusk to my empty apartment. Anyone with a set of eyes could have
seen that a brown-colored aura had settled over me, like a dusting of defeat. It was
time. Time to make a leap.

“Yes,” I said, shaking the remaining doubt out of my head. “I’m in. I want to do this.”

The room erupted in applause. Amani nodded encouragingly.

“Consider the women in this circle your sisters. We can guide you back to your true
self,” Matilda said, standing up.

My chest tightened with emotion. I was feeling so much at the same time—joy, fear,
confusion and gratitude. Was this really happening? To me?

“Why are you doing this for me?” I asked, tears pooling in the corners of my eyes.

“Because we can,” said Bernice.

Matilda reached under the table and pulled a zippered folder. She placed it in front
of me. It looked like real alligator skin and it was embossed with my initials,
CR
. They knew, on some fundamental level, that this was not something I could turn down.
I opened it, exposing the two sides of the folder, each filled with ornately embossed
papers. On the left was a linen envelope with my name on it in calligraphy. Even my
wedding invitations weren’t this beautiful.

“Go ahead,” said Matilda. “Open it.”

I carefully ripped the seal. Inside was a card.