Exit to Eden

by Anne Rice

  After several visits to Bath Heaven and its choir of little Bath-angels I knew nobody was going to tell me much about her, who she really was.

  I did worm it out of Mr. Iron Fingers Masseur that there was a gorgeous female slave named Diana mixed up in it who was in tears someplace because the Boss Lady-Perfectionist hadn’t sent for her in two whole days.

  “But where does she come from, what kind of jokes does she laugh at, you have to know something about her that’s not classified, come on.”

  I kept doing inventories of her possessions, those sculptures, that shelf of books.

  “Those paintings, the masks, how did she get those?”

  “Elliott, this is like a stuck record,” he said, working my skin like it was clay. “Get your mind off her. Male slaves don’t get close to her. Think about all the beautiful ladies and gentlemen she’s training you for.”

  “What do you mean, she doesn’t like men, is that what you’re saying, that she and this Diana slave . . . ?”

  “You’re getting yourself wound up over nothing. She doesn’t like anybody. She just knows how to handle everybody better than anybody else could handle them, get the point?”

  But the one thing they didn’t mind confirming, over and over again, was that she was the real creator of The Club.

  Almost every little game she had invented; the sports arcade was entirely her idea, and she had some other elaborate trips on the drawing board right now.

  And I kept thinking about the way she looked last night when she stood in the middle of the arcade and said in that strange ironic voice, “Aren’t we geniuses of exotic sex?” She was some kind of genius all right. But I was building up a suspicion about her. How did she feel about what she had accomplished? Was she one-tenth as impressed with it as I was? I didn’t think so. I wish I had grabbed her and kissed her like Rudy Valentino in The Sheik.

  But it was too crazy. I mean I was fantasizing about her, imagining she could love, she could feel, that I could affect something in her. I mean it was . . . like the goddamned song . . . almost like falling in love.

  What the hell had Martin said, about sado-masochism maybe being a search for something. You might be searching for a person, Elliott, rather than a system and at The Club the system is what you get.

  I didn’t need Martin to tell me not to fall any deeper into this trap.

  Listen to what Mr. Iron Fingers is saying to you. You’re supposed to want the system. You’re supposed to prove Martin was wrong.

  But all day long I was playing this maddening little game of watching for her. Watching for her in Scott’s class, half relieved she wasn’t there to compound that little torture-chamber nightmare. And half disappointed she wasn’t. And seeing her in the crowds all around while I mixed drinks and carried drinks and set down drinks, trying to properly wallow in the pinches and the compliments and the smiles.

  But then there were those final confusing moments last night, when she was standing there naked in that open negligee, all moist and sweet and pink, with that handler gaping at her, stammering all those directions like the building was on fire. Damn her. I wanted to grab her, just hold her. I wanted to say just let me stay here and let us talk together for a little while, let us . . .

  I wished I could talk to Martin. Ask him what to do about this. Emergency. Help. Something dangerous was happening in my head, the thought that I could make her love me, make her really love me. Ah, pride before the fall as all know.

  And now and then, I thought of screwing up to disgust her and get away from her, to be sent back below stairs.

  But it was really too late for that.

  During the trainers’ class, when I had almost bolted away from the hands examining me, I had been terrified of being sent back down again, separated from her. And there had been the electrical fire in my brain when Scott, that dark, feline trainer, had whispered in my ear: “Thinking about her, Elliott? Dreaming about her? What would she do if I gave a bad report on you, Elliott?”

  Martin, I am in trouble. And the trouble is, it’s too late.

  ELLIOTT

  Chapter 19

  Dress Up

  Six o’clock and no chimes anywhere on the island. Just the thumping in my chest. The handler glanced at his watch, and then told me to go in and wait right beside the door.

  More than anything, I wanted to savor the first glimpse of her, wanted to slow things down so at that moment I could truly see her and hear what was in my head.

  I have this theory actually, that after an absence you discover in that first glimpse what you really think and feel about another person. You know things you couldn’t know before.

  Maybe I wouldn’t be so stark raving mad about her; she would be a little less dangerous, less pretty. I would start to think more about the others; like, who knows, maybe I’d start thinking about Scott.

  The door closed behind me. The handler was gone. And the room looked warm in the soft electric light, the sky beyond the lace curtains a leaden gleam. Dreamy place. Like a chamber of the heart.

  I heard some sound so unobtrusive that I wasn’t even sure of it, and I turned my head towards the open parlor doors.

  She was standing there all right. And I was in love with her. So much for the first glimpse. And the really wonderful thought came to me that she was quite deliberately trying to drive me out of my mind.

  She was in a man’s suit, a tight-fitted little three-piece number, except it was made of dark, dusty lilac velvet, so deep that in the creases it was an ashen gray. And knotted very loosely under the white collar of her shirt was a pale pink silk foulard. Her hair was swept up and back in a twist, and she was wearing a fedora of the same dusky mauve with a dark charcoal silk band. It was right out of the forties gangster movies, the shape of the hat, the way it dipped over one eye, and she was all cheekbones under the shadow of the brim, the mouth a kind of pouting glimmer of red.

  The lust I felt for her was so total I could hardly keep still. I wanted to bury my face in her crotch, pull her down on top of me. In love with her, love her, the words were caught up in the lust.

  I could see her eyes now, clearly, and feel that force emanating from her, see the hair swept up from her naked neck, her naked ear. She looked delicate in the suit, downright breakable.

  “Come closer,” she said. “And slowly turn around. I want to look at you. Take your time.”

  The pants were so snug on her they must have been made for her, and her breasts were pushing at the covered buttons on the vest.

  I did as she said. I wondered if they’d given her the details, about the trainers’ class, what that little adventure had been like.

  And I could feel her coming closer, as if she affected the air around her, feel her perfume before I smelled it, feel that force again when I saw her angular shadow in the corner of my eye.

  I inclined my head to the side rather deliberately and glanced down at her, sucking up her appearance before I looked straight ahead. Shiny little pointed toes peeking out of the pant legs, high heels, pants tight enough in her crotch to make her feel the seam between her legs.

  I saw her hand move and I thought, I can’t stand it. She has to touch me. I have to touch her. Rudy Valentino, the sheik, is going to kidnap her and take her off to his tent in the desert. But neither of us moved.

  “Follow me,” she said, snapping her fingers lazily, the light glinting on her fingernails for a second, and she turned and went through the pair of double doors.

  It was the parlor I’d glimpsed last night. I watched the easy shift of her little hips, wanted to touch the back of her naked neck. She looked like a little manikin in the suit. I mean a baby man, a supernatural creature, something not a woman yet just as little and lovable and soft.

  Large desk, massive African sculpture in one corner, and a really terrific Haitian painting in six panels of scenes from the French colonial days, something to look at later when she wasn’t blinding me, in all the thousands and thousands of times I’d b
e in these rooms kissing her naked insteps and her naked calves and her naked crotch that ought to be freed from those tight little pants and let to breathe in my face. Nothing really feminine in this room, except her steaming in the mauve velvet, turning back to me and then staring quite deliberately to her left.

  I looked in the same direction, and for one moment it didn’t register. “Those are my suitcases,” I said.

  Martin had said that your clothes are locked up. It’s the strictest security because if you can’t get your clothes and your papers then you can’t possibly escape from The Club. He said they weren’t even on the island, the clothes, they were stored in a special place. And I remember I had pictured bank vaults.

  Yet there were my suitcases unlocked and open and I could see my passport and my wallet on top of the clothes. It was almost embarrassing looking at those personal, otherworldly things.

  “I want to see what you look like,” she said, “in clothes.”

  I looked at her, trying to figure what this meant. And the surprising thought came to me that that would be too humiliating to be dressed in front of her. But it was kinky, divinely kinky. And I could feel her trembling though she didn’t appear to be trembling at all.

  “I want to see you in this,” she said. She bent over the suitcase and pulled out a gray turtleneck shirt. “You like gray, don’t you? And you don’t like colors. If you belonged to me in the outside world, were my slave utterly and completely, I’d dress you in colors. But put this on for me now.”

  I felt absolutely strange taking the shirt from her. I jerked it down over my head as if I’d never done anything like that before. It was incredible, the liveliness of the sensation as the cloth touched my skin all over. And my lower half felt ludicrously naked. My cock looked illegal. I felt like a centaur in a pornographic sketch.

  But she handed me a pair of brown pants before I had even pushed the sleeves up a little, and I put them on, feeling the rougher cloth scratch at my backside, come up uncomfortably tight around my cock and balls. I didn’t think I could close the zipper. I put my hand in trying to shift the painful erection, flashing a little smile at her, feeling her eyes on me.

  “Zip it,” she said. “And don’t come.”

  “Yes, Madam,” I said. “Just wondering if Adam and Eve felt this way in Eden the first time they got dressed.”

  I took the belt from her and that was a trip, holding the leather myself for once, sliding it through the loops. I shouldn’t have spoken to her like that. It was the clothing doing it already. But this was all madder even than the sports arcade and the damned whipping post and everything else that had gone down.

  “You’re blushing again,” she said. “It always makes your hair look terrific, really blond, when you blush.”

  I made a little gesture of mock modesty, like golly gee, I just couldn’t help it.

  She handed me a pair of socks and the brown Bally loafers I didn’t like very much. I had to make myself stop staring at her and put them on.

  Really weird, even the fraction of a difference in height, the leather against the sole, the smooth feeling of it all, like it was a casing, like it wasn’t natural—all this clothing, like it was a form of being shackled and harnessed, just being dressed.

  She held out the brown wool jacket.

  “No, not that. . .” I said.

  Hesitation. She looked suddenly blank, lost.

  “I mean it’s too precious, the jacket matching the pants and the shoes. I’d never wear that.”

  “What then?”

  “Give me the Norfolk jacket, the tweed. I mean if you don’t mind if I have something to say about it.”

  “Of course,” she said. Apologetic! She put the brown back on the hanger and took out the Norfolk jacket. I love belted jackets. I really wanted one of my filthy old safari jackets, but I didn’t think she’d go for that.

  “You happy now?” she asked. Tough again, slightly sarcastic.

  “Not till I comb my hair. It’s kind of a compulsive thing, you know, after I put on my jacket, I comb my hair.” My butt was burning under the cloth of the pants. I thought my cock would go off. I was literally tied in knots. When she reached into her back pants pocket just like a man would do it and drew out a black plastic comb, all her gorgeous little curves jiggling like crazy, I couldn’t help shifting my weight, trying to get more straight with not coming. “Thanks.”

  “There’s the mirror,” she said, pointing to a rather small narrow one between the two doors that led to the hall.

  And there was Elliott Slater in it, combing his hair, looking like he had two million years ago in San Francisco when he headed out to catch a movie on his second to last night as a free man.

  I looked down when I was finished, and then up again slowly as I handed the comb back to her, letting my fingers linger on hers for a second, and then staring at her. And she backed away. She almost jumped. But she realized what she’d done, and she stiffened as if she had to take command again, deny that she’d showed this little glimmer of fear.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Shhh. Walk up and down so that I can look at you,” she said.

  I walked very slowly away from her with my back to her, feeling everything pulling and rubbing and burning and cramping me, and then I came around again towards her, getting closer and closer, until she put her hand up and said sharply, “Stop!”

  “I want to kiss you,” I whispered as if the room were full of people.

  “Shut up,” she said, but she had backed away again with two little anxious steps.

  “Are you afraid of me, just because I’m dressed?” I asked.

  “Your voice is changed, and you’re talking a lot and acting different!” she said.

  “What did you expect?”

  “You have to be able to play it both ways for me,” she said raising her finger and pointing at me threateningly. “And you behave yourself, dressed or undressed. You make one impertinent little move, and I’ll press one of some ten different buttons in this room, and you’ll be running races in the sports arcade all night.”

  “Yes, Madam!” I said again unable to stop a little smile. I shrugged. But then I looked down again, trying to show that I wanted to please her. If she pressed one of those buttons, well . . .

  She turned her back on me, and I had a feeling it was kind of like a young, inexperienced matador turning his back for the first time on the bull.

  She walked around in a little circle, and when she glanced at me again I lifted my right hand very stiffly to my lips and I blew her a little kiss. She stood there staring at me.

  “I did something,” she said suddenly. She put her left hand on her hip and she looked uncomfortable, very uncomfortable. “I found this book in your luggage and I unwrapped it so that I could look at it.”

  “Fine,” I said. Don’t try to figure this out, I was thinking. She can’t really be interested. “I’d like you to have it, if you want.”

  She didn’t answer. She just studied me for a moment. There was all sorts of light and heat playing in her face. She went over to the table and she picked up the book.

  It gave me a mild shock to see it—Elliott the photographer, Elliott the correspondent—but not as bad as I would have thought. She had a fountain pen in her hand and she said, “Sign it?”

  I took it from her, trying very discreetly just to touch her hands when I did it and not managing it, and I went over to the couch and sat down. I can’t sign books standing up.

  I went suddenly and totally on automatic pilot, like I didn’t know what was going to come out as I moved the pen. I wrote:

  To Lisa,

  I think I am in love with you,

  Elliott

  And I stared at it. I gave the book back to her. I felt like I had just done something really stupid that I’d regret till I was ninety years old.

  She opened it and when she read the words, she was beautifully stunned. Beautifully!

  I was still sitting
on the couch, and I put my left arm up along the back of it and tried to look very casual, but my cock was pumping like something with a mind of its own that wanted to get out.

  Everything was rolling together, this insane lust for her, this love, this love for her, and this absolute exhilaration that she’d read this and she was blushing and she was afraid.

  I think if there had been a brass band in the room at that moment, I wouldn’t have heard it. I would have heard only this pumping of my own pulse in my head.

  She had closed the book and she was looking glaze-eyed almost like someone in a trance. For a second, she was unrecognizable to me. I mean it was one of those moments of “the absurd” when people look not only like strangers but strange beasts. I saw all the details of her as if she’d just been invented, and I didn’t know what she was, whether she was a man or a woman, or what.

  I wanted to shake myself out of it, but what shook me out of it was the sudden scary feeling she was going to cry. I almost got up and grabbed hold of her, or said something or did something, but I couldn’t move. The spell went as fast as it had come. She was all woman again, looking unaccountably soft in the masculine pants and jacket, and she knew things about me nobody knew, no other woman knew, and there was this sense of dissolving into her. Maybe I was the one, sitting there on the couch looking casual, who was about to cry.

  I could understand this, really understand it, if I pressed just a little further with it, I felt. But then maybe I would cry.

  She licked her lips slowly, and again, she didn’t seem to see anything. Then hugging the book to herself she asked: “Why did you get so scared? I mean last night in the arcade when I made you wear the blindfold?”

  Shocking, real shocking. Like somebody throwing a bucket of cold water over me, but then that would make me go limp. This didn’t make me go limp. Just feel naked as hell in these damn clothes. And like a dangerous rapist.

  “I didn’t like it,” I said. Funny monotone voice. I mean this isn’t exactly the conversation you have at a restaurant table, for God’s sakes. And we’re dressed like we were having lunch at Ma Maison. What was it going to be like, taking off these damned clothes? “I wanted to see what was going on,” I said. Shrug. “Isn’t that typical?” When in the hell had I ever wanted to be typical, I thought.