Exit to Eden

by Anne Rice

  “It wasn’t like that for me,” she said. “Martin’s was the place that was intellectually free.” She walked with nice easy strides beside me. We were making good, exhilarating time down the avenue, under the lacy shadows of the leaves beneath the street lamps, past the big white front porches, the little iron fences, the garden gates.

  Her dad was an old-guard Irish Catholic who worked his way through college in St. Louis and taught at the Jesuit college in San Francisco, her mother one of those old-fashioned women who just stayed home until her four children were grown up and then went to work in the public library downtown. They moved to the Berkeley hills when Lisa was a little girl because they liked the heat in the east bay and they thought the hills were beautiful. But they hated the rest of Berkeley.

  I knew her street, her house even, a big ramshackle brown-shingle place on Mariposa, and I had even seen the lights on lots of times in the big garage library when I drove by.

  That is where her dad was always reading Teilhard de Chardin and Maritain and G. K. Chesterton and all the Catholic philosophers. He would rather read than talk to people, and his rudeness and coldness were legends in the family. On sex he was Augustinian and Pauline as she described it. He thought chastity was ideal. But he could not practice it. Otherwise he might have been a priest. When you stripped all the language away, sex was filthy. Homosexuals should abstain. Even kissing was a mortal sin.

  Her mother never voiced a contrary opinion; she belonged to all the church organizations, worked on fund-raisers, cooked a big dinner every Sunday whether the kids were there or not. Lisa’s younger sister got perilously close to being a Playmate of the Month for Playboy and it was a family tragedy. If any of his girls had an abortion or posed nude for a magazine her father said he would never speak to that girl again.

  He didn’t know anything about The Club. He thought Lisa worked for a private membership resort somewhere in the Caribbean, and that the people who went there were being treated for various illnesses. We both laughed at that. He wanted Lisa to quit and come home. Her older sister had married a sort of dull real estate millionaire. They all went to Catholic schools all their lives except Lisa, who laid down the law that she go to the University of California or she would not go to college at all. Her father sneered at the books she read, the papers she wrote. Lisa did S&M when she was sixteen with a student at Berkeley. She had had her first orgasm when she was eight years old and she had thought she was a freak.

  “We were what they used to call Catholics in nineteenth-century France,” she said, “ ‘immigrants of the interior.’ If you think of devout Catholics as simple, stupid people, you know, peasants in the back of big city cathedrals saying their rosaries before statues, then you don’t know my dad. There is this awesome intellectual weight to everything he says, this constitutional puritanism, this languishing for death.”

  But he was a brilliant man, loved art and saw that his daughters learned a great deal about painting and music. They had a grand piano in the living room, they had real paintings on the walls, Picasso etchings and Chagall etchings. Her father had bought Mirandi and Miro years and years ago. They went to Europe every summer after Lisa’s younger sister was six years old. They lived in Rome for a year. Her father knew Latin so well he kept his diary in it. If her father ever found out about The Club or her secret life it would kill him. It was damn near unthinkable, his finding out.

  “There is one thing I can say for him, however, and you might understand it, if anybody would understand it, that he is a spiritual man, truly a spiritual man. I have not met too many people who really live by what they believe as he does. And the funny thing is I live by what I believe, absolutely what I believe. The Club is the pure expression of what I believe. I have a philosophy of sex. Sometimes I wish I could tell him about that. He has these aunts and sisters who are nuns. One is a Trappistine nun and another is a Carmelite. These are cloistered nuns. I would like to tell him that I too am a sort of nun, because I am saturated in what I believe. You must know what I am talking about. It’s kind of a joke in a way, if you think about it, because when Hamlet said to Ophelia, as I am sure you know, when he said, ‘Get thee to a nunnery,’ he really meant a whorehouse, not a nunnery at all.”

  I nodded. I was dazzled a little.

  But her story frightened me, and made me hug her tightly as she talked. It was exquisite, her animation and intensity, and the simplicity and the honesty of her face. I loved the details she described, her first communion, and listening to opera in the library with her father, and sneaking away to Martin’s in San Francisco and feeling then and only then that she was truly alive.

  We could have talked like this forever. She had said in a rush at least sixteen things that I wanted her to explain. We would need a year or so to know each other. This was just peeling back the first layer.

  She wasn’t really finished before we were trading facts and I was telling her all about my father, who was an atheist and believed totally in sexual freedom, how he’d taken me to Las Vegas to get laid when I was still a teenager, and how he drove my mother crazy demanding she go with him to nude beaches, and how she finally got a divorce, a little disaster from which none of us had recovered. She taught piano in L.A., and worked as an accompanist for a voice teacher and fought constantly with my father over a measly five hundred bucks a month spousal support because she could barely support herself. My father was rich. So were his children because his father had left us money. But my mother didn’t have anything.

  I was getting mad talking about this, so I got off it. I had given my mother a check for a hundred grand before I left for The Club. I had bought her a house down there. She had a whole bunch of gay men friends I couldn’t stand, hair dresser types, and she was still pretty in a pale sort of way. She didn’t believe in herself.

  My father would keep the community property that belonged to my mother tied up in court forever. He was a big conservationist in northern California, chained himself to redwoods when they were about to be cut down, owned a big Sausalito restaurant, a couple of bed and breakfast hotels in Mendocino and Elk, and acres and acres of Marin County land that was almost beyond realistic appraisal. He worked all the time for nuclear disarmament. He had the largest collection of pornography outside of the Vatican. But he thought S&M was sick.

  Again we started laughing.

  He thought it was disgusting, perverted, childish, destructive, made speeches about Eros and Thanatos, and the death wish, and when I told him about The Club—I had told him it was in the Middle East (this really cracked Lisa up)—he threatened to have me committed to the state mental hospital in Napa. But there wasn’t time.

  My dad had married a twenty-one-year-old girl just before I left; she was an idiot.

  “But why did you tell him about The Club!” She couldn’t stop laughing. “You told him the details, about the things you’d done!”

  “Why not? He’s the one that stood outside the hotel room door in Las Vegas when I slept with the hooker. I tell him everything, if you want to know.”

  She was still laughing. “I wonder what you and I would be like,” she said finally, “if our fathers had abandoned us when we were kids.”

  We had come to Washington Avenue and we cut over across Pyrthania Street to see if the bar at Commander’s Palace was open. It was and we had two more beers, talking steadily all the time about our parents and the things they’d said to us about sex and about scores of other things that had nothing to do with it. We’d had the same teachers at Berkeley, we’d read the same books, we’d seen the same movies.

  If it hadn’t been for The Club, she hadn’t the faintest idea what she would have been—the question made her anxious—maybe a writer, but that was just a dream. She’d never created anything but an S&M scenario.

  Her favorite books kind of amused me, but they made me love her, absolutely love her. They were pretty muscular things like Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and Re
chy’s City of Night. But then she also loved Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

  “In other words,” I said, “books about sexual outlaws, people who are lost.”

  She nodded, but there was more to it than that. It was a question of energy and style. When she felt bad, she would pick up Last Exit to Brooklyn and she would read in a whisper the “TraLaLa” story or “The Queen Is Dead.” She knew the rhythms so well she could practically recite them from memory. It was the poetry of darkness and she loved it.

  “I will tell you,” she said, “what it is that has made me feel like a freak most of my life, and it wasn’t having the orgasm at eight years old or listening furtively and shamefully to other little kids describing spankings or slipping off to San Francisco to be whipped in a candlelighted room. It’s that nobody has ever been able to convince me that anything sexual between consenting individuals is wrong. I mean it’s like part of my brain is missing. Nothing disgusts me. It all seems innocent, to do with profound sensations, and when people tell me they are offended by things, I just don’t know what they mean.”

  I was engrossed. In the light of the bar she looked exotic, her face all angles, her voice low and natural, and it was like drinking water to listen to her.

  Before we left New Orleans, she said, we had to make the transsexual shows on Bourbon, the really raunchy ones with the female impersonators who are actually taking hormone shots and getting operations to turn them into women. She loved these shows.

  “You must be kidding,” I said. “I wouldn’t get caught in those joints.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said. She got furious. “These people are putting their sexual principles on the line, they’re acting out their fantasies. They are willing to be freaks.”

  “Yes, but those are dives, tourist joints. How far from the elegance of The Club can you get?”

  “Doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “Elegance is just a form of control. I like those joints. I feel like a goddamned female impersonator and I like to watch them.” Her whole manner changed when she said this, and she started trembling a little and so I said, well, of course, if she wanted to see them.

  “I’m confused,” I said. My tongue was getting thick. I had drunk two Heinekens since we came into the bar. “You’re writing the ticket. Why don’t you just say where we’re going?”

  “Because I just did. And you said, ‘You gotta be kidding,’ and besides I do not just want to tell you what to do, and I am not writing a scenario!”

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  We cut out again, and hung around the gate to the Lafayette Cemetery across the street for about twenty minutes, talking about whether or not we should climb over the wall and walk through the graves. I love these above-ground graves with their Grecian pediments and columns, and broken-down doors and rusted coffins. I had half a mind to climb the fence. But then we might get arrested.

  We decided it was a good time to go all through the Garden District instead of doing that.

  And so we wove back and forth from Saint Charles to Magazine on the various streets, here and there to look at a particular antebellum house, white columns in the moonlight, wrought iron railings, old oaks so big around I couldn’t span them with my arms.

  There is maybe no neighborhood on earth quite like this, these giant sleepy houses, these relics of a former time, all spruce and serene behind their immaculate gardens, here and there the hum of an automatic sprinkler, the faint shimmer of the spray, in the dense and leafy dark. The sidewalks alone are beautiful, made up as they are of long stretches of herringbone brick, and purple flagstone, patches of cement broken into little hills over the roots of the giant trees.

  She had favorite houses, houses she used to come to look at when she lived here in the apartment and did nothing but read and walk; and we went visiting them now. We found two houses with For Sale signs on the fences, and one house in particular entranced us, a tall narrow Greek Revival house with the door on the left side and two french windows on the front porch. It had been painted a deep rose color with white trim, and now the paint was peeling softly all over it except where it was covered in vines. It had Corinthian columns and long front steps, and a string of old magnolia trees inside the fence. There was a side garden behind a brick wall that we couldn’t see.

  We stayed a long time, leaning on the gate and kissing each other, and not saying anything until I said we should buy the house. We would live there happily ever after and we would travel all over the world together and we would come home to our house. It was big enough to have wild parties and houseguests and a darkroom and sit-down dinners for both our families from California.

  “And when we get bored with New Orleans,” I said, “well fly to New York for a couple of weeks or down to The Club.”

  She looked irresistible, smiling up at me in the half dark, her arm wound around my neck.

  “Remember, this is our house,” I said. “Of course we can’t live in it for two years, until my contract’s up at The Club. But I don’t see why we don’t make the down payment now.”

  “You’re not like anybody else I ever knew,” she said.

  We started walking again, kissing in a soft, dreamy, drunken way without urgency; we would walk a few steps, kiss, lean against one of the trees. I messed up her hair hopelessly. She didn’t have any more lipstick on, and I could reach under her dress very quickly before she had a chance to stop me and feel the smooth cotton of her panties between her legs, wet and hot, and I wanted to fuck her right where we were.

  Finally we managed to pull ourselves across Jackson Avenue and we wandered into the Pontchartrain Hotel, where the bar was still open too, and we had some more drinks, and when we came out we figured everything from then on was rather ugly and seedy so we took a cab back downtown. I was feeling manic, like this night was momentous, and every time I felt it I would grab her and kiss her again.

  Those horrible joints on Bourbon were closed already, thank God.

  It was three o’clock and we went into some comfortable enough place with a couple of gas lamps and several square wooden tables and we got into our first argument. I knew I was drunk. I should have shut up, but it was over a movie called Pretty Baby, all about the old Storyville red light district in New Orleans, directed by Louis Malle. I hated it and she said it was a great film. It had Brooke Shields as the little-girl whore in it and Keith Carradine as the photographer Belloc and Susan Sarandon as Brooke’s mother and I thought it was worse than a flop.

  “Don’t call me an idiot just because I like a movie you don’t understand,” she was saying, and I was stammering, trying to explain that I didn’t mean she was an idiot. She said that I said that anybody who liked a piece of garbage like that was an idiot. Did I say that?

  I had another Scotch and water, and I knew what I was saying was brilliant, about how that whole movie was a lie, and nothing in it had any substance, but when she started to talk it was sexual outlaws again, that the movie had been about these women prostitutes and the way that they went on living and loving and experiencing day-to-day life though they were outcasts.

  It was all about flowers blooming in cracks; it was about life being unable to crush out life. And I started to understand everything she was saying. She knew how Belloc the photographer felt, he was in love with the little-girl prostitute (this is the Keith Carradine character in love with the Brooke Shields character) and how he got left by everybody in the end, but the best scene was when the whore played by Susan Sarandon was nursing the baby in the whorehouse kitchen.

  She was saying how you cannot just make people shut up and die because they are sexual outlaws, that you wouldn’t know now that that was what The Club was all about because all you saw was rich people sitting around the pools and you had to have money to go there and be young and be beautiful, but there was an idea and the idea was that anybody could come here and act out his or her sexu
al fantasy, and you still could, you still could, you still could.

  The slaves didn’t have to be rich, and if you weren’t beautiful enough to be a slave you could be a handler or a trainer, all you had to do was really believe in the idea of The Club, and you had to be in the fantasy. And a lot more happened at The Club than people realized. Because a lot of the members admitted in private that they wanted to be dominated and punished by the slaves. So a good many of the slaves knew how to take the dominant role on demand. It was a hell of a lot freer than it looked. Her eyes were really dark now, and her face was drawn and she was talking rapidly in silvery riffs, but she started to cry when I said: “Well, goddamn yes, that’s just what I’m doing at The Club, acting out my fantasies, but what’s that got to do with the whores in Pretty Baby? It wasn’t their fantasy they were acting out, it was somebody else’s.”

  “No, but it was their life and it was life, and they went on hoping and dreaming and the movie caught the day-to-day life. The photographer in the movie saw in them images of freedom and that is why he wanted to be with them.”

  “But that’s stupid. All the Susan Sarandon character wanted to do was get married and get out of the whorehouse and Pretty Baby was just a kid and . . .”

  “Don’t tell me I’m stupid. Why the hell can’t a man argue with a woman without telling her she’s stupid?”

  “I didn’t say you were stupid, I said that was stupid.”

  The bartender was suddenly leaning in my face saying, sure this was an all-night bar, and he hated to ask us to leave, but this was the hour between four and five when they did the cleaning. Would we maybe go around the corner to Michael’s?

  Michael’s was a real dump. No sawdust, no pictures, no gas lamps. Just a rectangular room full of wooden tables. They didn’t have any Johnny Walker Black Label. Lisa was not really crying. “You are mistaken!” And something kind of interesting was happening in Michael’s.

  The people who were coming in had just woken up or something. They hadn’t been carousing all night as we had. But what kind of people get up at five o’clock in the morning when it is still dark and start immediately drinking in Michael’s? There were two incredibly tall drag queens in wigs with pancake makeup on their faces talking to one of those thin young men who has drunk and smoked so much that he looks one hundred years old. His face was shrinking over his skull and his eyes were totally bloodshot. I wished I had a camera. If we were going to go to Venice I was going to get a camera.