Exit to Eden

by Anne Rice

  My mind was getting busy. I should call the real estate agents about that house for sale in the Garden District. I had to give my dad a call and see if he was alive, or if he’d killed my mother. I had to get another camera.

  What was all this?

  I wouldn’t even ask her why we were not going back to the hotel, what we were really avoiding, what The Club was likely to do.

  But when we left Oak Alley and she told the driver to go into the bayou country to Saint Martinsville, I knew we were definitely “running away from home.”

  We stopped in one of those big, purely American roadside discount stores and we bought cosmetics and toothbrushes and the cheapest clothes you can probably find anywhere in the States.

  At the motel in Saint Martinsville we put on khaki shorts and white T-shirts and then we went walking together, arm in arm like lovers, into damp, green depths of the quiet and endless Evangeline State Park.

  This was another haunted place, because there are three- and four-hundred-year-old oak trees here, leaning their great, enormous and beautiful elbows on the ground, which are true wonders of the world. The grass is velvet, and the sky comes right down through the trees like bits and pieces of polished porcelain glimmering through the clumps of leaves, and the moss drifts like the hair of ancient women all the way to the ground. The whole world seems, as it did at Oak Alley, to be a dark and silent and verdant place.

  There wasn’t any cinnamon or butter when we made love, just the two of us in the tiny little wallpapered motel cabin like it had been in the limo, and this time with the beer in the ice in the bathroom basin, and the little ruffled curtains moving in the moist current of the rattling air conditioner, we went right to the moon and the stars.

  Slower, sweeter, wilder, it went on all the late afternoon, the kisses and the sighs and the soft words spoken amid the battered doll-house-like furniture and the light through the dirty, brittle old yellow window shades under the ruffled curtains getting more and more golden until it was dark.

  Conversation about the kind of woman I always thought I’d marry: some primitive woman, deeply foreign, like the woman I’d lived with briefly in Saigon, waiting on me hand and foot, and never asking any questions, Goethe’s flower girl, Gauguin’s Tahitians, ah, the sadness, the hostility of it, the lockout and the despair of such ideas. I had never been stupid enough to call that a dream.

  She did not say anything about that. She looked adorable to me in the khaki shorts and the T-shirt and the thong sandals we’d bought in the discount mart. She wore Chantilly perfume, real cheap and sweet, that she’d bought there also, and I wanted to photograph her face, the way her face looked in the shadows, the cheekbones, the shadows in the hollows of her cheeks, the lovely pout of her red mouth.

  Finally she said: “I never thought I’d get married at all. I never thought I would really love someone. I never thought. . .” She sat still looking horror-struck and I felt stubborn looking at her, thinking, The hell, I am not going to say it again.

  I was hungry. I wanted some Cajun food, real Cajun jambalaya, and shrimp and red beans. And to hear some goofy, shrill, nasal, high-pitched Cajun music and singing, maybe even find a little bar somewhere where we could dance.

  “I’m going to buy that house in the Garden District,” I said.

  She woke up like somebody had pulled a string attached to her, as she sat there, staring off.

  “It will cost a million dollars,” she said. Her eyes were glassy and strange.

  “So what?” I said.

  We showered together and we put on more of the discount store shorts and shirts and sandals. And we were pretty much ready to go out.

  Then something stupid happened, well, more or less.

  One of those big brown horrible Louisiana roaches got into the room, and Lisa jumped up off the bed screaming, absolutely screaming, when the roach came waddling over the bumpy polyester carpet across the room.

  Now these are actually waterbugs or so I am told. But no one that I have ever known from Louisiana ever called them anything but roaches and just about everybody I know who was born there, with these roaches, goes screaming mad like this when they come into a room.

  I myself have no fear at all of roaches. So as Lisa was screaming her head off, I mean going to absolute hysteria, screaming, “Elliott, kill it! Kill it! Kill it!” it was a great pleasure for me to go and get the thing, pick it up off the carpet in my hand, and get ready to throw it out the door. It was a damn sight better idea than smashing it, because they give off an appalling popping noise if you smash them directly, and a squashed one is worse to look at than a moving one as far as I am concerned. I don’t like these things, but I don’t mind picking them up.

  But this act of picking up the roach, catching it like a moth in my right hand, brought Lisa into a catatonic state of silence with her hands clamped over her mouth. She stared at me as if she could not believe what I was doing, and I stood still staring at her. Then she put her hands down, and white faced and sweating and shaking she said, “Well, if it isn’t the goddamned samurai himself, Mr. Macho Man, picking up the goddamn roach in his bare hand!”

  I don’t know what exactly she was feeling. Maybe she was just so shaken up and so scared and so upset, and here I was holding the roach in my hand. I don’t know.

  But whatever it was she sounded furious and contemptuous and ironic, and I said, without thinking about it, possibly unconsciously irritated by her incredible screaming: “You know what, Lisa? I’m going to put this roach down your shirt.”

  She went totally and completely nuts.

  Screaming the same way she had before, really screaming, she rushed into the little ratty closet of a bathroom and slammed the door and pushed the latch. And there came through the door the most hysterical condemnations and pleading and miserable choking-and-sobbing crying I’d ever heard.

  Well, very plainly this was not funny to her, not funny at all. She was just too scared. And I was a rat.

  But for one solid hour I could not persuade her to come out. I had thrown the roach outside, and then killed the sucker. He was dead, dead, dead. No more would he scare gorgeous little girls from roachless Berkeley, California. Not enough of him remained for a roach funeral. He was dead. I was sorry, I told her, I wouldn’t do such a thing, really, it was bullying and mean.

  But just when I would get her calmed down and believing in me, that I knew I had behaved terribly, I couldn’t, just couldn’t resist throwing in some little teasing remark, like, “Of course I would never put a big, sticky, ugly, multilegged, squirming brown cockroach down your shirt!”

  I knew I shouldn’t do this, it was so sadistic, but it was also so damned funny and I just couldn’t stop myself, and of course I knew I wasn’t going to really do it, and the next time I said, “Of course I wouldn’t, Lisa, do you think I would expect you to work out your fear of roaches in an S&M scenario with me putting a roach down your shirt, the way you made me wear that blindfold at the whipping post in the sports arcade, no Madam!”

  But finally I was begging her to come out.

  “Lisa, come out of the bathroom. I swear I would never do something like that to someone. I have never and I would not. It’s mean. I wouldn’t do it.” I had come completely straight. She still wouldn’t open the door.

  “All right, Lisa. This is Louisiana. Now what are you going to do the next time one of those critters gets in?” (Crying.) “What did you do when you were here before and I wasn’t here?” (More crying.) “But I am here and I am going to get rid of them when they come in, right? Now you better make up with me immediately or maybe I just might not.” (Terrible crying.) “Like what if there is one in that bathroom right now, coming right out from under the linoleum or something right against the wall?” (Awful, sad, terrible crying.)

  “I hate you, Elliott,” she said in the most deep and resonant and feelingful voice. “You don’t understand this. You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t imagine how I feel. I swear to God
I hate you right now. I really do hate you. I do.”

  “Lisa, I’m sorry! It’s seven o’clock. It’s dark. We’re in this shit-kicking bayou town. I’m hungry. Come out! Okay. If you don’t come, Lisa, Mr. Macho Man is going to break down the fucking door right now.”

  She didn’t come out.

  I broke down the door like I said I would.

  Actually, this was very easy. The hinges were rusted and corroded, and when I slammed the door with the one wooden chair in the room, the hinges broke right out of the jam. And there was Lisa standing on the toilet top, with her arms folded, and the door lying in front of her with the paint scraped off it, and she was just staring at me. And the door jamb was a splintered mess.

  “Look, Ma,” I said and I opened both my hands. “No roaches. I swear.” I stood still and I smiled at her and silently pleaded with her. I made motions to her to please get down and come to me, and then she broke and jumped off the toilet top and ran down the sloping ramp of the door into my arms.

  “I wanna get out of this ratty motel,” she said, and I held her and kissed her and smoothed her hair back from her face, while I apologized again. And softly, hotly, helplessly, she burst into new fits of tears.

  This was an extraordinary, luscious moment, and I felt like a rat.

  The manager was banging on the front door. His wife was shouting.

  We got everything together. The driver was already outside. I gave the manager a hundred-dollar bill to cover everything and said in a sneering, imperious voice, “That will teach you to rent to rock stars again.”

  We were doubled over laughing as we got in the car.

  “Goddamn hippies!” the manager said.

  That sent us into hysteria.

  Twenty miles out of town, we found a great roadside restaurant with freezing air conditioning and we had everything I wanted to eat, crawfish done six different ways on a platter, and jambalaya and cold beer, with the jukebox playing the most cacophonous Cajun music I could have asked for. I ate like a pig.

  Hour by hour we rode north.

  Necking, talking now and then, as the night fell down around us and it didn’t really matter where we were or where we were going, and the movement of the car was like the movement of a ship.

  When we got faintly hungry again (It was I, not she. She was astonished that I could be hungry.) we pulled in at a drive-in movie, let the driver get in the back to go to sleep, and loaded up on hot dogs and popcorn to watch The Road Warrior with Mel Gibson, an Australian film directed by George Miller that despite the ironic, sarcastic, anti-macho wisecracking coming from the female occupant of the car, I found terrific.

  I must have drunk a six-pack of beer. I was drifting off when the second feature ended and she started the car.

  “Where are we headed?” I said sleepily. I could hardly see.

  “Go on to sleep,” she said. “We’re bound for parts unknown.”

  “Parts unknown.” I loved it. The cool air from the vent was rushing over me. I was snuggled up against her with my legs stretched out to the side. The night was a mirage.

  ELLIOTT

  Chapter 27

  To Keep Warm

  When I woke up, the sun was cutting through the windshield and we were going at least one hundred miles an hour. The chauffeur was still asleep in the back.

  I took one look at the land and knew we weren’t in Louisiana anymore. And one look at the road ahead again, and knew that the skyline could only belong to one city on earth. We were driving into Dallas, Texas, and you could almost see the heat rising off the road.

  Without looking at me or letting up on the accelerator, her naked legs long and brown and soft coming out of the khaki shorts, she picked up a silver canister off the seat and thrust it at me. “Coffee, blue eyes,” she said.

  I took a big hot swallow of the coffee, and stared forward, positively humbled by the Texas sky in front of us, the unbelievable height of the voluminous clouds. Somebody had opened up the whole world. Stacked to the stratosphere the clouds were, with the morning sun driving shafts right through them, turning the rolling white terrain to pink and yellow and gold.

  “And what exactly are we doing here, beautiful?” I bent over to kiss her smooth soft little cheek.

  We were already mounting the tangle of immaculate Dallas freeways, sliding through the wilderness of towering glass and steel monoliths. Everywhere I saw futuristic buildings with an almost Egyptian purity and massiveness, flawless reflections of the cloudscape gliding across a hundred polished walls.

  She was weaving in and out of the traffic like a race car driver.

  “Ever hear of Billy Bob’s Texas?” she asked. “In Fort Worth? Wanna go dancing there tonight?”

  “Hot damn, you’re my kind of girl,” I said. I took another swallow of the coffee. “But I left my snakeskin boots back in New Orleans.”

  “I’ll buy you some new snakeskin boots,” she said.

  “What about some breakfast?” I kissed her again. “This boy needs some grits and eggs and ham and flapjacks, the works.”

  “All you really think about is food, Slater.”

  “Don’t be jealous, Kelly,” I said. “Right now, you’re the only thing in this world I love more.”

  We stayed in the big gaudy silver Hyatt Regency long enough to make love in the shower, stash the driver in his own room in front of a color TV, and then we took off for Neiman’s, Sakowitz, and the swanky sci-fi shopping malls with their glass ceilings, fountains, and fig trees, and silver escalators, and everything for sale from diamonds to junk food.

  I loaded up on good books at the B. Dalton, mainly some old favorite stuff I thought I might read to her, if she’d let me. And she kept picking out blue and lavender and purple clothes for me—turtlenecks and velvet jackets, dress shirts and even suits. I made her buy kinky high-heel sandals, strapping them on for her myself in the store, and she had to at least try on for me every pretty white dress we saw.

  Then late afternoon we hit Cutter Bill’s for what we really wanted—pearl button cowboy shirts, fancy belts, skin-tight Wrangler jeans, and Mercedes Rio boots.

  It was dark when we got to Billy Bob’s Texas and the place was jammed. We had on matching everything, including hats, and we sauntered in like a couple of natives, or so we figured it. Who knows what we really looked like? Two people crazy mad in love?

  It took me a moment to realize we’d entered a city-block-sized compound, with souvenir shops, billiard tables, restaurants, and bars—even an indoor rodeo arena—and thousands eating and drinking and crowding onto the dance floor while the seamless sound of the live country-western band rolled over everything, going at once to my head.

  We danced every number the first hour, fast, slow, in between, drinking beer right out of the bottle, and just copying the dancers around us until we had it down. We slunk around the floor with our arms around each other’s necks, waltzed, swung, danced cheek to cheek, smooched. It seemed insane that women had ever worn dresses, that lovers had not always worn exactly the same clothes. I could hardly keep my hands off her gorgeous little bottom in the tight jeans, her breasts bulging under the tight shirt. And her hair was still that feminine mane, that silky dark veil over her shoulders, that was the final touch. When she pulled her hat down over her eyes, leaned against the wooden railing with her ankles crossed and her thumbs hooked in her pockets, she was too damned pulchritudinously fuckable for me to stand it. Nothing to do but dance.

  The rodeo in the little indoor arena was the real thing and not half bad. I loved the smell of it, the sound of those stomping animals. She covered her face a couple of times when the guys were almost trampled, and then we wandered into the restaurant part for some big juicy hamburgers and french fries, and around eleven, I discovered she knew how to play pool.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” I said. Time for some serious gambling. And by midnight she’d won three billion dollars from me. I wrote her a check.

  My feet were killing me.
But I was still grooving on the dim yellow lights, the endless thumping music, the deep, sweet, sentimental voice of the baritone singing Linda Ronstadt’s old “Faithless Love.” One last dance.

  “S&M boots,” I said finally. “Why don’t you lasso me and drag me to the car so I don’t have to walk?”

  “You’re not kidding,” she said. “Guess who’s walking out of here in her sock feet? Come on, cowboy. Time for the proverbial roll in the hay.”

  A little after eight when I was doing laps across the pool, singing “Faithless Love” with a lot of bubbles in it, she came out, dressed up in jeans and boots again, and said we should take off for Canton right now. Only it wasn’t Canton like in China, but Cant’n.

  “Post haste, wherever the hell it is,” I said, climbing out of the water. “But an emergency ration of eggs Benedict and Miller’s beer first, okay?”

  I also wanted to cut off her Wranglers with a scissors and make love to her before we left. We compromised on that.

  (We didn’t have a scissors.)

  Canton was a town an hour south of Dallas where every first Monday of the month for one hundred years they have held a gigantic flea market which attracts people from all over the States. And by ten we were rocking south in the limo again, the driver in the back, Lisa at the wheel as before.

  “Quilts,” she said, “that’s what I’m looking for, the last genuine batch from the thirties and forties, made in Kansas and Texas and Oklahoma, where the women still knew how.”

  It was ninety-eight degrees when we got out of the car.

  But from eleven until one we shuffled through the dusty dirt paths of an endless sprawling marketplace past thousands of tables and booths full of beat-up furniture, prairie antiques, dolls, paintings, carpets, trash. Quilts we found by the pound. I know because I was carrying them over my shoulder in a green plastic sack.