Exit to Eden (14 page)
Authors: Anne Rice
Tags: #Rich people, #Man-woman relationships, #Nightclubs, #New Orleans (La.), #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Romance, #Erotic fiction, #Suspense, #Erotica, #Sex, #Photojournalists, #Love stories
For days I roamed the cafés of the left bank in a daze. I was shocked and bruised by the din of the traffic, the press of the passersby as if I'd been released from a padded cell. My body was aching for the paddle, the strap, the cock, the enormous, smothering, tormenting wealth of attention! Orgasm. Pain.
Two miserable dates with a student at the Sorbonne, supper and argument with an old American friend, a dull evening of tepid lovemaking with an American businessman picked up boldly in the hotel lobby for no reason at all.
And the long flight home, the crowds on the campus, the glaze-eyed young men, eviscerated by drugs and ideas, who seemed not even to see the bronzed girls in their braless T-shirts, talk of pot, sex, revolution, women's rights in the greatest social laboratory in the world.
Alone in the room at the Saint Francis Hotel, I'd made the inevitable call after hours of staring at the telephone.
"Yes," Jean Paul had answered with immediate enthusiasm. "I have just the thing for you. He's nothing as rich as our other friend, but has a beautifully furnished Victorian in Pacific Heights. He'll be impressed with your experience. And he's frightfully strict. How long is the Christmas vacation? When can you be ready to go?"
Was it an addiction?
This is not my life
! I am a student, a young woman. I have things I must do…
There had been the man in Pacific Heights, yes, and then the couple, the young man and woman, both very skilled, who kept the room on Russian Hill only for their slaves. And another fortnight—"No more than that, Jean Paul!"—with the master again at that lovely Hillsborough estate, and his sitting beside me on the high four-poster, his hand hurting mine slightly as he talked:
"You know you are a fool to leave me. Jean Paul says I must not harass you, pressure you. But don't you see what you're throwing away? I'd let you go to school in the mornings if you wish. As long as you obeyed as always. I would give you whatever you needed, as long as you remained devoted as you've always been."
I was sobbing, his voice going on and on.
"I need you," he said. "I need to possess you, to possess you completely, to make you feel all that you can feel. Oh, if I had only less conscience and less delicacy I'd never let you leave here. It can be so exciting, don't you see, passing back and forth through the veil. I would dress you up to take to the opera, sit with you in the box, forbidding you to speak, to move your hands, then bring you back, strip you, possess you. Each morning after you returned from school, I would make you run naked through the garden—"
I would, I would, I would
… "Ah, you know you want it, you want to belong to me, you do belong to me
Out alone on the highway that night, I had hitched a ride into San Francisco, the driver saying over and over, "College girls like you just shouldn't get into cars with strange men."
******
After that, the months of refusing others, no I cannot, I will not, not again. I will study, I will go to Europe. I will be what the world calls normal. I will fall in love, get married, have children. I will, I will… I am burning. I am in hell.
Jean Paul was angry, disgusted. "You are my finest pupil, my work of art."
"You don't understand. It was swallowing me. If I do it again, I won't come back from it. Don't you see? It was eating everything up. I was losing my mind."
"It's what you want!" Angry whisper. "You can't deceive me. You were born for it, you are a slave, and all your life you will be incomplete without the master."
"Don't contact me again."
******
Knock at the door? Knock at the dream door?
I sat up in the bed. Dim sounds of conversation from the garden beyond, guests moving along the paths. The darkness thinning slightly as I stared into it, the shapes of the trees becoming distinct against the glass.
Yes, a knock, so soft that it seemed an auditory hallucination. And the odd feeling in me that Elliott Slater was going to be out there. Impossible. They had him below stairs, probably shackled. And why in the world would I think that even if he could he would come to this room?
I hit the little buzzer on the table and the door opened. Slice of yellow light from the hall, and a figure, naked, perfect as they are all perfect, but it was much too small a figure to be Elliott Slater. It was Michael come back again, unable to see as he looked into the darkened room.
"Lisa?"
"What is it, Mike?" I couldn't have been more dazed if I had been really sleeping, really dreaming. The past was its own drug, it seemed.
"They need you in the office, Lisa. They said that the phone must be off."
Impossible. I never turn off the phone, and this is First Night…
Yet in the corner of my eye I saw the tiny pulsing light of the phone. The bell, what had happened to the bell? And I remembered that when I had come in I had deliberately turned it off myself.
"Richard says they have a girl down there with some fake papers," Mike explained. "She isn't old enough to go to her senior prom."
"How the hell do they get in here?" I asked.
"Lisa, if I'd known about this place when I was seventeen, I would have parachuted in." He was already standing by the open closet, ready to help me dress.
I sat there for a moment, hating it that they needed me. But it was better than this sleep that wasn't sleep, these dreams that weren't dreams.
"Michael, see if there's some good red wine in the bar," I said. "I can get dressed by myself."
Chapter 9
Visitor in the Shadows
It was dark.
I was standing on the balls of my feet again, head hanging forward, my wrists tethered to a hook, as I had been on the yacht. Second night in a row. Pleasant dreams. There were other slaves near me, and every so often the door would open and an attendant would come down the row, swabbing oil onto our sore butts and legs. Lovely sensation. Less often an attendant passed to offer water from which we were only allowed to lap.
All afternoon and evening we'd cleaned the lavatories—not the private baths of the bungalows and suites—but the public rest rooms on all floors of The Club buildings, adjacent to the many lounges and the swimming pools: full-fledged slavery with the mops and scrub brushes, a lot of it done on hands and knees. The brawny male attendants who worked us, a cheerful crew of real rough-cut gems, had a field day with the tips of their boots and their inevitable leather straps.
You couldn't cook up something this divinely degrading in a brothel—the sublime necessity of every humiliation and command. It was an eight-hour tease to the greatest climax you'd ever had, except they made sure the climax never came.
A thousand glimpses of salons, bars—the beautiful and the privileged passing us everywhere without a glance—added nicely to the gorgeous torture. And the attendants helped themselves to a little one-way fun and games when they had the chance, just to remind us what climaxes were all about.
But the genius of it, the real purpose, was that it wore you down. It wore down the nervousness, the inhibition, the raw feeling that around every corner was an impossible test.
I could feel the barriers going in my head.
And I was part of the system. It was working. I was grateful for the uncomfortable rest period, and oddly accepting that in less than six hours I'd be scrubbing again in a glare of lights as the fashionably dressed members came and went. Three days of this! And the real training hadn't even begun.
And the real training meant Miss Dark Hair Dark Eyes Beautiful Hands Called Lisa. Elliott, you drew a royal flush.
But back off from that. My mind went a little fuzzy every time I tried to picture her, remember the tone of her voice.
Better to think about anything else. Better to hope that after three days of mop-and-scrub-brush purgatory I'd be all toughened up for hell.
Or was it heaven?
That's the problem with all this, it's both.
******
I think I was half sleeping when I picked a strange sound out of the shadows. Boots on the marble floor, probably in front of me, in front of the narrow strip of thin carpet on which my aching feet were planted. But what was it? A lighter, crisper clicking sound.
I opened my eyes.
There was a figure in the darkness off to the right. Tall but not as tall as all the men were here. And there was that sweet, intoxicating scent of Chanel.
No doubt about it. She was there. The woman in my life.
I saw the light touch the long sleek fall of her hair. I saw it glint in her eyes.
All the rest of her except for the gleam of a ring on one of her fingers was dark. Then a flash of light on the instep of her boot and something sparkling in her hand as she stepped nearer, and the luminous white of her blouse with tiny glimmering pearl buttons on it, and her face coming visible as if the darkness were thinning with light.
If it hadn't been so dark still I would have dropped my eyes the way we're supposed to do. But I just stared.
She stepped closer, and I felt her hot little hand on my cheek, and the touch of something cold to my lip.
I smelled the rich, fruity fragrance of the wine, and opened my mouth. Delicious claret, and just cool enough. I drank deeply, and when the glass was drawn away, ran my tongue over my lips.
Her eyes were enormous and dark and clear.
"Are you enjoying your little penitential sojourn among the brushes and buckets?" she asked softly, without even a hint of irony.
I heard myself answer with a low laugh.
Not smart. I tensed, but I saw the light on her cheek as she smiled.
Her naked forearm brushed my hip and her hand stroked my backside.
"Hmmm!" I winced too quickly, stiffened too violently. And my leg muscles weren't the only thing getting stiff.
"Bad boy," she said. She pinched one of the welts and her fingers sent that shock through me just as they had in the receiving hall upstairs.
My pulse was racing. I could feel it in my temples. Her breasts were almost touching my chest before she stepped back.
"What have you learned down here?" she asked.
Again, I almost laughed. I was sure she had heard it.
"To be absolutely obedient, Madam," I said. It had a thin edge of humor to it, but it happened to be the truth.
What she was doing to me now, however, was worse than the brooms and mops. And every titillation of the day was making it worse. Sexual satisfaction was getting to seem mythical to me at this point. The dizzying arousal would go on forever with its peaks and its valleys, and this was one of the peaks. This was getting to be Mount Everest, as a matter of fact.
"Give me something in particular," she said earnestly. "Something you've learned that was new to you. If there
is
anything." Her voice had nothing of artificial drama in it. It was intimate and strangely raw. Soft pulse of Chanel. Light etching her little mouth.
I tried to think. But all I could think about was what was going on in the lower half of my anatomy, and how she looked and smelled, and what her fingers had felt like.
She lifted the glass of wine again and I drank slowly and took a deep breath. Not much help.
"What have you learned?" she asked again and there was a little steel in her voice. Like she was going to smack me with a ruler if I didn't say my multiplication tables at once.
"That I'm afraid," I said, surprising myself.
"Afraid," she repeated it. "Of the men who've been using you?" she asked. "Or of me?"
"Of both of you," I said. "And I don't know which I fear more."
Instantly I regretted it. I wanted to take it back. And I couldn't understand what had drawn it out.
I'd been voice trained, as Martin and all his clients called it, that is, versed in making sort of ritualistic answers. And ritualistic answers aren't just a turn on; they cover everything up.
"Did the broom and mop brigade… work you over?" she asked.
"Of course, when they had the chance," I said. My face went hot. "They're more into soap and water and name calling. There wasn't much time for anything else."
Was this me talking? To her?
"You're a tough guy, aren't you?" she asked. Again, no irony. In fact, she sounded vague.
"Only if it pleases you, Madam." Now that was a nice ritualistic answer. But it sounded as sarcastic as hell.
My heart was too loud, too fast.
But she appeared to smile again, yet not broadly, not easily. "Why are you afraid of me?" she asked. "Haven't you ever been punished by a woman?"
"Not all that much, Madam." I felt a distant catch in my throat. Just those exquisite creatures in Martin's house in those frilly Victorian bedrooms, giving me the barest taste of it, driving me wild. And that Russian countess at the country villa who merely watched. Now, that was a trip—but not enough of a trip to buffet me against what was happening right now.
"Are you too good to be punished by a woman, Elliott?" she whispered. Ritual question.
"Not if it's a good woman," I said. Goddamn it, Elliott. Knock it off.