Exit to Eden (18 page)

And there had been the added tease of seeing so many other polished bodies on the massage tables, and the bath slaves a flock of little nymphs and fauns among the potted fuchsias and ferns, all reassuring patter ("You can talk now, Elliott, if you want to.") and toothpaste-commercial smiles.

Why had I been scared to ask what was happening? Why had I waited for the handsome little Ganymede who was working on me with his steel fingers to say: "You're going to the boss lady, Elliott, better get some sleep."

If I had been dozing before, that brought me up wide awake.

"The boss lady?" I asked.

"That's what she is," he had answered. "She runs The Club. She practically created it. And she's your trainer. Good luck."

"The top lady," I murmured. A whole string of firecrackers had gone off in my head.

"Close your eyes," he had said. "Believe me, you're going to need your rest."

******

I had slept. I must have. The sheer exhaustion must have done it, because all of a sudden I was staring up into the great pattern of leaded glass that made up the ceiling, and the handler was standing there and he said, "Come on, Elliott, we don't keep the Perfectionist waiting."

No, of course not.

And so the labyrinth with my last moments of Life Before Lisa slowly ticking away.

******

We stopped. White hallway, a pair of heavily carved double doors. Silence. Okay. You're much too stable for a total psychotic break.

The handler snapped his fingers:

"Go inside, Elliott, and wait there silently on your knees."

The doors closed behind me. He was gone, and I felt the panic rising as keenly as ever before.

I was looking at a large room done entirely in blue tints with violent splashes of bolder color that caught the light. There was no electric illumination here. Only the sun filtered through the blue-and-violet flowered curtains over the french doors.

Yards of deep vermillion carpet, and on the walls giant Renoirs and Seurats intermingled with Haitian paintings—brilliant works full of Haitian sky and green hills and dark stick-figure Haitians at work, at play, in the dance.

There were long-faced African masks as well as Indian masks in bright enameled green and red. Graceful, serpentine African sculptures of wood and stone rose here and there out of banks of potted palms and ferns. And to my left, its head against the wall, loomed a large four-poster brass bed.

The thing reminded me of a giant gold cage. It had drapery rods and scrollwork, and it was hung all in white cotton lace even to the sheer curtains that enveloped it in a diaphanous cloud. Heaps of lace-trimmed pillows lay piled on the ruffled cotton spread. A bower is what it was, the kind of fanciful thing men often love but can't arrange for themselves, leaving it to the women in their lives to create.

I saw myself walking towards it. I was dressed in a black tuxedo and I had a bouquet of flowers in my hand, ordinary daisies, and I bent down and kissed a girl who was sleeping in the bed.

That kind of bed. But there wasn't any "girl" in it. She wasn't anywhere in sight.

Time just to enjoy the intensity of the room, the way it so marvelously suggested the forbidden, even in this forbidden place. The slight movement of the green tree branches beyond the flowered gauze of the window curtains was something like a dance.

I felt a rush of blood to my head, a sudden disorientation. A trap door had opened and I had stumbled into some secret chamber. And the whole room distressed me suddenly for no apparent reason: the mess of silver articles before the circular mirror on the dresser, boxes, perfume bottles, brushes. A black satin high-heeled shoe lying on its side by a chair. All that snow-white lace.

I sat back on my heels looking around, wishing my face wasn't so hot, and the rest of me wasn't so hot. I had been in stuffy feminine Victorian bedrooms at Martin's house, but this was different, uncontrived, even a little insane. Not a stage set for all the craziness here, but a real place.

There were lots of books. Shelves of them on a far wall, and they were all chewed up like somebody really had read them all to death. Paperbacks stuffed in with hardcovers, some of them patched up with tape.

I stared forward, at nothing and everything; at a white leather chain dangling from the ceiling with a pair of leather handcuffs attached to it, at that black satin shoe lying on its side.

And when a door opened somewhere with a soft, almost inaudible click I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

She had come out of the bath; I could smell the perfumed steam of the bath, one of those piercingly sweet floral scents, very nice, and some other aroma, something clean and smoky and mingled with the perfume: her smell.

She moved across the room into my field of vision without making a sound. She was wearing spike-heel slippers of white satin, like the black one discarded by the chair. And above that she wore nothing but a little lace-trimmed slip that came halfway down her thighs. The slip was cotton, bad luck.

I don't really care one way or the other about the feel of a body through nylon. But a body under sheer cotton drives me out of my head.

Her breasts were naked under the slip, and her hair hung down in a dark shadow about her shoulders, something like a Virgin Mary veil, and through the slip I could see the dark triangle between her legs.

Again I had that sense of a force emanating from her. Beauty alone couldn't account for the effect of her presence, even in this insane room, though beauty she certainly had.

I never should have sat back without her permission. And to look at her directly, that was a violation of the rules of the game, yet I did.

I looked up at her, though my head was slightly bowed, and when I saw her small, sharply angled face, her large brown eyes almost brooding as we stared at each other, the sense of her force intensified.

Her mouth was indescribably luscious. It was rouged without gloss so that the deep red appeared natural and the bones of her delicately sloping shoulders were for some mysterious reason as enticing to me as the full slope of her breasts.

But the current coming from her was not the sum of all the splendid physical details. No. It was as if she gave off invisible heat. She was smoldering in the skimpy little slip and the fragile satin slippers. And you couldn't see the smoke but you knew it was there. There was something almost inhuman about her. She made me think of an old-fashioned word. The word lust.

I looked down deliberately. And going on my hands and knees towards her, I stopped when I had reached her feet. I could feel the force coming from her, the heat. I pressed my lips to her naked toes, to her instep above the band of satin, and I felt that strange, baffling shock again that left a tingling in my lips.

"Stand up," she said softly. "And keep your hands clasped behind your back."

I rose as slowly as I could without breaking the movement, and when I obeyed, I was certain my face was really red. But it wasn't the old ritualized emotion. I stood over her, and though I didn't look at her again, I could see her perfectly, see the well between her breasts, and the dark rose-colored circles of the nipples under the white slip.

She reached up, and I almost backed away from her, feeling her fingers move into my hair. She clasped my head tightly, massaged it with her fingers, sending the chills down my back, and then brought her fingers slowly over my face the way a blind woman might, to see it, feeling of my lips and my teeth.

It was the touch of someone burning with fever, the hot dancing tips Of her fingers, and it was further heated by some low sound she made, like a cat's purr without opening her lips.

"You belong to me," she said in something lower than a whisper.

"Yes, Madam," I answered. I watched helplessly as her fingers dropped to my nipples, and pinched them, pumping them as my body tensed. The sensation shot down through my cock.

"Mine," she said.

I felt this compulsion to answer her, but I didn't say anything, my mouth opening and then closing as I stared at her breasts. That sweet, clean smoky scent came to me again, flooded me. I thought, I can't bear this. I have to have her. She is using some altogether new weapon on me. I can't be tormented like this, in this silent bedroom, this is too much.

"Back up, there to the center of the room," she said in a low monotone, advancing as she spoke, her fingers still pressing and pulling at my nipples, pinching them hard suddenly so that I gritted my teeth.

"Oh, we are sensitive, aren't we?" she said. And our eyes met again, the heat blazing in hers, her red lips just parted to show the barest flash of white teeth.

I almost begged her, said "please." My heart was skipping as if I'd been running. I was on the very edge of bolting, just backing off from her—I didn't know what exactly—trying to shatter her power. Yet there wasn't the remotest possibility that I would or could.

She rose on tiptoe in front of me. I could see she had hold of something above me, and I glanced up to see the pair of white leather handcuffs with buckles dangling at the end of the white leather chain.

That I had forgotten about that stuff seemed a fatal error. But what did it matter, after all?

"Lift your hands," she said. "No, not too high, my tall beauty. Just over your head a little where I can still reach them. Fine."

I heard myself shudder. Little symphony of stressful admissions. I think I was shaking my head.

The leather went round my left wrist first, buckled very tight, and then around the right. My wrists were crossed, bound together. And as I stood as helplessly as if six men were holding me there, she went to the far wall, and pressed a button that silently made the leather chain above me retract into the ceiling, causing the cuffs to pull my wrists up well above my head before it stopped.

"It's very strong," she said, coming towards me again, her grace perfect in the spike heels. "Would you like to try to break loose?" The little petticoat slid up on her thighs, the little nest of hair prickling under the white cloth.

I shook my head. I knew she was going to touch me again. I couldn't stand the tension.

"You're impertinent, Elliott," she said, her breasts almost grazing me. Her fingers were spread out flat on my chest. "It is 'No, Madam' and 'Yes, Madam,' when you speak to me."

"Yes, Madam," I said. The sweat had broken out all over me. Her fingers moved down over my belly, her right forefinger pressing into my navel. I couldn't keep quiet. Quickly, she dropped her hand to touch my cock.

I moved my hips back away from her. And her left hand went up behind my neck. She moved to my side, her right hand pinching the loose skin of my scrotum very hard, the fingernails biting into it. I tried not to grimace. "Kiss me, Elliott," she said.

I turned my head towards her, and her lips nudged at my mouth, opening it, and that electric shock came again. My mouth locked tight on her. I kissed her like I wanted to swallow her. I kissed her like I had her on a hook. I could hold her that way, no matter how helpless she had me, that's how strong the current was. I could lift her by the sheer power of it, draw her out of herself, and when through this delirium I felt her breasts against my side, I knew I'd done it, that I had her. And the kissing was wet and luscious and sweet. Her nails pinched the flesh around my scrotum harder, but the pain mingled with the force passing out of me into her. She was up on tiptoe with her whole weight against my side, her left fingers clasping my neck, and I was feasting on her, my tongue inside of her, and my wrists ground into the leather cuffs trying to break loose beyond my control.

She pulled away, and I closed my eyes. "God," I whispered.

And I felt her wet sucking mouth on my underarm, pulling at the hair so hard that I winced. I was moaning out loud. She'd gathered my balls up in her right hand, was massaging them, gently, ever so gently, her lips sucking on the skin of the underarm and I thought I'd go mad. My skin, all over, had come alive. She bit into the flesh, licked at it.

My body went rigid, my teeth gritted. I could feel her fingers letting go of my balls, and closing around the shaft of my penis, and stroking it upwards. "I can't… I can't…" I said between my gritted teeth. I danced backwards, straining not to come, and she let go, tugging my face around and kissing me again, her tongue going into my mouth.

"It's worse than being whipped, isn't it," she purred under the kisses, "being tortured with pleasure?"

I broke away this time, pulling free of her, and then I kissed her all over her face, sucking at her cheeks and her eyelids. I turned and thrust my cock at her, against the thin cotton of her slip. The feel of her through the cotton was too exquisite.

"No, you don't!" she drew back with a low, sinister laugh, and smacked my cock with the flat of her right hand. "And you never do that, until I tell you that you can do it." She slapped my cock again, and again.

"God, stop it," I whispered. My cock was pumping, hardening with each slap.

"You want me to gag you?"

"Yes, gag me. Do it with your tits or your tongue!" I said. I was shaking all over, and without meaning to, I yanked on the leather handcuffs as if I meant to try to break loose.

She laughed a low, vibrant laugh.