Exit to Eden (34 page)

She nodded. She seemed to be remembering something, and her hand touched her waist lightly, her fingers stroking the fabric of her dress. "The first time," she said, "I ever put on one of those black leather corsets, you know…"

"Yes…"

"I had this feeling about the time when all women wore things like that, you know, every day…"

"Of course. When it was routine. All the paraphernalia is the flotsam of the past. And where is it routine today? In our dreams. In our erotic novels. In our brothels. No, in S&M we're always working with something a hell of a lot more volatile than childhood struggles; we're working with our most primitive desires to achieve intimacy through violation, our deepest attractions to suffering and inflicting pain, to
possessing
others."

"Yes, possessing…"

"And if we can keep the racks and the whips and the harnesses forever relegated to the S&M scenario—if we could relegate rape in all its forms to the S&M scenario—then maybe we could save the world."

She looked at me for a long time without saying anything. And she nodded just a little again, finally, as if nothing I said shocked her or surprised her.

"Maybe it's different for a man," I said. "Call the San Francisco police any night of the week and ask who's committing the robberies and assaults. It's the people with testosterone in their blood."

She gave a little polite smile to that, but lapsed back immediately into seriousness.

"The Club is the wave of the future, babe," I said. "You ought to be more proud of it. They can't sanitize or legislate our sexuality out of us. It's got to be understood and contained."

She made some little accepting sound, her lips pressed together, her eyes narrowing slightly, then brightening again.

I finished the drink, and was quiet, watching the movement of the clouds across the sky.

I could feel the vibration of the steamboat all through my body, feel the dull surge of the engine and even the great silent pull of the river, or so it seemed. The wind had picked up but only a little.

"You aren't really proud of what you've done, are you?" I asked. "I mean, in spite of what you said last night."

She looked darkly troubled and indescribably lovely sitting next to me, the hem of her dress fallen back from her bare knees, her long, lean calves so beautifully shaped, her face so still. I could feel her brooding, her agitation, and I wished she would talk to me, say what she really thought about this.

"Well, I think you're terrific," I said. "I love you. Just like I told you last night."

She didn't answer. She was staring at the blue sky over the shore, as if her thoughts had snared her.

Well… so what?

After a while, she turned to me again.

"And you were always fully aware of what you wanted from The Club," she said. "It always had this therapeutic quality for you."

"Therapeutic, hell," I said. "I'm only flesh and blood, and I listen a lot to the flesh, maybe more than most people do." I touched her cheek very lightly with my fingers. "I've had the feeling most of my life that I was a little more physically there than most people."

"So have I," she said.

"Uh huh, very hot," I said, meaning it straight, not playfully.

"Yes," she said, "like I could explode if it didn't get out. Like my body had made me a criminal even when I was a little kid."

"Exactly. And why do we have to be criminals?"

I sat up and lifted her hair back from her face, and let my lips just lightly brush her cheek.

"Let's just say after that experience in El Salvador," I said, "I got hooked on symbolic violence. Therapeutic? Who knows. I got obsessed with violent films and TV shows that I wouldn't have even glanced at before. I got hooked on my own violent fantasies and when I heard somebody talking about Martin's place again for about the thirtieth time, I did what I never thought I'd ever do. I said: 'Tell me about that place. Where is it? How do you get the number to call?' "

"You can't believe it's real when you first hear about it," she said, "that others are doing it."

"Right. And it wasn't therapy, really. That was the best part. Martin said in one of our first little conversations that he never tries to analyze anyone's sado-masochistic desires. He doesn't give a damn why one person has fantasies that are full of whips and chains and another person has never thought of such a thing in his entire life. 'We'll work with what you are now.' I guess I just started working with it, peeling back the layers. Going deep into it, through one scary moment after another. I found it was as scary as anything I'd done. It was fucking awful and fucking delicious. It was the grandest and most interesting experience I'd had so far."

"An odyssey of sorts," she said. She had slipped her hand up around the back of my neck, and her fingers felt warm in the cool river breeze.

"Yeah, like that," I said. "And when I heard of The Club, well, I couldn't quite believe that somebody had had the guts to create it on that scale. I was dazzled. I was crazy. I knew I would get into The Club no matter what I had to do."

I closed my eyes for just a second as I kissed her. I slipped my arm around her, lifting her towards me, kissing her again.

"Be proud of it," I whispered.

"Of what?"

"Of The Club, baby doll. Be brave enough to be proud of it," I said.

She looked vague and a little bruised, and softened all over from the kissing.

"I can't think about it all right now," she said. "I can't figure it out." I could feel her heating up, lips taut, luscious.

"Okay. But be proud of it," I said, kissing her just a little harder, opening her mouth.

"Don't talk anymore about it," she said, drawing up closer, her arm around my waist.

We were our own little heat wave on the deck. Anybody coming around might get burnt.

"How much longer do we have to stay on this tub?" I asked, whispering in her ear.

"I don't know," she said. Her eyes were closed. She was kissing my cheek.

"I want to be alone with you," I said. "I want to be alone with you back at the hotel."

"Kiss me again," she said.

"Yes, Madam."

We stopped on the way back for some wine and a load of delicacies—caviar and crackers, apples, sour cream, smoked oysters. I bought some cinnamon and butter and bread, lots of French yogurt, a cold bottle of Dom Perignon (the best they had, $50) and a package of liquor store wine glasses.

When we got to the room, I ordered an ice bucket, turned off the air conditioner again, and latched the shutters the way I had the first time.

It was just getting dusk, vivid, sweet New Orleans dusk with the sky blood red and the pink oleander glowing in the tangle of the garden. The heat lingered in the air the way it never does on the coast. There was a velvety feel to the warmth and the room was full of dusty shadows.

Lisa had crumpled up all the telephone messages and thrown them away. She was sitting on the bed, the white dress up on her thighs, her shoes tossed in the corner. She had a large crystal bottle of perfume in her hand and she was smoothing the perfume into her skin all over. She massaged it into her neck, and into her calves. She rubbed it into the spaces between her toes.

When the exquisite little mulatto child brought the ice he brought more messages.

"Will you throw those away?" Lisa asked. She didn't look at them.

I opened the champagne and got it to bubble just about perfectly into the two glasses.

I sat down beside her and reached lightly, slowly, for the buttons down the back of her dress. The perfume wasn't Chanel this time. It was Chalandre. Blissfully overpowering. I took the bottle from her and put it on the table, gave her the champagne.

The perfume mingled with the sunny smell of her hair and her skin. Her lips were wet from the champagne. She said, "Do you miss The Club?"

"No," I said.

"You know, the paddles and the straps and all that, do you miss it?"

"No," I said again kissing her. "Unless of course you have the overwhelming desire to beat the hell out of me. In which case, I'll throw myself on your mercy as a gentleman should. But I have something else in mind, something I've always wanted to do."

"Do it," she said.

She slipped off the dress. Her tanned skin was very dark against the white spread, and the light was good enough still to see the strawberry pink of her nipples. I ran my hand down between her legs, cradling her, touching her soft, secret hair, and then I slipped away from her, and went quietly out of the room into the dark little kitchen.

When I came back I had the butter with me and the little box of ground cinnamon.

I stripped off my clothes. She was leaning back on her arms, and the thrust of her breasts, and the long delicate curve of her flat belly to that secret mound of dark hair, was gorgeous.

There was a bashful flush to her cheeks.

"What are you going to do?" she asked, looking at the things I'd brought in, almost timidly.

"Just this little thing I've always wanted to do," I said, lying down beside her, stretching her out, cradling her head, kissing her. With my right arm I reached over her, and gathered up some of the butter on my fingertips. It was already nice and soft from the heat, and I smoothed it over the pink nipples of her breasts, caressing the nipples and stretching them a little as I did it. She was breathing deeply, the heat rising from her invisibly like the perfume. I put the little box of cinnamon to my lips. I smelled it, that delicious Eastern smell, that forbidden smell, about the wildest aphrodisiac fragrance I've ever smelled except for the smell of pure male or female body. I rubbed the cinnamon onto her nipples.

And rolling on top of her, crushing her a little, my cock hard against her thigh, I started to suckle her breasts, lick them.

I could feel her tense under me, the heat from her sex incredible, and she moaned, struggling it seemed not to lift her arms, and then she clamped her hands around my head. She was wildly excited yet somehow resisting, frightened.

"It's too much," she said, "too much." I drew up and smoothed the hair back from her face. I was pure animal now, and all I wanted to do was have her. I thought of what she'd said about the blindfold before, how it should have made things easier. And I reached down and picked up the little sheer cotton slip she'd worn under the dress, and I stretched it out until it was a gathered band of white cloth and then I tied it around her head, blindfolding her. I crushed the knot in back until it was flat. I placed her head on the pillow.

She took a long, languorous deep breath. Her mouth lost its tenseness. It was pouting and soft and luscious and I felt her whole body relax under me. I felt it grow warm and open to me. She wound her arms around my neck, and her hips moved against me.

She said something soft under her breath, a murmur. And this time when I licked her breast, when I closed my mouth on it and sucked on it, and let my teeth close on the nipple, stroking it, she moaned and pressed herself against me. I was going crazy doing this to her, just this, and had to rise up a little to keep my cock off her thighs, away from her wet heat, or I'd come and it would be too quickly over. She was giving hoarse cries, cries that would have made a child or a nun think she was in pain. There was something being cut loose in her.

I took the soft butter on my fingers again, and I went into her with it, rubbing it into her pubic hair, and into the lips of her vagina. I rubbed the cinnamon on her, onto her clitoris as she spread her legs, all the resistance utterly gone out of her.

"Do it, do it…" she whispered, or at least the words sounded like that.

I was so hot now I didn't think I could stretch it out much longer. I pushed my face into her, covering myself with her scent, her clean scent and the scent of the butter and the cinnamon.

I started licking up under the clitoris, opening her with my tongue, scraping upwards, and then closing my mouth on her completely, closing it over her lips, and then sucking on her.

She was flung out as if she were bound that way and couldn't lift her arms or her hands, or struggle to close her legs. She was mine completely. She writhed under it, lifted her hips, but she didn't resist. She belonged to me. I ate out the butter, ate the cinnamon, tasted that crazy aphrodisiac taste, the spice and her charcoal fluids and the heat of her. It sounded like she was crying. She struggled; she said she was going to come.

I climbed up on top of her and when my cock went in she was so tight, so hot I exploded in her. She was coming and coming, as I came, her face scarlet, the blindfold of white cotton glowing in the dark, her lips shuddering, some little curse or prayer coming out of her with the word God.

I said, "Say my name, Lisa."

"Elliott," she said. She said it again. Her sex was locked to me, shuddering like her mouth as I lay still inside of her.

******

After a little while, I got up and turned on the shower. Nice, good blast of warm water, the little white tile bathroom full of steam immediately. I was soaping all over and thinking about everything, trying to shake off my postfuck, drug-sleep feeling.