Exit to Eden (35 page)

She startled me when she appeared outside the glass door, and then I opened it for her.

She came in, sleepy-looking too, her hair all tangled, and I put her right under the torrent of water. I rubbed the soap well into the washcloth and I started to bathe her. I rubbed it over her shoulders and her breasts, gently washing off all the butter, and I could see her awakening, losing all control.

She kissed my nipples, then stroked them with her hands. Then she wrapped herself around me. I kissed her neck as the water flowed over both of us. I caressed her sex with the soapy cloth, washing her sex in slow, rough strokes with it.

"Come," I whispered, "come in my arms. I want to see you come." I didn't think I wanted to make it so soon again. I figured you had to be in prime shape for that, coming three and four times a day, the way I did at The Club. I felt happy. I loved the feel of her against me, naked and slippery and shivering, the water flooding over her hair. I felt her sex open as she went up on tiptoe. I felt her arm go down my back, her fingers moving into my backside, massaging, then opening me and slipping very gently inside.

That raw, inexpressible feeling of being opened up, being fucked there. She had two fingers inside me. She went deep, deep, easy as she had with the phallus before in that first scene at The Club, touching just the right place, finding the gland, pressing it.

I dropped the washcloth and went into her. She came in violent red shivers. Her mouth was open against my cheek. The sobs were caught in her throat. I fucked her against the white tile, her fingers still inside me. She came again, if she'd ever stopped coming, her breasts as red as her face, her face speckled with water droplets, her hair flowing down her shoulders and her back as if it was water.

"I meant it when I said I love you," I said.

No answer. Just the heat of the shower flooding us and our own heat and then her upturned face and her lips kissing me, and her head on my shoulder. Good enough for now, beautiful. I can wait.

******

The River Queen Lounge was pleasantly crowded when we got there, but she was easily the most ravishing woman in the room.

She had on a little black Saint Laurent dress, and spaghetti strap heels, and her hair was all tousled and witchy. The diamonds around her throat made it look long and exotic and positively biteable. I guess I was no slouch myself in a black tuxedo either. But that wasn't what made everybody look at us.

We were like a honeymoon couple, necking almost as soon as we had our drinks, and pushing onto the dance floor glued to each other, in a swoon among the polyester husbands and wives.

The place was softly dim, full of pastel light, the city of New Orleans an ocean of glitter outside the plate glass windows, the band Latin American, steady and sensuous, real dance music with all those extra rhythmic sounds.

The champagne went to our heads. I kept them playing through the break with a couple of hundred dollar bills, and we did rhumbas and cha-cha-chas and all kinds of stuff I'd never have been caught dead doing before. Her hips swung gorgeously under the black dress, breasts shivering in the silk, feet pivoting on the stiletto heels.

We had fits and fits of laughter.

We went back to the table bent double laughing after we did the cha-cha-cha.

And we drank all the gooey, disgusting, ridiculous tourist cocktails. Anything with pineapple or little paper hats or colored straws or salt or sugar or cherries or Sunrise or Voodoo or Sazarac in the name of it, we wanted it. Bring it right here to this table now. But we had the best time at the break when the band went into Bossa Nova. The singer was not a half bad imitation of Gilberto, with the lulling Portuguese words and the druggy rhythms, and we were really wailing, drifting in it, and barely stopping to sip our drinks standing up.

By eleven o'clock we wanted something a hell of a lot noisier. Yeah, come on, let's blow this place.

I carried her into the elevator. She was giggling against my chest.

We went down into Rue Decateur and found one of the new discos, the kind of place I never connect with New Orleans, like a thousand discos the world over with the stifling crowds and the flashing colored lights. The dance floor was packed, the crowd was young, the music deafening, the giant video screen flickering with Michael Jackson screaming out "Wanna Be Startin' Something" and we went into it immediately, pumping and twisting, and flung into the sea of bodies, grabbing hold of each other, and necking again with a new heat. Nobody, but absolutely nobody in this place was dressed as we were. And they were staring at us. And we were having fun, pure fun.

No sooner did we have our drinks than the slower sound of Eddie Grant's "Electric Avenue" was dragging us back out again. We were making it up, what we were doing, didn't matter what anybody else was doing. Right into the Police: "Every Breath You Take" and the "King of Pain." And then the screen went black for the Doors' "L.A. Woman." This wasn't dancing, it was total madness, convulsions, whipping and gyrating, holding up Lisa when she was off her feet, her hair clinging in wet strands to the side of her face.

I hadn't done anything like this in years since the big rock concerts in San Francisco when I was a student. We belted down the drinks, the colored lights making the place flash on and off the way a place can do when you're so drunk you're about to slide off the barstool. The mandate was to keep dancing. Gliding through David Bowie and Joan Jett and Stevie Smith and the Manhattan Transfer, and back to Jackson again with one of those soft melodic cheek-to-cheek numbers, and we were in a sweet, slow embrace on the dance floor, as they sang "The Lady in My Life."

I was singing it to her in her ear. I wasn't with the rest of the human race anymore. I had everything from the earth I had wanted. We had our arms around each other, and we were just one body, one warm body, a satellite, broken free forever from its orbit, unwinding forever into its own celestial path.

"Pity the rest of the human race," I said, "that they don't know this is heaven; that they don't know how to get in."

******

At one o'clock we glided out, our arms around each other, and just drifted through the narrow streets, the passing headlights cutting a path over cobblestones and gas lamps and the old Spanish galleries and green shutters.

We were wilted and exhausted, and when we came to one of those phony lampposts made to look like an old gas lamp (I actually love these lampposts), I put my arms around her and kissed her like I was a sailor with a girl he'd picked up. Real messy, wet kisses, gnawing at the sweet inside of her mouth, feeling her nipples through the black silk.

"I don't want to go back to the hotel," she said. She was all disheveled and lovely. "Let's go someplace different. I can't walk. I'm too drunk. Let's go into the Monteleone."

"Why don't you want to go back?" I asked. She was supposed to call The Club. I knew she hadn't. She'd never been out of my sight except for the brief moments when she went to the ladies' room.

She said: "I just don't want to hear that phone ringing. Just anyplace, let's go into the Monteleone, just a hotel room, you know, like we just met." She was too anxious. "Please," she said, "please, Elliott."

"Okay, sweetheart," I said.

We turned around and went to the Monteleone.

They gave us a room on the fifteenth floor, the pearl gray velvet, wall to wall carpet type with a little double bed, like a million old-fashioned, faded at the seams hotel rooms in America. I shut off the lights and opened the drapes and looked out on the low roofs of the French Quarter. We drank Scotch out of the bottle we'd bought on the way, and then we lay down, dressed, on top of the covers.

"One thing I want to know," I said in her ear. I was running my finger around the rim of her ear. She was a little limp sack of sweetness and heat tumbled next to me.

"What?" she said. She was almost gone.

"If you were in love with me, if you brought me here like this because you were, if you were just busted up in love with me the way I am with you, instead of this just being a fling, a bizarre little fling, or nervous breakdown or something for you, a crack-up or something, would you tell me?"

She didn't answer me. She lay still like she was already asleep, the shadow of her lashes dark against her cheeks, the little black Saint Laurent dress soft as a nightgown. She was breathing deeply. Her right arm was over me, and her fingers tightened on my shirt, but the way a hand can do in sleep, trying to pull me closer.

"Damn you, Lisa," I said.

The headlights of a car below slid over the papered ceiling, down the wall.

"Yesss," she said. But it was a sleep voice. She was out of it.

We were the only people touring plantations the next day in evening clothes. But what the hell, we'd been the only people at the drugstore soda fountain eating breakfast in evening clothes, too.

The private limo took us north to Destrahan Manor and then to San Francisco Plantation, and on to Oak Alley in Saint Jacques.

We snuggled together in the big gray velvet seat and we traded stories again, of childhood and disappointment and dreams. It was supernatural, flying at sixty miles an hour through the low Louisiana landscape, the levee always concealing the Mississippi, the sky frequently completely overlaced with green.

The air conditioning was silent, deliciously icy, and we tunneled through time itself as surely as we tunneled through the verdant and lush subtropical land.

We had plenty of liquor in the little icebox. We had cold beer and some caviar and crackers. And we turned on the little color TV set and watched the game shows, soaps.

And then we made love, really wonderful hangover love, with no blindfold and no nothing, stretched out all the way on the big wide soft seat.

But a mood came over me at Oak Alley, maybe because it is one of the most glorious Louisiana plantations I've ever seen. Or maybe because I finally had some time to think.

Oak Alley does truly have an avenue of oaks going to the front door, and inside it is one of those perfectly balanced houses, with a central hallway and stairs that makes you feel every other kind of house is a mess. But there is more than grandeur to Oak Alley. There is the color of the light coming through the oaks, the tall grass in which you seem to sink as you walk around the house; there are black angus cows silently fixed in the distance, staring at you like ghosts from an exotic past; and there is the scale of things, the round columns, the high porches, and the silence of it all, that makes you feel as if you have gone one more step through the otherworldly quality of New Orleans to yet another enchanted place.

I got stubborn and silent as we roamed around it because I had to make up my mind about what I thought.

I was in love with her. I'd said that to her and to me at least three times. She was everything I had ever wanted in a woman, mainly because she was sensuous and she was serious, and she was smart and she was straight and painfully honest in her own way, which must have been why she was so silent now. On top of all that she was beautiful, unrelentingly beautiful. And whether she talked about her father or the movies she loved, or she said nothing, whether she danced or laughed or looked out the window, she was the first woman I had ever found as
interesting
as a man.

Perhaps if Martin had been here he would have said: "I told you so, Elliott. You were looking for her all the way along."

Maybe, Martin. Maybe. But how could you or anyone else have predicted this!

Okay. All that was marvelous. And she had busted us out of The Club in a violent, spontaneous, and romantic fashion just as I had hoped the first night. But it was clear there could have been three reasons, just as I suggested when I tried to talk to her on the bed in the Monteleone when she fell asleep. Either she loved me. Or she was having a nervous breakdown. Or she was just really having a fling. I mean if The Club is where you lived for six years, you are really into acting out your fantasies, right? Or are you?

But whatever the case, she was not going to tell me.

When I had told her I loved her, her face was as vulnerable and responding as I could want it to be. But she hadn't answered. She didn't commit. She didn't explain. She either wouldn't or couldn't cop to what was going on inside.

Okay. So what was I going to do? The funny part is that even stubborn and silent and thinking, I was just as charged with love for her and with the madness of the whole thing as I had been when I was talking and kissing. Nothing went sour or dim. But what was I going to do?

It seemed to me, by the time we left Oak Alley and the limo rocked its way out .of the drive onto the river road, that the situation was pretty much what men say they want: sex and fun without a commitment, an affair with no strings attached. And here she was the one acting like the man. And I was the one acting like the goddamned woman, wanting her to tell me where we stood.

And I was pretty sure that if I pressed her, if I took her by the arms and said, "Look, you have to tell me. We can't go one more step without your telling me where we stand," I had a fifty-fifty chance of destroying the whole thing. A fifty-fifty chance. Because she just might tell me something so disappointing and simple that I would come totally apart.