Exit to Eden (41 page)

Like what is this guy supposed to do now? Like he gets ready for the sensuous experience of a lifetime and you up and yank him out of it? You unilaterally decide that you will bring down the curtain? I want to be understanding, but how much understanding would I have gotten from you if I had done it, if I had up and taken Diana or Kitty Kantwell or any one of them out like this? Do you think you would have flown a thousand miles to talk it over with me, Miss Perfectionist?

I was no longer at all certain that I could walk back. I had to stop and think to remember where it was, a map I drew in my mind. Like two blocks that way and then this way. And what about the goon they have hiding out there somewhere, would he appear if I fell on my face in the street?
It's not a matter of the expense, or the talk on the island. Think of this man and what you have done to him. What the hell are we going to say to Martin? Martin sent him to us
.

I got up to see whether or not I could walk, and then I was standing on the sidewalk and asking the barker where I could find a phone. I looked down and I saw the most peculiar thing, that I was wearing those ugly, tacky thong sandals we'd bought in the discount store. Elliott looked terrific in the safari shorts and the white shirt and the white tennis shoes.

What we are asking is why? Why did you do it? What we are asking is that you just come back, now, that you get on the plane, help us to get him back, sit down and talk this thing over…

I was out in the street in these awful sandals, and I had some sort of raincoat on, some burgundy-colored poncho raincoat that I vaguely remembered getting in San Francisco at a store on Castro Street called the All American Boy with my sister saying, "I don't care, being right in the middle of them makes me nervous." She meant the homosexuals. She should see these angels, my angels. It was too heavy for New Orleans, this raincoat, even on this spring night when it was not hot, it was as Elliott had said, sublime, but I remembered now why I was wearing it. I didn't have anything on under it.

When I had started to throw up, I had torn off that lovely dress, my favorite dress, my very best favorite dress. I had ruined that dress and it was the dress I'd worn when we went dancing, and when we made love in the back of the car, and when we slept on top of the sheets at the Monteleone together, and when we drove back.

That dress was just gone forever, ripped up and ruined forever on the bathroom floor. When I had gotten up off the bed I had thought, I will simply put this on, this poncho. This is fine. I did have the cotton slip on under it.

And no underwear, that secret naked feeling of no underwear. It doesn't matter. All opened up by love, that wonderful naked feeling of no covering there.

You owe him that, you owe us that Get on the plane with him now. God, that is the least you can do! Come with us.

So I was standing on Bourbon Street and I was drunk, and I was in this burgundy-colored rain poncho with nothing but a slip on under it. I had money in my pockets, too much money. I had hundred-dollar bills and coins and coins. I had given out the bills the way Elliott did it, folding the bill in half and just slipping it to the person, making no big deal of it, smiling, and that was all. And one of those girl/men, the big beautiful brunette with the voice stuck right in the top of her throat like the throb of a kid's toy electric organ, had sat down by me and called me honey and talked to me. Pink and sleek, like an angel or a giant seal, depending…

…
Doesn't anything mean anything to you? Do you know what you are jeopardizing if you do not come back with us
?

They were all of them having operations, the girls. The angels. They did it piece by piece. She had her balls still, tucked up someplace into her body, and her penis all bound down so that it wouldn't show when she stripped down to the G-string, and she had breasts and the estrogen injections.

She knew she was beautiful, that she looked like some lovely Mexican woman who knows she's prettier and smarter than all her sisters and brothers, the one who gets the job as the hostess in the roadside restaurant so that she wears the low-cut black dress with the cleavage showing and gives out the menus while all the rest of them are working as cooks and busboys, that kind of beauty, the Miss Universe of the pots and pans.
Look, we're trying to understand, we're trying
. Castration for this?

"You don't really let them, I mean, they won't cut off your balls, will they?"

"Honey, we don't think those things are very ladylike!"

He said, "There's the phone."

"What did you say?"

"The phone, honey. Honey—" (confidential, like we'd just fallen in love, slimeball) "—is there somebody who can come down here and meet you?"

Well, what do you call it then, if not flat-out victimization? You took advantage, you just took total advantage of your position and your power. You want to hear the truth, you acted like a goddamned stereotypical, selfish, and emotional woman.

"What time is it?"

"Two o'clock." He looks at his cheap watch. Two o'clock in the morning. Elliott gone now exactly seven hours. We could have been to Mexico by now. And headed for Panama. Bypassing El Salvador.

What do you think is going on in his head right now? Two years he absents himself from his business, his career, his life, and the boss lady wants a fucking five-day fling in New Orleans?

"Honey, we're closing now."

Go ahead and close up the Dreamgirls Club. See if I care. Crackly music playing to the empty stage behind the bottles. Now they all grow white satin sequined wings and they fly out the back door and up into the dark damp sky over the rooftops of New Orleans and they are gone out of the squalor of the chapel forever. (Though in the distance and under cover of night they do look to mortals remarkably like giant flying roaches.) Mirrors reflecting the empty rows of benches and tables where I had just been sitting at the very end, unbothered, by myself. The street full of garbage, enormous, glistening, green-plastic sacks of garbage. Roaches. Don't think of roaches.

Reek of Chinese food from the booth, a couple walking together, girl in white shorts and halter and man in short-sleeve shirt, drinking beer out of big paper milk-carton-type containers. Lots of beer. Get some beer, enough to really swallow. Beer would taste wonderful. Miller's beer. Elliott says the best American beer is Miller's, best foreign Heineken's, best worldwide Haitian. Wake up Elliott and we'll drive all night and in the morning we will be in Mexico. If only he had had that passport. We could be in New York by now, waiting on a flight to Rome. They could never have caught us.

It's the inconsideration of it I don't understand, it is the betrayal of the trust, the absolute disregard for the delicate mechanism, the degree of vulnerability, the .
. . STOP IT!

Then on from Rome to Venice. There is no city on earth for walking like Venice. And relatively small roaches.

"Where is a phone? Can you tell me where I can find a phone?"

Open corner bar. Not the same bar. Yes, the same bar. The same bar where we had the argument about
Pretty Baby
. The same bar where we drank the Scotch and the gin before we went to Michael's and Elliott said… everything that Elliott said.

Taste of Elliott, feel of Elliott's turtleneck pulled tight across Elliott's chest. Elliott's mouth, Elliott smiling, blue eyes, hair full of rain, Elliott smiling. Kiss of Elliott.

"Right there, honey."

("She's really drunk." "She's okay. She's okay.") Nooooo, she's not!

I put the quarters in the phone, one after the other, one after the other. I do not believe actually that it's necessary to put this many quarters in at the outset. Very brief lapse of memory. Focus. Probably you put in one quarter and wait for the operator. The truth is I haven't made a call from a pay phone since… three days ago? If after seven years it's the same phone number, but why wouldn't it be the same phone number, nothing has changed, nothing has moved. Phone ringing in San Francisco. It is two o'clock here, well it will only be twelve o'clock there. And at twelve o'clock Martin Halifax is never sleeping.

A man in a really appalling polyester suit has come out of the bar. Straw hat, sheer white shirt thinly concealing undershirt, Shriner on convention from Atlanta. Oh, the things we make up about people whose clothes we don't like. But he looks a little too neat, everything being pressed, for a native.

Ah, but there he is by the lamppost, the Club goon, and how do I know? He's the only guy on Bourbon Street at two o'clock in the morning with the million-dollar tan, the straight white teeth and the designer jeans and the pink tennis shoes! We don't hire slobs, do we? (Ringing in San Francisco.) Not people who go around in ponchos and thong sandals with no underwear on.

"Hello."

"Martin!"

"Yes, this is Martin. Who's is this?"

"Can you hear me all right? Martin, you have to help me. Martin, I need you."
(Martin will have to know about this. Martin sent him here. What the hell are we going to say to Martin? She just up and kidnapped Elliott Slater!)
"Martin, I need you like I never needed you before. I have to talk to you."

"Is this Lisa? Lisa, where are you?"

"I'm in New Orleans, Martin. I'm on Bourbon Street, and I'm wearing this rain-poncho and these sandals. And it's two o'clock. Martin, help me please. Please come. I'll cover it, every penny of it, expense is no object, could you just get on the next plane and could you come? Martin, I know what I am asking. I know what I am asking. That I am asking you to drop everything and fly two thousand miles to help me. I'm not going to make it through this one, Martin. Will you come?"

"Have you got a room in New Orleans, Lisa? Can you tell me exactly where you are?"

"The Marie Laveau court, Rue Saint Anne, the cab driver will know it. I'm in the servants' quarters suite in back under the name Mrs. Elliott Slater. Will you come?"

"Mrs. Elliott Slater?"

"I did this terrible thing, Martin, I did it to Elliott Slater. I betrayed everything, Martin. Everything we believe in. I need you so badly. Please help me."

"Lisa, I'll be there as soon as I can possibly get there. I'll call the airport now, and I want you to go directly back to the hotel, Lisa. Do you think that you can manage to get a cab? I can have people come pick you up where you are…"

"I can make it that far, Martin. I made it that far a week ago. I can make it again." And there is that goon standing there, that bright shiny muscular goon with the white teeth and the shirt unbuttoned down the front, and the tight jeans over his hips, and his cock shoved up in front under the jeans so that he looks like he's got a hard on when he hasn't. I have just dropped the entire contents of my purse. No I haven't. I don't have a purse. I just dropped several quarters. He is picking up the quarters. Fine strapling of a youth.

"Go back to the hotel and go to sleep. And I'll be there as soon as I can, I promise. I'll be there before you wake up, if I can manage it."

"I did a terrible thing, Martin. I did it to Elliott Slater. I don't know why I did it."

"I'm on my way, Lisa."

The man in the polyester suit was standing right up against the glass of the phone booth. The goon was nearby counting the quarters. He has to be from The Club. What perfect stranger in designer jeans would steal a woman's quarters?

"You sure are a pretty little girl, you know that? You just about the prettiest little girl I've seen in this town all night." Nice man. Like the man who sells your parents a vacuum cleaner or mortgage insurance.

Table in the bar to sit down. No. Don't go to the bar. Go directly home. Turn the corner. Beer in the icebox. Nope, drank the beer. Elliott's clothes. No, they took them.

"How'd you like to come have a drink with me, pretty girl?"

The goon is sidling up. Wink of the eye. "Good evening, Lisa."

Gotcha.

"A pretty girl like you all by yourself. Why don't you come have a drink with me?"

"Thank you. You are very kind."

The goon moves in.

"But I belong to a very strict religious order and we are guarded night and day by young men. You see, here is one of them now. And we are not allowed to talk to strangers."

"Do you want me to walk you back to the hotel, Lisa?"

"If you don't find me a six-pack of Miller's beer somewhere in this town before we get to the hotel, you can just forget it."

"Good night, honey."

"Come on, Lisa."

Good night, angels.

"Why don't you start from the beginning?"

We were sitting in the corner of the little Italian restaurant, and he looked so calm, so infinitely reassuring. There was more gray at his temples than there had been, and a touch of gray in his eyebrows that strengthened the inquisitiveness, the openness of his gaze. But otherwise he was simply Martin, unchanged, and he was holding my hand in his very firmly and there was no indication he would let it go until it was okay.

"They called you, didn't they?" I asked. "When they were looking for us."

"No, they didn't," he answered at once.