Exit to Eden (43 page)

"So?" he prodded.

"So damned affectionate! Sometimes we'd be holding each other in the dark, I mean when we were half asleep, and it was like just holding on to… I don't know… I don't know…"

"And how was it for you?" he asked under his breath. "I mean when it was on the natch"—he took the question slowly—"when it was without the rituals and the paraphernalia?"

I was quiet, because maybe all afternoon I'd known I was coming to that. And I felt as shaky suddenly as I had every time during this week when I'd considered that very question.

"You want to hear something crazy?" I said. "Crazy as all the rest? It was the first time I'd ever done it like that." I looked at him, wondering if he could ever guess the extraordinary quality of saying this, confessing it. "I won't say there weren't the fantasies, the bits and pieces of things running through my brain. I think there will always be that, some ironclad connection between pleasure and pain that can't be broken. But there were these moments, these flashes, even these long, slow periods of times when there was just me and him in that bed and I have never known that before. Never."

I looked away from him. It was as if the silence around me was getting louder and louder. I lifted the drink and felt the ice-cold scald of the gin, the heat in my throat, my eyes faintly watering. Shattering to feel as if Elliott were here, as if we were together. And the anguish at the sheer impossibility of all of it.

Martin was quiet, no longer prodding.

We were still alone in the little garden, the noise from the bar very faint, and the night was stealthily coming on as it does in the South, with no chill, the cicadas come alive, the dark red-brick stain of the walls deepening. The small patch of sky overhead was shot through with red and gold, a rippling stream of clouds bleeding away from the riverfront.

Soon would come that moment of real darkness, when the leaves on the trees would sharpen and contract and the light behind would be white and everything would be distinct in silhouette for a few seconds. And then the dark clumps and shapes would grow thicker and merge with one another. I couldn't bear it, bear the beauty of it suddenly. Slow, ugly pain of crying again. It was getting too familiar.

Martin moved to take a drink of his wine, and then settling back with his long legs out, his ankles crossed, he spoke in a low voice as if the silence and the dusk required it.

"Is it really possible you
don't
know what happened?" he asked.

"God, I've told you that over and over again," I said. "I don't understand any of it. It was like I fell apart, like I never really was anybody and I suddenly discovered it. Like the walls were scrims and everything was a fraud from start to finish. I got on that plane with him like somebody jumping off a cliff. And yet I wouldn't be any other human being except the one I am. God! I have won in the course of my life some extraordinary victories."

He studied me for a moment before he nodded.

And he drew back a little, obviously into his thoughts. It seemed he would say something, and then he was quiet for a long moment, drinking the wine, savoring it, and finally setting it down as he turned to me and touched the back of my hand lightly with his fingers.

"All right," he said as if he had made some quiet decision. "Don't be impatient when I say this. But all through the afternoon, as I've listened to this story, I've found myself reminded again and again of another story. A short story I read some time ago. It was beautifully written by a true genius of prose, an author named Eudora Welty. And there is no way that I can do justice to it, really, in the recounting of it now. But I want to tell it to you as best I can."

"Tell me then," I said all too quickly.

"All right," he said again. And there was a momentary pause in which he seemed to gather himself together. "It was called 'The Death of a Traveling Salesman.' And if memory serves me right the salesman was on the road again after a long debilitating illness during which he'd been nursed in a hotel room by strangers. He was out in the heat again, in the country, and lost, and his car got snagged on a cliff so that he had to stop at a lonely house to get assistance. There was a woman in the house and later a man joined her. And though the man managed to free the salesman's car, nevertheless the salesman wanted to stay on in this little country house, and have supper.

"But almost from the moment the man arrived he thought there was something mysterious happening in the house, something he couldn't quite fathom. Every detail of the place seemed to profoundly affect him, to be almost hallucinatory. The simplest words of the man and the woman seemed somehow to contain an enormous import. There was a moment early on in fact when the salesman even felt the presence of danger.

"But before the night was over, the salesman realized what it was that was going on in this house that struck him as so mysterious. It was very simply that the man and woman were married, and going to have a baby. It was merely ordinary love between two people who were expecting a child that had struck the salesman as so unusual, so almost terrifying and magical. He had traveled so long and so far from that simple intimacy in life that he could scarcely recognize it when he saw it.

"Well, it seems to me, that something of the same thing has happened to you with Elliott Slater. Lisa, you simply fell in love. For all the complicated and personal and irreducible reasons, you fell in love.

"You recognized something in Elliott that meant everything that love can mean. And when you were swept up by that love, you went with it instinctively, exactly where you thought it should go. And to your astonishment that love didn't die; it flowered. It positively expanded, until all its possibilities were beyond escape.

"Now that is bound to be an overwhelming thing. It is the basis upon which lives are subverted and hearts broken. And there are people who live out their whole lives without ever knowing it even once. But I cannot believe that you, who've devoted yourself to exploring love under all its names, can't recognize normal love for what it is. You know. You've known all along."

It seemed I focused purely upon the words he'd said, that just for a split second the meanings were beyond me, and there came a flood of images that had to do only with Elliott. Elliott saying, "I love you" that first drunken night and me sitting silent on the bed as if my lips couldn't move, as if I'd swallowed some drug that left me like a statue.

I thought I was going to burst inside. And now as then, it was as if my lips were sealed shut. I couldn't talk. I wanted to, and yet I couldn't. When I heard my own voice it was like something breaking, ripping.

"Martin," I said, trying to keep calm, trying not to crack. "Martin, I can't love a man like that. I can't. It's like I'm dissolving. I am coming apart, like I am a mechanism dependent upon a thousand little wheels and springs, which is suddenly breaking down, each part beginning to run at its own speed, uncontrollably. I can't love like a normal person at all."

"But you can and you have," he said. "All these hours, it is normal love that you have been describing to me. That is all there is to it. And you know that what I'm saying is true."

I tried to say no. It was important to say it. To get to the elusive and horridly complex reasons why he was making it all too simple.

He drew closer to me, his face shadowy in the half-life from the distant glass doors, and I could feel his fingers closing on my arm, that wonderful reassuring touch.

"You didn't need me to tell you this. You know it yourself. But something else here is wrong."

"Yes…"

"Somehow or other you feel this love disenfranchises the secret life, the life of The Club, that the two can't mix. If this
is
love— what you and Elliott have—then all the things you have done are bad. That simply is not so, Lisa. You cannot make that terrible, damning judgment upon yourself."

I put my hand over my eyes and turned my face away from him. I felt we had come immediately to the knife edge of it, and I had not thought really that all the talking in the world was going to bring us there.

"Lisa, don't run away from this," he said. "Don't question it and don't run from it. Go back to The Club, and tell Elliott exactly what you've been telling me, what he wanted to hear when he told you he loved you."

"Martin, it's impossible," I said. It was absolutely essential to stop this disintegration, this horrid sense of breaking down forever.

But I was thinking the strangest thing: what if, what if it really was something that could happen? What if Martin was right and Elliott and I could have each other like that? What if it was half that good for only a year, a fourth that good for a decade? Christ, that was worth the death of everything I'd ever been before, wasn't it? But that was the very problem.

"You know what I am," I said. I pleaded for him to understand. "You know the paths I've traveled."

"But don't you see?" he answered. "So does Elliott. Lisa, this love was born at The Club. It was born in the very fulcrum of your secret life. Do you think it could have happened to you anywhere else? And what about Elliott? Do you think this has happened to him before?"

"I don't know."

"Well, I know. Elliott loves you, knowing exactly what you are, and you love Elliott, knowing full well what he is. It isn't an either/or situation of normal love versus exotic love. You have the thing all men and women strive for: the lover from whom you do not have to hide anything."

I put up my hands in a little gesture for silence. It was moving too fast for me to catch up.

"Then why can't I go back there!" I asked. "Why the hell am I terrified of the very sight of the place?"

"Why did you have to get out when you took him on the plane?"

"Because the person I am there couldn't know him the way I knew him here! I couldn't mix the two. God knows other people can. Scott can. Richard can. You can. You can sleep with your lovers and talk to your lovers and snap right back into it…"

"But the rituals were always protecting you from that very thing."

"Yes!"

We stared at each other for a moment. I had lifted my hand to my lips. What I said astonished me. But there was the overwhelming sense of injustice, that it was nothing so simple, and yet I was struck by the violent simplicity of what I'd just said.

"I can't think," I said. My voice was breaking and it infuriated me, the crying, the endless crying. "I can't reason, I can't believe somebody who has done the things I've done can have love!"

I heard his reaction though it wasn't in words, the soft murmur of shock.

I struggled to get a handkerchief out of my purse, and I hid my face behind my hand for a moment. For the first time all day I wanted to be alone.

"You know, it's as if I made this choice early on, it's as if…"

"But there was no reason for that choice!" He started to say something more but he stopped. Then he spoke again very softly. "I never knew you felt so guilty about all of it. I never knew you felt so bad."

"I don't," I insisted. "Not when I am doing what I am supposed to do at The Club. I do not feel bad. I believe in what I do. The Club is the veritable externalization of what I believe. It is my vocation, The Club."

Again, I stopped, mildly shocked by what I had heard myself say. And yet these were words I'd used many times over the years, to others, as well as in my own head. The Club was my nunnery.
But the rituals were always protecting you from that very thing
.

I had been staring ahead in the darkness and I turned and looked at him now, a little amazed at the alertness and the calm of the expression on his face. The sheer habitual optimism of his expression.

"That vocation requires an awfully stiff amount of self-sacrifice, doesn't it?" he asked.

"I never thought so," I said. But I felt flattened, absolutely flattened and strangely excited at the same time.

"Maybe it was a moral deal all along," he said.

I nodded.

"And it was never meant to be that, was it? It was done in the name of freedom and as we have said a thousand times, in the name of love."

I shook my head, and again that quick little gesture for silence.

"It's all happening too quickly," I said. "I need time to think." But that was a lie. I couldn't think when I was alone. That's why I sent for him. And to tell him so, I reached out and I took hold of his hand. I held him so tight I was probably hurting his hand a little, but he didn't pull away.

"You know, Lisa, very few of us anymore get through life without a dramatic bid for freedom. That dramatic bid is the hallmark of our times. But most of us never really reach our goal. We get stuck halfway between the morass of myth and morality we left behind and the Utopia on which we've set our sights. That's where you are, stuck between that dismal, repressive Catholic morality you came from and the vision of a world in which no form of love is a sin. You've scored your victories and they've been spectacular, but if you think you cannot love Elliott, you've paid an awfully high price at the same time."

I didn't speak. But every syllable had struck home.

For a long time, I sat still, not even trying to think consciously about the words, and feeling only sadness, sadness like grief, and that stealthy surge of exhilaration struggling as if to get free of the grief.