Exit to Eden (29 page)

Nothing, I said. I just stayed in school as long as I could, really got a gentleman's education, read all the great books three times. It was photography that I worked at, that I did well, that I liked.

We had two cups of coffee before we left and then we went outside and started walking down Napoleon Avenue towards Saint Charles. It was just about a perfect New Orleans night, not hot at all, and no wind, just the air almost inviting you to breathe it.

I said again there was no city in the world like this for walking. When you try to walk in Port au Prince you get stuck in the mud, and the sidewalks are no good and the kids won't leave you alone, you have to pay one of them to keep the others off; and in Cairo you get sand in your hair and in your eyes. And in New York it's usually too hot or too cold or you get mugged. And in Rome you get almost run over at every intersection. San Francisco's too hilly to walk anyplace except Market Street; the flat part of Berkeley is too ugly. London is too cold, and despite what anybody says I have always found Paris an inhospitable place to walk, gray and all concrete and too crowded. But New Orleans. The pavements are warm and the air is silk and there are big, drowsy, drooping trees everywhere that have thrown out their branches at precisely the right height for you to walk under them, as if they knew you were coming.

And all the way down Saint Charles Avenue we would see beautiful houses.

"But what about Venice?" she asked. "How can you beat walking in Venice?" She slid her arm around me and pushed her body against mine. I turned and kissed her and she said underneath her breath that maybe in a few days we'd go to Venice, but why think of that now when we're in New Orleans.

"Do you mean this?" I asked. "We can stay gone that long?" I kissed her again, and put my arm around her.

"We go back when I say we do, unless you want to."

I took her face in my hands and kissed her. I figured that was my answer, and just thinking of who we were and where we'd come from got me excited again. I didn't want to be anyplace on earth where she wasn't. But the place on earth I wanted to be with her most was here.

She kept us moving, tugging on me, her right hand on my chest, her weight against me slightly. We were on Saint Charles now and the streetcar went rocking past, a lighted string of empty windows. The domed roof was wet and that reminded me that it had been raining. It was probably still raining downtown. So what? The rain was like everything else here in that it didn't stop you from walking.

"Okay, so you started photographing people, faces in San Francisco," she said, "but how did you start working for Time-Life?"

I told her it wasn't as hard as she might think, that if you had a good eye you could learn very fast, and I had the added luxury of not needing the money. I covered local stories for two years, rock shows and even some movie stars and writers for
People
, really dull stuff while I was learning my craft and getting familiar with every kind of camera and doing a lot of my own work in the darkroom. But you don't do your own darkroom work for the big magazines. You just send back the film. They pick what they want and then you can sell the rest someplace else if you want. It's not so interesting.

By the time we got to Louisiana Avenue, I had made her start talking again, and she was telling me rather disturbing and upsetting things like that she never had any life outside The Club actually, that she had done the four years at Berkeley kind of in a dream, mainly carrying on S&M work at Martin's in San Francisco on the sly.

What the university meant to her was sort of what it had meant to me, finding secluded places in which to read.

A funny embarrassment came over me that she knew The House in San Francisco where I'd been first turned on to S&M, that she knew Martin. But she not only knew Martin, she was friends with him, had worked with him. She knew the rooms in the house and we talked about that for a while, but I kept asking her personal things, like where did she live in Berkeley, and how did her family get there. When she spoke of Martin there was a reverence in her voice.

"I was no good at normal life at all," she said. "And I was really lousy at being a child."

"I never heard anyone say that before," I laughed, hugging her and kissing her.

"I couldn't figure out what childhood was supposed to be. I had dark, strange sexual feelings when I was very little. I wanted to be touched and I made up fantasies. I thought childhood was a perfect crock, if you want to know the truth."

"Even in Berkeley with all the liberalism and free expression and intellectualization of every step you take?"

"It wasn't like that for me," she said. "Martin's was the place that was intellectually free." She walked with nice easy strides beside me. We were making good, exhilarating time down the avenue, under the lacy shadows of the leaves beneath the street lamps, past the big white front porches, the little iron fences, the garden gates.

Her dad was an old-guard Irish Catholic who worked his way through college in St. Louis, and taught at the Jesuit college in San Francisco, her mother one of those old-fashioned women who just stayed home until her four children were grown up and then went to work in the public library downtown. They moved to the Berkeley hills when Lisa was a little girl because they liked the heat in the east bay and they thought the hills were beautiful. But they hated the rest of Berkeley.

I knew her street, her house even, a big ramshackle brown-shingle place on Mariposa, and I had even seen the lights on lots of times in the big garage library when I drove by.

That is where her dad was always reading Teilhard de Chardin and Maritain and G. K. Chesterton and all the Catholic philosophers. He would rather read than talk to people, and his rudeness and coldness were legends in the family. On sex he was Augustinian and Pauline as she described it. He thought chastity was ideal. But he could not practice it. Otherwise he might have been a priest. When you stripped all the language away, sex was filthy. Homosexuals should abstain. Even kissing was a mortal sin.

Her mother never voiced a contrary opinion; she belonged to all the church organizations, worked on fund-raisers, cooked a big dinner every Sunday whether the kids were there or not. Lisa's younger sister got perilously close to being a Playmate of the Month for
Playboy
and it was a family tragedy. If any of his girls had an abortion or posed nude for a magazine her father said he would never speak to that girl again.

He didn't know anything about The Club. He thought Lisa worked for a private membership resort somewhere in the Caribbean, and that the people who went there were being treated for various illnesses. We both laughed at that. He wanted Lisa to quit and come home. Her older sister had married a sort of dull real estate millionaire. They all went to Catholic schools all their lives except Lisa, who laid down the law that she go to the University of California or she would not go to college at all. Her father sneered at the books she read, the papers she wrote. Lisa did S&M when she was sixteen with a student at Berkeley. She had had her first orgasm when she was eight years old and she had thought she was as a freak.

"We were what they used to call Catholics in nineteenth-century France," she said, " 'immigrants of the interior.' If you think of devout Catholics as simple, stupid people, you know, peasants in the back of big city cathedrals saying their rosaries before statues, then you don't know my dad. There is this awesome intellectual weight to everything he says, this constitutional puritanism, this languishing for death."

But he was a brilliant man, loved art and saw that his daughters learned a great deal about painting and music. They had a grand piano in the living room, they had real paintings on the walls, Picasso etchings and Chagall etchings. Her father had bought Mirandi and Miro years and years ago. They went to Europe every summer after Lisa's younger sister was six years old. They lived in Rome for a year. Her father knew Latin so well he kept his diary in it. If her father ever found out about The Club or her secret life it would kill him. It was damn near unthinkable, his finding out.

"There is one thing I can say for him, however, and you might understand it, if anybody would understand it, that he is a spiritual man, truly a spiritual man. I have not met too many people who really live by what they believe as he does. And the funny thing is I live by what I believe, absolutely what I believe. The Club is the pure expression of what I believe. I have a philosophy of sex. Sometimes I wish I could tell him about that. He has these aunts and sisters who are nuns. One is a Trappistine nun and another is a Carmelite. These are cloistered nuns. I would like to tell him that I too am a sort of nun, because I am saturated in what I believe. You must know what I am talking about. It's kind of a joke in a way, if you think about it, because when Hamlet said to Ophelia, as I am sure you know, when he said, 'Get thee to a nunnery,' he really meant a whorehouse, not a nunnery at all."

I nodded. I was dazzled a little.

But her story frightened me, and made me hug her tightly as she talked. It was exquisite, her animation and intensity, and the simplicity and the honesty of her face. I loved the details she described, her first communion, and listening to opera in the library with her father, and sneaking away to Martin's in San Francisco and feeling then and only then that she was truly alive.

We could have talked like this forever. She had said in a rush at least sixteen things that I wanted her to explain. We would need a year or so to know each other. This was just peeling back the first layer.

She wasn't really finished before we were trading facts and I was telling her all about my father, who was an atheist and believed totally in sexual freedom, how he'd taken me to Las Vegas to get laid when I was still a teenager, and how he drove my mother crazy demanding she go with him to nude beaches, and how she finally got a divorce, a little disaster from which none of us had recovered. She taught piano in L.A., and worked as an accompanist for a voice teacher and fought constantly with my father over a measly five hundred bucks a month spousal support because she could barely support herself. My father was rich. So were his children because his father had left us money. But my mother didn't have anything.

I was getting mad talking about this, so I got off it. I had given my mother a check for a hundred grand before I left for The Club. I had bought her a house down there. She had a whole bunch of gay men friends I couldn't stand, hair dresser types, and she was still pretty in a pale sort of way. She didn't believe in herself.

My father would keep the community property that belonged to my mother tied up in court forever. He was a big conservationist in northern California, chained himself to redwoods when they were about to be cut down, owned a big Sausalito restaurant, a couple of bed and breakfast hotels in Mendocino and Elk, and acres and acres of Marin County land that was almost beyond realistic appraisal. He worked all the time for nuclear disarmament. He had the largest collection of pornography outside of the Vatican. But he thought S&M was sick.

Again we started laughing.

He thought it was disgusting, perverted, childish, destructive, made speeches about Eros and Thanatos, and the death wish, and when I told him about The Club—I had told him it was in the Middle East (this
really
cracked Lisa up)—he threatened to have me committed to the state mental hospital in Napa. But there wasn't time.

My dad had married a twenty-one-year-old girl just before I left; she was an idiot.

"But why did you tell him about The Club!" She couldn't stop laughing. "You told him the details, about the things you'd done!"

"Why not? He's the one that stood outside the hotel room door in Las Vegas when I slept with the hooker. I tell him everything, if you want to know."

She was still laughing. "I wonder what you and I would be like," she said finally, "if our fathers had abandoned us when we were kids."

******

We had come to Washington Avenue and we cut over across Pyrthania Street to see if the bar at Commander's Palace was open. It was and we had two more beers, talking steadily all the time about our parents and the things they'd said to us about sex and about scores of other things that had nothing to do with it. We'd had the same teachers at Berkeley, we'd read the same books, we'd seen the same movies.

If it hadn't been for The Club, she hadn't the faintest idea what she would have been—the question made her anxious—maybe a writer, but that was just a dream. She'd never created anything but an S&M scenario.

Her favorite books kind of amused me, but they made me love her, absolutely love her. They were pretty muscular things like Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
and Hubert Selby's
Last Exit to Brooklyn
and Rechy's
City of Night
. But then she also loved Carson McCullers's
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
and Tennessee Williams's
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

"In other words," I said, "books about sexual outlaws, people who are lost."

She nodded, but there was more to it than that. It was a question of energy and style. When she felt bad, she would pick up
Last Exit to Brooklyn
and she would read in a whisper the "TraLaLa" story or "The Queen Is Dead." She knew the rhythms so well she could practically recite them from memory. It was the poetry of darkness and she loved it.

"I will tell you," she said, "what it is that has made me feel like a freak most of my life, and it wasn't having the orgasm at eight years old or listening furtively and shamefully to other little kids describing spankings or slipping off to San Francisco to be whipped in a candlelighted room. It's that nobody has ever been able to convince me that anything sexual between consenting individuals is wrong. I mean it's like part of my brain is missing. Nothing disgusts me. It all seems innocent, to do with profound sensations, and when people tell me they are offended by things, I just don't know what they mean."