Exit to Eden (30 page)

I was engrossed. In the light of the bar she looked exotic, her face all angles, her voice low and natural, and it was like drinking water to listen to her.

Before we left New Orleans, she said, we had to make the transsexual shows on Bourbon, the really raunchy ones with the female impersonators who are actually taking hormone shots and getting operations to turn them into women. She loved these shows.

"You must be kidding," I said. "I wouldn't get caught in those joints."

"What are you talking about?" she said. She got furious. "These people are putting their sexual principles on the line, they're acting out their fantasies. They are willing to be freaks."

"Yes, but those are dives, tourist joints. How far from the elegance of The Club can you get?"

"Doesn't make any difference," she said. "Elegance is just a form of control. I like those joints. I feel like a goddamned female impersonator and I like to watch them." Her whole manner changed when she said this, and she started trembling a little and so I said, well, of course, if she wanted to see them.

"I'm confused," I said. My tongue was getting thick. I had drunk two Heinekens since we came into the bar. "You're writing the ticket. Why don't you just say where we're going?"

"Because I just did. And you said, 'You gotta be kidding,' and besides I do not just want to tell you what to do, and I am not writing a scenario!"

"Let's get out of here," I said.

We cut out again, and hung around the gate to the Lafayette Cemetery across the street for about twenty minutes, talking about whether or not we should climb over the wall and walk through the graves. I love these above-ground graves with their Grecian pediments and columns, and broken-down doors and rusted coffins. I had half a mind to climb the fence. But then we might get arrested.

We decided it was a good time to go all through the Garden District instead of doing that.

And so we wove back and forth from Saint Charles to Magazine on the various streets, here and there to look at a particular antebellum house, white columns in the moonlight, wrought iron railings, old oaks so big around I couldn't span them with my arms.

There is maybe no neighborhood on earth quite like this, these giant sleepy houses, these relics of a former time, all spruce and serene behind their immaculate gardens, here and there the hum of an automatic sprinkler, the faint shimmer of the spray, in the dense and leafy dark. The sidewalks alone are beautiful, made up as they are of long stretches of herringbone brick, and purple flagstone, patches of cement broken into little hills over the roots of the giant trees.

She had favorite houses, houses she used to come to look at when she lived here in the apartment and did nothing but read and walk; and we went visiting them now. We found two houses with For Sale signs on the fences, and one house in particular entranced us, a tall narrow Greek Revival house with the door on the left side and two french windows on the front porch. It had been painted a deep rose color with white trim, and now the paint was peeling softly all over it except where it was covered in vines. It had Corinthian columns and long front steps, and a string of old magnolia trees inside the fence. There was a side garden behind a brick wall that we couldn't see.

We stayed a long time, leaning on the gate and kissing each other, and not saying anything until I said we should buy the house. We would live there happily ever after and we would travel all over the world together and we would come home to our house. It was big enough to have wild parties and house-guests and a darkroom and sit-down dinners for both our families from California.

"And when we get bored with New Orleans," I said, "we'll fly to New York for a couple of weeks or down to The Club."

She looked irresistible, smiling up at me in the half dark, her arm wound around my neck.

"Remember, this is our house," I said. "Of course we can't live in it for two years, until my contract's up at The Club. But I don't see why we don't make the down payment now."

"You're not like anybody else I ever knew," she said.

We started walking again, kissing in a soft, dreamy, drunken way without urgency; we would walk a few steps, kiss, lean against one of the trees. I messed up her hair hopelessly. She didn't have any more lipstick on, and I could reach under her dress very quickly before she had a chance to stop me and feel the smooth cotton of her panties between her legs, wet and hot and I wanted to fuck her right where we were.

Finally we managed to pull ourselves across Jackson Avenue and we wandered into the Pontchartrain Hotel, where the bar was still open too, and we had some more drinks, and when we came out we figured everything from then on was rather ugly and seedy so we took a cab back downtown. I was feeling manic, like this night was momentous, and every time I felt it I would grab her and kiss her again.

******

Those horrible joints on Bourbon were closed already, thank God.

******

It was three o'clock and we went into some comfortable enough place with a couple of gas lamps and several square wooden tables and we got into our first argument. I knew I was drunk. I should have shut up, but it was over a movie called
Pretty Baby
, all about the old Storyville red light district in New Orleans, directed by Louis Malle. I hated it and she said it was a great film. It had Brooke Shields as the little-girl whore in it and Keith Carradine as the photographer Belloc and Susan Sarandon as Brooke's mother and I thought it was worse than a flop.

"Don't call me an idiot just because I like a movie you don't understand," she was saying, and I was stammering, trying to explain that I didn't mean she was an idiot. She said that I said that anybody who liked a piece of garbage like that was an idiot. Did I say that?

I had another Scotch and water, and I knew what I was saying was brilliant, about how that whole movie was a lie, and nothing in it had any substance, but when she started to talk it was sexual outlaws again, that the movie had been about these women prostitutes and the way that they went on living and loving and experiencing day-to-day life though they were outcasts.

It was all about flowers blooming in cracks; it was about life being unable to crush out life. And I started to understand everything she was saying. She knew how Belloc the photographer felt, he was in love with the little-girl prostitute (this is the Keith Carradine character in love with the Brooke Shields character) and how he got left by everybody in the end, but the best scene was when the whore played by Susan Sarandon was nursing the baby in the whorehouse kitchen.

She was saying how you cannot just make people shut up and die because they are sexual outlaws, that you wouldn't know now that that was what The Club was all about because all you saw was rich people sitting around the pools and you had to have money to go there and be young and be beautiful, but there was an idea and the idea was that anybody could come here and act out his or her sexual fantasy, and you still could, you still could, you still could.

The slaves didn't have to be rich, and if you weren't beautiful enough to be a slave you could be a handler or a trainer, all you had to do was really believe in the idea of The Club, and you had to be in the fantasy. And a lot more happened at The Club than people realized. Because a lot of the members admitted in private that they wanted to be dominated and punished by the slaves. So a good many of the slaves knew how to take the dominant role on demand. It was a hell of a lot freer than it looked. Her eyes were really dark now, and her face was drawn and she was talking rapidly in silvery riffs, but she started to cry when I said: "Well, goddamn yes, that's just what I'm doing at The Club, acting out my fantasies, but what's that got to do with the whores in
Pretty Baby
? It wasn't their fantasy they were acting out, it was somebody else's."

"No, but it was their life and it was life, and they went on hoping and dreaming and the movie caught the day-to-day life. The photographer in the movie saw in them images of freedom and that is why he wanted to be with them."

"But that's stupid. All the Susan Sarandon character wanted to do was get married and get out of the whorehouse and Pretty Baby was just a kid and…"

"Don't tell me I'm stupid. Why the hell can't a man argue with a woman without telling her she's stupid?"

"I didn't say you were stupid, I said that was stupid."

The bartender was suddenly leaning in my face saying, sure this was an all-night bar, and he hated to ask us to leave, but this was the hour between four and five when they did the cleaning. Would we maybe go around the corner to Michael's?

Michael's was a real dump. No sawdust, no pictures, no gas lamps. Just a rectangular room full of wooden tables. They didn't have any Johnny Walker Black Label. Lisa was not really crying. "You are mistaken!" And something kind of interesting was happening in Michael's.

The people who were coming in had just woken up or something. They hadn't been carousing all night as we had. But what kind of people get up at five o'clock in the morning when it is still dark and start immediately drinking in Michael's? There were two incredibly tall drag queens in wigs with pancake makeup on their faces talking to one of those thin young men who has drunk and smoked so much that he looks one hundred years old. His face was shrinking over his skull and his eyes were totally bloodshot. I wished I had a camera. If we were going to go to Venice I was going to get a camera.

Everybody coming in knew everybody else. But they didn't mind us being there.

"What do you mean you're not writing a scenario?" I asked. "When are you going to tell me what you are doing? You mean people just take off from The Club like this and go back? If you have a slave, you can just take the slave out like this, and then bring him back? But what are the rules? Suppose I just split out of here right now, you know, left? I've got all my personal belongings…"

"You want to do that?" She was rubbing the backs of her arms, and she looked gorgeous to me in an Italian way, her dark hair really a mess now, her eyes getting bigger and bigger as she got drunker, her speech just a little slurred.

"No, I don't."

"Then why did you say it?"

We were outside again. The rain had stopped. I couldn't remember the rain starting. We were in the Cafe Du Monde next to the river, across the street from Jackson Square, and we were in a wash of white light, and there were already big noisy delivery trucks roaring through the Rue Decateur.

The café au lait was wonderful, hot and sweet and perfect, and I was eating dozens of hot little sugar-covered beignets, and telling Lisa all about cameras, and things about shooting faces and getting people to cooperate.

"You know I could stay here forever," I said. "This is a seedy place, but it's a real place. California isn't real. Did you ever think it was real?"

"No," she said.

I wanted more Scotch, or several cans of beer. I got up and went over to her side of the table and pulled a chair up right beside hers and wrapped my arms around her and kissed her and hugged her and lifted her out of the chair, and we stopped on the street corner realizing neither of us knew where the hotel was.

When we got there, the phone was ringing and ringing. She got furious.

"Did you call every goddamned hotel in New Orleans to find me?" she said into the phone. "And you call me at six o'clock in the goddamned morning!" She was walking up and down in her bare feet with the phone in her hand. "What are you going to do, have me arrested!" She hung up. She tore up the phone messages that had been tacked to the outside door.

"It was them, wasn't it?" I think I asked her.

She had her hands up, rubbing her temples, and she sounded like she might cry.

"What are they so uptight about?" I asked her.

She leaned against my shoulder and I hummed something under my breath, very low, "I Can't Give You Anything but Love Baby," and we sort of danced for a long time without moving our feet.

It was daylight and I was making a speech.

The garden was wet and more lush and fragrant even than it had been in the dark and all the windows of the little servants' quarters house were open and she was sitting on the high four-poster bed in her white cotton slip. I could smell flowers everywhere. Flowers in California never smell the way they do in Louisiana. This was intoxication, the pink oleander and jasmine and the falling-apart wild roses. I called her "pretty baby" and I was explaining to her that I loved her, and I was making long intricate points about what the love was and why it was different from anything that had ever happened to me before, that we had peeled back this skin at The Club, and that she knew things about me and my secret desires that no woman had ever really known, no woman who knew me, and that I loved her. I loved her.

I loved who she was, that she was this small, dark-haired, dark-eyed, intense person who believed so passionately in what she was doing and that she wasn't just a mystery to me like other women, that I knew what she was, I knew all about her, things she hadn't even told me, that inside her was this locked-up place into which nobody could get, but I was going to get there. And it was even all right her thinking
Pretty Baby
was a good movie because she was projecting on it all her purity and defiance.

She was terribly upset. But she might as well have been behind glass. I was too drunk to stop.