Exit to Eden (38 page)

She looked wonderful as she drove. Her black dress slipped down back from her knees into her lap and her legs were lovely, and she stabbed at the pedals with her stiletto heels, and she drove the big limousine like a suburban girl who'd learned to drive when she was teenager, that is, with more gusto and ease than most men could have driven it, parallel parking it in three seconds when we had to, without a whimper, using only one arm, and never hesitating to pass, and running yellow lights every time there was a chance, and never unnecessarily letting somebody go first or get ahead, and rolling through stop signs.

In fact, she maneuvered the car so easy and so fast, she made me a little bit nervous, telling me to shut up more than once. What she really wanted to do was go faster than the driver would have gone, and pretty soon we were roaring towards New Orleans at ninety miles an hour when there wasn't any traffic and a good seventy when there was. Once she pushed to one hundred ten and I told her to slow down or I would jump immediately.

******

I told her this was a damn good time to read
On the Road
. She couldn't even smile anymore, but she tried. She was trembling. When I said it was a marvelous and poetic book, she only nodded.

I read her all my favorite passages, the truly dazzling and original parts, though all of it is really dazzling and original, and pretty soon she was really enjoying it, nodding and smiling and laughing and asking me little questions about Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and the others who had inspired the book. These were the beat poets and writers of the fifties in San Francisco who were for all practical purposes swept off the popular scene by the flower children of the sixties before we had gotten old enough to know what was going on. They were the most fragile of subjects, recent literary history, when we were in school. And I wasn't really surprised at how little she knew of them, and how thrilled she was by Kerouac's prose.

Finally I read her a hilarious part of the book where Sal and Dean are in Denver and Dean gets all excited and steals one car after another so fast that the cops cannot even figure what is happening, and after that I got to the passage where they were actually driving a limousine to New York, and Dean tells Sal to imagine what it would be like if they owned the car they were driving, that there's a road they could take through Mexico and Panama and maybe even to the bottom of South America.

I stopped.

We had just roared past Shreveport, Louisiana, and we were headed straight south.

She was staring straight forward, her eyes wide, blinking suddenly as if she was trying to see through a fog.

She glanced at me for a split second, and then back at the road.

"That road's still there, gotta be," I said. "Through Mexico, Central America, down to Rio… And we could rent a better car than this. Hell, we could take a plane, we could do anything…"

Silence.

This was what I'd told myself I wouldn't do. I sounded too angry. It would never work.

The speedometer was climbing to a hundred again. She took a swipe at her eyes. Tears all right. But she had seen the speedometer and slowed down.

And then she clamped shut again, white faced, lip quivering. She looked like she might start screaming or something. Then she was gone again, stony eyed, into the miles.

After a while, I put the book away, opened the flask of Johnnie Walker I'd bought back somewhere in Texas, and took a little taste. I couldn't read anymore.

******

Just after Baton Rouge, she said: "Where's your passport? Have you got it with you?"

"No, it's in the room in New Orleans," I said.

"Damn," she said.

"And yours?"

"I have mine."

"Well, hell, we can get mine," I said. "We could check out and go to the airport and take the first plane to anyplace."

She flashed her big round brown eyes on me for so long I reached out to steady the wheel.

******

It was just before dark when we were barreling through the narrow streets of the French Quarter, and she was telling the driver over the phone in the car to wake up.

We got out of the car, mussed-up, tired, hungry, with a bunch of tacky paper bags full of junk, and started into the flagstone carriageway of the little hotel.

She turned around before we got to the desk.

"You wanna do it?" she said.

"You bet I want to do it," I said.

I looked at her for a second, her white face, the pure fear in her eyes. I wanted to say what are we running from? Why does it have to be like this? Tell me you love me, goddamn it, Lisa. Let's get it all out!

"Lots of phone messages for you all," said the lady at the desk.

I wanted to say all that and more to her, but I didn't. I knew I'd settle for it on any terms she laid down.

"Go in there, get your passport," she whispered. Her fingers were actually biting in my flesh of my arm. "I'll wait for you in the car. Come right back out."

"And company too for you all," said the woman. She craned her neck to look through the glass doors into the yard. "Two gentlemen still waiting for you all. Been waiting all day."

Lisa spun around and glared through the doors.

Richard, that tall Master of Postulants, was standing there in the little garden watching us with his back to the doors of the cottage. And Scott, the unforgettable Trainer of Trainers, was just getting up and crushing out his cigarette.

They were both dressed in dark suits, rather somber and immaculate, and they greeted us very courteously, if not downright cheerfully, as we crossed the yard and went into the cottage and turned on the lights.

Everything was orderly and cool and normal-seeming except that they had been in the cottage, obviously, and the rooms were still full of cigarette smell. There was something perfectly sinister about it, about them being here at all.

Richard, bushy browed and smiling, looked enormous, which to be more specific means he was still a couple of inches taller than me. Scott, a shorter and much more graceful man, looked equally as physically powerful under the Madison Avenue drag.

I realized I was sizing them up.

Lisa was really shaking now. And she did this very peculiar thing of walking all the way across the bedroom and standing against the wall. This was something like a hysterical action. And I realized I was really rattled myself as I nodded to them both and took the sack of junk we had with us into the other room.

Actually I wanted to see if there was anyone in the bath or the kitchen. There was not.

Scott, who was rather fantastic looking in the slim-fitting black suit, came slowly into the kitchen—all of their movements and gestures were calculated to put somebody at ease, it seemed—and told me they would like to speak to Lisa alone. There was an obvious anguish in his face. He looked at me and I wondered if he was thinking what I was thinking, that the last time he'd seen me we'd been playing master and slave for an audience of twenty novice trainers in his class.

I did not really want to think of that at this moment. But I could feel it, like somebody had just opened the oven door and the oven was on full blast. He was one of those men who looks all the more like an animal when he gets dressed up.

"We just have to talk to her for a little while alone," he said in a low, almost purring chest voice.

"Well, sure, of course," I said.

He put his left hand on my neck and gave it a soft pressure, and he smiled, a flash of agreeable dark eyes and white teeth, and went back into the other room.

I went out of the kitchen into the courtyard and, I sat down on the wrought iron bench that was farthest from the rooms.

But I knew that Lisa could see me where I was sitting. There were lights scattered around this little garden, which had just come on with the slow deepening of the evening, and I was sitting in the light. I put my foot up on the bench, and I lit a cigarette. I wished I had brought out the bottle of Scotch.

But really it was better not to drink. I could see them through the lighted french windows, against the backdrop of the rose-colored walls and the immense four-poster bed and the antique mahogany chairs, and the two men in their black suits were talking to Lisa, walking back and forth and gesturing and she was sitting in the rocking chair holding the backs of her arms. All of them in black, curious, the way that they stood out, and the light of the lamp skittering on her blackish-brown hair.

I couldn't hear anything because of the goddamned air conditioner, but I could see that Lisa was getting more and more upset. Finally she was on her feet and she was pointing her finger at Richard, and Richard had his hands up as if her finger was a loaded gun. That perpetual smile had left his mouth, but his eyes were still crinkled as if he was smiling. But deep-set eyes like his with bushy eyebrows often look like that.

Then she was screaming and the tears were sliding down her face. I could see the veins standing out in her neck, and her face was twisted, and even her legs stretched by the high stiletto heels were taut and shaking. She looked like she was all wires.

I couldn't stand this much longer.

I crushed out the cigarette and stood up, facing the doors. Lisa was pacing the floor and tossing her long hair back and really shouting. Still I couldn't hear the words that were exchanged. It looked to me like Scott had told Richard to back off and Scott was taking over. Lisa was calming down. Scott was moving about with that feline fluidity, palm up as he gestured. She was listening and she was nodding, and then it seemed she saw me through the glass door. We were just staring at each other through the glass.

Scott turned and he looked at me. And I just stood there, waiting, not willing to turn around or walk off.

He came over to the window and, gesturing for my patience, he started to pull the drapes.

I went to the door and opened it.

"No, man, I'm sorry," I said, shaking my head. "Can't do that."

"We're just talking, Elliott," Scott said. "You're kind of a distraction out there. And it's very important that we have this talk."

Lisa, who had sat down in the rocker with her knees drawn up, wiping her nose with a linen handkerchief, looked up and said softly. "It's okay, Elliott. Believe me. It's okay. Go into the bar and have a drink. It's okay."

"Well, let's get some things straight before I do," I said. "I don't know what's happening, but nobody is going to force anybody…"

"Elliott, we don't do that kind of thing," Scott said. "We don't force people to do anything at all. Now, you know who we are." He looked just a little injured and painfully sincere. His black eyes were easily expressive, and his mouth moved into a similar easy and somewhat sad smile. "But there is something here at stake that is very important to us. We have to talk to Lisa about this."

"It's okay, Elliott," she said, "really it is. I'll call you in the bar. I want you to go. Would you do that because I ask?"

It was the longest forty-five minutes I ever spent. I really had to remind myself every thirty seconds that I didn't want to get drunk. Otherwise I would have been gulping the damn Scotch. Everything that had happened was going off like firecrackers in my brain. Through the open door I could see a slice of French Quarter street, a long rose-wreath wrought iron railing on a gallery over the narrow sidewalk, couples walking arm in arm past the gaslights of a restaurant door. I kept looking at this as though it meant something, the dark green of the shuttered doors, the flickering light.

Finally Scott came gliding in. The human panther, with a sleek head of curly black hair, eyes quickly scanning the place.

"Let's have
our
talk now, Elliott," he said. Hand on the back of the neck again, hot silky fingers. Everybody at The Club has hot silky fingers, I thought.

Richard was waiting in the room, and he explained that Lisa was in the kitchen and it was our turn to talk now. Those stiletto heels of hers, the rhinestone straps glittering, were lying on the rug. Like the slipper on the floor of her bedroom that first time. Icepick right through the head.

I sat down in the armchair. Scott was in a little straight-back chair by the secretaire. Richard, with his hands in his pockets, leaned against the post of the bed.

"Elliott, I want to ask you a few questions," Richard said. Face pleasant, manner a lot like Martin's, deep-set eyes cheerful, smile a little tight.

Scott seemed lost in his own thoughts.

"Were you happy at The Club before you left? I mean were things popping, were they working out?"

"I don't really want to talk like this without Lisa," I said.

He shook his head, just a touch of impatience.

"We can't solve this, Elliott, unless you come straight with us. We have to know what's going on. Now, from all our reports, and we're awfully good judges in these situations, you were doing beautifully at The Club. We were both getting our money's worth." Narrow eyes. Pause that said Let's hear you contradict that.

"Now when a slave gets to The Club, Elliott, I mean before anything happens, if a slave gets as far as The Club grounds, Elliott, that slave is pretty deep into S&M. I mean he knows a lot about his sexuality and what he wants. I mean you don't wind up full time at The Club because you had a weird weekend in the Castro District of San Francisco with a kinky friend."