Exit to Eden

by Anne Rice

  Stunning sum of money. Everyone silent.

  “You see,” Mr. Cross again, “our research indicates that there are thousands of people, potentially millions, who will pay a great deal to have the sexual vacation of their dreams. Sado-masochism, kink, discipline, and bondage—whatever you call it, they want it, especially when it’s well done and perfectly safe.”

  “And we offer them a clean, well-run place that is absolutely luxurious,” Alex said. “An experience they can’t get anywhere else at any price.”

  “It’s an atmosphere of sexuality we’re talking about,” Mr. Cross continued. “An atmosphere where it is fashionable for you to act out anything you please.”

  Martin was uneasy.

  “But there is something here you don’t seem to understand. The majority of those who want this kind of thing are masochists. They’re passive. And that is something they can’t even admit to their husbands and wives.”

  “They can admit it to us,” Mr. Cross said.

  “No,” Martin answered. “You are talking about people with money, position, the kind who can afford this sort of holiday. What makes you think they will come to an enormous resort like this where they may see others whom they know? In The House our biggest problem is secrecy, keeping one guest from seeing another. People are too ashamed of masochistic desire.”

  “But there are ways to make the thing fashionable,” I said. Little silence. The idea was tantalizing me. It was marvelous.

  “Yes, but how? How do we make it fashionable?” Alex looked at me. “How do we staff it, arrange it, offer it to the public so to speak?”

  “Okay,” I said. “We want famous people, rich people, people who don’t want to be the butt of jokes about their masochistic habits, the fact that they like to be whipped, tied up. Okay. You make a situation in which they don’t have to admit it, in which being a member of The Club doesn’t mean that that is happening at all. The members who come to the island are all ‘masters’ and ‘mistresses’ to be waited on hand and foot in public and in private by a staff of well-trained male and female slaves. They’re guests of Kubla Khan in Xanadu, there to enjoy the dancing boys and girls, and the harem, unless of course they want to retire to the privacy of the soundproof bedroom, and ring the bell for a slave who can serve as ‘master or mistress’ with all the appropriate flair.”

  Mr. Cross smiled.

  “In other words, all the members are dominant.”

  “Macho,” Alex said with a raise of the eyebrows, a dry derisive laugh.

  “Exactly,” I answered. “That’s how we sell it worldwide. Come to The Club and live like a sultan, lord of all you survey. Being seen at The Club doesn’t necessarily mean anything except that you’re there to enjoy the little spectacles, swim, get a tan, be waited on hand and foot.”

  “That could work,” Martin said. “That could work beautifully, I think.”

  “But the slaves themselves,” Mr. Cross asked. “This staff you’re talking about.”

  “That’s no problem at all,” Alex said. “You’re talking now about a different class. Young people from all walks of life, the ‘singles’ that live in every big city, the young women who sport-fuck and the young men just out of the closet.”

  “Yes,” Martin said. “The good-looking kids who would have been the starlets, the high-class hookers, the dancers in a Las Vegas or Broadway show. Offer them room and board in paradise, and a hefty salary to live out their wildest fantasies, and believe me they will be beating down the door.”

  “I think we have to start small to do it right,” I said. “It has to be carefully structured, really clean. Nothing shabby. This sort of sex has its rituals, its limits, and its rules.”

  “Of course, that’s why we sent for you,” Mr. Cross answered. “Let’s think about a little beachfront club . . .”

  And five years later look what you have around you. Three thousand guests on the island this very night.

  And the imitators, the “resort” in Mexico and the one in Italy, and the posh big city clubs in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the one in Berlin where all the members were slaves and the staff were the masters, and the vast spa in southern California giving us the most competition. The inevitable auction houses, and the private trainers. And that mysterious legion that had always existed, the private owners.

  Was it inevitable? Was it the right moment? Would someone else have organized it, discreetly advertised it, made it big business? If we hadn’t been the first?

  Who cares? Were codpieces inevitable in their time, or castrati singers, or the sky-high white wigs of the Ancient Regime, the bound feet of Imperial China, or the witch trials, the Crusades, the Inquisition? You set something into motion. It gains momentum. It is.

  Momentum. For me, year after year, it was mania.

  Meetings and draftings and drawings and discussion, inspecting the buildings, picking out fabrics, paint colors, shapes for the swimming pools. Hiring the physicians, the nurses, training the best slaves to be dominant, to “handle” the masochistic members who didn’t even know their own desires. Executing, correcting, expanding. First two buildings, then three, then the compound. Motifs, ideas, fees, contracts, agreements.

  And the same old heady gratification of seeing one’s fantasies, one’s secret dreams, made into a dizzying reality. Only it was now on an almost incalculable scale.

  I could always think of better things than what my masters did to me. More elaborate things. The source is virtually endless. All life is variation upon certain themes. Now I saw others swept up in it, dazzled, amazed, adding to it, varying it. The flame burns ever brighter and brighter.

  But passion for me?

  Passion? What does that mean?

  Certainly there were never again masters. Sometime or other that kind of intimacy had been utterly forfeited and there are times when I do not know why. Was it because I really liked it better when I was the mistress, because it was not merely the old excitement, it was that divine sense of knowing what my slaves, my lovers, really felt? I mean I really had them. My knowledge and my understanding penetrated them. They belonged to me inside and out.

  As for love, well, now, that had never happened, had it? Not in the conventional way. But what is love, if it’s not the love I feel for every one of them in those moments?

  And in the shadowy alcove of my veiled bed, I had had the best of the male slaves, bodies you wouldn’t believe.

  There are exactly thirty seconds between wanting and having at The Club.

  Lashing them into submission, ordering them to fuck, astonished at their heat, their power, that strength under my command, that extraordinary masculine body belonging to me.

  Noting their responses later in the computer files. Learning how better each time to manipulate them.

  And then the women slaves with their silken fingertips and lapping tongues. Leslie, Cocoa, the lovely and presently neglected Diana, my darling, who nestles with me in the dark, which is possibly the same dark from one end of the world to the other, soft on soft.

  Midnight in Eden. But is it Eden? Somewhere an old-fashioned clock chimes.

  Twelve hours until Elliott Slater. And what is so special about that blond-haired, blue-eyed man? Won’t he be like all the rest?

  ELLIOTT

  Chapter 12

  White Cotton

  The corridors were a labyrinth. Bits and pieces of The Club passed me without making any real impression. I knew only that she was at the end of the string that was pulling me through this. She had gotten me out of the lower depths, and they were taking me to her.

  I’d awakened in a half dream of desire for her. There was no use pretending it was anything other than that. All morning, I’d seen her face in flashes, fragments of the dream letting go, feeling the lace of her blouse against my chest, feeling the almost electric touch of her mouth.

  Who the hell was she, really? What was she all about?

  Then something unusual had happened. We had started cleaning on
our hands and knees at daybreak, but the attendants had gone easy on me. No clever insults, no straps.

  Must have been her doing, but what did it mean? Too easy to think about it in spite of the scrubbing. Too easy to think about her.

  It had occurred to me when we were being given our noon meal in the barren little refectory—on hands and knees, of course—that nothing here was turning out the way I’d thought it would.

  No matter what Martin had told me, I’d expected protracted periods of boredom, an inevitable inefficiency that would dilute the whole thing.

  Well, there was no boredom. And I hadn’t been on top of what was happening since the start. And now this rather calamitous desire for her, this unpredictable reaction to the scent or the sight of her, her touch.

  I had to get this part, at least, under control. I mean, she must have trained a thousand slaves like me, and she probably didn’t give a damn about any of them, really, any more than I give a damn about the “masters and mistresses” who had worked me over under Martin’s watchful eye at The House.

  I didn’t even give a damn about Martin when it came right down to it. I liked him, of course, maybe even loved him; and true, I got turned on thinking about him. But when it came to the sex part, the lovely nit-grit of sado-masochistic ritual, I didn’t give a damn who did it, except in the most decorative way.

  And now my mind was attaching itself to her. She was taking over. It was like she was materializing where there had been only a dark figure. I didn’t like this at all.

  Yet the low, pumping excitement had gotten worse, the sense of being a real slave, of being in real danger from her, as my hands and knees got more and more sore.

  Then when I’d been taken to the bath I knew I was going to her. Delicious hot shower, expert massage—this was how the good guys lived.

  And there had been the added tease of seeing so many other polished bodies on the massage tables, and the bath slaves a flock of little nymphs and fauns among the potted fuchsias and ferns, all reassuring patter (“You can talk now, Elliott, if you want to.”) and toothpaste-commercial smiles.

  Why had I been scared to ask what was happening? Why had I waited for the handsome little Ganymede who was working on me with his steel fingers to say: “You’re going to the boss lady, Elliott, better get some sleep.”

  If I had been dozing before, that brought me up wide awake.

  “The boss lady?” I asked.

  “That’s what she is,” he had answered. “She runs The Club. She practically created it. And she’s your trainer. Good luck.”

  “The top lady,” I murmured. A whole string of firecrackers had gone off in my head.

  “Close your eyes,” he had said. “Believe me, you’re going to need your rest.”

  I had slept. I must have. The sheer exhaustion must have done it, because all of a sudden I was staring up into the great pattern of leaded glass that made up the ceiling, and the handler was standing there and he said, “Come on, Elliott, we don’t keep the Perfectionist waiting.”

  No, of course not.

  And so the labyrinth with my last moments of Life Before Lisa slowly ticking away.

  We stopped. White hallway, a pair of heavily carved double doors. Silence. Okay. You’re much too stable for a total psychotic break.

  The handler snapped his fingers:

  “Go inside, Elliott, and wait there silently on your knees.”

  The doors closed behind me. He was gone, and I felt the panic rising as keenly as ever before.

  I was looking at a large room done entirely in blue tints with violent splashes of bolder color that caught the light. There was no electric illumination here. Only the sun filtered through the blue-and-violet flowered curtains over the french doors.

  Yards of deep vermilion carpet, and on the walls giant Renoirs and Seurats intermingled with Haitian paintings—brilliant works full of Haitian sky and green hills and dark stick-figure Haitians at work, at play, in the dance.

  There were long-faced African masks as well as Indian masks in bright enameled green and red. Graceful, serpentine African sculptures of wood and stone rose here and there out of banks of potted palms and ferns. And to my left, its head against the wall, loomed a large four-poster brass bed.

  The thing reminded me of a giant gold cage. It had drapery rods and scrollwork, and it was hung all in white cotton lace even to the sheer curtains that enveloped it in a diaphanous cloud. Heaps of lace-trimmed pillows lay piled on the ruffled cotton spread. A bower is what it was, the kind of fanciful thing men often love but can’t arrange for themselves, leaving it to the women in their lives to create.

  I saw myself walking towards it. I was dressed in a black tuxedo and I had a bouquet of flowers in my hand, ordinary daisies, and I bent down and kissed a girl who was sleeping in the bed.

  That kind of bed. But there wasn’t any “girl” in it. She wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  Time just to enjoy the intensity of the room, the way it so marvelously suggested the forbidden, even in this forbidden place. The slight movement of the green tree branches beyond the flowered gauze of the window curtains was something like a dance.

  I felt a rush of blood to my head, a sudden disorientation. A trap door had opened and I had stumbled into some secret chamber. And the whole room distressed me suddenly for no apparent reason: the mess of silver articles before the circular mirror on the dresser, boxes, perfume bottles, brushes. A black satin high-heeled shoe lying on its side by a chair. All that snow-white lace.

  I sat back on my heels looking around, wishing my face wasn’t so hot, and the rest of me wasn’t so hot. I had been in stuffy feminine Victorian bedrooms at Martin’s house, but this was different, uncontrived, even a little insane. Not a stage set for all the craziness here, but a real place.

  There were lots of books. Shelves of them on a far wall, and they were all chewed up like somebody really had read them all to death. Paperbacks stuffed in with hardcovers, some of them patched up with tape.

  I stared forward, at nothing and everything; at a white leather chain dangling from the ceiling with a pair of leather handcuffs attached to it, at that black satin shoe lying on its side.

  And when a door opened somewhere with a soft, almost inaudible click I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

  She had come out of the bath; I could smell the perfumed steam of the bath, one of those piercingly sweet floral scents, very nice, and some other aroma, something clean and smoky and mingled with the perfume: her smell.

  She moved across the room into my field of vision without making a sound. She was wearing spike-heel slippers of white satin, like the black one discarded by the chair. And above that she wore nothing but a little lace-trimmed slip that came halfway down her thighs. The slip was cotton, bad luck.

  I don’t really care one way or the other about the feel of a body through nylon. But a body under sheer cotton drives me out of my head.

  Her breasts were naked under the slip, and her hair hung down in a dark shadow about her shoulders, something like a Virgin Mary veil, and through the slip I could see the dark triangle between her legs.

  Again I had that sense of a force emanating from her. Beauty alone couldn’t account for the effect of her presence, even in this insane room, though beauty she certainly had.

  I never should have sat back without her permission. And to look at her directly, that was a violation of the rules of the game, yet I did.

  I looked up at her, though my head was slightly bowed, and when I saw her small, sharply angled face, her large brown eyes almost brooding as we stared at each other, the sense of her force intensified.

  Her mouth was indescribably luscious. It was rouged without gloss so that the deep red appeared natural and the bones of her delicately sloping shoulders were for some mysterious reason as enticing to me as the full slope of her breasts.

  But the current coming from her was not the sum of all the splendid physical details. No. It was as if she gave off invi
sible heat. She was smoldering in the skimpy little slip and the fragile satin slippers. And you couldn’t see the smoke but you knew it was there. There was something almost inhuman about her. She made me think of an old-fashioned word. The word lust.

  I looked down deliberately. And going on my hands and knees towards her, I stopped when I had reached her feet. I could feel the force coming from her, the heat. I pressed my lips to her naked toes, to her instep above the band of satin, and I felt that strange, baffling shock again that left a tingling in my lips.

  “Stand up,” she said softly. “And keep your hands clasped behind your back.”

  I rose as slowly as I could without breaking the movement, and when I obeyed, I was certain my face was really red. But it wasn’t the old ritualized emotion. I stood over her, and though I didn’t look at her again, I could see her perfectly, see the well between her breasts, and the dark rose-colored circles of the nipples under the white slip.

  She reached up, and I almost backed away from her, feeling her fingers move into my hair. She clasped my head tightly, massaged it with her fingers, sending the chills down my back, and then brought her fingers slowly over my face the way a blind woman might, to see it, feeling of my lips and my teeth.

  It was the touch of someone burning with fever, the hot dancing tips of her fingers, and it was further heated by some low sound she made, like a cat’s purr without opening her lips.

  “You belong to me,” she said in something lower than a whisper.

  “Yes, Madam,” I answered. I watched helplessly as her fingers dropped to my nipples and pinched them, pumping them as my body tensed. The sensation shot down through my cock.