Exit to Eden

by Anne Rice

  “What the hell’s the matter with you!” I said. “Has everybody in this place lost his mind!”

  “Excuse me!” He snapped to. Took Elliott’s arm.

  “Get him out of here!” I said.

  Elliott was looking at me. Stop it. The awful, appalling feeling came to me that I’d failed him utterly, that for the first time in my entire “secret life” I hadn’t delivered right on the line. It was a pain flashing like electricity through my temples. I turned my back.

  LISA

  Chapter 17

  Obsession: Twenty-four Hours

  I was sitting there, just staring at them as though they were living things instead of two large, dirty canvas suitcases with the keys in the locks, and the forbidding little documents case on top. I had the impulse to hide them in the closet, or under the lace skirts of the bed.

  It was twelve o’clock. The breakfast tray was cold, untouched. And I was still sitting against the pillows, in my nightgown, drinking a second pot of coffee. I hadn’t slept four hours all night. I’d tried to sleep between 10 and 11 A.M. when I knew he was in the classroom with tall, dark, handsome Scott because I couldn’t stand the thought of it. But jealousy doesn’t make you sleep. It makes you lie awake and stare.

  Yet I didn’t feel bad now. That was something I was just beginning to realize.

  The fact was, I felt better than I had in years and years. I could not remember ever feeling precisely the way I did now. Or could I? It struck me that we didn’t have enough words in the English language to describe excitement. We needed at least twenty to get the nuances of sexual feeling, and then this sort of excitement, this being swept up and out of yourself and into an obsession, this combustible mixture of ecstasy and guilt. Yes, obsession, that’s the word for it.

  And now there were the suitcases here, which hadn’t been easy to get.

  Not enough just to say, “This is Lisa and I want the personal possessions of Elliott Slater. Bring them to my room.” You don’t bring slaves’ clothing and personal possessions into the compound. You don’t just send for the documents case. This stuff is strictly confidential, the private belongings of the person whom the slave becomes when he finally leaves here.

  And who set up all these rules? You guessed it.

  But I’d managed it, by a little mixture of lies and logic. After all, I have my reasons and I shouldn’t have to explain things. And the bags had been unpacked, hadn’t they, inventoried and the clothes hung up in plastic bags with mothballs, right? So what’s the big secret? I have very personal and urgent reasons for requesting all the personal possessions of Mr. Elliott Slater. I will sign for everything in full, including his cash and documents. Pack it up and bring it here.

  One of those waves of desire was coming again, something like a scorching wind. I wanted him so badly. I wrapped my arms around my waist and bent over, tensing, waiting for it to pass. And I found myself remembering, quite abruptly, the early high school years when I had known these same agonizing waves of sexual hunger, and they had seemed purely physical and there was no promise of consummation, no promise of love. Ugly memories of feeling freakish, like I carried a secret within me that made me an outcast.

  And yet it was exhilarating to feel that young again, that crazy. And frightening at the same time. This time it was hooked to another being, to Elliott Slater, this blast of heat, this physical takeover of body and mind. If I stopped to think about it, really think about it, I could fall into something just as bad as despair.

  I slid off the bed and padded silently across the floor to the suitcases. They were filthy, the leather corners scratched and bruised. Extremely heavy. I turned the key in the lock of the one on the left, and undid the straps.

  Everything was very different inside. A faint masculine perfume rose from the neatly folded clothes. Nice brown velvet coat, leather patches on the elbows. Tweed Norfolk jacket. Two exquisite Brooks Brothers three-piece suits. Blue work shirts starched and ironed under their plastic wrapping. Army surplus turtlenecks, two really beat-up khaki bush jackets with crunched airline tickets and parking lot stubs in the pockets. Church’s oxfords, Bally loafers, expensive jeans. Mr. Slater flies first class.

  I sat cross-legged on the carpet. I felt the velvet coat with my fingers, smelled the perfume in the tweed. Cologne in the fibers of the turtlenecks. Lots of gray, brown, silver. No real colors except the blue work shirts. And everything immaculate, except the grungy safari jackets. Little plastic case with a fancy Rolex in it. Should be in the documents case. Address book in one of the pockets, and a plain blue business ledger thrown in with the underwear that was a . . . yes, a diary. No, close that, this is going far enough. But don’t fail to note that the handwriting is legible. And he writes in black ink. Not ball point. Black ink.

  I drew back my hand as if I’d touched something hot. Queasy feeling in the stomach at the sight of his writing. I reached for the documents case. I turned the key.

  One-year-old passport, good photo, the smiling Mr. Slater. And why not? He’d been to Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and half of Europe, as well as Egypt and South Africa, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Brazil, all within twelve months.

  Ten credit cards which would expire before he left here, except for the American Express Gold. And five grand—five grand, I counted it twice—in cash.

  California driver’s license, handsome face again with the irrepressible smile. Damn near best driver’s license picture I’ve ever seen. A leather checkbook. A Berkeley hills (north campus) address. About five blocks from the house in which I grew up and where my father still lived. I knew those blocks up there.

  No student apartments that high up, just those modern weather-stained redwood houses, old stone cottages with peaked roofs and diamond pane windows, here and there a mansion like a giant rock clinging to the cliff, all half hidden by the dense forest that swallowed up the winding sidewalks and crooked streets. So he lived up there.

  I drew up my knees and ran my fingers back through my hair. I felt guilty. Like he would suddenly appear behind me in the doorway and say: “Get out of those things. My body is yours. But not those things.” But there wasn’t anything personal here except the diary. After all, why would he carry copies of his own books? Maybe to remind him who he had been when his two years had passed? Maybe because he always did.

  I tipped over the other suitcase and unlocked it and unbuckled it.

  More fashionable male finery. A handsome black tuxedo under plastic, five dress shirts. Primo cowboy boots, probably snakeskin, probably custom-made. Burberry raincoat, cashmere sweaters, plaid scarves, all very British, fur-lined driving gloves. And a real camel’s hair sports coat, really nice.

  And now pay dirt, sort of. Two torn and wrinkled receipts for auto service in a thumbed-up guide to world ski resorts. Mr. Slater drives, or did drive, a fifteen-year-old Porsche. That meant the old-fashioned, upside-down-bathtub-style Porsche, the one nobody ever took for anything else. And two dog-eared Dover paperback copies of Sir Richard Burton’s travels in Arabia with lots of private scribbling on the inside cover, and yes, finally, a brand new copy of Beirut: Twenty-four Hours still sealed in the plastic wrapping put on by the publisher with a sticker on the front announcing it as the winner of some kind of award. God, if there wasn’t plastic all over it.

  I flipped it over. The inimitable Elliott, windblown in turtle-neck and bush jacket, looking appropriately forlorn—Ladies and Gentlemen, this man has seen disaster, risked his life to take these pictures—the inevitable smile melancholy, wise. I felt the queasy feeling again, like my high school love had just walked past the homeroom door.

  Well, I’d gone this far, so what was a little plastic? I mean I’m not going to hurt the book. Feeling like a thief I tore it open, and standing up, I walked back to the coffee and the bed.

  Beirut, a city being smashed to fragments by years and years of tribal war. This was strong stuff. The most wrenching kind of photo-journalism in which you are spared nothing, and yet the framin
g of each shot—the juxtaposition of ancient and modern, death and technology, chaos and deliberation—is so fine that it gives you the chilling pleasure that only art can give.

  Unerring eye, it seemed to me, for the eloquence of faces, figures in motion. Light and shadow used like paint. The darkroom technique was perfect and he probably did it himself on the black and white. And the color photos made the dirt and the blood embraceable, like the texture on a modern sculpture, the subject of which was war.

  I started to read the commentary—he wrote that, too—and it was a hell of a lot more than captions for pictures. Understated, clean, it was almost a parallel story, in which the personal was subordinated to the power of what had been witnessed and recorded.

  I put down the book. More coffee. So Elliott’s a good photographer and Elliott can write.

  But what does he think of himself? Why did he come here? And for two full years of incarceration? What made him do a thing like that?

  And why am I rifling his stuff like this, and doing this to myself?

  I drank another mouthful of coffee and got off the bed and walked around the room.

  This wasn’t a good excitement now, it was an uncomfortable restlessness. I reminded myself twice I could send for him anytime I wanted, but that wasn’t right, not right for him, not right for me. And I could hardly stand it.

  I went to the bedside table and picked up the phone. “Would you get me Scott if he’s gettable? I’ll wait,” I said.

  Twelve forty-five. Scott would be drinking his only after-lunch Scotch right now.

  “Lisa, I was going to call you.”

  “What for?”

  “To thank you for that little present this morning. I loved every minute of it. But I never expected to get my hands on him so soon. What got into you, giving him away like that? Tell me he disappointed you and I won’t believe it. Are you okay?”

  “One question at a time, Scott. And let me ask the first one. How did it go?”

  “Well, I exhibited him in the trainers’ class, you know, lessons in how to read a slave’s responses, find his weak points. It drove him nuts. I thought he’d go out of his head when the class started examining him, but he was totally controllable. On a scale of one to ten, I’d say he’s a solid fifteen. Why did you let me get my hands on him so soon?”

  “Did you teach him anything new?”

  “Hmmmm . . . That he could stand more than he thought he could. You know, being examined by the trainers, hearing himself discussed as if he were a specimen. He was delightfully unprepared for all that.”

  “Did you learn anything about him, anything special?”

  “Yes. He’s not in the fantasy, he’s wide awake.”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” he said. “He’s too sophisticated to be imagining he ‘deserves’ all this, or that he was ‘born to be a slave,’ or that he’s lost in a world ‘more noble and moral’ than the real world, all the lovely romance slaves like to invent for themselves. He knows where he is and what he’s doing to himself. He’s about as open as any slave I’ve ever handled, the kind you think will crack but never cracks. Why did you let me have him? How come you’re not really talking to me?”

  “Okay. All right,” I said. “All right, fine.”

  I hung up.

  I stared at the messed-up suitcases. And the copy of Beirut: Twenty-four Hours that lay on the bed. He’s not in the fantasy. He’s wide awake. You said it.

  I went back to the suitcases and picked up the worn, dirty paperbacks of the two-volume Burton book, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah. I’d read it years ago in college at Berkeley. Burton the wanderer, disguising himself as an Arab to get into the forbidden city of Mecca. Burton, the sexual pioneer. Obsessed with the sexual practices of peoples who differed so dramatically from the proper English class he came from. What did that mean to Elliott? I didn’t want to read Elliott’s notes. It would be like reading the diary.

  But I could see that he had been over these books thoroughly. Passages were underlined, circled, double marked in red and black, the flyleaves were covered with markings. I put the books back carefully and I put back Beirut: Twenty-four Hours.

  I had to send for him. Yet I couldn’t. Had to keep the desire in check.

  I took another walk around the room, trying to feel something other than desire, and little spasms of jealousy over the details that had come tripping off Scott’s tongue, trying to feel something a little easier than this obsession.

  Once again: why would a man who could produce something like Beirut: Twenty-four Hours come as a slave to The Club? Did he have to escape the ugliness of something like Beirut?

  There are of course thousands of reasons why slaves come here. In the early days of The Club, they were mostly marginal beings, the half-educated, quasi-artistic, highly imaginative creatures whose careers in no way absorbed their exotic energies. Sado-masochism was a cultural world to them, utterly divorced from their dreary jobs, or repeated failures to get into music, theater, some artistic profession.

  Now they were generally better educated, and usually enjoying the freedom of a protracted adolescence in their late twenties, ready and willing to exploit and explore their desires at The Club, just as they might study at the Sorbonne for a couple of years, undertake Freudian analysis, go to California and live in a Buddhist monastery.

  But they were people by and large who lost themselves in what they did because they had not become themselves yet. Elliott Slater’s life was going full tilt.

  What was his reasoning? Had he been lured into our fun and games, and slowly addicted to it so that he was losing touch with everything out there that was waiting for him, the books he could write, pictures he could take, the assignments that would take him around the world?

  The clash between our little universe and the raw reality of Beirut unnerved me. It gave me the shivers.

  Yet the book was not raw. The book was art. And this place was art. And it struck me that Elliott’s reasons for coming here had nothing to do with escape or renunciation of who he was. His reasons maybe had more to do with the pilgrimage by Burton, and Burton’s obsessions and quests.

  If you have landed in Beirut in the very middle of a war, where you might be killed by a bullet or a terrorist bomb, what is it like to come here where you know you won’t ever be injured—on the contrary, you will be nurtured, watched over, babied—yet all these things will happen to you, these raw humiliations and exposures that most human beings could not possibly bear?

  What had Martin written in the file? “Slave says he wants to explore what he fears most.”

  Yes. This had to be a sexual odyssey for Elliott, a deliberate violence to himself, a plunge into the things he feared in a place where he couldn’t be hurt.

  And the eerie thought came to me that he was really disguised as a slave the way that Burton had been disguised as an Arab when he penetrated the forbidden city. The disguise was nakedness. And I had found his identity in the things he owned, in his clothes.

  Eerie thought, because as far as I knew he was being the perfect slave. He was in tune with us all the way. And I was the one with the jammed gears and the screaming engine. I was dreaming up all this shit about him. I ought to leave him alone!

  I poured a fresh cup of coffee and made a slow promenade of the room.

  Why weren’t we obscene to him compared to the suffering of Beirut? Why wasn’t our sexual paradise the worst sort of decadent contrivance? How could he take it seriously on any level when he took pictures so skillfully of all that?

  I put down the cup of coffee and put my hands to my temples. It was as if the thoughts were hurting my head.

  It came to me again, as it had on the vacation in California and on the plane coming home, that something was very wrong, that something was happening in me, a momentum building that I didn’t understand, to which I didn’t want to lose control.

  T
he Club: Twenty-four Hours. Was it all equal in his mind? But the pictures would never tell the tale.

  I think for the first time in all the years since it had begun, I hated The Club, at least for a moment. I hated it. I had this irrational desire to push out the walls that surrounded me, push up the ceiling, get out. Something brewing, and for a long time.

  The phone was ringing. For a long moment I just stared across the room at it, thinking somebody should answer it before I realized the somebody was me.

  I had a sudden fear that it would be about Elliott, Elliott had “cracked.”

  Very reluctantly, I picked up the phone.

  Richard’s voice: “Lisa, have you forgotten our appointment?”

  “Our what?”

  “With the pony trainer from Switzerland, Lisa. You know our friend with the elegant human stable . . .”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Lisa, the man really has something here, something rather marvelous if you could . . .”

  “You handle it, Richard,” I said. I started to put down the phone.

  “Lisa, I spoke to Mr. Cross. I told him you weren’t feeling too well. Needed some rest. Mr. Cross says it’s up to you to approve all this. You should see the slave ponies, review the whole . . .”

  “Richard, tell Mr. Cross I’ve got a hundred-and-three temperature. You play the ponies. Sounds just great to me.”

  I hung up the phone, shut off the bell, pulled the plug, and knelt down and hid the disconnected phone under the bed.

  I went back to the suitcases. I picked up the silver turtleneck that I had unfolded before, and I pressed it to my face, smelling the rich cologne. I slipped off my negligee and my nightgown. And I pulled the turtleneck over my head. It was like having his skin on, to feel it on my arms, over my breasts, and smell that perfume.

  ELLIOTT

  Chapter 18

  Lisa on My Mind