Exit to Eden

by Anne Rice

  I went down on my knees in front of her, burrowing my head into her sex, and then my face and licking her and kissing her.

  “I can’t, I can’t stand it,” she whispered. She was clawing at my head, pressing me against her and then pushing me back. “It’s too intense, stop it. Come into me,” she said, “it’s too, it’s too . . .”

  I had my own clothes off in a second. And I pushed her up on the bed, so that she was sitting at the very foot of it, and I pushed her legs apart and looked at her naked sex and the way that it was breathing, moving, the hair glistening, the lips pink and secret and quivering.

  “I want you inside of me,” she said, and I looked up at her face and it seemed for a second too exquisite to be human, just as the sex seemed too savage, too animalian, too secretly different from all the rest of her to be human. We moved back on the bed together, kind of rolling over, kissing and just rubbing against each other naked.

  I went down on her again, spreading her wide apart and this time she didn’t resist.

  But she couldn’t keep still. She started thrashing under me. I was licking her and kissing her, and diving my tongue into her, drenched in her clean, salty, charcoal smell, and licking at the silky hair, and she was going absolutely crazy. She clawed at me again, and told me to get on top of her. But I couldn’t stand not doing it, I had to do it just a little bit more, taste her, have her like that, get into her.

  I turned around and I got into the 69 position and I felt her mouth take hold of my cock, and then she was all right with me suckling her and licking her. She was locked on, sucking strong and passionately as a man, as if she liked to do it. She sucked stronger and stronger, her hand around the base of my cock, her mouth really wet and steady, and I was plunged into her sex, stroking the depth of it with my tongue, really wet with her, saturated with her, while her fingers were pinching the welts on my backside, stroking them and scratching at them. I moved back to let her know I was going to come, but she locked her arms even tighter around me and when I came in her, I felt her delicious little cunt contracting, her hips thrust against me, this little mouth of hers shuddering under my mouth, her whole body burning up. It went on and on, and I could hear her moaning, giving the same cries again against my cock. She came like a chain reaction of explosions. I came until I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  I lay back thinking I had never done that with a woman. With at least 568 men, probably, but never in that position with a woman. And I had always wanted to do that. But I was mainly thinking I loved her, that I really loved her.

  The second time it was a lot slower. We didn’t start right away.

  I think I slept maybe a half hour, I don’t know how long it was, under the covers, with the dim lamp on still and the rain falling a little slower, the sounds that same symphony of the rain on a hundred surfaces and the water flowing in the rain pipes and the gutters.

  Then I got up and turned off the lamp. And we snuggled together again, only now I was fully awake. I could see the raindrops like tiny silver lights clinging to the slats of the green wooden shutters and hear all the other rough, mingled sounds that make up the French Quarter, the dim blast of the Bourbon Street clubs only a block away, the loud roar of cars in the narrow streets, that jukebox pumping out some older, more deep-throated rhythm and blues song that almost brought back with it a memory. Smell of New Orleans. Smell of the earth and flowers.

  When we finally started again it was tender. And we were kissing each other all over. We kissed each other under the arms and on the nipples, and on the belly. On the inside of the thighs and in back of the knees.

  I went into her and she broke loose, her head all the way back, her cries like they’d been before, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, as I came in her.

  When it was finished, I knew I was going to sleep for a million years and I got up on my elbow and looked down at her, cradling her in my arms, and I said, “I love you.”

  Her eyes were closed. She squeezed her eyebrows together for one instant, and she reached up to pull me down against her. She said “Elliott” like she was scared, really scared, and she just lay there under me, holding onto me.

  A little while after, dreamily, it occurred to me to tell her that I’d never said this to anyone before, but that seemed arrogant. I mean why was that special? All it meant was that I was a jerk of sorts. And I was too sleepy with her next to me, curled up against me, to say anything. She hadn’t answered me, really, but then why should she? Or maybe she had. Think of it that way.

  And she was petal soft now and sweet and her perfume and her juices mingled in this overpowering aroma that kept bringing the pleasure back in waves over me.

  I woke up very abruptly two hours later. I didn’t want to be asleep anymore no matter how tired I was.

  I got up and opened my suitcases and started to put some of the clothes away, my eyes used to the dark, and the light through the slats of the blinds enough to see everything. But I realized I didn’t know how long we were going to stay here. I couldn’t think about going back to The Club right now. What had she said, it was “heavy duty” switching back and forth.

  She sat up and sat still with her arms around her knees watching me.

  I put on a white turtleneck shirt, khaki pants, and the only clean safari jacket that was in the suitcase. It was the best of the bunch actually, the military khaki jacket from the army surplus store, and it wasn’t badly wrinkled. And I loved it. I never put it on that I didn’t think of some of the places around the world I’d been in it, El Salvador, for instance. Not too good to think of that one. But Cairo, okay, and Haiti, sure, and Beirut of course, and Teheran and Istanbul and dozens of other strange memories.

  She got out of bed and I think a tight wire in me snapped rather comfortably when I saw she was unpacking just about everything. No leather skirts or boots. She hung up gorgeous little velvet suits and skimpy gowns and threw dozens of high-heel shoes on the floor of the closet.

  Then she put on a little dark blue polka-dotted silk dress that went down over her angles and curves softly and beautifully, with long cuffs at the wrists that made her hands look longer and full sleeves and a little smocking at the shoulders. She tied the cloth belt around her waist, which brought the hem up nicely over her knees and made her breasts into two dark points under the silk, and she didn’t bother with pantyhose, thank God, and she put on a pair of navy blue leather shoes with heels like ice picks.

  “No, don’t do that,” I said. “The thing about this city is it’s great to walk in. We can take a walk after we eat. It’s utterly flat. We can walk anyplace. Put on some low shoes so we can walk.”

  She said all right. She put on a pair of natural brown leather sandals with lower stacked heels. She brushed her hair loose, and put her sunglasses up on the top of her head to hold her hair back out of her face and changed all her personal things from a black leather bag to a brown leather bag and we were ready.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  The question surprised me. Wasn’t she going to tell me?

  “Well, Manale’s on Napoleon,” I said. “It’s nine o’clock, we might have to wait for a table, but we can have some oysters in the bar.”

  She gave a little nod of approval and smiled uncertainly, very pretty smile while it lasted.

  “You didn’t keep the limo, did you?” I asked, moving towards the phone. “I’ll call a cab.”

  ELLIOTT

  Chapter 22

  The First Layer

  In the cab we didn’t say anything to each other. I didn’t know what to say to her. There was just the pounding excitement of being with her and the fun of being back in New Orleans, riding up Saint Charles Avenue under the oak trees towards Napoleon and thinking of all the things we could do if she let us stay here. Let us, let us, let us. I almost asked her if this was done often, but I didn’t want to just yet. Or maybe not ever.

  Years ago when I discovered Manale’s you never had to wait, but now the whole world knows about
it. The oyster bar was so crowded we could hardly hear each other, but we started right into two dozen raw oysters on the half shell and two beers.

  “How did you first come to New Orleans?” she asked, drinking the beer fast the way I did, and devouring the oysters. She sounded natural, like we were just a couple on a date. “I found it on my first vacation from The Club,” she said. “Fell in love with it. And after that every time I had to get away from The Club for a few days I came here.”

  “Vacations with my mom and dad,” I said. “For Mardi Gras mainly.” The beer and the oysters were too good to be food for humans. “They’d take me out of school to come down for that week every year.”

  I told her about the little mansion hotel on Saint Charles Avenue where we stayed—she knew it, great place, she said—and then making the oyster festivals and the gumbo festivals in Cajun country.

  “Yes, I want to do that too,” she said. “Go into the Cajun country. I almost did it several times. But I’m so in love with the town . . .”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. And I kissed her on the cheek.

  “I do photo stories all the time on New Orleans just to get down here,” I said. The kiss had caught her off guard. Every time I kissed her it caught her off guard. “The pay’s lousy,” I said. “I usually lose more than I make. But I can’t resist it. I’ve done ten articles in the last five years.”

  “So you’re glad . . . that we’re . . . that we came here?”

  “Are you kidding?” I tried to kiss her again, but she turned away like she hadn’t seen me, but she had. She took a deep drink of her beer.

  She said she spent six weeks down here once all alone in a Garden District apartment right off Washington Avenue doing nothing but reading and taking walks in the afternoon. Yes, it was great for walking, this city. I was right about that.

  She was softening all over, her manner changing. She was smiling. Her cheeks were just a little flushed.

  I think at The Club she was always aware of people watching her, probably more so than a slave would be. Now she just got lost in what she was saying and she ate the oysters and drank the beer just like I thought she would, sensuously and enjoying every morsel, every drop.

  By ten o’clock I was deliriously high, that kind of high you only get from beer, and when you haven’t had anything to drink for a while.

  We were in the crowded dining room under the glaring lights and everybody was talking loudly and she was buttering the bread and going on rapidly and easily all about her one big side trip, this plantation house out in the country that she went in by herself when she rented a car and drove to Saint Jacques Parish alone not knowing how she had managed to do it.

  She just wanted to see the old ruined house and there was nobody to go with so she went by herself. She talked about this powerless feeling she’d always had, even in California where she grew up, that she couldn’t do anything unless there was somebody with her, and how this was one city where for some reason she didn’t have it. She did things by herself. I wondered if the noisiness of the dining room wasn’t helping both of us. She was beautifully animated and her neck and her hands were extraordinarily graceful and the dress made all these shadows in the right places in the glare of the lights.

  And then came the barbecue shrimp, which was nothing short of fantastic, and she started in at once.

  I don’t think I could love a woman that couldn’t eat this barbecue shrimp. First of all the dish isn’t barbecued at all. It’s a mess of giant whole shrimp, with their heads on, baked in the oven in a deep dish of peppery marinade. They bring it to the table just like that and you tear off the heads of the shrimp and peel them and eat them with your fingers. It turns you into a gourmet, then a gourmand, and then a barbarian. You can enjoy it with white wine or red, it’s so peppery, but the best way is with beer, she agreed with me, and we had three more Heinekens each and dipped the french bread in the marinade and cleaned up both the dishes when we were finished. I wanted some more.

  “I’m really starving,” I said. “I haven’t had anything but slop since I went to prison. I saw what the members were eating. Why do you have to feed the slaves such slop?”

  She laughed out loud.

  “To keep your mind focused on sex,” she said. “Sex has got to be the only pleasure you have. We can’t have you looking forward to dinner, you know, when you’re supposed to be making love to a new member in Bungalow One. And don’t call it prison. It’s supposed to be heaven.”

  “Or hell anyway,” I said laughing. “I’ve always wondered how we masochists that managed to get saved would ever explain to the angels that we would rather be tormented by a couple of devils, you know, I mean, if it’s supposed to be heaven and there are no devils, then it’s really going to be hell.”

  That really broke her up. Next best thing to making a woman come is making her laugh.

  I ordered another dish of shrimp and we both dug into it. And by this time the dining room was thinning out. In fact, we were closing down Manale’s and I was doing all the talking about photographing New Orleans and the way it should and shouldn’t be done, and then she started asking me how I got into photography, when I had the Ph.D. in English and what they had to do with each other, the Ph.D. and photography.

  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 ha
d 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?”