Exit to Eden

by Anne Rice

  “What would you do without me?” I asked.

  “Gee, Elliott, I don’t know,” she said. “Hold still and let me wipe the sweat from that brow.”

  But I’d also kind of fallen in love with the quilts by that time, learned about the old patterns—Dresden plate, and wedding ring, and flower basket, and lone star, and postage stamp. I was loving the colors, the stitching, the feel of these old things, their clean cotton smell, and the gentle way that the vendors bargained with Lisa and she got them for the price she wanted every time.

  We ate hot dogs from one of the stands, and dozed for a while under a tree in the shade. We were all dusty and sticky and just watching the families pass—the barrel-shaped guys in short-sleeve shirts, the women in shorts and sleeveless tops, the little kids.

  “You like it out here?” she asked.

  “I love it,” I said. “It’s like another country. Nobody could ever find us here.”

  “Yeah. Bonnie and Clyde,” she said. “If they knew who we really were, they’d kill us.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I could handle them if they got rough.” I got up and bought two more cans of beer and sat down again beside her. “What are you going to do with all these quilts?” I asked.

  She looked weird for a moment as though she’d seen a ghost or something. Then she said, “Try to keep warm.”

  “That’s not a very nice thing to say, Bonnie. What about old Clyde here, he can’t keep you warm?”

  She turned one of her rare smiles on me that was pure loveliness.

  “You stick with me, Bonnie,” I said. “And I swear, you’ll never be cold again.”

  On the way back to Dallas, we made love on all the quilts in the back of the car.

  We put them on the bed when we got to the Hyatt and they really classed up the place. Then we swam, had dinner in the room, and then I read aloud to her as she lay beside me on the bed.

  I read a couple of short stories I loved, and a funny part of a James Bond thriller, and my favorite paragraph from a French classic, things like that. She was a terrific listener. I’d always wanted a girl I could read to, and I told her that.

  It was midnight. We got all dressed up again, and went up in the elevator to the Top of the Dome and we danced till the band quit.

  “Let’s go for a drive,” she said. “See the mansions of Turtle Creek and Highland Park by moonlight, you know . . .”

  “Sure, as long as we wake up Rip van Winkle and make him do the driving so I can snuggle with you in the back.”

  I felt like we had been together for years and years. It couldn’t have been any better for me, the way it was moment to moment.

  We stayed in Dallas for four more nights like that.

  We ate take-out chicken and watched the basketball games on TV, and we took turns reading aloud the short stories in the New Yorker, and chapters from the books. We swam in the pool.

  At night we went out to the big glossy Dallas restaurants and the discos and the nightclubs, and sometimes we went for long rides in the clean countryside looking to spot old white farmhouses or old overgrown cemeteries with Confederate dead.

  We walked through old-fashioned streets of little towns at sunset, when the katydids were going at it in the trees and we sat on benches by the town square and we watched slowly, thoughtfully, as the sky lost its color and its light.

  We watched old movies on cable at two in the morning as we snuggled together under the quilts, and we made love all the time.

  Love in the American Hyatt Regency spaceship where everything is brand new and nothing is permanent and the windows are imitations of windows and the walls are imitations of walls, and the lovemaking is so real it is like a thunderstorm, whether or not it is in the spotless bed or in the spotless shower or on the deep, spotless, carpeted floor.

  Off and on we talked. We talked about just the worst things that had ever happened to us, school things, and parent things, and the things we thought were beautiful: paintings, sculptures, music.

  But gradually our conversation started to wind away from ourselves. To cling to other subjects. Maybe she was afraid. Maybe I didn’t want to say any more until she said something very particular that I wanted to hear, and I was being stubborn. I don’t know. We still talked plenty, but it was about everything else.

  We argued Mozart versus Bach, and Tolstoy versus Dostoyevsky, whether or not photography was an art—she said yes, I said no—Hemingway versus Faulkner. We talked like we knew each other very well. We had a horrible fight over Diane Arbus and over Wagner. We agreed on the genius of Carson McCullers and Fellini and Antonioni and Tennessee Williams and Jean Renoir.

  There was a splendid tension, a magical tension. Like any moment something could happen. Very important something either good or bad. And who was going to tip the scales? Like if we started to talk about ourselves again it would have to go a step further and we could not go that step. But hour by hour, it was remarkably wonderful, remarkably good, remarkably just plain all right.

  Except when the Warriors lost to the Celtics in a really crucial play-off game, and we were out of beer and room service was taking forever and I was really, really pissed off. She looked up from her copy of the newspaper and said she had never heard a man shout like that over a ball game, and I told her that this was symbolic violence in all its glory and please shut up.

  “A little too symbolic, don’t you think?” She locked me out of the bathroom and took the longest shower in history. Just to have the final say, I passed out.

  In the middle of the third night I woke up and I realized I was alone in the bed.

  She had pulled the drapes and she was standing at the window looking out at the great steel wilderness of Dallas in which the lights never go out.

  The sky was enormous above her, a deep midnight blue with a panorama of tiny stars. And she looked tiny against the window with her head bowed, and it seemed she was singing something to herself under her breath. Too faint to be sure of. Like the scent of her Chanel.

  When I got up, she turned silently and came to meet me in the middle of the room. We put our arms around each other and just held each other.

  “Elliott,” she said like she was working up to tell me some dreadful secret, but she just laid her head on my shoulder, and I held on to her stroking her hair.

  Under the covers again, she was shuddering and yielding like a half-frightened young girl.

  When I woke up later, she was sitting in the far corner away from the bed, with the silent TV turned towards her, so the light wouldn’t bother me, I guess, just watching it, the blue light flickering on her face, and she was drinking Bombay gin straight with the bottle next to her and smoking my Parliament cigarettes.

  The driver said next afternoon that he had to get home. He liked the money and all and the traveling and the food was terrific, but his brother was getting married at Redemptorist Church in New Orleans and he had to get back.

  But we knew we could have let him take the limo back and just rented a car.

  That wasn’t why we were going back.

  She fell utterly silent at dinner and she looked tragic, which is to say that she looked beautifully, exquisitely, heartrendingly, frighteningly, and wrenchingly sad. And I said, “We’re going back, aren’t we?”

  And she nodded her head. Her hand was shaking. We found a little bar on Cedar Springs where there was a jukebox and we could dance all by ourselves. But she was too tense, too unhappy. We went back before ten o’clock.

  We were both wide awake at four in the morning when the sunlight came down on the glass city. We got dressed up again in our evening clothes and checked out of the hotel. She told the driver to get in the back again, that she wanted to drive.

  “That way you can read to me if you want,” she said.

  I thought that was a great idea, and we hadn’t even tapped Kerouac’s On the Road, my favorite of all the books, which to my amazement she’d never read.

  She looked wonde
rful 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 a 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 were 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.

  ELLIOTT

  Chapter 28

  The Walls of Jericho

  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.
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  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 were a loaded gun. That perpetual smile had left his mouth, but his eyes were still crinkled as if he were 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, palms 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.”