Exit to Eden (17 page)

Old-fashioned rooms, high ceilings, dim lamplight on the papered walls. The solarium, the schoolroom, the master's bedroom, and now the boudoir, waiting for me, satin slippers, the whip, the paddle, the strap, the harnesses, and the illusion perfect to the daguerreotypes in their little golden ovals on the dresser, the silver-backed hairbrush, the bottles of perfume catching the light in their crystal facets, the roses fresh and moist and nodding amid the wreath of fern in the silver vase.

"Now for the right person the pay is excellent, if I do say so myself, but you see it's rather like joining a club…"

"Or a religious order."

Soft respectful laughter. "Yes."

******

Weekend after weekend, I made the drive across the bridge to those mysterious rooms, the doomed and fragile strangers, the ambience of loveliness and sensuality, the place they call The House. My House.

Oh, I know exactly what they feel, know what to say and the words sometimes are everything, know when to exert the pressure, know when to give the tender kiss.

Maybe things were under control, the way I had always wanted them, at last.

******

And then the mysterious night flight to Rome two years later, Martin and I getting pleasantly drunk in first class, and the long limousine ride to Siena through the rolling, green Italian countryside.

A weekend conference with other talents in the secret world of exotic sex: Alex from the The House in Paris, one of Martin's old protegees, Christine from Berlin. I don't even recall some of the others, except they were all so refined, so clever, the wine flowing in the villa above the city, with all the good veal suppers, and those young dark-eyed Italian boys slipping like shadows through the hall.

Mr. Cross had come in his own plane with five bodyguards. Three Mercedes-Benz limos winding up the hill, towards the villa. "When is somebody going to tell me what this is all about?"

"But you've heard of him, surely," Martin said. The hotel chain and the sex magazine empire—
Dreambaby, Xanadu
—and the wife from Mississippi who didn't understand anything that was happening and wanted pizza to eat.

"Unreal money," Martin sighed with a slight lift of the eyebrows. "The best kind."

Was it possible? We were all gathered around the sixteenth-century table to discuss it.

A posh club, set somewhere in the world where the laws would in no way intrude, and all the pleasures that Martin Halifax and others like him had so cleverly invented. Think of it…

"Well, you know, a real getaway," Alex was saying. "Deluxe accommodations, food, swimming pools, tennis, the works. And then the sex. Any kind of sex. Something absolutely therapeutic if you think about it. Doctors will send their patients to us."

I winced at the word therapeutic. Martin hated it.

And the quiet voice of Mr. Cross, the man at the end of the table, our financier.

"You see, there is this possibility, a Caribbean island. Well, it would be almost as if we were an autonomous country, with our own laws. But we would still have the protection of the government that I've been talking about. I mean like there is no way that we would have to worry about any sort of intervention or any, you know, underworld muscle coming in. I mean where we would be, we would be strictly legit. We would have our own clinic, a decent police force if we ever needed it…"

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 sportfuck 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 Ancien 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?

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 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.