Exit to Eden (2 page)

You can touch and feel the candidates as you inspect them, asking a question now and then of those who are mercilessly ungagged. (Voice trained, we call it. It means trained never to speak except when spoken to, never to express the slightest preference or wish). And occasionally the other trainers draw your attention to a fine specimen, maybe one they don't think they can afford themselves. Now and then there is a gathering of buyers around some extraordinary beauty who is being made to assume a dozen or so revealing positions, respond to a dozen commands.

I have never bothered to paddle or strap a slave at an auction preview. There are others only too willing if you just wait and watch. And the few blows dealt on the block itself at the moment of bidding can tell you all you need to know.

And you hear so much gratuitous wisdom: this slave marks much too easily, you'll never get your money's worth, and this skin feels kitten soft but it's very resilient, or small breasts like that are really the best.

It's an education all right if you can keep away from the champagne. But the really fine trainers reveal little of themselves or the poor shuddering victims they examine. A really fine trainer can learn all he wants by slipping up to a slave and closing his or her hand very suddenly on the back of the slave's neck.

And no small part of the fun is seeing the other trainers who come from all over the world. Gods and goddesses they seem sometimes, slipping out of those black limousines lined up before the doors—everywhere that brand of high fashion that seems luxuriously friable: threadbare denim and open-down-the-front shirts in the thinnest Indian cotton, the off-the-shoulder silk blouse that is about to fall apart. Savaged hair and dagger nails. Or the colder, three-piece-black-suit aristocrats with the square, silver-rimmed glasses, and the perfectly combed short hair. A babble of languages, (though the international language for slaves has pretty much been established as English) and the special imprint of a dozen different nationalities on what is almost invariably an air of command. Even in the sweet-faced ones, the seemingly innocent ones, there is underneath the air of command.

I know trainers when I see them in other places. I have spotted them everywhere from the dirty little pavilion in the Valley of the Kings at Luxor to the veranda of the Grand Hotel Olaffson in Port au Prince.

There are dead giveaways like the broad black leather watch-bands and the high heels you could never find in an ordinary shop. And the way that they undress with their eyes every good-looking man or woman in the room.

Everyone is a potential naked slave to you once you become a trainer. And you carry with you an aura of supercharged sensuality that is almost impossible to shake off. The naked backs of women's knees, the little crease where a bare arm presses against the body, the way a man's shirt stretches across his chest when he puts his hands in his pockets, the movement of a waiter's hips as he bends to retrieve a napkin from the floor: you see all that everywhere you go, feeling that perpetual low hum of excitement. All the world is a pleasure club.

But there is a special pleasure too at the auctions in seeing those few very rich individuals who maintain trainers in their homes or country houses and are permitted to buy slaves through the auction for their own use. They are often stunning, the private owners, a curious lot.

I remember one year there was a handsome eighteen-year-old in the company of two bodyguards going through the catalog with great seriousness and peering from a distance through his violet sunglasses at each victim whom he would then approach and quite deliberately pinch. He was dressed all in black except for a pair of dove-gray gloves that he never removed. I could almost feel those gloves myself when he would pinch one of the slaves. Everywhere he went the bodyguards went, and the trainer, one of the best I should add, was also right at his arm. His father had been keeping a trainer and two slaves for years, and now it was time for the son to learn to enjoy "the sport."

He settled on a very robust boy and girl.

******

Understand when I say a boy and a girl, I don't mean children. The Club and the reputable auction houses don't deal in children for obvious reasons. The private trainers know better than to send them to us. When teenagers do get in sometimes, through trickery or with false papers, we fly them right back out.

By boy or girl, I mean a kind of slave who regardless of his or her real age looks and acts young. There are slaves thirty years old who qualify as boys or girls. And there are slaves of nineteen or twenty who even in bondage and humiliation retain an air of seriousness and injured dignity that makes you think of them as women or men.

Anyway, the eighteen-year-old master bought two very youthful and well-muscled slaves and I remember it because he outbid The Club in the auction for the girl. She was one of those darkly tanned blond-haired creatures who never sheds a tear no matter how hard she is punished, and the master becomes more and more enflamed. I wanted her badly, and I remember being a little out of sorts when I saw her bound up and packed off. The young master observed this and I saw him smile for the first and only time that day.

But I always worry about them, those slaves who go to individual owners. It's not that these owners aren't trustworthy. To buy from a reputable slave auction house or a reputable private trainer, you have to be trustworthy, and your staff must be tested and approved and your house must be safe. It's just that it's lonely and eerie being only one of two or three slaves on a great estate.

I know because that is what I was when I was eighteen. And no matter how handsome or beautiful the master or mistress is, no matter how often there are parties or other entertainments, no matter how vigorous and good the trainers are, there are too many moments when you are left alone with your thoughts.

The Club frightens the slaves at first. It terrifies them. But in a real way, The Club is a great womb. It's an immense community where no one is ever abandoned, and the lights never go out. No real pain or damage is ever inflicted. There are never any accidents at The Club.

But as I was saying, I don't go to the auctions now, and haven't for some time.

I'm simply too busy with my other duties—supervising our little newspaper,
The Club Gazette
, and meeting the insatiable demand for new souvenirs and novelty items sold in The Club Shop.

White leather paddles, straps, boots, blindfolds, even coffee mugs with The Club monogram—we can never design or supply enough. And these items don't end up in bedrooms back in the States. In San Francisco and New York, they are selling, along with back issues of the
Gazette
, for four times the original price. That means this merchandise has come to represent us. All the more reason to make it first rate.

Then there are the new members who have to be guided on their first visits, have the naked slaves personally introduced to them.

And then there is the all-important indoctrination and training and perfecting of the slaves themselves, which is my real work.

A good slave is not merely a thoroughly sexualized being, ready to serve your every whim in bed. A good slave can bathe you, massage you, talk to you if that is what you want, swim with you, dance with you, mix your drinks, feed you your breakfast with a spoon. Just make the right phone call from your room and you can have a specially trained slave ready to play master or mistress expertly, making you the slave as you desire.

******

No, there is no time anymore to go to the auctions.

And besides, I've found it's just as interesting to wait for the new batch of slaves to be delivered and then choose the one I want to train.

We buy enormous numbers, at least thirty at a time if the auctions are big enough, and I'm never disappointed. And for two years now, I've had first pick. That means I choose before any other trainer the slave whom I want to develop myself.

******

It seemed the plane had been circling for an hour.

I was getting more and more anxious. I was thinking, this is like an existentialist play. There is my world down there but I cannot get into it. Maybe it is all something I've imagined. Why the hell can't we land?

I didn't want to think anymore about dreamy Mr. Straight in San Francisco or a dozen other clean-cut faces I'd glimpsed in Dallas or New York. (Was he just about to come over to our table at the Saint Pierre when we left so abruptly, or did my sister make that up?) I didn't want to think about "normal life" or all the little irritations of the vacation weeks.

But as long as we were up here I was still caught in the net. I couldn't shake the atmosphere of big city traffic, the endless small talk, or those hours with my sisters in California, listening to the complaints about careers, lovers, high-priced psychiatrists, "consciousness-raising groups." All the easy jargon about "levels of awareness," and the liberated spirit.

And my mother so disapproving as she made out the list for the communion breakfast, saying what people needed was to go to confession, and there didn't have to be psychiatrists, old-guard Catholicism mixed up with the tired expression on her face, the irrepressible innocence in her small black eyes.

I had never come so dangerously close to telling them all about "that certain spa" that was always being mentioned in the gossip columns, that scandalous "Club" they'd read about in
Esquire
and
Playboy
. "Guess who created it? Guess what we do with 'levels of awareness' at The Club?"

Ah, sadness. Barriers that can never be broken.

You only hurt people when you tell them the truth about things that they cannot respect or understand. Imagine my father's face. (There wouldn't be any words.) And imagine a flustered Mr. Straight hurriedly paying for the coffee and the croissants in that Pacific Coast hotel dining room. ("Well, I guess I better drive you back to San Francisco now.") No, don't imagine that.

Better to lie and lie well, as Hemingway put it. Telling the truth would be as stupid as turning around in a crowded elevator and saying to everybody: "Look, we're all mortal; we're going to die, get buried in the ground, rot. So when we get out of this elevator…" Who gives a damn?

I am almost home, almost okay.

We were crossing the island now, and the sun exploded on the surface of the half-dozen swimming pools. It flashed from a hundred dormer windows in the main building. And everywhere in the verdant paradise below I could see movement, crowds on the croquet lawn and on the luncheon terrace, tiny figures running beside their mounted masters or mistresses along the bridle paths.

Finally the pilot announced the landing, the gentle reminder to fasten my seat belt.

"We're going in, Lisa."

I felt the air in the small cabin subtly change. I shut my eyes, imagining for a moment some thirty "perfect" slaves, that it would be difficult for once to make my choice.

Give me one really unusual slave, I was thinking, one true challenge, something really interesting…

I felt suddenly, unaccountably, like I was going to cry. And something happened in my head. There was some little explosion in slow motion. And then fragments of thought or fantasy like the bits and pieces of dreams left over the next day. But what was the content? It was disintegrating almost too quickly for me to know.

Some image of a human being broken open, penetrated, but not in any literal sense. Rather a being laid bare by the delicacy of sado-masochistic ritual—until you reached out and you touched the beating heart of the person and it was this miracle, because the truth is, you've never seen anybody else's beating heart and up until this moment of touching you thought it was just a myth.

Not in good mental shape. Almost unpleasant thought.

I hear my own heart. I have heard and felt the pulse of hundreds and hundreds of other hearts. And no matter how good the slaves are, no matter how exquisite, it will all be the same in. a couple of hours.

That's why I want to be back here, isn't it?

That is what I'm supposed to want.

They told me to bring any clothing I would want when it came time to leave. How did I know what I'd want when it came time to leave? I'd signed a two-year contract for The Club, and I wasn't even thinking about when I would leave. I was thinking about when I would arrive.

So I filled up a couple of suitcases pretty quickly, and put on the "dispensable clothes" they'd told me to wear for the trip. And then there was an overnight case with what I might require on board.

But at the last moment I threw in my tuxedo, thinking, what the hell, maybe I'd go to Monte Carlo as soon as it was over and gamble every cent they'd paid me for the two years. It seemed a perfect thing to do with the hundred grand. I mean it was such an irony that they were paying me anything. I would have paid them.

And I packed my new book too, though why I wasn't sure. It might still be in a few bookstores when I got out, if the wars in the Middle East were still going on. Photography books tend to stick around that way, but then again maybe not.

I just had this idea that I should look at it as soon as I left The Club, maybe even page through it on the plane out. It might be really important to remind myself of what I'd been before I went in. But what were the odds that I'd still think I was a pretty good photographer by then? Maybe in two years it would all look like trash.