Exit to Eden (28 page)

I pulled off her jacket, broke open the vest, starting pulling the shirt off her. When she bent to unbuckle her belt, her hair fell down over her naked breasts, and something about the movement, the bent head, her hands loosening the tightness around her waist, breaking open the pants, went right to my brain. I pulled the pants down and lifted her out of them, crushing her naked bottom in my fingers.

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 her 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 some out of her face and changed all her personal things from a black leather bag to a brown feather 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."

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 vacations 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.