The handlers lifted her off the floor. She kicked furiously as they carried her out the open door.
When it closed softly behind her, Richard and I glanced at each other.
“Ari’s on line one.”
I picked up the phone.
“Honest to God, Lisa, I don’t understand this. That girl can’t be sixteen. If she is, I’m losing my mind.”
“Ari, I just saw her. Miss Teenage America. Cut the crap.”
“I’m telling you the truth, Lisa, this is over my head. She had papers all over the place. Did you test her, Lisa? She’s been working as a cocktail waitress for two years in the Village. Lisa, she’s a stick of dynamite, I’m telling you, she can’t be sixteen, she taught me tricks.”
“We don’t buy from you again, ever, Ari,” I said.
“Lisa, you can’t do this to me. You don’t understand . . .”
“Not if it’s Racquel Welch’s body and Greta Garbo’s head.”
“Lisa, she could have fooled God. I’ve sold you the best merchandise this side of the Rockies, you can’t get slaves out of the eastern states from anyone . . .”
“Ever hear of Gregory Sanchez in New Orleans, or Peter Slesinger in Dallas? You sold us a minor, Ari, a sixteen-year-old girl. We can’t trust you, Ari. Good-bye.”
I put down the phone.
I leaned against the high back of the chair and looked at the ceiling.
“I’ve pulled the files on the other two he sold us,” Richard said, sauntering towards the desk with his hands in his pockets. “No other questions, really. The male slave is at least twenty-three, probably a little bit older, and the woman is twenty-nine.” He was watching me. “It’s top merchandise,” he said with a little tilt of his head.
I nodded.
“What about the money?”
“Let it go,” I said. “She won’t ever see a nickel of it if I know Ari, and I don’t want any more conversations with Ari. I don’t like playing policeman for children and liars.”
“But that’s just it,” Richard said coolly, “she was no child.” He squinted the way he always did when he was serious, making his eyes smaller, more bright. “She probably menstruated when she was eleven, lost her virginity, if they still use that barbaric expression, when she was thirteen. She was everything she said she was. Probably worked Ari’s private rooms for six months. She had an orgasm when I touched her. You smack her with the paddle and the skin comes alive right before your eyes.”
I nodded.
“I know all these old arguments. From Kathmandu to Kansas, our name means no minors, no crazies, no captives, no drugs. Consenting adults!”
He looked away a little wistfully, eyes narrow again and distant, all the deep lines in his face emphasizing his expression as they always did. He raked his fingers back through his hair.
“Don’t be so abrasive,” he said under his breath. “She was my pick. I turned her in.”
“I don’t like to praise people for doing the least that’s expected of them. Shall I make an exception now and praise you?”
“But is it fair, the rule? I mean after what she’s been doing and what she’s learned?”
“You’re going to make me into a schoolmarm or a sociologist,” I said. I felt angry. “Let me remind you, in case you’ve forgotten, what this place is. It isn’t a chain of dimly lit rooms to which you retire on Saturday night to act out the rituals of which you’ve dreamed all week. It’s total. It’s an environment that engulfs you and obliterates the reality of any other environment you’ve ever known. It’s your fantasies made real!”
I stopped. I was really steaming. I tried to keep my voice down.
“You have to remember what those years are,” I said. “I mean the years between sixteen and twenty-one—what they mean.”
“They don’t mean chastity and obedience anymore,” he said.
“They aren’t just ordinary years in a person’s life! It’s her youth she’d be spending on us, and we don’t need anything that valuable from her or from anyone else. We can fuel our fires with much cheaper and more negotiable energy. I don’t care how pliant she is, how beautiful, how ready! What do you think she’d be like . . . after two years?”
“I understand,” he said.
I wasn’t sure I did. There had been a touch of hysteria in my voice. I kept seeing the estate in Hillsborough again, my first master, that highway down which we’d come in the limousine. The arguments with Jean Paul. Oh, if only there had been a Martin Halifax then.
The sheer size and weight of The Club oppressed me suddenly. How many more things would happen before the new season settled in?
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” I said under my breath. “Maybe once in a while this place gets on my nerves.”
“Well, adolescence was pretty complicated for all of us, I suspect. Maybe we all have our regrets about those teenage years. . .”
“I don’t have any regrets,” I said. “But I wasn’t in The Club when I was sixteen or eighteen or twenty, that’s the whole point. I could come and go, in and out. No high wires for me without a net.”
He nodded.
“But it’s not just a matter of the minors themselves,” I said. “There’s more written about us every day. We’re almost common knowledge now in certain circles. I’d be willing to bet anyone—and I mean anyone—who sets out to get in touch with us could do it. And nobody must ever be able to cook up a story about minors, or crazies, or captives in this place.”
It was surprising actually that no one had fabricated such things before now. Because every story about us had been written “around us,” that is without our acknowledgment or consent. There had never been a scrap of proof behind anything that was written except blurry aerial photos that revealed nothing at all. No reporter had ever gotten inside.
But there were a lot of reasons for this. Members were blackballed without refund of fees if they were connected to the slightest public mention, and the enormous fees they paid, as well as our investigative process, thoroughly eliminated reporter spies.
Cameras weren’t allowed on the island. Our own monitoring equipment did not record, so there was nothing to steal. And the electronic devices at virtually all exit points thoroughly ruined any smuggled film or magnetic tape.
As for the slaves, the handlers, and the drivers, and all the other employees, it was simple economics. They made fabulous salaries, and the fringe benefits were intoxicating, to say the least. Booze, food, slaves when they wanted them, the employees’ pool, the beach. Nobody could pay them enough for an exposé, because the exposé itself wasn’t worth that much, and they were washed up at any club in the world if they “talked.” Only a disgruntled few, ones who’d been fired, had ever broken the silence, and the unsubstantiated accounts were badly written, sordid, poor-grade stuff even for the tabloids that ran them, as I had indicated to the girl.
But when people write “around” you, they can say anything, and there had been amazingly few distortions in the big Esquire and Playboy stories, and even in the tabloids there were no out-and-out lies.
“It’s not a matter of whether the girl is ready,” I said. “It’s a matter of being careful, of being completely clean.”
“I agree,” he said. “But there is too much money now in this place to get so worked up about it. And all I’m saying is that some of these minors are no more minors than I am.”
“Don’t kid yourself. Not everyone in this world is afraid of money.” It had a sneer to it. This was all getting too rough. “Look, Richard, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not myself tonight. My vacation was too damned long. I hate going home. The outside world got on my nerves.”
“Of course . . .” he said softly.
An odd feeling was creeping over me again. I saw Elliott Slater’s face, felt his mouth. I had an unexpected memory of that guy in the bar in San Francisco, Mr. Straight. Three days down there. God, I was tired. Now maybe I could sleep. Maybe all the memories would just pack u
p and go home.
“Well, for tonight, you’ve done your duty to your slaves and their masters,” Richard said. “Why don’t you get out of here and have some fun.”
Subtle change in Richard’s face.
And I realized that it was purely a reaction to the change in my face. I was aware that I had shifted my gaze to him and I did not feel at all like myself.
“Have some fun?” I asked.
He was studying me. He nodded. Worry in his face.
“Is that what you said? Have some fun?” I asked.
He waited.
“I want an exception made, Richard,” I said. “Elliott Slater. I want him reprieved and brought to my quarters tomorrow afternoon.”
“Hmmmmm, you are not yourself, as you said. You’ll have the young man in three days.”
“No,” I said. “You made your little stand for the rules in front of everyone. Now make the private exception. I want Slater tomorrow afternoon. They aren’t to touch him in the morning; bath and rest by ten. My room at one P.M. Put the order through now. No one is going to know the difference. The other postulants are too damn busy, and the trainers are overworked as we well know, and I don’t give a damn.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said: “You’re the boss.”
“Yes, the boss and the mastermind . . .” I said.
“But of course,” he said quietly. “If you feel that strongly about it. Tomorrow, after lunch.”
I rose and started towards the door.
“Something’s really wrong, isn’t it?” he asked.
“What?”
“And it didn’t start on your vacation,” he said softly. “It’s been brewing for a while.”
“No,” I said. I shook my head. “Just tired. Make sure they send Slater to me at one o’clock. Will you do that?”
“Very well, my dear. Hope it does the trick.”
LISA
Chapter 11
Welcome to The House
Something wrong, something brewing for a long time? Regrets about those teenage years? There had to be some reason for this ambush of memories, didn’t there?
Hope it does the trick
I stood in the garden outside the administration building, and I looked up at the stars, always so brilliantly clear when there were no clouds, as if the sky were sliding down to the sea. Japanese lanterns gave off their low flicker in the flower beds. Lilies under the dark lace of the crepe myrtle were as white as the moon.
My mouth started tingling as if I were kissing him again. And he was only steps away, wasn’t he?
Do you know there are three thousand members here tonight, Elliott Slater? Oh, we are such a success.
Distant sound of the plane from the far side of the island. Miss Teenage America already taking off, back to the hypocrisy and the absurdities of adolescence. Sorry and good luck.
But I hadn’t any regrets, it wasn’t that. Richard was wrong, at least on that score. It would be a terrible lie to say I hadn’t done what I wanted from the beginning with those early lovers, and in fighting Jean Paul finally, refusing to go on.
Something was brewing maybe, something I didn’t understand, but I had made my own choices always.
And certainly I made my own choice on the night when Martin Halifax had first called.
Of course I’d heard of him, the mysterious owner of the place they called The House. In a moment of exquisite ambivalence I’d almost put down the phone.
“No, I have a different sort of opportunity for you, Lisa,” he had said. “Something you might find easier just now. You might try it from the other side, you see.”
American voice. Like the older priests in childhood, the ones who didn’t sound like Protestant ministers, the ones who were real old-guard Irish-Catholic priests.
“Other side?”
“The finest slaves make the finest mistresses and masters,” he said. “I would so love to talk to you, Lisa. About your becoming, shall we say, a part of The House? If you’re afraid for any reason to come here, I’ll meet you wherever you like.”
The basement den of the Victorian that they call The House. Strangely, amusingly, like my father’s library except it was filled with more expensive things, more cut off from the noise of the world outside. None of the Catholic books on the walls. No dust.
Martin himself. That wonderful voice connected at last with the friendliest face I’d ever seen. Simple, unaffected, amazingly straightforward.
“It was strictly a belief, a suspicion the way that it began,” he said, with his fingertips touching for an instant before he folded his arms on the desk. “That out there, caught in the web of modern life, there were hundreds of other men like me, maybe thousands really, roaming the bars, the streets, looking—in spite of danger and disease and ridicule and God knows what—for the place to enact those little dramas, those rich and frightening little dramas we have known over and over in our souls.”
“Yes.” I think I smiled.
“I don’t believe it is wrong, you see. I never believed it was wrong. No. Each of us has within him a dark chamber where the real desires flower; and the horror of it is that they never see the light of another’s understanding, those strange blooms. It is as lonely as it is dark, that chamber of the heart.”
“Yes.” I sat forward a little, unexpectedly disarmed, interested.
“I wanted to create a very special house,” he said, “as special as is the chamber inside us. The house where the desires could come to the light. A house that would be clean and warm and safe.”
Are we all poets, we masochists? Are we all dreamers, dramatists at heart? There was something so innocent about his expression, so matter-of-fact. There was not the faintest hint of coarseness to him, or subterfuge, or the dark humor that shame can produce.
“. . . and over the years I’ve discovered that there are more of us than I can ever admit or satisfy here, that the range of desires is far more intricate than I ever supposed . . .”
He had paused, smiled at me.
“I need a woman, Lisa, a young woman, but she can’t be just a hireling. There are no pure hirelings in The House. She has to know what we feel to work with us. You understand this is no ordinary brothel, Lisa. This is a place of elegance and sometimes beauty. And you might think me mad for saying so, but this is a place of love.”
“Oh, yes.”
“In love there is understanding, there is respect for the innermost secrets. There is compassion for the very root of desire itself.”
“I understand. I know.”
“Come upstairs with me. Let me show you the rooms. We are not therapists here. We are not doctors here. We ask no questions as to why or wherefore. We are only believers in this refuge, this little citadel for those who all their sexual lives have been in exile. We exist for those who want what we give.”
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 protégées, 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. . .”