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.
ELLIOTT
Chapter 3
&nbs
p; The Voyage In
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.
As for El Salvador—the book that didn’t get done, the book I was leaving undone—well, it was too late now.
All I cared about on that score was shaking this eerie sense that I ought to be dead, just because some asshole had almost seen to it, this feeling it was some kind of special miracle that I was living and breathing and walking around.
It was strange the last evening. I was sick and tired of waiting. Ever since I’d signed the contract, it had been nothing but waiting, turning down the assignments from Time I’d ordinarily jump at, drawing away from everybody I knew. And then the final call.
The same genial, well-bred voice. An American “gentleman,” or an American behaving like a British gentleman without the British inflection, something of that sort.
I closed up the house in Berkeley and went to Max’s at the Opera Plaza and had a drink. Nice to look around at the crowd against all that brass and plate glass and neon light. Some of the most beautifully finished women in San Francisco pass through Opera Plaza. You see them in the Italian restaurant, Modesto Lanzone, or in Max’s. Gorgeously painted ladies with professionally done hair and couturier clothes. Always wonderful to look at.
And then there’s the big bookstore, true to its name, “A Clean Well Lighted Place,” where I could pick up half a dozen Simenon mysteries for the voyage, and some Ross MacDonald and le Carré, same high-grade escapist stuff I’d read in the hotel room at three o’clock in the morning when the bombs were dropping on Damascus.
Almost called home to say good-bye again, but then didn’t, and then I took a cab to the waterfront address.
Nothing but a deserted warehouse, until the cab had pulled away, and then a well-dressed man appeared, one of those nondescript guys you see everywhere in the financial district of a city at noontime, gray suit, warm handshake.
“You must be Elliott Slater.” He led me out onto the pier.
A handsome yacht was anchored there, dead quiet like a white ghost ship, with its string of lights reflected in the black water, and I went up the gangplank alone.
Another man appeared, this one a lot more interesting, young or at least my age, with nicely unkempt blond hair, and very tanned skin. His white shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and he gave an extraordinary display of beautiful teeth when he smiled.
He showed me to my cabin, and took the suitcases off my hands.
“You won’t see these again for two years,” he said in a very friendly manner. “Is there anything perhaps you want, Elliott, just for the trip? Everything in your cabin will be put in these afterwards, your wallet, passport, that watch of yours, anything you leave.”
I was a little startled. We were standing very close together in the passage and I realized this meant he knew what I was, where they were taking me. He wasn’t somebody who merely worked on the yacht.
“Don’t worry about anything,” he said. He was standing right under the light, and it showed a few freckles on his nose, the sun streaks in his hair. He slipped something small out of his pocket and I saw it was a gold chain with a nameplate. “Give me your right wrist,” he said.
It raised the hairs on the back of my neck, the touch of his fingers as he put the bracelet on me and snapped the clasp.
“Your meals will be pushed through that slot. You won’t see anyone, or talk to anyone during the voyage. But the doctor will come for a final check. The door won’t be locked until then.”
He opened the cabin door. Soft amber light inside. Dark-grained wood under a sheen of plastic lacquer. His words had set up a din in my head. The door won’t be locked until then. And the little bracelet felt annoying, like a cobweb clinging to me. I read my first name on the plate and something like a code of numbers and letters beneath it. I felt hairs rise again on my neck.
The cabin was okay. Rich, brown leather armchairs, mirrors all over the place, large bunk with too many cushions, built-in video monitor with a library of films on laser disc under it, lots of books. Sherlock Holmes of all things, and the erotic classics, Story of O, Justine, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, Romance of the Rod.
There was a coffee grinder-maker, beans in a glass canister, a refrigerator full of French mineral water and American soda, a tape player, and unopened decks of exquisitely decorated cards. I picked up one of the paperback Sherlock Holmeses.
Then the door opened without a knock. And I jumped.
It was the doctor, obviously, in a starched white coat. With an easy, amiable expression, he set down the inevitable black bag. I wouldn’t have guessed he was a doctor without the coat and the bag. He looked like a weedy adolescent, even a little pimply still and washed out, and his short brown hair was as messy as short hair can get. Maybe he was a resident just off twenty-four-hour duty. And with a polite but preoccupied look, he had out the stethoscope immediately, asking me to take off my shirt. Then he removed a manila file from the bag and opened it on the bed.
“Mr. Elliott Slater,” he said, scratching the back of his head, and looking at me for definite verification. He was already thumping on my chest. “Twenty-nine. In good health? No major problems of any kind? Regular doctor?” He turned to consult the file again, and glance over the signed report of physical examination. “All this has been checked out,” he hummed half under his breath. “But we like to ask you face to face just the same.”
I nodded.
“You work out, don’t you? You don’t smoke. That’s good.”
Of course my private physician hadn’t known what the examination was for when he filled out the report. “Fit to participate in a long-term strenuous athletic program” was jotted on the blank portion at the bottom in his near indecipherable hand.
“Everything seems in order, Mr. Slater,” said the doctor, putting the file back in his bag. “Eat well, sleep well, enjoy the voyage. You won’t be able to see much out of the windows; they’re covered with a film which will make the scenery something of a blur. And we have one recommendation, that you refrain from any private sexual stimulation during the trip.” He was looking me directly in the eye. “You know what I mean . . .”
I was startled, but I tried not to show it. So he understood everything, too. I didn’t answer.
“When you arrive at The Club, you should be in a state of sexual tension,” he said as he moved to the door. He might as well have been telling me to take an aspirin and call next week. “You’ll perform much better if you are. I’m going to lock the door now, Mr. Slater. It will open automatically if there is any emergency on the vessel and there is more than adequate lifesaving equipment, but for no other reason will it be opened. Is there perhaps any last question you want
to ask?”
“Hmmmm. Last question!” I couldn’t resist laughing under my breath. But I couldn’t think of anything. My heart was clipping along a little too fast. I looked at him for a moment. Then I said: “No, thank you, Doctor. I think everything’s been covered. That’s tough about not jerking off, but I never did want hair to grow in the palms of my hands.”
He laughed so suddenly that he looked like somebody else. “Enjoy yourself, Mr. Slater,” he said trying to get his smile under control. The door shut behind him, and I heard the lock turn.
For a long moment I sat on the bunk staring at the door. I could already feel a stirring between my legs. But I decided I would try to play the game. It would be like being twelve years old again and feeling guilty just on general principles. And besides, I knew he was right. Better to land at The Club with all systems revved and ready for action rather than on an empty tank.
And for all I knew they were watching me through the mirrors. I was theirs now. It’s a wonder it didn’t say “Slave” on the bracelet. I’d signed all the papers myself.
I took one of the books off the shelf . . . one that wasn’t erotic, and making myself comfortable on all the pillows, started to read. James M. Cain. Terrific stuff, but I’d already read it. I reached for the Sherlock Holmes. It was a wonderful facsimile of the original Strand Magazine printing of the stories, complete with little ink drawings. I hadn’t seen anything like it in years. Very nice, being with Holmes again, remembering just enough to make it interesting, not enough to ruin it. What they call good clean fun. After a while, I put the book down and consulted the shelves again hoping they’d have Sir Richard Burton, or Stanley’s book about finding Livingstone. But they didn’t. And I had Burton in my suitcase where I’d packed it and forgotten about it days ago. First feeling of being a prisoner. Trying the door to see it was locked. What the hell? Get some sleep.