She nodded again in that same slow way, like she was thinking it through.
“Now if you get to be my age, and somebody has to stick an M-16 rifle right in your face for you to know what death really is, for all this to come home, well, I think you’re a pretty hard-headed individual, frankly, the kind of literalist who just might be dangerous.”
She was puzzling this.
“Well, I had to think about it. Why was I seeking it out, literal death, literal warfare, literal suffering and starvation, and grooving on the pure reality of it, as if it were merely symbolic, the way people groove on a film.”
“But the act of reporting, getting the story . . .”
“Ah,” I waved that away, “I was a beginner. There are too many others.”
“And what did you conclude about it all?”
“That I was a pretty destructive guy. That I was a kind of a doomed person.”
I took a swallow of my drink.
“That I was a damned fool,” I said. “That’s what I concluded.”
“What about the people who were fighting in these places? I don’t mean the soldiers of fortune or the mercenaries. I mean the people who believe in the wars? Are they damned fools?” She asked this very politely, truly inquisitively.
“I don’t know. In a way, it doesn’t really matter in my story whether or not they’re fools. The fact was my death wasn’t going to change anything for them. It would have been gratuitous, utterly personal, the price of the sport.”
She nodded, slowly, her gaze moving past me over the deck and the distant banks of the river, the low, olive drab swampland falling right into the brown water, the swift panorama of the gliding clouds.
“This was after you did Beirut: Twenty-four Hours?” she asked.
“Yes. And I didn’t do any Twenty-four Hours in El Salvador.”
When she turned to me again she was as serious as I’d ever seen her, unselfconscious, completely absorbed.
“But after what you’d seen,” she said, “of real suffering, real violence—if it did mean something to you for whatever reason—how could you stand the scenarios at Martin’s?” She hesitated. “How could you stand the rituals of The Club? I mean how did you make this transition?”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked. I took another swallow of Scotch. “You’re asking me that?”
She looked genuinely confused by the question.
“You saw people who were really being tormented,” she said. She was picking her words slowly. “People who were, as you said, immersed in literal violence. How could you justify what we do after that? Why weren’t we obscene to you, decadent, an insult to what you’d witnessed? The guy getting put into the truck . . .”
“I thought I understood what you were asking,” I said. “Nevertheless I’m amazed.” I took another little drink, thinking about how to approach the answer. Whether to take it slowly or to come right out.
“Do you think that the people on this planet who are fighting literal war are superior to us?” I asked.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Do you think that people who do literal violence, either defensively or aggressively, are better than those of us who work out the same drives symbolically?”
“No, but God, I mean there are those who are swept up in it for whom the suffering is inescapable . . .”
“Yes, I know. They’re swept up in something that is as ghastly and destructive as it was two thousand years ago when it was fought with swords and spears. It is not too different from what was happening five thousand years before that with rocks and clubs. Now why does something that primitive, that ugly, that horrible, make what we do at The Club obscene?”
She understood me, I knew she did, but she didn’t commit herself.
“Seems to me it’s the other way around,” I said. “I have been there and I assure you it is the other way around. There is nothing obscene about two people in a bedroom trying to find in sadomasochistic sex the symbolic solution to their sexual aggressions. The obscenity is those who literally rape, literally kill, literally strafe whole villages, blow up busloads of innocent people, literally and relentlessly destroy.”
I could almost feel her thinking as I watched her face. Her hair had fallen down over her shoulders, and against the whiteness of her dress, it made me think of her little joke last night about the nunnery, it made me think of a nun’s veil.
“You know the difference between the symbolic and the literal,” I said. “You know what we do at The Club is play. And you know the origins of that play are deep, deep inside us in a tangle of chemical and cerebral components that defy competent analysis.”
She nodded.
“Well, so are the origins of the human impulse to make war as far as I’m concerned. When you strip away the current politics, the ‘who did what to whom first’ of every small and great crisis, what you have is the same mystery, the same urgency, the same complexity that underlies sexual aggression. And it has as much to do with the sexual desire to dominate and/or submit as the rituals we play at The Club. For all I know, it is all sexual aggression.”
Again, she didn’t answer. But it was like she was listening out loud.
“No, The Club is no obscenity compared to what I’ve seen,” I said. “And I thought you more than anyone else would know that.”
She was looking out at the river.
“That is what I believe,” she said finally. “But I wasn’t sure that someone who had been in Beirut and El Salvador would believe it.”
“Maybe somebody that has had that kind of war done to them, somebody who has been ground under by it for years and years, maybe they would have no use for our rituals. Theirs is a different life than anything you or I have ever known. But that does not mean that what has happened to them is superior, either in origin or effect finally. If it makes saints out of them, that’s wonderful. But how often can the horror of war be counted upon to do that? I don’t think anybody on the planet anymore really believes war is ennobling, or that it has any value.”
“Is The Club ennobling?”
“I don’t know. But for my money, it certainly has value.”
Her eyes seemed to brighten a little at that, but whatever she was really feeling was deep inside her.
“You came there to work it out symbolically,” she said.
“Of course. To explore it, to work it out, without getting my head blown off or blowing off somebody else’s. You know this. You must know it. How could you create this intricate island paradise if you didn’t?”
“I told you. I believe it, but I’ve never lived in any other way,” she said. “My life’s been too much of a self-created vocation. And there are times when I think I have done everything in the name of defiance.”
“That’s not what you said last night. Do you remember what you said? About feeling no disgust for anything that two consenting individuals could do together, that it had always been innocent to you? You know as well as I do that if we can work out our violent feelings within bedroom walls where no one is hurt—no one really frightened, no one unwilling—then we just might be able after all to save the world.”
“Save the world! That’s a tall order,” she said.
“Well, save our own souls anyway. But there isn’t any other way to save the world now, except to create arenas to work out symbolically the urges that we’ve taken literally in the past. Sex isn’t going to go away, and neither are the destructive urges wound up in it. So if there was a Club on every street corner, if there were a million safe places in which people could act out their fantasies, no matter how primitive or repulsive, then who knows what the world would be? Real violence might become for everybody a vulgarity, an obscenity.”
“Yes, that was the idea of it all, the idea.” Her brows came together, and she seemed lost for a moment, and strangely agitated. I wanted to kiss her.
“And it still is the idea,” I said. “People say S&M is all about childhood experiences, the batt
les with dominance and submission we fought when we were little that we are doomed to reenact. I don’t think it’s that simple. I never have. One of the things that has always fascinated me about sado-masochistic fantasies, long before I ever dreamed of acting them out, was that they are full of paraphernalia that none of us ever saw in childhood.”
I took another drink, finishing the glass.
“You know,” I went on, “racks and whips, and harnesses and chains. Gloves, corsets. Were you ever threatened with a rack when you were a kid? Did anybody ever make you wear a pair of handcuffs? I was never even slapped. These things don’t come from childhood; they come from our historic past. They come from our racial past. The whole bloody lineage that embraces violence since time immemorial. They are the seductive and terrifying symbols of cruelties that were routine right up through the eighteenth century.”
She nodded. She seemed to be remembering something, and her hand touched her waist lightly, her fingers stroking the fabric of her dress. “The first time,” she said, “I ever put on one of those black leather corsets, you know . . .”
“Yes . . .”
“I had this feeling about the time when all women wore things like that, you know, every day . . .”
“Of course. When it was routine. All the paraphernalia is the flotsam of the past. And where is it routine today? In our dreams. In our erotic novels. In our brothels. No, in S&M we’re always working with something a hell of a lot more volatile than childhood struggles; we’re working with our most primitive desires to achieve intimacy through violation, our deepest attractions to suffering and inflicting pain, to possessing others.”
“Yes, possessing . . .”
“And if we can keep the racks and the whips and the harnesses forever relegated to the S&M scenario—if we could relegate rape in all its forms to the S&M scenario—then maybe we could save the world.”
She looked at me for a long time without saying anything. And she nodded just a little again, finally, as if nothing I said shocked her or surprised her.
“Maybe it’s different for a man,” I said. “Call the San Francisco police any night of the week and ask who’s committing the robberies and assaults. It’s the people with testosterone in their blood.”
She gave a little polite smile to that, but lapsed back immediately into seriousness.
“The Club is the wave of the future, babe,” I said. “You ought to be more proud of it. They can’t sanitize or legislate our sexuality out of us. It’s got to be understood and contained.”
She made some little accepting sound, her lips pressed together, her eyes narrowing slightly, then brightening again.
I finished the drink, and was quiet, watching the movement of the clouds across the sky.
I could feel the vibration of the steamboat all through my body, feel the dull surge of the engine and even the great silent pull of the river, or so it seemed. The wind had picked up but only a little.
“You aren’t really proud of what you’ve done, are you?” I asked. “I mean, in spite of what you said last night.”
She looked darkly troubled and indescribably lovely sitting next to me, the hem of her dress fallen back from her bare knees, her long, lean calves so beautifully shaped, her face so still. I could feel her brooding, her agitation, and I wished she would talk to me, say what she really thought about this.
“Well, I think you’re terrific,” I said. “I love you. Just like I told you last night.”
She didn’t answer. She was staring at the blue sky over the shore, as if her thoughts had snared her.
Well. . . so what?
After a while, she turned to me again.
“And you were always fully aware of what you wanted from The Club,” she said. “It always had this therapeutic quality for you.”
“Therapeutic, hell,” I said. “I’m only flesh and blood, and I listen a lot to the flesh, maybe more than most people do.” I touched her cheek very lightly with my fingers. “I’ve had the feeling most of my life that I was a little more physically there than most people.”
“So have I,” she said.
“Uh huh, very hot,” I said, meaning it straight, not playfully.
“Yes,” she said, “like I could explode if it didn’t get out. Like my body had made me a criminal even when I was a little kid.”
“Exactly. And why do we have to be criminals?”
I sat up and lifted her hair back from her face, and let my lips just lightly brush her cheek.
“Let’s just say after that experience in El Salvador,” I said, “I got hooked on symbolic violence. Therapeutic? Who knows. I got obsessed with violent films and TV shows that I wouldn’t have even glanced at before. I got hooked on my own violent fantasies and when I heard somebody talking about Martin’s place again for about the thirtieth time, I did what I never thought I’d ever do. I said: Tell me about that place. Where is it? How do you get the number to call?’”
“You can’t believe it’s real when you first hear about it,” she said, “that others are doing it.”
“Right. And it wasn’t therapy, really. That was the best part. Martin said in one of our first little conversations that he never tries to analyze anyone’s sadomasochistic desires. He doesn’t give a damn why one person has fantasies that are full of whips and chains and another person has never thought of such a thing in his entire life. ‘We’ll work with what you are now.’ I guess I just started working with it, peeling back the layers. Going deep into it, through one scary moment after another. I found it was as scary as anything I’d done. It was fucking awful and fucking delicious. It was the grandest and most interesting experience I’d had so far.”
“An odyssey of sorts,” she said. She had slipped her hand up around the back of my neck, and her fingers felt warm in the cool river breeze.
“Yeah, like that,” I said. “And when I heard of The Club, well, I couldn’t quite believe that somebody had had the guts to create it on that scale. I was dazzled. I was crazy. I knew I would get into The Club no matter what I had to do.”
I closed my eyes for just a second as I kissed her. I slipped my arm around her, lifting her towards me, kissing her again.
“Be proud of it,” I whispered.
“Of what?”
“Of The Club, baby doll. Be brave enough to be proud of it,” I said.
She looked vague and a little bruised, and softened all over from the kissing.
“I can’t think about it all right now,” she said. “I can’t figure it out.” I could feel her heating up, lips taut, luscious.
“Okay. But be proud of it,” I said, kissing her just a little harder, opening her mouth.
“Don’t talk anymore about it,” she said, drawing up closer, her arm around my waist.
We were our own little heat wave on the deck. Anybody coming around might get burnt.
“How much longer do we have to stay on this tub?” I asked, whispering in her ear.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes were closed. She was kissing my cheek.
“I want to be alone with you,” I said. “I want to be alone with you back at the hotel.”
“Kiss me again,” she said.
“Yes, Madam.”
ELLIOTT
Chapter 25
“The Lady in My Life”
We stopped on the way back for some wine and a load of delicacies—caviar and crackers, apples, sour cream, smoked oysters. I bought some cinnamon and butter and bread, lots of French yogurt, a cold bottle of Dom Perignon (the best they had, $50), and a package of liquor store wine glasses.
When we got to the room, I ordered an ice bucket, turned off the air conditioner again, and latched the shutters the way I had the first time.
It was just getting dusk, vivid, sweet New Orleans dusk with the sky blood red and the pink oleander glowing in the tangle of the garden. The heat lingered in the air the way it never does on the coast. There was a velvety feel to the warmth and the room was full of dusty s
hadows.
Lisa had crumpled up all the telephone messages and thrown them away. She was sitting on the bed, the white dress up on her thighs, her shoes tossed in the corner. She had a large crystal bottle of perfume in her hand and she was smoothing the perfume into her skin all over. She massaged it into her neck, and into her calves. She rubbed it into the spaces between her toes.
When the exquisite little mulatto child brought the ice he brought more messages.
“Will you throw those away?” Lisa asked. She didn’t look at them.
I opened the champagne and got it to bubble just about perfectly into the two glasses.
I sat down beside her and reached lightly, slowly, for the buttons down the back of her dress. The perfume wasn’t Chanel this time. It was Chalandre. Blissfully overpowering. I took the bottle from her and put it on the table, gave her the champagne.
The perfume mingled with the sunny smell of her hair and her skin. Her lips were wet from the champagne. She said, “Do you miss The Club?”
“No,” I said.
“You know, the paddles and the straps and all that, do you miss it?”
“No,” I said again, kissing her. “Unless of course you have the overwhelming desire to beat the hell out of me. In which case, I’ll throw myself on your mercy as a gentleman should. But I have something else in mind, something I’ve always wanted to do.”
“Do it,” she said.
She slipped off the dress. Her tanned skin was very dark against the white spread, and the light was good enough still to see the strawberry pink of her nipples. I ran my hand down between her legs, cradling her, touching her soft, secret hair, and then I slipped away from her, and went quietly out of the room into the dark little kitchen.
When I came back I had the butter with me and the little box of ground cinnamon.
I stripped off my clothes. She was leaning back on her arms, and the thrust of her breasts, and the long delicate curve of her flat belly to that secret mound of dark hair, was gorgeous.