Reek of Chinese food from the booth, a couple walking together, girl in white shorts and halter and man in short-sleeve shirt, drinking beer out of big paper milk-carton-type containers. Lots of beer. Get some beer, enough to really swallow. Beer would taste wonderful. Miller’s beer. Elliott says the best American beer is Miller’s, best foreign Heineken’s, best worldwide Haitian. Wake up Elliott and we’ll drive all night and in the morning we will be in Mexico. If only he had had that passport. We could be in New York by now, waiting on a flight to Rome. They could never have caught us.
It’s the inconsideration of it I don’t understand, it is the betrayal of the trust, the absolute disregard for the delicate mechanism, the degree of vulnerability, the . . . STOP IT!
Then on from Rome to Venice. There is no city on earth for walking like Venice. And relatively small roaches.
“Where is a phone? Can you tell me where I can find a phone?”
Open corner bar. Not the same bar. Yes, the same bar. The same bar where we had the argument about Pretty Baby. The same bar where we drank the Scotch and the gin before we went to Michael’s and Elliott said . . . everything that Elliott said.
Taste of Elliott, feel of Elliott’s turtleneck pulled tight across Elliott’s chest. Elliott’s mouth, Elliott smiling, blue eyes, hair full of rain, Elliott smiling. Kiss of Elliott.
“Right there, honey.”
(“She’s really drunk.” “She’s okay. She’s okay.”) Nooooo, she’s not!
I put the quarters in the phone, one after the other, one after the other. I do not believe actually that it’s necessary to put this many quarters in at the outset. Very brief lapse of memory. Focus. Probably you put in one quarter and wait for the operator. The truth is I haven’t made a call from a pay phone since . . . three days ago? If after seven years it’s the same phone number, but why wouldn’t it be the same phone number, nothing has changed, nothing has moved. Phone ringing in San Francisco. It is two o’clock here, well it will only be twelve o’clock there. And at twelve o’clock Martin Halifax is never sleeping.
A man in a really appalling polyester suit has come out of the bar. Straw hat, sheer white shirt thinly concealing undershirt, Shriner on convention from Atlanta. Oh, the things we make up about people whose clothes we don’t like. But he looks a little too neat, everything being pressed, for a native.
Ah, but there he is by the lamppost, the Club goon, and how do I know? He’s the only guy on Bourbon Street at two o’clock in the morning with the million-dollar tan, the straight white teeth and the designer jeans and the pink tennis shoes! We don’t hire slobs, do we? (Ringing in San Francisco.) Not people who go around in ponchos and thong sandals with no underwear on.
“Hello.”
“Martin!”
“Yes, this is Martin. Who is this?”
“Can you hear me all right? Martin, you have to help me. Martin, I need you.” (Martin will have to know about this. Martin sent him here. What the hell are we going to say to Martin? She just up and kidnapped Elliott Slater!) “Martin, I need you like I never needed you before. I have to talk to you.”
“Is this Lisa? Lisa, where are you?”
“I’m in New Orleans, Martin. I’m on Bourbon Street, and I’m wearing this rain poncho and these sandals. And it’s two o’clock. Martin, help me please. Please come. I’ll cover it, every penny of it, expense is no object, could you just get on the next plane and could you come? Martin, I know what I am asking. I know what I am asking. That I am asking you to drop everything and fly two thousand miles to help me. I’m not going to make it through this one, Martin. Will you come?”
“Have you got a room in New Orleans, Lisa? Can you tell me exactly where you are?”
“The Marie Laveau court, Rue Saint Anne, the cab driver will know it. I’m in the servants’ quarters suite in back under the name Mrs. Elliott Slater. Will you come?”
“Mrs. Elliott Slater?”
“I did this terrible thing, Martin, I did it to Elliott Slater. I betrayed everything, Martin. Everything we believe in. I need you so badly. Please help me.”
“Lisa, I’ll be there as soon as I can possibly get there. I’ll call the airport now, and I want you to go directly back to the hotel, Lisa. Do you think that you can manage to get a cab? I can have people come pick you up where you are . . .”
“I can make it that far, Martin. I made it that far a week ago. I can make it again.” And there is that goon standing there, that bright shiny muscular goon with the white teeth and the shirt unbuttoned down the front, and the tight jeans over his hips, and his cock shoved up in front under the jeans so that he looks like he’s got a hard-on when he hasn’t. I have just dropped the entire contents of my purse. No I haven’t. I don’t have a purse. I just dropped several quarters. He is picking up the quarters. Fine strapling of a youth.
“Go back to the hotel and go to sleep. And I’ll be there as soon as I can, I promise. I’ll be there before you wake up, if I can manage it.
“I did a terrible thing, Martin. I did it to Elliott Slater. I don’t know why I did it.”
“I’m on my way, Lisa.”
The man in the polyester suit was standing right up against the glass of the phone booth. The goon was nearby counting the quarters. He has to be from The Club. What perfect stranger in designer jeans would steal a woman’s quarters?
“You sure are a pretty little girl, you know that? You just about the prettiest little girl I’ve seen in this town all night.” Nice man. Like the man who sells your parents a vacuum cleaner or mortgage insurance.
Table in the bar to sit down. No. Don’t go to the bar. Go directly home. Turn the corner. Beer in the icebox. Nope, drank the beer. Elliott’s clothes. No, they took them.
“How’d you like to come have a drink with me, pretty girl?”
The goon is sidling up. Wink of the eye. “Good evening, Lisa.”
Gotcha.
“A pretty girl like you all by yourself. Why don’t you come have a drink with me?”
“Thank you. You are very kind.”
The goon moves in.
“But I belong to a very strict religious order and we are guarded night and day by young men. You see, here is one of them now. And we are not allowed to talk to strangers.”
“Do you want me to walk you back to the hotel, Lisa?”
“If you don’t find me a six-pack of Miller’s beer somewhere in this town before we get to the hotel, you can just forget it.”
“Good night, honey.”
“Come on, Lisa.”
Good night, angels.
LISA
Chapter 30
Love and Ideals
“Why don’t you start from the beginning?”
We were sitting in the corner of the little Italian restaurant, and he looked so calm, so infinitely reassuring. There was more gray at his temples than there had been, and a touch of gray in his eyebrows that strengthened the inquisitiveness, the openness of his gaze. But otherwise he was simply Martin, unchanged, and he was holding my hand in his very firmly and there was no indication he would let it go until it was okay.
“They called you, didn’t they?” I asked. “When they were looking for us.”
“No, they didn’t,” he answered at once.
“Well, that shows you the magnitude of it. They didn’t want you to know what I’d done. You trained Elliott and you sent him to us. They probably didn’t want anybody to know. It was crazy of me to think they’d call you.”
I sipped the white wine, trying not to feel sick from last night’s drunk and the long ride to the airport—I had made myself go to the airport as soon as I confirmed that he was on the incoming flight—trying to let the food and the wine do what they were supposed to do. Elliott and I had not discovered this place and it was just around the corner, really good veal, Elliott would have loved it.
Martin drank his coffee and tried not to make a face.
“Ah, New Orleans,” he shook his head, the smile easy,
wonderful. “Coffee and chicory.” He made a mock scowl.
“I’ll get them to bring you some good coffee,” I said.
“No, you won’t. We masochists love wretched coffee.” His left hand squeezed just a little tighter. “Tell me about Elliott. Tell me the whole thing.”
“I don’t know what went wrong. I don’t know how it ever went so far. It was like something happened to me and I didn’t have any control, I just lost all control. I betrayed everything I believed in, everything I taught others to believe.”
“Lisa, talk to me. Make sense.”
“I busted him out, Martin. I got his clothes out of storage. I told him to get dressed. I got him on the plane with me. I led him to believe this was ‘done’ at The Club, that you could take a slave out and bring him back. I came here to New Orleans and for five days . . . I don’t know . . . maybe longer . . . we just, we just did things. We went dancing and we made out and we even went to Dallas for a while and . . . God, there were so many things we never got to do . . .” I stopped. It was happening again.
I was losing the damned thread of it in a dissolve of emotion.
“I did a terrible thing,” I said. “I broke his contract. I betrayed him, Martin, and I betrayed The Club and I betrayed you.”
He narrowed his eyes and it seemed the politest of gestures. The way he let the other person know that he was really listening, though his face was as placid and accepting as ever.
“Where is Elliott now?” he asked.
“At The Club. They came and got him and took him back. It was incredible. They were like a pair of cops, Richard and Scott. I mean they looked like they worked for the fucking FBI. The board of directors is up in arms. Of course they are saying I’m not fired. Mr. Cross said if there is one person who is indispensable around here, it is Lisa. They just want me to come back. They took Elliott back and God knows what’s going on in his head.”
Suddenly I couldn’t talk. My voice just gave out, like someone had put a hand on my throat. I didn’t look at him. I looked at the silver-edged plate. I wanted to reach for the wine, but I couldn’t. It seemed impossible to even do that.
“Why did you stop?” he asked. Warm dry fingers. He lowered his head slightly to look into my eyes.
“Help me, Martin,” I whispered.
“I’m no doctor, Lisa. You know that. But I’m a good listener and I want you to take it from the top, and tell me everything, every last detail.”
I nodded. But that was almost too painful to contemplate, recapturing those five days, making anybody understand them. Crying again. In this place. Cried in the Court of Two Sisters. Cried in the motel. Crying in this place. That’s more crying than I have done in ten years.
“Martin, I want you to tell me something first.” I took his hand now in both of mine. “With all my heart I have to know this.”
I could see the worry in his face, but he didn’t look as scared as Elliott had when I cried in the Court of Two Sisters. Elliott had looked like he was going to pass out.
“Is what we do right, Martin? Or is it evil? Are we the good thing that we tell ourselves we are, are we the healthy thing we say we are to others? Or are we some evil, twisted thing that never should come to be? Are we bad?”
He looked at me for a long moment, obviously suppressing his surprise at the question, and if he was offended he concealed that as well.
“Lisa, you are asking me this?” he answered slowly. “The night you first came to The House in San Francisco, I told you how I felt about all this.”
“I have to hear it again, Martin, please, as if I never understood before.”
“Lisa, as far as I’m concerned, The House is proof of my refusal to be a bad person—my refusal to be made to look bad, feel bad, or sound bad because of the brand of sex that I want. You know that.”
“But is it bad or good, what we do?” I asked again.
“Lisa, we have taken the search for exotic sex out of the bars and off the streets and out of the shabby rip-off hotel rooms; we’ve taken it away from the hard-bitten prostitutes and the tough little hustlers, and all those who made criminals and beggars out of us in the past. How could that not be a good thing? But you understood this when you first came to The House, and nothing has changed since then. The Club itself is a masterpiece built upon the same principles with stunning controls, and it’s never failed anyone who ever passed through its gates.”
“Well, it failed Elliott Slater,” I said.
“Hmmm. I wonder. But what’s happened to change you so that you don’t believe in what we’ve done?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know! I don’t for the life of me understand. Everything just fell to pieces. One moment I knew where I belonged and who I was, and the next moment I wasn’t anybody I knew and I didn’t understand anything that was going on.”
He watched me. He waited. But I knew if I said anything it would be the same stuttering repetition. He said begin. How to begin?
“Lisa,” he said patiently, “it’s been years since we really talked, years since that first night when we got together in the basement den and I explained to you about The House. But I remember you as you were then perfectly. You were a lovely young girl, though nothing as pretty as you are now. And there was something so wise and almost seraphic about your face that I wound up talking to you that night the way I’ve talked to very few people in my life.”
“I remember that night,” I said.
I wanted him to bring it back, the wonder, the sense of discovery, the great reassuring illusion of The House, of something already realized, established.
“I talked to you about love and about ideals,” he said, “and about my belief that some day people everywhere would stop leaving the crucial business of aberrant sex to riffraff and policemen.”
I nodded.
“I remember I asked you if you could love the people who came to my house,” he said. “Do you remember your reply? You told me that in a very real way you loved all the sexual adventurers who didn’t hurt others, that it was impossible for you to feel any other way towards them. You felt love and pity for the old flasher in the park who opens his coat, the guy on the bus who rubs against the pretty girl, never daring to speak to her. You felt love for the drag queens and the transvestites and the transsexuals. You said that you were they and they were you. It had been that way ever since you could remember.”
He pushed the coffee cup to the side and leaned a little closer across the table.
“Well, when you told me that,” he said, “I thought here is a girl who is as romantic as I am, and fifty times as innocent as I ever was, and possibly a little bit crazy. I could see that a powerful sexuality had shaped you, perhaps even embittered you. But that you’d managed to invest it with an almost unaccountable spirituality. Yet I couldn’t quite believe you that night.”
Lovely words. But for me it was more the way I’d described it to Elliott, that same vital imprinting had never taken place, some message about sex being bad had failed over and over to reach its destination in my head.
“But two years later,” he went on, “when you had been working at The House every weekend, when you knew the ‘guests’ as well as I did, I knew that you’d meant exactly what you’d said. It wasn’t only that you could act out a scenario of dominance and submission with flawless conviction. It was that you loved. You really loved. Nothing sexual disgusted you or confused you or turned you off. Only real violence, real hurt, the real destruction of another’s body and will were your enemies, the same as they were mine. You were just what you said you were. But it is entirely conceivable, entirely, that a love like that could not endure forever.”
“But no, it’s not that,” I said. “It wasn’t like they changed or I changed in that way. It was like something altogether inexplicable intervened.”
He drank a little of the wine that had gone untouched during the meal, and lifted the bottle to fill the glass again.
“All right, then,” he said. ?
??Just start talking about the first moment when things went bad. And let me listen as I have to a thousand stories.”
I put my hands to my head and I leaned forward on the table and let my eyes close.
“I think in some way it started when I was on vacation,” I said. “When I was on the way home, and I holed up in this luxury hotel in Dallas and I was watching this movie on video disc. It was about the gypsies in New York—it was called Angelo, My Love—and they were so alive, these gypsies . . . they were so undeniably wholesome no matter what they did. You know, they stole and they bullshitted and they lied, but they lived within this incredibly vital closed society and there was a gorgeous continuity to their lives. You didn’t want anything to happen to them to ever make them be part of the herd.”
“The way you were at The Club.”
“Well, normally, I would have thought so. That’s their world and this is mine. But it didn’t feel like that anymore. It was like they had something that I never had. It was like when I was a kid and I wanted this, you know, the secret life, our life, and I thought, God, maybe I’ll never have it. It will always be fantasies in my head, you know. That desperate feeling.”
“Of course.”
“Well, anyway. I was in this hotel and I was crazy to get back to The Club. I had to get inside The Club. And then this photograph, this picture in the file of Elliott. I mean this has nothing to do with the movie, you understand, but when I saw it something snapped in my head.”
“Keep talking.”
“You know, I’ve always concurred that women aren’t visually stimulated the way men are. You know, that old argument, but when I saw this picture. Just this picture . . .”
LISA
Chapter 31
“Death of a Traveling Salesman”
It was getting dusk. And we were still talking.
We had drifted from one little place to the next, having a drink here, a cup of coffee there. And now we were walking back through the streets to the hotel, and the whole city was glowing in the waning sun, the way only New Orleans can. Maybe in Italy the light is this color, I didn’t know at this exact moment. Why think of Venice when you are in New Orleans? But it was too beautiful now, the soft variegated walls of the old building, the chalky green paint on the long shutters, the purple flagstones with their tracery of green moss.