Anne Rice - Exit to Eden

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EXIT TO EDEN

ANNE RAMPLING

A Futura Book

This edition published in 1986 by Futura Publications, a Division of Mac

donald & Co (Publishers) Ltd London & Sydney

Reprinted 1986, 1987

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real p

ersons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

n a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without th

e prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and

without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the s

ubsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0 7088 3000 5

Typeset by Leaper & Gard Ltd., Bristol, England

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Limited, M

ember of the BPCC Group, Aylesbury, Bucks

Futura Publications

A Division of Macdonald & Co (Publishers) Ltd

Greater London House

Hampstead Road

London NW1 7QX

A BPCC plc Company

For Stan

1 -- Lisa

My name is Lisa.

I'm five foot nine. My hair is long and it's dark brown. I wear leather a grea

t deal, high boots always, and sometimes glove-soft vests and even leather ski

rts now and then, and I wear lace, especially when I can find the kind I like:

intricate, very old-fashioned lace, snow white. I have light skin that tans e

asily, large breasts, and long legs. And though I don't feel beautiful and nev

er have, I know that I am. If I wasn't, I wouldn't be a trainer at The Club.

Good bones and big eyes, that's the real foundation of the beauty, I suppose -

- the hair being thick, having a lot of body -- and something to do with the e

xpression on my face, that I look sweet and even kind of lost most of the time

, but I can inspire fear in a male or female slave as soon as I start to talk.

At The Club they call me the Perfectionist, and it is no small compliment to b

e called that in a place like The Club, where everyone is after a perfection o

f sorts, where everyone is striving, and the striving is part of the pleasure

involved.

I've been at The Club since it opened. I helped create it, establish its pri

nciples, approve its earliest members and its earliest slaves. I laid down t

he rules and the limits. And I imagined and created most of the equipment th

at is used there today. I even designed some of the bungalows and the garden

s, the morning swimming pool and fountains. I decorated over a score of the

suites myself. Its many imitators make me smile. There is no real competitio

n for The Club.

The Club is what it is because it believes in itself. And its glamour and its t

error evolve from that.

This is a story of something that happened at The Club.

A great deal of the story doesn't even take place there. It takes place in N

ew Orleans and in the low countryside around New Orleans. And in Dallas. But

it doesn't matter really.

The story began at The Club. And no matter where it goes from there, it's a

bout The Club.

Welcome to The Club.

2 -- Lisa

The New Season

We were waiting for landing clearance, the enormous jet slowly circling the

island in the tourist route, I call it, because you can see everything so we

ll: the sugar-white beaches, the coves, and the great sprawling grounds of T

he Club itself -- high stone walls and tree-shaded gardens, the vast complex

of tile-roofed buildings half hidden by the mimosa and the pepper trees. Yo

u can see the drifts of white and pink rhododendrons, and orange groves, and

the fields full of poppies and deep green grass.

At the gates of The Club lies the harbour. And beyond the grounds, the ever

busy airfield and heliport.

Everyone was coming in for the new season.

There were a score of private planes, winking silver in the sun, and a half-

dozen snow-white yachts anchored in the blaze of blue-green water offshore.

The Elysium was already in the harbour, a toy ship it seemed, frozen in a se

a of light. Who would guess that there were some thirty or more slaves insid

e it, waiting breathlessly to be driven naked across the deck and onto the s

hore?

The slaves all make the journey to The Club fully clothed for obvious reasons.

But before they're allowed to see the island, let alone set foot on it, they

are stripped.

Only naked and subservient are they admitted, and all their belongings are st

ored under a serial number in a vast cellar until time comes for them to leav

A very thin gold bracelet on the right wrist with a name and number artfully

engraved on it identifies the slave, though in the first few days much woul

d be written with a grease pen on that stunning naked flesh.

The plane dipped slightly, passed closer to the dock. I was glad the little sp

ectacle had not begun yet.

I'd have a little time before inspection to be in the quiet of my room, just a

n hour or so with a glass of Bombay gin and ice.

I sat back, feeling a slow warmth all over, a diffused excitement that came

up from inside and seemed to cover all the surface of my skin. The slaves we

re always so deliciously anxious in those first few moments. Priceless feeli

ng. And it was just the beginning of what The Club had in store for them.

I was unusually eager to get back.

I was finding the vacations harder and harder for some reason, the days in t

he outside world curiously unreal.

And the visit with my family in Berkeley had been unbearable, as I avoided

the same old questions about what I did and where I lived most of the year.

'Why is it such a secret, for the love of heaven? Where do you go?'

There were moments at the table when I absolutely could not hear anything

my father was saying, just see his lips moving, and when he asked me a que

stion I had to make up something about having a headache, feeling sick bec

ause I'd lost the thread.

The best times oddly enough were those I hated when I was a little girl: the

two of us walking around the block together, uphill and downhill in the early

evening, and him saying his rosary, and the night sounds of the Berkeley hil

ls all around us, and not a word said. I didn't feel miserable during those w

alks as I had when I was little, only quiet as he was quiet, and inexplicably

sad.

One night I drove into San Francisco with my sister and we had dinner alone

together at a glossy little North Beach place called Saint Pierre. There w

as a man standing at the bar who kept looking at me, the classically handso

me young lawyer type wearing a white cable-knit sweater under his gray houn

dstooth jacket, hair cut full to look windblown, mouth ready to smile. Just

the sort I always avoided in the past, no matter how beautiful the mouth,

how brilliant the expression.

My sister said, 'Don't look now, but he's eating you alive.'

And I had the strongest desire to get up, go to the bar and start talking to hi

m, give my sister the car keys, and tell her I'd see her the next day. Why can'

t I do that, I kept thinking? Just talk to him? After all, he was with a couple

and he obviously didn't have a date.

What would that have been like, vanilla sex as they call it, in some littl

e hotel room hanging over the Pacific with this wonderfully wholesome Mr.

Straight who never dreamed he was sleeping with Miss Lace 'n' Leather from

the grandest exotic sex club in the world? Maybe we'd even go to his apar

tment, some little place full of hardwood and mirrors with a bay view. He'

d put on Miles Davis, and together we'd cook dinner in a wok.

Something wrong with your head, Lisa. Your stock and trade is fantasies, but

not fantasies like that.

Get out of California right away.

But the usual distractions hadn't done much for me afterwards, though I'd

raided Rodeo Drive for a new wardrobe, spent a whirlwind afternoon at Sako

witz in Dallas, gone on to New York to see Cats and My One and Only, and a

couple of Off-Broadway shows that were great. I'd haunted the museums, be

en to the Met twice, seen the ballet everywhere I could catch it, and boug

ht books, lots of books, and films on disc to last me the next twelve mont

hs.

All of that should have been fun. I'd made more money at twenty-seven than

I'd ever dreamed I'd make in a lifetime. Now and then I'd try to remember w

hat it was like when I wanted all those gold-covered lipsticks in Bill's Dr

ugstore on Shattuck Avenue, and only had a quarter for a pack of gum. But t

he spending didn't mean very much. It had left me exhausted, on edge.

Except for a very few moments, sort of bittersweet moments, when the dancin

g and music in New York had been utterly exalting, I'd been listening to th

is inner voice that kept saying:

Go home, go back to The Club. Because if you don't turn around right now a

nd go back, it might not be there anymore. And everything you see in front

of you is unreal.

Odd feeling. A sense of the absurd as the French philosophers call it, making

me so pervasively uncomfortable that I felt like I couldn't find a place just

to take a deep breath.

In the beginning I had always needed the vacations, needed to walk through n

ormal streets. So why the anxiety this time, the impatience, the feeling of

being dangerous to the peace of those I loved?

I had ended up the vacation finally watching the same video disc over and o

ver again in my room at the Adolphus in Dallas, of a little film by actor R

obert Duvall called Angelo, My Love. It was about the gypsies in New York.

Angelo was a shrewd, black-eyed little kid about eight years old, really stre

et wise and brilliant and beautiful, and it was his film, his and his family'

s, and Duvall let them make up a lot of their own dialogue. 1t was realer tha

n real, their life in their own gypsy community. Outsiders in the middle of t

hings, right in New York.

But it was crazy for me to be sitting in a darkened hotel room in Dallas watch

ing a film seven times, like the reality of it was exotic, watching this sharp

little black-haired boy call up his preteen girl friend and bullshit her, or

go into the dressing room of a child country-western singing star and flirt wi

th her, this fearless and good-hearted little boy immersed in life up to his e

yeballs.

What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does

it make me want to cry?

Maybe it's that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way

through a wilderness of normality that is just a myth.

Maybe even Mr. Straight at the Saint Pierre bar in San Francisco is some kind

of an outsider -- the young lawyer who writes poetry -- and wouldn't have shoc

ked out over coffee and croissants the next morning if I'd said: 'Guess what I

do for a living? No, actually it's a vocation, it's very serious, it's ... my

life.'

Crazy. Drinking white wine and watching a movie about gypsies, and turning ou

t the lights to look at nighttime Dallas, all those glittering towers rising

like ladders to the clouds.

I live in Outsider Heaven don't I? Where all your secret desires can be satis

fied, and you are never alone and you are always safe. It's The Club where I'

ve lived all my adult life.

I just need to get back there, that's all.

And here we are circling over Eden again, and its almost time to have a very

close look at those fresh slaves coming in.

I wanted to see those slaves, see if this time there wasn't something new, s

omething altogether extraordinary ... Ah, the old romance!

But every year the slaves are different, a little more clever, interesting,

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摘要：

EXITTOEDENANNERAMPLINGAFuturaBookCopyright©1985byAnneRamplingThiseditionpublishedin1986byFuturaPublications,aDivisionofMacdonald&Co(Publishers)LtdLondon&SydneyReprinted1986,1987Allcharactersinthispublicationarefictitiousandanyresemblancetorealpersons,livingordead,ispurelycoincidental.Allrightsreserv...

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Anne Rice - Exit to Eden

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