Erotic Paradise (5)

Scanning Proofreading: CSH

Elliot 23 Detectives and Leaks

I do remember. Remember every word.

I went out for breakfast at ten o’clock because I still couldn’t get her out of bed and there was no food at the hotel and I was hungry.

She kissed me. I told her that the coffee was brewing by the bed and that I was going to the Two Sisters Atrium and would come there when she woke up or I would be back when I was done.

I immediately went to a newsstand to buy magazines and newspapers, and then to a camera store to buy a “Canonae”, a simple, reliable and inexpensive camera that I could give to a child before returning to the island.

You can’t even pack a camera in your luggage and bring it into the “club” or my luggage will be full of cameras.

By the time I arrived at the Two Sisters Atrium, I had shot an entire roll of negatives and I knew I was in a state of hangover, leading to a feeling of bliss and hallucinations. No headache at all, just dizziness and a happy feeling that everything looked wonderful.

I wanted to get drunk again, but I didn’t. These moments with her were so unusual.

Today will be the culmination of being with her, that is, if she isn’t unpacking when I go back for her.

I told the waiter that she might come to see me, and if she did, to bring her to my table. Then I ate two or three Eggs Benedict, ordered two extra orders of sweetened ham, and drank three bottles of Miller’s beer, which is absolutely and obviously needed and deeply appreciated by a hungover person. Then I settled down with a pot of coffee and plowed through “The Master,” “Playboy,” “The Floating World,” “Time,” and “The News. Time” and “Newsweek.”

The world is certainly as disorganized as it was when I left it, as less than a week has passed.

Please see how long it will take for the world to become that way.

There are at least two new movies I really regret not being able to see. “Time magazine used two of my photos in an article about gay writers in San Francisco. Okay! The assassination squad is still operating in El Salvador. But, of course, there’s a civil war in Nicaragua, and the Marines are still in Beirut, and so on and so forth.

I pushed it all away and just sipped my coffee. “The open garden of the Two Sisters Atrium was quiet, and I tried to think rationally about last night and what had happened, but couldn’t. All I could feel was pure, irrational love and a happy, unusual sense of well-being. It occurred to me that I should pick up the phone, dial my father in Sonoma, and say, “Dad, guess what, I found the dream girl.”

You’ll never guess where. He’ll never know how funny it was or that the joke could have been on me.

Reality is starting to return.

For example, what does it all mean for her? When we get back to the “club”, what if she does the following? Push the button on the dresser, and when Daniel comes in she says to him, “Take him away, I’m done with him. Give him to another trainer.” Or: “I’ll call him in two or three weeks.” And she did if she wanted to, which she probably did every time she took a slave.

Maybe it’s like checking out a book from the library, reading it and calling it a day.

No, don’t think about such things. Don’t think that she might do this. Just when we’re here and I have her, why think about it? Like she said, why think of Venice when you’re in New Orleans?

But I had to think about it. And as I think about it, I remember those last moments of clarity, having told her that she would hurt me, and this excitement, this blissful feeling when I was in the middle of it.

I’m going back to her.

But something else was bugging me too. That would be the phone, and the way she talks to it, “What are you going to do? Arrest me?” I’m sure that’s what she said. And what did that mean? I kept telling myself that she was just drunk and angry. But what did that statement mean?

There’s also the possibility, a very real possibility, that what she did to take me out of the “club” was absolutely against the rules, and that they’ve been looking for us.

But the possibility was too forced, a romantic idea that was too pure and too wonderful. Because if she did that, uh…

No, that’s ridiculous. She’s the boss’s wife. Getting in and out is a big responsibility… If you’re not ready, I can understand. She’s a scientist in sex, all her life, so why is she so anxious and upset?

No, she has a fair amount of poet in her, just as any good scientist has a fair amount of poet in her, but she’s a scientist and she knows what she’s doing. She just forgets to report for duty and forgets her administrative responsibilities.

So they called her at 6:00 in the morning?

I was quite frustrated with this line of thinking. I poured another cup of coffee and gave the waiter a five-dollar bill to buy me a hundred-pack of Paramount cigarettes. I thought about our walk last night, through the “garden district”, my arm around her, and how there was no “club”, just us.

When the waiter returned with the packet of 100 Paramount cigarettes, something startled me. At the edge of the courtyard, near the Bourbon Street gate, a man I knew from somewhere was watching me. He was staring at me so closely that I didn’t avert my gaze for a second as I looked at him. I quickly recognized that he was wearing white leather pants and white leather boots. He was dressed like a “club” manager. In fact, he couldn’t be anyone else. And I knew this guy. I remembered him as the good-looking blond young man, long-time boatman, dark-skinned, who had greeted me on my first day in San Francisco and had said to me on the deck of the yacht, “See you later, Elliot!”

But he wasn’t smiling now as he had done on those occasions. He just looked at me and leaned against the wall.

He was silent and certain. Appearing in this particular place revealed an almost ominous aura.

I looked at him and a shiver ran through my body, then a wave of anger slowly boiled over. Just calm down!

There are two of these possibilities, right? It’s not uncommon. You take a slave out, you’ll be watched.

Or, she has violated the rules. They’ve come out looking for us?

I could feel my eyes narrowing and my defenses rising. What the hell are you going to do? Arrest me? I squelched out my cigarette and slowly stood up, starting to walk towards him. I could see his face change, backing away slightly, leaning against the wall, his face becoming blank. Then he turns around, and walks out.

When I walked down the street, of course I couldn’t spot him. I stood there for two or three minutes. Then I went back to where the man had just been just inside the entrance. He wasn’t there, he was gone.

I looked across the courtyard.

Lisa has come in. The waiter brought her to my table. She stood there with a bit of an anxious look, obviously waiting for me.

She seemed cute enough to make me forget all about it. She’s wearing a white cotton A-line dress complete with a crepe-trimmed turtleneck and sleeves that look like lamb shanks, and has white sandals on. She even brought a white straw hat, grasping the long ribbon tied around it and holding it to one side of her body. When she saw me, her face lit up like a young girl.

She met me halfway and put her arm around me as if no one was around to see us, no one minded, and she kissed me too.

Her hair was still a little wet from the shower. She was dressed in white and looked fresh, revealing a strange innocence. For a moment, I just hugged her, realizing that I hadn’t properly hidden all the things that were on my mind.

Her arms were around me as we walked back to the table.

“What’s new in the world?” She said, pushing the magazine away and for a second gazing at the camera.

“I know I can’t take the camera back with me,” I said. “So I’ll give it to someone on the street, or an interesting-looking student at the airport.”

She smiled and told the waiter that she would like some grape juice & some coffee.

“What’s going on?” She said suddenly. “You do look distracted.”

“Nothing, just that guy you sent to spy on me, the manager, he alarmed me.

I would have thought they would have made it invisible, or something more sophisticated than that.” I said as I scrutinized her.

“What guy?” She asked, her head tilting a little to the side. Her eyes narrowed, just like I did about five minutes ago. “If this is a joke, I can’t figure it out. What are you talking about?”

“One of the managers of the ‘club’, he was just there. I got up and was going to ask him what he was doing, and he left. Then you came in.”

“How did you know he was a manager?” She asked, her voice having dropped to a whisper, her face turning slightly red. I could see her temples floating.

“White leather jacket, injection drug gear. Except, I know him.”

“You sure.”

“Lisa, he’s all dressed up like that,” I said. “What kind of guy walks around the world in white leather shoes and white leather pants unless he has a round sequined denim shirt to match? I remember him, from the boat that sailed in. Yes, it’s the same guy.”

The waiter set down the two glasses of grape juice served on a silver ice tray. Lisa just stared at the grape juice and then at me.

“He was just there, watching me. He wanted me to know he was watching me. But apparently…”

“Fuck the bastards,” she whispered, standing up and yelling for the waiter. “Where’s the phone at?

”

I followed her into the kiosk. She dropped two or three silver coins into the coin slot.

“Back to the table.” She said, looking up at me.

I didn’t move.

“Please,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

I stepped back into the sunlight, still watching her. She was talking to someone on the phone, her hand covering the receiver. I could hear her voice high and shrill, and then it faded away. Finally, she put the phone down and ran toward me, the carrier bag almost falling off her shoulder.

“Pay the bill, please?” She said. “We’re changing hotels.” She crossed the atrium without waiting for me.

I grabbed her wrist and gently pulled her towards me.

“Why did you change hotels?” I asked. I have a strange feeling of dizziness, no longer hungover. I kissed her cheek and forehead and could feel her relaxing very slowly and reluctantly, giving in to me a little.

“Because I don’t want them to go his spying on us!” She said, tugging gently to break free of my hand. She was more upset than she appeared. I could feel it.

“What does it matter?” I said softly. My arms were around her, squeezing her shoulders, urging her toward the table. “Come on, have a little breakfast with me. I don’t want to run away from people. I mean, what are they going to do? What are they supposed to do?” I was looking at her end to end. “Think about it! I don’t want to leave that little place that’s ours.”

She looked up at me, and for a moment I felt: everything was as I had dreamed it would be. But the dream was too complicated for me to understand. I kissed her again, vaguely aware that more and more people were now crowding the atrium, some of them watching us. I wondered if it made them happy: to see a young woman like this, so fresh and lovely, and a man kissing her as if he didn’t mind anything in the world but her.

She sat down, bent her head forward and leaned on her elbow. I lit a cigarette and watched her for a minute, my eyes slowly scanning the atrium to see if that manager had returned or if anyone had replaced him. I didn’t see anyone.

“Is this an unusual occurrence on a journey like this one?” I asked. “I mean, they follow and watch so I don’t get away?” Almost like a fatalist, I felt I knew the answer. This bringing in and taking out thing is not done on new slaves, but on slaves like the following: they’ve been there for months, know the rules, and can be trusted to keep them in line. She had done it on me a little earlier, and that was that.

But when she looked up, her expression revealed a deliberately sarcastic scowl, and her drooping eyelids fluttered open so feebly that her eyes were almost black.

“Not unusual.” She said, her voice so low I could barely hear it.

“So why did they do it?”

“Because what I’m doing is also unusual. In fact, no one has done it before.”

I sat there in silence, deliberating for a moment. My heart raced as I smoked slowly but nervously.

“Uh…”

“No one has ever taken a slave from the ‘club’.” She said.

I didn’t say anything.

She sat quietly, sliding her hands above her arms as if the place was cold. She wasn’t looking directly at me, she wasn’t looking at anything.

“I don’t think any other person could have done it,” she said, “in case you were wondering.” Her voice was raw, her lips twisted in a slightly acerbic smile. “I think I’m the only one who can make everything work that way.” She looked at me slowly, her lashes fluttering just as feebly. “I mean, tell someone to bring the plane over and have them load your things and put you in it.”

I flicked the ashes off my cigarette.

“They didn’t know you were gone until three o’clock this morning. They inquired of me and I went away.

No one can find you. I left on a plane with a man. Who was that man? I had someone send your luggage. It took them hours to figure it out. Then they started calling hotels all over New Orleans. They found us shortly before six o’clock. You may or may not remember that call.”

“I remember.” I said. Which meant that I remembered everything else, including telling her again that I loved her.

I looked at her. She was indeed in a dangerous situation. She wasn’t shaking, but I could tell. She stared at the food as if it were a little scary. But she also stared at the table in the same way, at the grapevines wrapped around the cast iron posts that supported the flat roof of the porch above us.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Her body was very stiff and she walked to the right, passing me. Then she didn’t make a movement at all, didn’t make a sound at all, her eyes became moist and she looked dull.

“I want to.” She said.

Her lower lip began to tremble as she took the napkin from the table, folded it up, and touched her nose. She was crying.

“I just want to.” She added.

I felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach. I mean, it was scary watching her lose control and start crying. And it was sudden. What had been a very stiff face was all of a sudden tears welling up in her cheeks, her lips quivering, her expression completely paralyzed.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go back to the hotel where we can be alone.” I gestured to the waiter for the bill.

“No, no, wait a minute.” She said. She blew her nose hard and hid her napkin in the drape of her dress.

I waited. I wanted to touch her, put my hand over her, hug her, or do whatever, yet I didn’t because we were in the middle of this go-go-go public place. I really felt stupid.

“I want you to understand something.” She said.

“I don’t want to understand,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

But that statement is completely untrue. I just don’t want her to cry like that, she’s totally broken right now, she just isn’t making much noise. She looks sad, very sad indeed.

I just want to hold her right now. Maybe, everyone who has been watching us in front of us is thinking: what did that son of a bitch do to make her cry?

She blows her nose again, wipes it, and sits quietly for a while. It was a hard time. Then she said, “As far as you are concerned, everything is okay. They know I lied to you, and I made you believe that it was something we did together. I told them that. When I tell them again, make sure they know it twice as sure. They were very insistent. I think they’re calling the hotel now. But here’s the thing: they know that I took you, that you were the victim of the whole thing, that it was my idea. I abducted you.”

I can’t help but smile when I hear this.

“What do they want you to do?” I asked. “How will it turn out?”

“Um, sure, they wanted me to take you back. I didn’t follow the rules, I broke your contract.” Tears welled up again, but she fought them back, deliberately showing a calm demeanor while keeping her eyes off me. “I mean, it was a horrible thing to do, you know.”

She looked at me for a moment, then averted her gaze as if I was going to say something horrible and blaming. I had no intention of doing so. In fact, the idea was quite ludicrous.

“They want me to go back to work,” she said. “There are all kinds of problems going on. The night before last, we kicked out a nouveau riche girl, and it didn’t seem to be the fault of the trainer who told her to leave. She came in posing as her sister, who was married to a guy from CBS. The whole thing seemed like it was prearranged. And CBS was really pushing us to be interviewed, and we weren’t formally interviewed by anyone. Everybody was really anxious about what I was doing…”

She paused, as if suddenly realizing what she was doing now, suddenly realizing it when she told me all this. She looks straight at me again, then turns her gaze away. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she whispered. “This look took you away from there.”

I leaned in against the table and took both of her hands in mine. Although she resisted slightly, I pressed her two hands together and kissed her fingertips.

“Why did you do that?” I asked again. “Why do you want to do it, as you say?”

“I don’t know!” She said, shaking her head. She was about to start crying again.

“Lisa, you know,” I said. “Please tell me. Why did you do it? What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She was crying, so she couldn’t really say the words. “I don’t know!

“She held on. She was completely broken.

I put two or three twenties on the table and led her out of there.

Eliot 24 Literal and Symbolic

When we returned, there were more phone messages hanging on the door.

Now, she was very calm and didn’t ask me to come outside the room when she called.

But she seemed to have a frustrated, pathetic and beautiful look on her face, and it was painful for me to see that look on her face.

In fact, I’m completely emotionally unstable in the quiet.

Within minutes, I knew she was talking to Richard, the “master of the willing slaves,” and she refused to give him the exact time of our return.

“No, don’t send an airplane yet!” She said at least twice.

I could tell by her answer: she insisted that nothing bad had happened, that I was with her, and that I was fine. She said she would call again tonight to let them know how long it would be.

“I will,” she said. “I will, I will stay here. You know what I’m doing. Now what I’m asking you for is a little time.”

She cried again. But they couldn’t have known. She kept it in, her voice steady and cold.

Then they talked about the hip girl posing as a sister and the CBS interview, and I knew she wanted me out, so I went out. I heard her say, “I can’t provide that kind of answer right now. You’re asking me to create a popular philosophy, a popular statement. That takes time and thought.”

I took a few pictures of the patio and a few pictures of the little house in which we live.

As soon as she walked into the courtyard, I stopped taking pictures and immediately said, “Let’s take a nice walk through the French Quarter, I mean really review all the museums, and the old houses, and spend a little bit of crazy money at the store.”

She was surprised, revealing a look of confusion and coldness, but her face became a little more vivid. She clasped her arms nervously and scrutinized me as if she didn’t quite understand what I was saying.

“And then,” I said, “let’s have a two-thirty wheelbarrow yodeling. It’s dull, but, by golly, it’s on the Mississippi. We can get something to drink on the boat. And I have an idea for tonight.”

“What?”

“Dancing, pure old-fashioned traditional dancing. There are some great dresses there. I’ve never been out dancing with a woman in my life. We went up there, to the ‘Queen of the River Fellowship Room’ at the top of Mariotte, and we danced until the band stopped playing. We just dance and dance.”

She stared at me as if I was crazy. We just stared at each other for a moment.

“Are you serious?” She said.

“Of course I mean it. Kiss me.”

“Sounds great.” She said.

“So smile,” I said. “Let me take your picture.”

To my utter amazement, she let me take the picture. She stopped in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and smiled. She looked beautiful in her white dress, the ribbon of her hat hanging down her arm.

We went to the museum in Cabildo, then to all the restored old houses open to the public, including the “Gallier House”, the “Herman Gleeman House”, the “Mrs. John’s Estate”, and the “Casa Cottage”, and we stopped in almost every antique shop and gallery we saw. Gleeman House”, “Mrs. John’s Estate”, and “Casa Cottage”, and we stopped in almost every antique store and gallery we saw.

My arms were around her again, and she was acting more and more relaxed and happy, and her face was smooth again, like a young girl’s. She was dressed in white, and her hair should have been tied with a white ribbon.

I thought: if I don’t love her forever, if this ends in some vile and uninteresting misfortune, then one thing is certain: I will never be able to look at a woman in white again.

Around 1:00 we had lunch at the Oyster Bar of Desire and talked again as we had last night. It was as if the manager and the phone hadn’t interfered.

She told me as much as she could about the initiation and creation of the Club. Initially there were two contributors and they had a surplus at the end of the first year. Now they are overwhelmed with applications for membership and can be very selective. She told me that there are other clubs that are copying them and that there is a very large club in Holland that meets indoors, another in California, and another in Copenhagen.

She was often offered higher packages to jump ship, but now she gets half a million dollars a year in dividends and doesn’t spend a penny except on vacations. The money keeps accumulating.

I told her that I was so addicted to sports that I almost crashed an “ultralight” airplane in Texas and spent two winters skiing in some of the most dangerous mountains in the world.

I hate this part of myself, always have, and hate the people I meet through these events because I feel like I’m playing a role. Taking pictures of people jumping off cliffs in Mexico was so much better than jumping off myself. I think I’m interested in taking pictures because it’s a way to get out of it.

But I suffered unfavorable consequences as a result.

I accepted every wartime assignment offered to me by Time and Life magazines. I worked as a freelance writer for two newspapers in California. After the first shots of the Beirut war, I worked day and night for nine months to finish the book. Nothing dangerous happened to me in Beirut, but I was nearly killed in Nicaragua & El Salvador, and I was really nearly killed in El Salvador. This incident in El Salvador slowed me down and got me thinking.

We talked about all this and I was a little surprised to find out that she knew what was going on in these places. She didn’t just know the generalities, she knew the history of the religious sects, the government of Beirut. I mean, regardless of the “clubs,” she reads more newspapers than most people.

The time was two o’clock and we had to catch the steamboat up the river. The weather could not have been better, blue skies, lovely clouds drifting rapidly, and really had not been seen anywhere else except in Louisiana, with only occasional little sun showers, and then again there were not a lot of people on the boat, as it was not a weekend.

We leaned together on the railing of the upper deck and just gazed at the city, and then the steamboat sailed far down the river, and the view was clouded with the colors of industry, repeating itself. All we had to do was recline on two or three light chairs, drink some wine, and feel the movement of the steamboat and the breeze off the river.

I told her that I hated to admit that I actually loved these steamboat trips, even though they seemed so commercial and boring. I love being in the midst of the Mississippi River, and no other river but the Nile creates that kind of reverence in my heart.

Two years ago, she was in Egypt at Christmas. During that time, she just couldn’t get close to her family, and she spent two weeks by herself in the “Winter Square” in Lexor. She knew what I meant by the two rivers, because every time she crossed them, she thought, “I’m on the Nile.”

But every time she crossed a river she had a peculiar feeling of excitement whether it was the Arno, the Thames or the Tiber, as if she were touching the nudge of history itself.

“I want you to tell me,” she said, a little abruptly, “what happened when you almost lost your life in El Salvador. And what does that mean, that thing that made you think?”

The same intense and almost innocent look appeared on her face again, just as it had appeared on her face last night when we talked. We both drank very slowly indeed. She really didn’t look like the woman I thought she was when we talked. But I know what that means: my idea of a woman sucks. I mean, she was asexual or something, interesting, not consciously seductive. She could be anyone. I find that extremely seductive.

“This whole thing isn’t the kind of thing you can’t read about in the papers,” I said. “It’s not really anything. It’s just nothing.” In fact, I didn’t want to describe the incident in exacting and detailed detail, to push it toward a climactic moment, to relive every second. “I was with another journalist and we were in San. Salvador, staying out after the curfew. Someone stopped us and almost got shot at. We knew.”

I could feel myself once again in that ugly, abyss-like feeling. For six weeks after I left El Salvador, I still had this feeling of the futility of almost everything, of that short-lived disappointment that can come at any time in your life, that you’re not going to be in a situation most of the time…

“I don’t know exactly where we thought we were, in a diner on ‘Telegraph Street’ in Berkeley, with two or three upper-middle-class white liberals, talking to other Berkeley upper-middle-class liberals about Marxism, the government, and all that nonsense. I mean, I guess we felt safe that way, that nobody was going to hurt us in a foreign country, that it wasn’t our war. Si, we were about to go back to the hotel when we were stopped in the dark by two guys, and I don’t even know what they were: national guard assassination squad thugs, whatever kind of people; and the guy we were with, the Salvadoran guy we’d been talking to all night, was scared to death. After we identified ourselves, it was clear: they wouldn’t let us go. I mean, the kid with the M-16 moved back and looked at the three of us. It was clear: he was just standing there, contemplating shooting us.”

Not wanting to recapture the sheer tension of that moment, that stench of real danger, that absolute helplessness of not knowing what to do, to move? To talk? Or stay still? The slightest change in facial expression can be fatal. And then there’s the anger that comes with helplessness, pure anger.

“Um, anyway,” I said. I took out a cigarette and tapped it on my knee. “He and the guy he was with disagreed and argued, and the kid kept aiming his gun straight at us; that’s when something happened, as if a truck showed up and they were leaving. Both of them looked at us and we didn’t move or say anything. I mean froze up, man.”

I lit the cigarette.

“For about two seconds we knew what they were thinking, or at least the situation seemed to be again: they were going to shoot us. Until this moment, I could not say whether it was true or not; if it was true, why didn’t they shoot? But they took the Salvadoran. They put him in the truck and we stood there and did nothing. We were in his mother’s house all night talking politics, mind you. We didn’t do anything.”

She sucked in air and made a dry sound.

“Jesus,” she whispered. “Did they kill him?”

“Yes, they killed him. But that’s what we didn’t know until we got back to California.”

She murmured something, a prayer, a curse, something like that.

“Exactly,” I said. “And you know, I mean, we didn’t even argue with them.” I said. That’s why I don’t want to talk about it, definitely don’t want to talk about it.

“But you don’t think you should argue…” she said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know if I should argue. I mean, if I had an M-16 rifle, you know, things would be different.” I took a drag on my cigarette, which seemed flavorless as it wafted in the breeze off the river. “I left El Salvador right fucking away.”

She nodded slightly.

“From that point on you started thinking.”

“Well, I was thinking about it for about the first week, and I never told anybody about it. I kept it in the back of my mind, thinking about it, thinking about what happened, thinking: if, if, you know, if this guy had fired that one M-16 rifle, we’d be the bodies of two other American journalists.

I mean, the ‘New York Times’ or whatever hits the news half an inch long, and then it’s over. It’s as if this spellbinding thing keeps happening, a go it tape in my mind, and I can’t get rid of it.”

“Sure.” She said.

“And what I think is clear, really clear, is that I’ve been doing all kinds of dangerous things. I’ve been traveling through these countries, as if I’m traveling through Disneyland, as if… you know, I’m asking for assignments, going into places where there’s a situation, not having the slightest idea what I’m doing. I’m taking advantage of these people, I’m taking advantage of their wars, I’m taking advantage of everything that’s going on.”

“What do you mean by using them?”

“Sweetheart, I don’t mind any of them at all. It was talk, Berkeley free talk. It’s a hilarious rollicking thing for me here.”

“You don’t like them… the people in Beirut: 24 Hours?”

“Oh yeah, I love them,” I said. “They rip me apart. I mean, I’m not a stupid fan of photography, just shooting these things as if they don’t mean anything. The truth is, it’s agonizing: photographs cool everything down, make everything abstract. You just can’t get everything on a camera, you can’t get everything on a VCR. But I really don’t mind all that.

I don’t want to relate to it all, to what’s going on! I was riding on top of these experiences as if they were roller coasters. I’m about to slide down a hill. I’m glad deep down that there is war, violence, and pain that allows me to experience them. It’s the truth!”

She stares at me for a second, then nods slowly.

“Yes, you understand,” I said. “It’s like you’re standing in Laguna. Sacramento trackside, thinking: well, if there’s a crash, Si, I want to be right here so I can see it.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

“But even that wasn’t enough,” I said. “I almost got involved in the situation itself. Not because I minded, not because I thought I could change anything in the world, but because it would have been a perfectly legal license to go and do things that I would not have been able to do…”

“Killing others.”

“Yes, perhaps,” I said. “As a matter of fact, that’s exactly the sort of thing that goes in and out of my head. The war’s a game. For whatever reason, really, except that, you know, they’re supposed to be the good guys, what we liberals call the good guys, but that really doesn’t matter in the end. Fighting for the Israelis, fighting in El Salvador, whatever.” I shrugged. “Pick a reason, any reason.”

She nodded again in the same slow manner, as if she were thinking thoroughly.

“If you’re my age and someone is holding an M-16 rifle against your face to show you what death really is, to get this right down to the nitty-gritty, then I think you’re a very realistic person, and frankly, the kind of realist that can be dangerous.”

She was thinking hard about this.

“Well, I had to think about it then. Why do I seek all this real death, real war, real suffering and starvation. Why I like its pure reality as if it were merely symbolic, as one likes a movie.”

“But reports, interviews…”

“Ah,” I said with a wave of my hand, indicating inadequacy, “I was a newbie and there were plenty of others.”

“What’s your conclusion about all this?”

“I’m a very destructive guy, I’m kind of ordained.”

I swallowed a mouthful of wine.

“I am a spellable fool,” I said. “That’s my conclusion.”

“What about the people who fought in those places then? I don’t mean mercenaries, I mean people who believed in war. Were they cursable fools?” She hated asking the question politely, it did reveal curiosity.

“I don’t know. In one respect, in my reporting, it doesn’t really matter if they’re idiots or not. In fact, my death wouldn’t change anything for them. It would be unnecessary, a completely personal thing, the price of the game.”

She nodded slowly, her gaze skimming over me and turning to the deck above and the far bank of the river, the olive monotone marshes down low falling right into the brown water, the drifting clouds creating a quick pictorial scene of activity.

“Was it after you wrote Beirut: Twenty-Four Hours?” She asked.

“Yes, and I didn’t write Twenty-Four Hours in El Salvador.”

When she turned to me again, her expression was very serious and she appeared calm and fully focused.

“But after you have seen,” she said, “seen real suffering, real violence if that experience means anything to you anyway then how can you endure what is going on there with Martin?” She hesitated. “How can you endure the rituals of the ‘club’? I mean, how do you make that transition?”

“Are you making fun of me?” I ask, swallowing another mouthful of whiskey. “Are you asking me that?”

She looked genuinely confused when I asked this.

“You’ve seen people actually tortured,” she said, choosing her words slowly. “Those people, as you say, involved in actual violence. How can you possibly justify what we did after that kind of thing? Why don’t you see us as despicable and depraved, an insult to what you have witnessed? The man who was put in the truck…”

“I thought I understood the question you were asking,” I said. “In any case, I’m surprised.” I take another small sip of wine and think about how to provide an answer. Should I answer slowly? Or should I just come right out and say it?

“Do you think those in this world who are engaged in real combat are superior to us?” I asked.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Do you think that those who engage in real violence, either in defense or aggression, outweigh those among us who come up with the same offense in a symbolic way?”

“We’re not superior to them, but gosh, I mean, there are some people who are involved in this, for whom suffering is unavoidable…”

“Yes. They are involved in a thing which is terrible and destructive, as it was two thousand years ago when people fought with arrows and spears. Such a thing would not be so different from what happened five thousand years further back when people fought with stones and sticks. Why would something so primitive, so ugly, so horrible, make what we do at the ‘club’ seem despicable?”

She understands me, I know she does, but she doesn’t make it clear.

“I think just the opposite,” I said. “I’ve been there before. Just the opposite, I assure you.

There is nothing despicable about two people in a bedroom trying to discover the symbolic solution to sexual assault in the midst of ‘sadomasochistic masochistic’ sex. What is despicable is the people who do rape, who do kill, who do shell entire villages, blow up entire busloads of innocent people, and who do and ruthlessly carry out their work of destruction.”

I gazed into her face and could almost feel her thoughts. Her hair hung down over her shoulders against her white dress, reminding me of the little joke she had told last night about the convent, reminding me of a nun’s veil.

“You know the difference between the symbolic and the real,” I said. “You know that we’re in the ‘club’

The thing that is done in it is play. You know the origin of that kind of play is deep, deeply located within us, in a tangle of chemical and cerebral components that cannot be effectively analyzed.”

She nodded.

“Well, I also think that the human impulse to engage in war has the same origin. If you strip away the veneer of current politics, the veneer of ‘who’s going to do what to whom first’ of every crisis, big or small, then what you get is this: the same kind of mystery, the same kind of urgency, the same kind of sophistication that underlies sexual assault. It’s the same rituals we play in ‘clubs’ that involve the same kind of sexual desire to dominate or submit to others. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all sexual assault.”

Again, she didn’t answer. But the situation was as if she was listening very carefully.

“No, the ‘club’ isn’t meaner than what I’ve seen,” I said. “I would have thought you would have understood that better than anyone else.”

She looked out at the river.

“I do think so,” she said at last. “But I don’t know for sure: one who has spent time in Beirut and El Salvador would think so.”

“Maybe people who have suffered from that kind of war, people who have been ravaged by that kind of war for years, maybe they won’t like our ceremony. Their lives are not like any life you or I have ever experienced. But that’s not to say that what happened to them was superior either in terms of origin or end result. If they became saints as a result, that would be great. But can we expect terrible wars to have that effect from time to time? I don’t think there are any more people in the world who really think that war makes people noble, or of any value.”

“Does ‘club’ make one noble?”

“I don’t. But as far as money is concerned, it does have value.”

Her eyes seemed to light up slightly at those words, but her true feelings were hidden deep inside.

“You came here to realize its value in a symbolic way.” She said.

“Of course. In order to explore its value, to realize its value, one does not let one’s head fall off, or anyone else’s. You know this, you must know it. If you didn’t know it, how could you have created this complex island paradise?”

“I told you. I do believe, but I don’t live any other way,” she said. “My life has been too much self-created work. Sometimes I think I do everything in the name of ‘challenge’.”

“That’s not what you said last night. Do you remember what you said? You said that you were not disgusted by anything that two legal individuals did together, that you always thought it was innocent. You knew it as well as I did: if we could show our violent feelings within our bedroom walls, and no one got hurt and no one was really frightened and no one was reluctant then, after all, we would be able to save the world.”

“Save this world! That’s a very exaggerated admonition.” She said.

“Well, at least save our own souls anyway. But there is no other way to save the world now, except to create places where we can symbolically represent those impulses that we took literally in the past. Sex is not going to go away, and neither are the destructive impulses that are combined with sex. So if there were a ‘club’ on every street, if there were a million safe places for people to act out their fantasies, no matter how primitive or repulsive they might be, then who knows what the world would be like? Real violence might be vulgar and vile for everyone.”

“Yes, this is where the Idea was then, the Idea.” She frowned and seemed lost for a moment, revealing a strange look of agitation. I wanted to kiss her.

“It’s still where the idea is,” I said. “People say that the ‘sadomasochistic masochism’ mania is entirely concerned with childhood experiences, a battle between the battle we fought as children and the battle between the desire to dominate and the desire to submit, and that we are destined to do it again. I don’t think it’s that simple; I didn’t think it was.

One thing about ‘sadomasochistic’ maniacal fantasies that I often hated fascinated me before I ever dreamed of manifesting such fantasies that is, such fantasies are filled with some props that we don’t see in childhood.”

I took another sip of my drink, the last one left in the glass.

“You know,” I continued, “the rack and the whip, the lasso and the smithy, the gloves and the tights. Were you ever threatened with the torture rack as a child? Did anyone ever ask you to put on handcuffs? I was not ever slapped. These things don’t come from childhood, they come from the past of our history, they come from the past of our race. The entire bloodline has embraced violence since the far-off days. They are temptations, as well as horrible symbols of those cruelties which were common up to the eighteenth century.”

She nods, as if remembering something, one hand gently touching her waist, her fingers caressing the texture of her dress. “The first time,” she said, “I put on a pair of black leather leggings, you know…”

“Yes…”

“The time when I felt all the women were wearing these things, you know, every day…”

“Of course. At that time when the matter was common, all props were drifts from a bygone time.

Where are they common today? In our dreams, in our erotic novels, in our brothels. No, in the ‘sadomasochistic’ mania, we are always dealing with something that is much more capricious than the struggles of childhood; we are dealing with our primal desire to want to reach intimacy via rape; we are dealing with the deepest attraction within that draws us to seek to suffer, as well as to inflict pain, to seek to have someone else. “

“Yes, have…”

“If we can transfer the torture rack, the whip, and the lasso forever to the ‘sadistic masochist’ maniac scenario if we can transfer all forms of rape to the ‘sadistic masochist’ maniac scenario then maybe we can save the world.”

She looked at me for a long time without saying anything. Finally she nodded slightly again, as if what I said didn’t shock her.

“Maybe this kind of thing is different for men,” I said. “You call the police in San Francisco any night of the week and ask them who’s doing the robbing with bodily harm. It’s people with testosterone in their blood.”

She offered a polite smile, but immediately returned to her serious demeanor.

“‘The Club’ is the wave of the future, baby,” I said. “You should be more proud of it.

They cannot sanitize or legislate away our sexuality. Sexuality must be understood and tolerated.”

She made a weak sound of agreement, her lips tightly closed and her eyes narrowed slightly before becoming bright again.

I finished my drink, silent and speechless, watching the clouds drift across the sky.

My whole body could feel the vibrations of the motorboat, feel the vague fluctuations of the engine, and even feel the silent but strong pull of the river or so it seemed. The wind had strengthened, but only slightly.

“You’re not really proud of what you’ve done, are you?” I asked. “I mean, despite what you said last night.”

She sat beside me, revealing a look of gloomy distress, and a look of unspeakable loveliness, with the edge of her dress lifted from her bare knees, her long, thin calves beautifully shaped, and her face silent. I could feel her contemplation, her agitation, and I hoped that she would speak to me and say what she really thought about the matter.

“Um, I think you’re great,” I said. “I love you. Like I said to you last night.”

She didn’t answer, gazing at the blue sky above the riverbank as if her thoughts had captured her.

Well… so what?

After a moment, she turned to me again.

“You’re always fully aware of what you want at the ‘club,'” she says. “They are always therapeutic for you.”

“Therapeutic, by God,” I said. “I’m just flesh and blood, and I’m fairly obedient to the flesh, perhaps more so than most.” My finger touches her cheek very slightly. “I’ve felt it most of my life. I have a slightly more physical component than most.”

“Me too.” She said.

“Um, ah, very colorful.” I said, expressing my meaning bluntly, not poking fun at her.

“Yes,” she said, “as if it would explode if it didn’t get out. As if even as a child, my body made me a criminal.”

“Precisely. Why do we have to be criminals?”

I sat up and ruffled my hair from her face, my lips skimming over her cheek.

“Let’s put it this way: since that experience in El Salvador,” I said, “I’ve been hooked on symbolic violence. Is it therapeutic? Who knows. Or addicted to violent movies, and TV shows, things I wouldn’t have even looked at before. I’m addicted to my own violent fantasies. When I heard people talking about Martin’s place for about the thirtieth time, I did what I thought I would never do. I said: ‘Tell me something about that place! Where is it? How do I find the phone number to call it?’

”

“When you first hear about this place, you are not going to believe it’s real,” she said, “and you’re not going to believe that people are doing it.”

“Yes. And it’s not a cure, really. That’s the best part. Martin said in one of our first little conversations that he doesn’t try to analyze anyone’s ‘sadomasochistic’ maniacal desires. He didn’t mind at all why some people filled their fantasies with whips and smithies and others would never think of such things in their lives. ‘We will deal with your present instincts.’ I think I just started to deal with this instinct, peeling back layer after layer, going deeper and deeper into it, experiencing moment after moment of horror. And I realized that this kind of thing is as horrible as anything I’ve ever done. It’s really the horror of doing it and the wonder of doing it. It’s the most solemn and interesting experience I’ve ever had up to this point.”

“An adventure, so to speak.” She said, already sliding her hand upward to the back of my neck, her fingers feeling warm in the cool breeze off the river.

“Yes, just like that,” I said. “When I heard ‘club,’ Si, I couldn’t quite believe that anyone would have the courage to create a club of that size. I was dazzled. I was crazy. I knew that I would get into ‘the club,’ no matter what I had to do.”

I close my eyes for just a second and kiss her at the same time. I wrap my arms around her and hold her to me, kissing her again.

“Be proud of it.” I whispered.

“Proud of what?”

“For the ‘club’, baby. Be very brave and be able to be proud of it.” I said.

She looked confused and a bit frustrated. As I kissed her, it seemed very tender.

“I can’t think about it at the moment,” she said. “I can’t think about it.” I could feel her hating excitement and her lips tightened in a sexy way.

“Okay, but be proud of it.” I said, kissing her slightly harder and opening her mouth.

“Let’s not talk about this anymore.” She said, moving even closer to me, her arm around my waist.

We’re a little heat wave on the deck. Anyone who comes near gets burned.

“How much longer are we going to be on this ship?” I asked, whispering in her ear.

“I don’t know.” She said, her eyes closed and she was kissing my cheek.

“I want to be alone with you,” I said. “Back at the hotel, I want to be alone with you.”

“Kiss me again.” She said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Eliot 25 “The Women in My Life.”

We stopped on the way back and had some wine and lots of good food caviar and cookies, apples, sour ice cream, smoked oysters. I bought some cinnamon, butter and bread, a lot of French yogurt, a bottle of iced “Don Pellegrino” (the best, fifty dollars), and a bottle of “Pellegrino” (fifty dollars). I bought some cinnamon, butter and bread, a lot of French yogurt, a bottle of iced “Don Pellegrino” (it’s the best, $50), and a set of wine glasses.

When I arrived at my room, I ordered an ice bucket, turned off the cold air again, and latched the blinds, just as I had done the first time.

The hour approached twilight, vivid, lovely New Orleans twilight, the sky blood-red, the pale red oleander glowing in a tangle of gardens. Heat hovered in the air as it did not on the coast. A softness is revealed in the warmth, and the room is filled with gray shadows.

Lisa crumpled up all the phone messages and threw them away. She sat on the bed, her white dress lifted to her thigh area, her shoes scattered in the corner. She had a large crystal glass bottle of perfume in her hand and rubbed it all over her skin. She rubbed the perfume into her neck, into her calves and rubbed it into the area between her toes.

The elegant mixed-race kid brought the ice over and more phone messages as well.

“Would you please throw these away?” Lisa asked. She didn’t look at the phone messages.

I opened the champagne and poured it into two glasses in a perfect spray of bubbles.

I sat down next to her and gently, slowly, ran my hand up to the buttons on the back of her dress. This time the perfume wasn’t Chanel, it was Chardonnay. It was too beautiful to resist. I took the glass from her hand, placed it on the table and offered her the champagne.

The perfume mixed the sunny scent of her hair and skin. Drinking champagne made her lips moist. She said, “Do you miss the ‘club’?”

“No.” I said.

“You know, the torture cane and the belt and all that that you miss?”

“No,” I said, kissing her again. “Unless, of course, you have a very strong desire to beat the shit out of me. If that’s the case, I’ll throw myself at your mercy, as a gentleman should.

But I have one other thing in mind, one thing I’ve always wanted to do.”

“Go for it!” She said.

She took off her clothes. The tanned skin was dark against the white sheet. There’s still enough bright light to see the strawberry’s pale red nipples. I slide my hand down between her legs, embracing her, touching her soft pubic hair before sliding away from her and quietly leaving the room and walking into the dark little kitchen.

When I came back, I took the butter, and the little box of ground cinnamon.

I took off my clothes. Her body rested on her arms, her breasts protruding, her flat belly and that secret hill of black pubic hair, forming thin, graceful curves, was beautiful.

Her cheeks revealed a blush.

“What are you doing?” She asked, looking at what I’d brought in with an almost timid expression.

“Just a little thing I’ve always wanted to do.” I say, laying down next to her, stretching her out, hugging her head, kissing her. I bring my right arm up and dip my fingers in a bit of butter. The butter had gotten lovely and soft due to the heat. I rubbed the butter onto the pale red nipple of her breast, caressing it and stretching it slightly. She was breathing deeply, and the heat was visibly rising from her, like an aroma. I put the locket of cinnamon to my own lips place and sniffed it, that wonderful oriental odor, that forbidden scent, about the wildest aphrodisiac aroma I had ever smelled aside from the smell of purely male or female flesh. I rubbed the cinnamon against her nipples.

I rolled on top of her, pressing slightly against her, my dick hard against her thigh, and began to suck on her nipples, licking them.

I could feel her body tensing up underneath me, and the heat radiating from her sex organs was bizarre. She moaned and seemed to struggle to control herself from raising her arms, and then, both of her hands clutched my head. She looked wild, yet a little resistant and frightened.

“It’s too much,” she said, “too much.” I stopped and ruffled the hair from her face. I was pure animal now, and all I wanted was her. I thought about what she’d said before about the blindfold, about how it was supposed to make things easier to handle. So I reached down and picked up the little cotton undershirt she wore under her dress and stretched it out until it resembled a folded white band of cloth, then I tied it around her head, covering her eyes. I flattened the knot at the back and settled her head on the pillow.

She breathed in feebly and deeply, her mouth was no longer tight, it was pouty, soft and sensual, and I felt her whole body loosen beneath me. I felt her body become warm and open to me. Her arms wrapped around my neck and her hips moved against me.

It was a murmur as she whispered what tender words came out. This time when I licked her breasts, when I came up to them and sucked on them, my teeth on them and caressed them, she moaned, her body pressed against me. I was going crazy doing this to her, just doing this, and had to raise my body a little to get my dick off her thighs, off her wet heat, or I would come out and it would be over too soon. She let out a hoarse cry, a sound that a child or a nun would think she hated pain when they heard it. Something in her was cut open.

My fingers were smeared with soft butter again, and I slipped my fingers in, rubbing the butter into her pubic hair, into her pussy lips. I rubbed the cinnamon on her, on her pussy core, while she stretched her legs apart, all hint of resistance completely gone from her.

“Do, do…” she whispered, or at least the words spoken sounded like it.

I was so aroused, I didn’t think I could stretch her out any longer. I brought my face up to her, enveloped in her scent, her clean aroma and the scent of butter and cinnamon.

I started licking underneath the nub, spreading it out and rubbing it upward with my tongue, then my mouth came fully up on it, on her pussy lips, and sucked on it.

She was stretched out on all fours as if she was tied that way, unable to raise her arms or hands, unable to struggle to bring her legs together. She was completely mine. She squirmed underneath, lifting her hips, but not resisting. She belonged to me. I lapped up the butter and ate the cinnamon, savoring that wild aphrodisiac, the spices, her dark gray love juice, and her hot breath. It sounded so much like she was crying. She struggled, she said she was coming out.

I climbed on top of her body. Her body was tight and hot when my dick went in, so I exploded inside her. She was coming out, coming out, just like I was coming out, and her face turned a deep red, her white cotton eyeshade glowed in the darkness, her lips trembled, and a little curse or prayer went out with the word “Oh, God.”

I said, “Say my name, Lisa.”

“Elliot.” She said. She says it again. Her sex organ locks onto me, quivering like a mouth as I hold still inside her.

After a while I stood up and turned on the shower faucet. It was great, lots of warm water, and the little white tiled bathroom was instantly filled with steam. I soaped up my entire body, thinking about everything and trying to shake off the feeling of deep indulgence.

I was taken aback when she appeared outside the glass door, and then I opened it for her.

She walked in, also looking sleepy, her hair a mess. I pushed her right under the stream of water, rubbed a lot of soap on top of the towel, and started bathing her. I rubbed the towel over her shoulders & breasts, gently washing all the butter. I could see her coming to her senses and losing all control.

She kissed my nipples and then stroked them with both hands. Then she hugs me tightly. I kissed her neck while water ran above us both. I caress her sex with a soapy towel and rinse her sex in slow but rough motions.

“Come,” I whispered, “come in my arms. I want to see you come in.” I do not think I want to come again so soon. I think one has to be at one’s best to do this, to come out three or four times a day, as I did at the “club.” I was very happy. I loved the feeling of her against me, naked, slippery, and quivering, with the water rolling over her hair. As she tiptoed to her feet and stood up, I felt her sex open. I felt her arms slide down my back, her fingers inside my ass, massaging it, then opening and sliding in very gently.

The raw, indescribable sensation of being opened, of being there. She slipped two fingers in, deeper, deeper, as easily as she had done with the dildo for the first time at the Club, just touching the right spot, finding the gland, pressing against it.

I dropped the towel and entered her inside. She came out in a violent shudder. Her mouth opens against my cheek, sobs catching in her throat. I leaned back against the white tile her, her fingers still inside me. She came out again if she had inhibited her breasts as red as her face, her face covered in droplets, her hair cascading down her shoulders and back as if it were water.

“When I say I love you, I mean it.” I said.

There was no answer. Just the heat from the shower that rinsed us off, and our own heat, and then her face lifting upward, and the lips that kissed me, and the head that rested on my shoulder. It’s good enough for now, it’s beautiful. I was able to wait.

When we arrived at the “Queen of the River Fellowship Room,” the place was delightfully crowded, but she was clearly the most attractive woman in the room.

She wore a tiny black “St. Lawrence” dress, a pair of spaghetti strap heels, and her hair was a mess, like a witch. The diamonds around her throat made her neck look long and strange, as if she could take a bite out of it.

I was wearing a black dress, which was nice, I guess. But it wasn’t all that made everyone look at us.

We were like a honeymooning couple, making intimate gestures almost as soon as we drank, walking onto the dance floor, glued to each other, in the midst of so many husbands and wives that it was like passing out.

The place is a little dim, full of chalky crayon highlights, the city of New Orleans looks like a glowing sea beyond the plate-glass windows, and the band is Latin American in flavor, steady and sensual, playing real dance music, with added rhythmic sounds.

The champagne went straight to our heads. I gave the band two or three hundred dollars to keep playing without interruption, and we danced the rumba, the cha-cha, and all sorts of dances no one had ever seen me do before. Her hips swayed flamboyantly under her black dress, her breasts quivered in her silk dress, and her feet swirled on their thin heels.

A wave of laughter came out of us.

After the cha-cha-cha, we returned to the table and laughed as our bodies bent in half.

We drank all the sweet, sticky, heartfelt, ridiculous tourist cocktails. Anything with pineapple, little paper hats, colorful straws, salt, sugar, cherries, Sunrise, Voodoo, Sacha Lek, etc., we want it all. Now bring them all to this table! But when the orchestra plays the Brazilian “Brahmsa Nova” during the break, we’ll have a good time. But we had the most wonderful time when the orchestra played the Brazilian “Brava Nova” during the break. The singer did a great Gilberto imitation, with hypnotic Portuguese lyrics and a mesmerizing rhythm. We did wail and float through it, barely stopping to stand and sip our wine.

By eleven o’clock, we wanted something more raucous. Yeah, come on, let’s get out of this place.

I take her into the elevator. She leaned against my chest and ate and laughed.

We walked into “Decatur Road” and found a new disco club, the kind of place I would never associate with New Orleans, like thousands of disco clubs around the world, with breathtaking crowds and flashing colorful lights. The dance floor was packed, the people were young, the music was deafening, the giant TV screen was flashing, and Michael Jackson was screaming “Wanna get it on”. Jackson screamed “want to start something”. Immediately we were in the middle of it, rushing, writhing, plunging into the sea of flesh, gripping each other’s sides and making out in a new wave of heat. No one, absolutely no one, was dressed like us in this place. They were watching us.

We’re having fun, pure fun.

Once we’d had our drinks, the slow music of Eddie Gran’s “Electric Street” brought us out again. The slow music of Eddie Gran’s “Electric Street” drew us out again. We were making up for what we hadn’t done in the past, and what we were doing was making up for it, regardless of what anyone else was doing. It goes on until “Every Breath You Take” and “King of Pain” by The Police. Then the screen went black for “L.A. Woman” by The Gateway Porch. It’s not a dance, it’s a complete frenzy, a spasm, a jolt and a pirouette; as Lisa’s feet leave the ground, I pick her up, her hair forming damp locks that stick to the side of her face.

I haven’t done one of these in years, not since the big rock concerts in San Francisco when I was a student.

We swallowed our drinks quickly. In the colorful lights, the place is bright and fuzzy, just like that place is bright and fuzzy when you’re so drunk you’re about to fall off the bar’s high chair. The important thing is to keep dancing. Slide past “David Bowie,” “Bowie,” “Bowie. David Bowie”, “Joanne Jett”. Jet”, “Steve Smith”, and “The Bowie”, “Joan Jet”, “Steve Smith”, and “The Bowie”. Smith,” and “Manhattan for Cars.”

It’s back to the slow, cheek-to-cheek music of “Jackson”. We were on the dance floor, embracing sweetly and slowly while they sang “The Woman in My Life.”

I sang into her ear. I was no longer with the rest of humanity; I had everything I wanted on Earth itself. With our arms around each other, we are just one body, one warm body; a satellite, forever out of orbit, forever into its own path in the sky.

“Woe to the rest of humanity,” I said, “they don’t know it’s heaven, they don’t know how to get in.”

At one o’clock we stepped out, arms around each other, and just drifted through the narrow streets: sweeping headlights blazed a trail over cobblestones, gas lamps, old Spanish colonnades, and green shutters.

We were exhausted. We walked up to a fake lamppost that looked like an old gaslight (I actually love these lampposts) and put our arms around her and kissed her as if I were a sailor with the girl I’d hooked up with. It was a mess, wet kisses, biting the inside of her sweet mouth, stroking her nipples through the black velvet.

“I don’t want to go back to the hotel,” she said. Her hair was tousled and cute. “Let’s go to a different place. I can’t go, I’m too drunk. Let’s go in to ‘Monteleone’!”

“Why don’t you want to go back?” I asked. She should have called the Club. I know she didn’t. She doesn’t leave my sight except for a brief moment when she enters the ladies’ restroom.

She said, “I just don’t want to hear that phone ring. Let’s go anywhere, let’s go into the Monteleone, just a hotel room, you know, like we just met.” She was too worried. “Please,” she said, “please, Elliot.”

“Okay, sweetie.” I said.

We turn around and enter “Monteleone”.

They gave us a room on the fifth floor with pearl gray velvet, carpeted throughout, and a small double bed, like millions of old, faded hotel rooms in the United States. I turned out the light and opened the window  to look out over the low roofs of the “French Quarter.” We drank the whiskey we had bought on the way, and then we lay down on top of the quilt with our clothes on.

“There’s one thing I want to know,” I say in her ear, my fingers wandering around the edge of her ear. She reveals a lovely flaccid look, her hot breath falling straight down my side.

“What?” She said, almost falling asleep.

“If you’re in love with me… if you brought me here like this because you’re in love with me, if you’re very much in love with me, like I’m very much in love with you, and it’s not just a kind of indulgence, a weird little indulgence or a nervous breakdown or something, then, please, will you tell me?”

She did not answer me. She lay still, as if asleep, the shadows of her eyelashes dark against her cheeks, her little black “St. Lawrence” dress as soft as a nightgown. She breathed deeply, her right arm above me, her fingers gripping my shirt, but in the manner that one’s hand might assume in sleep, endeavoring to draw me closer.

“Fuck you, Lisa.” I said.

The headlight light from a car below swept above the wallpapered ceiling and shone downward on the wall.

“Yes!” She said. But it was the sound of sleep. She slept through it.

Eliot 26 Desire Under the Oaks

The next day, it was just the two of us in our evening gowns touring the farmyard. But so what? It was also just the two of us in tuxedos eating breakfast at the soda vendor at the grocery store.

A private limousine took us north to the Destrahan Estate and then to the San Francisco Farms.

And then to “Oak Park Lane” in St. Jax.

We snuggled together in the gray velvet car seats and swapped stories again, talking about childhood, disappointments, and dreams. It was truly supernatural, traveling at sixty miles per hour through a Louisiana lowland landscape where the riverbanks always hid the Mississippi River and the sky was often overly dotted with green color.

The cold air is silent and reveals a wonderful chill. We did pass through time itself, just as we did pass through the green subtropical land.

We have a lot of wine in the mini-fridge. We have cold beer and some caviar and crackers. And we turned on the little color TV to enjoy game shows, soap operas.

Then we made love, really wonderful hangover love, no blindfolds, nothing, our whole bodies stretched out on the very large, very wide couch seats.

But in Oak Alley, a mood arose, perhaps because it was one of the most magnificent farm gardens I’d ever seen in Louisiana. Or maybe because I finally had time to think.

“Oak Alley does have a road to the front door, and it has one of the most harmonious houses, with a center hallway and steps that make you feel like the rest of the house is a mess. But Oak Alley is more than just magnificent. The bright colors of light through those oaks; the way you seem to sink into the tall green grass as you walk near the house; the silent appearance of the black-haired, hornless oxen in the distance, gazing at you like ghosts from a strange bygone time; and so much more, with its columns, its high porches, and the silence it all reveals, makes you feel as if you had penetrated still further into the unearthly character of New Orleans, and had arrived at another enchanting place. place.

We roamed about the neighborhood, and I became strong and silent, for I had to make up my mind about what I was doing.

I am in love with her. I have said so at least three times to her as well as to myself. She has everything I want in a woman, mainly because she is very sensual woman, very serious, very intelligent, and in her own way decent and very honest, and all this must be the reason why she seems so silent now. In particular, she was beautiful, in a cold sort of way. Whether she was talking about her father or her favorite movies or saying nothing at all: whether she was dancing or laughing or looking out the window, she was the first woman I’d ever found as interesting as a man.

Maybe if Martin were here, he’d say, “I told you so, Elliot. You’ve been looking for her.”

Maybe, Martin. Maybe. But how could you or anyone have predicted this!

Okay! It was wonderful. She took me out of the “club” in a violent, natural, romantic way, just as I had hoped on the first night. But it was clear that there could be three reasons, just as in the bed at Monteleone, when she was asleep and I tried to talk to her, suggesting three reasons. Maybe she’s in love with me; maybe she’s having a nervous breakdown; or maybe she’s just letting off steam. I mean, if “The Club” was where you’d lived for six years, you’d be acting out your fantasies, right? Or would you?

But in either case, she wouldn’t tell me.

When I told her that I loved her, her face looked sensitive and responsive, like I wanted her to show it. But she didn’t answer, she didn’t show. She didn’t show that she might not want to deal with her inner thoughts, that she might not be able to deal with them.

Okay! So what am I going to do? The funny thing is: even though I’m stubborn, silent, and thinking about it, my heart is full of love for her, full of the same madness that the whole thing reveals, just as it was when I was talking and kissing her. Nothing had become acrimonious or obscure. But what was I to do?

As we left Oak Alley and the car rattled out of the driveway and onto River Road, I felt that the situation was very much like what a man would want: to enjoy the sex and the fun without committing to anything; to enjoy the cheating, but without any strings attached. She acted like the man, and I acted like the woman who went for it, asking her to tell me what situation we were in.

I was sure of one thing: if I forced her, if I grabbed her arm and said, “Listen to me, you have to tell me. If you don’t tell me what situation we’re in, we can’t go any further.” Then I had a fifty percent chance of ruining the whole thing. Fifty percent chance. Because she could have told me one very disappointing, very simple thing and I would have been completely devastated.

Okay! It’s not worth doing. As long as she’s with me, it’s not worth doing. As long as she’s snuggled up to me and I can kiss her, love her, talk to her like this, then it’s not worth doing. I silently thought: she hates the fact that she may be changing the direction of my entire life.

So, I decided to keep loving her and not say anything else. That first drunken morning, I told her that she was going to hurt me, but that it didn’t matter, I was feeling a little bit like this. Kind of like that. It’s just that I’m too excited right now, and there’s too much happening to me, to think about it in that sentimental way.

My mind was busy. I should call the real estate company about the house for sale in the Garden District. I had to call my father to see if he was alive or if he had killed my mother. I had to buy another camera.

What is all this?

I won’t even ask her: Why don’t we go back to the hotel? What are we running from? “What could the Club do?

But when we left “Oak Lane” and she told the driver to drive into Gulfstream country to St. Martinville, I knew we were indeed “on the run”.

She didn’t say anything about it. She looked so cute in her khaki shorts, t-shirt, and the leather-striped sandals we bought at the discount store. She sprinkled on ‘Strongly’ perfume, really cheap and fragrant, also bought at that store. I wanted to take pictures of her face, of how her face looked in the shadows, and those shadows on those cheekbones, in the hollows of her cheeks, and the cute pouty look of her red lips.

In the end, she said, “I never thought I would get married at all. I didn’t think I’d ever really fall in love with someone. I didn’t think…” She sat quietly, looking horrified. I looked at her, feeling stubborn, and thought, “Hell, I’m not going to say another word.

I’m hungry for some Cajun local food, real Cajun chowder with shrimp and red beans. I want to hear some ridiculous, shrill, nasal and high-pitched Cajun music and singing, and maybe even discover a little bar somewhere where I can dance.

“I’ll take the one in the ‘Garden District’.” I said.

She woke up like a man pulling on a rope tied to his body. She sat there, staring into the distance.

“It’s going to cost a million dollars!” She said, her eyes slow and strange.

“And?” I said.

We showered together and put on more discount store clerk shorts, shirts & sandals. We were ready to go out.

Then a stupid thing happened, more or less stupid.

A big, scary Louisiana brown cockroach crawled into the room, and Lisa jumped off the bed, screaming, screaming at the top of her lungs, while the cockroach lumbered across the uneven chemical carpet and across the room.

It’s actually a water bug, as far as I know. But all the Louisianans I know just call it a cockroach, and all the people I know who were born here with this cockroach scream like crazy when it crawls into a room.

I’m not at all afraid of cockroaches myself. So, when Lisa screamed herself into a stupor, I mean almost into a state of complete hysteria, screaming, “Elliot, kill it! Kill it! Kill it!” I was just happy to go ahead and deal with the thing, grabbing it off the carpet with my hands, ready to throw it out the door. This is an even better idea than crushing it, because if you just crush it then it makes a horrible secluded snapping noise and, in my opinion, a crushed cockroach is worse to look at than a moving one. I don’t like these things, but I don’t mind catching them.

As my right hand grasped the cockroach as if it were a moth, Lisa saw me do it and fell into a state of schizophrenic silence, covering her mouth with both hands. She stared at me, unable to believe what I was doing, while I stood there silently, staring at her. Then she dropped her hands, her face white, sweating, her body trembling, and said, “Eh, I hope it wasn’t the samurai himself, Mr. ‘Strong Man,’ who grabbed the cockroach that went to it with his empty hands!”

I don’t know how she did feel. Maybe she was surprised, scared, upset, and I had the cockroach in my hand. I don’t know.

Whatever the case may be, her voice revealed anger, contempt and sarcasm. I didn’t bother to think about it, perhaps because of the unconscious anger I felt from that incredible scream of hers, so I said, “You know what? Lisa, I’m going to put this cockroach on your shirt.”

She’s totally crazy.

She screamed just as she had just screamed, truly screamed, and stormed into the broken closet of the bathroom, slamming the door hard and pushing the latch shut. From the doorway came the most hysterical curses, pleas, and choked sobs of agony I’ve ever heard.

Well, obviously the matter was not fun for her, not at all. She was too scared. I’m a despicable person.

But for a whole hour I couldn’t convince her to come out. I threw the cockroach outside and the stupid thing perished. It’s dead, dead, dead. It will no longer frighten pretty little girls from roach-free Berkeley, California. It doesn’t have enough parts left over for a cockroach funeral. It’s dead.

I hated sorry, I told her I wouldn’t do anything like that again, really, it was bullying and mean.

But, although I wanted her to calm down and believe me when I said that I knew I was behaving horribly, however, I just couldn’t help but say things that teased her, such as, “Of course I’m not going to put a big, slimy, ugly, multi-legged, squirming brown cockroach on your shirt!”

I know I’m not supposed to do this, this so sadomasochistic, but also so much fun that I can’t help but do it. Of course, I knew I wouldn’t actually do it. Then I said, “Of course I’m not going to do it, Lisa, do you think I’ve ever gone toward a kind of ‘sadomasochistic’ mania scenario where I put a cockroach in your shirt and expect you to act out your fear of cockroaches? Like you asked me to be blindfolded at the whipping post in the sports commons? No way, ma’am!”

But, in the end, I begged her to walk out.

“Lisa, get out of the bathroom! I swore I would never do that to anyone else again. I’ve never done it before and I’ll never do it again. It was vile and I won’t do it again.” I said bluntly. She still wouldn’t open the door.

“Okay, Lisa. This is Louisiana. What are you going to do the next time one of these beasts creeps in?” (CRYING) “What did you used to do when you were here and I wasn’t?” (MORE CRYING) “But I’m here now, and when they come crawling in, I’ll get rid of them, okay? Now you’d better make up with me right now or I may not make up with you.” (horrible, crying voice) “Like what if there’s one in this bathroom right now, running out from under a tarp or something leaning against the wall?” (horrible, sad cries)

“I hate you, Elliot,” she said in her deepest, loudest, most moving voice. “You don’t understand this thing. You don’t know what this thing is like. You can’t imagine how I feel. I swear to God, I hate you now, I really do, I do.”

“Lisa, I hate to apologize! It’s seven o’clock and it’s dark. We’re staying in this shit Gulf Stream town. I’m hungry. Come on out, will you? If you don’t come out, Lisa, Mr. ‘Strong Man’ is going to break dry its door and enter now.”

She didn’t come out.

I burst through the door, just like I said I would.

Actually, it was pretty easy. The hinges of the door were raw  and corroded, and I banged hard on the door with one of the wooden chairs in the room, so the hinges cracked. Lisa stood at the top of the toilet, arms crossed, the door lying in front of her, paint flaking, and she just stared at me. The side pillar of the door was cracked and a mess.

“Look, shit,” I said, opening my hands. “No roaches, I swear.” I stand still, smiling at her, silently pleading with her. I gesture to her, asking her to come down, to my side. Then she jumps off the top of the toilet, runs to the tilted side of the door, and throws herself into my arms.

“I’m getting out of this crummy motel.” She said, and I hugged her, kissed her, and ruffled the hair back from her face, all the while apologizing. She gently, passionately, and helplessly burst into a gush of new teardrops.

It was a very unusual and sweet moment, and I felt like a very mean person.

The manager is banging hard on the front door. His wife is yelling.

We gathered everything together. The driver was already outside. I gave the manager a hundred dollars for everything and said in a mocking, arrogant voice, “This will teach you a lesson: don’t rent to rock stars again.”

Our bodies bent in half with laughter as we got into the car.

“Fuck hippies!” The manager said.

We were in a state of hysteria.

Twenty miles out of town we found a huge roadside restaurant with a freezing cold air conditioning unit, everything I could possibly want to eat, river shrimp prepared six different ways on a plate, chowder and cold beer, and a jukebox playing the most ear-splitting Cajun music of the kind I could possibly ask to hear. I ate like a pig.

Hour after hour we pushed north.

We were intimate with each other, talking now and then, while the night was falling around us, and it did not really matter where we were or where we were going, but the car was moving as a ship moves.

When we were slightly hungry again (me, not her. She was surprised that I was hungry), we drove into an outdoor movie theater, let the driver sleep in the back seat, and then we bought hot dogs and popcorn and watched Mel Gibson’s “Punch Bowl” with George. We bought hot dogs and popcorn, and watched Mel Gibson in “Punch Bowl”, an Australian movie directed by George Miller. It was an Australian movie directed by George Miller. I thought the movie was great, despite the snide, sarcastic, anti-strong man warnings from the woman in the car.

I think I must have had a six-pack of beer. By the time the second movie was over and she started the car, I was going to sleep.

“Where are we going?” I asked in my sleepy sleep. I could barely see anything.

“Sleep,” she said. “We are traveling to places unknown.”

“Unknown Places.” I loved it. The cool air emanating from the vent rushes toward me. I snuggle into her, my legs stretched out to the side. The night was a mirage of sorts.

Elliott 27 Stay Warm

The sun was shining through the windshield when I woke up, and we were currently going at least a hundred miles an hour. The driver was asleep in the back seat.

I glanced toward land and knew we were no longer in Louisiana. I glanced toward the road again and knew that the horizon could only belong to one city on earth. We were about to drive into Dallas, Texas, and you could almost see the heat rising off the road.

She didn’t look at me and didn’t slow down, her bare legs were long, brown and soft, emerging from her khaki shorts. She picked up a silver can from the seat and tossed it at me. “Blue eyes, coffee.” She said.

I take a hearty big gulp of my coffee and stare at the place in front of me. The Texas sky in front of me, with its amazing heights formed by 10,000 cirrus clouds, did make me feel humble. Someone has opened up the whole world. The clouds piled up into the stratosphere, and a golden ray of morning light penetrated through them, turning the undulating white territory into pale reds, yellows and golds.

“What the hell are we doing over here, beautiful?” I leaned over and kissed her smooth, soft little cheek.

We’ve ascended the perfect Dallas highway network through a wilderness of towering glass and steel columns. Everywhere I look I see futuristic buildings revealing an almost Egyptian purity and vastness, flawlessly reflecting the landscape of clouds gliding over a hundred polished walls.

She weaved in and out of the cars like a race car driver.

“Ever heard of Billy. Barber’s Texas?” She asked. “It’s in Fort Worth. Want to dance there tonight?”

“Wanted it bad enough, you’re my girl,” I said, taking a big swallow of coffee. “But I left my snakeskin boots in New Orleans.”

“I ja new snakeskin boots for you.” She said.

“How about a little breakfast?” I kissed her again. “The boy needs some oats, eggs, ham, and pancakes to quench his hunger.”

“All you really think about is food, Slater.”

“Don’t be jealous, Lisa,” I said. “Right now you’re my favorite and only thing in the world.”

We stayed in the huge, gorgeous, silver “Hiatus Regency” long enough to have sex in the shower and leave the driver in his room to watch color TV. Then we head to “Neiman’s”, “Shakowitz”, and the funky sci-fi store with glass ceilings, fountains, fig trees, silver elevators, and all the bargains, from diamonds to junk food.

I bought a lot of good books at “B. Dalton’s”, mostly old favorites that I thought I could read to her if she let me. She has been picking out blue, lavender, and purple dress pullover sweaters for me, as well as velvet jackets, dress shirts, and even suits. I want her to buy wacky high-heeled sandals and dress them for her herself in the store. Every beautiful white dress we saw, she had to at least try it on for me.

Then in the late afternoon, we found what we really wanted at “Carter Bill’s”. We found the pearl button up denim shirts, specially selected belts, snug fitting “Rango” jeans and “Mercedes Rayo” boots that we really wanted at “Carter Bill’s”. Mercedes Rayo boots.

We arrived at Billy Barber’s Texas. It was dark when we arrived at Billy Barber’s Texas and the place was packed. We put on matching everything and hats and wandered in, looking like a couple of locals or so we thought. Who knows who we actually looked like? Two people madly in love?

It took a while for me to realize that we had entered a paddock the size of a city block with souvenir stores, pool tables, restaurants, and bars and even an indoor rodeo arena with thousands of people eating and drinking. Squeezing onto the dance floor while a lively country-western band played perfect music, the waves of music rolled over everything and immediately poured into my head.

For the first hour, we danced every dance – fast, slow, in-between, drank beer straight from the bottle, and mimicked the dancers around us until we were exhausted. We stalked around the dance floor, arms hooked around each other’s necks, walking easily, twirling our bodies, dancing face to face, kissing. It seemed crazy that women wore clothes and that lovers didn’t always wear the exact same clothes. I simply couldn’t keep my hands off her wonderful little ass in her tight jeans and her breasts jutting out from under her tight shirt. Her hair was still in that thick feminine mess and the black veil that hung like silk above her shoulders was the perfect final touch. She pulled her hat up above her eyes and leaned back against the wooden railing, her ankles crossed and her thumbs hooked in her pockets, it was so go it’s as beautiful as it could be , I could hardly stand it. Couldn’t do anything but dance.

The indoor rodeo is quite realistic and nice. I love the smell of it and the sounds the stomping animals make.

Canton is a town about an hour south of Dallas, and for a hundred years, on the first Sunday of every month, they’ve had a mammoth flea market that draws people from all over the United States. At ten o’clock we were again in the sedan speeding south with the driver in the back seat. As before, Lisa was driving.

“Reddened,” she said, “that’s what I’m looking for, the last real ones from the ’30s and ’40s, made in Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma, where the women still know how to make them.”

We got out of the car and it was ninety-eight degrees.

But from eleven to one we all dragged our feet through some squalid trails of an endlessly stretching marketplace, past thousands of tables and little rooms full of broken furniture, prairie antiques, dolls, paintings, rugs, junk. We found pounds and pounds of red tape. I know it was pounds because I carried them in green plastic bags over my shoulder.

“What are you going to do without me?” I asked.

“Hee, Elliot, I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t move, I’ll wipe the sweat off your forehead.

”

But I also fell a little in love with being eredged then, learning about the old style Dresden plates, wedding rings, baskets, lone stars, and stamps. I loved the colors, the stitching, the touch these old things gave, their clean cotton smell, and the gentle way the vendors haggled with Lisa, and every time she got them for the price she wanted.

We ate hot dogs at a stand and slept in the shade for a while. We were covered in dust and sticky, watching a family walk by barrel-chested guys in short-sleeved shirts, women in shorts with sleeveless tops, and little kids.

“Do you like it here?” She asked.

“I love it,” I said. “It’s like another country. No one can find us here.

”

“Yeah! Like Bonnie and Creed in ‘There’s No Tomorrow for Us,'” she said. “If they knew who we really were, they’d kill us.”

“I didn’t know about this,” I said. “I’ll be able to handle them if they get rough.”

I stood up, got two more cans of beer, and leaned over to sit down next to her. “What do you need all this red tape for?”

I asked.

For a moment she looks weird, like she’s seen a ghost or something. Then she said, “Try to stay warm.”

“That’s not very nice to say, Bonnie. How about this old Creed of mine? Can’t he keep you warm?

”

She gave me a rare smile that was really cute.

“You follow me, Bonnie,” I said. “I swear, you’ll never feel the cold again.”

In the depths of Dallas, we made love on all the red tape in the backseat of the car.

When we arrived in Hiyat, we put the quilt on the bed, and the quilt really brightened up the place. Then we swam, dined in the room, and finally, I read aloud to her while she lay on the bed next to me.

I read two of my favorite short stories, and an interesting part of a James Bond thriller. I read two of my favorite short stories, as well as a funny part of a James Bond thriller, and a favorite passage from a French classic, that sort of thing. She was very good at listening to me read. I have always wanted a girl to let me read to her; I told her that wish.

It was midnight. We got dressed again and took the elevator to the “Dome” where we danced until the band stopped playing.

“Let’s go for a drive,” she said. “Look at the mansions of ‘Turtle Creek’ and ‘Highland Park’ in the moonlight, you know…”

“Sure, as long as we wake up big dreaming Lib and make him drive so I’ll be able to snuggle in the back seat with you.”

I feel as if we’ve been together for years. Things couldn’t be better for me, every single moment.

And so we stayed in Dallas for four more nights.

We ate take-out chicken, watched basketball games on TV, and took turns reading aloud short stories from “The New Yorker” and chapters from books. We went swimming in the pool.

At night, we went out, to the big luxury hotels, discos, and nightclubs in Dallas.

Sometimes we took long drives into the quiet countryside expecting to find old white farmhouses, or old cemeteries full of weeds where the Confederate dead were buried.

We walked through the old-fashioned streets of the town at sunset, caddisflies chirping in the trees, and we sat on the branches of a tree by the town square, gazing slowly in contemplation while the colors and brightness of the sky disappeared.

We watched old movies on cable at 2:00 a.m. while we snuggled together under the bedding. We make love all the time.

Sex in the U.S.S. Hiatt Regency. There, everything is new, nothing is permanent, the windows are faux, the walls are faux, and the sex is as real as a thunderstorm, whether it’s in an immaculate bed, or in an immaculate shower, or on a deep, immaculate, carpeted floor.

We talked intermittently. We talked about the worst encounters, about school, about our parents, and about things we thought were beautiful: painting, sculpting, music.

But little by little, our conversations began to drift away from topics about ourselves. To cling to other topics. Maybe she got scared, maybe I didn’t want to talk much more unless she said something very specific, something I wanted to hear. And I’m stubborn. I don’t. We still talk a lot, but about other things.

We debated the contrasts between Mozart and Bach, Tolstoy and Shestoyevsky, whether photography was an art she said yes, I said no and Hemingway and Faulkner. We talked as if we knew each other well. We argued about Dionne Arbus, about Wagner. We argued a lot about Dean Arbus, about Wagner. We agreed on Carson B. Macaulay, Fellini, Antonioni, Tennessee Williams, and Reynolds. Williams, and Renoir had genius.

There is a wonderful tension present, a magical tension. As if something could happen at any moment. Something very important, something that could be good or bad. Who would change the situation? As if we had to take a step forward if we were to talk about ourselves again, and we couldn’t take that step. But hour after hour, the situation looks very wonderful, very favorable, very clear.

Except when the Braves lost to the Celts in a really crucial final game and we ran out of beer and the room service flew out forever, I was really, really pissed. She looked up from the newspaper she was reading and said she had never heard of a man yelling like that at a ball game. I told her that for all its boastfulness, it was symbolic violence and asked her to stop talking about it.

“A little too symbolic, don’t you think?” She locked me out of the bathroom and took the longest shower in history. To show that I had the final say, I got drunk.

On the third night, halfway through my sleep, I woke up and realized I was alone in the bed.

She had pulled up the window  and was standing by it, looking out at the great steel cast wilderness of Dallas where the lights never went out.

The sky was a vast expanse above her, a kind of deep blue, with the moving picturesque of tiny stars. She hung her head, looking small against the window. She seemed to be singing something softly. The voice was too faint to be sure. Much like the scent of her Chanel.

When I got up, she turned silently and walked to the center of the room to greet me. We put our arms around each other and hugged.

“Elliot.” She said, as if she was endeavoring to tell me a terrible secret, but instead she just leaned her head on my shoulder. I hugged her and stroked her hair.

Back under the covers again, she was trembling and yielding, like a half-frightened young female nucleus.

When I woke up again, she was sitting in the far corner of the bed, the silent TV shifted in her direction to keep the bright light out of my way, and I guessed that she was just staring at the TV with the bright blue light flickering in her face; she was drinking the Bombay gin next to her without a glass, and smoking my Paramount cigarettes.

The driver said in the next room that he had to go home. He loved the money and everything, and the trips, and the food was great, but his brother was getting married at the Church of the Redeemer in New Orleans, and he had to go home.

But we know that it would have been possible for him to take the sedan back and rent another car.

We’re going back not because of this.

She was completely silent during the meal and looked sad, that is to say, her kind of sadness was beautiful, noble, gut-wrenching, frightening, and upsetting. I said, “We’re going back, aren’t we?”

She nods, her hands shaking. We found a little bar in Cedar Springs with a jukebox where we could dance completely alone. But she was too nervous, too unhappy. We went back at ten o’clock.

We were both wide awake at four o’clock in the morning, when the sun was shining on the glass city. We put on our evening gowns again and checked out of the hotel. She asked the driver to sit in the back seat again, saying she wanted to drive.

“This way, you can read to me if you want.” She said.

I think it’s a great idea; we haven’t even touched Clogar’s The Big Road, one of my favorite books I’m surprised she hasn’t read it.

She looked beautiful as she drove. Her black dress slipped off her knees and lifted up to her thigh places, her legs were lovely, and she pressed hard on the pedals with a thin high heel. Drove a big sedan like a sun-tanned girl who had learned to drive in her teens, that is to say, with more flavor and self-possession than most men were likely to show, able to stop the car in less than three seconds if necessary without a grunt, using only one arm. Never hesitates to overtake, runs yellow lights at every opportunity, never lets or has to let anyone else drive first or in front of her, and will go straight through a “stop” sign regardless.

In fact, she maneuvered the car so easily and quickly that she made me a little nervous because she told me to shut up more than once. What she really wanted to do was this: drive faster than the driver. Soon we were roaring toward New Orleans. It was ninety miles per hour without a passenger car and seventy with one. At one point she accelerated to 110 miles and I told her to slow down or I would jump out of the car immediately.

I told her that it was a good time to read the book The Big Road. She couldn’t even smile anymore.

But she tries anyway. She was trembling. She just nods when I say the book is wonderful and poetic.

I read her all my favorite passages, that is, the parts that were truly dazzling & truly original though all of them were truly dazzling and truly original. Soon she was really enjoying it, nodding her head, smiling and laughing. She asked me little questions about Neil B. Kashadi, the man who started the book, and Aaron B. Kashadi, the man who started the book, and the man who started it. Cassaday, Aaron Ginsburg, Gregory B. K. Kennedy. Ginsburg, Gregory B. Kelso, and others. These were all Beat poets and writers in San Francisco in the 1950s, and for all practical purposes, they fell out of favor when the hippies came along in the 1960s. Then we were old enough to realize what was going on. When we were in school, they belonged to the most tenuous of topics, being recent literary history. She knew next to nothing about them, and Kroga’s prose excited her in a way that didn’t really surprise me.

Finally, I read her a hilarious part of the book, in which Saul and Dinn are in Denver and Dinn is so excited that he keeps stealing cars so fast that the police don’t even know what’s going on. Then I read another passage in which they were driving a sedan to New York, and Dinn asked Saul to imagine what it would be like if they owned the car they were driving. Also, they could drive up a road through Mexico and Panama, maybe even to the bottom of South America.

I stopped.

We had just roared past Hirewepo, Louisiana, and we kept going south.

She looked straight ahead, her eyes wide open and blinking suddenly, as if trying to see through a layer of fog.

She looked at me for a brief second, then back at the road.

“That road is still there, it must be,” I said. “Through Mexico, Central America, all the way to Rio… we can rent a nicer car. To hell with it, we can take a plane, we can do anything…”

Silence.

It’s something I tell myself not to do. My voice sounds too angry and it won’t work.

The number on the speedometer climbed back up to a hundred. She clapped her eyes. It was tears all right. But she had seen the speedometer and slowed down.

Then she was silent again, her face white and her lips quivering. She looked like she might scream out, or something. Then she sped up again, her eyes blank.

After a while, I let go of the book, opened the bottle of John’s Walking I’d bought somewhere in Texas, and took a sip. I couldn’t read any more.

As soon as we passed Barton Rodger, she said, “Where’s your passport? After driving past Baton Rouge, she said, “Where’s your passport? Do you have it with you?”

“No, in the New Orleans room.” I said.

“Fuck it.” She said.

“Where’s yours?”

“I have.”

“Eh, no big deal, we can go get my passport,” I said. “We can check out of the hotel, go to the airport, and take the first plane to wherever.”

Her big, round brown eyes flashed at me for a long moment, and I reached out to steady the steering wheel.

Just before dark, we drove quickly through the narrow streets of the “French Quarter” and she used the car phone to wake up the driver.

We got out of the car, clothes in disarray, exhausted and hungry, grabbed a bunch of sticky paper bags, filled them with garbage, and walked into the small hotel’s flagstone driveway.

She turned around before we could get to the table.

“Are you going to do it?” She said.

“I do have to do it.” I said.

I looked at her for a second, at her white face, at the look of pure fear in her eyes. I wanted to say: what are we running away from? Why does it have to be this way? Tell me that you love me. Fuck it, Lisa. Let’s say it all!

“You have a lot of phone messages.” The woman at the table said.

I wanted to say it all to her, to say more, but I didn’t. I knew I would accept any offer she made.

“Go inside and get your passport,” she whispered. Her fingers were practically pinching the flesh on my arm. “I’ll meet you in the car. Be right out.”

“And your companions.” The woman said. She stretched her neck and looked through the glass door into the middle of the courtyard. “Two men are still waiting for you, have been all day.”

Lisa spun her body around and stared angrily through the door.

Richard, the tall “master of the volunteer slaves,” was standing in the little garden, watching us, with his back to the door of the cottage. And Scott, the unforgettable “trainer of trainers,” was about to come up and extinguish his cigarette.