Exit to Eden Read Free Page A

and meeting the insatiable demand for new souvenirs and novelty items sold in The Club Shop.
    White leather paddles, straps, boots, blindfolds, even coffee mugs with The Club monogram—we can never design or supply enough. And these items don't end up in bedrooms back in the States. In San Francisco and New York, they are selling, along with back issues of the
Gazette
, for four times the original price. That means this merchandise has come to represent us. All the more reason to make it first rate.
    Then there are the new members who have to be guided on their first visits, have the naked slaves personally introduced to them.
    And then there is the all-important indoctrination and training and perfecting of the slaves themselves, which is my real work.
    A good slave is not merely a thoroughly sexualized being, ready to serve your every whim in bed. A good slave can bathe you, massage you, talk to you if that is what you want, swim with you, dance with you, mix your drinks, feed you your breakfast with a spoon. Just make the right phone call from your room and you can have a specially trained slave ready to play master or mistress expertly, making you the slave as you desire.
    ******
    No, there is no time anymore to go to the auctions.
    And besides, I've found it's just as interesting to wait for the new batch of slaves to be delivered and then choose the one I want to train.
    We buy enormous numbers, at least thirty at a time if the auctions are big enough, and I'm never disappointed. And for two years now, I've had first pick. That means I choose before any other trainer the slave whom I want to develop myself.
    ******
    It seemed the plane had been circling for an hour.
    I was getting more and more anxious. I was thinking, this is like an existentialist play. There is my world down there but I cannot get into it. Maybe it is all something I've imagined. Why the hell can't we land?
    I didn't want to think anymore about dreamy Mr. Straight in San Francisco or a dozen other clean-cut faces I'd glimpsed in Dallas or New York. (Was he just about to come over to our table at the Saint Pierre when we left so abruptly, or did my sister make that up?) I didn't want to think about "normal life" or all the little irritations of the vacation weeks.
    But as long as we were up here I was still caught in the net. I couldn't shake the atmosphere of big city traffic, the endless small talk, or those hours with my sisters in California, listening to the complaints about careers, lovers, high-priced psychiatrists, "consciousness-raising groups." All the easy jargon about "levels of awareness," and the liberated spirit.
    And my mother so disapproving as she made out the list for the communion breakfast, saying what people needed was to go to confession, and there didn't have to be psychiatrists, old-guard Catholicism mixed up with the tired expression on her face, the irrepressible innocence in her small black eyes.
    I had never come so dangerously close to telling them all about "that certain spa" that was always being mentioned in the gossip columns, that scandalous "Club" they'd read about in
Esquire
and
Playboy
. "Guess who created it? Guess what we do with 'levels of awareness' at The Club?"
    Ah, sadness. Barriers that can never be broken.
    You only hurt people when you tell them the truth about things that they cannot respect or understand. Imagine my father's face. (There wouldn't be any words.) And imagine a flustered Mr. Straight hurriedly paying for the coffee and the croissants in that Pacific Coast hotel dining room. ("Well, I guess I better drive you back to San Francisco now.") No, don't imagine that.
    Better to lie and lie well, as Hemingway put it. Telling the truth would be as stupid as turning around in a crowded elevator and saying to everybody: "Look, we're all mortal; we're going to die, get buried in the ground, rot. So when we get out of this elevator…" Who gives a damn?
    I am almost home, almost okay.
    We were