Read Online Exit to Eden by Anne Rice - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Anne Rice
Tags: Fiction, Suspense, Erótica, Romance, Contemporary, Sex, Man-Woman Relationships, Love Stories, Erotic Fiction, New Orleans (La.), Rich people, Photojournalists, Nightclubs
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was the blaze at last consuming all the more swiftly because I hardly knew who he was.
I couldn't remember his face even now. Only that he was good-looking, that he was young, that he looked wholesome, like every other young man in Berkeley, that I knew the house, the street where he lived.
But then the thrill had been the near anonymity, that we were two animals, that we were mad, that we knew absolutely nothing really about each other. A quiet young high school girl too serious for sixteen, and a college boy scarcely two years older who read Baudelaire, made enigmatic statements about sensuality, smoked fancy pastel-colored Sherman cigarettes that you ordered direct from the company, wanted what I wanted, and had a place to do it, a plausible technique.
We would make dissonant but beautiful music. And the danger? Had that been thrilling? No, that had been an ugly undercurrent, dissipated only when the night was finished, when drained and silent I had followed him out of the hotel, slipping through the side door, relieved that nothing "horrible" had happened, that he wasn't insane. Danger was not a spice, only what I had to pay in those days.
In the womb of The Club there was never that price… that was its genius, its contribution, its raison d'etre. No one was ever hurt.
Had I seen him two times more before he suggested a meeting with his friend, David, and the afternoon session with the three of us together, when it lost its intimacy, when it seemed suddenly we were not all equal participants, when I became afraid? Sudden attack of inhibition. When he called with yet another friend, another proposal, I felt betrayed.
Long agonizing evenings after that wandering in downtown San Francisco searching faces that passed me, peering into the lobbies of the grand hotels, thinking, yes, somewhere, somewhere a man, an elegant and experienced man, a new beginning, someone infinitely more clever, commanding, more discreet.
Sitting by the phone at home with the personal column from the newspaper before me. Is it a cryptic code for what I think it is? Do I dare to call the number? Drifting through the regular experiences—senior prom, movie dates—murmuring lies now and then to excuse apathy, restlessness, that appalling feeling of being a freak, a secret criminal. Wandering past the counters where the leather gloves lay in the glass case looking faintly sinister for all the white tissue paper in the shallow box.
Yes, I would like these, these long, long tight black gloves… And the broad leather belt around my waist cinching me like an exotic girdle, yes, and black silk and the high tight fitted boots as soon as I could afford them. And finally discovering in a bookstore near the Berkeley campus, in silent disbelief and blushing excitement, that shocking French classic which others must have known for years, looking so innocent in its smooth white book jacket,
The Story of O
.
No, you are not alone.
I felt everyone in that store was looking at me when I paid for it. Yet flushed and glaze-eyed I sat in the Cafe Mediterranee turning page after page, defying someone to see it, comment on it, come up to me, closing it only when I had finished all of it, and staring through the open doors at the students hurrying through the rain on Telegraph Avenue, thinking I will not live all my life with it being fantasy, not even if…
But I had never called Barry again. And it hadn't been one of the mysterious personal advertisements, nor the blatant communications between sadists and masochists that shocked everyone so in the pages of the underground newspapers. Rather it had been a most innocent-looking little advertisement in a San Francisco neighborhood paper:
Special Announcement. Applications still being taken for the Roissy Academy. At this late date, only those entirely familiar with the training program should apply.
Roissy, the name of the mythical estate to which O had been taken in the French novel. Impossible to
I couldn't remember his face even now. Only that he was good-looking, that he was young, that he looked wholesome, like every other young man in Berkeley, that I knew the house, the street where he lived.
But then the thrill had been the near anonymity, that we were two animals, that we were mad, that we knew absolutely nothing really about each other. A quiet young high school girl too serious for sixteen, and a college boy scarcely two years older who read Baudelaire, made enigmatic statements about sensuality, smoked fancy pastel-colored Sherman cigarettes that you ordered direct from the company, wanted what I wanted, and had a place to do it, a plausible technique.
We would make dissonant but beautiful music. And the danger? Had that been thrilling? No, that had been an ugly undercurrent, dissipated only when the night was finished, when drained and silent I had followed him out of the hotel, slipping through the side door, relieved that nothing "horrible" had happened, that he wasn't insane. Danger was not a spice, only what I had to pay in those days.
In the womb of The Club there was never that price… that was its genius, its contribution, its raison d'etre. No one was ever hurt.
Had I seen him two times more before he suggested a meeting with his friend, David, and the afternoon session with the three of us together, when it lost its intimacy, when it seemed suddenly we were not all equal participants, when I became afraid? Sudden attack of inhibition. When he called with yet another friend, another proposal, I felt betrayed.
Long agonizing evenings after that wandering in downtown San Francisco searching faces that passed me, peering into the lobbies of the grand hotels, thinking, yes, somewhere, somewhere a man, an elegant and experienced man, a new beginning, someone infinitely more clever, commanding, more discreet.
Sitting by the phone at home with the personal column from the newspaper before me. Is it a cryptic code for what I think it is? Do I dare to call the number? Drifting through the regular experiences—senior prom, movie dates—murmuring lies now and then to excuse apathy, restlessness, that appalling feeling of being a freak, a secret criminal. Wandering past the counters where the leather gloves lay in the glass case looking faintly sinister for all the white tissue paper in the shallow box.
Yes, I would like these, these long, long tight black gloves… And the broad leather belt around my waist cinching me like an exotic girdle, yes, and black silk and the high tight fitted boots as soon as I could afford them. And finally discovering in a bookstore near the Berkeley campus, in silent disbelief and blushing excitement, that shocking French classic which others must have known for years, looking so innocent in its smooth white book jacket,
The Story of O
.
No, you are not alone.
I felt everyone in that store was looking at me when I paid for it. Yet flushed and glaze-eyed I sat in the Cafe Mediterranee turning page after page, defying someone to see it, comment on it, come up to me, closing it only when I had finished all of it, and staring through the open doors at the students hurrying through the rain on Telegraph Avenue, thinking I will not live all my life with it being fantasy, not even if…
But I had never called Barry again. And it hadn't been one of the mysterious personal advertisements, nor the blatant communications between sadists and masochists that shocked everyone so in the pages of the underground newspapers. Rather it had been a most innocent-looking little advertisement in a San Francisco neighborhood paper:
Special Announcement. Applications still being taken for the Roissy Academy. At this late date, only those entirely familiar with the training program should apply.
Roissy, the name of the mythical estate to which O had been taken in the French novel. Impossible to
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