Exit to Eden Read Online Free PDF Page B

of thing. It was a religious thing to torment us, while we kept our fear and humiliation inside."
    Had I really said all that?
    "Terrific fantasy," he had said very sincerely, with a slight lift of his brows. He appeared to reflect. "All the best ingredients. You not only have 'permission' to enjoy the degradation, but it's religious, good."
    "Listen, my mind is a three-ring circus," I had laughed, shaking my head.
    "That's the way it is with all sado-masochists," he said. "The 'circus animals' almost never desert
us
."
    "There has to be the framework," I said. "All very neat. It would be unthinkable if you were really forced. Yet there has to be coercion."
    I had put the glass down on the desk and immediately he rose to fill it.
    "I mean there has to be consent and coercion for it to be a really good fantasy," I said, watching him. "Yet it has to be a humiliation, with a struggle inside between the part of you that wants it and the part that doesn't; and the ultimate degradation is that you consent and grow to like it."
    "Yes."
    "We were objects of scorn as well as veneration. We were mysteries. We were never allowed to speak."
    "Just priceless," he whispered.
    What had he really heard in those hours as we talked? Anything really different, new or unique? Maybe all he had learned was that I was like a thousand other men who had passed through his doors.
    "And your master, the man who buys you in the other Greek city…" he had asked. "What does he look like? How do you feel about him?"
    "You'd laugh if I told you. He falls in love with me. And I fall in love with him. Romance in chains. Love triumphs in the end."
    He hadn't laughed, merely smiled agreeably, drawing on his pipe again.
    "But he doesn't stop punishing you or using you when he starts loving you…"
    "No, never, he's too good a citizen for that. But there's something else." I could feel my pulse accelerating. Why the hell mention it at all?
    "Yes?"
    I felt a slowly heating anxiety for the first time, a confusion as to why I-had come here.
    "Well, just that there is this woman in the fantasy…"
    "Hmmmm."
    "She's the wife of the master, I guess. Well, I know she is. And it sometimes works towards her."
    "How does it work towards her?"
    "No. I don't want to be involved with women," I said.
    "I understand."
    "There are a thousand reasons why you choose a man or a woman as a love partner, a sex partner, aren't there? It's not like it used to be, when the lines were hard to cross."
    "No, not like that anymore," he said. But he had paused for a second before answering. "And you've been with women as well as men?"
    I had nodded. "Too many of both."
    "And she's in the fantasy."
    "Yeah. Damn her. I don't know why I brought her up. I sort of look to her for some sort of mercy, tenderness, and she becomes more and more interested in me—her husband's slave—but then she's worse."
    "How is she worse?"
    "She's tender, and she's loving, but she's harsher, stricter, crueler at the same time. The humiliation is like keening. You know what I mean? Strange."
    "Yes…"
    "She isn't always there. But sooner or later…"
    "Yes."
    "But this is really off the point."
    "Is it?"
    "Well, I mean I want male lovers, male dominators, if you will. That's what I really have to say. That's why I came here, for men. I've heard you've got beautiful men here, the best…"
    "Yes," he said. "I think you'll like the album when it's time for you to make your choice."
    "I get to choose the guys who dominate me?"
    "Of course. That is, if you want to. You can always leave the choice to us."
    "Well, it's got to be men," I said. "Men are the exotic sex to me, the hot sex. The sex for romps and for rough adventures…"
    He nodded, smiled.
    "There's nothing like it, that sense of being with somebody as tough as yourself. When women come into it there is something sentimental, high pitched and romantic…"
    "Whom have you
loved
in the past—really loved—men or women?" he asked.
    Silence.
    "Why is that