my life.' 'I remember that night,' I said. I wanted him to bring it back, the wonder, the sense of discovery, the great reassuring illusion of The House, of something already realized, established. 'I talked to you about love and about ideals,' he said, 'and about my belief that some day people everywhere would stop leaving the crucial business of aberrant sex to riffraff and policemen.' I nodded.
'I remember I asked you if you could love the people who came to my house,' he said, 'Do you remember your reply? You told me that in a very real way you loved the sexual adventurers who didn't hurt others, that it was impossible for you to feel any other way towards them. You felt love and pity for the old flasher in the park who opens his coat, the guy on the bus who rubs against the pretty girl, never daring to speak to her. You felt love for the drag queens and the transvestites and the transsexuals. You said that you were they and they were you. It had been that way ever since you could remember.' He pushed the coffee cup to the side and leaned a little closer across the table. 'Well, when you told me that,' he said, 'I thought here is a girl who is as romantic as I am, and fifty times as innocent as I ever was, and possibly a little bit crazy. I could see that a powerful sexuality had shaped you, perhaps even embittered you. But that you'd managed to invest it with an almost unaccountable spirituality. Yet I couldn't quite believe you that night.' Lovely words. But for me it was more the way I'd described it to Elliott, that some vital imprinting had never taken place, some message about sex being bad had failed over and over to reach its destination in my head. 'But two years later,' he went on, 'when you had been working at The House every weekend, when you knew the "guests" as well as I did, I knew that you'd meant exactly what you'd said. It wasn't only that you could act out a scenario of dominance and submission with flawless conviction.
It was that you loved. You really loved. Nothing sexual disgusted you or confused you or turned you off. Only real violence, real hurt, the real destruction of another's body and will were your enemies, the same as they were mine. You were just what you said you were. But it is entirely conceivable, entirely, that a love like that could not endure forever.' 'But no, it's not that,' I said. 'It wasn't like they changed or I changed in that way. It was like something altogether inexplicable intervened.' He drank a little of the wine that had gone untouched during the meal, and lifted the bottle to fill the glass again. 'All right, then,' he said. 'Just start talking about the first moment when things went bad. And let me listen as I have to a thousand stories.' I put my hands to my head and I leaned forward on the table and let my eyes close. 'I think in some way it started when I was on vacation,' I said. 'When I was on the way home, and I holed up in this luxury hotel in Dallas and I was watching this movie on video disc. It was about the gypsies in New York -- it was called Angelo, My Love -- and they were so alive, these gypsies ... they were so undeniably wholesome no matter what they did. You know, they stole and they bullshitted and they lied, but they lived within this incredibly vital closed society and there was a gorgeous continuity to their lives. You didn't want anything to happen to them to ever make them be part of the herd.' 'The way you were at The Club.' 'Well, normally, I would have thought so. That's their world and this is mine. But it didn't feel like that anymore. It was like they had something that I never had. It was like when I was a kid and I wanted this, you know, the secret life, our life, and I thought, God, maybe I'll never have it. It will always be fantasies in my head, you know. That desperate feeling.' 'Of course.'
'Well, anyway. I was in this hotel and I was crazy to get back to The Club. I had to get inside The Club. And then this