thousands really, roaming the bars, the streets, looking -- in spite of danger and disease and ridicule and God knows what -- for the place to enact those little dramas, those rich and frightening little dramas we have known over and over in our souls. 'Yes,' I think I smiled. 'I don't believe it is wrong, you see. I never believed it was wrong. No. Each of us has within him a dark chamber where the real desires flower; and the horror of it is that they never see the light of another's understanding, those strange blooms.
It is as lonely as it is dark, that chamber of the heart.' 'Yes.' I sat forward a little, unexpectedly disarmed, interested. 'I wanted to create a very special house,' he said, 'as special as is the chamber inside us. The house where the desires could come to the light. A house that would be clean and warm and safe.' Are we all poets, we masochists? Are we all dreamers, dramatists at heart? There was something so innocent about his expression, so matter-of-fact. There was not the faintest hint of coarseness to him, or subterfuge, or the dark humour that shame can produce. '... and over the years I've discovered that there are more of us than I can ever admit or satisfy here, that the range of desires is far more intricate than I ever supposed ...' He had paused, smiled at me. 'I need a woman, Lisa, a young woman, but she can't be just a hireling. There are no pure hirelings in The House. She has to know what we feel to work with us. You understand this is no ordinary brothel, Lisa. This is a place of elegance and sometimes beauty. And you might think me mad for saying so, but this is a place of love.' 'Oh, yes.' 'In love there is understanding, there is respect for the innermost secrets. There is compassion for the very root of desire itself.' 'I understand. I know.' 'Come upstairs with me. Let me show you the rooms. We are not therapists here. We are not doctors here. We ask no questions as to why or wherefore. We are only believers in the refuge, this little citadel for those who all their sexual lives have been in exile. We exist for those who want what we give.'
Old-fashioned rooms, high ceilings, dim lamplight on the papered walls. The solarium, the schoolroom, the master's bedroom, and now the boudoir, waiting for me, satin slippers, the whip, the paddle, the strap, the harness, and the illusion perfect to the daguerreotypes in their little golden ovals on the dresser, the silver-backed hairbrush, the bottles of perfume catching the light in their crystal facets, the roses fresh and moist and nodding amid the wreath of fern in the silver vase. 'Now for the right person the pay is excellent, if I do say so myself, but you see it's rather like joining a club ...' 'Or a religious order.' Soft respectful laughter. 'Yes.'
Weekend after weekend, I made the drive across the bridge to those mysterious rooms, the doomed and fragile strangers, the ambience of loveliness and sensuality, the place they call The House. My House. Oh, I know exactly what they feel, know what to say and the words sometimes are everything, know when to exert the pressure, know when to give the tender kiss. Maybe things were under control, the way I had always wanted them, at last.
And then the mysterious night flight to Rome two years later, Martin and I getting pleasantly drunk in first class, and the long limousine ride to Siena through the rolling, green Italian countryside. A weekend conference with other talents in the secret world of exotic sex: Alex from The House in Paris, one of Martin's old protegees, Christine from Berlin. I don't even recall some of the others, except they were all so refined, so clever, the wine flowing in the villa above the city, with all the good veal suppers, and those young dark-eyed Italian boys slipping like shadows through the hall. Mr. Cross had come in his own plane with five bodyguards. Three Mercedes-Benz limos winding up the hill, towards the villa. 'When is somebody going to tell me what this is all about?' 'But you've heard of him, surely?' Martin said. The hotel chain and the sex magazine empire -- Dreambaby, Xanadu -- and the wife from Mississippi who didn't understand anything that was happening and wanted