big white front porches, the little iron fences, the garden gates. Her dad was an old-guard Irish Catholic who worked his way through college in St. Louis, and taught at the Jesuit college in San Francisco, her mother one of those old-fashioned women who just stayed home until her four children were grown up and then went to work in the public library downtown. They moved to the Berkeley hills when Lisa was a little girl because they liked the heat in the east bay and they thought the hills were beautiful. But they hated the rest of Berkeley. I knew her street, her house even, a big ramshackle brown-shingle place on Mariposa, and I had even seen the lights on lots of times in the big garage library when I drove by. That is where her dad was always reading Teilhard de Chardin and Maritain and G.K. Chesterton and all the Catholic philosophers.
He would rather read than talk to people, and his rudeness and coldness were legends in the family. On sex he was Augustinian and Pauline as she described it. He thought chastity was ideal. But he could not practice it. Otherwise he might have been a priest. When you stripped all the language away, sex was filthy. Homosexuals should abstain. Even kissing was a mortal sin. Her mother never voiced a contrary opinion; she belonged to all the church organizations, worked on fundraisers, cooked a big dinner every Sunday whether the kids were there or not. Lisa's younger sister got perilously close to being a Playmate of the Month for Playboy and it was a family tragedy. If any of his girls had an abortion or posed nude for a magazine her father said he would never speak to that girl again. He didn't know anything about The Club.
He thought Lisa worked for a private membership resort somewhere in the Caribbean, and that the people who went there were being treated for various illnesses. We both laughed at that. He wanted Lisa to quit and come home, Her older sister had married a sort of dull real estate millionaire. They all went to Catholic schools all their lives except Lisa, who laid down the law that she go to the University of California, or she would not go to college at all. Her father sneered at the books she read, the papers she wrote. Lisa did S&M when she was sixteen with a student at Berkeley. She had had her first orgasm when she was eight years old and she had thought she was a freak. 'We were what they used to call Catholics in nineteenth-century France,' she said, '"immigrants of the interior". If you think of devout Catholics as simple, stupid people, you know, peasants in the back of big city cathedrals saying their rosaries before statues, then you don't know my dad. There is this awesome intellectual weight to everything he says, this constitutional puritanism, this languishing for death.' But he was a brilliant man, loved art and saw that his daughters learned a great deal about painting and music. They had a grand piano in the living room, they had real paintings on the walls, Picasso etchings and Chagall etchings. Her father had bought Mirandi and Miro years and years ago. They went to Europe every summer after Lisa's younger sister was six years old. They lived in Rome for a year.
Her father knew Latin so well he kept his diary in it. If her father ever found out about The Club or her secret life it would kill him. It was damn near unthinkable, his finding out. 'There is one thing I can say for him, however, and you might understand it, if anybody would understand it, that he is a spiritual man, truly a spiritual man. I have not met too many people who really live by what they believe as he does. And the funny thing is I live by what I believe, absolutely what I believe. The Club is the pure expression of what I believe. I have a philosophy of sex. Sometimes I wish I could tell him about that. He has these aunts and sisters who are nuns. One is a Trappistine nun and another is a Carmelite. These are cloistered nuns. I would like to tell him that I too am a sort of nun, because I am saturated in what I believe. You must know what I am talking about. It's kind of a joke in