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important?"
    "Oh, you know why it's important," he said very gently.
    "A man. And a woman. At different times." Close those doors, please.
    "You loved them equally."
    "At different times…"
    ******
    It wasn't three months before we were talking again in that same room—though I would never have thought after all that happened upstairs I could sit in a room, fully clothed, and talk to him again—and he was saying: "But there is no need for you to pay me anything anymore, Elliott, that's what I'm telling you. I can arrange it with three or four interested 'masters' who will cover all expenses. You'll come here as before, but on their nickel. While you are here you will belong to them."
    "No. Money doesn't mean a damn thing to me where all this is concerned, and I'm not ready for that…" The complete domination of another, his fantasy supplanting my fantasy. No, not yet. Keep it careful. It's hard enough.
    But it was like a staircase spiraling upwards from the basement room, and I was going to climb it right to the very top.
    "I'd like a woman," I said suddenly. Did
I
say that? "I mean I… Well, a woman," I said. "I… think it's time for that, a really good-looking woman who knows what she's doing, and I don't want to know anything about her, and I don't want to pick her picture out of any album. You pick her. Make sure she's good at it, great at it, that she can take over. It's time… I mean, to be dominated by a woman, don't you think?"
    Martin was smiling agreeably.
    "As the genie says when he rises from the lamp, 'Yes, master.' A woman it shall be."
    "She'll be good looking—she doesn't have to be beautiful you understand—and she'll know how to do what she does…"
    "Of course." He nodded patiently. "But tell me…"He drew on his pipe, letting the smoke out slowly. "Do you think you'd like to meet the lady in a Victorian bedroom, you know, an old-fashioned setting? I mean in a very ladylike room—lace curtains, a four-poster, that sort of thing?"
    "Oooooh, God. Is this really happening to me?"
    ******
    Up and up the staircase, through one lovely layer of dream after another.
    And now, half a year later, where was I headed? The Club.
    ******
    "It's just what I want," I had said. I had driven over as soon as I finished reading the rules and regulations, waiting an hour to see him in the little waiting room, glancing again and again at my watch. "Why didn't you tell me about this place before?"
    "You have to be ready for The Club, Elliott."
    "Well, I'm ready for it now. The full two-year contract, that is exactly what I want." I was steaming as I paced the floor. "How long will it take to get me in there, Martin? I could be ready day after tomorrow. I could be ready this afternoon."
    "The two-year contract?" he had asked, weighing each word equally as he spoke. "I want you to sit down, have a drink. I think we should talk a little more about what happened in El Salvador, Elliott. What happened there with the death squad and all of that."
    "You don't understand, Martin. I'm not running from anything that happened there. I learned something there about violence, that it didn't have to be literal for it to work."
    He was listening very intently.
    "When a man seeks out violence," I said, "be it war, sports, adventure, he wants it to be symbolic and most of the time he believes it really is. And then comes that moment when somebody
literally
puts a gun to your head. And you
literally
almost die. Then you realize that you've been confusing the literal and the symbolic all along. Well, El Salvador is the place where I learned that, Martin. I'm not running from it. It's merely the reason I'm here. I want violence just as I always have. A sense of danger, Martin. I love it. I think I even want to be annihilated by it all. But I don't really want to be hurt and I certainly don't want to die."
    "I understand," he had said. "And I think you put it very well. But for some of us, Elliott, sado-masochism may only be a phase. It may