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“Who’s the woman in the painting?” I heard myself say.
“Carolina Mendoza, the woman who made all of this possible,” Matilda said.
“Who still does,” added Amani.
“Yes, that’s true. As long as we have her paintings, we have the means to continue S.E.C.R.E.T. in New Orleans.”
Matilda explained how she met Carolina more than thirty-five years earlier, back when she was an arts administrator for the city. Carolina was an artist, originally from Argentina. She fled in the ’70s, just before the military crackdown made it impossible for artists and feminists to create and speak freely. They met at an art auction. She was just beginning to show her work, large vivid canvases and murals that weren’t typical of the paintings women were doing at the time.
“Are these her paintings? And the ones in the lobby?” I asked.
“Yes. Which is why security is so tight here. Each is worth millions. We have a few more in storage in the Mansion.”
Matilda explained how she and Carolina began to spend time together, something that surprised Matilda because she hadn’t made a new friend in a long time.
“It wasn’t a sexual relationship, but we talked an awful lot about sex. After a while she trusted me enough to share her world with me, a secret world where women gathered to talk about their deepest desires, their most hidden fantasies. Remember, it wasn’t common back then to talk about sex. Let alone how much you liked it.”
At first Carolina’s group was informal, Matilda said, a gathering of artist friends, and local offbeat characters, which have always been aplenty in New Orleans. Most were single, some were widows, a few were long married, some of them happily so, she said. Most were successful and over thirty. But there was something missing from their marriages, their lives.
Matilda became her exclusive art broker and Carolina’s paintings began selling for sky-high prices. Eventually she sold several to the American wife of a Middle-Eastern oil sheik for tens of millions of dollars. She bought the Mansion next door, then put the rest of her fortune into a trust that funded their burgeoning sexual collective.
“Ultimately we realized we wanted to experience our sexual fantasies—all of them. And these scenarios cost money. Finding men, and sometimes women, the right men and women, to fulfill these fantasies, required recruiting. And … training. That’s how S.E.C.R.E.T. began.
“After we all helped one another experience our sexual fantasies, we began recruiting one person every year upon whom we would bestow this gift—the gift of complete sexual emancipation. As current chair of the Committee, it was my duty to choose this year’s recruit. According to our mandate, she must, in turn, choose us.”
“That’s your cue, Cassie,” said Brenda.
“Me? Why?”
“For several reasons. We have been watching you for a while now. Pauline made the suggestion after seeing you at the restaurant. She didn’t leave her notebook on purpose, but we couldn’t have planned it better. We had already discussed you a couple of times. It all worked out rather well.”
This stunned me for a moment, that I’d be
en watched, checked out … for what? Signs of abject loneliness? I felt a flash of anger.
“What are you saying exactly? That you saw I was some pathetic, lonely waitress?” I looked accusingly around the room.
Amani reached out and held my arm, while some of the women murmured reassurances: “No” and “It’s not like that” and “Oh, honey, that’s not what we meant.”
“Cassie, it’s not an insult. We operate from a spirit of love and support. When someone shuts down their sexual self prematurely, it’s often not noticeable to them. But other people pick up on it. It’s like you’re operating with one less sense. Only you don’t know it. Sometimes people in that kind of retreat need an intervention of sorts. That’s all. That’s what I meant. We found you. We picked you for this. And now we’re offering you a chance at a new beginning. An awakening. If you want it. Do you want to join us and begin your journey?”
I was stuck on how they had been monitoring me. How? I had always thought I camouflaged my loneliness, my accidental celibacy. Then I remembered my brown clothing, my messy ponytail, my awful shoes, my slouch, my cat, my trudge home at dusk to my empty apartment. Anyone with a set of eyes could have seen that a brown-colored aura had settled over me, like a dusting of defeat. It was time. Time to make a leap.
“Yes,” I said, shaking the remaining doubt out of my head. “I’m in. I want to do this.”
The room erupted in applause. Amani nodded encouragingly.
“Consider the women in this circle your sisters. We can guide you back to your true self,” Matilda said, standing up.
My chest tightened with emotion. I was feeling so much at the same time—joy, fear, confusion and gratitude. Was this really happening? To me?
“Why are you doing this for me?” I asked, tears pooling in the corners of my eyes.
“Because we can,” said Bernice.
Matilda reached under the table and pulled a zippered folder. She placed it in front of me. It looked like real alligator skin and it was embossed with my initials, CR. They knew, on some fundamental level, that this was not something I could turn down. I opened it, exposing the two sides of the folder, each filled with ornately embossed papers. On the left was a linen envelope with my name on it in calligraphy. Even my wedding invitations weren’t this beautiful.
“Go ahead,” said Matilda. “Open it.”
