By Lisabet Sarai
Quite a lot happened to me in the
nineties. I turned forty. After more than a decade of considering
ourselves married, my husband and I overcame our distaste of
government meddling in our personal affairs, went to a Justice of the
Peace, and legalized our relationship. The company he and I founded
together received a federal research grant. We traveled in Italy, in
Indonesia and in the Philippines. We lived for a lovely year in the
historic Boston district of Beacon Hill.
However, from Lisabet's perspective,
the last decade of the twentieth century was most significant because
that was when I wrote and published my first novel. And like many
major turning points in our lives, a minor incident was responsible
for triggering the chain of events that led to the 1999 release of
Raw Silk.
After years of my enjoying my husband's
tales of Hagia Sofia and the Grand Bazaar, we'd finally managed to
make it to Turkey. We stayed in a tiny boutique hotel in the heart of
old Istanbul, two narrow houses that had been converted to serve a
handful of guests. The hotel, which adjoined an ruined haman
(bathhouse), featured a boulder-strewn, cat-filled garden and a view
of minarets and the Sea of Marmara from the window of our fourth
floor room. In the white-washed stone lobby, above a divan spread
with rich embroidery, I found a book swap shelf, a common feature in
traveler's locales around the world. Leave a book, take a book – we
cycle our reading and share our passions. Having run low on reading
material, I picked up a slim black and gray volume. The cover
featured a moderately discreet image of a couple in an ecstatic
embrace. Gemini Heat was the title, authored by Portia da
Costa.
The novel was published by a UK imprint
called Black Lace, whose slogan was “Erotic fiction for women”. A
benighted American, I'd never heard of Black Lace. At the time, I
hadn't read much erotica. My master had “assigned” me The
Story of O and Anne Rice's Beauty trilogy, and I'd sampled a few
bawdy Victorian titles, but for the most part I was innocent, from a
literary perspective at least. I'd been penning my own D/s erotic
fantasies for a while, copying them by hand into greeting cards and
sending them across the country for my master to savor (following in
Pauline Réage's footsteps,
though I didn't know it at the time). However, I'd never considered
sharing those fantasies with the world.
Gemini Heat astonished and
aroused me, with its intelligence, its erotic diversity and its
unabashed heat. Identical twins Deanna and Delia Ferraro look enough
alike to fool most people, although their styles and personalities
could not be more different. Deanna is brash, bold, even a bit wild,
a freelance artist with a penchant for hippie-style clothing and a
taste for adventure. Delia is shyer and less experienced sexually,
but more polished and organized, as accomplished at her job in
corporate middle management as she is in cooking or home repair. One
evening, with busy Delia's blessing, Deanna attends an art opening
using an invitation intended for her twin. The paintings on show turn
out to be of the erotic variety, stirring her hot blood to the point
that she allows a seductive stranger to fuck her on a balcony
overlooking the crowd. Only the morning after do she and Delia
realize that her partner was Jackson Kazuto de Guile – millionaire
businessman, unabashed sybarite, and Delia's boss – and that he'd
thought Deanna was in fact his employee Delia. And now, despite her
more cautious personality, Delia wants her turn with the delicious
and demanding Jake.
The story piles one erotic episode on
top of another, as Deanna and Delia pretend they are the same woman,
alternating in the role of “Dee” and discovering new dimensions
of their sexuality. There are sex clubs and opulent mansions,
Jacuzzis and massages, exhibitionism and voyeurism, lesbian and gay
male interactions, bondage and beatings, lovely fetishistic articles
of clothing that get torn to shreds in the throes of lust, and lots
of intense orgasms. Jake involves a cast of co-conspirators
(especially the notorious red-headed author Vida Mistry) in his
education and sexual conquest of the twins.
The book was a perfect fit to my own
erotic inclinations. It pushed all my personal buttons. I was
delighted to discover the existence of Black Lace (though the other
Black Lace authors I sampled did not come close to Ms. Da Costa in
their ability to excite me). And after I'd calmed down a bit, I began
to think, “I'll bet I could write a book something like that.”
I sent away for the Black Lace author
guidelines. (Nobody had websites then, remember.) The document I
received was unbelievably intimidating – ten pages long at least,
written with severe precision, and focusing far more on what they
didn't want than what they did. Nevertheless, still inspired by
Gemini Heat, I started working on a novel about a woman's
sexual odyssey, set against the sensual backdrop of exotic Thailand.
In a matter of weeks I'd penned three chapters. I sent the chapters
off with a synopsis (by snail mail – no email submissions in those
days!) to editor Kerry Sharp. Then I more or less forced myself to
forgot about the matter. Although I'd had great fun writing those
chapters, the chances of being accepted seemed totally remote.
About four weeks down the road, I
received a post card acknowledging my submission and warning me that
due to the volume of manuscripts Black Lace received, I might not
hear anything further for several months. I shrugged and filed the
card with the guidelines. I was not surprised or disappointed.
Three days later, Kerry Sharp emailed
me, enthusiastically declaring that Raw Silk was just what
they were looking for, offering me a contract and asking me when I
could deliver the full book.
You could have knocked me over with a
feather. When could I deliver the full book? I didn't have the
foggiest idea.
I've written elsewhere about the
process of writing Raw Silk, how easy it was, how I poured all
my fantasies uncensored onto the page, most especially my cravings
for submission and surrender. I've also talked about how naïve I was
concerning the publishing business, how I imagined imminent glamor,
fame and fortune, press conferences and release parties, book tours
and free trips to London. I didn't realize how most publishers, even
back then, operated on a shoestring. I learned, though. When Raw
Silk went out of print, I reclaimed the rights and placed the
book with another publisher. The novel is on its third publisher
now, but I still sell at least a few copies a month.
I should mention that this whole
incident was totally beginner's luck. Kerry Sharp flatly rejected the
next two proposals I sent her.
I'm reprising this now because I just
finished rereading Gemini Heat. (Yes, the same dog-earned
black and gray paperback!) I wanted to know if it could still move me
now, after I've published more than fifty single author erotic titles
of my own and read at least three times that many by others. Would it
seem clichéed
or silly? Would I find it tame?
I'm
pleased to say that I still would place this novel among my top ten
or top twenty erotic books. Ms. da Costa excels at describing the
internal state of her characters. The sexual encounters that occur in
Gemini Heat
are far less extreme or outrageous than they seemed upon my first
reading, but their impacts upon the characters (which is really what
counts in my view) remain intense.
Meanwhile,
in these days of sub-genre tyranny, I value the diversity in Gemini
Heat more than ever.
These days, erotic romance reigns. (Black Lace officially rebranded
itself that way a few years before it folded.) The thrillingly
sensual lesbian interactions in Gemini
Heat would probably get
the book rejected now – not to mention the description of the M/M
sex show at Club Seventeen. Then there's the hero's decidedly
non-alpha appearance and behavior. Sure, Jake is a Dom, but he is not
tall, gruff and muscle bound. He's slender, graceful, elegant, as one
might expect from someone who is part Japanese, with long, silky hair
and smooth, mostly hairless skin. Ms. da Costa is perfectly
comfortable with a hero who shows some feminine characteristics, but
I suspect that many of today's readers might reject such ambiguity.
In fact, despite his adeptness at power games, Jake is a switch –
that becomes quite clear in the final chapter of the novel. I loved
the breadth of the author's sexual imagination, but I'm willing to
bet that if she submitted this novel today, the publisher would want
to attach all sorts of Reader Advisories.
I
didn't realize when I first encountered Gemini
Heat that it was one of
Portia da Costa's very first erotic novels. Now I suspect that her
experience writing the book must have been similar to mine – that
the book is an uncensored outpouring of her personal favorite
fantasies. I've read and enjoyed a lot of her later work, but with
the exception of the brilliant Entertaining
Mr. Stone, none of these
novels has made the same impression on me as her tale of the horny
twins and their diabolical seducer. Her writing has become smoother
and more controlled, technically more accomplished, but rarely
reaches the same level of raw heat.
People
sometimes say the same thing about my work. Raw
Silk has many flaws that
are all too visible now to my more experienced eyes: excessively
verbose descriptions, repeating words and phrases, horribly stilted
dialogue. Nevertheless, I've received more praise from readers for
that book than for anything else I've written. I know why. It's the
pure emotion I poured into the pages. The novel is my personal
journey, mostly imagined though studded with bits and pieces of my
real life. In a sense, Kate is me – not in terms of her personality
but in her desires and her reactions. And readers sense this.
At
the same time that first book, released at the very end of the
nineties, was just the start of my journey, the first steps on the
road to becoming Lisabet Sarai. Now, fifteen years later, I still
have no idea where that road will ultimately lead me.
