Surrender to Mr. X (12 page)

His voice was persuasive because it was soft, it was kind. Besides, he had stopped the hum: he covered me with a blanket, he told me how wonderfully I had succeeded, how proud of me he was: he was the doctor, all bedside manner and I was the patient, and he was healing me. I believed him. You will be rewarded, he told me.

“I don't need paying,” I said. “This isn't about money.”

“You mean you're doing it for love?” he asked, and Joan actually blushed.

“I'll be rewarded in Heaven,” I said.

He seemed embarrassed; his glance shifted away.

“You're very sweet,” he said, still not looking at me. “I'm so touched.”

“You're Prospero, aren't you?”

“Prospero was lucky enough to be shipwrecked on a desert island,” he said. “These days you have to have enough money to build your own.”

“Do you love me?” I asked. He just raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, as if to say he'd like to explain, but it would take more time than was possible: or some such bullshit.

It's an odd thing, the declaration of love business.
Get in with it too early, and the man backs off. Too late and he's wandered off. But if you blush you show your hand. I couldn't remember when Vanessa had last blushed. It came so simply and naturally to Joan. I blushed.

I had simmered down. It was quite cathartic—like the après-sex feeling: all passion spent—to recover from fear and rage.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Let's go up to Ray's and see if he'll rustle up some dinner—you must be hungry.”

“Yes,” I said, “I am.” But I felt vaguely disturbed, insulted by the suggestion: the evening was suddenly moving fast away from the intimate, the seductive, into social banality.

“But I'm not sure I trust the food anywhere in this house,” I added. “What was in those chocolates the other day?”

“Something new,” he said, “a shamanic, gateway psychotropic from the rain forest. It's perfectly safe. It's organic. It's not an artificial pharmaceutical.”

“How d'you get it?”

“I have friends, connections. Some are chemists.”

Bet you do, I thought. That's where the money comes from. Drug dealing. All the private art galleries in the world wouldn't bring about this wealth. But buying and selling paintings is a good way of laundering money, especially if you pretend to do it ineptly: write-down. The art world is probably full of noble, etiolated aesthetes who have friends who are “chemists.”

No wonder he is socially insecure—and sees himself as a great musician.

“Don't worry, Joan,” he said. Shit. I loved it when he used my name. “There'll be nothing like that again. Now I know you better I value you too much.”

Nice to hear but easy enough to say. I said thank you, but, if he didn't mind, could he call a taxi and I'd be off home. He seemed taken aback. Perhaps he had seen the evening as drifting toward sex: another—maybe successful—attempt to free himself from the trauma of sudden explosion. And so indeed had I, funnily enough. But since he was now suggesting we went up to Ray's, then by the time we got round to making love it would be well after midnight, and all I really wanted to do now was get back home. I'd had a long day. Forget sex, I felt fidgety and irritable.

“I have to wash my hair before I go to work,” I said. “I have to be up early.”

“Your hair looks absolutely delightful,” he said. “Disheveled. A demonic sprite. I love it to death.”

He looked at me all little-boy, and wistful. He smiled the big broad, charming smile of a George Clooney, except the gums showed—but the teeth were perfect.

“I wish you'd stay,” he said. “That first night, you know—I so much wanted it to end differently.”

I remembered the piston-drive, perfect rhythm, but leading nowhere. I had to close my eyes. My body remembered too: sensation shot down from brain to crotch, the expectation of fulfillment taking physical
form, demanding satisfaction.

“It would make so much difference to me,” he said. “It's so rarely I have the nerve to approach a woman sexually. Who would want a half man like me? I feel safe with you.”

“Well if you put it like that,” I said, grudgingly, like Joan in a bad mood.

He hooked out clothes from the jumble with his walking stick hook—French knickers, a sturdy bra, black knee-highs, a Zandra Rhodes tweed ankle-length tartan skirt, Prada black long-sleeved polo neck—my mother couldn't have made a less seductive choice. I was to wear these for supper with Ray?

“They're very plain,” I said. “Rather dull.”

“Ray likes very plain rather dull women,” said Alden. “You don't qualify but you might make an effort for his sake? Do your best. Ray has problems, but he's a great cook.”

“What sort of problems?” I asked.

“Where to start?” he said. “Artist's block? Premature ejaculation?”

I laughed, because between them Alden and Ray made quite a pair: their problems neatly complementing each other. He looked haughty and continued:

“Death by a thousand principles? Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn? Little trips to Southgate for weekly meetings: coming back with the ‘Secret of Power'? Then moaning about constipation or cumming too soon. You name it. I put up with it because he's a genius. You
could put up with it because he can cook and is a nice guy and a warm human being and you like him.”

“I didn't think anyone did premature ejaculation any more,” I said. “I thought they just took Viagra, or something.”

“It's against his principles,” said Alden.

“That's daft,” I said.

“It's not organic,” he said, which I could see was true.

I still had no shoes, but Alden hooked out a pair of pink ballet pumps with blocked toes, and thongs which wound up round the leg. I gave them a disparaging look.

“They're the only ones with flat heels,” he said, which either implied compassion, pity for my calves, or else that he seriously preferred me to look dowdy. I put the whole bloody ensemble on as instructed, too tired to bother to fight, and slouching with anomie I followed him like a dog up to the attic floor in the open lift, which had arrived at his imperceptible command. There was a mirror here as well. Amazingly I looked even more than plausible: I looked good. He saw me looking and said, “What a little narcissist you are,” and Joan asked what a narcissist was and he told me it was someone who was erotically turned on by themselves: in other words in love with themselves.

Now I know it is more complicated than this. If anyone was the narcissist it was Alden. It was the pot calling the kettle black. The Neurotic Personality of
our Time. Karen Horney—the psychoanalyst: what page? Somewhere near the beginning: toward the end, third paragraph?—Yes, got it. “Narcissism, the ‘N' type. The striving for glory in the environment—conceit, exhibitionism, vanity and messianism. An associated innate facial expression”—yes—“a broad smile, showing lots of gum.” That was Alden's smile. Me, I have perfect teeth and pretty lips. “Narcissistic rage, going red in the face”—“mass discharge of the parasympathetic nervous system”—me on the bed just now: how true. Awful. I could see I had some of the N-type traits, but Alden had the full scorecard.

I was having quite a relapse, I could see that. Something might have been triggered by the something new and strange and perfectly safe from the rain forests in the Harrods chocolates. Perhaps it was long-lasting, intermittently so. Perhaps I should go back to the doctor and get some lithium. But I didn't think so. Better to stick to the road more traveled of sex and shopping.

After this brief lull of self-awareness the mental storm blew in with a second wind. Alden, the “N for Narcissism” type mixed up with the “P for Perfectionism”: “obsessiveness, compulsiveness, repetition, and the maintenance of neatness, order, symmetry.” His annoyance when he and Lam had to use the spreader bar for my ankles instead of the matching cuffs. Or was that A.M. Benis, and the NPA Personality Theory, which I'd come across on line? The three major types,
Narcissism, Perfectionism, and Aggression. Ah yes, the latter. Also applies to Alden. “In a pejorative connotation the trait may reveal itself in the context of sadism or sadomasochism.” One thing you could say about Alden, his pathologies were well balanced out—N, A, and P in the middle: all three.

For me, you could add a touch of Bipolar Two to the “N”: sexual recklessness, impulse-shopping, urge to sudden travel. But really we're all of us a little off balance, it's healthier that way, more human. Mine was a perfectly tolerable mix of symptoms. At least we Bipolar Twos are happy (mostly: when not acutely depressed), attractive to others, and like to have a good time. Better being that than the Bipolar One, who is morose and solitary but tends to genius. More like Ray, in fact.

My mind was going ape again; how was I ever going to get it back in its box—call it back from the remembered printed page and into real-time me's: who were ascending in a lift specially fitted out for wheelchairs with a man I—quite intolerably—wanted to fuck?

I nearly fell to my knees before Alden's wheelchair and offered to service him—tranquilizer sex—but restrained myself. Joan would never do such a thing. There was safety in Joan. Vanessa was going through a quite severe episode of whatever it was that afflicted her, and had produced Joan as a safety measure. So just be Joan, and prim, and virtuous, and all will be well. Just be Joanie.

R
AY'S STUDIO WAS A
vast room at the top of Alden's house. Joan loved it the moment she set eyes on it. You know how it is, you get used to the places you frequent. Your world narrows: mine had lately, down to my flat, the view of Little Venice, the Olivier Hotel and the Bound Beast, the Rectory for occasional weekend visits, and the shops of SW 1 and 3. Alden's house, with its formal, creeping bleakness, I could live without—though I could see how a woman could improve it. But here was a sensual richness Joan found most congenial, just when I had come to believe that Vanessa's world was all there was. For suddenly here was a different, sensual, novel one, alive with the smell of turpentine and garlic, where the eros was not confined and organized, but was bouncing around the clutter in healthy chaos. Except that Ray himself, self-oppressed and twisted by his neurosis, seemed so disconnected from this garden of delights of which he was both center and progenitor that he was not rejoicing in it at all.

The studio took up most of the top floor. The kitchen was a stove and a sink in an alcove, the bathroom a shower behind a screen, the rest was space: paintings stacked against the walls, oriental wall hangings, vases, glass jars, tins of anchovies bought for their labels, piles of vinyl records and a bicycle with a flat tire; an easel, crowded surfaces, an old deal table, jam jars with dried out brushes in them; an old blue sofa, squishy with use and age, button back chairs in a dilapidated state, rugs everywhere, Kelims—including a nice Heriz and what might be a Kazan; a wide low bed, unmade, in the far corner into whither Ray presumably crawled at night or in the early morning when work was done.

“You look better than the last time I saw you,” said Ray. “You were rather éclatante for my taste.”

“Told you so,” said Alden, amiably. “You'll have to learn to trust me, Joan.” He said he'd brought up a CD of
Thelemy: The Silence of the Senses
for us to hear. After supper we could all listen to it? He thought he might re-title it
Thelemy
—
The Murmur of Eternity?
He was nervous, as people are when they first offer their creative work to scrutiny by the outside world, and Joan found this endearing: he was brave, but he was vulnerable.

She wandered about the studio, uttering little cries of delight, while Ray sliced red onions and grated garlic. Alden whined that the wooden chopping board was unhygienic and needed to be plastic or marble, and Ray
said Alden was more likely to die from over-cleanliness than he was from dirt.

“Because you won't have any antibodies to protect you,” he added.

Alden looked around the room, and his tone lost its geniality: why had nothing been done to the painting? What had Ray being doing with his time?

Ray turned around from the onions, rubbing his eyes with the back of his right hand from which a large square cleaver dangled.

“Block,” he said. “I've got creative block—hello? Ring a bell?”

“Been down to Southgate lately, by any chance?” asked Alden. Ray rolled his eyes, and turned back to his cooking.

The “painting” Ray was working on—or not working on—was executed on traditional canvas, but the shape was anything but traditional. The background was painted a ghostly blue and had then been divided into dozens of little squares, each rimmed with a slim wooden frame, and into each of the four sides of every frame was fixed a little mirror, at an angle: so what was painted in each square was thrown back myriad times from one side to the others. It was rather like the bedroom downstairs, in concept, but the execution was jumbled, organic, full of nooks: an attempt to reproduce the infinite, as if by the observation of perpetually regenerated form some magic goal, as impossible as perpetual motion, could be reached.

In each of the completed squares Ray had, with the finest of calligraphy brushes, painted a complex thicket of tiny contorted strokes, which to him no doubt held profound meaning, but to me presented none. Perhaps half of the squares had been filled. Ray's promise to Alden, now thwarted by his artist's block, had been to fill up the rest so it could be finished and delivered to Alden's client Lady O by mid-September. The task didn't seem impossible to me, nor too hard: you would just take up your brush and make little lines, steadily, one after another, and eventually it would be done. But it didn't seem that way to Ray. He asked me what I thought.