Surrender to Mr. X (6 page)

He rolled ahead. I followed. Doors opened magically to his will.

T
HE DOOR SLID OPEN
to show a spacious room, long rather than wide. There was little bare white to be seen, which was a relief if only because the walls were almost all mirror, into one of which a plasma screen as big as a small shop window was let in as flush as a piece of giant marquetry. There were a couple of odd-shaped velvet chairs, like something out of Jules Verne had he ever set a scene in some Victorian brothel, or described a Parisian
maison close
. Otherwise there was just the ample bed.

Ample, of course, is a relative term: this one would have been more than ample for this evening even if Alden's other guests had not had to divert to Milan. What a bed! It had four posts, but no canopy or side rails; just the ceiling looked down, mirrored like everything else. The posts were again in bur oak, with more of the famous Mr. Lukas's caryatids crawling up them; they didn't have to hold anything up. I daresay the bed, like its companion piece the cabinet, had increased
in value by more than a third since the first day of its occupation. It was big enough to accommodate an orgy, rather higher than normal, spread with a pure white quilt, patch-worked, each white square of a different texture. I saw silks, cottons, linens, damasks, velvets—and why someone should go to all that bother I couldn't think: it was still just a plain white quilt. But there were some ten plump, silk, scarlet, startling pillows strewn across it. Alden had quite an eye for contrast.

“Relax,” he said, “lie down. Find out.” I started to unlace my Jimmy Choos but he said he preferred me to keep them on. So I lay down on the bed, demure and obedient, legs politely together; trying to think and feel like a nice, quiet nursery school teacher whose ambition was to make a difference. I would method act this through and enjoy. I hoped he was right and the Jimmy Choos would not leave dirty marks on the pristine counterpane. It would probably be okay. I had only had to walk in them between my house and the cab and then to the house this end, the weather was dry, and it had been nothing but marble or carpeted floors ever since but all the same I had to overcome the reservation of habit.

“The pale green and the red,” he said. “Unexpected. But it works. It's holistically connected: color, machinery, sex. The idea is to follow the Ophidian currents and transmute sexual energy into artistic energy. And vice versa, of course.”

“Green and red are powerful together,” I said. “The clash is good.”

I lay still compliantly on the bed. I was not sure what he meant by the Ophidian current but I had come across the sex-machinery link before, on the wilder shores of French philosophy. Phrases flitted into my head—I have an eidetic memory: that is to say I can recall large chunks of information as if I were seeing it on the page. It isn't perfect in my case, but I locate information by its place on the page, and then recall the page. It doesn't suggest one is more intelligent than other people, just better able to retrieve information. My sisters, the twins Alison and Katharine, have the same gift of photographic recall, but theirs is even more effective and accurate.

“Sex/machinery,” and there I was with pages on Raymond Roussel, 1877-1933 (the latter date was his suicide), writer of the play
Out of Africa;
“positive exploratory dreams taken to delirious extremes; seeker after the master sex machine, which will function independently of time and space and change the world.” Make a difference. We all long to make a difference. Little Joan, lying here on the bed, a fauvist picture in clashing red and green, waiting for Alden's secrets to be revealed, longing for the turmoil in her head to stop. All that ever really got it to stop was sex, and occasionally shopping.

“What is Ophidian?” I asked.

“It's lizard form stuff,” he said shortly. “Stargate-related.”
He was barely paying attention, absorbed in rebalancing lighting at a lower level.

More pages. Roussel, forgotten now, but a powerful influence on Duchamp, painter of
The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even
. “Even” what, I wondered: “even” me? More pages scrolled by. The notion of the early avant-garde, that art is about ideas, not things. The dreamy yet hard-edged image, seductive. In literature, Roussel, Proust, Kafka, Wyndham Lewis; in art the Futurists, the Vorticists, the toppling towers of Depero, eventually Pollock and Warhol; in music the sense of prolonged orgasmic action propelled into eternity through ceaseless, fantastic repetitions; the complexities of minimalism—Reich and Riley, Phase Patterns—Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Cage, Max Headroom. In all these forms see complexity, repetition to the point of insanity, the creation of spontaneously inventive movements, the fountain of creation spewing forth doubt as well as marvel. Mechanical discourse in language, art, music and now sex too? Now finally with the advent of the computer those early dreams of the avant-garde come true, for is this not the apogee of complexity? A world of ideas not things? The virtual world more real than reality: the computer the ultimate sex machine, bringing sex-in-the-head to the millions? Who wants the real thing any more: live sex has got too dangerous. Thus Bill Gates, the new messiah, came along and saved the world.

The notion of play on the mirrored form, sexual
procedure involving abnegation, imprisonment and liberation? I was to be the idea made flesh? The next stage? If I looked into any corner of the room I could see a thousand thousand me's: a million brides stripped bare of her bachelors. If I sat up and looked forward I could see a warp and woof of sound wave graphics on the computer screen; perhaps I was to be something to so with the composition of
Thelemy: The Silence of the Senses?

But all the brides that were me were sure of one thing: I/we wanted fucking, soon. The intellectual context was another way—interchangeable with any on the menu—of evoking a tension that needed to be released. I feared this was to be more about Alden's artistic fantasies than actual sex. Locking my hands behind my head, I flexed my knees taut and stretched to relax, shut my eyes, and breathed peacefully and deeply as if I were in the final phase of a yoga class.

Then he pounced. The shock was elemental.

The bed tipped to the left and lowered: I rolled gently and opened my eyes again as he pulled my head toward him and into his lap, grasping my hair. His penis rose monumental like a serpentine obelisk from his lap, his belt undone and his trousers parted like the curtains of a stage. He guided my head firmly as a ballet coach might correct an angle of posture, and thrust his thing, graceful and powerful as a wild animal, into my mouth. I could not, I cannot, find a word—the common ones are banal and facetious and
it was the opposite to that—but it was so alive. An animal both hunting and hunted, both pouncing and leaping to safety, both tiger and stag. My question was answered: he was right to treat his need of a wheelchair as a minor issue. There was no handicap in this central expression of his maleness.

It was very large and thick on this, the first occasion. At other times it was to seem slimmer but longer, more probing than plunging. Taken by surprise as I was, disturbed in my meditations on Roussel and the metaphysics of the avant-garde, I had to consciously remember to breathe through my nose, as the penis—the first and only one in my life—swelled in my throat, and I relaxed my muscles, opening, not defending, so that the choking next moment stayed just ahead, never reached.

When I got the chance to ease my neck for a second or two, and raised my eyes I could see past him to the huge swirling screen on the wall and I heard the sound waves as I saw them. Alden, seeing me do so, either let his penis go, or found it going limp, and pushed my mouth away, gently but deliberately. His wheelchair seemed to float back from no obvious instruction on his part, and likewise the bed slowly leveled itself. I was affronted. He had offered me no likely sexual pleasure—it was outrageous. This should not be like the Hotel Olivier: this was a proper date. I needed—oh please—the barest little token of courtship, if only an ear nibble, a kiss, a stroke of my inner thighs, a
brush of lips, a tentative gesture, something, anything: not this, a penis only filling the stretched mouth, my participation limited to my endurance, no affect on either side. I needed something to respond to, with the normal female skills: to encompass, encourage and entice.

Alden meant to find “artistic holism” at my sexual expense. I was to be the catalyst for his search for authenticity. I got up and stood in front of him, my legs astride, my hands on my hips. I was about to tell him what I felt, make a statement in reasonable terms, no criticism, just gently tell him what was real, but he was too quick for me. His chair brought him forward, and he grabbed my hair and forced my mouth back down to its slave labor. I really tried to move my head away but he would not let my hair go. I pulled, he tugged. Then, just as suddenly as it entered, the penis was withdrawn. The humming frequencies and rhythms subsided.

“You see,” he said, “it works. That was what you wanted to know.”

“But you didn't come,” I said.

“That's a different matter,” he said. “I like to do it properly.”

I sat back on the bed and he told me neutrally as a police report that when he was fifteen he had been making fireworks with a friend; there had been an explosion, and he was blown backward down a flight of stone steps and hit his head. He was in a coma for
four weeks, and when he woke up his legs didn't work anymore, from the knees down.

“So you've never had normal sex?” I asked.

“I don't have normal legs,” he said, with an edge in his voice he had not yet shown me till now.

“I'm really sorry,” I said. “I meant, were you still a virgin when you—lost them?”

“I haven't lost them,” he said, his voice really hard. “They just don't work.”

This was not to be an easy area for conversation.

“No,” he said, deciding to make things easier for me. “I wasn't a virgin. I started pretty young. Does that make it better, or worse?” If he now had problems with his potency he hadn't started out that way.

“Perhaps it's to do with explosions?” I asked. “You dread them?”

I had heard of men like this but had never met one: who can go on and on, but fear ejaculation.

“You're very intuitive,” he said. “Thank you.”

“What happened to your friend—does he have the same problem?”

“He died in the explosion,” he said. “And I lived, in a cloud of unspoken blame, from his parents and everybody else.”

“And you blamed yourself.”

“It was my fault.”

“That must make things worse,” I said, and he said yes, he thought it had. And then we were silent. I wanted to ask where all the money came from—if he
came from a clerical family in Yorkshire there wasn't likely to have been much around to begin with, but I didn't ask. He would tell me that too sooner or later.

“All right,” he said. “To business.”

He rearranged a scarlet cushion to his taste; laid my white arm along it, eyed me a little longer. Then with another of his sudden movements, sudden artistic decisions like a painter attacking a canvas with his brush, he pushed the top of my dress down and hooked the breasts out of my bra. He did not bother to undo the hooks, let alone acknowledge their mundane existence. It looked good in the mirror on the ceiling. An artistic pose, if there was a digital camera up there, hooked into the computer.

He looked at me a little longer as if considering the design I made: judging me as a painter judges and weighs up a model before he begins. He rearranged a breast and brushed both nipples with silky soft fingers—no horny manual worker he: they stood erect at once. I have nice plump and round breasts, with broad semicircles of white around the aureoles, and the nipples, which are pink, not brown or rough; they are neither perky, nor tip-tilted, nor minimalist in any way: they are substantial.

I made a move to rise, to cover my breasts—one's instinct for privacy surfaces at the oddest times—but he shook his head reprovingly and I stayed as I was. He was the choreographer, the one who instructed: I accepted instruction. I had already accepted the rules
of engagement. Let what happened, happen. Consent is consent. And I owed it to him, and to his tragedy.

“Just look at that,” he said. “Admire yourself.” The touch pad glowed, the pattern of lights in the room changed, and I seemed to come into sharper definition in the mirror. I thought I could quite fall in love with myself. Were I a work of art I'd pay anything to own me: a Boucher come to life, exotic and erotic, breathing, sucking, fucking, lovely.

My grandmother Molly, wife of the difficult Wallace, had been something of a courtesan in her time. The paintings she left me had no doubt been earned, as his Lordship sometimes brutally put it, on her back. I could see I might well have inherited Molly's temperament.

When I tore my eyes away from myself in all my loveliness, Alden, though wheelchair-bound, was nonetheless homo erectus, asserting the fact with his cock out, manoeuvering it as much for artistic effect as for his subjective pleasure. Its fleshy solidity flung back at him, at us, via a receding infinity of mirrors, back, and back, forever in space and time. And I was out there with it, endlessly split and detached: the baroque play of the repeated mirrored form, the infinite complexity. I started thinking of Roussel again, but squashed the inclination before it ran away with itself.

The fingers of his left hand wiggled over the touch-pad console, and the whole wall on the right of the bed slid back to reveal another of the Lukas carved pieces, this time a walnut cabinet from which he took an
ordinary cheap wooden walking stick. He thrust it into the air with a flick of the wrist, like a fencer testing the weight and balance of a foil, then he reached toward me with it and hoiked my skirt deftly, if roughly, up to my waist. My diamond navel-ring caught the light and twinkled.