Surrender to Mr. X (9 page)

Mouths and asses are not the most numinous receptacles of love in the longer term, though connecting at the time to the pleasure centers. Vaginas are obviously the more profoundly connected to the mixing and loving of male with female; new life is thus created, though that particular sacramental function these days gets overlooked.

I would have thought if I hadn't known better that Alden was gay. The houses of people who have had children, or even mean to have them, are different from those of people who live without the expectation; these are cleaner and more self-conscious than the dwellings of the breeding kind, more post-modern, metro-centric, reflecting a culture with a declining birth rate, where appearance is valued above function.

Personally I had what I wanted: a top floor in a house built a century and a half ago, and showing it, looking
out over the Canal at one of the prettier topographies in London, with a shabby old kitchen and an ergonomic office stripped for intellectual action.

I decided, thinking about Alden, that what he needed was social approval, acceptance. Why else the Radio 3 music? He wanted to be taken seriously. He designed environments for people who wanted to display art, but there wasn't a single painting in his own place. The reason might well be that he doubted his own taste. The painting you buy is such a giveaway. At least mine were inherited so I wasn't responsible for them. Maybe he could make a living from the art and design business, but his lifestyle suggested that there was nothing ordinarily sumptuary about its funding. But what? Something he was ashamed of, perhaps. Was he an arms dealer, or manufacturing portable toilets, or importing false teeth, or diluting antibiotics like Harry Lime in
The Third Man?
Something that would douse conversation at dinner parties?

My mind was over-active again: a doctor once claimed I had Bipolar Two syndrome, the liveable-with, workably acceptable, up-and-down kind of manic depression, and when I was a student the university head-shrinks put me on lithium—but the side-effects were worse than the BP2: I just couldn't bear the way it slowed my mind up and it made my hands tremble, so I stopped. I learned instead to let my mind race, and enjoy the skill of controlling it like a rally driver does
the gears of a car on the winding corniche roads of a mountain range.

Woo-hoo! I sang aloud. I tossed the soggy new July
Vogue
I was reading into the air, and watched it tumble into the loo like a shot bird. £5,000 cash! Hey! “Nothing cheap, a lot of color.” I leapt out of the bath, dried myself, and put £2,000 of it straight away between the pages of Jung, vol.13,
Alchemical Studies
. I slung on some Matalan jeans and a yellow T-shirt with the word “So?,” skipped my way to the taxi rank and headed for Knightsbridge with the rest.

Shop assistants can be very helpful, especially in SW1, where black-burkaed Arab wives and girlfriends wield their store cards in the designer boutiques, never given cash in case they use it to run away. They buy the fanciest clothes to wear beneath the shrouds, present their man the receipts, model the clothes for him, and their girl friends at the odd tea-party: then run round to the up-market thrift shops and exchange their purchases for cash. I would get Alden £5,000 worth of clothes: but I reckoned I had only to spend £3,000 doing it by deft recycling. £2,000 was what one of the more expensive professional girls would have charged for an evening's bondage and full sex at the end of it. If the money shot was missing it wasn't this girl's fault.

The small shops are not above changing a receipt for the sake of a sale, and some of the clothes you find are gorgeous, from A-list designers, only one or two wearers from the catwalk, and lingerie to die for.
You have to pay full price for shoes, though: I like the shoe departments in Harvey Nicks, so I went there and bought four pairs which set me back £1200, the most expensive an absurd pair of winter ankle boots by Stuart Weitzman in silver with a ruff of leopard fur and rather dangerous looking chrome heels, in a sale for only £320. Response to the butch-fey contrast of winter boots with a flimsy dress never fails. If I was to buy clothes to “model” for Alden, who was paying, the least I could do was coincide my taste with what he liked—which I inferred was tasteful-and-expensive nuanced with a little vulgarity: good girl plays the tart.

I left all my packages to date with the girl in the shoe department, and took the escalators to the sunny Fifth Floor Bar and drank a glass of chilly Pouilly Fuisse, refusing the eyes of all the men who were trying to meet mine.

Instead I meditated upon Alden, his long strong cock, blushed and seasoned from use, lolling across the poor puny leg, and exulted in the feelings of my body, aching here, sore there, which are the reward of good sex and keep the memory of it alive. I wondered what Alden had meant about “modeling,” and had a fit of nerves that it might be just that: literally, and without the sex. But I took a grip on myself: I didn't quite think it would be. Some girls don't mind it: being hung in slings and bonds and left to dangle and twist, get whipped a bit, but just be observed, and not get
any penetrative sex—but that seems totally pointless to me.

And I wanted to know more about Alden; one side of him seemed so open and friendly, honest and frank, with his bright eyes and floppy hair, traumatized, wounded, secretly vulnerable. He needs me. But he needs me—helpless. And, if he keeps an artist in the attic, what does he keep in the basement? Is he the new Bluebeard—or Bluetooth—seeing sex as technology: one half man, one half sexual pleasure by remote control …?

He longs for acknowledgment as a creative genius, to be known as a great musician, respected not by the vulgar mass, not as a sing-along celebrity but up there in the ethereal zone of the avant-garde, ahead of the game with a fusion of the aleatory and techno-minimalism. His tastes and influences were catholic, from Webern to Satie, Ives to Várese, Cage to Reich and Terry Riley, Brian Eno to Iggy Pop, all coming into full frontal and final flood in Alden, worshipper at the shrine of the Golden Dawn.

My brain is running hares again. I've been staring into space, but I notice a man across the circular bar from me who supposes my attention is fixed on him. Shit! He's an Arab in a very good suit and rather too much gold jewelry. He will have a very fast car and a tasteless flat somewhere behind Harrods, with a drinks bar and a water bed. He will have a long penis, will take Cialis every day for breakfast and be determined
to get his money's worth before it wears off. The ghost of a smile, and he nods toward the door: I must say I am a little tempted. It would be so excellent to be free of thought, just for a time.

But I move my head from side to side, and look down at my glass. No. No one else in the bar will have noticed the exchange, it is so fast, but certain. I look around the bar, finishing my wine, and catch his little shrug—her loss, not mine—and he turns his attention elsewhere. It's a near thing, though. Fucking bipolarity: my doctor says if I won't take lithium, Valium is the next best thing in emergencies, and after that sex, and after that shopping.

I've left the Valium at home, declined the sex, and spent all I was going to part with of my allocated money. On my way out of the store to the Lowndes Square side where the taxis wait at the round hotel I see a little last year's Marc Jacobs purse, orange with buckles, knocked down to nothing—£103—and use my one working credit card. That takes it up to its limit. I'll pay some of the Jung money into the account tomorrow, I promise myself. It's there for emergencies, but this sort of was one. A kind assistant from the Trish McEvoy counter helps me with my bags to the taxi—one shopaholic recognizes another, I suspect, or maybe she wanted to get out in the sunlight for a minute—and I go home to prepare myself in tranquility for the evening. It was the right thing to do: the Jacobs bag had got my head back into gear, so I even managed
half an hour on my thesis.

The doorbell rings at ten past seven, and I trit-trot down with all my bags and carriers, and there's Loki at my door with the black cab waiting behind. I'm wearing the Weitzman boots with the leopard-fur trim and five-inch heels, which is about as high as you can go and still walk. I'm wearing jeans and a sleeveless Miguelina goddess top in a diaphanous orangey-pink which you wear with a soft beigey-pink floating tie at the waist—jeans are fairly indestructible and the gauze tie could at a pinch be used as a top. My stockings were black mesh hold-ups almost to the groin and with a wide pink band across the top, but they would not be seen, of course, until I took my jeans off. I had the little Marc Jacobs bag, with the receipts in it as well as lipstick, comb and stuff. None of this was exactly Joan, but I'd had my instructions.

And then Loki says, “I've got a message for you, Miss Bennet. Mr. Alden says he's sorry, he can't make it to-night, and so can it be tomorrow instead? He's had to fly to Scotland unexpectedly.”

I sighed sweetly and said: “Oh, what a relief. I've so much marking to do. Tomorrow's just great!” I smiled, nodded then closed the door on him. It was a close one: I nearly said “Tell Mr. X to go fuck himself,” but I didn't. I could I suppose have said to Loki, “How about going down the pub then?”—but I didn't seem to have done that either.

I had some unfinished business with Alden. I've
had the odd hard physical slap in my time—we won't go there though—and once I was sworn at for a slut, which hurt a bit. But I am not accustomed to being stood up. The walking out, the letting down—if it's got to happen, I do that.

When I got upstairs I took today's choice off and put the clothes aside for tomorrow, to save myself the trouble of going through all that freedom of choice again, then called a few girlfriends but they were all busy, or had just had babies, or wanted to moan about baby-sitters. So I took two Temazepams, went to bed, and slept right through until eight next morning.

I was calm about it in the morning. It was probably for the best, I decided: there were still marks on my wrists and ankles. I was dwelling in a kind of erotic haze. I could feel the ball-gag still in my mouth.

I had breakfast in the staff canteen. Spare food from the guests' breakfast menu—best organic bacon, crisp and delicate, not too salty, poached eggs on toast, a couple of chipolatas made from Gloucester Old Spot pigs, and a roll and apricot preserve. And the coffee was divine. I hadn't realized I was so hungry. If you're prepared to eat the surplus from the restaurant you get the very best quality food but slightly congealing and crusty and not necessarily hot where hot is expected. If you eat what they cook in the staff kitchen, it's a quarter the quality and cost: that is to say tough, fatty bacon, stale eggs, heavy rolls, plain apricot jam rather than preserve, instant coffee not real, and so on, but
often straight from the stove. Those less secure than me turn up their noses at the restaurant leftovers; that's their choice.

Max came down to find me as I was dabbing the last butter and confiture off my lips.

He said he was so glad I'd come in this morning, and not taken yet another day off. He'd hoped I would because he had a job for me. A really civilized young gent from Saudi, asking for a nice girl to take to lunch and spend an hour or two with him in 404, one of the posher suites. Not a cash job; his father kept him on a tight rein, but he had a diamond ring to offer.

“Where'd he get it—nick it from his mum?” I asked.

“Probably.” Max gave a little laugh to humor me.

“How old is he?”

“Sixteen.”

And I said, he'd better be, because not only is age of consent a can of worms in this country—paid sex it's eighteen, unpaid sex it's sixteen—but in Saudi you have to be married to have sex with anyone, male or female. In theory. Max said he didn't think there'd be a problem: he was a pleasant and civilized youngster staying overnight before flying back to Saudi with leave from his English public school to attend an important family celebration. The father was a frequent guest at the hotel, and always booked 404 for himself and family members—the worldly-wise Max was curiously calmed, reassured and impressed by consistency.

But I demurred. I'd just eaten breakfast so the
thought of lunch a couple of hours on didn't tempt me: my young brother Robert is sixteen—they're no conversationalists. I could envision tedious awkwardnesses. Also, I tried to keep these jobs down to two a week, and there had been the tennis player a couple of days back; and the evening with Alden had counted as five in one—now full sex with a teenager who might not be as old as he claimed? I decided to say definitely: no.

And then I thought about Alden who'd stood me up. I really needed to wash that man right out of my hair for form's sake, somehow, temporarily, otherwise my resentment might fester and threaten the relationship in the longer term, and this was probably the way karma, or God, had provided. I needed defragmenting like a computer, grounding, settling, and this was the way to do it. Alden couldn't possibly know: how could he? Loki was to collect me at half past seven: nine hours to wait, and it would pass some of that time. So I said: “Okay, Max, let's go for it.”

I don't usually go with Arabs, especially not young ones, untamed by wives. They desire, yet despise western women, not without reason. The whole world knows about our binge-drinking sluts. They've seen every porn film on the net including the rape ones and are neurotic about sex to begin with. Their religion and culture persuades them that sex outside marriage is a sin, that if it were not for women there would be no lust: the West beams its porn screens at them and they
resent it. But it also gives them copycat ideas. They tend to like blond, fragile-looking girls, and then take their bafflement out on them. The really nasty ones make you perform for them in some way that humiliates you—animals seem a favorite, though hard to organize in an hotel—before engaging with you, and hand you over to the bodyguards when they've had enough. A girl limps moaning away.