Surrender to Mr. X Read online

  Surrender to Mr. X

  Surrender to Mr. X

  Rosa Mundi

  New York • London

  © 2012 by Rosa Mundi

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to Permissions c/o Quercus Publishing Inc., 31 West 57th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10019, or to [email protected].

  ISBN 978-1-62365-274-6

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

  c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  Contents

  Ninety-Three Days On

  At The Front Desk

  In the Bound Beast and Bumpkin

  Suite 402

  Home

  Dinner With Alden

  In The Bedroom

  Going Home

  Getting to Know You

  Clothes Mare

  Being Joan

  Domesticity

  Two Women

  A Weekend in the Country

  In the Name of Art

  A Weekly Routine

  A Family Episode

  Evenings at the Club

  Scenarios

  Suburbia

  Lam Juggles

  Living sacrifice

  A New Beginning

  The Pay Back

  Quiet Seas

  True Love

  The Siblings Come To Town

  Stress And Paralysis

  Party

  A Scandal

  Ninety-Three Days On

  I RAN HOME, IN THE end. Not really ran all the way, I hailed a taxi: but it is fair to say that I fled for my life, who knows, maybe for more than my life, dressed only in Jimmy Choo cracked metallic silver four inch heels, no-crotch Wolford fishnets, beige cashmere jacket—sequined, Christian Lacroix, but well cutaway—and without my purse. Fear and anger propelled my flight. Mother told me once that I should never go to a party without the fare home: as it happened I had a folded twenty-pound note in my pocket.

  The party—though that may not be quite the right word—was in Hampstead, a couple of miles away from where I live in Little Venice, by the canal. It’s not really me to walk any distance by day let alone night, if only because my heels are so high, so it was just as well the money was to hand. Otherwise I might have killed the anger, decided escape was too much like hard labor, too much strain on the ankles, stayed, and been destroyed. I don’t need hindsight to know that I was within a sulfury whiff of it.

  I had borrowed the £20 from the rent money, which I hid as cash between the leaves of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, on the grounds that no-one else but me is going to open it. I’d put it in the pocket of the Lacroix jacket at suppertime on June 21st, having perhaps some intuition of what was to come—a feeling of adventure in the air on that midsummer’s night—where it was to stay until 21st September, the date of my flight.

  I do love Lacroix. Not just for the pocket, I’m in his debt for that, but the way the clothes make you feel so extravagant, dramatic and luxurious: textures surprise and delight, discretion and glitter exult in tandem. I like to think that’s my style.

  During the ninety-three days of my dealings with Alden X and his painter friend, Ray, I could not focus on Wittgenstein, nor even on Kant’s somewhat easier Copernican Revolution, nor my twenty-four volumes of Jung’s Collected Works. I was meant to be getting on with my PhD thesis on “changes in the group psyche as created through faulty perceptions of reality as exacerbated by implicit distortions of meaning in the new lingua franca: Bill Gates’ Microsoft.”

  But during that summer, the year I turned twenty-six, if I turned the pages the words meant nothing: they hung alien and unconnected on the page. If I tried to write nothing came. It worried me. Can the life of the flesh so undermine the life of the mind that one loses all powers of reasoning? Or interest in them? Or perhaps it’s okay to take lust and intellect in shifts, and not to try to live a balanced life and kind of synthesize your own Prozac, like you’re supposed to do.

  At The Front Desk

  I WORK PART-TIME IN ONE of London’s plusher hotels, the Olivier in Covent Garden, and it was there at my post behind the reception desk that I first met Alden, on June 21st last year. At eleven that morning I had checked in a Mrs. Matilda Weiss and her party. She traveled with a posse of three—nutritionist, personal trainer and lawyer. She had booked into our Premiere Suite, 406, the others into cheaper rooms on the second floor. Mrs. Weiss was a botox-happy Manhattan matron and socialite in her fifties, passing for her thirties, newly divorced, slim as a rake; dressed in taupes with heavy gold hung here and there. She was not a pleasant person, and caused trouble from the start, demanding instant personal access to the chef for her nutritionist; and installed in her suite, sent down to demand black grapes instead of the white ones in the complimentary fruit bowl, banging on that they were too acid. Takes one to know one; she’d know all about acid. Some guests never feel at home until they have registered a whole string of quite ingenious complaints.

  Two hours later, at ten to one precisely, Alden came toward me in his wheelchair, broad-shouldered, energetic, cheerful, brown floppy hair, a man with bright-eyed film-star looks, though rather more in the square-jawed manly Warren-Beatty mold of yesterday, than today’s softer, more troubled Tom-Hanks-ish look. Late thirties, I thought; wealthy. His suit was good, his wheelchair Italian and custom built. He had a paid companion to push it, a pasty young-old little man with an egg-shaped head, over-large, dark, watchful eyes and clammy hands, whom I was eventually to know as Lam.

  I paged Suite 406 to tell Mrs. Weiss that Mr. Alden X was here for lunch and for my pains was rewarded with: “Lunch—with that fucking crazy? He is joking? Tell him to shove his interior designs up where no sun shines, is that interior enough? Or can’t he reach, sitting in a wheelchair?” and further words to this effect.

  I held the phone further away from my ear but the contemptuous voice crackled on, the others now hearing it the better before I realized what I’d done. Lam frowned in concern—his lugubrious eyes seemed even panicky—but Alden just smiled and said quietly, “Don’t worry about it, kid. Just put the receiver down.”

  So I did.

  “It’s an ill wind,” said Alden. “Perhaps you’ll have a drink with me instead?”

  I had to say yes, but not because he was disabled and might have interpreted any reluctance on my part as insult. I was curious. This is embarrassing, but I’m going to say it anyway: faced with a good-looking and vigorous man in a wheelchair one’s mind instantly goes to practicalities: can he, can’t he? Was he born like that or was there an accident? Will he get better or is it permanent? How does he manage? Does he confine himself to oral things; was the important part of him permanently limp, or even altogether gone? Perhaps it was part of his mi
nder’s remit to hoist his master on to all fours so he could perform? Or did he just lie on his back? Or… what? I wanted to know. I needed to find out. Because I’m a philosopher, and trained to ask questions about the world of phenomena? Or my natural curiosity, like that which killed the cat?

  I said we’d have to wait for the concierge to come back. Max was down in the kitchens trying to soothe the chef, who was still miffed because of the earlier insult to his white grapes, a special purchase—they had a particularly fine flavor and delicate skins—flown in from the Andes or wherever they grow them in June. My shift was technically over at one o’clock, but if Mr.—?

  “Call me Alden,” he said. “Alden X.”

  —If Alden didn’t mind waiting five minutes or so, my shift would be over and I’d be free, I said. Conversation with someone in a wheelchair is difficult. You have to talk down to them, as if they were a child. I rather wished I hadn’t said yes, and then felt guilty for wishing it. Also, I was slightly miffed because he hadn’t asked me to lunch but only for a drink. I know the girl behind reception can hardly expect to be treated with the same courtesy as a guest, but even so these social distinctions can make you paranoiac if you’re on the wrong side of them.

  He asked me what my name was and I said “Joan Bennet,” and added that I was only temporary staff. I had a proper profession. He asked me what that was and I said I was a nursery school teacher. I was working extra hours at the Olivier to pay for a course in teenage counseling. He said that sounded very virtuous and I said I was.

  What else was I to tell him? The truth? That my name is Vanessa d’A. and I have a double first in philosophy, and while working toward my PhD I earn money best as I may? Nothing puts most men off like too much class or cleverness in a woman. It’s still true: they need to feel they’re your superior. Best to come over as a nurse or a teacher, and there are no disappointments; everyone knows where they are and cocks rise uninhibited.

  I am virtuous enough, in my way. My mother once told me that the only difference between a professional girl and the others is that the first take money for sex and the rest don’t. She’s a lady vicar in the Church of England with her own vocation, so I take her word for it. She could even be a bishop one day if Synod ever gets its act together about female equality. I do not sell my body for a living. I see it as the temple of my soul, as my mother explains to me that it is, and so I respect it accordingly. It’s just that a temple will need its roof mended and its doors and windows painted and the rest, which requires money. I am not cut out for regular employment. I’m useless with computers, and offices make me claustrophobic. I could set out to marry a rich man but that might have to limit my sex life, and I’m not ready for that quite yet.

  I am what Max the concierge describes as a vocational, rather than a working girl. I like sex; I’m good at it, and sometimes I feel it’s what I’m best at; what I feel I’m for.

  Unaccompanied men, especially when in a strange land, are often at a loose end sometimes of an evening. Max the concierge will point them in my direction: not too often—but once or twice a week or so is acceptable. I am a nice girl, a good girl and an educated girl: my face stays soft and vulnerable and the corners of my mouth turn upward, not down. I am a rosy sort of person: friendly: people stop me to ask me the way, knowing I can be trusted to give a true answer. Rather too rounded for a catwalk model, though with a little help from a seamstress I know I can get into their cast-offs: I have friends in the fashion houses. A little waist, full breasts, very long legs, shiny reddish hair—people ask me if I use henna but that’s just the color it is—slim thighs, little feet and pretty hands. I have not much to complain about.

  If men care to give me gifts for services rendered that suits me very well. A couple of hours a day behind the desk at the Olivier pays peanuts but is a good way of making contacts. The hotel gets an excellent class of clientele—prices range from around £400 a night for an ordinary room without a river view, up to £2,000 for a suite. We are a favorite with EU officials, NGO senior staff, wealthy Americans, UN magnates and Japanese tourists; nothing too flashy or corrupt.

  If I had been born Japanese, my natural habitat would have been in a tea house, as a geisha. Nothing too vulgar, nor up-front, but if the clients feel like sex as well as conversation—well so do I, and should they like to give me presents, I don’t have a problem with it: my rent is high and I have to fund my own way through college. In the long term the only place I see for myself is in academe. Meanwhile there are my clothes to pay for—I have a princess’s taste but a commoner’s income. I hope I don’t sound too defensive here. Because I frequently have sex without requiring or expecting payment: although, oddly, men often prefer to pay than not to pay. The transaction is less value-loaded: no sense of emotional obligation is left drifting in the air. It is more like paying one’s psycho-therapist: then it is clear that “friendship” has been bought, and with a time limit.

  In the Bound Beast and Bumpkin

  ALDEN TELLS ME HE is a musician, an interior designer and an “applied conceptual artist,” and I say, “Quite the Renaissance man!” Which is slightly over-clever for Joan, and Lam suddenly speaks up in flat, nasal tones: “Mr. X—true Leonardo,” just as I’d forgotten he existed. Then Max comes back, says it’s okay for me to go, and nods us over in the direction of the bar of the Bound Beast and Bumpkin, a designer pub which crouches in the lee of the Olivier, where its staff meet out of hours, a few drugs are bought and sold and high-class hookers congregate.

  Max is tall, grizzled, lugubrious and around fifty: he is dapper and neat and self-contained and wears a red carnation. Max has a smooth line of talk which keeps guests happy, and a dangerous glint in his eye which keeps staff docile. He is the outer and visible sign of the Hotel Olivier’s dignity. His wife long since learned to live without him: his love goes to the hotel. He started as a bell boy and is now head concierge and doubles at reception if required; he is the link between the hotel and the outside world; he knows every theater, every restaurant, every call girl in town; he bribes and blackmails in the hotel’s interests; he has a hot line to the local cop-shop; he has his favorites amongst the cab drivers; he takes a modest cut from everyone for putting business in other folks’ way, as is his due, and sometimes boasts to me about the tens of thousands he has in cash beneath his bed.

  “Except,” as he says rather unnecessarily, being a wary kind of person, “it isn’t really under my bed.”

  Max seems to like me. I dress tastefully, even modestly, I’m cool and efficient behind his desk, and if I find myself in Larry’s Bar at the hotel with a guest, after work, it is with Max’s permission. I am well-spoken: I don’t attract the wrong sort of attention. He once told me I was good for the bar trade. We get top film and music people, even writers, scientists, all kinds of interesting sorts in, and super celebrity models too, so I took that as a compliment.

  “Wheelchair access is better at the Beast than in Larry’s,” says Max. It sounds ingenuous, but there is a subtext. What he means is that wheelchairs are not welcome in the hotel bar. The Olivier offers wheelchair access to all floors and public spaces, but the well-heeled public, though happy to pay lip service to the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the physically and mentally incapacitated, does not want its nose rubbed in disability when it has its hair let down, enjoying itself.

  Better if Max had said nothing. I felt quite upset on Alden’s behalf. He had already that morning been snubbed by Mrs. Weiss, and humiliated in front of me. Now his eyes were bright as if there were tears brimming just behind them. Maybe he was just blazing cross, but hiding it. I resolved to be as nice to him as I could, and on our way to the Bound Beast shook my hair loose from its pins, undid the top three buttons, pushed up the sleeves of my white ruched blouse, and by the time I sat down opposite his wheelchair and was finally able to engage with him on the level and not from a height, I felt we were kind of pals, on the same side, almost joined together at the hip in some way. I smiled at him as
if he were God’s gift to women—which I could see that, were he not in a wheelchair, he might very well be.

  “You have an interesting smile,” he said. “You’re not as obvious as you pretend—I like that.” His voice was quizzical, strong and low and had a slight Yorkshire growl to it. He was at ease, so I was at ease. I felt honored to be noticed, to be more than just essence of girl, but girl with detail: girl fascination. But then I wondered if his flanks were thin and withered, or strong and firm like normal. How could I know? Would it matter? Probably not. As a child I used to rescue birds the cat brought in, befriend the bullied, adopt African children and so on. I’ve always liked lame ducks. But then he wasn’t acting lame at all.

  So I wondered what he wanted. A drink with a nursery school teacher because his lunch date had fallen through? Company, any would do, and that was that? He was hardly the lonely type though: so why?

  Lam bought drinks and chicken sandwiches with cash Alden handed him, put them in front of us, then went and sat by himself at another table and read his newspaper, not resentful, but humble like Uriah Heep; the role made him comfortable. So he acted as servant and not some kind of companion. The Leonardo comment was incidental. And he seemed uninterested in me. Perhaps he was gay? He had a small mouth and a tapered chin and a plaintive air of incipient victimhood. I was pretty sure about Alden’s sexual orientation and he was the opposite of plaintive. If he was a victim, he asked for no favors because of it.

  “A tenth of the price and twice as good as lunching in your hotel,” said Alden. He had a good appetite: broad white orthodontist-teeth bit into thick chunks of fresh crusty white bread. I nibbled at the chicken, leaving the bread. Personally I would rather have lunched at the Olivier. The mayo here was too sharp, out of a jar.

  “It’s not my hotel,” I giggled, and he put up his hands in a no contest gesture and made a face and grinned, then shook his head. “Thank you for keeping me company, Joan. God, that woman is a bitch.”