Surrender to Mr. X Read online

  “I don’t think it’s nice to call any woman a bitch,” I said primly, in my Joan persona. His eyebrows rose a bit. “How do you know her?” I said, changing tack.

  “It’s a business relationship,” he said. “Is, was …? Probably still ‘is.’”

  There were two or three professional girls at the bar, swinging legs, eating lunch, waiting for their pimps or the odd punter to come along, eyeing me and my new acquisition up, smirking and whispering behind hands, but not aggressively, perfectly friendly. They don’t seem to mind me. I don’t take business away from them, or only in such small quantity it scarcely affects the price of fish. Anyway, I put business their way from time to time, whenever I depped for Max behind the concierge’s desk.

  Alden told me he owned a design agency. It was called Arts-Intrinsick. I looked it up later that afternoon on Google. It was “working toward a unified vision of art, design and sound,” which could have meant anything, or nothing, but so far as I could see its mission was to bring together private art collectors, architects and “sound sculptors to embrace the senses in a functional, luxurious and sophisticated environment.” Bullshit, it seemed to me but plausible enough to work. What did I know? In other words if you were a very, very rich divorcée like Mrs. Weiss and liked to buy paintings and art installations as an investment, you would then employ Alden to create a state-of-the-art gallery within your own home, where you could display your collection to its advantage against a background of specially composed sense-enhancing music.

  I had no doubt Arts-Intrinsick would thrive: there is plenty of free-floating money to be netted in the art world—especially if you are not an actual painter. I have a step grandfather, Lord Wallace F, grand old doyen of British architecture, and so I know all about that from him, and from my grandmother, who had the misfortune to be married to him for a time. Wallace was a horrid man, though his scathing dismissal of what he called “art-world scum” and “culture nomenclature” could be quite energizing; no doubt it would have included someone like Alden in it. I felt the more protective toward him, having to struggle not just against the handicap of his disability, but the contempt of the likes of Wallace while he tried to bring his vision to reality. Wallace had a point perhaps, but froth would be a kinder word than scum. But then I liked Alden and didn’t like Wallace: judgment follows where emotions lead.

  Alden and I chatted; we talked of our families. He came from a Yorkshire vicarage—had gone to grammar school—he’d played with the village soccer team, which suggested an accident later in life, but he was not prepared to go into details—the Royal College of Music, then fine arts at the Slade—he was multi-talented, evidently—a job with the Warhol Foundation—and then on to start his own business. No marriage. A light laugh—it wouldn’t be fair: he couldn’t have children. What about me?

  I resisted the temptation to say I too came from a clerical family, only on my mother’s side, and, as Joan Bennet, presented him with a portrait of a lower-middle-class Essex family—father an out-of-work printer, mother a social worker, two sisters working in a call center, a brother in trouble with the police. I implied that I loved working with children: I was not ambitious, other than I wanted to make a difference, you know? I added for good measure that I was Plymouth Brethren, and he looked quite intrigued—a sect in which sex is a source of neurotic guilt, and where else, these days, can you find that?

  For hit-and-run sex it is useful to be someone else: if you feel bad about it later for any reason, why then, it wasn’t you that did it. If you get emotionally hurt, it is someone else who suffers. The kernel of you stays intact. I rather liked this Joan of mine. She had a cuddly, kind heart and would certainly go to bed with Alden, if that was what he wanted, if only out of compassion, because she was whole and he was not. She would not of course expect financial reward.

  I would use Joan again: the thought quite stirred me. Being Joan as well as Vanessa added spice to the expectation of adventure. It was almost as if I could be both male and female: dom and sub, top and bottom, the one who did, the one done unto.

  So, Alden was infertile. I felt restless on my chair. Why couldn’t we just get on with this? But would it work? Men can be infertile for reasons other than mechanics. He would lie on his back: I could sit on top of him. If the worst came to the worst he could use a vibrator. Lam could run out for one, in the role in which he was now running backward and forward to the bar with whisky sours for Alden and over-sweet cocktails—made of crème de cacao, brandy, cream and nutmeg with two little umbrellas on top—for me, that seeming obviously the sort of thing Joan would drink.

  Luigi the barman at the Beast, with his Robert de Niro looks, was ever one to foster intimate relationships in his bar; he had coated the drink with a thick layer of nutmeg, rather than the normal bitty sprinkle. Alden told me it was aphrodisiac and I pretended ignorance, which is usually popular with men, for the less you know the more opportunity they have to enlighten you. He gave me a full breakdown of the spice’s chemical composition.

  He asked me if I had a boyfriend, and I confessed that I had been engaged for four years to a Geology student who’d then walked out on me and married my best friend. A tear or two came into my eye. I really took myself in. He sympathized, and I said really, I was okay, but I’d given up on men. You couldn’t rely on them, you couldn’t trust them. He said, “We men, perhaps we’re not all the same.” I said perhaps I didn’t know very much about them really.

  He set about impressing me. One of his “environments,” he said, had been had been written up in May’s Vogue. But his real passion was music, sound. He had had some acclaim recently—a ten-minute piece for percussion on Radio 3 last year, in a series called Minimalist Maelstrom—and he was currently struggling to deliver a twenty-minute commissioned piece called Thelemy: The Silence of the Senses, again for Radio 3. He asked me if I liked music and I said I was quite keen on trance. He laughed and said that figured and reached out and took my hand and held it a moment. When we touched a spark of static electricity clicked and leapt between him and me. It was probably coincidental—there was a new carpet in the bar—but it left me with the feeling that the energy ordinary people wasted walking round built up in some kind of inner battery he had, and was ready for use; his eyes were so bright.

  He said he was an avant-garde man himself and I asked him what he meant by avant-garde and he said “in the forefront” and I said that seemed a dangerous place to be, in the front line of the battle, and he said yes, that’s what it was: he was in the forefront of the battle against stupidity and man’s inhumanity to man. I would have asked him where women fitted in but remembering in time that I was Joan, not Vanessa, just nodded appreciatively.

  Alden and Joan were really getting along together, rather happily together in fact. And then of all things the great diplomat Max came in, escorting Mrs. Matilda Weiss who looked me up and down as if I was something the cat had brought in. She sat down at our table all conciliatory frowns and smiles and mwah-mwahs, simpering and apologizing all over Alden. While they were thus engaged, Max gave me a very definite little nod toward the door, telling me I should leave, and since Alden had lost interest in my presence, so I did.

  And I thought that was all there was going to be to it, and that I wouldn’t see him again: I was furious. But Lam came out into the street after me with a message from Alden—an invitation: that if I was free that evening perhaps I would join him and some friends of his for dinner at home? 8:00? Wear something pretty? He lived in Hampstead and would send a taxi.

  I hadn’t felt so happy since I was six, when I saw my father walk in through the door, returned from a week away, during which time I was sure, quite wrongly, that he’d run off with the au pair. It was like waking from a bad dream to find your teeth haven’t fallen out, the house hasn’t burned down, and the world is a far more wonderful place than the disastrous one you have become reconciled to overnight. A sudden, gratuitous, lift of the heart. I gave Lam my address, and would h
ave gone straight home to doll myself up, already working out what Alden’s idea of “pretty” might possibly be while I waited for the taxi: but Max had something else in mind.

  Suite 402

  A WELL-KNOWN CENTRE COURT TENNIS player was checking in when I left the Bound Beast and came back into reception. I will not tell you his name, not even the initial, but he is as famous for his sexual impetuosity as for the speed of his serve: over 140 miles per hour. His wife was not checking in until the next day. He was a shock-headed blond, stocky, lovely and healthy looking, and barely thirty. Women in the foyer were already huddling and staring. Max caught his attention and moved his eyes inquiringly toward me: I felt an involuntary tingle of response as I watched him look me briefly up and down and nod approval to Max.

  “Perhaps you could help our guest up with his bag,” said Max. And so I did, though God knows the tennis star was young and strong enough to carry it for himself, the porter’s desk for once was well staffed, and I was off-duty.

  Max usually gives me some warning, and a free range of options—yes, no, never, perhaps, what’s in it, and some time to think about it—today for some reason he did not. But I chose not to make a fuss, and just went along with it: I wanted adventure. I had been thoroughly stirred up sexually and then dismissed, and I was still shaken. I owed Alden less than nothing, yet it was partly the thought that I owed him this to serve him out which drove me to smile my consent. Max gave the glimmer that for him passed as appreciation—a slight loosening of his impassive lugubrious features. I was often surprised that men found courage as they did to approach him regarding their sexual needs—but there’s nothing like sex, I suppose, for stiffening the sinews.

  I trotted ahead of the great Wimbledon server, carrying his bag for him with both hands. The expectation, amongst equals, that the male carries the burden for the female, is overruled when such class distinctions are at play. In the great scale of things my position as servant far outweighed any traditional rights as a female. I resolved to make a note of it when I got home and see if I could work these ideas into my thesis. The different meanings of serve: an internet server, a tennis server, a servant…

  Had my hair been thin and gray it could have changed the balance, he could have said “let me,” but my hair was doing its glossy, tumbling thing since I’d taken out the hair grips earlier, and it’s amazing the effect undoing a button or two on a staff uniform can have. We had crossed into the roles of the chamber maid and he the young master, and we were locked in.

  I put down the bag—heaven knows what was in it, did tennis players do weight lifting?—and used the card to open the door of Suite 402. I heaved it inside and started on the usual spiel about the master switch, the air conditioning, how to call the maid to do the curtains, the Carreras marble bathroom floor and not to remove the non-slip pad, and so on, but my voice faded away because the famous tennis player was leaning back against the closed door with his flies already unzipped and his serpentine member moving upward and outward, a willful, independent, questing thing. It was a blond’s penis, moderately thick, but long and pale, with veins taut as if they were muscles, and impressed even me. All it had taken was three slight nods, Max toward me, his toward Max, and mine to Max, not a word spoken, and all this, within minutes, was not just possible, it was inevitable, already really happening. But such was the panders’ art, I supposed, and why Max had so much cash beneath his mattress, or wherever he really put it away.

  Not all women enjoy fellating, and many do it just for the man’s sake, but I have more than broken myself out of that habit: I have come to love doing it. I like the feel of my lips being stretched, the incorporation of the chthonic male other into the mouth from which I speak, the head from which I think, the face which is my polite persona in the non-sexual intercourse of polite society. The teasing and honoring with the tongue, like the anointing of a priest-king, I revel in it almost—though never quite—as much as I do full penetrative sex in my cunt, where the superego is entirely absent.

  The fact that you do this for a stranger adds to the marvel of it, and the religious reference in kneeling gives intensity to the obeisance, as if a god someone has whisked you out of the crowd for this moment of intimate selfless sacrifice, and will whirl you back into it again afterward, some symbolic act of union accomplished, leaving you the more for it, not the less, and the rest of the world outside ignorant of the secret ritual, unknowingly saved.

  I was on my knees in front of him, his prick in my mouth, which was steered by his serving hand wound firmly into my hair. First the tip to be circled, then the whole sucked and given up, sucked and given up. It tones the mouth muscles: keeps the lips firm and full. Now he pushed his pelvis forward into my throat, my head pressed against his flat sportsman’s belly. I could scarcely breathe but that too is a discomfort one quickly gets to like, once one stops panicking.

  Sex is a cheap way of escaping the compulsive nature of ratiocination. That is to say, in the language of everyday, rather than the language of my PhD thesis, fucking stops you thinking, and that can be a relief. But since blow jobs only take up half the mind, not the whole of it, there’s enough room left in one’s head, observing, for being one’s own voyeur, and thinking discursively, even creatively. What I was thinking about now was ancient Babylon and the temple whores of Ishtar.

  My father is a classical scholar of the traditional dusty and distant absentminded professor type, and he had me reading Latin from the age of five and Greek at seven. He kept a clutch of books on the top shelf of the library, away from my eyes. These of course were the ones I later sought out when he wasn’t in the house, standing on a chair and books to get them down. It was thus, when I was ten, that I’d first come across a passage by Herodotus about Ishtar’s sacred harlots written two and a half millennia since.

  “Babylonian custom,” he wrote, “compels every woman of the land once in her life to sit in the temple of love and have intercourse with some stranger … the men pass and make their choice. The money that passes hands makes the act sacred, but its amount is of no consequence, the woman will never refuse, for that would be sinful. After their intercourse she has made herself holy in the sight of the goddess and goes away to her home; and thereafter there is no bribe however great that will get her. So then the women that are tall and fair are soon free to depart, but the uncomely have long to wait because they cannot fulfill the law; for some of them remain for three years or four.” I liked temple life. My vocation was to serve Ishtar today, and the Hotel Olivier was her temple. I was fair, not short, I was comely enough to return home almost at once, but I preferred to leave it a while.

  Herodotus also observed that many of the temple whores returned home to marry and have children, but that was then. Personally I’m for an academic career when this period of my life is over. I believe later Sumerian texts advise against marrying a professional temple prostitute, since she would tend to be too independent. That figured. “Besides being accustomed to accepting other men, she would make an unsympathetic wife.” Indeed. She would make comparisons and that is hard for a man to take. Joan Bennet, the figment I had created for Alden the cripple’s benefit, was a girl of little experience if not downright virginity. But she was an aspect of me, taking my shift at a sacred duty: I was no professional.

  As I reflected on these things, the tennis star came, but went on and on—with all the stamina of someone used to world championships—until my knees were sore, my mouth began to stiffen and threaten cramp, and my interest waned. I was beginning to be bored. I made him come again, and gasping, removed myself and lay back upon the bed, half hoping he would take matters further to a different and less mechanical conclusion but he did not: his wife was joining him the next day and he probably liked to be faithful. For many men, like President Clinton, sucking doesn’t count. In church car parks of the Democratic mid-west, bumper stickers were displayed during his time of trial taking, in his support, the biblically arguable view that Eatin’ ain’t Che
atin’.

  But now my champion was on top of me, his trousers kicked away, thrusting down into my mouth from a more productive angle, unnaturally huge balls banging my nose, and finally reason abandoned me and I squirmed and gasped as he stretched and jerked and shrieked and more semen spurted at 140 miles an hour, and trickled down my throat and that was—finally—that.

  Freud said there was a vaginal orgasm (superior) and a clitoral one (inferior) but in my experience there is also an oral one, linked more to the imagination, the shock and wonder of the event, than to any physical stimulation. You observe it in the mouth but you feel it in the vagina.

  It seems rude to wash one’s mouth out after such an encounter so I desisted, rearranged my dress, as he did, finished the guided tour—here is the television wand, here the pay-movies card, here the spare pillows; was there anything else you required, sir?—while he retrieved his chinos, looked in his wallet and peeled off two Centre Court tickets for Wimbledon.

  “Men’s Finals on June 28th,” he said, handing them to me. “You’ll get fifteen hundred each on eBay. Unless you want to watch me win.” Tickets were in great demand. And he hadn’t had to pay a single thing for them. It seemed remarkably like cheating to me, and I felt a spasm of indignation. But a goddess’s servant is required to accept what comes, and be grateful with noblesse oblige: no doubt rare Centre Court tickets sanctify the act as well as money, if not better.

  The champion thanked me, asked me with albeit genial impatience to stop rambling on about the room—it wasn’t the first hotel room he’d been in and he could see with his own eyes where the minibar was—ran his fingers round my mouth, iron-fleshed as they were from many a racquet handle, and assured me I was surely “the best,” whatever that meant, and I left. I was tongue-tied; I think I bowed first.