Surrender to Mr. X Page 4

  Nor, when it came to it, was wine. He had opened a bottle of Petrus Chateau la Fleur 2004 Pomerol; three glasses stood waiting. It was expensive, but still en primeur, much too young for drinking. The bottle would have set him back, I reckoned, about £50. If he’d only lay that down for a couple of years it would fetch him double, triple. It was reassuring to realize he didn’t know everything. I nearly said it was a pity women didn’t increase in value with age as did works of art, rather the contrary—but I let that one lie.

  “I thought you said dinner-party,” I said meanly. “Sushi in the kitchen with one other doesn’t quite make it.” I was pissed off that if it wasn’t a dinner party, it wasn’t a tête-à-tête either: three was a crowd.

  “They canceled, full of apologies,” said Alden absently. “They had to be in Milan.”

  “So who didn’t have to go to Milan?”

  But he’d slipped into his own thoughts, and just for a split second I saw the attention he was paying to me was not his spontaneous priority, before—almost seamlessly—he switched it back on, but raised his voice slightly, turning away from me as he spoke.

  “Oh, the other friend is Ray Franchi, the painter—does that impress you? Ray’s pretty famous, but he’s not the kind of guy to blow his friend out when he’s got a better offer. That’s why I like him—you’ll like him.”

  I hadn’t heard of him and said as much. People do not usually introduce their dinner guests as “famous”: it’s just a bit insecure. But perhaps that too goes with being in a wheelchair. I was doing my best to write down Alden’s faults. I did so want him to be Mr. Wonderful, powerful, noble, wounded but romantic.

  At least it was less worse that the third person was a man. If it was a woman it could have been La Weiss. I asked if there was anything I could do, warm plates or something? It was a very Joan thing to say. Alden laughed indulgently as though he preferred me to be a child whose ignorance he enjoyed enlightening.

  “Sushi’s cold,” he said.

  “It may not all be sushi—some Japanese food is hot,” I said. He put up his hands in surrender.

  “If that’s what you want to do,” he said, “that’s all right. Make yourself at home.”

  I found some square white dinner plates and put them in the oven to warm. Then I realized I didn’t know how to switch it on. I asked him if he would, and he said, sure, but I didn’t see him touch any controls on his wheelchair, so I guess the oven stayed off.

  “This Ray,” I said, “is he always late?”

  “On the whole, yes,” he said, looking me over, with neither dispassion nor lust, but with the sort of interest with which a bookie might appraise a racehorse. He grinned, his eyes wide and full on; it was shtick, but the grin was twinkly, which gratified. And at least he was paying me attention now. “He’s a genius; that’s what they do.”

  Alden went on: Ray occupied the top floor of the house as a studio. He’d take me up there to see it some time. I’d like it a lot better.

  “It’s nice and messy,” he said, “bless his little socks. Well cozy. Personally, I couldn’t live like that. Ray sleeps, works, farts up there. He doesn’t fuck up there—he doesn’t fuck anywhere—quite the neurotic boy prodigy.”

  I asked what Ray was famous for, and Alden said for not finishing commissioned work on time. I gathered that one of Alden’s clients, Lady Daisy O, had commissioned a painting installation from Ray to be the centerpiece at a gallery Arts-Intrinsick had “newly created” in Daisy’s “palatial home.” Alden had a tendency to go into website language when he mentioned Arts-Intrinsick; I presumed because this was commercially effective in America, and that he retained his irony. The installation was supposed to be in place by September; but Ray was suffering from creative block, which was a bloody nuisance, Alden suggested, by no means least to himself.

  “You know where he is then—he is coming?”

  “Oh yes,” said Alden. “He goes to evening classes twice a week.”

  “How interesting,” I said questioningly. “What humility in someone so famous.”

  Alden said it wasn’t what I thought. Maybe he was about to explain, but at that point the doorbell rang: a gentle cooing noise. One of Alden’s touch pads winked, and a minute or two later a small, balding goat-like man sidled in; he looked like Woody Allen dressed in Columbo’s clothes. He held a paper carrier bag in each hand, and the right-hand one was dripping black soya sauce onto the kitchen floor. I gestured prettily toward it, concerned.

  “Shall I find a cloth?” I asked. Ray seemed to startle easily: he saw what I meant and dropped both bags.

  “Stop agitating,” said Alden. “No need. Both of you. Lam clears things up in the morning.”

  Ray’s looks suggested an ethnicity that was not entirely from northern Europe—I thought maybe one parent English, and the other perhaps Algerian, or Moroccan. He was attractive because he was buzzing with energy and you instinctively wanted to tidy him up and mother him. I was sorry to think he had sexual difficulties. It seemed a waste.

  Ray looked at me, his tongue between his lips.

  “Look at that ass,” he said. “My God!”

  And Alden reproached him, saying, “This is Joan Bennet. She’s a respectable girl. Shake hands?”

  Ray came to me and kissed me on each cheek: then on the mouth, and his tongue went right in. I was a little tall for all this in my Jimmy Choo heels, but he made it, all the way up.

  “You mean ripe for the plucking?” Ray wrinkled his nose at Alden. “Another one you can use and abuse?”

  Alden’s smile vanished. He looked as dangerous as a man in a wheelchair can: a tiger champing the sawdust behind bars, growling and helpless to act.

  “Only kidding Dilly-boy,” said Ray, a little quickly. “Just,” he shrugged, “kidding.”

  “Joan teaches kindergarten, in Essex,” said Alden, calming down. “The only boyfriend she’s ever had just walked out on her after six years. She’s a stoic; she’s rising above it, aren’t you? She’s not only beautiful, she has a beautiful soul, unlike you—or me. I want you to be nice to her, so be kind.”

  Ray looked genuinely chastened, almost puzzled, but not about anything obvious.

  “Sorry,” he said to me. “I don’t meet many nice girls nowadays. It’s good there are still some in this unyielding world,” and I forgave him.

  “She’s Plymouth Brethren,” Alden added.

  “I’m OTO,” said Ray.

  “Not Plymouth,” I said. “Just Brethren. We’re allowed to wear colors. I love clothes. I borrowed these from my friend Amy. I feel very wicked. What’s OTO? Why do you think the world is unyielding—do they tell you that?”

  “Sweet,” said Alden.

  The Japanese food was not from a wholesaler’s freezer. It was sushi, and I’ve never been to Japan, but it was as good as London ever had on offer. I ate with chopsticks and they marveled at my ability. I said my previous boyfriend had been half Chinese. I was impressed by my own facility for making up off-the-wall stories, and even more, by Ray’s and Alden’s gullibility.

  A Chinese geologist!

  “One day they’ll find oil,” said Alden. “Then they’ll be invincible.”

  Alden had sent Ray off to wherever you kept wine cool in a futurologist’s dream house, and he had returned with some refreshing and incensy Chassagne-Montrachet. We ate fat pink belly-tuna in thin slices, and translucent melty halibut in thinner ones, and big shrimp with spindly thin heads I’d never seen before.

  “It’s flown in,” said Alden, “this too.” I asked what the little orange eggs were and he said, “Flying fish roe. Tobiku.”

  “To be ku or not to be ku? To be cool or not to be cool?” said Ray. “I once had some in San Francisco with a special wasabe which nearly killed me, it was so hot. I was with these Japanese who were commissioning me. I just had to sit there and smile.”

  “Smiling means you’re pissed off in Japanese,” said Alden.

  “Bollocks, Alden,” said Ray. “It
entirely depends on the context.”

  The wine was going to his head. Was it disinhibiting some resentment baggage he had about his friend—his generous landlord?

  “Whatever you say, Ray,” Alden replied, and smiled at me.

  “Thank God you’re not Japanese then.” I was pink and giggly. The wine wasn’t just going to my head. Maybe it was the female flying fish hormones as well, but my loins were loosening; my cunt was telling me I was among friends, and I believed her.

  “Shouldn’t we be sitting on the floor?” I said, then felt myself blushing. But still I didn’t know why Alden was in a wheelchair, or how it affected him, and it still seemed further than ever from the right moment to ask. He behaved as if it didn’t register with him, so why should it with anyone else. He didn’t seem offended. I withdrew into my shell, protecting my embarrassment, which despite this reasoning needed time to dissipate.

  Ray was telling me what OTO stood for—the Ordo Templi Orientis: an Aleister Crowley study group, an aspect of the Golden Dawn movement. They met once a month in New Southgate: a nondescript outer suburb of little Diary-of-a-Nobody-style Edwardian semi-detached houses seemed a funny place for an Order, the Order of the Temple of the East. Maybe they were lying low, keeping their powder dry.

  Ray was on the Fourth Path, he told me. And explained that the Templum Orientis was the sacred legacy of Aleister Crowley, who was born in 1875 and died just after the Second World War, voluptuary, philosopher and occultist. It was the child of his study of Eastern eroto-gnostic techniques, amongst which the Tantra.

  “Eroto-gnostic is a bit of a mouthful,” I ventured.

  “Hard to swallow?” said Alden, and they both burst out laughing. I laughed, but less wildly. What Ray had omitted was the nom de guerre by which Crowley was affectionately known by his followers and less so by his enemies: the Beast 666.

  “The Fourth Path to what?” I asked.

  “Self knowledge,” he said. “And with it the Golden Dawn.”

  “What happens when it dawns?” I asked. “Golden showers? I don’t do that sort of thing.”

  I giggled again, but the men kept pointedly silent. Alden closed his eyes, as if employing a meditative exercise to keep calm. His face was a mask of frozen detachment.

  Ray breathed once deeply, and as he exhaled spoke with deliberate patience, like a driving instructor with an inexperienced pupil.

  “No,” he said. He wrinkled his forehead and held my gaze. Alden’s eyes remained closed like a Buddha’s. “You master yourself and others,” said Ray, “through the working of Amalantrah.”

  “So if I was a girl,” I said, seriously.

  “Which you are,” said Alden, opening his eyes, genial again.

  “I could mistress myself?”

  “Is that the last of the gunkan?” asked Ray.

  “You ate all the sea urchin already,” said Alden. “We watched you.”

  “Sorry,” said Ray. They both suddenly seemed to be switched over to automatic pilot, like Alden’s wheelchair. Shortly after that Ray went on upstairs. Alden and I were left alone together.

  “I know what you’ve been wondering,” said Alden. “Right back from when we met.”

  “Do you?” I said. My voice was small, involuntarily tightened, and I heard how cute it sounded to Alden: like Marilyn Monroe.

  “I know, don’t I?” he said. I nodded. I felt like a little girl, and lowered my eyelids like a geisha. I was a little girl-sushi, my legs bound up in delicate tight straps, and served up on a plate: I was about to be delicately taken up and dipped in fiery wasabe and eaten.

  “You want to know why I am in this wheelchair, how it happened, what use I am for sex.”

  “Well,” I said. “Yes!”

  “Then shall we go into the bedroom?”

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

  In The Bedroom

  THE 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 Vorticis
ts, 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.