Surrender to Mr. X Page 8

  What did we talk about? We agreed to only have one course, the sooner to get back to 404. He had a posh version of fish and chips and mushy peas and I had a salad. I drank champagne: he, mindful of his religion, drank Sprite from a champagne flute. He moaned a little about this and that, as teenagers do, mostly about his parents. Once he got home tomorrow he would have to spend a lot of time sitting next to his mother while she tried to push nuts and sweetmeats between his lips. She wept if he objected. It was moral blackmail. He had essays to write; it wasn’t as if they were all sitting under some date palm in the desert, and he wasn’t a girl. He wished she would not do it. His father would try and take him to a whorehouse, but he thought that would be unspeakably vulgar. His father had three other wives, apparently, and I asked if this upset his mother but he shook his head firmly, and said no: his father was very respectful of women and always careful to serve all three equally. We drank our black coffee quickly and left.

  Picture the next scene. Young Hasan lies naked on the bed, his cock reaching almost to his navel. It is as big as it is clumsy, awkward as it is hopeful, coltish as his feet and hands. The bodies of adolescent youths are a strange mixture of soft and bony, protuberances and concavities. He has his hands clasped behind his head while he watches me strip, until I walk about the room with only my heels on.

  “How your breasts bounce!” he says, amused. “How strange and uncomfortable it must be for women!” The cock twitched and jerked of its own accord. He looked at it as if it was some over-importunate stranger whose language he failed to understand. He tried to hold it down, and asked how a man could tell false boobs from real ones, so I explained it was a mixture of texture, appearance and likelihood. If a woman has a bean-pole body and very round big breasts they’re not likely to be her own. Likewise if they are formulaically circular. If a woman wears flat heels her breasts will usually be her own. I had no time to elaborate because he unexpectedly leapt from the bed with the energy of a jack-in-the-box and bore me down beneath him, pushing my thighs apart. He entered me at once, thrust thrice and immediately groaned in orgasm.

  “That was too quick,” he said, blushing apologetically. I had to agree. I told him it took practice and in a little while we would try again. He lay on his back on the bed and I gave him a lesson in theory. I explained that there was a thing called foreplay which made women receptive. I explained a man could ignore it but to do so limited his own long-term pleasure. The woman would put up with him, no doubt, but it was always better to have her full-hearted enjoyment. By and large where the cock went the finger should go before. I explained about the alleged difference between the vaginal and the clitoral orgasm. His hand moved into my cunt, and he found the clitoris and made me squeal involuntarily. Some women’s are more hidden than others, I said, but it’s always there somewhere. His cock was already swelling again. Another minute and he was in me again, and I was breathless and pounded: he realized he had to support himself on his elbows and took the weight off me.

  That lasted a full five minutes. Then it was back to instruction, “I bet your teachers like you at school,” I said. “You listen, and learn.” He said his favorite subject was physics. He would like to be a nuclear scientist, but he needed extra tuition with the math.

  If he was looking for holes, I went on, he must go very gently until he got the angle right. Bottoms needed lubricating. Rough sex, domination, was fine by consent but must be worked up to gradually; although sudden changes of mood and attack could be welcome. Breasts must be treated equally: if the left was nibbled then the right should be equally so, otherwise it made women feel oddly uneasy. Condoms? A requirement, especially in gay circles or the black community. He said in Saudi you didn’t run into that too often. I said actually if you stuck to heterosexual, well-heeled partners, as I did, then you could proceed pretty much as women had in the old days, worrying about pregnancy rather than disease: relying on coitus interruptus to get by. I referred to the “please cum all over my face” phenomenum in the porn films, a play-safe device which did instead of condoms.

  By now his cock was standing impudently up again, and he turned me over, and entered me from behind as I crouched. I explained that you didn’t have to do it in the same position till you’d finished, but could swap and change, so he took the point at once: now I was on my back with my legs over my head, but that excited him so much his timing went haywire again: at six minutes, though, it was still an improvement.

  I explained about the necessity of lubrication for anal sex, the idea of which had at first rather appalled him. I had neglected to bring any but he found the free organic hand cream from the hotel bathroom which I didn’t reckon would do me much harm. But I said first there really had to be some foreplay: he couldn’t think only about himself forever: we had to now go into the whole business of oral sex. He seemed rather surprised to find this so high on the sexual menu but I demonstrated the art of the blow job, which is patient attention to the man’s pleasure but not necessarily always your own. He came in my mouth, neck stretched to heaven in marvel. I swallowed. I said not all women would do that but personally I thought a dose of young male testosterone did me good. He recovered from sudden shyness to lick into my cunt, blowing and fingering. And the next time we went on for twenty minutes; properly, foreplay to oral sex to full sex to anal sex. I tried not to cry out too loud, because 406 was occupied: the walls at the Olivier are not all that thick.

  He asked me how he could tell when a woman was faking, and I said if he was wondering she probably was faking, but it was rude to inquire. Some women got very spiteful and bad-tempered if a man had an orgasm while she did not: but this was a very frequent occurrence and most women would fake out of consideration to the man, or if she had other things to do and wanted to get it over with.

  One more time, or was it two? We had a little siesta side by side, then some more. He was inexhaustible. The thing rose and collapsed and rose again as if he was making up for years of lost time which I supposed he was.

  “Nine times,” he said, happily. “Is that good?”

  “That’s very good,” I assured him. “And like riding a bicycle; once learned you never lose the knack.”

  Concerned that I was tired, and thanking me for my instruction, which he generously said would stand him in good stead for the rest of his life, he told me it was time to bring the session to an end. He was courteous but firm. He had a flight to catch at eight o’clock; he supposed I couldn’t help him with his packing? I said, actually no to that, and had a bath in 511 which was empty, checked in with Max to touch base, then went home to recover. I washed my hair, and put it in curlers.

  I felt quite noble and content: my day had been well spent. I had made a worthwhile contribution to the well-being of society. I was like Joan, I thought, “wanting to make a difference.” It is gratifying, anyway, when one is good at something, to pass one’s knowledge on.

  I put on a CD of Mozart’s K421 quartet in D minor and I waited for Loki to arrive. The delicate music sounded like dance and conversation in shifts, sometimes both at once and seemed to grow naturally out of the stillness of the evening.

  Clothes Mare

  SEVEN TWENTY, AND THE bell went and there was Loki once again. No, there was no cancelation. I said in that case Mr. X. would have to wait for me to change. I was not going to all that trouble again only to be told the date was off. Loki seemed rather nervous and said Mr. Lam, the pale, scary one, had told him I was not to be late. So I admit I hurried and didn’t change my mind about anything other than the Jacobs handbag which I decanted into my cheap but cheerful silver Fiorelli—and then had to decant back again when I changed my mind. I asked Loki if he thought it was nice when I finally made it downstairs, and out of the door, and he said, “I expect he will like it, but shall we go now?” and smiled with all his white, perfect teeth: meaning to reassure me, but clearly nervous. We raced through the streets, so far as anyone can race through London at seven in the evening. I tried to find out
more about Loki’s background with deliberately casual questions, but Loki would not be drawn further; he was of course having to concentrate on the traffic.

  I also brought along the big yellow Selfridges bag into which, yesterday, I’d stuffed all sorts of odds and ends: shoes, furs, velvet skirts, chokers, earrings, a selection of thirties flapper gear: I’d nearly added a white embroidered Victorian nightie, in lawn, but it took up too much room. Everything else squashed down into almost nothing.

  Lam let me in.

  “You late,” he said.

  “Oh, the traffic!” I said. “Where does it all come from?”

  There was no sign of Alden. Lam went through my bags, checking each item against the receipt and adding up the total. He was grudging in his satisfaction. He didn’t exactly smile but his wide thin mouth turned up slightly at the edges and his eyes looked less alarmingly suspicious than they had yesterday—well, a bit. He was wearing a white polo neck sweater again, which made his head look too big for his body. He was a bit of a cross, I decided, between the Close Encounters of the Third Kind aliens and Gollom in Lord of the Rings.

  I didn’t sit down because it’s easier to stand in five-inch heels. The leverage on them as you get up from a chair can be extreme, and they seem about to snap if you don’t get the angle right. Alden glided in, looking particularly cheerful and positive: almost serene.

  “Joanie my sweetheart,” he said, “I hear you got the shopping exactly right, I thought you would. There’s a bad girl hiding inside your good girl skin, isn’t there? Maybe it’s the other way round.”

  I didn’t really care what he said: I was just so happy he was pleased with me. I found myself chattering on, about how my friend Amy had helped me choose, and made me over, and done my hair. She had spent almost an hour on it, getting it into curls which she heaped up on my head ancient-Greece style, with a few falling, and dangling green ribbons. I listened to myself with awe: who the fuck was “Amy”?

  We exchanged a few disarming pleasantries about the day before, he thanked me for my patience and apologized if he had gone too far too fast, but as I probably realized he did have a few sexual hang-ups he needed to do serious work on, and he’d worried all day in case I’d not wanted to see him again. He’d called the hotel yesterday, the concierge had said I was off sick and that he didn’t have my mobile number—thank you, wise, cautious Max, I thought: you always cover the exits—so I must give it to him now in case we forgot later.

  So I gave it to him, but with four of the digits wrong. Alden as a stalker was a terrifying prospect: unlimited money, Lam to do his bidding—no thanks. If the worst came to the worst I could leave my job. There were other hotels. But then, of course, he did know where I lived. I killed my paranoia. I didn’t want to spoil a beautiful evening.

  He said tonight would be completely without erotic interest for me: he hoped I wouldn’t mind too much. I said I would be glad of the rest. He was taking measurements of light frequencies and color subtraction in the visible spectrum, he told me—or something like that—collating them against the typical sound frequencies of erotic activity and allied agitations in the thalamus. Physics was not my strong subject at school and he would certainly assume Joanie wouldn’t understand a word he was saying. So I just said that was really interesting and he must be very clever. He got very serious, took my wrists gently, and turned me round to look straight into his eyes.

  “I am,” he said simply, like a Pope speaking ex cathedra.

  He was obviously serious, so I took him seriously. I reckoned he was trying to work out some link between combinations of color and form and sexual desire, and also represent them in sound, the better vehicle to provide listeners to Radio 3 with a piece of music they’d love, and make love to without having any choice, and without knowing why. Alden, I thought, was trying to invent an aphrodisiac music which was compulsive. Sound can summon up in the listener all kinds of emotions—nostalgia, grief, elation, happiness—why not lust as well? The first day’s work with me as subject—ending up pitched at around 111 hertz and pulsed at the rate of a heart’s beat—had acted as a tranquilizer and pain killer and sent me to sleep but that was probably not what he’d hoped for.

  I was kind of with him conceptually up to a point: up to the point where tonight he was going to conduct experiments on the color aspect of his theory, but using as his raw material—and this was where I lost him, it was so beyond out to lunch, or even dinner—the clothes I happened to have chosen to wear. It was possible, I acknowledged, to be both clever, and serious, but mad. It was also possible to be harmlessly mad. I was in a little too deep now to be comfortable with the speculation that his madness was other than harmless.

  There was no sign of food or drink, which was a pity, because I was hungry again—I hadn’t had a great deal of lunch, and the afternoon had involved a lot of aerobic exercise—though had he offered me chocolates I would have refused.

  Alden asked me to walk up and down the room as if I were on a catwalk, which I did. Why not? Eventually he said the boots were wrong, and I had to agree. Can things bought in sales guarantee one the confidence that they would at full price? At some stage or other along the way they must have been rejected by quite a few people. I was rather relieved to take them off.

  “Never look as if you try too hard,” he said. My calves ached as the soles of my feet descended to ground level: the muscles cramped. I said so and jumped about a bit and Alden said Lam knew all about aching calves and gave an excellent massage, and I wished I had said nothing. We should go in to the bedroom, said Alden, and I should lie on the bed. I must have looked nervous because he laughed and said, “Don’t worry, the only props today are clothes.”

  So I limped and hopped to the bed, squealing. Joan would squeal: Vanessa, properly brought up, would suffer in silence. I was back in Joan mode. I took off my jeans and lay on my front. Alden said he thought the stockings were fantastic. That was nice. They were rather striking. Lam sat on the bed and massaged the backs of my legs with his clammy hands while Alden went through the clothes which had now been hung neatly in the wardrobe. There were racks of clothes and shoes behind the ones I had brought: so I guessed I was probably one of a succession—but how many girls are ever not—and he used the walking stick to move the hangers along the rails.

  “I suspect female color sense is different from the male,” he reflected, “though there’s no body of research that shows it up. I’d never have come up with anything like this.”

  The muscles in my legs relaxed: the cramps dispersed; but I think that was as much the passage of time as any skill of Lam’s, but how can one tell? There was no body of research that showed it up, but it was rather like receiving a massage from the creature in ET.

  “ET, go home,” I muttered under my breath, for I sensed both his helplessness and his power.

  “You get paid,” Lam said. He thought I was grumbling, but hadn’t heard what I said. “No worries. Good girl!” There didn’t seem to be the threat of an “if,” so I thought maybe at last I’d won him round. He was an ally? That could be useful. I was pleased. There was no point in engaging with him on the complexities of financial transactions between me and Alden so I gave him a lovely smile. His massage was technically correct and his hands were warming up quite nicely. He asked me to keep still, and with a surgical plaster stuck a metal device the same shape and size as a 50p piece, in the small of my back.

  “For science,” he said. “No worries.” And I didn’t.

  Alden the while laid out various combinations of clothes in neat piles. I was glad to see many of them, if not all, were the choices I had made. Each pile had shoes to go with it, mostly Manolos, though there are far sexier kinds, if few less expensive, on the market. Stuart Weitzman once made a pair of glass Cinderella slippers, with diamond studs and spun-platinum soles, for some star to wear to the Oscars. They cost two million dollars. She didn’t win anything, and I guess she didn’t actually pay for the shoes, though she did go on
to marry Count Von Bismarck. My point is, that’s why the boots at three-hundred-odd quid had seemed such a bargain.

  It turned out he wasn’t going to have me catwalk, but kind of catsprawl—simply lie upon the bed variously dressed: I got to choose the pose as I fancied, but in outfits he had chosen, and in his sequence. He could trust me on the poses because I was, he said, “a natural model.” I was flattered. I suppose he meant it, but I’ll let fine words butter my crumpet if I feel like it. I was to watch myself in the mirror above. I’m as narcissistic as anybody, so that was fine—but how was I to win his interest and affection, if I went on being Joan? I just engaged his lust as it was, and today there was little evidence even of that. He and Lam left the room.

  Yellow cushions had replaced the scarlet. The 111 cycle hum started up: it sounded like the second A below middle C—not soporific, simply all there, meta-here, filling all the spaces in the room from invisible sources of imponderable number. It was continuous this time—no heartbeat pulse, so maybe he thought that was the element that had sent me to sleep. Lights shone down on me, their closely related, constantly changing colors swirling like Rudolf Steiner wet-paper paintings, though less primary and more like those in Turner’s oil paintings. If I turned my head I could see the computer screen: all Steiner swirls today, nothing linear.

  I liked what I saw, I realized, in varying degrees. All pleased, but some variations in color and style turned me on more than others, even made my breath come shorter and my heart beat faster, and the patterns on the screen intensified by firming up and focusing into the sharp edged, infinitely receding into the microscopic, fractal geometry of an expensive kaleidoscope on acid. Had he mickey-finned me with acid, I wondered—but how and when? I had neither eaten nor drunk anything since I’d walked through the door, not on this visit, no Alice-Through-The-Looking-Glass I. But it only took micrograms: could you absorb it though the flesh with the right solvent? Was that what was on the small of my back under the tape? But my memory of the couple of times I took LSD recalled certain physical sensations that I wasn’t experiencing: I thought I was pretty sure of that.