Surrender to Mr. X Read online

  What was under scrutiny, I could see, were those responses you get when you dress for work or for a special occasion: when you look at yourself in the mirror and like what you see—or take the lot off and start again. The “real me” changes every day, which no doubt is why a girl has to have so many clothes, flounder in a sea of garments. I thought Alden must be preternaturally clever indeed, and was proud to have been selected for his research. He should of course have confided more in me in the first place; he didn’t have to do all that surreptitious druggy stuff—I would have cooperated without, had he come clean.

  I admired the confidence and speed with which he had made his decisions, selecting, discarding, reselecting. There was even an historical pattern to his choices; as I went through the outfits I changed from ’50s garage pinup to Pirelli calendar to incipient modern porn from the ’60s and so forth: increasingly indecent. The sets of clothes would be short of a skirt, or panties, or both, no bra, no top—then down to the Weitzman boots alone, finally nothing but a hair ribbon. Nudity, oddly, did nothing for me: the buzzing hum, which I had worked out depended upon my erotic reaction to myself, faded almost to nothing. Remove the hair ribbon: and it was nothing. But wind a scarf round my neck, or put on earrings or high heels, and it returned.

  There was still no sign of food or drink. I was getting tired and bored. Jumping up and down and changing clothes all the time is exhausting. I pulled the electrode off my back, and started searching vainly in the tumble of clothes for what I had arrived in. Lam was in the room almost at once, fiddling with the bed posts.

  “He said no sex,” I said. “I’m tired.”

  “No sex. All this science,” said Lam.

  I laughed.

  “Not funny, Joan,” he insisted. “Laugh bad.”

  “Tell Alden I’m bloody hungry,” I said, “and that I’ve had enough.”

  “Sure, sure,” he agreed. “I tell Mr. Alden. Sit on bed.”

  So I did. He was my friend and ally—wasn’t he?

  “Now you talk dirty,” he said.

  “I will not,” I said.

  “Mr. Alden not be pleased. Work wasted.”

  “Mr. Alden can go and play with himself,” I said and giggled, but Lam’s brow clouded and I bit my lower lip to stop. I shivered, and not because it was cold. I seemed to have forgotten what the joke had been.

  Lam took my left forefinger and slipped a rubber cuff around it, then the same to my left toe. Before I could work out what was happening he had clipped finger and toe together. Two tapes led from cuffs to bedpost. This was old fashioned non-wireless technology: pathetic. This whole bed was pathetic, was out of date already: it would be losing value daily. The cuffs on finger and toe tightened and relaxed. They were monitoring blood pressure, which was rising by the minute. Lam pushed me on to my side; in my folded position this was not difficult for him. He re-stuck the device onto my back: it was just out of the reach of my right hand. Now I was down and I could not get up. I was bent double, toe to thumb. I could have rolled off the bed but that would leave me in the same predicament, only bruised as well.

  Then he went away. I was wearing only the leopard ruff boots but they had good heels and I did what I could to rip the patchwork quilt with my right foot, but the yellow cushions were in the way and offered such yielding, fluffy resistance I could do no damage at first. But I kicked again and again, and again, until one tore and a cloud of feathers rose and gently fell all over me. I was very angry. I was being used as an experimental animal. I would tear Alden’s throat out, I would have him banned from the Olivier, I would go to the police and cry rape.

  “Lam,” I shouted. “I’ll call Immigration. Get you deported as an undesirable alien—back to the Planet Uranus. Up. Your. Anus. Lam.” It didn’t come out very clearly though, because of the unnatural position I was in. But at least I wasn’t frightened: I was too angry for that.

  The buzz grew louder, and cranked up outrage further still. Waves raced across the screen. I looked away, and there was nowhere to look but mirrors and see a furious, red-faced, naked, trapped and struggling thing, hair frizzy from heated tongs, straggly and all over the place. The sight so appalled me it shocked me back into sense, conjured up Vanessa from the real world. She composed myself quickly. Vanessa had more sense than Joan. If this was being filmed for the delectation of others, which Vanessa suspected and Joan would rather not think about, the film makers would not have the satisfaction of what they wanted, which would be unsimulated scenes with erotic content. Even if it was not, if all this was genuinely for the sake of science, where were the consent forms?

  This was outrageous. Composure abandoned me again: my posture didn’t encourage it. Fear seeped in: why had I got myself into this? It was terrifying, satanic. The noise level was rising so much I worried for my eardrums: the computer screen was a mass of static lines: rage rose in me again, but this time it didn’t kill the fear; I would have a stroke, a heart attack, I would die—and then Alden was beside me, in his chair, unclipping finger from toe, helping me to stretch my poor limbs, profusely apologizing: saying Lam had no right, he was out of order, ultra vires. He, Alden, had been delayed on an important phone call from California; if Lam ever did anything like that again, contrary to his explicit instructions, he would pay the price. But please try and understand—I must do this—that Lam had only one motive in his mind and that was to look after Alden’s interests: and Lam was not from round these parts, not from our world, and sometimes got it wrong.

  His voice was persuasive because it was soft, it was kind. Besides, he had stopped the hum: he covered me with a blanket, he told me how wonderfully I had succeeded, how proud of me he was: he was the doctor, all bedside manner and I was the patient, and he was healing me. I believed him. You will be rewarded, he told me.

  “I don’t need paying,” I said. “This isn’t about money.”

  “You mean you’re doing it for love?” he asked, and Joan actually blushed.

  “I’ll be rewarded in Heaven,” I said.

  He seemed embarrassed; his glance shifted away.

  “You’re very sweet,” he said, still not looking at me. “I’m so touched.”

  “You’re Prospero, aren’t you?”

  “Prospero was lucky enough to be shipwrecked on a desert island,” he said. “These days you have to have enough money to build your own.”

  “Do you love me?” I asked. He just raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, as if to say he’d like to explain, but it would take more time than was possible: or some such bullshit.

  It’s an odd thing, the declaration of love business. Get in with it too early, and the man backs off. Too late and he’s wandered off. But if you blush you show your hand. I couldn’t remember when Vanessa had last blushed. It came so simply and naturally to Joan. I blushed.

  I had simmered down. It was quite cathartic—like the après-sex feeling: all passion spent—to recover from fear and rage.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s go up to Ray’s and see if he’ll rustle up some dinner—you must be hungry.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I am.” But I felt vaguely disturbed, insulted by the suggestion: the evening was suddenly moving fast away from the intimate, the seductive, into social banality.

  “But I’m not sure I trust the food anywhere in this house,” I added. “What was in those chocolates the other day?”

  “Something new,” he said, “a shamanic, gateway psychotropic from the rain forest. It’s perfectly safe. It’s organic. It’s not an artificial pharmaceutical.”

  “How d’you get it?”

  “I have friends, connections. Some are chemists.”

  Bet you do, I thought. That’s where the money comes from. Drug dealing. All the private art galleries in the world wouldn’t bring about this wealth. But buying and selling paintings is a good way of laundering money, especially if you pretend to do it ineptly: write-down. The art world is probably full of noble, etiolated aesthetes who have friends who
are “chemists.”

  No wonder he is socially insecure—and sees himself as a great musician.

  “Don’t worry, Joan,” he said. Shit. I loved it when he used my name. “There’ll be nothing like that again. Now I know you better I value you too much.”

  Nice to hear but easy enough to say. I said thank you, but, if he didn’t mind, could he call a taxi and I’d be off home. He seemed taken aback. Perhaps he had seen the evening as drifting toward sex: another—maybe successful—attempt to free himself from the trauma of sudden explosion. And so indeed had I, funnily enough. But since he was now suggesting we went up to Ray’s, then by the time we got round to making love it would be well after midnight, and all I really wanted to do now was get back home. I’d had a long day. Forget sex, I felt fidgety and irritable.

  “I have to wash my hair before I go to work,” I said. “I have to be up early.”

  “Your hair looks absolutely delightful,” he said. “Disheveled. A demonic sprite. I love it to death.”

  He looked at me all little-boy, and wistful. He smiled the big broad, charming smile of a George Clooney, except the gums showed—but the teeth were perfect.

  “I wish you’d stay,” he said. “That first night, you know—I so much wanted it to end differently.”

  I remembered the piston-drive, perfect rhythm, but leading nowhere. I had to close my eyes. My body remembered too: sensation shot down from brain to crotch, the expectation of fulfillment taking physical form, demanding satisfaction.

  “It would make so much difference to me,” he said. “It’s so rarely I have the nerve to approach a woman sexually. Who would want a half man like me? I feel safe with you.”

  “Well if you put it like that,” I said, grudgingly, like Joan in a bad mood.

  He hooked out clothes from the jumble with his walking stick hook—French knickers, a sturdy bra, black knee-highs, a Zandra Rhodes tweed ankle-length tartan skirt, Prada black long-sleeved polo neck—my mother couldn’t have made a less seductive choice. I was to wear these for supper with Ray?

  “They’re very plain,” I said. “Rather dull.”

  “Ray likes very plain rather dull women,” said Alden. “You don’t qualify but you might make an effort for his sake? Do your best. Ray has problems, but he’s a great cook.”

  “What sort of problems?” I asked.

  “Where to start?” he said. “Artist’s block? Premature ejaculation?”

  I laughed, because between them Alden and Ray made quite a pair: their problems neatly complementing each other. He looked haughty and continued:

  “Death by a thousand principles? Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn? Little trips to Southgate for weekly meetings: coming back with the ‘Secret of Power’? Then moaning about constipation or cumming too soon. You name it. I put up with it because he’s a genius. You could put up with it because he can cook and is a nice guy and a warm human being and you like him.”

  “I didn’t think anyone did premature ejaculation any more,” I said. “I thought they just took Viagra, or something.”

  “It’s against his principles,” said Alden.

  “That’s daft,” I said.

  “It’s not organic,” he said, which I could see was true.

  I still had no shoes, but Alden hooked out a pair of pink ballet pumps with blocked toes, and thongs which wound up round the leg. I gave them a disparaging look.

  “They’re the only ones with flat heels,” he said, which either implied compassion, pity for my calves, or else that he seriously preferred me to look dowdy. I put the whole bloody ensemble on as instructed, too tired to bother to fight, and slouching with anomie I followed him like a dog up to the attic floor in the open lift, which had arrived at his imperceptible command. There was a mirror here as well. Amazingly I looked even more than plausible: I looked good. He saw me looking and said, “What a little narcissist you are,” and Joan asked what a narcissist was and he told me it was someone who was erotically turned on by themselves: in other words in love with themselves.

  Now I know it is more complicated than this. If anyone was the narcissist it was Alden. It was the pot calling the kettle black. The Neurotic Personality of our Time. Karen Horney—the psychoanalyst: what page? Somewhere near the beginning: toward the end, third paragraph?—Yes, got it. “Narcissism, the ‘N’ type. The striving for glory in the environment—conceit, exhibitionism, vanity and messianism. An associated innate facial expression”—yes—“a broad smile, showing lots of gum.” That was Alden’s smile. Me, I have perfect teeth and pretty lips. “Narcissistic rage, going red in the face”—“mass discharge of the parasympathetic nervous system”—me on the bed just now: how true. Awful. I could see I had some of the N-type traits, but Alden had the full scorecard.

  I was having quite a relapse, I could see that. Something might have been triggered by the something new and strange and perfectly safe from the rain forests in the Harrods chocolates. Perhaps it was long-lasting, intermittently so. Perhaps I should go back to the doctor and get some lithium. But I didn’t think so. Better to stick to the road more traveled of sex and shopping.

  After this brief lull of self-awareness the mental storm blew in with a second wind. Alden, the “N for Narcissism” type mixed up with the “P for Perfectionism”: “obsessiveness, compulsiveness, repetition, and the maintenance of neatness, order, symmetry.” His annoyance when he and Lam had to use the spreader bar for my ankles instead of the matching cuffs. Or was that A.M. Benis, and the NPA Personality Theory, which I’d come across on line? The three major types, Narcissism, Perfectionism, and Aggression. Ah yes, the latter. Also applies to Alden. “In a pejorative connotation the trait may reveal itself in the context of sadism or sadomasochism.” One thing you could say about Alden, his pathologies were well balanced out—N, A, and P in the middle: all three.

  For me, you could add a touch of Bipolar Two to the “N”: sexual recklessness, impulse-shopping, urge to sudden travel. But really we’re all of us a little off balance, it’s healthier that way, more human. Mine was a perfectly tolerable mix of symptoms. At least we Bipolar Twos are happy (mostly: when not acutely depressed), attractive to others, and like to have a good time. Better being that than the Bipolar One, who is morose and solitary but tends to genius. More like Ray, in fact.

  My mind was going ape again; how was I ever going to get it back in its box—call it back from the remembered printed page and into real-time me’s: who were ascending in a lift specially fitted out for wheelchairs with a man I—quite intolerably—wanted to fuck?

  I nearly fell to my knees before Alden’s wheelchair and offered to service him—tranquilizer sex—but restrained myself. Joan would never do such a thing. There was safety in Joan. Vanessa was going through a quite severe episode of whatever it was that afflicted her, and had produced Joan as a safety measure. So just be Joan, and prim, and virtuous, and all will be well. Just be Joanie.

  Being Joan

  RAY’S STUDIO WAS A vast room at the top of Alden’s house. Joan loved it the moment she set eyes on it. You know how it is, you get used to the places you frequent. Your world narrows: mine had lately, down to my flat, the view of Little Venice, the Olivier Hotel and the Bound Beast, the Rectory for occasional weekend visits, and the shops of SW 1 and 3. Alden’s house, with its formal, creeping bleakness, I could live without—though I could see how a woman could improve it. But here was a sensual richness Joan found most congenial, just when I had come to believe that Vanessa’s world was all there was. For suddenly here was a different, sensual, novel one, alive with the smell of turpentine and garlic, where the eros was not confined and organized, but was bouncing around the clutter in healthy chaos. Except that Ray himself, self-oppressed and twisted by his neurosis, seemed so disconnected from this garden of delights of which he was both center and progenitor that he was not rejoicing in it at all.

  The studio took up most of the top floor. The kitchen was a stove and a sink in an alcove, the bathroom a show
er behind a screen, the rest was space: paintings stacked against the walls, oriental wall hangings, vases, glass jars, tins of anchovies bought for their labels, piles of vinyl records and a bicycle with a flat tire; an easel, crowded surfaces, an old deal table, jam jars with dried out brushes in them; an old blue sofa, squishy with use and age, button back chairs in a dilapidated state, rugs everywhere, Kelims—including a nice Heriz and what might be a Kazan; a wide low bed, unmade, in the far corner into whither Ray presumably crawled at night or in the early morning when work was done.

  “You look better than the last time I saw you,” said Ray. “You were rather éclatante for my taste.”

  “Told you so,” said Alden, amiably. “You’ll have to learn to trust me, Joan.” He said he’d brought up a CD of Thelemy: The Silence of the Senses for us to hear. After supper we could all listen to it? He thought he might re-title it Thelemy—The Murmur of Eternity? He was nervous, as people are when they first offer their creative work to scrutiny by the outside world, and Joan found this endearing: he was brave, but he was vulnerable.

  She wandered about the studio, uttering little cries of delight, while Ray sliced red onions and grated garlic. Alden whined that the wooden chopping board was unhygienic and needed to be plastic or marble, and Ray said Alden was more likely to die from over-cleanliness than he was from dirt.

  “Because you won’t have any antibodies to protect you,” he added.

  Alden looked around the room, and his tone lost its geniality: why had nothing been done to the painting? What had Ray being doing with his time?

  Ray turned around from the onions, rubbing his eyes with the back of his right hand from which a large square cleaver dangled.