LAID & BETRAYED (Getting wrong with Mr. Wright) (4 page)

He carried me to the bed. I was gasping, rocking back and
forth,
a
gush
of hot
fluids
burs
t
from me in a tide and coat
ed
my thighs. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I had masturbated, lots and lots of times, but
imagining Simon finally
doing it had never hit the spot and
Charlie
Wright
had touched something in me waiting
desperately
to be touched.

He turned the video lens to face the bed. I wasn
'
t watching
him,
I was drawn to the eye of the camera,
struck
by its ability to capture this moment. There was doubt and
confusion in my head, fear too.
I
would think about it all later. I would remember always. B
ut now, I
laid
back on the
mattress
and watched Charlie
Wright
remove his
blue
shirt, his
white trousers
, his
undershorts
.
I watched his long hard cock spring to attention and I arched my legs to allow him to enter my body.

There was no ceremony, no kiss
ing,
no
foreplay. I was sopping. H
e entered me immediately, pushing hard and jerking upwards at the same time. The rush of pain as my hymen s
napped brought a tear to my eye,
and I thought about the camera, how it would preserve that instant, that small tear, the look of pain and pleasure that spread over my features as I pulled him up inside me, filling me, completing me, the light crossing the room and turning slowly to shadow.

Charlie
Wright
never did
make an offer
on
Black Spires. I dropped him at the station and I never saw him again – although that
'
s not strictly true. I have seen his naked back and white bottom many times. The video he shot found
its way on to the
internet
and,
if you sear
ch the dark recesses of the web,
you can watch me losing my virginity over and over again.

Part II

Was it a
just
coincidence
that
a year
to the
day when I lost my virginity, I was sitting in a
champagne
bar in Knightsbridge called
Dick's
wondering if I'd been set up by my friend
Camilla
?

Or, more likely,
by Quentin
Quoy
le
with Camilla
'
s connivance?

Camilla
Hunt
had gone
to my school and had started at
Cambridge a year before me. She was the only person I had told about my experience with Charlie
Wright
and
she'd
said it was the most romantic thing she had ever heard.

What
I didn't tell her
was that
after that long
hot
afternoon performing for the camera, I had gone through what I
thought of as
my wild period and slept with every boy I knew and every boy I met. I
studied
the geometry of
soixante-neuf
,
the
heady rush of oral sex, the
heart-pounding
, decibel busting eruptions of multiple orgasms. In parks, the backs of cars, in the living room with my parents upstairs
asleep
– the fact that I might get caught adding a charge to the proceedings, I
made up for lost time and
gave myself to shameless promiscuity.

A pathetic little virgin, my ex-bo
yfriend had called me,
and I thought, poor Simon, if only you knew.

By the time I arrived at college, my exploding hormones had calmed down and I was, I felt, worldly enough to
deal with the obsessions of
Quentin
Quoyle
,
my tutor, a tall gangly don
who dresse
d
in black collarless suits with
Indian cheesecloth
shirts, w
ore
his hair in a ponytail, dark glasses, even in
w
inter
,
and carrie
d
an ebony cane with a silver
sculpture of an
art deco nude
as a
handle.

At my first tutorial, he
had insisted that I drop the Mr.
Quoyle
and just call him
Q
. He gave me a book by Georges
Bataille
entitled
Eroticism
,
and we spent every subsequent tutorial discussing
the underlying sexual basis of
faith
and
philosophy to death,
transgression, taboo, mysticism
and
religious ecstasy
.

'My dear, it is
all erotic
. Everything.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'
Unlike the day-to-day sexual activity of those people out there,
'
he said, waving his arm
to indicate the universe
.
'
E
rotica
is a psychological quest in
dependent of the natural goals…
which are?'

He pause
d, I stammered, and he continued
.

'E
phemeral
pleasure, reproduction and
the chink of
cold hard cash
, a potential that passes through the mind of every woman at some time in her life.'

'
Is this part of the course?
'
I mumbled.

'
It is at the heart of life
,
'
he
replied
, drumming his ebony cane on the floor to make the point.
'
Where did you go to school?
'

'A convent?' he roared.

I nodded my head.

'
T
hen
you
should know
what I
'
m talking about,
'
he shot back, glancing at a sheet of paper that must have contained my name.
'Grace Goode.
Mmm
.
Very interesting
.'

He looked up and studied me more closely.

'
I
'
ll start b
y
quoting
Bataille
:
eroticism is assenting to life to the point
of
death
. Now do you understand?
'

'Not really.'

'
And
you can add
to
that something explained by
the Marquis de
Sade: there is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.
'
He paused.
'
The erotic underpins the entire structure of civilization.
You cannot understand
life,
you cannot a
pp
reciate
philosophy,
unless you understand erotica. That is where we
shall begin.'

'
The universe has come of age.
T
he twenty-first century
is
the
Age
of Hypocrisy. Nothing
is how it seems
. N
othing is sacred.
The world is a market. Everyone and e
verything is for sale.
Bankers cheat. Politicians use truth and lies as interchangeable sides of the same
false
coin. The corporations will steal your eyes
to
sell
you a white stick
.
T
hey
know, as
Machiavelli
tells us in
The Prince,
that
acknowledging the value of others impose
s
limits
on
our
capacity
to
strip
others
of
their
resources
by
sucking the blood and
crushing the
will of everything that
stands in their way
. If a
corporation
were a
breathing
being,
it
would be a psychopath.
How do we mere mortals deal with
the
slings and arrows of
this
outrageous misfortune
?'

'I'm not sure...'

'Th
e
n you have come to the right place.' He sat back, staring at the ceiling, then back at me. '
You know what
Sartre
said
?'

'Hell is
other
people.
'

'Well done, Grace Goode.
That's
a start.
' He paused
to give
his cane a couple of thumps.
'All life is me
tamorphosis. Everything you are
and everything you have ever thought
, perceived
and believed in will change, must change.
You do not attend my lectures for education but edification. You are a comatose grub. At the end of three semesters, you will
open
your wings and be
come
a butterfly.
Do you understand?
'

'Not entirely
…'

'
How does the butterfly begin life, Miss Goode?'

'As an egg,' I said with a shrug.

'Thank you.
An ugly little nondescript egg that hatches into an unpleasant larva,
sometimes called a nymph, incidentally,
or, more commonly, a caterpillar that eats and eats like an obese girl until it bursts and becomes
…' he paused.

'A
chrysalis
?

'Thank you
, a hideous black shell concealing a cocoon
where a slender body with big bright eyes and spindly legs develop
s
, where
the finest silk is woven into wings until
the shell
cracks
and from the morass,
magic appears
.'
He leaned forward
and stared into my eyes
. 'That is what I
intend
do
with your
mind.
Take that grubby little larva between your ears and transform it into a butterfly.
'

That's just how I felt in
Dick's,
like a butterfly,
a Red Admiral,
the words of my tutor fluttering through my mind.

Camilla had told me to wear something sexy and I was feeling self-conscious sitting there on a high stool in a low cut
red
dress that was way too short in heels that were way too high
. There were mirrors on every surface and wherever I looked, there I was, in
endless
reflections.