Surrender to Mr. X (5 page)

He was a piece of work himself: most decorative in white chinos and a black silk shirt exploding with hand-painted scarlet roses, on leafy stalks complete with pointed thrusting thorns. I had not been wrong: he was decidedly exciting—trapped by his physical disability but also enhanced by it. He exuded energy and the erotic charisma of those who know what they want, mean to get it, and show no doubt. Of course Mrs. Matilda Weiss had come down to apologize. Of course he had picked me up, fate having put me in his way to save his face; he induced opportunities as he progressed through the world.

“I like the shoes,” he said, and took my jacket, and the chair whizzed off gracefully, and without apparent instruction, so he could hang it on a peg. There was no sign of a proper clothes hanger, and I was nervous that the peg would stretch the wool fabric and leave a mark. I didn't say anything.

Now was my moment to say that I was Vanessa not Joan, but I missed it. “O what a tangled web we weave,” as my grandmother used to quote, “when first we practice to deceive.” But as Joan this evening I felt summery and alive and light, and free to hate his domain, and say so. Intellect, doubt and the habit of analysis can be a burden. Just to live here in the present, without relating it to past or future, is to be
happy. A garment is only a garment. I would not sulk. Let it be. Let it spoil.

“It's not exactly cozy in here,” I said. He laughed and said it wasn't meant to be, it was to impress clients. I could come into the kitchen if I felt more at home in the real world, and so we went through. It looked like the Pompidou Centre but human scale. Pinky gray granite and interlacing pipes, but at least there was a pot or pan or two.

The table was laid for three. I was afraid that meant Lam, but Alden said his friend was coming by with take-out Japanese on the way home from an evening class. I wondered if the friend was male or female. Takeaway Japanese seemed rather a come down but Alden was clearly a busy person and complicated food, as I had noticed when he devoured the chicken sandwich with the over sour mayo at the Bound Beast, was not high on his list of priorities.

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?”