The Engagement (14 page)

I took his hand off my skin and he opened his eyes.

He was gazing at me as if expecting I would start talking in our particular way, whispering in his ear a story of who he should be. Instead I went to my suitcase and unzipped the side pocket, taking out the envelope filled with cash. This was so obvious, why had I not realized earlier? The act of buying me, buying total control of me, was Alexander’s real thrill. I pulled out half of my weekend’s fee. Clearly it wasn’t the time to economize: I pulled out the other half.

“Here.” Turning, I presented him with every one of the hundred- and fifty-dollar notes.

He wouldn’t touch them.

“I’m serious.”

He stared at the money, now splayed next to him on the bedside table, as though it were somehow disgusting. “No.”

“Why not?”

“No.”

Forcing him wouldn’t work. I’d learned it was important to set up situations that made Alexander feel he had agency; made him feel that, despite my reporting on others’ actions, it had still been his idea to take my underwear off with his teeth, and his idea, really, to then put his head between my legs. It was a fine balance, asking for things I wouldn’t otherwise have known how to request, while never letting it appear I wanted this sex more than he did. In fact, it was better he thought I didn’t want it at all, better to show only the mildest flicker of attraction, so that he felt like a man on the verge of primordial victory. Suddenly most of my clothes had disappeared and I seemed to be in a weaker position.

Anyway, this was what moved Alexander. Not my stripping to expensive but gaudy underwear, and kneeling in front of him—as I was now—wrestling him so as to undo his fly.

“Please!” I begged. It did not fit with the room we were in but I was no longer playing a character; this was
me
. “Oh, please, let me, please . . .” For the strange thing was, suddenly I wanted him. I thought he was mad, and I no longer knew if I was doing this to attract or repel, but I wanted him; I was aching with some desperate mix of fear and confusion—and this desire.

The harder I pleaded, the more anguished he became. “You don’t have to do it anymore.” He was holding his hands in the air. “Liese, stop!”

Did Alexander require a piece of meat rather than a woman? Was he—as most men are—constitutionally threatened by too much female appetite? He liked hearing about what other men wanted, but preferred not knowing that this was also what I craved. For this craving, without the cash, seemed to cast me in a new light. It proved, I suppose, what he feared and reveled in most: the letter’s claim that I prostituted myself for no other reason than pleasure.

And so he made a sound that was completely animal. A sound to empty his lungs of distress and fill them with rage.

I took my hands from his crotch, crawling fast away from him. Getting off my knees, I stood in the corner of the room, waiting. He was red-faced, breathing heavily, each long limb electrified and full of kick and hit. To reach my blouse and jeans I’d have to squeeze past him, and I didn’t want to be that close.

When his breathing slowed, Alexander stood and shook out his arms and legs, sloughing off my sleaziness. He picked up the suitcase, sighing. He pulled out my clothes and carefully refolded each garment, placing it in the white chest of drawers. Had he done this previously? When other women tried to leave? The routine seemed to calm him: his every gesture stayed measured, controlled. None of what I’d done had aroused him. Without the cash it couldn’t.

“You know how I feel about you,” he said quietly. He leaned across to the bedside table and took the leather box, snapping it open. Inside was the diamond, bending light. It was my enemy. My beautiful enemy. I watched him slowly slide the ring over my finger.

“We will have to break this habit, Liese.” From his back pocket, Alexander was taking out his wallet. “Now that you are my fiancée, I can’t allow you to see anyone else.”

I did not answer.

He removed five new hundred-dollar notes and laid them on top of the rest.

“The others will have to give you up.”

His extra money seemed to glow.

“And what might be more difficult”—he smiled ruefully—“you will also have to give
them
up.”

I closed my eyes. The air in the room was richer, but I felt washed in hot shame. The horror was he knew how to activate something in me, drawing me further into his trap—a trap I couldn’t help feeling I had laid for myself. This routine between us was my creation. I had sketched out its shape and for months had lived under its shelter. But desires bend and stretch, and in the web of his mind, my imaginings had gone bad.
How can you leave?
my fiancé’s eyes mocked.
How can you possibly escape your own fantasy?

“Now,” Alexander ordered, “read this.”

V

Dear Mr. Colquhoun,

It comes to my attention you have not heeded my warning and ceased communication with Ms. Campbell. I therefore feel obliged to bring certain aspects of her character to your attention. I have attached testimonials (a sample of dozens I’ve now collected) from her former acquaintances. Please see overleaf:

I turned the page. The first “testimonial” was typed on cheap paper that had been handled a lot.

Some lads said she was up herself, acting posh, bragging about moving away. If they took too long she’d start making snoring noises and they’d get crapped off. Not me. I saw stars. Big girl with blond hair, all right face, good body, charging £10 for a bareback blow job or £15 for a full service. She would do all of it for a bargain £20. And once I heard in the upstairs room of the video store on Sander St. she spent three hours standing, sitting, squatting for like a party of five or six, and she hardly charged extra . . .

The note continued in this vein and was signed with a fake name and address that I assumed Alexander had chosen for effect: Greg Blackwood, 44, Unthank Road, Norwich.

I turned another page:

We’d meet on the edge of the golf course. It was dark but she had a torch she flashed three times, and I’d find her lying on the moist grass with her burgundy school dress pulled up, her skin all salt and sour, begging me to . . .

Several paragraphs detailed my “hot wet slit” and its encounter with a “throbbing cum-rod.” Were these the things that turned Alexander on? The stories I’d told him were far more subtle, far classier. I needn’t have bothered if this was what he preferred. Pathetic little dirty stories that were almost comic—not that I could now find a way to laugh.

 . . . for a fiver there was a map you could buy from the neighborhood lads with a key to places around the estate where she’d happily liaise.

Anonymous, Westlinks Rd.

On the next page I saw a photocopy of a hand-drawn map showing twisting half-circle streets marked with the following index:

1: golf course (at night).

2: the lane running behind the houses backing onto Eaton Primary.

3: the school playground on the half tires that make up the shite equipment.

4: the path parallel to Wentworth Green and adjoining oval. Go to gate with wire cut away.

5: her house, obviously.

My family’s house was depicted in crude style, although the details were right. This meant Alexander knew where my parents lived.

How?

He had found the address. But how?

He had typed their street into the Internet and up must have come the asphalt’s potholes, a tree’s shadow over those holes, every leaf on the tree. And past that, a little fence of rope strung between low posts, and the patches of front lawn that needed watering, my father’s pink and white impatiens reflecting in the front windows of a redbrick, gable-roofed, two-story house.

I felt a jolt like one I’d had at eighteen: I was sitting in the dark lecture hall, newly arrived at college, a projector on, the lecturer showing a slide of a house that he said epitomized bad, lazy, cynical design. And it was basically our family home on the screen. The house I’d grown up in on Wentworth Court. The other students were all laughing, although once my embarrassment faded I became sure they lived in similar places. It was the early 1990s, the ascendancy of Hadid, Gehry, Koolhaas, and computer-aided design packages. In class everyone was morphing a
3-
D blob, stretching it one way, pulling it the other, then “postrationalizing” the blob as a comment on fractal geometry or game theory. Anyone with style was supposed to reside in a comet tail, not dwellings like the one projected on the wall.

Pressing his little handheld button, the lecturer had continued his slide show of lower-middle-class English kitsch: row after row of postwar, two-story, single-garage houses, all basically the same but for a Tudor element here, a Georgian or Victorian touch there. He’d created a series of still lifes out of the ghostly objects veiled by these houses’ net curtains: studio portraits of long-grown children; a solitary armchair and reading lamp, the shade askew; maidenhair ferns; plastic daisies in a vase; figurines of angels, or swooning shipwrecked couples, or wigged aristocrats alighting from carriages to masked balls. These places, with their faux period details and statuettes, were temples of Thatcherism. Tory-voting aspirants lived within. “For a start all this should be bombed,” the lecturer pronounced, his scorn wedging inside me.

Alexander had seen exactly where I’d come from. On the computer, he must have spied through the windows at my family’s belongings, into the living room where the impressionist posters hung next to photographs of my sister in her wedding dress, and now holding her baby. Nothing of provenance, nothing of permanence, but everything spotless. After thirty years, nearly all the houses in the neighborhood looked as if the residents had only just moved in.

He had then clicked some arrow and zoomed out over the low fence, past the storybook trees and topiary hedges to the rest of Sunningdale Estate, a maze of cul-de-sacs named after the great golf courses of the world. Here people walked their dogs at three-quarter speed, cyclists pedaled in slow motion, and even the birds flew overhead as through some confection thicker than air: all of it seemed a kind of suburban asylum where everything was drugged. . . . Alexander would have taken in the local golf course where my parents had memberships—hiding the clubs if their family, scornful of perceived climbing, visited—and a little further on a sports field with a path parallel to it. This path, which he’d referred to on his map, was the one I’d taken every day after school. Kids used it as a shortcut, the older ones smoking, or snogging, or doing lame graffiti on back fences. For a split second I felt something in my brain turn slightly.

Blackwood, that was a name on one of the testimonials—there were Blackwoods who lived around the corner from our house. They owned a copying business. All the family were heavyset, a low center of gravity. . . . No. I shook my head to stir the image out.

“This is ridiculous!”

“Why?”

“Because”—I waved the letter in front of him—“none of it ever happened.”

Alexander nodded slowly. “Are you sure?”

He was still sitting on the single bed, hands knotted, shoulders slumped, trying to gauge the severity of my problems. “I want you to think back and really concentrate, Liese.”

“Oh, come on,” I started, and then couldn’t find words for the scale of this farce.

In the late eighties the trees on our estate were still saplings, and ornamentals anyway—if they grew too tall it would have been antisocial. I was visible everywhere I walked, everywhere I thought of walking. It was like God’s own eyes were upon me. Each garden was just a little patch of open lawn, each neighbor’s flower beds more perfect than the one before. Everyone was on view. There was nowhere to go and not be seen. And the safest place, the only place, to have sex was in your head.

She told me that one day after school she was window-shopping on St. Stephen’s Street when a woman approached her and asked if she wanted to make money. The woman, a madam, must have recognized her for the type who’d turn tricks in her spare time. Not just from her tarty clothes and makeup, but from her eyes because she looked like she wanted it all the time, and it was all she was good for. The madam had a brothel near Sweet Briar Road . . .

I spluttered.

“What’s the matter?”

“A brothel! I didn’t know there
was
a brothel in Norwich.”

 . . . and it catered to people with obscure tastes—it was a place for the real weird types. Sometimes she’d tell me the things these freaks made her do, she whispered them when we were together. Her head had been reset, she liked now to be frightened. Truly, it excited her, the edge of fear seemed to get her going, made her feel something . . .

I knew Alexander was watching me. But I could not look up from the page. I felt hot and cold. There followed a list of acts I’d truly never thought of. The strange thing was that all this vapid pornography, all the claims that I wanted to be hurt in these various ways, affected me far less than his knowing real details about me: the color of my school uniform—what kind of creep would find that out?—the street where I’d gone shopping as a teenager, the half tires around the grounds of my old primary school.

“Was there play equipment in the area where you grew up?” As our weekend together approached, Alexander’s questioning had become increasingly off-kilter. He seemed to imagine I was from some urban slum. “Were there any sporting facilities? Any fields or ovals that the local lads could use?”

He’d asked what I thought were trivial, if odd, questions about my background, and he’d obviously used the answers as aids to further research.

I shook my head. It was as though he were trying to put me in my place. As he drove me mad, he wanted me to remember where I’d come from.

“How have you done this?” I now asked. He had not seemed to be a particularly creative man.

“Done what?”

“Found this out, made up such filth.”

“Liese, try to calm down. You’re not thinking clearly.”

I was still only half dressed. Had he purposely waited until I was nearly naked to have me read his letters? I slapped the pages down next to him and covered myself with a blouse that I now buttoned haphazardly. I grabbed my jeans off the floor, stepping into them. My socks were caught in the jeans’ legs. I leaned against the white bed end, putting them back on my feet as quickly as I could. This bastard wanted a bona fide whore with an anthology of sluttish vignettes for use at night, and enough shame to keep her servile throughout the day.

Alexander was watching me open a drawer he had just refilled, his expression close to pity. Sighing, he said, “I think you’re trying to avoid something.”

“And what would that be?”

“I think you act while in a kind of trance. That you, I don’t know”—he rubbed at his forehead—“that you’re attempting to escape something painful.”

Was he actually going to head-shrink me, psychoanalyze my false identity? He hadn’t come across his theories riding in his dung-­splattered truck, talking to his cows. Were they remnants of his own failed treatment?

“It draws you in and you have to have sex. But you don’t feel it. You don’t feel anything.”

I chose a thick woolen top—if I found a way to get out of this house and walk toward safety, I didn’t want to freeze. I lifted it over my head, and the engagement ring’s platinum claw, the claw holding the diamond, got hooked and pulled at the wool. My head covered, I struggled to unsnag it. Finally I got the top down and slammed shut the drawer. The prissy white chest and its ornaments shuddered. Had he put me in this pink room as a rehabilitative measure? To “give me back” my childhood?

“Sometimes, as a side effect of trauma, people have addictions, sexual ones.”

“That’s very unfortunate for them.”

“It’s treatable.”

I was sitting on the floor, pulling on my running shoes, lacing them. “You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet, Alexander.”

“Liese, we can face this. The doubts you have, the insecurities, there’s no need. I love you . . .” He leaned forward, his blue eyes now awash with tenderness. And soon he was next to me on all fours, reaching out as though to a scared animal. His not shaving had begun to make him look older. “I want you to feel you can talk about this with me.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“From now on, if you have a problem, it’s a problem for both of us, darling.”

“Why does that sound like a threat?” As I stood I realized I wasn’t only frightened, now I also hated this man, hated his oppressive sincerity, and retrieving the pile of letters I threw them in his face.

“Okay . . .” Alexander kneeled to bundle the papers. He was strenuously maintaining his calm, even as he gathered up the last page. Straightening, he stared at it and asked casually, “Were you close to any teachers at school?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh”—a small shrug of defeat—“nothing.”

I grabbed the page out of his hands, knowing that I should not keep reading; it encouraged him and fed my own warped fascination, growing now exponentially like some cursed seed.

 . . . perhaps it was wrong to do it, but she was no longer my student. And if it wasn’t me it would have been someone else who might not have been so caring . . .

My mistake was to not regard this as pure fiction: instead I started running through the teachers at school, wondering who he meant me to imagine this was—and each candidate was nauseating.

 . . . I answered an ad and I met her in the Holiday Inn on ­Ipswich Road just off the A47. She liked it because there was a glass door at the side facing onto the car park and you didn’t have to walk through a foyer or security to get to the rooms. So I knock on her door and, of course, I presume she recognizes me, but she doesn’t acknowledge it. For six years I’ve seen her across the classroom and not once does she say anything.

This girl had every chance—I know because the parents turned up each time she or her sister ran a race or sang a song. She’d been quiet and studious until, I don’t know, one weekend she must have watched
Pretty Woman
on video and next thing you know she’s apparently the school’s great slut—up against fences on Saturday nights, all the kids practically cheering. She was the toast of the staff room each Monday morning.

One day she turns and asks me to do a certain thing that would hurt her and I didn’t want to do it, not at all, but she’d asked for it and I’d have done anything for her. Well, one thing led to another in that regard. It led to a lot of things, which most people would find too extreme.

I suppose I had the usual notions of how I’d leave my wife and she and I could move away somewhere warm and she would stop doing this. I was spending so much money. I was spending and spending. To see her I would go without eating or drinking out with friends.

But finally I realized she didn’t want anything a normal girl would, only sex and cash. Each one got her as hot as the other.