The Engagement (4 page)

“I see.” He waited for me to expand. “It was a nice sort of place?”

“It was a nice brothel, exactly.”

He nodded. “An exclusive one?”

“Very exclusive.”

“But it was time to move on and so you decided to come to Melbourne and strike out on your own?”

“More or less.” For some reason I couldn’t get in the mood. I hadn’t drunk enough to make a confession and lie back on his table, hitching up my skirt.

He looked at me as he sometimes did in the apartments, searching for a higher truth. It was always daytime when we met, and some places did not run to blinds or curtains: unless the room had little natural light, we saw each other in too fine detail. This made me want to blindfold him. If he wouldn’t close his eyes, I wouldn’t either. Really I preferred to face away.

“During your career has there ever been anyone you regretted working with?”

“Hmmm.” I made as if to remember. It didn’t take much; he was happy enough doing this routine alone.

“Presumably you’d be very fortunate not to look back with, I don’t know, dismay at some clients.” He was nodding, still trying for a story. “I just wondered if there was anyone you wished you hadn’t taken on.”

“Can we talk about something else?”

I hoped he’d take my reticence for part of the performance.

“I’m not trying to embarrass you.” Alexander considered a puzzle within the candle’s flame. “But yes—so, are you studying yourself ?”

“Ah, no.”

“I thought you might be using the extra funds to take a course, fine arts or literature maybe?”

“Why?”

“Well, with the money you make from your profession.”

“Alexander,” I tilted my head flirtatiously, “are these the sort of questions to ask a girl the first time you bring her home?”

While we’d discussed the rigors of my imaginary profession before, now, out of bed, I did find some hard-wired prudery kicking in. “I don’t think of myself in those terms,” I explained firmly. My keywords were
eros
,
cash,
debt reduction
. “And I suppose talking about it like this with you feels strange.”

“Does it?”

My fingertips touched my collarbone as I brushed back my hair. “It makes me shy.”

“I’m sorry, really,” he said, although he didn’t seem sorry. He seemed put out, frustrated that I was blocking him, even though it was done in a teasing style.

Alexander met my eyes briefly. “Do you have to give away a large cut of your pay?”

“I don’t follow.”

“To a pimp.”

“No,” I said sarcastically. “I’m an independent contractor.”

“Well.” He arranged his knife and fork side by side on his plate. “It must give you a lot of freedom. You can move around from place to place. Meet people.” From the neck up, he had reddened, turning as dignified and stiff as the man in the painting. “Good for you, being your own boss. Who wants to spend their life in an office?”

In my old life, every morning by seven a.m. I was on the tube to the East End. For ten hours a day I stared at a black computer screen, manipulating the red, green, and yellow lines of computer-aided design to create walls and floors and windows. The program infected everything I did: if I dropped something on the ground I’d think, Control Z, the shortcut for “undo.” As I walked down the street, trees before me morphed into
3-
D lines as if I were drafting the layers of their canopies; buildings rose in the air, rotating, zooming in and out. And when unwelcome visitors entered my thoughts, I drew a box around them and they were deleted.

I reached across the dining table for Alexander’s hand but he did not move.

“You have to be very brave to be in your line of work,” he said with pious generosity.

“I suppose so.” Upstairs I’d discovered my mobile phone had no reception. I’d told my uncle—the first person who’d notice I was missing—that I was going on a hiking trip with an old friend from school.

Alexander seemed to read my mind. “Presumably someone always knows where you’re working.”

My expression must have shown that no one did.

He stood, regarding my knife and fork, arranged differently to his. As the meat had cooled, its odor was of bodies. “I’m sorry this meal wasn’t more of a hit. I promise not to cook it for you again.”

“It was delicious. I just wasn’t that hungry.”

“The dogs will enjoy the leftovers.” He wiped his palms against his trousers before picking up my plate, and smiled, closed-mouth. “You might prefer dessert?” He waited a second by the door. “No. Tea or coffee, perhaps? I’ll give you a moment to think about it.”

The table seemed very long.

The candles were burning down; I reached out to stop a dribble of wax from falling on the wood.

To become accredited as an interior architect in Australia I had only to do a short course. It would have taken a weekend, and I could have then earned more than I did shepherding around renters and buyers. But I kept finding reasons to put it off. In truth I was sick of the design work I’d been doing. Most of my clients didn’t want just shelter, they wanted a temple dedicated to themselves: a kitchen to nourish their spirits, a bathroom to nurture their souls.

Why was selling these places easier than drafting them? Because these buildings were already built, the colors and materials chosen, their success or failure of no consequence to me. And the money Alexander gave me more than made up the difference in income. Plus I worked shorter hours and had access to locations for us to meet.

Every time we parted I locked another door behind us, and I felt intense relief that soon gave way to exhilaration, but also the groggy realization that this had to stop.
Although,
an impish voice taunted,
who exactly is getting hurt?
He had a good time. I did too—and each day there were new headlines about the global economy contracting, about multitudes overseas losing their jobs and savings and homes. It was hardly a time to turn down work.

“Live the dream!”—they don’t stop telling you that after you’ve been fired and had your credit cards suspended. And no one says which dream to live: the good or the bad one? Seeing Alexander soothed the tedium of the office, gave it charge. All the tagged keys hanging on the back wall became magical, each one able to open onto a new exotic wood. So would I have considered expanding my operation? No.

One detail about the brothel’s open day stuck in my head.

The group was standing in a room lit green. The carpet, although new, was already worn down around the bed. A security guard who’d joined the tour had a rat’s tail of bleached hair winding down his neck, and wraparound mirrored sunglasses that he raised up and down in a vaudeville-style move to check out the more attractive visitors. He told the group each bed was fitted with a discreetly located panic button in case there was trouble. “If the girls can get to it, that is,” he added with a smirk.

I stood up from the dining table.

The door was ajar. He had turned on the hall light and I walked through the cold to the drawing room. Facing the doorway was a tall rectangular gilt-edged mirror, and all the room—and anyone who entered—was caught in its reflection.

Had I considered being paid before?

Of course I had. Even before I was fired. Each month the bills rolled in, an ever fiercer wave, and despite my daily commute to that computer screen in Hoxton, I was traveling further into debt. Rain streaked the office windows like exclamation marks:
Do something! Act!
But the money owing multiplied. It was like an organism with its own moods, its own weather, over which I had no control. One credit card and then I was offered another credit card, and it seemed a way to wipe the slate clean. I’d rather have fallen into debt for more sympathetic reasons, but in this world you can become insolvent by just trying to look your best. How else to find a mate than by getting poorer still, wearing the right clothes to the right club, and ordering the right drink to meet the right person? But why had I been doing this? Did I think a mate could bail me out? Or did I want children? Could I stay with anyone for longer than it took to conceive? Would anyone stay with me? These subterranean questions spooled on and on.

When, after a typically expensive night out, one man arose from my bed and walked down the gnome-size stairs of my studio’s mezzanine, I thought, You will leave like you’ve had some victory, and I still don’t know how to pay my phone bill. From any direction it was five paces to the door. The kimono I was wearing suddenly looked gaudy. As he retrieved his clothes off my floor and coins fell out of the pockets, I scooped them up, winking. Was that self-regard or self-loathing?

In Alexander’s drawing room there was a general air of permission—whoever had decorated this had given herself license. The walls were covered in mustard-colored silk. Money had been deposited in dusty furnishings and transformed into class. I stood surrounded by oriental vases, an ormolu clock on an upright piano with attached brass candelabra, and exotic birds arranged in a glass case, their expressions suitably eerie. It was like a provincial museum you’d visit because nothing else was open.

In the center of the room, amid the antiques, was a squat couch not dissimilar to the one my parents owned, upholstered in a heavy autumnal print. It seemed that someone disapproving of their forebears’ high living had chosen the most drab, utilitarian design.

I heard his footsteps.

He loped into the room holding a block of chocolate, and must have caught derision in my expression. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“Oh,” I said casually, “it’s just that couch.” In strangers’ houses, sometimes we would laugh about their taste.

“What’s wrong with it?”

I shook my head. Who was I to judge his furnishings? My family had nothing of provenance other than an old dictionary and a slightly older silver teapot. Nerves made me sound disdainful. “It just looks out of place, when everything else is in such fine taste.”

“No one’s ever commented on it before.”

“Well, it’s certainly comfortable,” I said. Kicking off my heels, I displayed myself on it in camp apology, offering him the invitation I presumed he expected—the point of all this. As though I were really alone, I undid the buttons of my blouse, easing up my skirt, moving my fingers underneath. It was so easy to shock him. His repression turned me on and made him complicit. We were a team.

But now he stayed by the doorway. “Do you ever think of anything else?”

Here was something new.

I turned to him. “You
are
paying me to have sex.”

“Really?” Alexander sounded genuinely angry. “Is that really what you think?”

“To have sex if you want to.”

“I see.” He was trying not to appear wounded. “That
is
what you think.” His hand went to his forehead. “Listen, I’m, I’m not good at this sort of thing. Okay? Dating and the whole act you’re supposed to put on.” The hand was thrown down in exhaustion. “Can’t you see? I just want to know who you are, Liese, who you really are.”

Something about the way he said this made me uneasy. “I want that too,” I answered weakly.

“Do you really?”

“Yes.” My voice was too high.

“Then can we agree to start again?”

I nodded.

“To start from scratch and see who the other is?”

I felt this man’s isolation sharply. Surrounded by ancestral clutter, he was living in a time as well as a place that was remote, and this made sense of an impression I’d had before. Under the prickly carapace he seemed naive and at too great a disadvantage. The hint of sadism I thought I’d detected during dinner was just the gracelessness of someone unused to spending time with others. He needed to be treated gently; within his own house he wanted his lust to be hidden from view. Yet as I went to Alexander and lay my head against his chest, and as he laid his head on mine, I could not turn the idea of sex off. Almost disconnected from me, my hands crept down and started unbuckling his trousers.

He moved me away.

As he crossed his arms, his clothes became too wide for his frame. “You must be tired. It was a long drive,” he said sadly. “I think perhaps it’s time for bed.”

Picking up my shoes, sighing, I followed him back through the tiled hall, up the wide staircase.

My blouse was half undone, and I could feel the cold on my chest. I had to turn this night around, to fix its failure, but I’d drunk too much wine after all. When we reached the pink bedroom, the walls made me bilious. They were the Crayola color children use to draw the skin of white people.

“Won’t you come in?” I dropped the shoes on the ground.

“Not so loud.”

For a split second I wondered if there
was
a child asleep here.

I finished taking off my blouse and skirt, then my underwear, adding to the pile.

We’d never been together in a kid’s room before. Pouting: “Will you show me what I’m supposed to do?”

Usually I only had to make some minor move—take off my watch, even—and Alexander was on a string. I sat on the high single bed and beckoned him toward me. He came closer, and then, almost grudgingly, closer again until he was near enough for me to reach over a second time to undo his fly.

“Do you think we could turn out the light?” He sounded weary.

I looked up and caught the row of pony figurines along the mantelpiece. “Okay.”

Moving to the switch, Alexander glanced back at me—an expression as though he’d just won something.

The room went black and I felt a shiver of anticipation; the darkness was blindfolding. Raising my hand to my face, I could not see it, and I lay waiting for him to brush against me, for his breath on my skin. Laughing: “Where are you?”

No answer.

He knew the house so well, I thought, he must have remembered by heart where to stand, which floorboards made no noise, but I heard his breathing and I waited. Sometimes, at the start, he didn’t say very much, expecting me to take care of conversation. We’d be in a different apartment, but physically each episode began in a familiar way. His approach tentative at first, then opening my legs with his knees, lowering himself down. His mouth would find the same places, and then, in the same order, his hands were on my skin, calloused fingers touching me as though he wore rough gloves.