Surrender to Mr. X (11 page)

“Joanie my sweetheart,” he said, “I hear you got the shopping exactly right, I thought you would. There's a
bad girl hiding inside your good girl skin, isn't there? Maybe it's the other way round.”

I didn't really care what he said: I was just so happy he was pleased with me. I found myself chattering on, about how my friend Amy had helped me choose, and made me over, and done my hair. She had spent almost an hour on it, getting it into curls which she heaped up on my head ancient-Greece style, with a few falling, and dangling green ribbons. I listened to myself with awe: who the fuck was “Amy”?

We exchanged a few disarming pleasantries about the day before, he thanked me for my patience and apologized if he had gone too far too fast, but as I probably realized he did have a few sexual hang-ups he needed to do serious work on, and he'd worried all day in case I'd not wanted to see him again. He'd called the hotel yesterday, the concierge had said I was off sick and that he didn't have my mobile number—thank you, wise, cautious Max, I thought: you always cover the exits—so I must give it to him now in case we forgot later.

So I gave it to him, but with four of the digits wrong. Alden as a stalker was a terrifying prospect: unlimited money, Lam to do his bidding—no thanks. If the worst came to the worst I could leave my job. There were other hotels. But then, of course, he did know where I lived. I killed my paranoia. I didn't want to spoil a beautiful evening.

He said tonight would be completely without erotic interest for me: he hoped I wouldn't mind
too much. I said I would be glad of the rest. He was taking measurements of light frequencies and color subtraction in the visible spectrum, he told me—or something like that—collating them against the typical sound frequencies of erotic activity and allied agitations in the thalamus. Physics was not my strong subject at school and he would certainly assume Joanie wouldn't understand a word he was saying. So I just said that was really interesting and he must be very clever. He got very serious, took my wrists gently, and turned me round to look straight into his eyes.

“I am,” he said simply, like a Pope speaking
ex cathedra
.

He was obviously serious, so I took him seriously. I reckoned he was trying to work out some link between combinations of color and form and sexual desire, and also represent them in sound, the better vehicle to provide listeners to Radio 3 with a piece of music they'd love, and make love to without having any choice, and without knowing why. Alden, I thought, was trying to invent an aphrodisiac music which was compulsive. Sound can summon up in the listener all kinds of emotions—nostalgia, grief, elation, happiness—why not lust as well? The first day's work with me as subject—ending up pitched at around 111 hertz and pulsed at the rate of a heart's beat—had acted as a tranquilizer and pain killer and sent me to sleep but that was probably not what he'd hoped for.

I was kind of with him conceptually up to a point:
up to the point where tonight he was going to conduct experiments on the color aspect of his theory, but using as his raw material—and this was where I lost him, it was so beyond out to lunch, or even dinner—the clothes I happened to have chosen to wear. It was possible, I acknowledged, to be both clever, and serious, but mad. It was also possible to be harmlessly mad. I was in a little too deep now to be comfortable with the speculation that his madness was other than harmless.

There was no sign of food or drink, which was a pity, because I was hungry again—I hadn't had a great deal of lunch, and the afternoon had involved a lot of aerobic exercise—though had he offered me chocolates I would have refused.

Alden asked me to walk up and down the room as if I were on a catwalk, which I did. Why not? Eventually he said the boots were wrong, and I had to agree. Can things bought in sales guarantee one the confidence that they would at full price? At some stage or other along the way they must have been rejected by quite a few people. I was rather relieved to take them off.

“Never look as if you try too hard,” he said. My calves ached as the soles of my feet descended to ground level: the muscles cramped. I said so and jumped about a bit and Alden said Lam knew all about aching calves and gave an excellent massage, and I wished I had said nothing. We should go in to the bedroom, said Alden, and I should lie on the bed. I must have looked nervous
because he laughed and said, “Don't worry, the only props today are clothes.”

So I limped and hopped to the bed, squealing. Joan would squeal: Vanessa, properly brought up, would suffer in silence. I was back in Joan mode. I took off my jeans and lay on my front. Alden said he thought the stockings were fantastic. That was nice. They were rather striking. Lam sat on the bed and massaged the backs of my legs with his clammy hands while Alden went through the clothes which had now been hung neatly in the wardrobe. There were racks of clothes and shoes behind the ones I had brought: so I guessed I was probably one of a succession—but how many girls are ever not—and he used the walking stick to move the hangers along the rails.

“I suspect female color sense is different from the male,” he reflected, “though there's no body of research that shows it up. I'd never have come up with anything like this.”

The muscles in my legs relaxed: the cramps dispersed; but I think that was as much the passage of time as any skill of Lam's, but how can one tell? There was no body of research that showed it up, but it was rather like receiving a massage from the creature in ET.

“ET, go home,” I muttered under my breath, for I sensed both his helplessness and his power.

“You get paid,” Lam said. He thought I was grumbling, but hadn't heard what I said. “No worries. Good girl!” There didn't seem to be the threat of an “if,”
so I thought maybe at last I'd won him round. He was an ally? That could be useful. I was pleased. There was no point in engaging with him on the complexities of financial transactions between me and Alden so I gave him a lovely smile. His massage was technically correct and his hands were warming up quite nicely. He asked me to keep still, and with a surgical plaster stuck a metal device the same shape and size as a 50p piece, in the small of my back.

“For science,” he said. “No worries.” And I didn't.

Alden the while laid out various combinations of clothes in neat piles. I was glad to see many of them, if not all, were the choices I had made. Each pile had shoes to go with it, mostly Manolos, though there are far sexier kinds, if few less expensive, on the market. Stuart Weitzman once made a pair of glass Cinderella slippers, with diamond studs and spun-platinum soles, for some star to wear to the Oscars. They cost two million dollars. She didn't win anything, and I guess she didn't actually pay for the shoes, though she did go on to marry Count Von Bismarck. My point is, that's why the boots at three-hundred-odd quid had seemed such a bargain.

It turned out he wasn't going to have me catwalk, but kind of catsprawl—simply lie upon the bed variously dressed: I got to choose the pose as I fancied, but in outfits he had chosen, and in his sequence. He could trust me on the poses because I was, he said, “a natural model.” I was flattered. I suppose he meant it, but I'll
let fine words butter my crumpet if I feel like it. I was to watch myself in the mirror above. I'm as narcissistic as anybody, so that was fine—but how was I to win his interest and affection, if I went on being Joan? I just engaged his lust as it was, and today there was little evidence even of that. He and Lam left the room.

Yellow cushions had replaced the scarlet. The 111 cycle hum started up: it sounded like the second A below middle C—not soporific, simply all there, meta-here, filling all the spaces in the room from invisible sources of imponderable number. It was continuous this time—no heartbeat pulse, so maybe he thought that was the element that had sent me to sleep. Lights shone down on me, their closely related, constantly changing colors swirling like Rudolf Steiner wet-paper paintings, though less primary and more like those in Turner's oil paintings. If I turned my head I could see the computer screen: all Steiner swirls today, nothing linear.

I liked what I saw, I realized, in varying degrees. All pleased, but some variations in color and style turned me on more than others, even made my breath come shorter and my heart beat faster, and the patterns on the screen intensified by firming up and focusing into the sharp edged, infinitely receding into the microscopic, fractal geometry of an expensive kaleidoscope on acid. Had he mickey-finned me with acid, I wondered—but how and when? I had neither eaten nor drunk anything since I'd walked through the door, not on this visit, no
Alice-Through-The-Looking-Glass I. But it only took micrograms: could you absorb it though the flesh with the right solvent? Was that what was on the small of my back under the tape? But my memory of the couple of times I took LSD recalled certain physical sensations that I wasn't experiencing: I thought I was pretty sure of that.

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.