Surrender to Mr. X (2 page)

Unaccompanied men, especially when in a strange land, are often at a loose end sometimes of an evening. Max the concierge will point them in my direction: not too often—but once or twice a week or so is acceptable. I am a nice girl, a good girl and an educated girl: my face stays soft and vulnerable and the corners of my mouth turn upward, not down. I am a rosy sort of person: friendly: people stop me to ask me the way, knowing I can be trusted to give a true answer. Rather too rounded for a catwalk model, though with a little help from a seamstress I know I can get into their cast-offs: I have friends in the fashion houses. A little waist, full breasts, very long legs, shiny reddish hair—people ask me if I use henna but that's just the color it is—
slim thighs, little feet and pretty hands. I have not much to complain about.

If men care to give me gifts for services rendered that suits me very well. A couple of hours a day behind the desk at the Olivier pays peanuts but is a good way of making contacts. The hotel gets an excellent class of clientele—prices range from around £400 a night for an ordinary room without a river view, up to £2,000 for a suite. We are a favorite with EU officials, NGO senior staff, wealthy Americans, UN magnates and Japanese tourists; nothing too flashy or corrupt.

If I had been born Japanese, my natural habitat would have been in a tea house, as a geisha. Nothing too vulgar, nor up-front, but if the clients feel like sex as well as conversation—well so do I, and should they like to give me presents, I don't have a problem with it: my rent is high and I have to fund my own way through college. In the long term the only place I see for myself is in academe. Meanwhile there are my clothes to pay for—I have a princess's taste but a commoner's income. I hope I don't sound too defensive here. Because I frequently have sex without requiring or expecting payment: although, oddly, men often prefer to pay than not to pay. The transaction is less value-loaded: no sense of emotional obligation is left drifting in the air. It is more like paying one's psycho-therapist: then it is clear that “friendship” has been bought, and with a time limit.

A
LDEN TELLS ME HE
is a musician, an interior designer and an “applied conceptual artist,” and I say, “Quite the Renaissance man!” Which is slightly over-clever for Joan, and Lam suddenly speaks up in flat, nasal tones: “Mr. X—true Leonardo,” just as I'd forgotten he existed. Then Max comes back, says it's okay for me to go, and nods us over in the direction of the bar of the Bound Beast and Bumpkin, a designer pub which crouches in the lee of the Olivier, where its staff meet out of hours, a few drugs are bought and sold and high-class hookers congregate.

Max is tall, grizzled, lugubrious and around fifty: he is dapper and neat and self-contained and wears a red carnation. Max has a smooth line of talk which keeps guests happy, and a dangerous glint in his eye which keeps staff docile. He is the outer and visible sign of the Hotel Olivier's dignity. His wife long since learned to live without him: his love goes to the hotel. He started as a bell boy and is now head concierge and doubles at reception if required; he is the link between the hotel and the outside world; he knows every theater,
every restaurant, every call girl in town; he bribes and blackmails in the hotel's interests; he has a hot line to the local cop-shop; he has his favorites amongst the cab drivers; he takes a modest cut from everyone for putting business in other folks' way, as is his due, and sometimes boasts to me about the tens of thousands he has in cash beneath his bed.

“Except,” as he says rather unnecessarily, being a wary kind of person, “it isn't really under my bed.”

Max seems to like me. I dress tastefully, even modestly, I'm cool and efficient behind his desk, and if I find myself in Larry's Bar at the hotel with a guest, after work, it is with Max's permission. I am well-spoken: I don't attract the wrong sort of attention. He once told me I was good for the bar trade. We get top film and music people, even writers, scientists, all kinds of interesting sorts in, and super celebrity models too, so I took that as a compliment.

“Wheelchair access is better at the Beast than in Larry's,” says Max. It sounds ingenuous, but there is a subtext. What he means is that wheelchairs are not welcome in the hotel bar. The Olivier offers wheelchair access to all floors and public spaces, but the well-heeled public, though happy to pay lip service to the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the physically and mentally incapacitated, does not want its nose rubbed in disability when it has its hair let down, enjoying itself.

Better if Max had said nothing. I felt quite upset on Alden's behalf. He had already that morning been
snubbed by Mrs. Weiss, and humiliated in front of me. Now his eyes were bright as if there were tears brimming just behind them. Maybe he was just blazing cross, but hiding it. I resolved to be as nice to him as I could, and on our way to the Bound Beast shook my hair loose from its pins, undid the top three buttons, pushed up the sleeves of my white ruched blouse, and by the time I sat down opposite his wheelchair and was finally able to engage with him on the level and not from a height, I felt we were kind of pals, on the same side, almost joined together at the hip in some way. I smiled at him as if he were God's gift to women—which I could see that, were he not in a wheelchair, he might very well be.

“You have an interesting smile,” he said. “You're not as obvious as you pretend—I like that.” His voice was quizzical, strong and low and had a slight Yorkshire growl to it. He was at ease, so I was at ease. I felt honored to be noticed, to be more than just essence of girl, but girl with detail: girl fascination. But then I wondered if his flanks were thin and withered, or strong and firm like normal. How could I know? Would it matter? Probably not. As a child I used to rescue birds the cat brought in, befriend the bullied, adopt African children and so on. I've always liked lame ducks. But then he wasn't acting lame at all.

So I wondered what he wanted. A drink with a nursery school teacher because his lunch date had fallen through? Company, any would do, and that was
that? He was hardly the lonely type though: so why?

Lam bought drinks and chicken sandwiches with cash Alden handed him, put them in front of us, then went and sat by himself at another table and read his newspaper, not resentful, but humble like Uriah Heep; the role made him comfortable. So he acted as servant and not some kind of companion. The Leonardo comment was incidental. And he seemed uninterested in me. Perhaps he was gay? He had a small mouth and a tapered chin and a plaintive air of incipient victimhood. I was pretty sure about Alden's sexual orientation and he was the opposite of plaintive. If he was a victim, he asked for no favors because of it.

“A tenth of the price and twice as good as lunching in your hotel,” said Alden. He had a good appetite: broad white orthodontist-teeth bit into thick chunks of fresh crusty white bread. I nibbled at the chicken, leaving the bread. Personally I would rather have lunched at the Olivier. The mayo here was too sharp, out of a jar.

“It's not my hotel,” I giggled, and he put up his hands in a no contest gesture and made a face and grinned, then shook his head. “Thank you for keeping me company, Joan. God, that woman is a bitch.”

“I don't think it's nice to call any woman a bitch,” I said primly, in my Joan persona. His eyebrows rose a bit. “How do you know her?” I said, changing tack.

“It's a business relationship,” he said. “Is, was …? Probably still ‘is.'”

There were two or three professional girls at the bar,
swinging legs, eating lunch, waiting for their pimps or the odd punter to come along, eyeing me and my new acquisition up, smirking and whispering behind hands, but not aggressively, perfectly friendly. They don't seem to mind me. I don't take business away from them, or only in such small quantity it scarcely affects the price of fish. Anyway, I put business their way from time to time, whenever I depped for Max behind the concierge's desk.

Alden told me he owned a design agency. It was called Arts-Intrinsick. I looked it up later that afternoon on Google. It was “working toward a unified vision of art, design and sound,” which could have meant anything, or nothing, but so far as I could see its mission was to bring together private art collectors, architects and “sound sculptors to embrace the senses in a functional, luxurious and sophisticated environment.” Bullshit, it seemed to me but plausible enough to work. What did I know? In other words if you were a very, very rich divorcée like Mrs. Weiss and liked to buy paintings and art installations as an investment, you would then employ Alden to create a state-of-the-art gallery within your own home, where you could display your collection to its advantage against a background of specially composed sense-enhancing music.

I had no doubt Arts-Intrinsick would thrive: there is plenty of free-floating money to be netted in the art world—especially if you are not an actual painter. I have a step grandfather, Lord Wallace F, grand old
doyen of British architecture, and so I know all about that from him, and from my grandmother, who had the misfortune to be married to him for a time. Wallace was a horrid man, though his scathing dismissal of what he called “art-world scum” and “culture nomenclature” could be quite energizing; no doubt it would have included someone like Alden in it. I felt the more protective toward him, having to struggle not just against the handicap of his disability, but the contempt of the likes of Wallace while he tried to bring his vision to reality. Wallace had a point perhaps, but froth would be a kinder word than scum. But then I liked Alden and didn't like Wallace: judgment follows where emotions lead.

Alden and I chatted; we talked of our families. He came from a Yorkshire vicarage—had gone to grammar school—he'd played with the village soccer team, which suggested an accident later in life, but he was not prepared to go into details—the Royal College of Music, then fine arts at the Slade—he was multi-talented, evidently—a job with the Warhol Foundation—and then on to start his own business. No marriage. A light laugh—it wouldn't be fair: he couldn't have children. What about me?

I resisted the temptation to say I too came from a clerical family, only on my mother's side, and, as Joan Bennet, presented him with a portrait of a lower-middle-class Essex family—father an out-of-work printer, mother a social worker, two sisters working in a call
center, a brother in trouble with the police. I implied that I loved working with children: I was not ambitious, other than I wanted to make a difference, you know? I added for good measure that I was Plymouth Brethren, and he looked quite intrigued—a sect in which sex is a source of neurotic guilt, and where else, these days, can you find that?

For hit-and-run sex it is useful to be someone else: if you feel bad about it later for any reason, why then, it wasn't you that did it. If you get emotionally hurt, it is someone else who suffers. The kernel of you stays intact. I rather liked this Joan of mine. She had a cuddly, kind heart and would certainly go to bed with Alden, if that was what he wanted, if only out of compassion, because she was whole and he was not. She would not of course expect financial reward.

I would use Joan again: the thought quite stirred me. Being Joan as well as Vanessa added spice to the expectation of adventure. It was almost as if I could be both male and female: dom and sub, top and bottom, the one who did, the one done unto.

So, Alden was infertile. I felt restless on my chair. Why couldn't we just get on with this? But would it work? Men can be infertile for reasons other than mechanics. He would lie on his back: I could sit on top of him. If the worst came to the worst he could use a vibrator. Lam could run out for one, in the role in which he was now running backward and forward to the bar with whisky sours for Alden and over-sweet
cocktails—made of crème de cacao, brandy, cream and nutmeg with two little umbrellas on top—for me, that seeming obviously the sort of thing Joan would drink.

Luigi the barman at the Beast, with his Robert de Niro looks, was ever one to foster intimate relationships in his bar; he had coated the drink with a thick layer of nutmeg, rather than the normal bitty sprinkle. Alden told me it was aphrodisiac and I pretended ignorance, which is usually popular with men, for the less you know the more opportunity they have to enlighten you. He gave me a full breakdown of the spice's chemical composition.

He asked me if I had a boyfriend, and I confessed that I had been engaged for four years to a Geology student who'd then walked out on me and married my best friend. A tear or two came into my eye. I really took myself in. He sympathized, and I said really, I was okay, but I'd given up on men. You couldn't rely on them, you couldn't trust them. He said, “We men, perhaps we're not all the same.” I said perhaps I didn't know very much about them really.

He set about impressing me. One of his “environments,” he said, had been had been written up in May's Vogue. But his real passion was music, sound. He had had some acclaim recently—a ten-minute piece for percussion on Radio 3 last year, in a series called Minimalist Maelstrom—and he was currently struggling to deliver a twenty-minute commissioned piece called
Thelemy: The Silence of the Senses
, again for Radio 3. He asked me if I liked music and I said I was quite keen on trance. He laughed and said that figured and reached out and took my hand and held it a moment. When we touched a spark of static electricity clicked and leapt between him and me. It was probably coincidental—there was a new carpet in the bar—but it left me with the feeling that the energy ordinary people wasted walking round built up in some kind of inner battery he had, and was ready for use; his eyes were so bright.

He said he was an avant-garde man himself and I asked him what he meant by avant-garde and he said “in the forefront” and I said that seemed a dangerous place to be, in the front line of the battle, and he said yes, that's what it was: he was in the forefront of the battle against stupidity and man's inhumanity to man. I would have asked him where women fitted in but remembering in time that I was Joan, not Vanessa, just nodded appreciatively.