THE DOOR SLID OPEN to show a spacious room, long rather than wide. There was little bare white to be seen, which was a relief if only because the walls were almost all mirror, into one of which a plasma screen as big as a small shop window was let in as flush as a piece of giant marquetry. There were a couple of odd-shaped velvet chairs, like something out of Jules Verne had he ever set a scene in some Victorian brothel, or described a Parisian maison close. Otherwise there was just the ample bed.
Ample, of course, is a relative term: this one would have been more than ample for this evening even if Alden’s other guests had not had to divert to Milan. What a bed! It had four posts, but no canopy or side rails; just the ceiling looked down, mirrored like everything else. The posts were again in bur oak, with more of the famous Mr. Lukas’s caryatids crawling up them; they didn’t have to hold anything up. I daresay the bed, like its companion piece the cabinet, had increased in value by more than a third since the first day of its occupation. It was big enough to accommodate an orgy, rather higher than normal, spread with a pure white quilt, patch-worked, each white square of a different texture. I saw silks, cottons, linens, damasks, velvets—and why someone should go to all that bother I couldn’t think: it was still just a plain white quilt. But there were some ten plump, silk, scarlet, startling pillows strewn across it. Alden had quite an eye for contrast.
“Relax,” he said, “lie down. Find out.” I started to unlace my Jimmy Choos but he said he preferred me to keep them on. So I lay down on the bed, demure and obedient, legs politely together; trying to think and feel like a nice, quiet nursery school teacher whose ambition was to make a difference. I would method act this through and enjoy. I hoped he was right and the Jimmy Choos would not leave dirty marks on the pristine counterpane. It would probably be okay. I had only had to walk in them between my house and the cab and then to the house this end, the weather was dry, and it had been nothing but marble or carpeted floors ever since but all the same I had to overcome the reservation of habit.
“The pale green and the red,” he said. “Unexpected. But it works. It’s holistically connected: color, machinery, sex. The idea is to follow the Ophidian currents and transmute sexual energy into artistic energy. And vice versa, of course.”
“Green and red are powerful together,” I said. “The clash is good.”
I lay still compliantly on the bed. I was not sure what he meant by the Ophidian current but I had come across the sex-machinery link before, on the wilder shores of French philosophy. Phrases flitted into my head—I have an eidetic memory: that is to say I can recall large chunks of information as if I were seeing it on the page. It isn’t perfect in my case, but I locate information by its place on the page, and then recall the page. It doesn’t suggest one is more intelligent than other people, just better able to retrieve information. My sisters, the twins Alison and Katharine, have the same gift of photographic recall, but theirs is even more effective and accurate.
“Sex/machinery,” and there I was with pages on Raymond Roussel, 1877-1933 (the latter date was his suicide), writer of the play Out of Africa; “positive exploratory dreams taken to delirious extremes; seeker after the master sex machine, which will function independently of time and space and change the world.” Make a difference. We all long to make a difference. Little Joan, lying here on the bed, a fauvist picture in clashing red and green, waiting for Alden’s secrets to be revealed, longing for the turmoil in her head to stop. All that ever really got it to stop was sex, and occasionally shopping.
“What is Ophidian?” I asked.
“It’s lizard form stuff,” he said shortly. “Stargate-related.” He was barely paying attention, absorbed in rebalancing lighting at a lower level.
More pages. Roussel, forgotten now, but a powerful influence on Duchamp, painter of The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. “Even” what, I wondered: “even” me? More pages scrolled by. The notion of the early avant-garde, that art is about ideas, not things. The dreamy yet hard-edged image, seductive. In literature, Roussel, Proust, Kafka, Wyndham Lewis; in art the Futurists, the Vorticists, the toppling towers of Depero, eventually Pollock and Warhol; in music the sense of prolonged orgasmic action propelled into eternity through ceaseless, fantastic repetitions; the complexities of minimalism—Reich and Riley, Phase Patterns—Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Cage, Max Headroom. In all these forms see complexity, repetition to the point of insanity, the creation of spontaneously inventive movements, the fountain of creation spewing forth doubt as well as marvel. Mechanical discourse in language, art, music and now sex too? Now finally with the advent of the computer those early dreams of the avant-garde come true, for is this not the apogee of complexity? A world of ideas not things? The virtual world more real than reality: the computer the ultimate sex machine, bringing sex-in-the-head to the millions? Who wants the real thing any more: live sex has got too dangerous. Thus Bill Gates, the new messiah, came along and saved the world.
The notion of play on the mirrored form, sexual procedure involving abnegation, imprisonment and liberation? I was to be the idea made flesh? The next stage? If I looked into any corner of the room I could see a thousand thousand me’s: a million brides stripped bare of her bachelors. If I sat up and looked forward I could see a warp and woof of sound wave graphics on the computer screen; perhaps I was to be something to so with the composition of Thelemy: The Silence of the Senses?
But all the brides that were me were sure of one thing: I/we wanted fucking, soon. The intellectual context was another way—interchangeable with any on the menu—of evoking a tension that needed to be released. I feared this was to be more about Alden’s artistic fantasies than actual sex. Locking my hands behind my head, I flexed my knees taut and stretched to relax, shut my eyes, and breathed peacefully and deeply as if I were in the final phase of a yoga class.
Then he pounced. The shock was elemental.
The bed tipped to the left and lowered: I rolled gently and opened my eyes again as he pulled my head toward him and into his lap, grasping my hair. His penis rose monumental like a serpentine obelisk from his lap, his belt undone and his trousers parted like the curtains of a stage. He guided my head firmly as a ballet coach might correct an angle of posture, and thrust his thing, graceful and powerful as a wild animal, into my mouth. I could not, I cannot, find a word—the common ones are banal and facetious and it was the opposite to that—but it was so alive. An animal both hunting and hunted, both pouncing and leaping to safety, both tiger and stag. My question was answered: he was right to treat his need of a wheelchair as a minor issue. There was no handicap in this central expression of his maleness.
It was very large and thick on this, the first occasion. At other times it was to seem slimmer but longer, more probing than plunging. Taken by surprise as I was, disturbed in my meditations on Roussel and the metaphysics of the avant-garde, I had to consciously remember to breathe through my nose, as the penis—the first and only one in my life—swelled in my throat, and I relaxed my muscles, opening, not defending, so that the choking next moment stayed just ahead, never reached.
When I got the chance to ease my neck for a second or two, and raised my eyes I could see past him to the huge swirling screen on the wall and I heard the sound waves as I saw them. Alden, seeing me do so, either let his penis go, or found it going limp, and pushed my mouth away, gently but deliberately. His wheelchair seemed to float back from no obvious instruction on his part, and likewise the bed slowly leveled itself. I was affronted. He had offered me no likely sexual pleasure—it was outrageous. This should not be like the Hotel Olivier: this was a proper date. I needed—oh please—the barest little token of courtship, if only an ear nibble, a kiss, a stroke of my inner thighs, a brush of lips, a tentative gesture, something, anything: not this, a penis only filling the stretched mouth, my participation limited to my endurance, no affect on either side. I needed something to respond to, with the normal female skills: to encompass, encourage and entice.
Alden meant to find “artistic holism” at my sexual expense. I was to be the catalyst for his search for authenticity. I got up and stood in front of him, my legs astride, my hands on my hips. I was about to tell him what I felt, make a statement in reasonable terms, no criticism, just gently tell him what was real, but he was too quick for me. His chair brought him forward, and he grabbed my hair and forced my mouth back down to its slave labor. I really tried to move my head away but he would not let my hair go. I pulled, he tugged. Then, just as suddenly as it entered, the penis was withdrawn. The humming frequencies and rhythms subsided.
“You see,” he said, “it works. That was what you wanted to know.”
“But you didn’t come,” I said.
“That’s a different matter,” he said. “I like to do it properly.”
I sat back on the bed and he told me neutrally as a police report that when he was fifteen he had been making fireworks with a friend; there had been an explosion, and he was blown backward down a flight of stone steps and hit his head. He was in a coma for four weeks, and when he woke up his legs didn’t work anymore, from the knees down.
“So you’ve never had normal sex?” I asked.
“I don’t have normal legs,” he said, with an edge in his voice he had not yet shown me till now.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I meant, were you still a virgin when you—lost them?”
“I haven’t lost them,” he said, his voice really hard. “They just don’t work.”
This was not to be an easy area for conversation.
“No,” he said, deciding to make things easier for me. “I wasn’t a virgin. I started pretty young. Does that make it better, or worse?” If he now had problems with his potency he hadn’t started out that way.
“Perhaps it’s to do with explosions?” I asked. “You dread them?”
I had heard of men like this but had never met one: who can go on and on, but fear ejaculation.
“You’re very intuitive,” he said. “Thank you.”
“What happened to your friend—does he have the same problem?”
“He died in the explosion,” he said. “And I lived, in a cloud of unspoken blame, from his parents and everybody else.”
“And you blamed yourself.”
“It was my fault.”
“That must make things worse,” I said, and he said yes, he thought it had. And then we were silent. I wanted to ask where all the money came from—if he came from a clerical family in Yorkshire there wasn’t likely to have been much around to begin with, but I didn’t ask. He would tell me that too sooner or later.
“All right,” he said. “To business.”
He rearranged a scarlet cushion to his taste; laid my white arm along it, eyed me a little longer. Then with another of his sudden movements, sudden artistic decisions like a painter attacking a canvas with his brush, he pushed the top of my dress down and hooked the breasts out of my bra. He did not bother to undo the hooks, let alone acknowledge their mundane existence. It looked good in the mirror on the ceiling. An artistic pose, if there was a digital camera up there, hooked into the computer.
He looked at me a little longer as if considering the design I made: judging me as a painter judges and weighs up a model before he begins. He rearranged a breast and brushed both nipples with silky soft fingers—no horny manual worker he: they stood erect at once. I have nice plump and round breasts, with broad semicircles of white around the aureoles, and the nipples, which are pink, not brown or rough; they are neither perky, nor tip-tilted, nor minimalist in any way: they are substantial.
I made a move to rise, to cover my breasts—one’s instinct for privacy surfaces at the oddest times—but he shook his head reprovingly and I stayed as I was. He was the choreographer, the one who instructed: I accepted instruction. I had already accepted the rules of engagement. Let what happened, happen. Consent is consent. And I owed it to him, and to his tragedy.
“Just look at that,” he said. “Admire yourself.” The touch pad glowed, the pattern of lights in the room changed, and I seemed to come into sharper definition in the mirror. I thought I could quite fall in love with myself. Were I a work of art I’d pay anything to own me: a Boucher come to life, exotic and erotic, breathing, sucking, fucking, lovely.
My grandmother Molly, wife of the difficult Wallace, had been something of a courtesan in her time. The paintings she left me had no doubt been earned, as his Lordship sometimes brutally put it, on her back. I could see I might well have inherited Molly’s temperament.
When I tore my eyes away from myself in all my loveliness, Alden, though wheelchair-bound, was nonetheless homo erectus, asserting the fact with his cock out, manoeuvering it as much for artistic effect as for his subjective pleasure. Its fleshy solidity flung back at him, at us, via a receding infinity of mirrors, back, and back, forever in space and time. And I was out there with it, endlessly split and detached: the baroque play of the repeated mirrored form, the infinite complexity. I started thinking of Roussel again, but squashed the inclination before it ran away with itself.
The fingers of his left hand wiggled over the touch-pad console, and the whole wall on the right of the bed slid back to reveal another of the Lukas carved pieces, this time a walnut cabinet from which he took an ordinary cheap wooden walking stick. He thrust it into the air with a flick of the wrist, like a fencer testing the weight and balance of a foil, then he reached toward me with it and hoiked my skirt deftly, if roughly, up to my waist. My diamond navel-ring caught the light and twinkled.
“That’s bloody real,” he said. “It’s vast.”
“No, no it isn’t,” I lied, as Max denied the cash hidden under his bed. “They’re Chinese. You can get them at any Bazaar branch.”
The under-wire of the left cup had burst its protective seam and was sticking into the flesh beneath my arm, but I rose above that. With the walking stick he splayed my legs.
“Look again,” he said, but now I did not like what I saw. I was no longer Boucher; it could have been any stupid Essex girl making an exhibition of herself in a cheap trailer-park porn film. I moved my legs together in defiance. He let me.
“You’ll get used to me,” he said. “Just tell me if I go too fast.”
So he saw a future between us. My heart leapt—it was not an intellectual reaction: I swear it was banging against my chest. I remembered our dog Vera, how she would leap up with joy and nearly knock my father over when he came into the room.
“Stay just like that,” he said; the door slid open and the wheelchair glided away and out of the room. I felt bereft. With difficulty I eased out the wandering under-wire from my bra so it stopped jabbing into me: did that count as moving? I took the other one out to make them match, and dropped the two wire semicircles onto the white carpet. I have pretty hands: the nails varnished today in the palest pink. They looked good against the white carpet, long, but not too long, elegantly oval.
He came back, the penis still pointing upward and outward like a crane, his shirt removed, his white chinos halfway down his thighs. His shoulders were very well developed, which was not surprising; his flesh was tanned. A fine figure of a man from the hips up, if you left out his legs which I had not yet seen. He brought with him the bottle of champagne (Cristal—I looked) and chocolates in a green and gold Harrods box.
“It isn’t spiked,” he said. “It hasn’t been opened.” He eased off the mushroom cork very slowly so that there was barely a pop, and no explosive ejaculation, and swigged some from the bottle. He handed it to me, telling me to be careful not to spill any, which struck a slightly awkward note, as a man does who folds his clothes before he gets into bed with you. But I overlooked it. It was a very, very, white untainted coverlet and a man might well want to protect it. I swigged. It was smooth and prickly.
He opened my mouth and took one of the chocolates and pressed it in between my lips, a cherry chocolate liqueur; it burst in my mouth, spilling over my lips; but he had a tissue at the ready and wiped my mouth carefully.
“Another?” he asked, and I nodded. One chocolate does lead to another in my experience, which is why I try to avoid them altogether, so it was a relief to have no choice. This one was Cointreau. The next was kirsch. My mouth was a gooey mass of chocolate, gradually dissolving. The cherry had been the best.
“That’ll do,” he said. “You’ve had enough.”
From a shelf in the Lukas cabinet he took out a shiny, brown leather corset and studied it; it was designed to fit from under the breasts to the crotch, with leather thongs in front for tightening.
“I’m going to require some help here,” he said. “Sorry.”
And before I could protest bloody Lam was in the room, with his great spooky eyes, his pointy Roswell-incident face and white polo-neck. The two of them started fussing through the items on the cabinet shelves, like matrons at a Women’s Institute bring-and-buy muttering to one another sporadically as they made the right selection.
Cuffs it was now to be, and anklets. I would have liked to have sat and had some say on the choice, but was too languid. There had been something in the chocolates: of course there had. No doubt they had left Harrods innocent and innocuous, but chocolates can be easily injected with a syringe. I decided it was odds on that that had been Lam’s job. There’s an Agatha Christie story where the murderer has laced the kirsch liqueurs with cyanide because the almond tastes would blend.
They took their time trussing me up, very meticulous. Alden buckled my left wrist, Lam my right. Lam lifted me up and Alden used the walking stick to push a pretty pink silk coverlet under me to protect the quilt. I was glad they were so house-proud, but I wondered what they had in mind. A sharp tug with the hook of the stick and the French knickers tore. That was okay, they’d passed muster, and the fabric was so fine they’d already frayed a bit. Time they were thrown away. I leaned forward helpfully while Alden buckled on the corset, pulling the cords so tight I felt the constriction on my ribs under my breasts, and my waist being cinched firmly in. It was not unpleasant.
Alden touch-padded and the bed posts slid nearer together. Cords tumbled down, like oxygen masks in a stricken airliner; the unromantic comparison made me smile and Lam peered down at me curiously, narrowing his eyes. He was now tying the left cuff to the right post but Alden shook his head and Lam desisted. I was grateful that my arms were not to be crossed but merely stretched. I wanted Alden to get on with whatever it was he up to: I wanted to turn the next page of the script.
I was pleased by this formality, the ingenuity. This was in a different league to cheap sex-shop handcuffs, which are so flimsy and ineffective you feel they have Health and Safety certificates attached, or the silk ties men like to use for light bondage, which are so slippery one can usually wriggle out of them.
Lukas was a different matter altogether: colleague of Alden’s in creativity and superstar artisanal, with his Rousselian union of sex and ingenuity, complexity, imprisonment and liberation, his own special master machine. Alden seemed to sense that my intellect was firing up again and started pushing more liqueur chocolates into my mouth, while Lam stood by with a tissue. Every now and then Lam, gently dabbing, blinked, and the closing and opening of his eyelids seemed to take forever, they had such an area to cover. He was the mad scientist’s butler in a ’30s Bela Lugosi movie.
Now the right ankle to the right post, the left to the left. There was some technical trouble here. One of the posts didn’t slide properly, and stuck. Alden cursed Lukas. This annoyed me a little. Sod Lukas, it was taking the attention away from me. They made do as best they could but my legs were not parted as widely as they had planned. They used what Alden spoke of in impatient terms as a spreader instead: a rigid metal bar which went from ankle to ankle and served the same purpose.
I must have been taking too much of an interest in what was going on, because Alden, who clearly preferred me somnolent, now took his time in selecting a cherry liqueur from the box and I opened my mouth to receive it but instead he pushed it up my cunt as a kind of afterthought, with his long, welcomely accommodating fingers. I needed to be fucked but Alden seemed to have no such immediate intention: it just came nearer and nearer without arriving, like Xeno’s paradox. I didn’t even mind if Lam stayed around. He was more like an affect-free alien than anything. He probably didn’t even have a penis any more than Spock did.
Little patches of mental clarity opened and closed in the downy cumulo-nimbus clouds I floated among, pain-free and comfy as heaven. Whatever was in the chocolates was making me feel very nice.
“The rich are different from you and me,” I mumbled to myself. “They have better drugs …”
Lam raised an eyebrow, but his eyes stayed impassive.
“What did she say?” asked Alden, but Lam just shook his head briefly and dismissively. Alden’s wheelchair took him up to the head of the bed; he took each of my hands in turn and with a pair of nail clippers, carefully, took the nails of the first and second fingers down so they were really short and smooth, almost down to the quick. Thumb, third and little fingers stayed long, pinky-silvery and oval. It would look pretty odd tomorrow but I didn’t care. Alden was marking me, as a cattle dealer might brand a cow. Let him. If I changed my mind about it in the morning I could always take the other nails down to match. Time would pass, nails, like hair, always grow.
I had only known Alden for a few hours. Very nice of me to be such a trusting person. I congratulated myself. Alden, disadvantaged by a sour fate, crippled since he was a boy, was my good deed for the day, and I felt good about it like a girl-scout helping a crippled man cross a busy highway.
“I do love you!” I confided in him. “I want to cure you and make you whole. I want to make you happy.”
“What a sweetheart you are,” he remarked. “But sshh—you don’t need to speak, Joan my pet. Best not to say a thing.” And he gave me a delicate little kiss, which was bliss: the very first time our lips had touched, and it seemed extravagantly romantic.
“Pets need collars,” Lam spoke for the first time, and Alden frowned and gave a sage nod of assent. Lam foraged a studded leather dog collar from the cupboard, which matched the wrist straps and was as wide as I’d ever seen. Alden slipped it under my neck, raised my head, and buckled the collar round my neck, fastening it at the back. Lam handed him a leash which he clipped onto the collar, letting it hang loose—or so I thought, but now I could barely turn my head to see. But there was no mistaking it: an ordinary dog lead, just like the one we used to walk Vera, our over-demonstrative, annoyingly loving golden Labrador bitch. I thought this was touching and sighed affectionately and would have laid my head on one side but I could not. It would just have to stay high, as in a deportment class at school when we walked round with books on our heads. I felt proud, and saw great symmetrical dignity in the V-patterns my stretched limbs made in the overhead mirror.
I found I was singing the “70s” Coca-Cola song: “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.” That didn’t go down well. I had forgotten the stricture to silence. I soon found I had a rather large red plastic ball in my mouth, attached by a ribbon tied round my head, and all I could do now was gurgle.
Lam then saw to my make-up, which seemed odd, but maybe butlers are trained to do anything. I don’t usually wear a great deal—my skin being lovely enough without it, and my eyelashes naturally long and dark: I mostly stick with eye-shadow, eyeliner and eyebrow tweezers. He patted foundation on with his clammy hands, ringed my eyes with brown liner, brushed on sweeps of green and brown eye-shadow. He penciled soft dark-blue kohl along the pale inside lower rims of the eyes. You feel vulnerable around the eyes, but I had to trust him. His hand did not falter. He lipsticked heavily round such of my lips as he could get at for the red ball-gag in my mouth, though the bright red he was using was so unsubtle it would never have made the first round to my dressing table. Then he rearranged my hair to hide the straps which held the gag in place.
Alden watched.
“Now Joan perfect dream partner,” said Lam.
I looked up at myself in the mirror and saw a bondaged Barbie doll staring back. Then like a sulky child I took offense. Not at what had been done to me, the stripping away of individuality, but because I was attached to an ordinary dog lead of the kind anyone could buy in a pet shop. They had no right to treat a nursery school teacher like this. Alden obviously had all the money in the world. Wasn’t I worth better than that? How could he skimp on the dungeon paraphernalia? I struggled, but with legs and arms held fast and the corset only comfortable if I lay still, my leeway was only an inch or two in any direction. “That’s enough!” I tried to say, but what came out was mewing. The ball gag muffled language. And I had lost interest in sex: anticipation can devour itself and be reborn as boredom. I felt very, very cross with Alden.
A sudden unexpected sensation up my cunt: another chocolate, I assumed, my mouth being too much hassle to get at or into. And then two more, pushing the others higher: my interest in sex returned. Whatever was in the chocolates was quick acting, and lasted I estimated about ten minutes, but time was hard to assess, as if it wasn’t conforming to type but doing something that would interest Einstein.
The pattern of lights changed: I focused on the mirror above, vaulted with repeated me dolls. I was alone in the room. The door was open. Anyone could see in. There was no sign of Alden or Lam. Perhaps Ray might come down and see. I wouldn’t want that. On the other hand he might rescue me. I was conscious suddenly of a tingling at the pulse point in my wrists, my ankles, under my breasts, which intensified and fell away at the same time as a pulsing humming sound began, rising and falling in volume—the hertz waves again, I thought, translated into sound. If I struggled the pitch changed. I tested it out a little. I had a vision of myself as part of some atrocious mechanized disharmony devised by avant-garde composer of evil genius: in other words, from first principles, Alden. It occurred to me that the tingling sensations came from areas where they place the pads if you get your electrocardiogram done. All this had been an elaborate feint, a cover for nothing more than wiring me up for hospital monitoring: I was nothing but raw recording fodder, to be subsumed into Thelemy: The Silence of the Senses.
Turn the page of the eidetic memory: here’s the digest. Whatever’s in the chocolates has worn off. I am beginning to feel stiff. The ball in my mouth is making my lips sore. I take refuge in thought. The Abbey of Thélème, Rabelais’ creation, around 1530. “How the Thelemites were governed: and of their manner of living.” The one governance: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law—Fay ce que vouldras. A rule asking to be taken in vain by its adherents, for Rabelais’ folk of the Thelemite community were “free, well-born, well-bred and conversant in honest companies, and have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them to virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice.” Ironically, it became the motto of Sir Francis Dashwood’s Hellfire Club in the caves under his High Wycombe estate two hundred years later, where all kinds of sinister doings went on. Another century or so and “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” became the call to arms of voluptuary and black magician Aleister Crowley, the self-styled Beast 666, born 1875, died 1947, who claimed that the Golden Dawn could be won through the focused attention of the base and depraved into their own voluptuary satisfactions. The thoughts become dangerous. I switch my mind to more immediate considerations.
How long am I to lie here? Supposing they never come back? Of course they will. My whereabouts are known, I came in a black cab. I can be traced back. Just to loosen the corset would be a comfort. It is crushingly tight. How did the Victorians live with these things? A twenty-one-inch waist was nothing to them. The lady’s maid would put her foot in the small of your back and she’d pull the strings tight with all her strength. I have Lam for a lady’s maid, unasked. My waist is 24 in normal times and from the feel of it it’s squeezed down to 21. Alden has strong arms, understandably. I am sure I am dribbling, though I can’t see any sign of it in the mirror above. The pattern of lights re-constellate around me. I am spotlighted. I can’t turn my head to shade my eyes. I shut them, but it’s so glaringly bright my eyelids can’t keep it out, so I open them again and squint. Yes, it’s true, I am dribbling. That’s horrid, humiliating. Think of other things. This is own fault, you stupid cow. You should never be sorry for people. While I agitate the background drone rises in pitch. It seems to be picking up my heartbeat now.
I flee again into the world of facts.
The search for the dream-partner? Where had I come across that? More Crowley? Yes. “First raise the sexual energies before sleep by constant sexual stimulation without orgasm, then concentrate onto a talisman bearing a requisite symbol, and in dreams the aroused libido will copulate with the dream-partner. The talisman will thus become magically charged, and would make a particular wish come true.”
My great-grandmother visited Aleister Crowley in his house in Primrose Hill Road, down the hill from Alden’s place, up the road from mine. It was 1929: she went along in terrified anticipation, seeking a spell that would release her from love, but found a scene of shockingly inane domestic decorum: the Beast holding a skein for his mother while she rolled wool from it into a ball, the better to knit his winter jumper.
But her friend, Nina Hammet the sculptor, found him otherwise three years later in his apartment at Ninety-Three, Jermyn Street. Tales of Satanic masses, witchcraft, sacrifice of virgins and sexual excess of every kind at his Abbey of Thélème in Cefalu in Sicily had been titivating newspaper readers for years. Nina recorded the overwhelming smell of incense, mysterious fires which would burst into flame around the room, burn vigorously and then just as suddenly douse themselves, and quite horrid portraits on the walls of the mysterious entities which came to Crowley in visions. She left as soon as politeness permitted. When he subsequently sued her for describing him in print as a “black magician,” he lost. The collapse of an unwise libel case, as so often, rubbished his position in society. He was shunned and excoriated. Nevertheless the cult of Crowley lingers on. Think about it, Joan. Knights of Thelemy resurrected in Southgate. Ray a student. Alden with his atonal symphonics, the thelemic silence of the senses. Higher powers. Control over others. The Will, for good or bad. This is bad. With a shiver of recognition, I fear that on the Day of Reckoning I might be caught on the wrong side.
The music drones on at a pitch which is now like a soft breathing purr, and it’s sending vibrations through my body which seem to have anesthetic powers. None of me is hurting. And it’s sending me to sleep. I am broadcasting back to myself my own soporific narcosis. A feedback loop of sleep. I have the brainwave that you could market this drone and make piles of money. But no other thoughts succeed. I sleep.
My awakening is shocking. I am almost without restraints, lying on my side, though my right leg is up by my left shoulder, pushed up and held there by one of Alden’s strong hands. The lights are dim; the ceiling mirror is blacked out. The gag-ball is still fixed in my mouth; other than the fact that Alden, naked, is driving his penis into my vagina from behind, I am relatively free. It is a patient rhythm, a regular, mechanical piston. In—thump, out—thump, in—thump, out—thump, goes the pile driver. His resolution and determination, just not his impetuosity, is most impressive. For me, the wished-for consummation has come, and it’s pretty good. Remembering it now I think of the William Blake line: “What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of gratified desire!” With every steam-hammer drive of his, my inner answering self responds. I can hear my own cries, and his gasps. I feel ecstasy welling up gradually, to the unbearable and beyond, the culmination, the after shocks, only slowly fading … the best kind. Thank you, Alden.
Perhaps for Alden the dream partner indeed approaches. It isn’t me. He grinds and pumps on. He could stop now so far as I am concerned. The evening must surely soon be over. Rationality must return. Now he has both my hands in one of his, together in front of me: the angle has changed, but the beat continues remorseless. The other hand releases the tie round my head so I’m able to force the gag-ball out with my tongue. I cry out, because the ache when my mouth muscles revert to their normal form is extreme, yet exciting: if this goes on will I become a full-blown masochist? Suddenly I want more. My ass arches toward him of its own account.
And then he stops, and withdraws, and says, “I’m sorry, Joan. I still can’t.”
Or won’t, or won’t! How men will punish women by failure to complete sex. It is strange to be called by my name, even though it is not the right one. I have quite forgotten I had an identity. I try to ignore the hollow feeling in my cunt, now there is nothing in it, and become quite maternal, and when I have recovered some self-control I say: “It’s all right, there, there,” and so on.
To which he says, “No, actually, Joanie, it is not all right,” and I feel I have let him down, I have failed as a woman. I have failed to neutralize the trauma of the past. The explosion that haunts him still. I see the eager, handsome youth, the chemicals stolen from the school lab, the boy playing with fire: the mistake, the shock of realization, the roar, the pain, the dark, the waking to the reality of the half-life of the future, then the triumph of great difficulties heroically overcome, of fortune achieved—but the trauma remains. He still can’t trust the world. Fulfillment can’t be reached. The body triumphs but the soul fails. Tears of compassion fill my eyes.
My earlier paranoiac fantasies, that I was part of some musical composition, have vanished, only to be replaced by maudlin sentiment, which I wish to disown even as I feel it. I hope it is something to do with the drugs I have been given. I dash away the tears, glad that my hands are free to do such a thing, before Alden notices.
I have been fucked, and not fucked. I am confused. I am more Vanessa than Joan again. I want to get home, if only in order to re-establish some kind of sanity. My mouth is recovering, but my arms have been pulled in their sockets and I am beginning to feel it. My knees ache: the spreader-bar kept my legs unnaturally straight and my ankles apart for too long, and my cunt is sticky from sodding chocolate of all things. I need a bath and I want a rest, and I am not sure what I feel about Alden, except now I can see his poor helpless legs, and they are too thin for the rest of him.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” I hear myself saying. “Maybe you’ll be used to me by then. I’m sure we’ll do better. Only—please—could we somehow do without Lam?”
He thought about it. His prick had subsided, and lay, a great long lobcock thing, red from exercise and abrasion against over-narrow loins. He pulled the pink silk over himself, modestly, as I sat up. He did not like to be looked at. I wondered at my own confidence in expecting he would want to see me so soon, even at all. And I would like three or four days to recover from this.
I was off the bed, piecing together the rags of my dress, abandoning the French knickers, running my fingers through my hair to put some sense back into it, rubbing my neck to help the marks from the collar buckles go away. His eyes follow me.
“I’ll send a taxi at 7:30 tomorrow,” he said, eventually. “We’ll try and do without Lam if that’s what you want. But I really think I need an assistant.”
I refrained from saying that once he had managed a complete sex act the elaborate foreplay—for so I had decided to think of it—we had gone through that evening would be unnecessary. It might even begin to seem absurd. But I had to let him come to that conclusion in his own good time.