I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING refreshed and none the worse for my experience. A good bath, some essential oils in it—camomile and a touch of angelica root—for aromatherapy; after a sound night’s sleep whatever it was that had made me feel poorly was already cleansing out of my metabolism. Also, of course, sex always has a tonic after-effect.
The fact that I had £5,000 in cash and instructions to spend it on clothes made my step all the lighter. I called through to Max and said I had a migraine. I knew he would square it with the management: he owed me for the tennis champion, an incident that now seemed to me half a lifetime ago. His wife would be checking in this morning after an early arrival at Heathrow around nine and I wished them every happiness. Because of my ministrations he would be feeling less tense and have got a better night’s sleep than otherwise: it is best to be in mental, physical and emotional nick for any kind of power games. Clinton may have been right when he maintained that blow jobs didn’t count, in spite of the uproar from the feminists. It is a here-and-now kind of thing, and affection does not necessarily flow between sucker and sucked: nor should it, because it won’t necessarily give rise to any sense of emotional obligation. “But you and I made love last night, don’t you love me?” is at least a reasonable kind of question, as requiring the Latin prefix “nonne”: the “yes” of the yes? neither-or-both? no? trio: nonne? ne? num? “I gave you a blow job last night—don’t you love me?” if asked, must surely require the prefix “num” if it’s to be a sensible question at all.
Mouths and asses are not the most numinous receptacles of love in the longer term, though connecting at the time to the pleasure centers. Vaginas are obviously the more profoundly connected to the mixing and loving of male with female; new life is thus created, though that particular sacramental function these days gets overlooked.
I would have thought if I hadn’t known better that Alden was gay. The houses of people who have had children, or even mean to have them, are different from those of people who live without the expectation; these are cleaner and more self-conscious than the dwellings of the breeding kind, more post-modern, metro-centric, reflecting a culture with a declining birth rate, where appearance is valued above function.
Personally I had what I wanted: a top floor in a house built a century and a half ago, and showing it, looking out over the Canal at one of the prettier topographies in London, with a shabby old kitchen and an ergonomic office stripped for intellectual action.
I decided, thinking about Alden, that what he needed was social approval, acceptance. Why else the Radio 3 music? He wanted to be taken seriously. He designed environments for people who wanted to display art, but there wasn’t a single painting in his own place. The reason might well be that he doubted his own taste. The painting you buy is such a giveaway. At least mine were inherited so I wasn’t responsible for them. Maybe he could make a living from the art and design business, but his lifestyle suggested that there was nothing ordinarily sumptuary about its funding. But what? Something he was ashamed of, perhaps. Was he an arms dealer, or manufacturing portable toilets, or importing false teeth, or diluting antibiotics like Harry Lime in The Third Man? Something that would douse conversation at dinner parties?
My mind was over-active again: a doctor once claimed I had Bipolar Two syndrome, the liveable-with, workably acceptable, up-and-down kind of manic depression, and when I was a student the university head-shrinks put me on lithium—but the side-effects were worse than the BP2: I just couldn’t bear the way it slowed my mind up and it made my hands tremble, so I stopped. I learned instead to let my mind race, and enjoy the skill of controlling it like a rally driver does the gears of a car on the winding corniche roads of a mountain range.
Woo-hoo! I sang aloud. I tossed the soggy new July Vogue I was reading into the air, and watched it tumble into the loo like a shot bird. £5,000 cash! Hey! “Nothing cheap, a lot of color.” I leapt out of the bath, dried myself, and put £2,000 of it straight away between the pages of Jung, vol.13, Alchemical Studies. I slung on some Matalan jeans and a yellow T-shirt with the word “So?,” skipped my way to the taxi rank and headed for Knightsbridge with the rest.
Shop assistants can be very helpful, especially in SW1, where black-burkaed Arab wives and girlfriends wield their store cards in the designer boutiques, never given cash in case they use it to run away. They buy the fanciest clothes to wear beneath the shrouds, present their man the receipts, model the clothes for him, and their girl friends at the odd tea-party: then run round to the up-market thrift shops and exchange their purchases for cash. I would get Alden £5,000 worth of clothes: but I reckoned I had only to spend £3,000 doing it by deft recycling. £2,000 was what one of the more expensive professional girls would have charged for an evening’s bondage and full sex at the end of it. If the money shot was missing it wasn’t this girl’s fault.
The small shops are not above changing a receipt for the sake of a sale, and some of the clothes you find are gorgeous, from A-list designers, only one or two wearers from the catwalk, and lingerie to die for. You have to pay full price for shoes, though: I like the shoe departments in Harvey Nicks, so I went there and bought four pairs which set me back £1200, the most expensive an absurd pair of winter ankle boots by Stuart Weitzman in silver with a ruff of leopard fur and rather dangerous looking chrome heels, in a sale for only £320. Response to the butch-fey contrast of winter boots with a flimsy dress never fails. If I was to buy clothes to “model” for Alden, who was paying, the least I could do was coincide my taste with what he liked—which I inferred was tasteful-and-expensive nuanced with a little vulgarity: good girl plays the tart.
I left all my packages to date with the girl in the shoe department, and took the escalators to the sunny Fifth Floor Bar and drank a glass of chilly Pouilly Fuisse, refusing the eyes of all the men who were trying to meet mine.
Instead I meditated upon Alden, his long strong cock, blushed and seasoned from use, lolling across the poor puny leg, and exulted in the feelings of my body, aching here, sore there, which are the reward of good sex and keep the memory of it alive. I wondered what Alden had meant about “modeling,” and had a fit of nerves that it might be just that: literally, and without the sex. But I took a grip on myself: I didn’t quite think it would be. Some girls don’t mind it: being hung in slings and bonds and left to dangle and twist, get whipped a bit, but just be observed, and not get any penetrative sex—but that seems totally pointless to me.
And I wanted to know more about Alden; one side of him seemed so open and friendly, honest and frank, with his bright eyes and floppy hair, traumatized, wounded, secretly vulnerable. He needs me. But he needs me—helpless. And, if he keeps an artist in the attic, what does he keep in the basement? Is he the new Bluebeard—or Bluetooth—seeing sex as technology: one half man, one half sexual pleasure by remote control …?
He longs for acknowledgment as a creative genius, to be known as a great musician, respected not by the vulgar mass, not as a sing-along celebrity but up there in the ethereal zone of the avant-garde, ahead of the game with a fusion of the aleatory and techno-minimalism. His tastes and influences were catholic, from Webern to Satie, Ives to Várese, Cage to Reich and Terry Riley, Brian Eno to Iggy Pop, all coming into full frontal and final flood in Alden, worshipper at the shrine of the Golden Dawn.
My brain is running hares again. I’ve been staring into space, but I notice a man across the circular bar from me who supposes my attention is fixed on him. Shit! He’s an Arab in a very good suit and rather too much gold jewelry. He will have a very fast car and a tasteless flat somewhere behind Harrods, with a drinks bar and a water bed. He will have a long penis, will take Cialis every day for breakfast and be determined to get his money’s worth before it wears off. The ghost of a smile, and he nods toward the door: I must say I am a little tempted. It would be so excellent to be free of thought, just for a time.
But I move my head from side to side, and look down at my glass. No. No one else in the bar will have noticed the exchange, it is so fast, but certain. I look around the bar, finishing my wine, and catch his little shrug—her loss, not mine—and he turns his attention elsewhere. It’s a near thing, though. Fucking bipolarity: my doctor says if I won’t take lithium, Valium is the next best thing in emergencies, and after that sex, and after that shopping.
I’ve left the Valium at home, declined the sex, and spent all I was going to part with of my allocated money. On my way out of the store to the Lowndes Square side where the taxis wait at the round hotel I see a little last year’s Marc Jacobs purse, orange with buckles, knocked down to nothing—£103—and use my one working credit card. That takes it up to its limit. I’ll pay some of the Jung money into the account tomorrow, I promise myself. It’s there for emergencies, but this sort of was one. A kind assistant from the Trish McEvoy counter helps me with my bags to the taxi—one shopaholic recognizes another, I suspect, or maybe she wanted to get out in the sunlight for a minute—and I go home to prepare myself in tranquility for the evening. It was the right thing to do: the Jacobs bag had got my head back into gear, so I even managed half an hour on my thesis.
The doorbell rings at ten past seven, and I trit-trot down with all my bags and carriers, and there’s Loki at my door with the black cab waiting behind. I’m wearing the Weitzman boots with the leopard-fur trim and five-inch heels, which is about as high as you can go and still walk. I’m wearing jeans and a sleeveless Miguelina goddess top in a diaphanous orangey-pink which you wear with a soft beigey-pink floating tie at the waist—jeans are fairly indestructible and the gauze tie could at a pinch be used as a top. My stockings were black mesh hold-ups almost to the groin and with a wide pink band across the top, but they would not be seen, of course, until I took my jeans off. I had the little Marc Jacobs bag, with the receipts in it as well as lipstick, comb and stuff. None of this was exactly Joan, but I’d had my instructions.
And then Loki says, “I’ve got a message for you, Miss Bennet. Mr. Alden says he’s sorry, he can’t make it to-night, and so can it be tomorrow instead? He’s had to fly to Scotland unexpectedly.”
I sighed sweetly and said: “Oh, what a relief. I’ve so much marking to do. Tomorrow’s just great!” I smiled, nodded then closed the door on him. It was a close one: I nearly said “Tell Mr. X to go fuck himself,” but I didn’t. I could I suppose have said to Loki, “How about going down the pub then?”—but I didn’t seem to have done that either.
I had some unfinished business with Alden. I’ve had the odd hard physical slap in my time—we won’t go there though—and once I was sworn at for a slut, which hurt a bit. But I am not accustomed to being stood up. The walking out, the letting down—if it’s got to happen, I do that.
When I got upstairs I took today’s choice off and put the clothes aside for tomorrow, to save myself the trouble of going through all that freedom of choice again, then called a few girlfriends but they were all busy, or had just had babies, or wanted to moan about baby-sitters. So I took two Temazepams, went to bed, and slept right through until eight next morning.
I was calm about it in the morning. It was probably for the best, I decided: there were still marks on my wrists and ankles. I was dwelling in a kind of erotic haze. I could feel the ball-gag still in my mouth.
I had breakfast in the staff canteen. Spare food from the guests’ breakfast menu—best organic bacon, crisp and delicate, not too salty, poached eggs on toast, a couple of chipolatas made from Gloucester Old Spot pigs, and a roll and apricot preserve. And the coffee was divine. I hadn’t realized I was so hungry. If you’re prepared to eat the surplus from the restaurant you get the very best quality food but slightly congealing and crusty and not necessarily hot where hot is expected. If you eat what they cook in the staff kitchen, it’s a quarter the quality and cost: that is to say tough, fatty bacon, stale eggs, heavy rolls, plain apricot jam rather than preserve, instant coffee not real, and so on, but often straight from the stove. Those less secure than me turn up their noses at the restaurant leftovers; that’s their choice.
Max came down to find me as I was dabbing the last butter and confiture off my lips.
He said he was so glad I’d come in this morning, and not taken yet another day off. He’d hoped I would because he had a job for me. A really civilized young gent from Saudi, asking for a nice girl to take to lunch and spend an hour or two with him in 404, one of the posher suites. Not a cash job; his father kept him on a tight rein, but he had a diamond ring to offer.
“Where’d he get it—nick it from his mum?” I asked.
“Probably.” Max gave a little laugh to humor me.
“How old is he?”
“Sixteen.”
And I said, he’d better be, because not only is age of consent a can of worms in this country—paid sex it’s eighteen, unpaid sex it’s sixteen—but in Saudi you have to be married to have sex with anyone, male or female. In theory. Max said he didn’t think there’d be a problem: he was a pleasant and civilized youngster staying overnight before flying back to Saudi with leave from his English public school to attend an important family celebration. The father was a frequent guest at the hotel, and always booked 404 for himself and family members—the worldly-wise Max was curiously calmed, reassured and impressed by consistency.
But I demurred. I’d just eaten breakfast so the thought of lunch a couple of hours on didn’t tempt me: my young brother Robert is sixteen—they’re no conversationalists. I could envision tedious awkwardnesses. Also, I tried to keep these jobs down to two a week, and there had been the tennis player a couple of days back; and the evening with Alden had counted as five in one—now full sex with a teenager who might not be as old as he claimed? I decided to say definitely: no.
And then I thought about Alden who’d stood me up. I really needed to wash that man right out of my hair for form’s sake, somehow, temporarily, otherwise my resentment might fester and threaten the relationship in the longer term, and this was probably the way karma, or God, had provided. I needed defragmenting like a computer, grounding, settling, and this was the way to do it. Alden couldn’t possibly know: how could he? Loki was to collect me at half past seven: nine hours to wait, and it would pass some of that time. So I said: “Okay, Max, let’s go for it.”
I don’t usually go with Arabs, especially not young ones, untamed by wives. They desire, yet despise western women, not without reason. The whole world knows about our binge-drinking sluts. They’ve seen every porn film on the net including the rape ones and are neurotic about sex to begin with. Their religion and culture persuades them that sex outside marriage is a sin, that if it were not for women there would be no lust: the West beams its porn screens at them and they resent it. But it also gives them copycat ideas. They tend to like blond, fragile-looking girls, and then take their bafflement out on them. The really nasty ones make you perform for them in some way that humiliates you—animals seem a favorite, though hard to organize in an hotel—before engaging with you, and hand you over to the bodyguards when they’ve had enough. A girl limps moaning away.
But a lad of sixteen with a family connection vouched for by Max, offering his mother’s ring in payment is a different matter, and one should not prejudge individuals, certainly not on grounds of race. Max said he’d had a word with management and they were okay with my being at lunch in the main restaurant, even though I was staff. They, too, were rather nervous at having the young man in the suite on his own: they could depend on me to sound him out and make sure he was the kind who would behave, and wouldn’t ask his friends round for some noisy all-night party.
Max would get the ring to his friendly fence, and I’d get a quarter of its proper value, no doubt. Somewhere around £1500, he reckoned. He’d take a 20% cut: I’d get the rest. It is always safer if goods in lieu change hands, certainly than checks or credit cards: all transactions are so closely monitored these days, so barter comes into its own.
I keep emergency clothes in Max’s office—vocational girls can find themselves in need of a quick change of appearance at short notice. I put on a prim little white blouse and a pink suit: very fresh and young looking. I felt rather good. I had slept more than I had for years the night before, had had an excellent breakfast, and had mysterious adventures with Alden to look forward to. I don’t think you could quite describe me as being “in love” but something was making my eyes glittery and my skin peachy. I thought the lad in 404 was rather lucky.
The table was booked for one o’clock. Max took me up to the boy’s suite at half past twelve. He was tall, coltish, good-looking, pleasant, half-deferential, half-conceited—a typical product of those more expensive schools. He had big hands: the one wrapped round his champagne glass looked as if it might break it. He spoke in perfect English with the accent of the jet-setting classes: English upper class with an American drawl flecked with occasional slang from the black inner cities. He shook my hand formally, said he was grateful to meet me. He’d thought we should meet briefly before lunch so that if either of us changed our minds we could take leave of one another straight away. He was immensely courteous and condescending.
I said for my part that I thought he lived up to his name—Hasan—which means handsome. He asked me what Vanessa meant and I said “butterfly,” and he said he liked that; I was colorful and charming. So it seemed fairly certain that the afternoon would go as planned.
He confessed that he had not made love to a woman before and that it was not in his culture to do so. He nevertheless did not wish to have to go back home a virgin and ignorant of the ways of the world. He did not want to have to be dependent on his father and the gossip of boys for knowledge. He had seen a few porn sites at school but they seemed to him crude and disagreeable, and they turned him off. He preferred to do things properly or not at all. He had seen the body of one of the house matrons at school: she would display herself naked before a window at night for the benefit of the boys, but she had been fired.
I thought if this was the pattern of the new Arab princeling, peace on earth might yet be achieved. He hesitatingly asked me if I could just quickly take my clothes off so he knew better who he was talking to over lunch, so I did. Not a strip tease—we were short of time, after all—but clinically, as if I were at the doctors. He studied me from back and front, and touched my breasts.
“I had not realized quite how different a woman is from a man,” he said. “In this country they try to be the same thing, but I don’t think they will have much luck: it’s not the will of God.”
His religion was right: he could understand the need to keep a woman well covered. The naked female body was quite definitely an incitement to lust. He delicately and reverently put a finger into my clit, just half an inch, and then withdrew it.
“Paradise is at the feet of the mother,” he said, and asked me if I had children and when I said no, said he was glad because soon he would be dishonoring me, but sorry, because someone as beautiful as me should be busy reproducing from an early age. He then excused himself rather hastily and went into the bathroom for five minutes and I put my clothes on again.
He tripped over his adolescent feet on the way down, thus spoiling the illusion of total competence, but even then he just smiled benignly and said he was afraid his age made him clumsy. He hoped to grow out of it and had been assured that he would.
What did we talk about? We agreed to only have one course, the sooner to get back to 404. He had a posh version of fish and chips and mushy peas and I had a salad. I drank champagne: he, mindful of his religion, drank Sprite from a champagne flute. He moaned a little about this and that, as teenagers do, mostly about his parents. Once he got home tomorrow he would have to spend a lot of time sitting next to his mother while she tried to push nuts and sweetmeats between his lips. She wept if he objected. It was moral blackmail. He had essays to write; it wasn’t as if they were all sitting under some date palm in the desert, and he wasn’t a girl. He wished she would not do it. His father would try and take him to a whorehouse, but he thought that would be unspeakably vulgar. His father had three other wives, apparently, and I asked if this upset his mother but he shook his head firmly, and said no: his father was very respectful of women and always careful to serve all three equally. We drank our black coffee quickly and left.
Picture the next scene. Young Hasan lies naked on the bed, his cock reaching almost to his navel. It is as big as it is clumsy, awkward as it is hopeful, coltish as his feet and hands. The bodies of adolescent youths are a strange mixture of soft and bony, protuberances and concavities. He has his hands clasped behind his head while he watches me strip, until I walk about the room with only my heels on.
“How your breasts bounce!” he says, amused. “How strange and uncomfortable it must be for women!” The cock twitched and jerked of its own accord. He looked at it as if it was some over-importunate stranger whose language he failed to understand. He tried to hold it down, and asked how a man could tell false boobs from real ones, so I explained it was a mixture of texture, appearance and likelihood. If a woman has a bean-pole body and very round big breasts they’re not likely to be her own. Likewise if they are formulaically circular. If a woman wears flat heels her breasts will usually be her own. I had no time to elaborate because he unexpectedly leapt from the bed with the energy of a jack-in-the-box and bore me down beneath him, pushing my thighs apart. He entered me at once, thrust thrice and immediately groaned in orgasm.
“That was too quick,” he said, blushing apologetically. I had to agree. I told him it took practice and in a little while we would try again. He lay on his back on the bed and I gave him a lesson in theory. I explained that there was a thing called foreplay which made women receptive. I explained a man could ignore it but to do so limited his own long-term pleasure. The woman would put up with him, no doubt, but it was always better to have her full-hearted enjoyment. By and large where the cock went the finger should go before. I explained about the alleged difference between the vaginal and the clitoral orgasm. His hand moved into my cunt, and he found the clitoris and made me squeal involuntarily. Some women’s are more hidden than others, I said, but it’s always there somewhere. His cock was already swelling again. Another minute and he was in me again, and I was breathless and pounded: he realized he had to support himself on his elbows and took the weight off me.
That lasted a full five minutes. Then it was back to instruction, “I bet your teachers like you at school,” I said. “You listen, and learn.” He said his favorite subject was physics. He would like to be a nuclear scientist, but he needed extra tuition with the math.
If he was looking for holes, I went on, he must go very gently until he got the angle right. Bottoms needed lubricating. Rough sex, domination, was fine by consent but must be worked up to gradually; although sudden changes of mood and attack could be welcome. Breasts must be treated equally: if the left was nibbled then the right should be equally so, otherwise it made women feel oddly uneasy. Condoms? A requirement, especially in gay circles or the black community. He said in Saudi you didn’t run into that too often. I said actually if you stuck to heterosexual, well-heeled partners, as I did, then you could proceed pretty much as women had in the old days, worrying about pregnancy rather than disease: relying on coitus interruptus to get by. I referred to the “please cum all over my face” phenomenum in the porn films, a play-safe device which did instead of condoms.
By now his cock was standing impudently up again, and he turned me over, and entered me from behind as I crouched. I explained that you didn’t have to do it in the same position till you’d finished, but could swap and change, so he took the point at once: now I was on my back with my legs over my head, but that excited him so much his timing went haywire again: at six minutes, though, it was still an improvement.
I explained about the necessity of lubrication for anal sex, the idea of which had at first rather appalled him. I had neglected to bring any but he found the free organic hand cream from the hotel bathroom which I didn’t reckon would do me much harm. But I said first there really had to be some foreplay: he couldn’t think only about himself forever: we had to now go into the whole business of oral sex. He seemed rather surprised to find this so high on the sexual menu but I demonstrated the art of the blow job, which is patient attention to the man’s pleasure but not necessarily always your own. He came in my mouth, neck stretched to heaven in marvel. I swallowed. I said not all women would do that but personally I thought a dose of young male testosterone did me good. He recovered from sudden shyness to lick into my cunt, blowing and fingering. And the next time we went on for twenty minutes; properly, foreplay to oral sex to full sex to anal sex. I tried not to cry out too loud, because 406 was occupied: the walls at the Olivier are not all that thick.
He asked me how he could tell when a woman was faking, and I said if he was wondering she probably was faking, but it was rude to inquire. Some women got very spiteful and bad-tempered if a man had an orgasm while she did not: but this was a very frequent occurrence and most women would fake out of consideration to the man, or if she had other things to do and wanted to get it over with.
One more time, or was it two? We had a little siesta side by side, then some more. He was inexhaustible. The thing rose and collapsed and rose again as if he was making up for years of lost time which I supposed he was.
“Nine times,” he said, happily. “Is that good?”
“That’s very good,” I assured him. “And like riding a bicycle; once learned you never lose the knack.”
Concerned that I was tired, and thanking me for my instruction, which he generously said would stand him in good stead for the rest of his life, he told me it was time to bring the session to an end. He was courteous but firm. He had a flight to catch at eight o’clock; he supposed I couldn’t help him with his packing? I said, actually no to that, and had a bath in 511 which was empty, checked in with Max to touch base, then went home to recover. I washed my hair, and put it in curlers.
I felt quite noble and content: my day had been well spent. I had made a worthwhile contribution to the well-being of society. I was like Joan, I thought, “wanting to make a difference.” It is gratifying, anyway, when one is good at something, to pass one’s knowledge on.
I put on a CD of Mozart’s K421 quartet in D minor and I waited for Loki to arrive. The delicate music sounded like dance and conversation in shifts, sometimes both at once and seemed to grow naturally out of the stillness of the evening.