Surrender to Mr. X

Surrender to Mr. X

Rosa Mundi

New York • London

© 2012 by Rosa Mundi

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Ninety-Three Days On

At The Front Desk

In the Bound Beast and Bumpkin

Suite 402

Home

Dinner With Alden

In The Bedroom

Going Home

Getting to Know You

Clothes Mare

Being Joan

Domesticity

Two Women

A Weekend in the Country

In the Name of Art

A Weekly Routine

A Family Episode

Evenings at the Club

Scenarios

Suburbia

Lam Juggles

Living sacrifice

A New Beginning

The Pay Back

Quiet Seas

True Love

The Siblings Come To Town

Stress And Paralysis

Party

A Scandal

I
RAN HOME, IN THE
end. Not really ran all the way, I hailed a taxi: but it is fair to say that I fled for my life, who knows, maybe for more than my life, dressed only in Jimmy Choo cracked metallic silver four inch heels, no-crotch Wolford fishnets, beige cashmere jacket—sequined, Christian Lacroix, but well cutaway—and without my purse. Fear and anger propelled my flight. Mother told me once that I should never go to a party without the fare home: as it happened I had a folded twenty-pound note in my pocket.

The party—though that may not be quite the right word—was in Hampstead, a couple of miles away from where I live in Little Venice, by the canal. It's not really me to walk any distance by day let alone night, if only because my heels are so high, so it was just as well the money was to hand. Otherwise I might have killed the anger, decided escape was too much like hard labor, too much strain on the ankles, stayed, and been
destroyed. I don't need hindsight to know that I was within a sulfury whiff of it.

I had borrowed the £20 from the rent money, which I hid as cash between the leaves of Wittgenstein's
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
, on the grounds that no-one else but me is going to open it. I'd put it in the pocket of the Lacroix jacket at suppertime on June 21st, having perhaps some intuition of what was to come—a feeling of adventure in the air on that midsummer's night—where it was to stay until 21st September, the date of my flight.

I do love Lacroix. Not just for the pocket, I'm in his debt for that, but the way the clothes make you feel so extravagant, dramatic and luxurious: textures surprise and delight, discretion and glitter exult in tandem. I like to think that's my style.

During the ninety-three days of my dealings with Alden X and his painter friend, Ray, I could not focus on Wittgenstein, nor even on Kant's somewhat easier
Copernican Revolution
, nor my twenty-four volumes of Jung's
Collected Works
. I was meant to be getting on with my PhD thesis on “changes in the group psyche as created through faulty perceptions of reality as exacerbated by implicit distortions of meaning in the new lingua franca: Bill Gates' Microsoft.”

But during that summer, the year I turned twenty-six, if I turned the pages the words meant nothing: they hung alien and unconnected on the page. If I tried to write nothing came. It worried me. Can the life of the
flesh so undermine the life of the mind that one loses all powers of reasoning? Or interest in them? Or perhaps it's okay to take lust and intellect in shifts, and not to try to live a balanced life and kind of synthesize your own Prozac, like you're supposed to do.

I
WORK PART-TIME IN ONE
of London's plusher hotels, the Olivier in Covent Garden, and it was there at my post behind the reception desk that I first met Alden, on June 21st last year. At eleven that morning I had checked in a Mrs. Matilda Weiss and her party. She traveled with a posse of three—nutritionist, personal trainer and lawyer. She had booked into our Premiere Suite, 406, the others into cheaper rooms on the second floor. Mrs. Weiss was a botox-happy Manhattan matron and socialite in her fifties, passing for her thirties, newly divorced, slim as a rake; dressed in taupes with heavy gold hung here and there. She was not a pleasant person, and caused trouble from the start, demanding instant personal access to the chef for her nutritionist; and installed in her suite, sent down to demand black grapes instead of the white ones in the complimentary fruit bowl, banging on that they were too acid. Takes one to know one; she'd know all about acid. Some guests never feel at home until they have registered a
whole string of quite ingenious complaints.

Two hours later, at ten to one precisely, Alden came toward me in his wheelchair, broad-shouldered, energetic, cheerful, brown floppy hair, a man with bright-eyed film-star looks, though rather more in the square-jawed manly Warren-Beatty mold of yesterday, than today's softer, more troubled Tom-Hanks-ish look. Late thirties, I thought; wealthy. His suit was good, his wheelchair Italian and custom built. He had a paid companion to push it, a pasty young-old little man with an egg-shaped head, over-large, dark, watchful eyes and clammy hands, whom I was eventually to know as Lam.

I paged Suite 406 to tell Mrs. Weiss that Mr. Alden X was here for lunch and for my pains was rewarded with: “Lunch—with that fucking crazy? He is joking? Tell him to shove his interior designs up where no sun shines, is that interior enough? Or can't he reach, sitting in a wheelchair?” and further words to this effect.

I held the phone further away from my ear but the contemptuous voice crackled on, the others now hearing it the better before I realized what I'd done. Lam frowned in concern—his lugubrious eyes seemed even panicky—but Alden just smiled and said quietly, “Don't worry about it, kid. Just put the receiver down.”

So I did.

“It's an ill wind,” said Alden. “Perhaps you'll have a drink with me instead?”

I had to say yes, but not because he was disabled
and might have interpreted any reluctance on my part as insult. I was curious. This is embarrassing, but I'm going to say it anyway: faced with a good-looking and vigorous man in a wheelchair one's mind instantly goes to practicalities: can he, can't he? Was he born like that or was there an accident? Will he get better or is it permanent? How does he manage? Does he confine himself to oral things; was the important part of him permanently limp, or even altogether gone? Perhaps it was part of his minder's remit to hoist his master on to all fours so he could perform? Or did he just lie on his back? Or… what? I wanted to know. I needed to find out. Because I'm a philosopher, and trained to ask questions about the world of phenomena? Or my natural curiosity, like that which killed the cat?

I said we'd have to wait for the concierge to come back. Max was down in the kitchens trying to soothe the chef, who was still miffed because of the earlier insult to his white grapes, a special purchase—they had a particularly fine flavor and delicate skins—flown in from the Andes or wherever they grow them in June. My shift was technically over at one o'clock, but if Mr.—?

“Call me Alden,” he said. “Alden X.”

—If Alden didn't mind waiting five minutes or so, my shift would be over and I'd be free, I said. Conversation with someone in a wheelchair is difficult. You have to talk down to them, as if they were a child.
I rather wished I hadn't said yes, and then felt guilty for wishing it. Also, I was slightly miffed because he hadn't asked me to lunch but only for a drink. I know the girl behind reception can hardly expect to be treated with the same courtesy as a guest, but even so these social distinctions can make you paranoiac if you're on the wrong side of them.

He asked me what my name was and I said “Joan Bennet,” and added that I was only temporary staff. I had a proper profession. He asked me what that was and I said I was a nursery school teacher. I was working extra hours at the Olivier to pay for a course in teenage counseling. He said that sounded very virtuous and I said I was.

What else was I to tell him? The truth? That my name is Vanessa d'A. and I have a double first in philosophy, and while working toward my PhD I earn money best as I may? Nothing puts most men off like too much class or cleverness in a woman. It's still true: they need to feel they're your superior. Best to come over as a nurse or a teacher, and there are no disappointments; everyone knows where they are and cocks rise uninhibited.

I am virtuous enough, in my way. My mother once told me that the only difference between a professional girl and the others is that the first take money for sex and the rest don't. She's a lady vicar in the Church of England with her own vocation, so I take her word for it. She could even be a bishop one day if Synod
ever gets its act together about female equality. I do not sell my body for a living. I see it as the temple of my soul, as my mother explains to me that it is, and so I respect it accordingly. It's just that a temple will need its roof mended and its doors and windows painted and the rest, which requires money. I am not cut out for regular employment. I'm useless with computers, and offices make me claustrophobic. I could set out to marry a rich man but that might have to limit my sex life, and I'm not ready for that quite yet.

I am what Max the concierge describes as a vocational, rather than a working girl. I like sex; I'm good at it, and sometimes I feel it's what I'm best at; what I feel I'm for.