by Rosa Mundi
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 delica
te 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.