When, after a typically expensive night out, one man arose from my bed and walked down the gnome-size stairs of my studio’s mezzanine, I thought, You will leave like you’ve had some victory, and I still don’t know how to pay my phone bill. From any direction it was five paces to the door. The kimono I was wearing suddenly looked gaudy. As he retrieved his clothes off my floor and coins fell out of the pockets, I scooped them up, winking. Was that self-regard or self-loathing?
In Alexander’s drawing room there was a general air of permission—whoever had decorated this had given herself license. The walls were covered in mustard-colored silk. Money had been deposited in dusty furnishings and transformed into class. I stood surrounded by oriental vases, an ormolu clock on an upright piano with attached brass candelabra, and exotic birds arranged in a glass case, their expressions suitably eerie. It was like a provincial museum you’d visit because nothing else was open.
In the center of the room, amid the antiques, was a squat couch not dissimilar to the one my parents owned, upholstered in a heavy autumnal print. It seemed that someone disapproving of their forebears’ high living had chosen the most drab, utilitarian design.
I heard his footsteps.
He loped into the room holding a block of chocolate, and must have caught derision in my expression. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“Oh,” I said casually, “it’s just that couch.” In strangers’ houses, sometimes we would laugh about their taste.
“What’s wrong with it?”
I shook my head. Who was I to judge his furnishings? My family had nothing of provenance other than an old dictionary and a slightly older silver teapot. Nerves made me sound disdainful. “It just looks out of place, when everything else is in such fine taste.”
“No one’s ever commented on it before.”
“Well, it’s certainly comfortable,” I said. Kicking off my heels, I displayed myself on it in camp apology, offering him the invitation I presumed he expected—the point of all this. As though I were really alone, I undid the buttons of my blouse, easing up my skirt, moving my fingers underneath. It was so easy to shock him. His repression turned me on and made him complicit. We were a team.
But now he stayed by the doorway. “Do you ever think of anything else?”
Here was something new.
I turned to him. “You are paying me to have sex.”
“Really?” Alexander sounded genuinely angry. “Is that really what you think?”
“To have sex if you want to.”
“I see.” He was trying not to appear wounded. “That is what you think.” His hand went to his forehead. “Listen, I’m, I’m not good at this sort of thing. Okay? Dating and the whole act you’re supposed to put on.” The hand was thrown down in exhaustion. “Can’t you see? I just want to know who you are, Liese, who you really are.”
Something about the way he said this made me uneasy. “I want that too,” I answered weakly.
“Do you really?”
“Yes.” My voice was too high.
“Then can we agree to start again?”
I nodded.
“To start from scratch and see who the other is?”
I felt this man’s isolation sharply. Surrounded by ancestral clutter, he was living in a time as well as a place that was remote, and this made sense of an impression I’d had before. Under the prickly carapace he seemed naive and at too great a disadvantage. The hint of sadism I thought I’d detected during dinner was just the gracelessness of someone unused to spending time with others. He needed to be treated gently; within his own house he wanted his lust to be hidden from view. Yet as I went to Alexander and lay my head against his chest, and as he laid his head on mine, I could not turn the idea of sex off. Almost disconnected from me, my hands crept down and started unbuckling his trousers.
He moved me away.
As he crossed his arms, his clothes became too wide for his frame. “You must be tired. It was a long drive,” he said sadly. “I think perhaps it’s time for bed.”
Picking up my shoes, sighing, I followed him back through the tiled hall, up the wide staircase.
My blouse was half undone, and I could feel the cold on my chest. I had to turn this night around, to fix its failure, but I’d drunk too much wine after all. When we reached the pink bedroom, the walls made me bilious. They were the Crayola color children use to draw the skin of white people.
“Won’t you come in?” I dropped the shoes on the ground.
“Not so loud.”
For a split second I wondered if there was a child asleep here.
I finished taking off my blouse and skirt, then my underwear, adding to the pile.
We’d never been together in a kid’s room before. Pouting: “Will you show me what I’m supposed to do?”
Usually I only had to make some minor move—take off my watch, even—and Alexander was on a string. I sat on the high single bed and beckoned him toward me. He came closer, and then, almost grudgingly, closer again until he was near enough for me to reach over a second time to undo his fly.
“Do you think we could turn out the light?” He sounded weary.
I looked up and caught the row of pony figurines along the mantelpiece. “Okay.”
Moving to the switch, Alexander glanced back at me—an expression as though he’d just won something.
The room went black and I felt a shiver of anticipation; the darkness was blindfolding. Raising my hand to my face, I could not see it, and I lay waiting for him to brush against me, for his breath on my skin. Laughing: “Where are you?”
No answer.
He knew the house so well, I thought, he must have remembered by heart where to stand, which floorboards made no noise, but I heard his breathing and I waited. Sometimes, at the start, he didn’t say very much, expecting me to take care of conversation. We’d be in a different apartment, but physically each episode began in a familiar way. His approach tentative at first, then opening my legs with his knees, lowering himself down. His mouth would find the same places, and then, in the same order, his hands were on my skin, calloused fingers touching me as though he wore rough gloves.
Lying here now, stretched out, ready, I could make out his heartbeat, sense his hands inches from mine. I was determined not to say his name aloud, not to be the one to speak first.
“Alexander.” When finally I broke, my voice was plain, although he’d want me to be scared, girlish. “Alexander, stop it.”
Still I waited—there was the faintest ripple of glass as the wind charged by—and only slowly did I realize that the sound of his watch was in fact my watch, with its cheap mechanism; the sound of his breathing was really my own lazy breath, the heartbeat belonged to my body. This room now seemed to shrink, closing in until it was as small as a room in my head. He had been here, and now he was not. Turning off the lights, Alexander had disappeared, leaving me to lie alone in the pure dark.
IV
That first morning I lay still in the tall single bed, waiting for proof I was awake. The room was narrow, boxlike, with high pressed-metal ceilings. Over the years scouring sunlight had turned the pink walls sallow, this country’s light aging everything. In the bright white sky out the window I watched the green cloud of a cypress pine. The tree’s branches were swaying, but only silence, or whatever dream had tagged me in my sleep, now reverberated. I listened harder. It was unnaturally quiet, and I wondered if Alexander was still in the house.
I did not want to get up and start this whole routine again, but unfolding slowly into the cold I stood and walked to the window. Surrounding the house was a formal garden dominated by a vast lawn. From this vantage I could make out circular patterns where someone had recently mowed. The lawn was framed by a privet hedge; then further, as far as I could see, there was flat, verdant farmland�
�no other buildings, just fields, bleak in their sameness, with no sign of those mountains.
Old houses make me self-conscious. I knew I couldn’t be seen, but somewhere there were eyes. I made the bed, straightening the frayed satin edge of the blanket, plumping up the vintage pillow—admiring the frugality of rich people—and I did these things as though a camera were embedded in the ceiling’s cornice.
Everything now was performative: I was brushing my hair, dressing neatly. Then I was closing the door quietly behind me and walking down the grand staircase, through the house’s formal area to the servants’ quarters. A line of bells was still mounted on the wall, showing where in the front of the house the help were required: conservatory, dining room, yellow room, best bedroom, day nursery. Here at the back, extra dingy rooms seemed to have been added as the household’s staff multiplied, although as far as I could see, only one person was now in residence.
In the kitchen, Alexander had washed last night’s dishes, stacking them neatly by the sink. Above the sink a window looked onto an orchard. Long grass grew between twisting, bare trees. To the glass he’d stuck a note:
Checking cattle—back by midday. Make yourself at home.
AC
So he hadn’t been able to face me. It was hardly a surprise. If I’d been quicker-witted I’d have realized the morning after was always going to be fraught. Sustaining the intensity of our city appointments was near impossible. So what had I expected?
A dirty weekend, actually, for which I’d be paid.
I opened a door of the refrigerator: vegetables in the salad drawer, and half a dozen bottles of champagne. I opened the other door: a freezer filled with labeled containers, each one holding meat. An inventory was taped to the inside of the door listing dates and contents, as though some mad creature—with two brains, three loins, seven hooves—had just been vanquished. Alexander had drawn little boxes next to each item; some were ticked.
The clock struck, and I jumped before laughing to cover my nerves, laughing loudly like there was no problem. It was nine o’clock. He was not supposed to be back for a few hours, but listening, I now heard something else. A door slamming?
“Alexander?” I called.
There was no answer.
Peering out of the kitchen, down a thin corridor, I called again. “Hello?”
The entrance hall was empty. Through a clear patch of the front door’s stained-glass panel I made out the circle of pebbled driveway; only Alexander’s car was parked there. Whatever I’d heard must have been some corner of the house heaving with age. I turned the front door handle and cursed aloud. It was locked.
There was no key in the door, on the ledge of the glass, or anywhere else that I could see. Irritation washed through me, and when it had passed I could feel something else: my heartbeat.
I walked back to the servants’ quarters. Past the kitchen, I found a cloakroom. Here there was another door. It was battered, finger-stained; the handle moved but would not open.
It was sick, I know, but I thought of my wrists being tied.
On one of our first meetings, we were in the lavish bedroom of retirees who were moving permanently to a coastal property. Standing by their French provincial bed, Alexander took off his tie and weaved it nervously through his hands. “Have you had a busy day?”
I’d been uploading photographs of different properties to the agency website. “It was okay.”
The tie was navy with a print of light blue squares. “Many sales?”
Not wanting to talk, I held out my wrists.
“Oh,” he said. “Yes, of course.”
I waited while he fumbled with the knot. “I’d have thought a farmer would be good at this.”
“Sorry, nearly there.” Alexander glanced up; he was genuinely trying to get it right. “Perhaps I-I should tie you to something.”
The carved bed head had no rails. Across the room was a Louis Quatorze–style chair, and if I lay on the carpet, the smooth bedspread would stay undisturbed. These were the shortcuts I was still learning. (Once after taking a shower together, I’d found myself saying good-bye at the door only to have to return and painstakingly wipe each drop of water off the glass cubicle.)
I positioned myself, wrists next to the chair leg.
As he bent over me—leaning as he might over a sheep that needed tethering—I supposed we were both thinking how bad the other was at this game. I was admonishing myself for not quite taking control, or not taking control in quite the right way. It was supposed to be the person paying whose hands were tied, wasn’t it? And obviously it would have been better to undress before being disabled. Very politely Alexander went about removing which of my clothes he could, carefully folding them so they wouldn’t crease, and then he did the same with his own (and socks were never sexy things). He came down to me in a teetering fall, rigid, like a toppling statue. There was the slow summoning of conviction. He seemed too straight to leave me tied up, but I struggled, focusing on the oriental wallpaper patterned with a little peak-hatted, plaited man in a pagoda. His own precious piece of real estate.
But the locked door—I stood staring at it.
Had Alexander “forgotten” I was here?
Turning, my footsteps echoed with a confidence I did not feel. Despite the grime and bits of comedy, this house still knew its power. And all the decoration—the friezes, the plasterwork—seemed an elaborate distraction, not unlike my host’s manners, the ornament leading you further from the actual man. He’d left me no option but to snoop around.
Off the grand entrance hall were two rooms: the dining room and the drawing room.
The air in the drawing room had a kind of shimmer to it, a live quality that I figured was dust. After inheriting the house Alexander had evidently changed nothing. Every object was in its pedantic place, including the squat couch upon which, the night before, I’d started to undress. All the cushions were now perfectly straight, their geometry punitive.
A bird made a call like a whip—I glanced out the window.
The garden went mute; nothing moved.
When I turned back to the still room, the kookaburras and cockatoos, frozen on branches in their glass case, seemed too alert. I looked again out at the garden, where I presumed the birds had once lived, then back to the uncanny decor, which felt as alive as the birds. That was the way of antiques—a chair picked up some force from all the people who had sat in it, a vase from the hands that had touched it. They carried absence. The absence of those who’d previously used the objects in this room was palpable. People were needed to keep them under control.
I walked across the hall to the dining room.
Above the fireplace hung the portrait of Alexander’s great-great-grandfather—muttonchop sideburns, rosacea, a death stare. You don’t need looks to start a dynasty.
Around him framed sepia photographs gave an Australian history lesson: colonial prosperity to Edwardian dissipation. After the old man did the hard work his progeny were mostly at leisure—at shoots, hunts, tennis games, balls. Arabella Presented at Court, read a handwritten inscription under one picture. I guessed this thin-lipped woman in a tiara and elaborate gown was Alexander’s great-grandmother. Unpacking the Rocking Horse: her six lace-collared children stood in a pile of straw surrounding the carved horse. Fun for All!: two young men in three-piece suits spun a skipping rope for long-faced girls in white dresses and hats, the house rising up in the background, watching. Then a series of a man playing polo, and this same man riding an elephant alongside a laughing woman—both having a grand time as the money slips away.
I imagined Alexander returning to this house after visiting me, letting himself in and having all his pedigree shine back at him. Each room would be cool on hot days, a balm against whatever aspects of our meeting left him uneasy. At any moment we could have been caught in one of those apartments by whoever else had a key. But he�
��d gotten away with it. He’d transgressed and returned to this life unscathed, no one any the wiser.
Down the corridor to the right of the staircase, I found a room Alexander must have used as his office, a large leather-lined desk at its center. Facing the door were tall filing cabinets marked tax/accounting, cattle, sheep, export/asia, export/arabia, and arranged on the desk in careful stacks were account books, lists of forthcoming cattle sales, cropping records, spreadsheets on exchange rates, a calculator. There was also a newish computer set to a weather satellite; swirling cloud patterns moved across the screen.
Along one wall were high bookcases full of volumes with leather bindings now turned to suede. I moved a few steps forward to inspect this library, as if the books were my true interest. He seemed to know a little about a lot, and I tried to guess which ones he had read. Even the newer books were at least fifty years old. His father’s, perhaps? The various titles on cattle and sheep breeding included the huge tome Merino. This was near Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, while on the shelves out of reach was Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and, detailing the locals’ more recent past, a lot of books about mining by someone called Blainey.
I stood staring at the spines.
I was in his house, in his element. Around me was every clue to who Alexander Colquhoun was, and yet I felt my picture of him disassembling.
The few posh boys I had known at close quarters seemed to have a vacancy about them. They were nice, dull, ground-down souls, although maybe their class stopped them from opening their treasure vaults to girls like me. Alexander was their antipodean cousin. Surely his blankness was just blankness, not a screen for something else.
“I’ve never been with a prostitute before,” he said after our bondage session, as if apologizing for the awkwardness.
I’ve never been a prostitute before, I thought. The word itself seemed to make me one.
“Often I feel I don’t quite know who you are,” he went on.
The owners were due back any minute, and to palm him off I asked lightly, “Do we ever truly know the other?” I was whoever he found me to be; certainly I’d given up on finding myself. It looked like being just more of the same. Channeling this other person—this prostitute within—seemed far more rewarding. But now, standing in his study, I saw my problem: I’d been subsumed in my role, and this had been a kind of idiocy, leaving me deaf and blind to the clues my client handed out.
The Engagement Page 4