The Engagement

by Hooper, Chloe

  “My pimp, is that so?”

  “I thought you must have left him in the lurch, gone out on your own, and now he’s sort of taking his revenge.”

  Alexander leaned forward, the collar of his rugby top turned up almost jauntily, his fingers arranged in a thick-knuckled steeple. “We need to look at this from every angle. If you have to tell me about all the clients—the abusers, really—that you’ve ever had, what each of them wanted in all its detail, that’s okay.” His expression was one of bravery. “I’m not saying it won’t be painful, but I’m prepared to do it.”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Consider it a game. You like games.”

  I shut my eyes. Dear Nightmare, why?

  “Too many to recall?” He exhaled. “Together we can work it out, who it will be.”

  “Will be?”

  “It will be someone you saw more than once.”

  No one. There was no one but him.

  “Perhaps it was that man who liked to . . .” He broke off. “You remember . . . that thing.”

  Who was he talking about? What had I told him?

  As Alexander waited, his face turned taunting. “Liese, you know, don’t you? You know who’s been writing?”

  It was exciting playing detective, and he would not back down.

  “You suspect?”

  I could barely look him in the eye. “Yes, I do.”

  “If I showed you these letters . . .” He reached inside his jacket pocket. He had brought the correspondence upstairs with him. And he’d obviously intended this to be as disturbing as possible. “No.” Vigorous head-shaking. “No, I can’t do it to you.”

  As he talked about why the letters shouldn’t be read, I watched his mouth moving, those plump lips that were wet with satisfaction, and I asked myself, How do prostitutes get fired?

  They don’t give good service, presumably. They don’t laugh or moan or not look bored at the right time. They grimace at the sight of the man’s age, or his girth. They say his name as if it’s a chastisement, a joke, like his wife does. They humiliate him. They don’t humiliate him enough. They complain about the money: it’s too little, or—and something now exploded behind my eyes—or, in very rare cases, it’s too much.

  Alexander was still talking, but I got up off the bed and started to unbutton my blouse. I felt the cool of the room on my skin, on the sides of my arms and chest. Around us hung a series of framed prints showing flowers with fairies hiding near the stamens, on the stems. Delicately I unzipped my jeans. I pulled them down and stepped out of them in a way that was meant to be balletic. On my body the bra and panties became small strips of burgundy lace—a gesture, really, toward the concept of underwear, an homage. He stopped to look at me. To really look.

  “Liese, have you been listening?” he said. “You don’t have to do this anymore.”

  Something in his voice, however, suggested I might actually need to do it just one last time. Reaching out, I took his hand. Such a thin man, the model ectomorph but with hands warped from farmwork, covered in raised veins and now with red under his fingernails after gutting the bird. I no longer wanted to be touched by him, but I placed this hand on my skin.

  I felt him tremble.

  Before when he’d moved his fingers over my body, I wasn’t frightened of him. Now they crept lower slowly, very slowly, and I tried not to flinch. His rough fingers were beneath the fabric of my underwear. He closed his eyes.

  A draft coming from a gap between the window’s frame and its ledge made the curtains drift an inch, then back again.

  I’d be doing a rental inspection, assessing the state of a tenant’s curtains, of the carpets, walls, bathroom fittings; marking their state on a form from one to ten—ten being the least putrid—admonishing some rich girl whose parents paid her rent about the upkeep of the bathroom, all the while recalling the time Alexander and I had spent in this very spot, contemplating what had happened, and what might happen in the next place. It was all I could think about.

  We would be on the bed, or couch, or floor, and sometimes I wouldn’t have any story prepared for him. I’d even wonder whether we should try silence, but then he’d start asking whether I had anything I ought to tell him—“You don’t want to hear.” “I do.” “Are you sure?” Often I would begin my confession still without an idea of what to confess. I knew the names of the people who owned the houses and so once or twice I even adopted the sexual personalities I imagined they had. Someone with every inch of mattress covered in lace pillows would talk differently in the act of love, and want different things, to someone who, say, had a futon in a room painted deep turquoise.

  Occasionally other people’s belongings also became our props: once during sex I was arranged in such a way it was possible to reach out and open the drawer of a mirrored bedside table. It was as though I’d intuited the toys would be toward the back, but I left the latex and baubles, instead pulling out a large feather, which I used in my story to some effect.

  Steadily the things my imaginary clients liked to do became a wild half-guessing of Alexander’s desires, and the fulfillment of my own. Certain characters with very specific requirements reappeared in my tales. Their needs were extensive, and Alexander liked to hear about them blow by blow, so to speak. One client might have a favorite body part, another turn out to be obsessed with a series of positions, and a third need some combination of angles, rhythms, and textures that, I have to admit, bordered on genius. Then, when every possibility seemed exhausted, there came a john who liked to use only his fingers, touching me in very much the way Alexander was doing now.

  I took his hand off my skin and he opened his eyes.

  He was gazing at me as if expecting I would start talking in our particular way, whispering in his ear a story of who he should be. Instead I went to my suitcase and unzipped the side pocket, taking out the envelope filled with cash. This was so obvious, why had I not realized earlier? The act of buying me, buying total control of me, was Alexander’s real thrill. I pulled out half of my weekend’s fee. Clearly it wasn’t the time to economize: I pulled out the other half.

  “Here.” Turning, I presented him with every one of the hundred- and fifty-dollar notes.

  He wouldn’t touch them.

  “I’m serious.”

  He stared at the money, now splayed next to him on the bedside table, as though it were somehow disgusting. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “No.”

  Forcing him wouldn’t work. I’d learned it was important to set up situations that made Alexander feel he had agency; made him feel that, despite my reporting on others’ actions, it had still been his idea to take my underwear off with his teeth, and his idea, really, to then put his head between my legs. It was a fine balance, asking for things I wouldn’t otherwise have known how to request, while never letting it appear I wanted this sex more than he did. In fact, it was better he thought I didn’t want it at all, better to show only the mildest flicker of attraction, so that he felt like a man on the verge of primordial victory. Suddenly most of my clothes had disappeared and I seemed to be in a weaker position.

  Anyway, this was what moved Alexander. Not my stripping to expensive but gaudy underwear, and kneeling in front of him—as I was now—wrestling him so as to undo his fly.

  “Please!” I begged. It did not fit with the room we were in but I was no longer playing a character; this was me. “Oh, please, let me, please . . .” For the strange thing was, suddenly I wanted him. I thought he was mad, and I no longer knew if I was doing this to attract or repel, but I wanted him; I was aching with some desperate mix of fear and confusion—and this desire.

  The harder I pleaded, the more anguished he became. “You don’t have to do it anymore.” He was holding his hands in the air. “Liese, stop!”

  Did Alexander require a piece of meat rather than a
woman? Was he—as most men are—constitutionally threatened by too much female appetite? He liked hearing about what other men wanted, but preferred not knowing that this was also what I craved. For this craving, without the cash, seemed to cast me in a new light. It proved, I suppose, what he feared and reveled in most: the letter’s claim that I prostituted myself for no other reason than pleasure.

  And so he made a sound that was completely animal. A sound to empty his lungs of distress and fill them with rage.

  I took my hands from his crotch, crawling fast away from him. Getting off my knees, I stood in the corner of the room, waiting. He was red-faced, breathing heavily, each long limb electrified and full of kick and hit. To reach my blouse and jeans I’d have to squeeze past him, and I didn’t want to be that close.

  When his breathing slowed, Alexander stood and shook out his arms and legs, sloughing off my sleaziness. He picked up the suitcase, sighing. He pulled out my clothes and carefully refolded each garment, placing it in the white chest of drawers. Had he done this previously? When other women tried to leave? The routine seemed to calm him: his every gesture stayed measured, controlled. None of what I’d done had aroused him. Without the cash it couldn’t.

  “You know how I feel about you,” he said quietly. He leaned across to the bedside table and took the leather box, snapping it open. Inside was the diamond, bending light. It was my enemy. My beautiful enemy. I watched him slowly slide the ring over my finger.

  “We will have to break this habit, Liese.” From his back pocket, Alexander was taking out his wallet. “Now that you are my fiancée, I can’t allow you to see anyone else.”

  I did not answer.

  He removed five new hundred-dollar notes and laid them on top of the rest.

  “The others will have to give you up.”

  His extra money seemed to glow.

  “And what might be more difficult”—he smiled ruefully—“you will also have to give them up.”

  I closed my eyes. The air in the room was richer, but I felt washed in hot shame. The horror was he knew how to activate something in me, drawing me further into his trap—a trap I couldn’t help feeling I had laid for myself. This routine between us was my creation. I had sketched out its shape and for months had lived under its shelter. But desires bend and stretch, and in the web of his mind, my imaginings had gone bad. How can you leave? my fiancé’s eyes mocked. How can you possibly escape your own fantasy?

  “Now,” Alexander ordered, “read this.”

  V

  Dear Mr. Colquhoun,

  It comes to my attention you have not heeded my warning and ceased communication with Ms. Campbell. I therefore feel obliged to bring certain aspects of her character to your attention. I have attached testimonials (a sample of dozens I’ve now collected) from her former acquaintances. Please see overleaf:

  I turned the page. The first “testimonial” was typed on cheap paper that had been handled a lot.

  Some lads said she was up herself, acting posh, bragging about moving away. If they took too long she’d start making snoring noises and they’d get crapped off. Not me. I saw stars. Big girl with blond hair, all right face, good body, charging £10 for a bareback blow job or £15 for a full service. She would do all of it for a bargain £20. And once I heard in the upstairs room of the video store on Sander St. she spent three hours standing, sitting, squatting for like a party of five or six, and she hardly charged extra . . .

  The note continued in this vein and was signed with a fake name and address that I assumed Alexander had chosen for effect: Greg Blackwood, 44, Unthank Road, Norwich.

  I turned another page:

  We’d meet on the edge of the golf course. It was dark but she had a torch she flashed three times, and I’d find her lying on the moist grass with her burgundy school dress pulled up, her skin all salt and sour, begging me to . . .

  Several paragraphs detailed my “hot wet slit” and its encounter with a “throbbing cum-rod.” Were these the things that turned Alexander on? The stories I’d told him were far more subtle, far classier. I needn’t have bothered if this was what he preferred. Pathetic little dirty stories that were almost comic—not that I could now find a way to laugh.

  . . . for a fiver there was a map you could buy from the neighborhood lads with a key to places around the estate where she’d happily liaise.

  Anonymous, Westlinks Rd.

  On the next page I saw a photocopy of a hand-drawn map showing twisting half-circle streets marked with the following index:

  1: golf course (at night).

  2: the lane running behind the houses backing onto Eaton Primary.

  3: the school playground on the half tires that make up the shite equipment.

  4: the path parallel to Wentworth Green and adjoining oval. Go to gate with wire cut away.

  5: her house, obviously.

  My family’s house was depicted in crude style, although the details were right. This meant Alexander knew where my parents lived.

  How?

  He had found the address. But how?

  He had typed their street into the Internet and up must have come the asphalt’s potholes, a tree’s shadow over those holes, every leaf on the tree. And past that, a little fence of rope strung between low posts, and the patches of front lawn that needed watering, my father’s pink and white impatiens reflecting in the front windows of a redbrick, gable-roofed, two-story house.

  I felt a jolt like one I’d had at eighteen: I was sitting in the dark lecture hall, newly arrived at college, a projector on, the lecturer showing a slide of a house that he said epitomized bad, lazy, cynical design. And it was basically our family home on the screen. The house I’d grown up in on Wentworth Court. The other students were all laughing, although once my embarrassment faded I became sure they lived in similar places. It was the early 1990s, the ascendancy of Hadid, Gehry, Koolhaas, and computer-aided design packages. In class everyone was morphing a 3-D blob, stretching it one way, pulling it the other, then “postrationalizing” the blob as a comment on fractal geometry or game theory. Anyone with style was supposed to reside in a comet tail, not dwellings like the one projected on the wall.

  Pressing his little handheld button, the lecturer had continued his slide show of lower-middle-class English kitsch: row after row of postwar, two-story, single-garage houses, all basically the same but for a Tudor element here, a Georgian or Victorian touch there. He’d created a series of still lifes out of the ghostly objects veiled by these houses’ net curtains: studio portraits of long-grown children; a solitary armchair and reading lamp, the shade askew; maidenhair ferns; plastic daisies in a vase; figurines of angels, or swooning shipwrecked couples, or wigged aristocrats alighting from carriages to masked balls. These places, with their faux period details and statuettes, were temples of Thatcherism. Tory-voting aspirants lived within. “For a start all this should be bombed,” the lecturer pronounced, his scorn wedging inside me.

  Alexander had seen exactly where I’d come from. On the computer, he must have spied through the windows at my family’s belongings, into the living room where the impressionist posters hung next to photographs of my sister in her wedding dress, and now holding her baby. Nothing of provenance, nothing of permanence, but everything spotless. After thirty years, nearly all the houses in the neighborhood looked as if the residents had only just moved in.

  He had then clicked some arrow and zoomed out over the low fence, past the storybook trees and topiary hedges to the rest of Sunningdale Estate, a maze of cul-de-sacs named after the great golf courses of the world. Here people walked their dogs at three-quarter speed, cyclists pedaled in slow motion, and even the birds flew overhead as through some confection thicker than air: all of it seemed a kind of suburban asylum where everything was drugged. . . . Alexander would have taken in the local golf course where my parents had memberships—hiding the clubs if th
eir family, scornful of perceived climbing, visited—and a little further on a sports field with a path parallel to it. This path, which he’d referred to on his map, was the one I’d taken every day after school. Kids used it as a shortcut, the older ones smoking, or snogging, or doing lame graffiti on back fences. For a split second I felt something in my brain turn slightly.

  Blackwood, that was a name on one of the testimonials—there were Blackwoods who lived around the corner from our house. They owned a copying business. All the family were heavyset, a low center of gravity. . . . No. I shook my head to stir the image out.

  “This is ridiculous!”

  “Why?”

  “Because”—I waved the letter in front of him—“none of it ever happened.”

  Alexander nodded slowly. “Are you sure?”

  He was still sitting on the single bed, hands knotted, shoulders slumped, trying to gauge the severity of my problems. “I want you to think back and really concentrate, Liese.”

  “Oh, come on,” I started, and then couldn’t find words for the scale of this farce.

  In the late eighties the trees on our estate were still saplings, and ornamentals anyway—if they grew too tall it would have been antisocial. I was visible everywhere I walked, everywhere I thought of walking. It was like God’s own eyes were upon me. Each garden was just a little patch of open lawn, each neighbor’s flower beds more perfect than the one before. Everyone was on view. There was nowhere to go and not be seen. And the safest place, the only place, to have sex was in your head.

  She told me that one day after school she was window-shopping on St. Stephen’s Street when a woman approached her and asked if she wanted to make money. The woman, a madam, must have recognized her for the type who’d turn tricks in her spare time. Not just from her tarty clothes and makeup, but from her eyes because she looked like she wanted it all the time, and it was all she was good for. The madam had a brothel near Sweet Briar Road . . .

  I spluttered.

  “What’s the matter?”