Edge Play X

by Wilson, M. Jarrett

  Once Steinberg was gone, Compton sank onto the couch with another drink and turned on the television, flipping on a black and white movie, hoping that the images would take him away from his thoughts.

  He didn’t think that X had gone out for cigarettes, nor was he particularly concerned that she had been kidnapped. Yes, it was true that there was a greater security risk in Europe, and he himself was careful to always have a bodyguard available. But only a few people were aware that X was his traveling companion, and even fewer were aware of the true nature of their relationship.

  Still, the possibility existed that X could be kidnapped and held for ransom or used to force Compton to alter his business deals. The thought excited him. He wasn’t sure what the upper limit was that he would pay if the scenario ever occurred, but he was certain that it would be an incredible amount, millions if necessary, he would die a million little monetary deaths for the woman, and he grew erect at the thought of it, at the thought that X could be another commodity to be bought, sold, or traded, objectified, that she could be something negotiated for and ultimately owned by him.

  He watched the movie as night came fully to Paris. He drank until he was thoroughly inebriated. He waited.

  10.

  While she was out, X had gotten something to eat for dinner before riding back to the hotel on the metro. By the time she returned to the room and opened the door to see Compton on the couch, drink in hand, the flickering television the only light in the room, the man was drunk, saturated in his intoxication.

  Still angry that he had not taken her to Versailles, X went into the bedroom and locked the door. Compton desperately wanted to talk to her, to have her simply acknowledge him. Even just a hello would suffice and then she could go to bed and leave him there on the couch to fall asleep to the television.

  He waited a few moments and then got up and went to the bedroom door. The alcohol in his body made him teeter on his feet; the air around him had turned opaque at the edges. His heart swelled up at the thought of hearing her voice. Scolds or screams would suffice, as would the lower timbre of disdain that until recently had infused the bulk of her words to him. But X did not open the door or say anything at all.

  “I’m sorry, X. I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to take you to Versailles.”

  He waited for her to answer but received only silence. Inside, he could hear her stirring. A drawer opened and closed. He was sure that she could hear him.

  “We’ll come back to Paris another time and we’ll go for a whole day, a whole weekend. I’ll arrange it so we can stay there.”

  Nothing.

  “My business meetings, sometimes they go longer than I expect. Things come up out of the blue.”

  More silence. He had to concentrate so that he didn’t slur his speech. He decided to try a different tactic. That was what he did in business.

  “X, I have an idea. Why don’t we have a little fashion show? You can show me all the things that you bought today.” He corrected himself. “All the things that I bought today.”

  He polished off the last gulp of his drink and then put the glass onto the console table behind him.

  Elatedly, X sat on the desk chair and listened to him. She wondered if he knew how pathetic he sounded.

  Compton put his ear to the door, trying to hear her inside. Finally, he lifted up his hands and pounded on the door, enraged. He wasn’t used to being ignored.

  “Open the door, damn it! I just want to talk to you. I just want to see your face.”

  It wasn’t too much to ask, was it? All that money he had paid for her paintings, five thousand bucks an hour to get beaten and insulted by her, then a free luxury flight to Paris, and judging from all those boxes and bags from the boutiques, he had just spent a small fortune on clothes. Clothes! And now not even a word from her. Who did she think she was?

  He pounded some more, his palms smacking the heavy wood of the door, the man sliding down onto the floor as he did so, making X wonder if anyone from the hotel would come by to see what was going on. She guessed that they wouldn’t.

  Pulses of pain ran through Compton’s hands, and he rubbed them together, shaping his hands into fists which he released reluctantly.

  It was his desperation that she enjoyed. Finally, the man was displaying some sort of emotion. She relished that he was begging for her in a way that he would never stoop to in his business dealings. And let him beg. Everyone should have to beg for something. His money, she thought, wasn’t even so much about the money as it was about the acquisition of it. X had a sense that Compton acquired it simply to see how much he was capable of getting; wealth, after a certain point, was a supersaturated solution.

  She pitied him and his pathetic needs.

  Outside the door, Compton sat dejected, feeling that the room might start spinning at any moment, start spinning and then keep spinning until he was completely out of control, until he had lost all semblance of balance, thrown out of his orbit and flung from whatever the center of mass was that held him together. X’s strong gravitational pull was distorting the shape of his galaxy and he adored her for it.

  He started to sob. He wanted her more than he could bear. His desire was rupturing out of him.

  “You don’t know how worried I was about you,” he confessed, exaggerating his concern. “I didn’t know where you were. We had the whole hotel looking for you. I was going to call the police if you weren’t back soon, X. I thought maybe someone took you, that someone kidnapped you.”

  Compton ran his hands through his hair, pulling at it in desperation, and then he pounded at the door again.

  X went to the door and kneeled just inches away from him as if hearing his confession, the door the only separation between them, and she was touched by his pleads, by his apology, by his admission.

  “I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you, X! Maybe you’ll think that I’m full of shit but I want you to believe me when I tell you that you’re the first thing I think of when I wake. Nothing else. Only you. I don’t look forward to anything more than I look forward to just being in your presence.”

  When men begged X, it gave her a sense of reassurance that they desired her, that they loved her. It was as if, in his weakness, that Compton was passing a test, a test that X administered, consciously or not, to every man with whom she had any kind of extended relations. Compton, with his sobs of regret, with his confession of error, had proven to her that he needed her, that she was more than just a woman he paid to beat him and humiliate him. X understood then, completely, that now she could do whatever she wished to him, treat him in whatever way she fancied. His longing for her was unconditional. He was at her mercy.

  “Just talk to me, X, God-damn it! Punish me if that’s what you want. I deserve it. I’m a loser, an idiot, I admit it!” he screamed, as if making the pronouncement to himself.

  She put her hand to the doorknob, turning it slowly and then opening the door. Compton looked up at her, so happy to see her finally, and a relief swept through him. She existed. There she was. She recognized that he existed.

  X kneeled down next to him and put her hand to his face. She knew that if she wished, that Compton would take whatever punishment she would give and take it gladly. Instead, she pushed him back onto the floor and he toppled down heavily onto the carpet beneath him. He looked at her surprised, unsure what she was doing.

  Then, X climbed onto him, pressing herself into him, undoing his loosened tie and then his buttons, their mouths converging and diverging as clothing was undone, as body parts were groped, caressed, and licked, and there, on the floor, the television still flickering its spastic light, the two made love, the boundaries of their bodies dissolving and fusing as if it were metal being welded together, the purest of rendered substances alloying and coalescing until the edge of each form was blurred, forging a sculpture unique unto itself.

  The pair climbed into bed and fell asleep, and then, upon waking, made love again.

  And
it was during those sweet hours that Compton was able to finally discern the tattoo that adorned X’s lower back, the image being that of two crossed whips.

  11.

  That morning, after waking, Compton and X showered together and then dressed. Compton asked if he could select X’s outfit from the ones that had been recently purchased and she reluctantly agreed. One of the directors of the Louvre would be leading them on their tour, Compton told her, and the man was aware that he had recently acquired many of X’s paintings. After being shown her favorite outfits from her shopping excursion, Compton chose a scarf-lapel jacket, silk scoop neck tee, and pleated straight-leg pants.

  “Do you like dressing me?” she asked, and he shook his head yes before telling her that he much preferred undressing her.

  Still nude, he reclined on the bed and watched X as she dressed, watched as she put on her panties and bra and then pulled the wool and silk over her body. Compton left her as she finished her hair and put on her make-up. He went into the other bedroom where he put on his own pants and dress shirt, adjusting his onyx cuff-links with glassine manicured fingers. He slipped his feet into suede and deer leather sneakers, footwear he had chosen because he knew he would be walking a fair amount before his business meetings that afternoon.

  X and Compton rode together in back of the private car that the hotel had provided for them, the driver and bodyguard sitting up front, chatting together about sports and the weather. Compton used the time to talk to Steinberg on his cell phone. He spoke in a low, reserved voice, one similar to a physician with an excellent bedside manner, detached and professional, diagnostic yet not alarming.

  As he spoke, Compton watched stock values slide by on a screen next to him, watched the monitored vein through which money coursed. With each rotation of data, the numbers changed with such speed that they were not really numbers at all anymore, but commerce and capitalism made living entity. They grew or shrank, their expansions and contractions measured in milliseconds. Values shifted and Compton deciphered the meaning of the changes, determined which transformations might need addressed in terms of buying or selling. Predicting which of the entities would thrive and which would perish was a skill that Compton had refined over the years. There was logic to it, yes, but mostly, it was a kind of intuition, a gift, and he accepted that this was the case.

  As they traveled the busy streets of Paris, X eavesdropping on the conversation, it became clear to X that Compton’s time was scheduled down to the second by Steinberg. Each day was a continuum of meetings and agendas arranged by Steinberg and spearheaded by Compton, meetings which focused almost exclusively on money (or capital as Compton referred to it), about where to place it or how to remove it, on how to leverage it, on current asset values and their liquidity.

  When Compton hung up finally, X asked him, “You just move around money, don’t you?”

  He smiled, his eyes twinkling at her understanding.

  “Essentially.”

  When they arrived at the museum, X and Compton, the pair shadowed by the bodyguard, did not enter through the famous pyramid. Instead, they went to a side door where Compton was greeted by a uniformed guard who allowed them to enter the building. After the man had radioed the director’s secretary to let her know that the expected guests had arrived, the trio was told to please wait a few minutes and that the director would be right with them.

  A few minutes later, one of the museum directors came to greet them. The older man had the appearance of an old fumbling professor—the man’s tie was slightly askew and his white hair sat in whipped peaks atop his freckled head. The Englishman shook Compton’s hand and then Compton introduced X.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” the director said as he shook her hand vigorously. “From what I have heard, you have quite a career ahead of you.”

  X, unsure how to respond, simply smiled.

  The man started to walk, X thinking that at any minute he might topple over his own feet and down onto the floor.

  “Well, we’ll start with the Greeks, then visit the French wing, and finish off with the Italian Renaissance. There is so much to see, it could never be accomplished in a few hours time.”

  Tourists streamed past them, and X, impeccably dressed and feeling for the first time in her life that she did not fit in with the proletariat, the people whom she loved, felt that somehow she had crossed the line of class and entered the realm of the bourgeoisie, felt as if she had entered a time and space where she had become robotic, distant, as if her movements were not controlled by her, but instead by some alternate force. It was something other than the clothing and special treatment that was making her feel like a marionette, she realized, but she was unable to pinpoint the exact source. Like a word that almost comes to one’s mind, the reason dangled just out of reach.

  “We are going to be restoring some of our paintings soon, paintings that were given to the museum recently as a gift, and once the project is completed, some of the paintings will be housed in Italian wing.”

  The director was aware that Compton would be making a donation to the museum that day, aware because Steinberg had informed him weeks ago. And Compton, carrying a neatly folded check in the pocket of his shirt, a check made out to the museum for a jaw-dropping amount (but ultimately mostly tax-deductible), was proud that this piece of paper and its abstract numbers could elicit such a response, that it could garner such respect. The professorial man recognized the power of Compton’s presence. The director respected him in the same way that a dog respects that its master can enter a grocery store as it waits in the car and somehow come out with a full cart of food. There was a mystery behind the numbers, a power greater than their sum.

  They toured through the different areas, X spending particular energy circling the Venus de Milo, a sculpture that previously she had only seen in books, orbiting it and noting its opposites, the way the statue’s head turned, the thrust of the hips, the overall curve of it creating the shape of an s, balanced and beautiful.

  As they continued through the museum, X and Compton were aware that the works that they saw were a representation of the history of society and culture, an illustrated history. Quietly and reverently, they viewed the images of the goddess in her many forms, from the crude fertility idols to the ethereal paintings of the Italians.

  X felt promiscuous as they toured the building, believing that she should be devoting more time to each work. She was ashamed to admit to herself that museums gave her a greater feeling of peace and divinity than cathedrals. Compton, an atheist, had come to terms with that feeling long ago, an epiphany which had prompted him to begin his art collection.

  They ended their tour at the Mona Lisa. The painting was smaller than X had imagined. As X looked at it, and then looked at Compton looking at it, she wondered to herself if Compton was a Venus de Milo man or a Mona Lisa man, and guessed to herself that he was the latter. He was with her; certainly he was the latter.

  Compton gave his check to the man then, thanking him for the guided tour. The director shook his hand again, telling them to return whenever they liked, and wishing that their remaining time in Paris would be pleasant, a remark which garnered Compton’s gentle and confident smile.

  12.

  They spent another hour in the museum. The bodyguard allowed a decent enough space between them so that they were able to talk to one another without feeling intruded upon. Even so, the pair did not say much to one another, often spending the time looking at separate paintings or sculptures, periods of time in which the bodyguard simply ignored X and stayed closest to Compton.

  The tourists were there as well, speaking softly to one another for the most part, the children being told to keep their voices down and not to run around.

  Finally, Compton said to X that his meeting would be coming up soon. They better get going.

  The car took X back to the hotel. She said goodbye to Compton who stayed behind in the car with the bodyguard. He told her that he would be back to the
hotel room by six o’clock, and that he would arrange for them to eat dinner in the limo. He handed her an envelope which he told her contained a gift certificate for the hotel spa, said that he hoped that she would use it and relax that afternoon while he was away.

  She decided to take him up on the offer and she went directly to the spa.

  After speaking with the receptionist, X was escorted into a dimly lit treatment room, its walls papered in a similar golden tone to the cashmere blanket which covered the massage table, a room so minimalist yet comfortable as to give the same feeling of holiness that one might experience when entering a shrine.

  After being told to undress, the middle-aged Russian woman who would be giving her the treatments told X to follow her to the bath area adjoining the massage room. There, X, after wetting her body under the showerhead, was told to lift her arms and stay still, thank you. From a short jar, the woman scooped what appeared to be and indeed was a handful of black sand. The woman informed X that the sand, a special kind from Polynesia, would exfoliate the dead skin from her body, all the while softening it with the oils of jojoba, almond, and calendula. She went on to say that the natural minerals and marine ingredients would help to purify the skin, revitalize it, and leave it with a special glow.

  X stood as her body was rubbed, neck to ankle, with the concoction. Then she was told to enter the shower again and the woman rinsed the sand off X’s body. The dark granules collected on the smooth tile under her feet, the oils remaining for the most part on her body, softening it and scenting it. Once the sand was off, the woman wrapped X in a large, soft towel and told her to please go into the other room and lay face up on the table.

  The Russian woman covered X with a smooth sheet and then asked her a few questions about her skin routine: did she use sunscreen, did she moisturize, did she wear make-up, did she smoke. X admitted that she didn’t regularly apply sunscreen, believing that the sun was good for her and neither seeking nor shunning it. And yes, she moisturized and wore make-up. The woman gave her a disappointed look when X admitted that she smoked, X retorting that it was only a few a day and that she had every intention of quitting.