Go: A Surrender (15 page)

It was their game I’d fallen into tonight, not my own. Okay.
But where was Jack.

“Hold on,” said Anne now, “there’s broken glass. Better
carry her out.”

Still naked, Valerie slipped her clogs on and moved toward
me, then grabbed me around the waist and slung me over her shoulder. She was
shockingly strong. The guests parted for us as we exited the bathroom and
returned to the open section of the apartment.

“You’ve got a sweet pussy,” she said softly to me as we
reached my corner, and she gave my ass a little smack, then set me down. I
giggled, still a little lightheaded, and then she walked away and it was just
me standing under the light.

Where was Jack.

The rest of the party was moving back out into the living
area. I shuffled out of the light and saw fat old Harold shirtless and pushing Valerie
ahead of him. His shirt had been used to tie her hands behind her back. They
arrived at the dining table and he roughly leaned Valerie down on it as her
assistant hurried to clear plates and glasses out of the way. He unbuckled his
pants. The rest of the guests crowded around and I could see no more, but I
heard her cry out, “Fuck me, you fat old bastard!” And then, “You call that
fucking? What is that, a baby carrot? Somebody bring this man a weiner!”

People laughed and cheered and joined her in taunting Harold.
It seemed that the party had moved on to entertainment other than myself. I
didn’t really blame them. I’d been a curiosity, good for a spell, but this was
Anne’s court and obviously Valerie was its defiant jester. I’d been an object,
just as Jack had promised some ten days before—and nobody worried about an
object once they had lost interest and moved on.

Valerie’s assistant breezed past me with a tray full of
empty glasses. “Wait,” I said.

He paused; he seemed very young. Probably barely a day over
18, if even that. “Can you help me get out of this?”

As I nodded to the ropes that still held my arms above my
head, I was suddenly self-conscious and I felt a blush so deep it burned my
neck and my chest.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said gently. “They loved you, but
now they’ve forgotten all about you.”

“I know,” I said.

“Back in a jif,” said the boy, springing back into motion
with his tray.

He returned with scissors, began to cut through the lines
that connected my arms to each other and then through the ones to my legs. I
slipped the cut knots off my hands and they fell softly to the floor.

“Do you know who Jack is?” I asked, as he continued to cut
through the ropes.

“I think so,” he said, “Sort of distinguished fellow, yeah? 
Slim, salt and pepper hair?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He your boyfriend?”

“I… I don’t know.” I rubbed my wrists. “Valerie said he’s
come here before.”

“He might’ve,” said the boy. “I wouldn’t know. I’m new.”

He cut the last of the ropes and I slid them off my ankles
and felt so glad they were gone that I nearly forgot I was naked as a jaybird.
“Have you seen him?”

“Hmm,” he said. “Maybe not since everyone caught you two in
the ladies’. He could’ve stepped out for a fag?”

“He doesn’t smoke, I think?” But for all I knew, he might.

“You don’t know?” said the boy, surprised.

I shook my head, ashamed now in a very different way. Who
was this man, and how could I have thought I was falling in love with him, or
he with me? We’d been living in a vacuum this past week and a half, a fantasy
world of posh hotels and exotic vistas and sex games of his devising, a world
where it didn’t matter that I’d quit my stupid job and had no hope of finding a
better one, a world where he hadn’t yet figured out that I wasn’t special. Or
maybe he had, tonight. Maybe he’d seen I was just some other slut, like however
many other women he’d brought here before.

How could I have thought a man like Jack would be interested
in someone like me.

“You alright?” said the boy, putting a hand out to touch my
shoulder gently. “You want to check the fire escape? Usually we tell folks to
smoke up on the roof.”

“Sure,” I nodded miserably, though I knew Jack wouldn’t be
there. He had receded from my life as startlingly as he’d appeared, and his
warmth had disappeared with him, and all that was left inside me was cold, and
emptiness, and night.

“Come on, then.” I followed the boy back toward the entrance
to the flat, and he got down and helped me on with my beloved fur coat.

Now we crossed again, toward the kitchen. Glancing over into
the living area I saw Valerie’s punishment had grown more elaborate: she knelt
on the table with another man’s cock in her mouth as Harold continued to fuck
her from behind. It seemed a cheerful proceeding, and I was envious of the
mood—its odd conviviality—even as I felt like I never wanted to fuck another
stranger again.

“Here,” said the boy, gesturing toward a partially open
window. The fire escape was just beyond, and dark. He lifted the sash so I
could climb out. “You’ll be alright?” he asked again. He was genuinely worried
about me, I saw. It was sweet, though it hardly mattered.

I climbed out onto the metal grate and looked up and down
the side of the building. No sign of Jack. I knew in my heart he had left;
there was hardly even any point in searching. On the other hand, I had little
desire to go back inside. I suddenly felt lonelier than I ever did in my
life—and that was saying something, since I was—had always been—an awfully
lonely person.

I took hold of the ladder, and began to climb up the metal
stairs. I felt the damp of London on my bare feet; the grate was sharp on my
toes. I shivered miserably and continued to climb, feeling the burn in my
thighs, holding tight to the cold railing, simply doing my best not to look
down to the filthy street below. I’d been mistaken, that morning in the ocean:
this
was what the world was like.

When I reached the roof and saw that Jack wasn’t there I
simply sat down right where I was. I had told myself I wasn’t expecting to find
him, but of course, I had been
hoping
all the same—hoping to be proven
wrong in my pessimism.

Instead I was being proven right. So I sat.

It was very late into the night now, and a weeknight, and
the streets below were mostly silent. The sky was overcast, low and
mud-colored, and in my misery I felt it was a great soggy weight pressing down
on me, grinding me into the earth right where I was. It was not a sky of
endless possibility, it was the opposite sky, a sky that said there could be no
escape, ever, from exactly where and what you were.

I strained to hear sounds from the party below, imagining,
perhaps, that I heard laughter, or happy talk. It was impossible to know. Maybe
everyone had gone to bed.
Would they all have gone to bed without even
stopping to wonder where I was?
I thought, hurt and indignant. Then, for a
moment, I laughed out loud. I was like some sniveling six-year-old hidden in a
closet, weeping because the birthday party wasn’t for me and nobody had
bothered to come looking.

No, there was laughter—I heard it more distinctly now. And
now I heard feet on the metal steps. My heart leapt; I’d been wrong; he was
here!

Then I saw a slight, pale hand grip the ladder’s top rung
and realized it was not Jack. It was the boy again. He climbed down from the
ladder holding a little plate, and walked over to me, and crouched beside me,
setting it down. It was cake.

“I thought you might like some dessert,” he said.

My eyes misted over. “Why are you being so nice to me?” I
asked.

He shrugged. “Just seems like you need it.”

I picked up the plate and had a bite of cake. It was eggy
and soaked in some kind of alcoholic syrup, with thick, cold cream poured over.

“It’s really good, thank you,” I said.

“Val can cook. Never know it to look at her. Don’t know how
she learned it, either—she won’t say.”

He was talking to distract me, sweet child. I ate another
bite, letting the syrup spread sweetly across my tongue.

“So you work for them?”

“I help out a bit. They let me live here for free, so.”

“You’re a runaway.”

“Eh, dad weren’t so keen on having a queer in the house, you
know?”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“No need to be sorry. I’m fine now. It was bad for awhile,
but now it isn’t.”

He was so calm. I thought about what I’d planned when I
first quit my job. Just to move somewhere, start over from scratch. To become a
new version of myself, a little braver, a little more optimistic. I could still
do that, I thought. I’d made it thirty-three years without Jack. I didn’t need
him.

“Anne said your friend sent a car to take you back to your
hotel.”

“Sent a car?” I echoed. So he
had
left. Now, in place
of the pain, came a flash of anger.

I stood, still holding my plate, and walked to the edge of
the roof. The boy followed. Indeed, down on the street a black cab idled, its
exhaust lazily mingling with the cold, misty air. I took another bite of cake.
My first impulse was to let it wait. But then, I didn’t particularly want to
stay on the roof for the rest of the night. I stood staring at the car for a
very long time, and then I nodded, and the boy and I carefully climbed back
down the fire escape and through the window to the party.

Anne met us in the kitchen. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I’d
no idea you were still here. I assumed you and Jack had left together.”

“He didn’t say anything to you?”

She shook her head. “I thought it must be an emergency; he’s
never just disappeared in the middle of a party. Then Peter here told me you
were up on the roof.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was humiliating, Jack
abandoning me here.

Anne seemed to guess my thought, and she hastened to say,
“I’m sure there must be a good explanation. He’s one of the most reliable
people I know.”

“Yes,” I said flatly, “I guess there probably is.”

“Let’s get you your things.”

We crossed the living room. Valerie was still naked, curled
onto her side and napping peacefully in the middle of the dining table. A few
guests slept on couches or chairs. Others seemed to have left. The lights had
been switched off in the nook where I’d stood, leaving it shadowy and empty.

Anne disappeared into one of the bedrooms and returned with
my shoes and bag and the dress I’d arrived in.

“Here,” she said. I shrugged off the coat and slipped the
dress over my head as Anne watched me.

“You’re quite beautiful, you know. I’ll send Jack the
proofs—you can see for yourself.”

“Thank you,” I said. And then I left, and rode the squeaky
old freight elevator down to my cab.

“______ Hotel?” said the driver. I saw that the meter had
already racked up a sizeable bill.

“Right,” I said, and he put the car into gear. The streets
were empty. The city was silent as we moved through it, except for the hiss of
the tires against the fog-dampened pavement. We sailed through roundabouts and
bumped along narrow sidestreets and then stopped at a red light, at an empty
intersection in the middle of nowhere. London, like most places, was full of
nowheres.

What would be waiting for me at the hotel? An empty bed,
another plane ticket at breakfast? Some tearful fight? Or worst of all, simply
an ending—a polite embrace, some excuses, and everything restored to what it
was. Ordinary. Lonely. Just a little bruised, like I’d taken a tumble out the
back of a car.

It was wretched to think of, all of it.

“Driver?” I said. “Sir?” The cabbie peered at me in the rear
view mirror. He was Sikh, or something, bearded and turbaned.

“I’m sorry, but—do you mind taking me to the airport
instead?”

Forty-eight hours later I was standing on a balcony in New Orleans, watching magpies hop through the branches of an ancient magnolia tree.

“What do you think?” said the realtor, appearing beside me.

“It’s perfect,” I said. It was small, but clean and bright.
More than that, it had a newness to it—a feeling of adventure.

An hour after that, she had her money order and I had the
keys.

To celebrate my lease-signing, I bought a plastic patio
chair from the pharmacy, a pimiento and cheese sandwich, a bottle of cheap
champagne and a gorgeous strawberry shortcake that probably could have fed a
family of four. All these I carried upstairs, and I set my chair up in the
empty living room to begin my feast.

Jack hadn’t called since I’d failed to return to the hotel
in London. I still kept my phone with me constantly, checked it constantly, but
increasingly I was realizing I probably wouldn’t hear from him. Even as I’d sat
in Heathrow waiting for my plane to board, I’d hoped he might suddenly appear.
For two hours I fidgeted in my chair. Second-guessing myself. Feeling sick over
the cost of the last-minute flight back to the States. But it was he who had made
the decision, I told myself, not me: he’d left me alone at the party, after
promising he wouldn’t. He’d abandoned me in the middle of a game, after knowing
how I needed him there—to care about me, to be the one person in the room who
knew or cared for me as a human being.