The Engagement (12 page)

This room’s stink kept edging closer.

“Did anyone try to hit you? Were they dangerous?”

I could hear my heart beating, my blood. “No, never.”

“Was it something you allowed, if they asked?”

“I’m afraid not, Alexander.”

“That’s fortunate,” he said quickly. “You are very lucky, because you hear about it all the time: some adventure’s gone awry and a young girl ends facedown in a faraway ditch.” He presented the image without emotion, looking up from his work to gauge the effect. “I imagine the most frightening thing would be to end up with someone not right in the head. For all you knew at first,
I
could have been a psycho.”

Alexander continued cutting at the bird, but I could tell there was more, that he was blocking some longer speech—and I waited. Nausea swirled around us in the particles of air; I kept waiting. It was so fine, this situation, the signals so faint, like turning for no reason to catch something flicker on the periphery of your vision.

“Look, there’s no point keeping this from you,” he broke.

“What?”

“I . . . I don’t want us to hide things. I want us to always tell each other what we are
really
feeling.”

I felt unease, so sharp it was a gut ache. “I agree.”

Alexander looked at me and closed his eyes, tilting back his head to contain the distress. “Two months ago a letter arrived.”

Taking a dishcloth, he wiped his hands, smearing it with pink. From the center of the table he picked up the envelope addressed to him and held it in front of me.

“I’ve thought about burning this. However”—he was making a resolution—“I
won’t
have secrets between us, Liese. I just won’t.”

From within the envelope, he unfolded a sheet of white office paper, which he handed to me. Upon it was typed:

Dear Mr. Colquhoun,

A few weeks ago, I was driving when I saw you outside a block of flats in the Docklands with someone calling herself Liese Campbell.

The wise man says, “Beware the unknown woman, she is like a river whose twistings you do not understand.” He means, you will be dragged under by her, as I was. I had dealings with her back in ­England and was pulled down all the way. At first I took Liese for a sweet young lady who had fallen into a bad habit. I tried to be a true friend, and encourage changes to her career path. All week, when I was not with her, I thought of ways to help her, and ways to satisfy her needs.

But Miss Campbell is a deceitful woman (deceiving no one as thoroughly as herself). By taking payment for her favors she can say, “Oh, I don’t really want it (i.e., to mount
thousands
of different men). It is just a job.” Yet it is
not
just a job. Whoring is her way of controlling her own
constant
,
sick
desire, pretending to herself she is not a NYMPHOMANIAC.

Only her price tag stops the rutting. She wants it all the time, but money keeps you, and all the others, at a safe distance. Hand her all you have and the one thing she gives back she’s really taking. Not one true word or feeling will come from her lips because how can someone who’s frozen inside make what passes for a heart feel love? She takes you for a fool—and every time you give her money you confirm it. Behind your back, she is laughing.

Yours,

A Friend

I stared at the page: trying to take in its claims, my brain rebelled. The words would not crawl toward sense, the sentences turn to thoughts. I’d told no one I was meeting Alexander, let alone taking his money, and obviously I’d never done such a thing before. So how, and why, and
who
? On the top corner of the page was a perfect thumbprint of light red blood: the illiterate’s signature—and I knew. I knew with a kind of physical certainty that he had sat at the keyboard in his study and slowly picked off these lies. The pious tone was his alone. Alexander had put this letter in an envelope, addressed it, then mailed it to himself.

I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye.

“So it’s true,” he said slowly, his voice catching. “Everything in your reaction tells me it is true.”

I reached for a kitchen chair, needing to conserve my energy for thought.

I could not exist for him except as something to despise, so he’d invented evidence that made me despicable. This was like feeling a cocoon form—each silk thread another of his fantasies—while I was being wrapped inside.

“You can see,” he said defiantly, “why I would be upset?”

“Yes. It’s confronting.”

“Confronting?” he repeated sarcastically. All the restraint in his body was now gone; limbs uncoiling, he bent and took the letter from my hands, waving it in my face. “Confronting? Some pervert is sitting around trying to fill my head with this filth, and that’s all you have to say? Tell me who wrote it!”

I stared at him.
You wrote it, you did.

Veins were wiring his neck with fury: “Tell me. And I will find him. And I will kill him!”

Was I supposed to act scared? I mean, I was. I was very, very scared. In that moment it was clear just how capable he was of losing control. But I didn’t know if revealing my fear would make it easier to get away or far more difficult. “Alexander”—I affected a strict, hard voice—“we both know this letter is not true.”

“Oh, of course.” He laughed bitterly, tilting his head. “It’s a hoax.”

“The things it claims are impossible. I have no other clients.” I reached out, trying to calm him. “There’s no one else but you.”

“Please don’t act as if I’m stupid.”

“You were the only one. Always . . .” These words were so pathetic. “None of this is true—”

“Don’t lie to me!”

All the knives in the kitchen seemed too close to him.

The more I begged, the less sincere I sounded. I had to think like he did, but my imagination had no tread. “How could this person possibly have found you?”

Fear flashed across his face.

“I don’t know.” He sniffed hard. “I presume somehow we were recognized.”

“But why? Why would he bother writing to you?”

“You tell me.” Alexander’s hand went to the cleaver.

My line came automatically: “He may be someone with emotional problems.”

“Yeah? He’d probably say the same about you.”

“This person needs help.” Trying to regard Alexander with real sensitivity, real caring, I felt like a poor excuse for a method actor. “He’s been . . . wounded somewhere along the way, badly hurt. And perhaps it is time for him to”—in the film, this would stir something deep within him—“to face the fact that he needs proper care. Do you believe me?”

He jerked up one lean arm, pulling at his hair. “I don’t know what to believe!” The look in his eyes was furious. And remorseful. And pleased.

I was now standing in the oversize kitchen, winter sun still showing every stain and flaw.
How do walls go gray like that? Is it grease? Desperation?
Behind him the bird’s carcass was laid out, and nearby were carrots, onions, a bowl of green apples. I’d written an art essay once paraphrasing some book I’d found that claimed the vanitas works of the Flemish masters “contemplated the ephemeral nature of earthly life,” “the futility of pleasure,” and “the certainty of death.” I’d been clueless then about what this meant.

“Is the envelope postmarked?”

“They’ve been sent from all over the place.”

“You mean there’s more than one?”

He hesitated. “Oh, yes.”

Positioning myself near the doorway, I announced, “I don’t think, under the circumstances, I can rightly hold you to your proposal.”

He shook his head slowly. “Liese, you don’t know me at all, do you?”

I knew then that he was mad. I knew no one could talk him out of his delusions but that I had to talk myself out of the kitchen. “How could you ever trust me, Alexander?” My hands in the air, I was trying for the kind of self-disgust that’s convincing. “For God’s sake, I’m
so far
from your ideal woman. You deserve better than this!”

“My ideal woman is not ideal,” he said plainly, my turn at the theatrical making him matter-of-fact. He was considering his book’s diagram again. “It’s your imperfections that attract me.” He looked up with blue eyes so dark they were almost reflective. “Liese, I want you to go upstairs and put your engagement ring back on.”

I glanced down at my bare hand.

“Perhaps its value is intimidating, but I bought it for you to wear.” Half smiling, “I know you’re frightened. That’s okay because this is frightening for me too.” He nodded, hand to his heart; this sensitivity was a new form of sadism. “I have been a bachelor a long time, but when it’s right, you just know. Now,” he cleared his throat, “no more drama, all right? This should really be the happiest time of your life.”

I began walking to the hallway.

“Darling?”

Turning, I shivered; he had never used such an endearment.

“You will learn this about me: I am not a man who will be intimidated by any ghost from your past writing some sick letter.” His upper body rocked back and forth as he attempted to convince himself. “This”—he held his ridiculous piece of paper in the air—“this only makes me more determined to protect you.”

III

T
he arched window buckled the trees outside as I walked up the staircase and carefully shut the bedroom door behind me. From the white dressing table I took the matching white chair and wedged it under the doorknob. I sat on the edge of the bed. I sat completely still and closed my eyes.

I’d underestimated Alexander. What was worse, he knew it. I had made the oldest of mistakes: every real prostitute must know that the dullest clients have the deepest fantasies; the most wholesome are also the most dangerous.

Reading his letter, feeling startled, feeling sick, I had also been strangely unsurprised.

This one afternoon had changed everything between us: we were in a small inner-city terrace house built for Victorian laborers but now painted a color titled Thoroughbred, with a landscaped, water-featured, yard-square porch—and a million-dollars-plus price tag. The lawyers who owned it were having a baby and needed to expand. One lawyer was evidently an amateur photographer—on each sleek wall was a just-in-focus picture of the couple, say, standing by an Asian temple at sunset, or a market cart of tropical vegetables. Alexander and I had just finished up on their organic cotton bedspread and were lying side by side.

“I suppose you’re going out now?” Alexander asked.

“Possibly.” Although I had nowhere to go and most likely would return to the flat above my uncle’s garage to watch too many episodes of some television series.

“I can imagine you at a gallery, at an art opening.” He was staring at the ceiling, convivial; broken open slightly by the sex. “All of you standing around discussing the brushstrokes.” Alexander turned, damp curls flattened on his forehead. “Or perhaps you have another appointment?”

Probably I looked surprised.

“I don’t want you to meet him.”

I paused. “But I have to.”

“No.”

Dusk was settling outside; a blackbird sang in a plane tree. We both waited, curious to see what the other would do next.

“I’ll pay you more to stay here with me.”

“The client will be waiting, Alexander. I can’t just cancel.”

“I need you to.”

Sighing, but with my heart beating faster, I took my phone into the bathroom and locked the door. The lawyers were on vacation until the auction, and I was not expected back at the office that afternoon. Standing there, flushed pink in the mirror, I made apologetic noises into the phone as the scent we’d made rose off my skin.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” I announced, returning to the bedroom. “It was very unprofessional.”

“Was he upset?”

“He certainly wasn’t pleased.”

Alexander was sitting up on the bed, batik pillows crammed behind him. Leaning down to the floor, to his inside-out trousers, he untangled his wallet. “You charge us both the same amount?”

“Yes, I do.”

He doubled this sum and, biting his lip, handed it to me, unable to meet my eye.

Above the bed there were framed photographs of the owners’ trip to Morocco, close-ups of a tiled wall, a minaret, a fountain in a courtyard. It would be too much to claim the images were transporting, but as the sun went down we were on the towel I’d spread out, and suddenly it was like every other time we’d met had been a preamble for this meeting. Our skin, already sweat-lined, slightly bruised, wanted to press closer, as close as possible—and a question hung in the air. I can’t remember now if he asked it aloud, or if I guessed that he wanted to: What do you do for him, this man you’re no longer meeting, and what does he do to you?

I leaned against Alexander and into his ear started talking.

After this session, when we met I would tell him some story about an imaginary client, and soon he’d be acting as whoever I dreamed up, doing what these characters supposedly liked to do. The style of apartment we were in determined the scripts he heard; according to the layout or decor, vivid scenes came to me. I suppose we did things the people who lived in the houses might have done. A couch with floral upholstery inspired one set of maneuvers, a bold stripe shifted the mood and tempo.

Even if my accompanying story lines were as generic as the bleached pine we were often surrounded by—for I don’t pretend to be a brilliant or inventive pornographer—these episodes stayed with me, unlike other couplings I’d had. Small details about the wallpaper or furnishings that the owners had chosen imprinted, and so, therefore, did the encounter. This total recall had made what we did addictive. But each episode locked into my brain was now shot through with horror. And I
wanted
to forget them. For Alexander must have left me and at some point on his long drive home, feeling the drug of our liaison wearing off, started composing a letter.

 • • • 

Forcing myself to stand from the bed, I walked to the window and stared out at the horizon—the beckoning horizon. My packed suitcase: I did not need it. I could replace the clothes. I doubted I would want to wear them again anyway. I did not need my handbag. I’d just take the cash and my credit card and leave the rest. The engagement ring could stay on the bedside table in its leather box.

In which direction should I run? I calculated the safest path, trying to retrace the route from the house to the road. There was a bank of European trees that stopped abruptly where the garden ended and fields began. If I left now he would come looking and, in such wide-open spaces, have little trouble finding me. If I waited until nightfall, I could travel across the fields parallel to the driveway with the aim of making it to the public road. There would be fences, of course, and cattle, and dogs—and I had no idea how long it would take to walk to the nearest town. Was there a moon? I hadn’t noticed any moon. A sick feeling of treading through blackness washed over me.

Lines from that letter now slithered back:
a nymphomaniac
 . . .
controlling her own constant, sick desire
 . . .
someone who is frozen inside and only her price tag stops her rutting. She wants it all the time
 . . .

I caught sight of Alexander striding across the lawn, his jacket collar turned up, his long frame pitched forward as he scowled at the grass. He was holding a bucket in his hands—the yellow bucket from the kitchen—heading toward the kennels, where the dogs were already on their hind legs, stretched up against the mesh doors, barking. Alexander opened the doors one by one, and taking the bird’s wet innards from the bucket, threw them inside: his fiends whipped around, crazed for these lumps and scraps of meat.

I went to the door and took away the white chair.

The hallway was dark, all shadows and angles, and my eyes were slow to adjust. Each closed door seemed blank and knowing. A scream waited in my throat. I swallowed it down and turned the nearest door handle.

In this pale-blue room waited the outline of a man.

I reeled back: on a coat hanger hung Alexander’s dark-gray, beautifully cut silhouette. The suit was suspended from the window frame. A pair of polished black shoes waited underneath. Otherwise it was fastidiously swept of personal detail. No paintings on the wall, no photographs; not a book by the single bed. It was horrible to know he’d been lying on the other side of the wall to me, thinking up his next move.

There was no telephone.

Back in the hallway, I opened the door opposite. Drawn curtains—dark and stuffy. Feeling for a switch, I knocked a frame sideways. The light came on, revealing two single beds in old chenille covers, surrounded by piles of colonial detritus: boxes overflowing with stacks of pictures, rolls of plans, legal documents—I caught the word “Executor”—and balanced on top of them an old dinner gong and a beaded ceremonial shield. In the corner was a collection of light wooden spears, as basic and functional as weapons could be. Local Aborigines, I supposed. No telephone.

More rooms were virtually empty but for old beds, each one carefully made up with aging linen: ready for Alexander’s heirs . . . heirs I was meant to provide. Occasionally, against a bare white wall, stood an antique, a cabinet or washstand of some intricacy, objects of luxury in the midst of the spartan, which drew attention to what must have been missing. I guessed the rest had been taken away and sold.

Still no telephone.

In the hallway again, each door seemed identical. A few were open that I was sure I’d closed. Hesitating, I listened—the deep silence of this house. I waited for my breath to steady, and the house seemed to wait too.

At the end of the hall three steps led to a smaller door that appeared to have been added later. The door had a stained-glass panel showing a tree of life with perfect round fruit. Attached was a lock that had in part been painted over. I pushed hard at its little bolt and shoved the door open. The smell, then, of mold.

It was another wing: the house repeated in shadow, a warren with lower ceilings and walls scarred by water damage. Paint was peeling in great swathes; chunks of plasterwork had broken off. This was the part of the house I’d seen from the back, the ad hoc extension like a series of strange growths. These rooms were connected to the downstairs kitchen area by a narrow staircase. The servants had worked there but lived up here. They’d been gone for thirty or forty years—leaving cheap, plain furniture stacked in corners, dust, dead insects, mouse dirt—but it felt as though they’d only just closed the door and fled, their departure somehow connected to Alexander’s madness.

When I’d told him I was leaving the country, he seemed to take it as a personal affront. “What aren’t you happy with?” he’d asked accusingly, implying that this setup between us was without fault or complication. The next time he called to make an appointment he kept me on the phone for longer, and there was more need in his good-bye. Then, at our subsequent meeting, he began asking questions regarding my past. What school did I go to? Did I like it? Was I a good student? What is Norwich like? And the neighborhood where I’d grown up? Could I see myself ever returning there? “I hope not,” I’d answered.

I glanced in at the servants’ bathroom; a piece of lace beige with dust was nailed over a small window. In the next room, a rusting bed frame and putrid mattress, biblical in age, were positioned beneath a plastic crucifix and a hand-stenciled sign:
god is love
.

In the kitchenette, hanging on the oven’s handle, a dish towel was long shriveled. I stopped, and for a second the towel seemed to sway. Here, in the middle of these endless fields, there had been people, meals cooked, children playing around the people cooking. The towel was stayed again.

Turning, I glimpsed a telephone, an old black Bakelite with finger dials, fixed to the wall. I swooped on it even though I knew it was surely long disconnected. I held the dusty receiver to my ear and listened to nothing. Only a sound like that in a shell that one might pretend was the sea, or the last murmurs of an extinct species. People who vanished when they were of no further use.

“Will you give me a photo of yourself ?” Alexander had asked a few weeks earlier. “For after you’ve gone?”

I presumed he wanted nudity. “I don’t have any.”

“Not even from when you were younger?”

“No.”

“A school photo?”

“They’re all locked away back in England, thank God.”

“Well, it’s not like I can’t imagine what you were like.” He said this in a way that annoyed me. “And I’m sure if I went looking I could find your picture
somewhere
.”

We were lying on the hardwood floor of a weatherboard bungalow with sea views. His hour was up but his arm was still stretched over me. Often he’d been slightly surly when our sessions ended, and now there was something else: resentment.

“Do you feel perhaps you had a duty of care to that guy?”

I was gently patting the floorboards, checking for a dropped earring. “Which guy?”

“The one watching.”

“Watching who?”

“You—watching you with his girlfriend.”

I understood. Alexander had arrived at this address just as I finished showing the house to a young couple. Later he asked what they’d wanted and I reworked a story involving a voyeur, a script we’d used before, when it was fun. “Are you worried about him?”

“No, but I mean, I doubt seeing
you
do all those things made him feel good.”

“It was what he asked for. He’d requested it.”

“Still.”

We needed to get out of this house before the vendor’s babysitter brought her twins back from kindergarten. “I suppose at the time his self-esteem didn’t seem like my problem, okay?”

“Do you ever wonder what happens later, when your clients leave?” He sounded genuinely angry.

As far as I was concerned the phantoms we discussed vanished the moment I took the towel out from beneath us and stuffed it in my bag. “To be honest,” I answered, “I don’t give it a lot of thought.”

Nodding, “So it’s just business to you?”

Among his new lines of inquiry would there now be the ethics, if you will, of prostitution? The responsibilities and obligations a sex worker might have to her clientele? He had never again asked me not to meet another man, or offered to pay extra for exclusivity. I’d assumed he knew there was no need.

In the kitchenette I shut my eyes, trying to keep the layout of his house in my head. I had been trained to draft floor plans, but these small rooms had no logic to them. They were designed to switch off a person’s spatial sense, to completely disorientate.

Hearing something rattle, I glanced behind me. Nothing.

 . . .
You will be pulled down by her, pulled down all the way
 . . .
by someone who is frozen
 . . .
sick
 . . .

I peered into the narrow rooms on either side. Each time I turned I felt something shift on the periphery. It was the fusing of dust and the very idea of being trapped in here, the house’s dankest part. Unable to stand the thought, I moved like a bird banging into glass, trying to get out.

Now I couldn’t even find the door, the tree-of-life door, and when finally I rounded a corner and saw it, no reflection came from the other side, the glass was so dull with grime. Again the door stuck, and again I had to push and pull it until I was back in the Colquhouns’ forest-green hallway. Shaking, the adrenaline thudding through my body, I realized that there was one last room I hadn’t checked.