“Not really,” she said eventually. “I’m looking after Rafi, aren’t I? You went to Ajita’s brother’s place. Rafi showed me George’s autograph.”
“Yes, with Henry and Miriam.”
“They’re together, are they? Good of you to help them.”
I said, “If you need a babysitter in the evenings, I can always come over here and work. It would be a pleasure to see Rafi-and to see you, however briefly.”
“Yes? Thank you,” she said. “That’s kind.”
It wasn’t long before I stood up.
“Let me make you another cup of tea,” said Rafi.
“That would be a first,” I said, kissing his head. “But I have to go.”
As I was leaving, he slipped a CD into my hand. “For you, Dad.” It was one he’d burned for me, of some of his current favourites, Sean Paul, Nelly, Lil Jon. What I had once done for him, he was now doing for me.
The door closed behind me like a gunshot. Unconsciousness on a Sunday afternoon was one of the few pleasures of middle age. When I began to see my first patients, I’d learned to sleep between appointments. I could lie on my back on the floor and sleep immediately, sometimes for twenty minutes, or even for ten.
But today I felt so moved and desperate after leaving Rafi and Josephine-him waving at me from the window, after holding me and saying, “Daddy, don’t die today. If you lived here you’d be safe”-that I went home, showered and made a phone call.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
No other country has anything quite like a London basement. You turn sharply off the street and clamber down slippery and narrow steps into an echoey chamber, go through a door and find yourself separate from the clamour, underneath the city, where everything is cooler. It is like crossing a border from a maelstrom into an easy country.
I was in a dark, narrow hallway with several doors off it. I said to Madame Jenny, who had let me in, “I had a feeling that the Goddess might need help with her homework.”
“She does, dear, she does.” She took my coat. “How are you, Doctor? We haven’t seen you for a while. We even got you a Christmas card. Do you still want it?”
“I’d be delighted.”
The turbulent turn of the century-from the nineteenth to the twentieth-had been giving the Goddess some difficulty. In my view she spent too long on her essays and in the end got muddled and upset. Madame Jenny was proud of all her girls and was chuffed when I called them “intellectuals.” “Yes,” she said, “the girls in other places are not so bright as ours.”
“Nor as sexy.”
As I walked through the hallway, Madame Jenny said, “She’s expecting you.” I had phoned earlier, of course; like me, they only worked by appointment. “Otherwise it’s a madhouse rather than a whorehouse.”
“Here she is, sir,” said Madame Jenny, leading me into the room.
It was fittingly dim, the walls painted maroon. I held the Goddess for a moment, kissing her blond ringlets and stroking her face.
I paid her and said, “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you, Goddess.”
“Where have you been? I hope you haven’t been seeing any other tarts.”
“I wouldn’t even dream of it.”
“How do you want me?” she asked, thrusting out a hip and showing me the end of her tongue.
I contemplated the wall, which was covered in costumes on hangers; on the other wall were the whips. I asked her to dress as an air hostess. My father, of course, had spent a lot of time on planes, which seemed exotic to me then. Once he gave me a BOAC shoulder bag.
She asked, “Which airline?”
“British Airways, I think.”
“Patriotic as ever.”
She went off with the costume. Sex was niche marketing at its best. At least they didn’t stick the prices on the wall, as they did in some establishments, on brightly coloured pieces of paper, charging separately for “hand,” “oral,” “position,” “69” and my favourite, “complete.” I recalled that apparently, in the old days, brothels liked to feature a one-legged woman. I did have, a while ago, a patient who masturbated over his mother’s prosthetic leg. But I wasn’t here to think about work.
I removed my Converse All Stars, my trousers and my shorts. It was a little cold to take off my shirt. While I waited, hoping the Viagra and the painkillers were kicking in, I almost fell asleep, so contented did I feel, here where no one could reach me. I couldn’t think of a better way to squander time and money.
She returned, telling me that for her M.A. she was “doing” decadence and apocalypse, always a turn-of-the-century preoccupation, along with calls for a “return to the family.” Unfortunately, this millennium, our fears had turned out to be realities. It had been worse than we imagined.
Not that I could take in everything she said, as she was trussing my balls with a stocking, the house speciality-“tighter! tighter!”-and securing a vibrator to my dick with another one. No one could ever say she wasn’t good at what she did. She knew that, at my age, I needed all the stimulation I could get. Then she secured me to the bed with handcuffs. In the corner of the room was a cross to which you could also be tied, but I preferred the bed. I was keen to try most perversions, provided you could sit down for them.
She sat on me, flinging her hair across my face. She showed me her breasts, of which she was proud. They were “au naturel,” as she put it, which was unusual here and had become, in contemporary sexual life, something of a boon. “Enjoy them,” she said. “They’re yours.” She stood on the bed above me, bending forward, showing me her legs and butt, one of my favourite outlooks, I had to admit, along with the sight of the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge.
Untying me, she ordered me to kiss and lick her cunt and arsehole. I didn’t require much encouragement. This was where I loved to be and felt at home, as it were, with my face in the posterior of a whore, “a window on the world.” I wondered how many others had been in the same position with her today. Perhaps the only advantage of being older was that it took me a while to become aroused, and once so, it took me a long time to come.
Not that it mattered to me. I fucked her until I was tired, kissing her neck and ear and cheek, and she kissed the corners of my mouth. We adjusted easily to one another’s rhythm; mercifully forgoing a show, she made the quiet and slightly surprised noises of normal lovemaking. When I did eventually come-it was hard work; I felt as if I’d shoved a heavy train through a long tunnel-she raked my back with her nails.
We lay together. The Goddess was kissing my neck, cheeks and lips with her own full lips. I stroked and kissed her, as she told me I was a gentleman. She lay on me; I liked to feel the weight of her body, wondering not about the anonymity or dehumanisation that Lisa had talked about, but the abstract tenderness, which was more disturbing. The bewildering thing about anonymous sex was, as a lot of adults knew, not the alienation but, on the contrary, the intimacy and strong feeling. I can remember Dad reading Harold Robbins’s Never Love a Stranger. Only love strangers, more like…At least I had seen, a few years ago, that I was a naturally promiscuous person. I had realised this late, but not too late. Then something Paul Goodman had written came into my mind: “There is no sex without love, or its refusal.”
I considered Josephine walking around the Kama Sutra club, like a figure from Dante’s Purgatory. Ravenous, insatiable, perhaps bewildered, but pursuing something: the human desire to embody and manifest itself. Even then she doesn’t hurry. I still love her grace. I thought of my sister and best friend playing with the bodies of anonymous others. I felt as mystified as ever about the multiplicity and importance of human desire, and of how destructive and fulfilling it could be, with, often, the destructiveness sponsoring the achievement.