Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

‘I can’t be sure,’ I admitted.

We were having a sundowner at the Code of Hammurabi, which is one of the Unique’s six bars/eateries.

Ollie said, ‘Well, let’s hope you’re right. Good to know she’s landed on her feet.’

He was trying to be kind to me, which made me feel a little foolish. I decided to drop the subject, which was, as I’ve said, by that point regarded as ancient history. Nor was it the occasion to mention that Mrs TW2, or the person I’d believed, rightly or wrongly, to be Mrs TW2, was now a Mrs Svengali, outwardly smiling and singing and inwardly robotic. (I believe that the conjecture retains its validity even if the woman I met was someone other than Mrs TW2. I saw what I saw.) Ollie doesn’t go in for that kind of thinking.

‘I might be leaving town,’ he said.

‘Oh? Where to this time?’

‘I mean leaving for good. There’s this opportunity opening up in Shanghai.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Yeah, we’ll know a bit more in a few months. It depends on a few things falling into place.’

‘Shanghai,’ I said. ‘Cool.’

‘Yeah. Lynn is pretty psyched. I think she’s ready for something new.’

‘Cool,’ I said.

Ollie went on to say that although Dubai was a ‘great market’, China was a ‘truly exceptional market’, even allowing for widely expected drops in its GDP growth rates. Ollie said it would be a super place to ‘headquarter’ going forward, although he would of course retain a ‘strong presence’ in the Gulf.

‘That makes a lot of sense,’ I said.

‘It’ll be an adventure,’ Ollie said.

This was some months ago. I’ve heard nothing more about it.

Don’t go, Ollie. Don’t leave me stranded.

Hello, here’s the cavalry — Mila. I should get a special bugle tone for her texts.

You want two friends tonight? You can handle???

The threesome. The trio with brio. I’m well aware of the appeal. I’ve done the porn.

It’s not for me. A sexual encounter should retain at least the structure of the real thing, i.e., the one-on-one. The two-on-one, or the one-on-two, or the one-on-one-on-one — these are in formal contradiction, in my opinion, of the raison d’être of the coming together in closeness of persons. The problem of the third person is not the problem of the third wheel, which was solved once and for all, one would think, by the invention of the tricycle. It is the problem of the third as the third. His/her presence abolishes the bilateral relation of the first and the second — already fraught with difficulty — and installs in its place a trilaterality that, by its very multiplication of the possibilities for pleasurable physical interaction, by its generation of a beast with three backs and six arms and six legs and eight holes and one cock, involves the sexual participants in a metamorphosis in which they are turned into organs of an organism seeking only its sensual organization. Gone is the great promise of mutual caring enabled by one special other, whereby the carers together eliminate the terrible problem of space. (By ‘space’, I don’t just mean the isolating sea of interpersonal separation. I also mean the cosmic sea.) Even a fiction of this caring (of the kind I happily settle for in my semi-pro pairings) is impossible. In its place comes a nonfiction of meat and bones, of blowjobs and handjobs and you-name-it-jobs, of stick-that-in-here and my-turn-your-turn-her-turn, of you-do-this-while-he-does-that-and-I-do-this. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Everything turns to crap.

One friend please

is my reply to Mila.

I’ve showered, shaved, and shat, and am all set to head out, when a doorman calls: Mr Ali is here.

I meet the great man in the lobby. ‘Well, Ali, how are you keeping? Everything OK?’ We shake hands. I tell him, ‘One more day. Then Alain will be gone.’

Ali smiles. ‘I have information for you, boss,’ he says. During his brief sabbatical, this most diligent of assistants has made it his business to repeatedly visit the Project X site. ‘Today, I speak to a man there,’ he says. ‘He is American. I ask him, “What is this building?” He tells me, it is a “mah-kp”.’

I ask Ali to repeat that last word.

‘Mah-kp,’ Ali repeats. ‘This is what he says. They are building a very big tower somewhere else. This is the mah-kp.’

‘A mah-kp? What does that mean?’

Ali cannot tell me. He is relaying what the man told him.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘That’s very helpful. Thank you very much.’ I’ll get to the bottom of this later. ‘Anything else?’

Ali shakes his head. I give him taxi money and send him on his merry way. I/Godfrey Pardew also go on our merry way, to the Unique Luxury Resort and Hotel.

I valet-park the Autobiography and brace for the Nubians. They’re nowhere to be seen. I breeze unseen past the front desk: a first. It’s exhilarating. The childhood dream of invisibility has come to pass.

My hostess is Oksana. She has an amazingly high forehead, very black hair in a ponytail, and small, decidedly elliptical eyes. (Where is she from? I’m guessing Novosibirsk.) The good-time girls I’ve had dealings with are usually dressed up, and made-up, semi-formally and semi-glamorously, as if en route to the commercial attaché’s reception. Some even look as though they’re about to ice-dance. Oksana looks like she’s come back from the gym. She has come back from the gym: her discarded gym shoes are over there by the TV.

Good for her, I say.

She lights a cigarette. ‘You want to fuck?’ she says. ‘You want to drink something?’

‘Maybe a drink,’ I say.

Oksana responds with an eye-roll towards the minibar.

I’m getting disdain? I’m being put in touch with my unworthiness? Here? By her? I don’t want to sink to the contractual level, but submitting to a personal assessment by Oksana isn’t part of the deal. I insist only on niceness, and this isn’t being nice. If she doesn’t want to be in this room, neither do I.

I’m about to say something when I see, on the bedside table, something extraordinary: a Martial Arts Sudoku book, Black Belt.

I ask her, ‘May I look?’

She sucks on her cigarette. We’ll call that a yes.

My God, over half of the puzzles have been solved. The numbers are written down in a flawless, invariable hand. There isn’t a correction or marginal notation in sight. These solutions are totally clean.

Oksana is a Black Belt?

‘Bravo,’ I say. ‘These are very difficult. You must be very intelligent,’ I say. (Clumsy, I know, but it’s incumbent on me to speak to Oksana as if English were a foreign language for me, too.)

All I get out of her is more smoke.

Very shy, I hold out the book. ‘Can you teach me? How you do it?’

Oksana is beautiful, I realize. How wonderful it would be to lie on this bed with her doing Sudoku puzzles, laughing and sharing and solving. And then a breakfast of fava beans, and then a car journey on sand flats and corniches, and then a trip by speedboat to an island, and there a small cabin build of clay and wattles made.

Oksana terminates her cigarette. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she begins to remove her clothing, starting with the white socks. Then it’s off with the leggings and the T-shirt. In her underwear — sports bra and regular panties — she goes into the bathroom. She locks the door.

Oh, woe is me. Oh, woe is she.

She comes out a few minutes later, wearing a towel-turban and a hotel bathrobe. ‘OK,’ she says, lighting up again. ‘First, money. Then we fuck.’

Clearly, Oksana isn’t aware of the protocol. I explain to her that I pay Mila and Mila pays her.

‘Mila will not pay me,’ Oksana says. ‘My friends tell me this.’