Contours of darkness, p.12
Contours of Darkness, page 12
“I had thought that Cynthia and I had found the same space.”
“No,” Conrad answered. “You only found each other, like two children in the dark, and you’re both hanging on for dear life. Except that the clinging is killing the both of you.”
Aaron put his head in his hands. The talk had exploded into the foyer of the practical, and the juxtaposition of the airy way in which he was dealing with his problems at that moment with the hard fact of Cynthia’s powerful presence in their bed clashed like cymbals in his mind. In a quick flash he saw himself returning to the house filled with brave notions based on the grass and Conrad’s words, and very quickly spilling it all out into Cynthia’s ears and Cynthia’s mouth and Cynthia’s cunt, and having no energy to deal with the ideas in terms of action. He remembered watching a filmed sequence of a female black widow spider luring a male to her nest, and the undeniable dance of rapture that he indulged in while fucking her, and then his rapid attempt to flee before she pounced on him, pierced his skull with her fangs, and sucked his body dry.
“Conrad,” he said, “I’m afraid of her.”
“Sure,” the younger man nodded. “A woman can tear you to pieces, and if she likes you, will, if you let her. But you know, you’re physically stronger than she is, and she can’t do anything to you that you don’t allow her to do. You’re afraid of what you want her to do to you, what you would really dig.” He narrowed his eyes. “Have you ever let her tie you up and whip you?”
Aaron bit his lip. “No, but I do things that are close to that all the time.” He furrowed his brow. “I almost killed her once,” he said. Recalling the scene in the baroque atmosphere of Conrad’s parlor, Aaron spoke with hesitation, the event coming to life as though through an unfocused lens at first, gradually attaining clarity. He had not spoken of it to anyone before that moment.
“I came home one night in a strange mood,” he began. “A dozen things had gone wrong during the day and my anger started building early in the morning and went right on through the drive home. As I was walking up the stairs, it began to spill over and I remember hoping that Cynthia wouldn’t be there so I could just sit and fume for a while.
“But she was, standing in front of the stove. Something in her posture or her vibration made the hair on the back of my neck rise; she had a certain attitude of vulnerability that attracted my feeling the way a rod pulls down lightning. I didn’t know what I was doing. I walked up behind her and slipped my arms around her waist, putting my hands on her belly. She was wearing a thin cotton housedress with nothing on underneath and I could feel the fullness of her under the sliding cloth. She closed her eyes and leaned back against me as though she were yielding herself up, and I slid my fingers down to her cunt, electricity sizzling where I touched her.
“I began to say something, but the heat from between her legs distracted me, and I plunged into her with all my energy. I forgot where I was and who I was with; some deep and strong feelings were swamping my critical faculties. I bit her neck, it must have been very hard because she cried out, but at the same time she pushed her ass back and rubbed it against my cock. Whatever it was I was into, she was ready to be the other half.
“I pressed into her, excited by the liberty I sensed she was granting me. Her cheeks fit right into the hollow of my groin.” He paused to glance at Conrad who was lighting another joint. “You know how luscious her ass is,” he added. Conrad nodded. “Indeed I do,” he said, and the two men smiled at one another, Aaron relieved to be able to talk about Cynthia’s body with someone who also appreciated its beauty from firsthand experience. A glow of euphoria puffed through him as Conrad passed the stick to him and smiled again, a signal of camaraderie.
“It’s a groove to talk about chicks in the locker room, ain’t it?” Conrad said, his whole body relaxing in a deep internal stretch.
Aaron hunched forward. “She got very soft, and I didn’t know where to put my hands first. I held her breasts and rubbed the nipples until they got stiff and wrinkled. I grabbed her shoulders, her waist, her thighs. I pulled her buttocks apart so I could snuggle into her even closer. And she did nothing but be there, and in a way I couldn’t figure out, telling me that whatever I did was all right, that she didn’t want anything but to feel me doing my thing.”
He stopped and rubbed his chin which had the first bristle of beard on it. This was the first day in over two years that he hadn’t shaved. “I’m starting to talk like you,” he said. Conrad took the joint and dragged on it. “No, we’re just learning how to talk together,” he said, “And that means picking up on one another’s language.” He shot his chin forward. “But go ahead,” he said. “What happened?”
“I pulled her dress up to her waist, and her partial nakedness added a shade of obscenity to the tableau. She made a small choking sound and then bent forward, offering me her rear. I unzipped my pants with one hand, let my cock edge its way out, and then pushed into her again. All I could see was the stove and I felt like a cook balancing the ingredients of a meal. I touched her every place, and it was like the first time I ever put my hands on her, and was pinching and stroking and slapping. Her knees began to tremble. I slid my hand over one cheek and into crack of her ass, feeling the hair and the heat, and getting high on the smell. Then, it was like stepping into a puddle unexpectedly, one finger slipped into her wet cunt, and I arched my back to bring my cock up and out, to point it. I stepped into her and it slipped right between the lips and into the socket.
“She let out a groan, as though she had just been squashed, and collapsed onto the stove. The wooden spoon she was holding fell on the floor. I reached over and turned the burner off and moved the pot to the back, wondering that part of me could stay so cool while the rest of me was exploding. And then I just settled into fucking her.”
The narrative stopped and Aaron stared off into space, reliving the experience within himself before continuing to dissipate its power over him by spilling it out in words. “I stood back,” he went on, “and was like a painter admiring a work I was doing, watching my cock slide in and out of her, checking the color changes in her cunt and asshole. She went from tan to dark brown to purple within two minutes, and I was complimenting myself on my good taste in women. You see, it was as though she were only an object that I could use for my pleasure, and had no existence apart from that.”
“That’s the problem,” Conrad broke in, “because that aspect is true, too. We are objects for each other’s pleasure, but not only that. Every time you discover something, you get hung up on it and blot out everything else.”
“I felt tremendously guilty,” Aaron responded. “And that got my anger going again. I braced her by the thighs and pushed her head down until she was bent over like a woman trying to touch her toes. I kept my cock pressed into her, and her cunt felt like it was filled with glue, holding me inside. I was staring down on her and all I could see was the white circle of her ass and the dark slit down the middle, and I kept thinking that somehow the secret to all my problems lay in what I was looking at, if I only knew how to interpret it. Her ass assumed some kind of cosmic significance in my mind.”
“You were really getting it on,” Conrad said.
“I bucked into her, and braced my feet against the refrigerator behind me to ride her hard. Every time I piled into her she bucked and reared, raising her cunt so I could slam into it more powerfully. I was like a steamhammer gone berserk, punishing her cunt.
“She let out a high keening wail, like hearing an ambulance siren screaming through the streets late at night. I went wild, pulled her shoulders back, shook her unmercifully. I put one arm around her throat and with my free hand I…opened the oven door. I let her fall forward and her head dropped into the black space. And then, I can’t describe with what horrible fiendish exultation, I turned the center dial and in a few seconds the oven erupted with heat.”
Aaron’s hands” began to tremble. “At that moment,” he said, his voice rough with emotion, “I wanted to kill her. Do you understand? To kill her.”
Conrad rocked back on his spine. “At least you know it,” he said. “Most of the rest of us pretend we don’t have that inside us, and we try to act nice, and then it come out in distorted ways. We have wars, we cut each other with words, we rape.”
“But what I’ll remember most for the rest of my life was that as the heat engulfed her, her whole body went limp and she said, ‘Oh God, yes.’ It sounded like a prayer. I pinned her in that position, and went on fucking her. She was sprawled like a dead deer over a pole, and I was some ferocious beast tearing at her with cruel intensity. It was as though I were rooting for something, something incredibly precious, and I was willing to rip her open to get at it. Her cunt has never been so open, before or since, and as I slammed into her the most violent visions passed through my mind, and at one point I saw myself plunging a sharp long knife right into her center. And all the while wondering whether she might actually suffocate. But I was beyond stopping, even if it meant taking her life. I still can’t accept that. Part of me reasoned that she wouldn’t die, but I acted in such a way that showed me I didn’t care if she did. I was going after what I wanted at any cost. Only I didn’t know what I wanted.
“And then it came to me, and I was appalled at the baseness of the desire. I wanted to reach a climax, some kind of explosion. It’s clear now that I had taken all the anger I was feeling for all the shit I had to put up with that day, and channeled it into my sex. But right then I just needed to blow apart, and she was willing to be the fuse and the receptacle for my eruption.”
“That’s a thing with chicks in this culture,” Conrad said. “They’re trained to sacrifice themselves. I’d like to know what was going on in her head all this while.”
“She told me that the last thing she remembered was realizing that she wanted to be murdered, and asking herself whether I would actually kill her. She said it felt like her cunt had begun to peel backwards, covering her ass and her legs and her body until she had become nothing but a huge vagina, and absorbing me in as though she were a pool and I were diving into the water.”
“She’s a Scorpio, isn’t she?” said Conrad.
“I think so,” Aaron answered. “Her birthday is November sixth.”
“Right,” said Conrad. “And you’re an Aries. It all comes together on that level, too.”
“So I put all my attention into coming. I blotted out everything else except what happened between my cock and her cunt. My legs started to shake and I had to grip her to keep my balance. She was ravishing, her long legs stretched and bent at the knees, her ass like a table, her breasts hanging like tits on a cow, her head covered with her hair inside the black oven. She had stopped making any sounds. I leaped into overdrive and pumped everything I had into her, all the frustration and grief and rage and sorrow, all the repressed feelings that were keeping me from coming alive. And she absorbed it all, and I loved her for doing that. You know? I was loving her for letting me kill her.
“And then I felt it, the great boiling release, the cataclysmic breakthrough, the terribly fleeting solution to all the contradictions. I was coming inside her. My entire body flew apart at once, my legs buckling, my pelvis flapping like a loose sail in the wind, my arms flying, my head jerking back and forth. I felt the sperm shoot out, and I could see it—I mean actually see it, I don’t know how to explain this—spilling into her cunt, splashing against the walls, bursting into the deep crevices in the back chambers. And it was as though I were defiling her, committing some heinous sacrilege. Even as I experienced that I knew that was all wrong, but there it was, unavoidably actual. The expression on my face must have been hideously ugly.”
Conrad stared into the images that Aaron’s narrative had conjured up. He was translating the story into the scenario he would have played had he been in Aaron’s place. Having seen through the artifacts of sadism and masochism and understood their functions as means to release life energy, he was comfortable in either role, and chose his attitude in relation to the predilections of whatever partner he was with. Although the dominance-subservience game was not one he preferred as a steady diet, when he did indulge in it he approached it with a sense of style. As Aaron spoke he saw Cynthia with her hands tied behind her back and to her ankles forcing her to kneel with her ass raised. He would tickle her cunt with a feather until she begged piteously to be fucked, and then have her list the abominations she would endure for the privilege of receiving his cock. The excitement would come from the degree of desperation she reached and the frenzy with which she kicked about in order to present herself in the most lewd and inviting postures. His cock wallowed in a lazy erection.
“Right afterwards I pulled her back and lifted her to her feet. The thing became a person again, the anonymous woman became Cynthia in my arms. She sagged against me a long time and I could feel a thousand subtle tremors cripping through her. I was poised between joy and regret and didn’t know what to say or do. And then she turned slowly, her face mottled and bruised, swam up to me from whatever depths she had descended to, and covered my lips with her mouth. It was like death coming to get me. And I stood there petrified while she silently moved me with kisses.” He passed his hand across his eyes. “And clanging in me like a fire bell was the single clear desire to hither.”
“But you didn’t,” Conrad suggested.
“I didn’t have the courage, not after what I had just put her through.”
“You’re an idiot,” Conrad said, his tone sober. “She was using you just as much as you were using her.”
“But what would be the point in slapping her?” Aaron asked him.
“No point. It just would have been the proper thing to do.”
Something about the incongruity of the phrase, calling up as it did echoes of Emily Post, tipped Aaron into a peal of full rich laughter. He saw the seriousness on Conrad’s face and laughed all the harder, for the younger man’s earnestness reminded Aaron that he was a generation older and could take solace in the fact that no matter how much more Conrad knew, there were still areas in which he was a child. His inability to laugh at himself was one of those. Conrad waited until Aaron’s mirth had subsided, welled up again, and fallen away entirely. Then he spoke.
“By ‘proper’ I mean ‘organic’,” he explained. “Sometimes you have to do things which outrage your reason, but you have to recognize which of those have to do with your survival, and learn to follow those instantaneously, without questioning or looking back. You have to trust that there’s a force operating in you which knows more than all your ideas put together. And you begin to test it in small things, like telling somebody to fuck off if they lay shit on you; or slapping a chick when her emotional strength is killing you and you have to defend yourself physically.”
“You sound like you’re making a case for murder,” Aaron said, reflecting the sombre tone of Conrad’s direction.
“I killed a man once,” Conrad replied. “And I’ve been trying to get straight behind it ever since. In fact, everything I know comes from thinking about the night I did it.” He paused. “I was sixteen,” he added.
“What happened?” asked Aaron, immediately fascinated by the turn the conversation had taken. Like two lovers who lock themselves to one another by revealing the deepest secrets of the heart, the men hung the first strand of the bridge they had begun to build between them. After Aaron’s admission of his selfish bestiality, Conrad felt the burden of unburdening himself.
“I left home at fourteen,” he said. “My father was some kind of chairman-of-the-board type for a subsidiary of an aircraft company. My mother was into barbiturates and booze and fucking the latest stud to make the circuit of the Palo Alto rich bitches. I was about nine when I began to dig what was happening, and after I figured it out, it didn’t bother me, except the fact that they were pretending that they weren’t doing the things they were doing. She used to throw lines about going to the hairdresser every time she left to get laid; it was easy to tell because she always did a big scene with perfume and tight dresses; and my old man had his name on all the church functions and fashionable charity organizations, and I knew he didn’t give a shit about anything except money and power.
“So I split. I hitched a ride to New York and lived in the East Village until the winter came, panhandling, crashing. I found out you don’t need much just to survive. When it got cold I came back west, stopping in at different scenes and farm communes, going from connection to connection, discovering what was later called the underground. I was so young and lost that most people felt sorry for me, and I was even taken in by straights: once I stayed for days with a Navy captain and his wife, who was a Pepsi addict. And then made it to Berkeley, and learned how to live on the street.”
“Fourteen!” Aaron mused. “When I was fourteen I was a sophomore in high school and trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.”
“Yeah, well, I learned all at once. The one thing I wanted to be was alive. That’s the most important. Everything else is a tool for survival. I got very tough and lean, and I had the one quality my parents had instilled in me: I was ruthless. I fell in with some people who were calling themselves revolutionaries but were mostly into speed and danger. I felt like a wolf who had found his pack, and we spent a lot of time shooting up, and pilfering grocery stores, and writing slogans on walls.
