Contours of darkness, p.24
Contours of Darkness, page 24
“Maybe he’s with Conrad,” she said to herself as she hung up the phone. The thought cheered her. She saw the young man not only as a possible sexual partner, but as a friend, someone she could confide in. She knew with absolute certainty that she would tell all of her adventures to Conrad, and enjoy his responses and listen to his advice. And upon that, she also admitted to herself that she would fuck with him. It was clear that, although it contradicted her image of herself, if she and Aaron split up, she would not spend a long period of time in tearful loneliness, but would call Conrad immediately and have him take care of her. She knew that his liking of her went deeper than wanting a casual affair, and was prepared to lean upon his affection, like a convalescent leaning upon the arm of a nurse. She mused that it would be pleasant to do nothing for several months but have Conrad fuck her, feed her good grass and hashish, introduce her to mescaline, and show her the workings of his life. And failing that, she had Jackie and Maureen to support her for a while.
She ripped herself away from the direction of her thoughts, for a great deal depended on Aaron’s state of mind, and her own reactions to seeing him again. She looked around for her clothes, but they were nowhere in sight. Instinctively she went to the closet and found Jackie’s wardrobe, hanging like a fashion display, with one article of clothing to fit exactly each of the several dozen social scenes a sophisticated wealthy woman might visit, from an elegant evening gown to a pair of tailored tennis shorts. Cynthia could not suppress a moue of chagrin at the money and taste exhibited in the layout, especially in light of the fact that on the three occasions she had seen Jackie she was dressed in the same jeans and sweatshirt. Cynthia’s things weren’t there and she decided it would not be irregular in that house if she remained naked. She closed the closet door and spent a long time looking at herself in the mirror, seeking for any change in expression to indicate that the night’s and morning’s lovemaking had wrought some external differences in her. But she saw nothing extraordinary except for a flush over her cheeks.
“I am now technically bisexual,” she thought, “I wonder what that means.” She had spun around and swept into the living room, where she stopped short upon seeing Clare.
“That’s my brother,” Jackie had said. “And he’s been watching you sleep for a good part of the morning so you don’t need to worry about his seeing your body now.” Cynthia had fallen into the classic feminine response, dropping one hand over her cunt and covering her breasts with her other arm. At hearing Jackie’s words, she felt foolish and let her limbs fall to her side. “Come, sit by me,” Jackie had said, “and have some coffee.”
Now Clare snuffed out his cigarette. It had a trace of lipstick around the base. “But to see one’s folly is merely an intellectual exercise,” he went on. “One is stuck with that particular form of aberration until one finds another to replace it. Never an easy task, and especially difficult for a man who has spent almost a decade perfecting the skill of debauching women. For at the heart of all folly, including my forays into metaphysical sensuality, is an aching loneliness so profound that I dared not, and still dare not, face it. It wasn’t until later that I understood that my very anguish was what gave me power over the women I possessed. They were taken by my surface charm, but it was the deep vibrations in my soul that chained them to me. I think they found in me an echo of the fear that stands at the doorway to all human experience, the horror of this mysterious life, this whirring silent world in which we dance like ghosts to a music which has no recognizable source. They allowed themselves to hope that not only would I understand their pain, but that my strength would help them sustain it. And so they gave themselves to me, the way a cripple throws herself upon a statue that is reputed to have miraculous powers.”
He put two fingers of his right hand to his forehead, his thumb on his chin, and closed his eyes. His brow furrowed and he seemed gripped by a spasm of cerebral intensity. Cynthia watched the man, taken by his almost theatrical air of control, the measured cadence of his speech. Having resolved that she would leave that morning, she was able to relax and enjoy the interaction with a man she would have, just the day before, found grotesque had she seen him on the street.
“But that is why folly exercises such power over our lives,” he continued. “We make it a shield against the night. My guilt for my years as a sexual scavenger was largely ameliorated when I realized that the women were using me to their ends, fully as much as I used them, and it was merely my puffed-up male ego which allowed me to think that I was the only one writing the scenario. And so they clung to me, woman after woman, letting me infatuate them with promises of paradise, and debase them in baroque sexual rituals, only to be flung out once more into their solitude, wiser perhaps by having one less illusion concerning their nature. To me they became one woman, changing faces and bodies, but manifesting as a single flow of mood and muscle, sentiment and secretion. And I clung to them, a reasoned madman unable to accept responsibility for his life, and forging his weakness into a tool for conquest.” He smiled at Cynthia, the expression of a man who has just escaped being hit by a speeding car. “Given a different set of proclivities, I might have used all that energy to become a successful banker.”
Cynthia found herself smiling in return, although she would not have been able to describe the humor in his words. The air between them seemed to shimmer as Clare’s eyes lit up from within and beamed across the space, setting off sparks of pleasure in her brain. She felt an attraction for him that owed a great debt to his sheer physical handsomeness, but went beyond that into a realm of complicity; like Conrad he was able to give her the sense of being included in on a secret that no one else knew about. It was flirtation of the first water.
“You know that I looked at you while you and Maureen were still asleep,” he said. Cynthia felt a blush creeping across her chest and leaned into Jackie’s side. “I pored over your body in minutest detail, listened to your breathing, and watched your face made innocent by dreaming. I took in your movements and smells. And all during that time I imagined how it would have been had I met you earlier, when I was still ravenous for females wanting to be sacrificed. There is a quality about you that inspires extravagant forms of folly. You would probably make a splendid whore.”
Cynthia blinked at the words. She felt that she should feel flustered, but a pleasant excitement buzzed through her. “Don’t you have any relations with women at all any more?” Cynthia asked, a lilt in her voice.
“I’ve become a homosexual,” he replied.
“Hoorah for our side,” said Maureen as she glided into the room. Clare’s face brightened upon seeing her, the way a landscape will thrill with light when the clouds fly away from the sun. He jumped to his feet and held out his arms. Maureen walked toward him and slipped into his embrace. They touched tenderly and totally, the entire fronts of their bodies in delicate contact. They stood holding one another for such a long time that Cynthia began to feel uneasy, until she realized that she was experiencing minute pangs of envy. What astonished her was the fact that she didn’t know whether she wanted to be Maureen in Clare’s arms, or Clare in Maureen’s arms. They presented a stunning picture, both tall, Clare’s light skin contrasted against Maureen’s dark flesh, his clothing setting off her nudity.
She pulled back from him, put her hands on his chest, disengaged, and came to lie on the couch, at once putting her head in Cynthia’s lap. She turned to lie on her stomach and put her lips against Cynthia’s pubic hair, kissing the furry patch softly. Clare lit another cigarette and sat down to smoke as the three women spent a few moments restructuring their ambience. It was the first time that all of them had been awake together that morning, and it was necessary to reintegrate their energy fields and merge their auras harmoniously. For Cynthia to have sex with Maureen was one thing; for her to sit nestled against Jackie’s side was another; but when both Maureen and Jackie bracketed her between the power poles of their seven-year relationship, her position needed to be redefined. It was part of the ongoing process of living for the two lesbians to remain sensitive to the changes in atmosphere and relationship produced by the introduction of new people, and they maintained certain quasi-ritualistic ceremonies to insure that everyone in any given circle related to the others on levels understood by all. They were practitioners of a species of psychic technology which pervaded all radical activity in the Bay area, a process whereby all the functions of the person, either poorly understood or denied by orthodox psychology, were educated and tuned to perform with the precision of sophisticated machinery. Such faculties as extrasensory perception, telepathy, movements of electrical fields around the body, and astral projection were treated not as topics for speculation but as realities to be dealt with in day-to-day living. Beneath everything else, the real revolution the two women represented was the awakening of the individual to his or her full potential, although, given their sexual inclinations, they rarely involved men in the process of their teaching.
Cynthia closed her eyes as Jackie kissed her temples and Maureen tickled the insides of her thighs with her tongue. She was intensely aware that Clare was watching, but there was nothing salacious in the fact. It was an almost unique pleasure to have caresses and conversations mixed in such an easy blend, to feel the sexual excitation in her body and the intellectual stimulation of her mind as part of a unitary process, and to have the whole movement bathed in the warmth of honest affection. All of her years in the society she was raised in had conspired to teach her that sex was an activity apart from the rest of daily life; it was to be done in a special place or at a special time or during a special mood. To have several people sitting around talking and fucking, viewing both expressions as functions which interpenetrate, seemed the most natural thing in the world.
Lips covered her nipples and a finger slipped subtly into her cunt. She parted her thighs to let the hand slide further in, but it retreated, and she opened her eyes in time to see Clare sitting back down, sniffing the moist tip of his middle finger. “Dogs greet one another by smelling each other’s genitals,” he said as he saw the look of surprise on her face. “It shows a higher degree of organic intelligence than the stilted rituals we’ve come down to.” He put the finger in his mouth and sucked it thoroughly. “Are there any words which could tell me more about you than a single fleeting aroma from your cunt?”
“Chauvinist,” muttered Maureen as she sat up again, leaning against the backrest of the couch.
“No more so than you, my dove,” said Clare.
“I thought you were a homosexual,” Cynthia said, nonplussed at the rapidity of interchange.
“I have switched to cock as a matter of survival and human decency,” he told her, “but that doesn’t mean my taste for cunt has diminished. This division into homosexual and heterosexual and bisexual is really very tedious. Consider, if you were kneeling on the floor in front of a couple sitting before you, a man and a woman, and he presented you with a thick succulent cock and she offered a pulsing oozing cunt, and someone asked you to choose between the two, wouldn’t you think it odd that a question of choice should even arise? In moments of passion, it is the shapeshifting dances of our own mouths that we thrill to, and the genital we use as a prop is really incidental.”
“We’re not all narcissists,” Maureen said.
Jackie looked at him questioningly. It was as though she had suddenly dipped beneath the banter to listen seriously to what was being said. She was able to accept Clare’s lyrical cynicism as part of his style, and appreciate it as such, but she kept a sisterly eye on the little boy who still wept from a scraped knee or the death of his pet, the child with whom she had shared her childhood, and those posturings never obscured what she knew of his loneliness. She cared for him enough to remember that he was more than the act he presented. She made a wry face.
“Being a hooker is destroying your sensibilities,” she said.
Clare looked at her and responded to the note of concern. “It’s simply a matter of trading one system of perceptions for another. I’m finding that to chase my folly requires a more ruthless dedication than I had suspected.”
“You work as a prostitute?” Cynthia asked.
Clare lit another of his Gitanes and passed the pack around. Each of the women took one and he lit each of their cigarettes before getting to his own. He poured another drink from the frosted pitcher which stood on the table into his glass, and after taking a sip looked at Cynthia. “Most professional homosexuals,” he said, “the ones who make an ideology of their rectal idiosyncracies, would have it that I was homosexual all along, and using my involvements with women to deny my true proclivities. The fact that I did not ‘come out’ until I was almost thirty, and then bloomed all at once, would be taken as prime facie evidence. They would discount my argument that homosexuality was simply, at one point in my life, a more convenient diversion than the pursuit of women, and was chosen rationally. But after all, we have but one life to live, and it would seem sensible to experience as many variations as it has to offer within the allotted span, wouldn’t it?
“To the degree that I am not deluding myself, I can say that I became a homosexual because I found it a less painful and damaging mode of escape from existential terror than heterosexuality. And I have no doubt but that this is merely another phase of my development, and will pass with all the rest. Although,” and he shot a glance at Jackie and Maureen, “some would hold that the separation of the sexes is a historically necessary phenomenon, and homosexuality is the preferred mode of any truly revolutionary group. I don’t argue the point.”
“I’ve even heard you defend it,” Jackie said.
“Ah yes, that was the night we went to Sylvia’s.” He nodded to Cynthia. “I smoked quite a bit, something I don’t ordinarily do; marijuana tends to make me sociological. And I was struck by a vision of the future, a world in which the sexes have been permanently segregated. I imagined that men and women had been given different hemispheres of the globe to develop their own civilizations. And at the borders between the kingdoms would be a series of orgy houses, a great wall of heterosexual eroticism. And all those who wanted to could spend as much time as they desired there, wallowing in transgenital exuberance.
“In the world of men there would be no further cause for hostility; with the women removed all status symbols would be drained of their potency, all macho would be reduced to shadow show. They would spend their time wrestling, their gleaming bodies and rippling muscles delighting in their own strength, seeking combat instead of war, and desiring to win no prize, except perhaps penetration into the quivering hams of the man one has just pinned to the ground. Having no one to strut for, man settles quickly into harmless activity.
“And among the women all would be gentleness and honor, for with no man to compete for, their bitchiness to one another would disappear. The stridency would fall from their tongues like scales from the eyes of someone who had been blind, until they found the strength which transcends all artifice. They would become a race with three divisions: the wild witches dancing in the hills, fierce and proud; the soft mothers of the hearth, calm and silent; and the gaunt ethereal goddesses who walk alone beneath the moon.
“Children would be spawned in the orgy palaces, and after a brief period would be separated: the boys to one world, the girls to another, never to see the opposite sex again except when they themselves reached maturity and wended their ways to the border between the two cultures, there to revel in the very halls in which they were conceived. There are some who would never visit the heterosexual centers; and some who would never leave them; while most would go a few times out of curiosity, and generally be content with the peace to be found only among one’s own kind.”
Cynthia listened with wide eyes, disturbed by the elegance of the picture Clare painted, needing for some reason to find a flaw in it, to mar its sheen of perfection. “It sounds like a world without love,” she said at last.
“Ah, what a word that is,” Clare said. “Whenever we are taken to the outermost limits of our condition and there perceive that no possible utopia can ever hope to compensate for the essential poverty of our souls, we reach for the idea of love like a beggar lunging for a coin. But what is it, after all? We sit on a beach and smell the clean salt air and some ineffable joy fills us, and we call it love; or we swoon in our lover’s arms, and we say we are in love; we inject amphetamine into our veins and feel indescribable physiological exhilaration, and identify that with feelings of love; we project all our idealized yearnings onto another human being, and claim that we have fallen in love. But all this is to confuse a tickling of the ego with a rapture of the spirit, to mistake gratification for bliss. For all the conditions we usually ascribe to love are a result of some action on our part, and the one absolute quality of love is that there is no way for us to call it to us. It enters us at its discretion, not at our volition. Whenever we try to trap it or define it or rouse it in our hearts, we remain sterile and dumb. And then, just as we have forgotten about our quest, like a sudden breeze it’s upon us, and we are transformed by beauty and power and understanding. Yet these moments are not of our choosing. All we can do is live our pitiful lives, more or less comfortably, more or less intelligently, and be thankful for the crumbs from God’s table. It’s a gift we can’t do anything to have given to us, and it is taken away as capriciously as it is bestowed. Separation of the sexes can only be discussed in pragmatic terms; it has nothing to do with love.”
“Who you sleep with is a political decision,” Jackie said.
“Or a philosophical one,” Maureen added.
Clare took a drag on his cigarette and leaned back on his sitting bones. He let the smoke out in large puffs and with an audible explosion of breath. He raised his eyebrows and looked at the three women. He ran his fingers through his hair.
