Contours of Darkness (29 page)

Charlotte rubbed the fatigue from his shoulders, from his feet. Her fingers found the tensions in his neck and sent them scurrying. She pulled his toes and tickled his soles. He drank in the luxury of the treatment and flashed a montage in which he was dressed successively as an oil-rich diamond-heavy pasha of the middle east, an Indian nabob, and a Chinese mandarin, in each instance surrounded by young girls abasing themselves before him, licking his body with their avid tongues.

He heard a click, and Charlotte took her hands away. The massage was over. She stepped back and returned to her supply table. Aaron lay still for a moment, having barely begun to open up to the process, and then stretched once and rolled to his side. She turned around and looked at him. A thin wall hung between them and there was a thick silence in the room.

'Do you want a local?' she said at last.

'A local?' he said.

'Down there,' she said, flickering her eyes at his cock.

'Down there
,' he thought, and in a phrase it was all summed up for him. The terminology, used to dodge possible police intrusion by referring to a hand-job as a local and to his cock as 'down there', placed the sexual act in a framework of absolute sterility. Aaron shook his head. 'What did I expect?' he said to himself. 'Passion?' He looked up.

'Sure,' he said.

'It's ten dollars extra,' she told him.

'Twelve-fifty for the entire body, and ten dollars just for the cock,' he said. 'That seems disproportionate.'

'That's what it costs,' she continued.

He lay on his back, spread his legs, and put his hands under his head. 'It's all yours,' he said.

She walked to the edge of the table and without looking down took the limp cock in her hand, letting it rest on her palm. .She brought her other hand over it and began to stroke the top of the shaft, as a little girl will pet a kitten. Her face showed no expression and her body was erect; she looked like a factory worker at an assembly line, making small adjustments in a piece of fine machinery. It was the minimal sexual act possible, the sheer manipulation of the organ until it reached a state of tumescence and an excitatory level triggered the ejaculation response. His cock did not get hard.

'If you don't enjoy it, I don't think anything is going to happen,' he said.

She looked at him as though he were mad. 'I don't have anything to do with it,' she said. 'You're the one who's paying for it.
You're
supposed to like it.'

'Doesn't it give you any pleasure at all?' he asked.

'It's all the same,' she told him. She gently squeezed her right hand and coaxed some energy into the cock. It responded quietly and bulged slightly in her fingers.

'Do you ever do this when you don't get paid for it?' he said. 'Do you have a boyfriend?'

'I had a boyfriend,' she replied. 'He got killed in the Army. And then I went out with a lot of guys and got pregnant, and I got an abortion. And then I worked for a movie theatre, but the place got held up twice and I got scared and quit. And then? somebody told me about this. And it's all right. Some guys take me out and buy me things.'

'And do you sleep with them?'

She shrugged. "ITiey always want me to, and I don't mind. Some of them want me to tell them what I do with other men while they're fucking me.'

Her laconic recital excited Aaron more than the stimulation she conferred on him. He felt his excitement return.

Til give you five dollars extra if you'll suck it,' he said. 'Do you like to suck cock?'

Incongruously she looked over her shoulder. 'We're not supposed to do that,' she said.

He reached up and slipped his hand up her leg to her arse. The thin hard buttocks contracted but she did not move away. He stretched his arm and pushed his fingers into the crack between her buttocks. 'Suck it,' he whispered.

She bent over at the waist like a performer taking a bow, allowing his hand to plunge between her thighs and lodge at her cunt, which offered no clear delineations through the cloth. She held his cock between the second and third finger, as though it were a cigarette, and took it between her lips with a single swoop, pulling it inside her mouth with her breath. But it was not, somehow, what he wanted. She remained cool and detached, as though cocksucking were no more extraordinary than eating a plate of spaghetti, and he found that the raw sensation, in and of itself, was not enough to rouse his lust. She sucked the limp penis with the
sang-froid
of a child sucking its thumb, and he strained to elicit some special response from her.

'Take off your skirt,' he said.

She turned her head, the cock still between her lips, and looked at him with opaque eyes. 'I want to see your cunt,' he said.

She straightened up slowly, and brought her hands to her waist. 'We can't make any noise,' she said, 'they'll fire me if they find out.'

'Come on,' he urged, 'it will be all right.'

She untied the cord and dropped the skirt to the floor, exposing almost shapeless legs which rose to a pair of white panties imprinted with red and violet floral patterns, of the type sold on market stalls. He watched intently as she peeled them from her pelvis, snaked them down to her knees, and stepped out of the elastic top. A tuft of coarse hair sprung loose from its constriction, a thick deep bush which did not go with the rest of her body. His hand shot out and slid between her thighs, one finger immediately working to worm inside her cunt.

She leaned over again, and with the same clinical air, pulled the skin of his cock back with one hand, exposing the head more fully, and swept the thing into her mouth with a swish of her tongue. He lay back and let her work as he attempted to prod her into a flurry of excitement by rotating his finger inside the lips; her cunt remained dry. They went at each other for a few minutes, her head bobbing up and down and his hand wriggling, like two craftsmen attempting to shape intractable material.

She tried every trick she knew: biting the base of the cock firmly as she licked its head with her tongue, letting it lie in her mouth and coaxing it with her breath, sucking it so hard that it stretched an inch through sheer elasticity, and swinging her head from side to side so the cock hit against the insides of her cheeks. His finger wiggling inside her was faintly unpleasant, like having sand in one's shoe, but she was willing to tolerate more than that to successfully complete the act. She knew that if he did not come he would not pay, and there was no way to extract more than the price of a massage from him without his calling the police.

Aaron approached mild desperation. He had come in for a massage and been led to expect sex; then given a massage until he no longer thought of sex; and then been offered sex in such a way that he could not enjoy it. It was rattling him to have this woman calmly accede to his demands, let him use her cunt, and suck his cock with all the motions, but none of the emotions, of abandon, and withal show no more interest in him than if he were selling her a pint of milk. Finally he felt her remove her mouth; her lips were wet and her cheeks were flushed, but that only served to accentuate her noninvolvement, the way that rouge merely highlights the lifelessness of a corpse.

'What's the matter?' she said.

'I can't come this way,' he said.

'Do you want to fuck me?' she asked.

As an answer he swung his legs to the floor. 'You lie on the table,' he told her.

She glanced at the door behind her. 'We can't make any noise,' she reminded him, and then crawled onto the table. 'How shall I get?' she said.

'Lie on your back,' he said.

She stretched out, her arms at her side, her eyes fixed on his. 'Put your finger in your cunt and start rubbing it,' he said.

She opened her legs slightly and brought her right hand to the patch of hair. She bent her index finger and slid it neatly between the outer lips and into the centre. He jerked his head up as a signal for her to begin, and she dutifully started the motions of masturbation, sliding her finger in and out of the hole. He watched her for a moment and then climbed back on the table, moved over her until his knees were at her armpits.

'Open your mouth,' he said.

Her lips parted until they formed an oval.

'Wider,' he told her.

They kept stretching until her mouth made a perfect

0.

'Put out your tongue,' he instructed, 'and start licking.'

Then, as she lay under him, her hand stroking her cunt, her mouth pulled wide and her tongue lapping the air, like a mannikin wound up and enacting the gestures of sex, he took his cock in his hand and began to pull it.

'Keep your eyes closed,' he said, as he stared down at her face. She obeyed him, and with that his cock started to get stiff. He tightened his buttocks, hunched his shoulders, and bent forward. His left arm came down and he leaned on it for support. He jerked the cock frantically, with small rapid motions, keeping his hand close to the tip so that the head would receive constant stimulation.

Tm going to come in your mouth,' he hissed. 'And you're going to swallow it all.'

Charlotte seemed unconcerned, and continued to act out the part he had written for her. He felt a flash of anger and if they were not behind a partition of a massage parlour, would have slapped her. He had no thoughts in his mind and made no connection between what he was doing and what had happened with Cynthia, nor with his deeper feelings about women in general. Having gone through life operating at the surface of his attitudes, he had never contacted the rage which roars beneath the ingrained reflexes of politeness, and thus had no idea of the tender human feelings that lie beneath the layer of destructive impulses. By pretending affection, he denied hatred, and deprived himself of true caring for others. He had always stopped when his journey into himself brought him to the gates of violence and fear, and so never discovered the realm of love that lay beyond. By adhering blindly to his normality, he became dangerous; and if the setting had permitted he would have responded to the complementary dynamics in Charlotte. Having neither the genetic nor environmental advantages which had been Aaron's portion in life, she did not even have plump respectability to hold on to; her only shield against the dark forces inside her was the vapid existence of an unhealthy uneducated girl from a family of migrant fruit pickers who had come from the midwest in the thirties and been trapped in a poverty made more bitter by its contrast with the lush land whose produce they packaged, and the affluent lives of the people who held pieces of paper with which they claimed ownership of that land. In the place where Aaron found a need to destroy, she nursed an unconscious desire to be killed. And were they on a deserted beach late at night, playing out the drama they now enacted just ten feet away from the sunlit bustling streets of Berkeley where people exactly like themselves walked about in patterns of conformity, he would have ended by smashing her face until it w
^r
as bloody and then choking the life from her body.

As it was he had to compress all his fury and frustration into the restrained silent thrashing of his fist curled around his cock.

'God, I wish you hated this,' he said, wanting desperately for her to feel defiled so that his act could have meaning for him. He narrowed his eyes so that she was blurred in his vision, and he could blot out the fact that she went on mechanically. He made himself believe what he needed to believe, that she was torn apart between the forces of desire and revulsion. And when he had perfected the image in his mind, the sperm spurted out onto her face, splashing on her cheek, on her lips, onto the curling tongue, and down into her mouth.

Complying with his directions, she licked the spunk from her face, closed her mouth, and swallowed it. Then, as though a switch had been thrown, the finger in her cunt stopped moving and she opened her eyes. She looked up at him and to his intense amazement, she smiled warmly.

Tm glad you came,' she said. Tt made me feel bad to see how much trouble you were having.'

Aaron slid back, climbing off the table, and stood next to her. Disgust with himself began to well up in his chest. She sat up and put a hand on his arm.

'Are you all right?' she asked.

He shook his head. 'Oh,' he said, 'sure, I'm fine.' Her concern disconcerted him. 'Thanks,' he added. 'That was beautiful. I've never done that before.'

She leaned forward conspiratorially. 'A guy once paid me twenty-five dollars to pee in his mouth,' she said. A flicker of amusement shot across her eyes. 'I felt funny doing it, but it was easy money.'

Like a man fighting nausea, he beat back his feelings of depression. The few hours of relief he had been feeling since eating breakfast? had fortified him, and he struggled against slipping back into the sense of emptiness, of being lost.

Charlotte slid off the table and dressed methodically, carefully slipping her panties on and pulling her skirt up to her waist. Aaron went to the chair where his clothes lay, and put them on slowly. He wanted to stay a few more minutes.

'You have to give me the fifteen dollars and pay the twelve-fifty at the desk,' Charlotte said.

He pulled the bills from his pocket and gave them to her. She held them in her hand and looked at him questioningly. Abruptly he stepped forward, put his arms around her waist, drew her to him, and kissed her on the mouth. She did not move away, but did not respond, and after a moment he stepped back once more. His eyes burned into hers.