Contours of Darkness (36 page)

'And what do I want from him?' she asked herself. The answer slammed into her mind with the force of a blow.

'Strength,' she said out loud, 'I need him to be strong, to know who he is and what he wants from life. I want him to be bold, courageous. When he stands as firm and brave as a tree for me to lean on, then everything is right between us.' She grinned, thinking what Jackie would have to say to such ideas, for she recognised that her notions were, in the framework of women's liberation, terribly reactionary. 'But what of it?' she thought. 'I can only follow my feeling, and what satisfies me most deeply has to be what's right for me.' She sprayed a mist of cologne around her throat. The picture of her and Aaron, she saw, was Biblical in its contours, and she relished the image of the man at his labours, securing the home for his family, while the woman tended the chores and in the evenings held his head in her lap, stroking his face, until his fatigue left him and he rose to take her in his arms and make strong tender love to her. She rubbed her eyes. 'I'm mired in old-fashioned concepts of relationship,' she thought. 'In an age when those models seem to have no relevance.'

She took a deep breath. 'I wonder what will become of us?' continued the voice in her mind. 'Will I soon be lying on my back, his cock splitting my cunt apart, his arms holding me tightly on his chest? And after all the moaning and sighing, will he let me fall away, no longer interested in me until his next erection? I wouldn't even mind that, if we could keep it that clean. But we will begin to involve our emotions once more, and to raise our expectations. I will look to him to play a part he is not suited to, and he will begin to make demands on my inner life. We will bind ourselves to one another in that terrible bondage which, once fixed, becomes impossible to burst apart without pain and suffering. And then we shall feel trapped, and thrash about to find some way out. And another Conrad will enter our life, or a Maureen and Jackie, and it will be six months from now and the same cycle will repeat itself.' She picked up her toothbrush, covered it with paste, and began to clean her teeth. 'And would it be any different with Conrad? Once his lengthy seduction is complete and I give him what he yearns for, and his cock at last explodes in the recesses of my cunt, will I become just another woman for him, just another notch, another inconvenience, or will he want to start a new dance, in which the only difference for me is that I substitute one man for another?' She rinsed her mouth. 'And all of this because of sex, because we can't fuck, not anyone, not men or women, without that very fucking becoming the chain that binds us to ancient and deadly patterns of relationship. Maybe I should just give it up. Or maybe listen to Clive, and become a whore. There might be more dignity in outright prostitution than in any of the other forms of relationship people have evolved to deal with one another.'

She rubbed an astringent on her cheeks to tighten the skin and made a face at herself. 'What's the point in all this thinking?' she thought. 'All the while I'm trying to figure it out I'm making myself attractive for when he comes home.' She laughed silently, a brief expulsion of air through her nostrils. 'What's a woman to do?' she asked.

The front door slammed, and her heart jumped in her chest. In a flash she saw that she was afraid of what he might be like, and it was that very fear which thrilled her. It was impossible to know what his mood would be, and she considered that within a half hour she could be in bed with him, or packing her bags to leave. She had no preconceptions or guidelines as to her behaviour. She wanted to face him openly, with all her reactions vibrant, and try to see the man she had lived with for so long. Above all, she did not want to lose her perspective, the sense of opening and liberty that had accompanied her on the ride down from the hill. 'I wonder how much of that is an illusion,' she said to herself. 'Well, we'll soon find out,' she added as she opened the door and stepped out into the living room.

Aaron stood there, swaying, looking like one of the derelicts that haunt Third Street in San Francisco. Unshaved, his clothes rumpled, a look of despair on his face, he seemed ready for suicide or some form of salvation, to end his misery or to give himself to someone who promised peace for his soul and soup for his belly. She was shocked at his appearance, and checked her impulse to go over to him, put her arms around him, and give him her warmth. It was a sorrowful realisation that such a simple human gesture was laid about with a hundred psychic traps. It would have been easier to show compassion for a stranger in the street than to the man she had cared for so deeply.

Aaron looked at her as though through a thick haze. There wasn't a part of him that wasn't exhausted or thwarted. The enormous energy which normally coursed through him lay dormant; he was like a powerful elephant that had been shot with tranquilizer darts and could not rouse itself from its torpor. Cynthia had never appeared so beautiful as at that moment. Invulnerable in the privacy created by her secret disappearance, exuding an animal sensuality, enlivened by her bath, and wearing the robe that had a thousand connotations of their life together, she seemed a creature too strong and lovely for him even to approach. In the constant balance of power that obtains in the relationship between a man and a woman, he had fallen into a pit of helplessness, walled with self-pity, and was incapable of asking her for support. These were his feelings, and in the blink of an eye they could change. When he felt hopelessness, he might, in an instant, show anger. The difference between the two of them just then was that Cynthia was aware of how volatile the situation was, while Aaron was too deadened by disillusionment to perceive the dynamics beneath the surface emotions.

The physical distance between them was no more than six feet. But in terms of their willingness or ability to cross that space toward one another, they might as well have been on the opposite poles of the planet. After three years of intense involvement, having shared what they felt to be the truest aspects of their authentic selves as well as having suffered the mutual abrasions of the daily struggle with one another's most petty manifestations, they stared at each other as though they were aliens from hostile kingdoms, wondering whether they should fight, fuck, or turn their backs on one another and pretend the encounter had never taken place.

They stood facing one another, like actors who have forgotten their lines, stuck in their stage directions, waiting for someone to whisper the next word, the next move. A soft tension gripped them and a double awareness enhanced the space. It seemed to them that all the world held its breath, that the infinite unimaginable universe spinning in untold dimensions a tale for some unspeakable listener was but an insignificant detail in the drama of their confrontation. All that they were capable of feeling, they felt in those few minutes, rippling through the entire catalogue of human sensibility without responding to any of it. Like a madly blinking strobe their perceptions of one another flashed through their minds. They saw one another alternately as lover and stranger, the intimacy of their history clashing with the anonymity of their present condition. It was possible to accept either reality, or neither, or both, or reject the entire matrix within which they were frozen, like flies in a spider web. Each of the four choices launched them on a path that was already structured and planned out from beginning to end. The question was, which to choose? To leap once more into the turbulence of sexual relationship? To cease, all involvement on the spot? To attempt the difficulty and pain of beholding each other as both real and unreal at the same time? To continue to drift in ambiguity?

Freedom is simply an understanding of one's limitation, and crucial to all these considerations was the problem of which should make the first overture, who would bear the onus of setting the mood. The moment surged toward some critical point when a decision had to be made. It was past the time for preamble. They were taken to the brink of articulation and asked by history the single question upon which the future of the species was to be judged: is any healthy relationship possible between a man and woman fucking?

Cynthia's nostrils flared; she was too wary to make any overt gesture. Aaron straightened his spine; there was nothing he could say. They waited, like two aerial artists watching the bar swing back and forth between them, unwilling to move until the timing was perfect, until each could be sure that there would be someone at the other end to catch the one who dared to release the safety grip and fly through the air in a single giddy tumbling arc of trust.

'Aaron, take the responsibility,' Cynthia said to herself.

'Cynthia, help me,' Aaron whispered in his mind.

And externally, nothing happened. The drum roll petered out, the audience lost its patience, and the spotlights swung around to some other act which was beginning its fanfare in the centre ring on the ground below. Whatever chance they had had to seize the instant in a spontaneous movement born of the overflow of their feelings was lost, and they fell back upon their calculations.

The moment softened and bent. They returned from the stark heights of their structural dramaturgy and descended into the material reality of the room. They assumed the colouration of their environment, like two chameleons adjusting to the hue of woodbark. Aaron rocked back and forth on his heels, and Cynthia's fingers trembled. They each let the impetus of their separate convergent escapades catch up to the present, and confronted the fact that after all the ruminations they were now faced with the actuality of one another's presence.

'You look terrible,' she said.

'I haven't slept much,' he replied.

The sentences slid into the space like alligators slipping into a stream, the commonplace quality of their message underscoring all that had been evaded. The simple words cut like razors drawn across soft skin.

Aaron lifted his head. The fact that she had spoken first, the sound of her voice, and her calm demeanor, filled him with a rush of energy which, to his debilitated ego, appeared as a surge of power. Like a man in shock who had just been given a shot of whiskey, Aaron stirred from his stance. He felt the first stirrings of a return of self-assurance; Cynthia served as a marker against which he could estimate his position.

Til make you some coffee,' she said. Why don't you get cleaned up? I think there's enough hot water left.'

Her allusion to the hot water heater, a decrepit piece of machinery that had served as their major point of argument with the landlord, was like a door closing distantly behind them. The fabric of their life together torn apart by the explosive events of the past few days, began to be realigned. Cynthia watched the process without fully understanding it. Some voice in her warned, 'Now's the time. If you want to stay honest with yourself, now's the time to speak. Tell him what you've been doing, what you've been thinking.' While Aaron wondered if he would ever mention the fact that he had already killed her in his heart, and was not sure that there was anything to be gained by bringing her back to life.

But sentimentality, one of the seducers of truth, swept through the atmosphere like an aria from a Neopolitan opera. All the accumulated habit of their patterns of relationship rose up to disarm them. And there were no words. Cynthia could not transmit her experience to Aaron; she could only communicate the details of the adventure, a process which would make him jealous. Then her energy would be spent in dealing with his changes, and little would be left to consider her insights. She needed him to be sensitive to her altered state of consciousness. While through his body ran a single mute physiological hope: the notion that he could fuck her again. All else that he felt suddenly became subservient to the throbbing nerve of lust that had been activated by her physical presence. His circuits were wired in such a way that the ability to fuck was the central proof that everything was all right; once he had an erection and was inside her, he would have claimed her once more as his own, he would be in control, and he could make the decisions. As it was, in this ambience of ambivalent equality, he felt unmanned.

She blinked once and turned to go into the kitchen, stepped past him, her shoulder almost touching his, the scent of her hair stinging him like a whiplash. The mood was too powerful for him to assimilate and he whirled around as she walked by him.

'Cynthia,' he said, grabbing her shoulder.

T don't know, Aaron,' she said. 'You've hurt me too much in the past.'

His lips twitched. 'You're not the only one who's been hurt,' he said.

She cast her eyes down. 'I understand that,' she said. 'I'm not blaming you. I just don't want to continue if it's going to be more pf the same.'

'Do you want to split up?' he asked, his voice tinged with accusation.

'Why do you make it sound as though it's only my decision?' she shot back. 'What do
you
want to do?'

His fingers dug into her arm. His face jumped with nervous tics. The question was like a thorn in his back; he could neither ignore it or reach it. His mouth moved as though to speak, and he realised that any words which came out would be meaningless; they would be nothing but noises to vibrate the air. His speech had lost all connection with his actions, for nothing he said would hold true even an hour after he spoke it. He could make no declarations, no promises; and like many a man brought to the brink of humility by the circumstances of his life, he attempted confession.

'All I want now is to fuck you,' he said. 'I can't see past that.'

Her breath was heavy in her chest. She stared at him as though trying to find the lie she knew had to be hidden in his words. But his statement was so simple, so bereft of any hidden motivations, she relaxed her guard momentarily and accepted it. In that instant a second door closed behind them. For both of them ignored the reality which the words pointed to. Fucking was not for them an act like eating, a deed to be indulged in and then passed over. In thfc sexual encounter, they entered realms of intensity which melted their powers of intellect, the way white flame will cut through steel.