Contours of Darkness (37 page)

'I've never said no to you,' she said.

He stepped forward and took her in his arms, and in the way all the parameters of existence change when a person leaps from the world of air into the world of water, requiring a radically different orientation to all life systems, Aaron's entire personality changed. Where he was rigid, he became soft; where he was uncertain, he became masterly; where he was lost, he found the map to guide him. With every other aspect of his relationship in tatters, this was one area in which some security was still to be found. He crushed her to his chest.

'You're hurting me,' she said.

Had she spoken the words a few seconds earlier, they would have served only to alienate him further, but in the context of his burgeoning desire, her description inflamed him. He squeezed her to him with the implacable slowness of a boa constrictor killing a leopard, holding her through sheer muscular dominance. It was as though he were draining her of blood, forcing her to depend on him for mercy. Her body against his, the smell of her skin in his nostrils, roused him to a ritual of power. She could feel the immense strength bottled up inside him, and her knees buckled at the thought that it would erupt at any moment and be detonated inside her.

'I was half out of my mind when you didn't come home,' he said. 'Where did you go?'

Her detachment fading, she sagged into him. Her mind remained lucid and she saw that the others had been right, that once she stepped back into the world of her relationship with Aaron, she would be helpless to fight its raging current. She would have to give in and act as a sacrifice on the altar of Aaron's need, and later listen to more of his promises about how the future would be better. She was amazed at how easy it was to yield to his demands. She knew that the fiercer he became, the more gloriously he would fuck her, and being fucked by Aaron was still the core of her existence. As he bent her back bringing her cunt up against his thighs, she recalled the last time she was in the living room with Aaron, and Conrad's presence there. She yearned for the young man the way she looked forward to a drink of cold water on a hot day. 'This may be the last time,' she thought. 'After this, I may have to leave him for good.'

'Who were you with?' he insisted.

It was difficult to continue thinking, she couldn't keep her eyes open. 'I went to visit friends,' she gasped. 'Girl friends.'

'Do I know them?' he said, continuing his inquisition.

'No,' she told him, 'they're people I met at a meeting, I can give you their number, you can call them if you don't believe me, for God's sake you're breaking my back.'

He bit her throat and sucked the flesh between his teeth. The dialogue, his actions, her responses, were not conscious in any real sense of the word. The two of them were like computers that had been programmed with rigidly defined schemata, and could deliver their results within those limits. All their intelligence, education, and good intentions to the contrary, they were enslaved by the rigours of their conditioning. They knew what they were doing, but as that knowledge had no practical effect on the workings of their behaviour, it had no more value than speculation. As he tortured and questioned her, Aaron's conscience attempted to intervene, telling him he had no right to treat another human being in this fashion, even if the other person were, willy-nilly, cooperating. But all ethical considerations were met and overcome by the fervour engendered by the situation and the unassailable argument of his stiffening cock. He stared into space as his mouth fastened on her skin, considering that all his actions and emotions and thought of the past twenty-four hours had been predicted on a fantasy. He believed Cynthia's statement, and its implication that her evening was innocently spent. He saw that without evidence he had assumed that Cynthia had gone to spend the night with a man. 'Perhaps that's what I really wanted to be true,' he thought. 'Maybe I want to be rid of her.' But now she was back, and he was caught up in a massive regression, twisting in the toils of jealousy and lust. He perceived that he was being dragged once more into the morass of their relationship, and he felt helpless to do anything about it as her firm breasts warmed against his chest. 'Why did you come back?' he said, his tone vibrant with regret.

His question struck her as the final insult, and anger ripped through her psyche. She threw all her strength into a single gesture and wrenched loose from his grasp, leaving him standing with his arms out, like a store-window dummy. She faced him with all the sizzling animosity of a drop of water splashed on a red hot iron. Her face was a flag of aggression.

'You bastard,' she spat. Her eyes narrowed. 'Only because I felt sorry for you.'

She did not see the blow coming, nor feel it directly. Her next recollection had her lying on the floor, her left cheek on fire, her eyes watery, and Aaron leaning over her.

She began to cry, the tears bursting to the surface, but she fought back the impulse. Aaron's eyes were already a sea of concern; he was already blaming himself, seeking forgiveness by her acknowledgment of his brutishness. If she gave in to weeping, he would hold her and console her, and his slap would be forgotten. And it was a thing she did not want to forget, for it served as a launching pad from which to hurl herself out of the gravitational field of their relationship. She made herself hard.

Cynthia put one arm over her face, shielding herself from contact with the man hovering over her. There was a long moment in which nothing happened, and then she felt his hand pulling her bathrobe open, exposing her naked body. His fingers pushed the cloth apart and trailed delicately over her skin. Had she been looking at him, she would have seen the expression on his face change to one of mindless lust. His mouth fell open and a thin line of spittle twisted from one corner of his lips. It was as though he were in a dream, and he drooled over her. Had he been a rapist having knocked a woman to the ground, what he was about to do would have been nobler in its motivation than it was. For he did not only desire to possess her, he wanted to subjugate her; if he had been interested merely in his own sexual gratification, his deed might have been understood as an animal act; but he needed to prod her to respond, to make her want what was happening to her. As his hand covered her cunt, a third and final door closed behind them, stealing them into the very reality they had fought so hard to escape.

His middle finger slipped into the fold and Cynthia bit her lip. Like an epileptic filmed in the middle of a seizure and played back in slow motion, her eyes rolled back in her head, her tongue became a curled lizard in her mouth, her body twisted in a long convulsive movement. He slipped into the moist centre of her and she let herself be carried off in a dance of exposure in which all the expressions she had muted and suppressed for a lifetime came to the surface. She threw herself into her gotterdammerung gyrations, unheed-ful of all its connotations. He had hit her trying to damage her, and she no longer cared what went down between them. Like a well uncovered by an explosion, she bubbled with the disgust, anger, hatred, fear and anguish that her civilised veneer had walled in. The eruption of all the ugliness inside her was so full that it flowered into a fantastic beauty.

Her lips twisted, her tongue circling her mouth and licking her own skin, her fingers curled into claws, her head rolling from side to side, her legs gnarled and kicking, she was like some ancient beast at last pinned to the ground by a stake through its belly, oozing all the accumulated poison of a lifetime. She projected all her negativity, no longer caring that the man who was the target for it all was guilty only through weakness. Aaron gained the final perspective on his situation. He trembled with need and whimpered with loss. He saw in Cynthia the breaking through of the woman he had always desired, the free unfettered animal, and knew that once she tasted that liberty, he would lose her. The crux of all his confusion came clear. His ambivalence about their marriage came from the fact that he grew bored with her whenever she fell below her fullest potential; but grew fearful when she began to explore the avenues to liberty. Thus it had been necessary to support and goad her efforts at growth, and at the same time sabotage them when they came close to succeeding. He had boxed her in a double bind because he was afraid she would outstrip him.

'Cynthia,' he said, 'how unworthy I am to have you.'

She looked up at him. She no longer knew who he was. He was a man, a person. He was one of the catalysts in her transformation toward some other reality. She realised that all her other images had been illusory; Aaron had no meaning for her except as a tool for her own development. All that was important was herself, her own dance, her inner voice.

'You have never been so beautiful,' he said.

'What does he see?' she wondered. 'Who is he talking to?'

They were tied to one another by bonds stronger than either could break. Once in each other's presence they were both fated to continue the drama, pick up where they had left off, the only difference being in the sophistication of their rationalisation. The only choice was whether to come together at all. And Cynthia had chosen to return because she wanted to perceive Aaron after her experiences with Jackie and Maureen. But now she saw that she was addicted to their relationship, that for all its brutality and evasiveness it brought forth a kind of ecstasy that she found nowhere else. She wondered whether she could leave Aaron and continue to visit him, to have these moments with him. An image of her life opened in which she saw herself walking through a supermarket, and like heads of lettuce were stacked, the heads of Aaron, and Conrad, Maureen and Jackie, Clive, each a different brand, each a different price. And she was free to choose whichever appealed to her at any given time.

Aaron surrendered to his sorrow. He was laced with such longing for what lay at his very fingertips that he almost doubled over in anguish. He wanted her so badly he could barely breathe, and yet he knew that the moment he entered her he would lose himself in her. He saw before him the body of a woman stripped of all its civilised postures. He saw a writhing pulsating creature of movement and moisture and heat. He saw the Cynthia he had glimpsed time and time again, but who had always eluded him. And now she was there, in all her ugliness and glory, in all her salaciousness and purity.

She made thick mewing sounds like a kitten choked with milk.

'Oh my god,' Aaron moaned, 'I have to get inside you.'

He leaned back and stripped off his clothing, his body emerging like a figure from stone under the blows of a cold chisel. He fell forward and his mouth covered hers. She made no change to accommodate his pressure. It was as though she continued to lick the air, and the fact that her tongue fell on his lips seemed incidental. She was in the throes of expression and was not concerned with appreciation. Aaron drank her in, revelling in the fact that she did not recognise him by any outward sign. Her wanton impersonality allowed him to free the beast within himself. He grabbed her breasts in his hands, squeezing them harshly, pushing them back against her chest with his palms, kneading them with his fingers. She let out a series of huffing grunts like a woman in labour.

'Gggnhngh,' she groaned.

'Baby, baby, baby/ he crooned, 'come on, let it out.'

He planted himself between her legs and ravished her body with his eyes, in a glance consuming the full soft fleshy desirability of her, going from her wildly gesticulating lips to her lush breasts and the deep belly which stretched taut to the centre of his charge, her pink, guarded, essential, and trivial cunt, source of so much pain and confusion from the day of his conception. With cosmic significance, he brought the opposite member to bear, flourishing his throbbing, hungry, ignorant cock, the bane of Cynthia's existence. He lumbered over her like a great ape, heavy in his legs, and cried out to the ceiling, his voice echoing in the dark room. And then he fell upon her.

His cock plunged into her cunt with the accuracy of an arrow loosed from the bow of a Zen archer. She let out a moan of mingled pain and pleasure as the ruthless organ tore past the dry outer lips, seared the inner lips with its heat, and burst loudly into the tiny bud at the very centre of her sexual soul. She dug her nails into his shoulders as her legs shot straight up in the air. They hung poised without moving for several seconds, glued to the wonder of penetration and invitation, and then wrapped themselves around each other's body.

A great silence enveloped them as they moved into a different dimension, leaving the world of evaluation and entering the kingdom of immediate realisation. Like a king and queen who had been exiled in a land where their sovereignty was not recognised and then return to their own borders to have their powers restored, Aaron and Cynthia came home, to the one level of being where they could create their own reality.

Aaron's hips moved in a circular motion, and Cynthia twitched under him, an instantaneously hot wet woman yielding to the parabolic passion of a man possessed. At the juncture where their legs met, the bulging cock kissed the sopping cunt in all the farthest recesses of its mouth. They glided into the realm of touch, the primal sensation, and were buoyed up through the ontology of feeling as they smelled the secretions of their act, tasted the sweat on one another's skin, heard their mutual moans, and looked at each other's rolling forms. Like two heavily charged batteries, their forces built up during their separation, they released tremendous amounts of energy into the air and into one another's systems, creating a momentarily perfect union of male and female. His pelvis rocked in the cradle of her thighs and she yearned upward to receive him. They moved together until their fields merged and came to climax in an orgasm of the emotions that was the sweetest experience either of them had ever known. Cynthia licked Aaron's shoulder as he held her tenderly and tightly. They were at the station where all the trains of their essential currents converged, and from the centre there was no way to proceed but back out into the tangled periphery of their involvement.