Contours of darkness, p.27
Contours of Darkness, page 27
“Shall we go,” said Clare.
Cynthia stood up. She began to walk in the direction of the kitchen. But Clare caught her arm. “Don’t forget this,” he said holding out the five hundred dollars. He smiled into her eyes. “Whore,” he said.
They ate on the grass, bathed in sunlight and the smell of eucalyptus. Maureen produced an exotic omelet and a loaf of freshly baked bread. With it came butter, honey, several kinds of jam, and a pot of breakfast tea. It was after eleven when they sat down, and almost twelve when Maureen began stacking the dishes. Clare rolled several joints and they smoked slowly, enjoying their digestion and the sweetness of the air. The day began to slip gears, to lose the sense of time and purpose and move once more into a mood of drifting and observing. Cynthia felt the first tinges of anxiety. Used as she was to a life of schedules and directed activity, the ambience of the house rendered her like a compulsive without her obsessive behavior. She had no capacity for idleness.
She looked around the circle, at Maureen whose cool exterior hid such scorching ardor, at Jackie whose clear intellect matched her unfailing warmth, at Clare who went through life as though it were his private berry patch. Their naked bodies gleamed innocent in the sparkling daylight. She wondered whether she would see them again, knowing that in a few days this entire incident might appear as though it had been a hallucination.
“I think I should go soon,” she said. Her words were slow and distant, already affected by the marijuana that passed from mouth to mouth.
“Not really,” Jackie said.
“I’m beginning to feel overwhelmed,” Cynthia told her. “In less than twenty-four hours I’ve done things I haven’t even imagined doing during the previous twenty-four years. And all of this after a traumatic day with Aaron.”
“Still Aaron?” Clare said.
“I’ve been with him for three years,” Cynthia replied. “And by tonight the whole thing may be over, but I owe it to myself, if not to him, to find out where we stand with each other.”
“You only have to consider yourself,” Clare said.
“I can’t treat people I’m close to like used toilet paper, to be thrown away when I’m finished with them.”
“Nice try, Cynthia, but your going back has less lofty reasons,” Clare said. “How many times have there been crises in the past? Quite a few, I imagine. And each time the reconciliation has followed the same pattern, hasn’t it? Distance, anger, violence, tears, sex, regret, and recapitulation, ad infinitum. Isn’t that so?” He didn’t wait for a response. “That’s all so tedious; why repeat it now? Why not make a clean break altogether. Tell no one where you are, not Aaron, not your employers, not your family. Take a new name. Wear totally different clothes. Cut your hair. Change yourself.”
She smiled and shook her head. “I wish it were that easy.”
“No one is preventing you except yourself,” he said.
“Don’t you think I know that?” she snapped. “The only one oppressing me is me. But I have to find my own way.”
“Excuse me,” said Jackie, “but I think Clare is right about one thing. If you see Aaron again, it’s almost certain you’ll be drawn back into that pattern.”
“And if I stay here I’ll be drawn into this pattern. I become a victim of circumstance in any case.” She closed her eyes tightly and then opened them again. “You must understand. I couldn’t relax here until I confronted what’s back there.”
“I hope you don’t get stuck,” Maureen said. Her voice held an uncharacteristic quaver and when Cynthia looked at her she saw that her eyes were moist.
“What is it?” Cynthia asked her.
“I just felt very sad all of a sudden,” Maureen said. “I got very afraid that we might not ever see you again.”
Cynthia was about to protest that that wasn’t possible, but even as she began to speak she realized that there was not a bad chance that she wouldn’t return. Life’s liaisons often broke off when it seemed they should be just beginning. Cynthia and Maureen watched the fact that this might be the last time they would be together, and shared the sorrow of that possibility. Cynthia leaned forward and Maureen embraced her. They held on to each other for a long minute.
“Well,” said Jackie, her voice plump and reassuring, “she’s only going into town; it’s less than ten minutes away. There’s no point in whomping up an imaginary tragedy.” She paused. “Of course we’ll see her again.” She took Cynthia’s hand. “It’s foolish to talk of permanence, but you know we like you and find you exciting in bed. At any time you want you can come live here and plan on staying a few months at least. And then you’d be in an entirely different place from which to make life choices. Our intuition is that you are meant to become one of our family. I think your going to see Aaron is a mistake. It’s a stale scenario. But I don’t want to pressure you in any way at all. Do what you have to, and come back when you want to. You don’t even need to phone. Just drive up. If we’re not home, let yourself in.”
“You don’t know how much I appreciate that,” Cynthia said.
“Yes she does,” Clare said. “It’s all figured in.”
Cynthia turned to him. “I still don’t know what went on in there,” she said.
“You experienced a brief taste of one of several real alternatives open to you at this moment,” Clare told her.
“It was interesting to be a whore for a few minutes,” Cynthia said, “but it’s ridiculous to think I can change my whole style of life overnight.”
“Don’t confuse making the decision with living the decision out,” Clare said. “Of course, life is hard wherever you are, whatever you do. But you have some choice as to where you will conduct your struggle, and how you will play the role. I think you can live a fuller life up here than down there with your man and his dying civilization. It won’t be easier here, only more conscious.”
“I don’t know how I will ever be able to integrate your talk of revolution and human dignity with forms of behavior I have always been taught are degenerate,” said Cynthia.
Clare sipped his tea. “It’s the closet queens who shriek the loudest against homosexuality; it’s the priests who persecute the saints; it’s the financial robber barons who mount campaigns against prostitution. The people have a right to discover their own life styles, without condemnation and persecution.” Clare sniffed and tossed his head as though to include the whole world outside the garden. “They are zombies,” he said, “trying to force us to conform to their deadened patterns of living. They can’t stand the idea of individual free choice, of arbitrary decisions, of a refusal to conform to any externally imposed standards. They’re termites and ants, not true human beings. Of course they have taught you that it’s evil to be a whore or a lesbian or a radical thinker. But is it really? You have begun to taste these things for yourself, and you have to now ask yourself what is the truth? Does your experience confirm what they have programmed into you? If so, then return to your marriage and your burgher life and peace be with you. If not, then you have to tear the knots loose with your own hands.”
Cynthia listened to the strong words and understood their accuracy. Her eyes shone. “I wish Aaron could hear you say those things,” she said. “He’s been struggling with those ideas for so long, and has no one to talk to who will help him get clear.”
“Perhaps I’ll come by your place,” Clare said. He smiled. “Does he have a big cock?”
“It’s very large,” Cynthia said.
She turned to Jackie. “Can I have my clothes?” she asked.
While Cynthia dressed in the bathroom, the others took the breakfast things inside and were sitting in the living room when she stepped out, ready to leave. For a moment she simply stood there, feeling her own breathing. Then she stepped toward the door. The other three all stood and walked with her to the front lawn.
“It’s hard to leave,” Cynthia said.
“Call me tomorrow,” Jackie said.
Maureen embraced her again. “Passion is the only freedom,” she whispered in her ear.
Jackie kissed her. “The revolution begins inside you,” she said.
Clare shook her hand. He held her gaze and then caught her up in his arms, crushed her to his chest, and set her down again. “As long as everyone else is giving you little nuggets of wisdom to take with you, I’ll leave you with these words: Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. Anyone who tells you anything else is probably trying to sell you something.”
She walked to her car, stepped inside, and watched them wave goodbye as she began the winding drive down the hill.
10
Dejà Vu
Standing in the shower, removed from the stimuli of the world at large, the steaming water drumming against the tiles and the plastic curtain, Cynthia ran a soapy washcloth over her body, feeling the coarse fabric scrub off the grime of the past three days. She enjoyed the sense of splendid isolation which contrasted with the preceding period of intense socialization. It was the first time she’d washed since the night of Aaron’s acid trip, longer than she ordinarily went without bathing. Aaron had tried a number of times to convince her that frequent bathing was injurious to the balance of oils on the skin and was an artifact of television commercials. “What’s the pleasure in washing if you don’t let yourself get dirty?” he had asked. There was no way for her to make him understand that the ritual of the bath was unrelated to cleanliness; she indulged in it for its sensual gratification.
Touching her own body was a delight, close to a psychological necessity. Her self-definition was, like that of most others, derived largely from her social identity. She became the person others perceived her to be. After eight hours at the office she more or less unconsciously thought of herself as a dull efficient machine; after an evening with Aaron she was a housewife with an appetite for tumultous fucking; and on the street she became a neuter the lowest common denominator of all accumulated impressions. On those occasions when she was alone and asked herself, “Who am I really?” she found no answer that would yield to a verbal formulation. Much of her unrest came from the difficulties she had in knowing which of her several selves was the truest, and she was not sophisticated enough to know that so long as she attempted to put value on different aspects of her ego, she would never approach the problem successfully.
She slid the cloth between her legs, rubbing her cunt until it tingled, scrubbing the deep cleft between her buttocks. She lifted one leg and washed its beveled contours, admiring its curves and smoothness of skin. She smiled as she thought of Clare, and pictured herself as a prostitute preparing for an evening with a client, wondering what it would be like to have a certain price, to be an object that men were willing to pay for, as they did for automobiles and other manifestations of wealth. She held her breasts in her hands, pleased with their firmness and weight, and watched the water run in a single rivulet in the canyon between them. Cynthia enjoyed the sensations in her breasts considerably more than those in her fingers, and she puzzled as to why men found touching a woman’s breasts so compelling. She was close to understanding that a major portion of most men’s pleasure with a woman is not sexual per se, but a compound of power and male pride which flushes at being able to allow a woman to give herself up to her own excitement.
A wave of depression momentarily swept over her and she thought, “One day I will be old, and all these charms will be wrinkled and flat. My breasts will shrivel, my cunt will get dry. And who will want me then?”
She was propelled into ruminations on the use of sexual criteria as a means of estimating the value of human beings. She stood under the fine spray of water until all the soap had been rinsed away, and remained to bask in the heat of it on her muscles. She mused that of all the people who had passed through her life over the past few days, not one of them had wanted to relate to her without sex serving as a focus for the interaction. She thought of Clare’s discourse on folly, and was forced to conclude that sex served as the single most important distraction from a steady understanding of life for her and the people she attracted. She turned the handles, cutting off the shower at its source, and let the water drip off her skin for a few minutes.
“What if I sewed my cunt shut?” she thought. “Would all those people who want to live with me still find me interesting and appealing?” She marveled that her multiple array of functions and expressions had been, over the years, reduced to three main channels: fucking, cooking, and working. She was on the verge of accusing the others of venery when it occurred to her to reverse the question. “If I were unable to have sex at all, how many of them would I continue to want to see? And under what circumstances?”
She ran down the list. Without sex she would lose interest in Aaron very quickly, she would care to see Conrad only sporadically, and would have little cause to visit Jackie and Maureen again. Clare would become a joke instead of a possible pimp. She was amazed at how all other social functions, intellectual rapport, emotional warmth, political involvement, were all laced with the strands of sex. The coming together of any group of two or more always held the same implicit question: who gets to fuck whom at the end of the meeting? She received a vision of all civilization as a stilted sublimation, a substitute for simple straightforward sexuality, of everyone she knew as a pack of polite savages, pretending they were interested in everything else except the central driving issue of human society: how the energy gets distributed. Had she a sociological imagination, she would have extrapolated into other realms, and seen the chaos of mankind as a result of the inability to deal with that question in terms of food and other natural resources.
She stepped out of the tub and looked at herself in the mirror opposite it, rubbing the fog from the glass with a towel. Her skin was pink and glowing, her nipples wrinkled, her face beautiful with seriousness, her cunt staunch between her thighs. She was quintessentially erotic.
“And yet,” she said to herself, “what is it after all? A pole sliding into a hole. A meshing of gears. A conditioned dance.” She peered into her eyes and into the nature of sex, attempting to confront this problem which had been central to all her difficulties in relationships since she was thirteen years old. “And it is nothing at all. It changes nothing. It solves nothing. It accomplishes nothing. Why is it so terribly important? Is it that we are so horribly neurotic that we are fixated on fucking all out of proportion to the role it should play in our lives? Do we fuck too much or not enough? Or perhaps it’s that we don’t do it correctly? Is there anyone who knows? Why the burning jealousy, the clinging and running away, the long cries in the night, the urgent efforts at one more orgasm, one more spasm greater than the last? Haven’t I experienced that enough times? Shouldn’t there come a point where one is free of sex?”
She would soon have to confront Aaron, and she did not know how she would respond. For she had come to see that their problems were rooted in a complex of characterological difficulties imbedded in the structure of society itself. Everything from official corruption to sexual frustration, from the decay of the nation to the nastiness over breakfast cups, were all part of the same piece. There was a clear relationship between Aaron’s unhappiness at work and his sexual insensitivity at home, and the very nature of his job was a function of the general brutality of the economic system within which it operated, and the overall destruction of the culture was hinged on its inability to deal with the sexual instinct. The circle closed in on itself and there seemed nothing any individual could do. “Jackie’s right,” Cynthia thought, “the whole civilization needs to be turned on its head. But where to begin?”
“I must make a choice of life style,” she said to herself. “The battle will be the same everywhere. The question is, where will I be most effective, most at home?” She saw that choosing marriage with Aaron or some other man as her pattern would entail harsh and bitter struggle to keep from succumbing to the traps of that particular social structure. On the other hand, it was the scene she knew best, and going to live with Maureen and Jackie might seem easier only because she wasn’t familiar with the more unpleasant realities of that path. The labyrinth laughed loudly as she glanced down its false exits.
She covered herself with baby powder, pulled the hair from her face and fixed it in a bun at the back of her head. She put on a tattered pink bathrobe, the first present Aaron had ever given her. “Am I desirable?” she said to her image in the mirror. “Will he see me and want me? And what will he be taken by? My breasts, my lips, my cunt? What else is there in a woman for a man to look for? Emotions come and go, and affection is a thing of the moment.” She investigated the functions she served in Aaron’s life and found that all of them cast her in one or another role of server, ranging from nurse to conversation post, things she had been willing to accede to so long as there was some sense of investment, a feeling that her time would bring her dividends. But what was the pay-off? It seemed she would have nothing to look forward to but more of the same, acting as counterweight for Aaron’s erratic forays into himself.
“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 recognized 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 labors, 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.”
