Contours of Darkness (17 page)

The girl walked silently into the room. Her eyes were still sticky from sleep. And her skin was imprinted with the outlines and inclines of the hammock. She exuded palpability and her cunt hair was sparse. The subtle vibrations of reverberations of words, and the realities they referred to, stirred around like whispers in church and settled as she smiled, stretched and yawned, like a kitten waked from a nap.

'Hello, kitten,' said Conrad. 'That's Aaron,' he said.

She turned toward him, her hands still curled by her ears, her elbows framing her breast, her wrists tilted, her legs two shapely white columns that led to her cunt. If he had not seen her earlier, he would have believed she was an apparition.

'Want some dope?' Conrad asked.

As a reply she sat down next to him, crosslegged, leaning forward. Without self-consciousness Aaron scooted across the floor until he was part of a tight triangle.

'Me, too,' he said eagerly.

'He's cute,' said the girl.

'He's a tiger, watch out,' said Conrad.

Aaron beamed like a child at a birthday party.

Conrad rolled a thick joint, with finely powdered marijuana as a base, and crumbs of hashish as a topping. Aaron watched his fingers in their deft practiced movements, and realized that Conrad was an expert in hallucinogenic drugs, a man who had learned thoroughly through his own experiences, and was immensely more learned than colleges full of psychologists who derived all their data from reading reports made by other psychologists who used students as subjects to experiment with.

'You use drugs a lot,' he said.

'It's my business,' Conrad replied. Aaron looked blank. 'I'm a dealer, didn't you know?' he continued. He grinned. 'I buy wholesale and I sell retail.' He laughed out loud. 'That's the biggest irony of all, you see. I've become a businessman, just like my father.' He furrowed his brow. 'The only difference is that I'm honest in my motivations. I never sell anything I haven't tried myself. And I never keep any surplus wealth. I make enough to keep me alive, at whatever level of affluence or poverty seems right at any given time. I went through a period when I was turning over five thousand dollars a week, and I made my deliveries in a Morgan. But it got to be too much of a hassle to maintain at that volume, so I simplified my externals, and got it to where I only need to sell a couple of dozen lids a week to stay alive.'

'What kind of drugs do you sell?' Aaron asked, his mouth hanging open.

'Grass, hash, acid, mescaline, psilocybin, cocaine, and when I can get it, opium.'

'I'm sitting with a pusher,' Aaron thought, taking the term from his inaccurate understanding of the nuances of the drug world. Visions of police bursting through the door flooded his mind. He saw headlines: SCHOOL TEACHER ARRESTED IN NARCOTICS RAID, and the photograph of the three of them, with black squares to cover the girl's nipples and pubic hair. For a brief fraction of a second he tasted what it means to be in jail; the bars closed behind him and he stood trapped in a small concrete tomb. Sweat blossomed on his forehead.

'But I haven't done anything wrong,' he shouted down the corridors of his prison. 'We weren't harming anyone.'

And the booming voice came tumbling down from the judge's bench, 'Statutory rape, corrupting the morals of a minor, possession of narcotics with intent to sell. Five years, ten years, fifteen years!' He screamed inside his mind. He shut his eyes tight.

'Are you all right?' said the girl, her hand on his shoulder.

'Why is it against the law?' he said to Conrad. 'I'm scared to death all of a sudden that we are going to be arrested, and I know it can happen, but all we're doing is sitting here peacefully minding our own business.'

'Ah,' said Conrad. 'You have begun to ask dangerous questions. You are already a suspicious character. Soon you will be identified with us, and the stout men in the blue uniforms will begin to follow you, and listen to what you say, and tap your telephone.'

'Stop it,' said the girl. 'You're making him paranoid.'

'In America the blatant truth is cause for all the paranoia anybody can handle,' Conrad said in a loud voice.

'Fuck him,' she said to Aaron. 'He always starts doing this when he gets really stoned.'

'Stoned, is it?' said Conrad. 'You go stand on the fucking street corner and try to sell a little harmless grass to a friendly face and suddenly get grabbed by some longhair who turns out to be a narc in disguise and then spend ten days in jail with real freaking crazies who might slit your throat in the middle of the night and pray that your father has more loyalty to his son than he does to his society so he will come up with some bail, and then do a shitting and pissing Step 'n' Fetchit for the judge and get a-year-and-a-day-suspended-sentence, and then go out three days later and have to stand in the same spot and run through the whole scene all over again, and hope that you don't get caught again this time.'

'It's stupid to deal on the street,' the girl said.

Well, it's my fucking right,' Conrad said, his voice agitated. 'That's what I dig doing most, sitting in the sun on Telegraph Avenue, sitting high, and selling drugs that will make people beautiful. And if some stupid motherfucker with a hard-on in his throat wants to lock me up in a cage for that, then it's come time for me and him to start doing some fighting, because he is a bad man.' He ran his tongue along the glued edge of the paper and sealed the cigarette. He held it in his fingers for a moment. 'Excuse me,' he went on. 'There's no point in my spraying you with my anger, you're not the people who are trying to put me away. And anyway, I don't do much dealing on the street anymore. I have a small discreet clientele, and I make home deliveries. In some circles, I'm considered a celebrity.'

Aaron watched the young man play out his role with interest and affection; this was a side of Conrad he had not known of, and he suddenly felt oddly glamorous; he realised he was doing something which, in another of his life contexts, would be considered extremely daring. And yet, at that moment, it all appeared so natural. With a twinge of amusement he thought of how this whole day would appear as he sat soberly before his students, and the smile had barely begun to form on his lips when he was raked by paralyzing horror. He saw with unmistakable clarity that he didn't want to return to that classroom or any of the life that it implied. Having treated the period of time since he had ingested the LSD as a baroque episode, he was suddenly taken by the understanding that he could easily continue right down the path that had opened to him, and come to view all of his life up to that day as unconscious preliminary to his true existence. It was not beyond the realm of possibilities that he might one day be sitting with a beard and a naked woman, rolling countless joints, taking acid as regularly as most people see movies, and talking open insurrection.

He shook his head violently. 'It's impossible,' he said to himself. 'These notions are the result of drugs and not sleeping. I'll see things differently tomorrow.'

But another voice in his head mocked him. 'These have been the most liberating twenty-four hours of your life/ it told him. 'They've given you a taste of the freedom you've always dimly suspected was waiting for you. All you have to do is continue. Don't go back to the old life. Stay here.'

Like a thirsty man at the edge of a well he fears may be poisoned, Aaron sipped at the implications slowly. Many of the dimly formulated evaluations he had stockpiled in his mind began to find their completion. All the frustrations that stifled him at his work saw their origins clearly. The questions about his relationship with Cynthia that had wracked him in pain leaped at their answers. And yet he could not be sure. For a fearful instant it seemed to him that the only way he had any chance to extricate himself from the numbing maze of his treadmill days lay in an area where he w
^r
ould find himself continually in the role of what he had always considered as outside the law. For at that very moment he was, he saw, a criminal, indulging in actions which carried the penalty of jail.

'What are you thinking?' asked Conrad.

'Whether or not I should turn you in,' Aaron responded, enjoying the drama of his words.

Conrad smiled knowingly, understanding at once the context from which Aaron spoke. But the girl shifted uneasily. 'What kind of game are you two playing?' she said.

'Neither of us knows,' said Aaron.

'Oh, I know,' Conrad said, 'and so does he. But he's just beginning to find out where it's at.'

'I'm glad I'm just passing through,' she said.

Conrad lit the joint and passed it to Aaron. As the older man took a deep drag, pulling it into his lungs, holding it, imitating the way he saw Conrad smoke, Conrad gazed at him with unblinking eyes.

'But you don't have to rush it,' he said. 'All you have to remember is that you never have to make a decision. Only exercise a choice. You don't have to seek anything out. Just say yes or no to what's presented to you.'

And with a fluid motion he turned to the girl and put his arms around her shoulders. He leaned on her until she began to sag, and slowly sank to the floor. He turned her over so that she lay face down, and ran his hand over her arse. He nibbled the back of her neck and she raised her legs from the knees, her plump calves curving toward each other until they crossed at the ankles.

The three of them continued to smoke and talk, watching the afternoon change into evening, the evening give itself up to night. They entered a gentle euphoric communion and gradually, without difficulty, the men took off their clothing and lay down on either side of the girl, whose body had begun to glow in the dim light. Without an abrupt movement or sound to break the spell they were weaving, they began to make love to her, with their hands, their mouths, their cocks, covering her with the overflow of their good feeling. She barely breathed, but vibrated with every touch, every caress, every penetration, lost in a revery of acceptance.

As Conrad covered the girl's thighs with his own and slid his cock into her young wet cunt, Aaron felt her tongue fluttering delicately against his, her rhythms responsive to what happened at either end of her, blending the input so that her subtle movements were in harmony with each man alone, and both men together. As he was further unravelled by the patient fingers of their blissful anonymous sex, Aaron thought once of Cynthia, but as one thinks of a distant dear friend, fondly, poignantly, and with no relevance to the action at hand.

Comrade Cunt

'But you make it sound as though all my problems would be solved if I became a lesbian/ Cynthia said.

'Not at all/ said Jackie. 'I just pointed out that what now seems like problems will show up as the product of insufficient knowledge. What we're talking about is expanding the base of your experience. "Lesbian" is just a word, a label, and shouldn't freeze you into a premature understanding of what's involved in the process of entering a relationship with a woman which doesn't exclude the sexual aspect. Ultimately, you are never doing anything but finding out more about yourself. Whether or not you wish to continue to fuck with men is a different question altogether. But if you do, you'll find that you won't be prey to all the confusions that propel you into the sort of difficulties women have with men.'

'Do you ever have sex with men?' Cynthia asked.

'I haven't for several years,' Jackie told her.

'I still have a taste for them,' Maureen broke in. 'But it's not too often that I find a man highly evolved enough to interest me more than physically. Most of them still have a conquest reflex which makes them terribly boring as lovers. And the ones who have a balance of sensitivity and strength seem to have been stricken by a peculiar air of listlessness which robs them of the desire to encounter a woman, and either become asexual or gay.' She smiled. 'Occasionally one meets a man who is simply and truly a man, and then

I give myself to him unconditionally.' She rolled her head around on her neck. 'Until he leaves,' she added.

'Why does he leave?' Cynthia asked.

'Why, that's their nature,' Maureen replied. 'Once they have opened the woman fully and tasted all her secrets, they have no further interest in her. If she wants to rid herself of him quickly, she lets him see all of her in a single night; and if she wishes to keep him tied to her, she feeds him piecemeal, yielding up little tidbits, teasing him with foreshadowings of delights to come. You know the tale of Scheherezade, of course. It is clearly allegory for what I'm talking about. She was able to provide the king with a thousand and one different qualities and aspects of her sexuality and saved her life with that.'

'Doesn't the man have anything to say in all this?' Cynthia said, beguiled by the tenor of the talk.

'It depends on how conscious he is of who he is. If he is a dolt, unable to admit that the only unique thing he has to offer a woman is his erection and therefore incapable of putting his ego on the shelf, he will have no idea that the capsule containing him and the woman has limited air, and will sustain life in inverse proportion to the intensity at which it is lived. You see many couples who have burned themselves out and then go on groping and rooting, looking for any little scraps that might have been overlooked in the initial looting. Their sex usually becomes stale or violent.' Cynthia shifted her weight on the couch; the description fitted her situation with Aaron, and with every other man she had been with, too closely for comfort. 'If he has totally understood his sexual nature, however,' Maureen continued, 'then he can choose to remain passive and let the woman decide the hows and durations of things; or become aggressive, and ransack her at his own pace. I remember a man who unveiled me completely in six hours. His energy was fantastic and I did nothing but open continuously until I had totally absorbed him.'