Contours of Darkness (20 page)

'Ask the woman who owns one,' Jackie broke in.

'Precisely,' said Maureen. 'The woman who makes love to you is yourself, and gives you what you know you really want.'

'But she can't give me a cock,' Cynthia said.

Maureen brushed the question aside with a flick of her wrist as though she were chasing a gnat. 'Find a man for that,' she said. 'If you're really still interested. Sex between women doesn't necessarily preclude heterosexual activities. It underscores them so you see them for what they are, and surrounds them, so you understand their limitations and don't get swamped every time a fleshy rod is poked between your thighs.'

'I like men,' Cynthia said, wondering as she spoke why she was trying to derail the train of Maureen's thought.

'Do you?' Jackie cut in. 'Do you really? Think about it a moment.'

In the space which followed, Cynthia felt the eyes of the others on her. They seemed to keep her thoughts off balance and she attempted to wrestle with the question, but there was no handle to grab it by. Two pictures flashed in her mind, the one of herself lying sated under Aaron's body and the other of herself lying next to him while he slept and she churned with some unde-finable dissatisfaction.

'Remove the cock, and what do you have?' Jackie added.

Cynthia suddenly saw Aaron standing before her without clothes, all the attitudes and postures of his character manifest in his naked body, but nothing at his crotch but a smooth expanse of skin. He came toward her, the familiar look of lust in his eyes, and the sight of him filled with such intensity and no phallic focus with which to direct it presented a model of such ludicrousness that the laughter spurted out from between her lips and she lapsed into a fit of giggling. She looked up to find the other women smiling warmly at her, and she saw them suddenly as two tight-rope walkers in precarious equilibrium operating at the edge of a finely honed tension, relying on one another's steadiness to keep the wire from shaking. Imagining Aaron's presence in the setting was like thinking of a gorilla in an operating room.

'We're not going to creep up on you,' Maureen said, shifting the mood during the brief interface. 'But what can happen to you if you come to bed with us?'

'I don't know,' Cynthia told her. 'It just seems so alien to me.'

'Look at me,' said Jackie, 'am I strange to you?'

She stood up. Wearing faded paint-stained jeans and a work shirt with the top three buttons open, she looked like any of thousands of Berkeley housewives, like Cynthia herself, who appeared in the supermarkets on Saturday afternoons. She was several inches shorter than Cynthia, somewhat heavier, with thick thighs and a short waist. Her breasts were full, and Cynthia could see the tips of her nipples clearly outlined, emphasising the fact that she wore no bra. Her own brassiere suddenly seemed an artificial halter and her self-consciousness about wearing it grew. She had for some time debated with herself about being free enough to let her breasts hang from her body without obstruction, but was held back by the thought of the stares she would attract on the street. Jackie's expression was one of penetrating calm, and her eyes held an amused taunt that Cynthia found both disquieting and fascinating. She received a brief glimpse of what a thin line separated her from the jaunty attitude Jackie wore so easily.

'I am a woman, just like you,' Jackie said. 'I have known every passion and fear and feeling that you have. I've gone wild in the arms of men, men more exciting than any you have probably known. And I've tasted every hesitation in doing what's being offered to you now. Believe me, you are going to lose nothing. Even if you decided to continue your relationship with your man, knowing us will make it stronger, if it deserves to survive at all; or destroy it, if it isn't worth saving.'

Cynthia became light-headed. The notion that she would actually succumb to their offer and in a few moments would be feeling their hands on her body, their tongues in her mouth, their cunts.. . She stopped the flow of images there. 'What's holding me?' she thought. 'I've gone to bed with men whom I've trusted and liked less than I do these two.'

'Why don't you take your clothes off?' Maureen said.

Cynthia turned to her. 'I - I couldn't,' she replied.

'Oh, you will go on being a child,' Maureen told her. 'How long do you think you can hide? Like a virgin pretending to be shy. But don't stop, it is very becoming. Your cheeks are flushed and your breath is shallow. Open your eyes and look at what's in front of you. We don't want to plunder you or conquer you or make you have our baby or get you to fall in love with us. We are the same as you. And we're inviting you to a communion, a sharing with us. Do you understand the difference? We've all had the same experience, we all have the same organs, the same responses. There's no contest we have to engage in. We can be as free as we want with one another, go as deep as we want, fly as high as we want. Together. Isn't that obvious? We can go to places where you can't go with a man.
Can't'
She spoke the last word with a gravid finality.

'I feel like a specimen,' Cynthia said. Her palms were moist and she was uncertain of her reactions. If the two of them had closed in on her at once, she did not know how she would respond, whether she would fight them and flee, or give herself up to the moment.

'That's only because the two of us have a much stronger bond between us than exists between you and either of us. And because we've been very much involved with you.'

'How was that?' Cynthia asked.

'You were something special,' Maureen said. 'After Jackie took your number, we talked about you and were looking forward to seeing you at the next meeting. But after a few weeks it became clear that you weren't coming back and had probably fallen back into your old scene. We pondered calling you a long time, because we both wanted your body, and both intuited that you would be more to us than a passing trick. We refined our minutest vibrations to get every bit of analysis we could out of the scanty data we had, and found ourselves very turned on thinking about you. And then we decided to have Jackie call, and concluded we would be absolutely straightforward in our approach and hoped you would respect that enough to really listen to what we were saying, to feel it as it pertains to you, and not treat it as a theoretical discussion.'

Cynthia heard not so much the content of the words as their penetrating clarity and honesty. She was convinced that they were telling the truth about themselves, and for her that was the pertinent quality. She understood that at the moment she didn't care about all the reasons why they wanted her, or even about the things they wanted to do with her. What gripped her was the rare sweet honesty of their communication. Being with them threw into shadow the half-life of dissembling and camouflage she lived at her office, and the world of murky emotions she shared with Aaron. She suspected that freedom for her would mean more than the ability to have sex with women. But it was the freedom that she wanted. She was tentatively prepared to try unusual vehicles to attain it.

She leaned forward. 1 like you very much,' she said to Jackie, 'and I'm a little afraid of you, I think,' she told Maureen.

Maureen stood up and walked around to stand next to Jackie so that the two of them faced her. Cynthia was able to see them as a single gestalt, and the effect was very strong. Long and short, dark and light, hard and soft, mental and physical, they bracketed all the contrasts. She looked into Maureen's eyes and then into Jackie's and then back again, switching her gaze rapidly until she realised that the two women were watching her with a single consciousness, and she was able to perceive the unity which bound them. They were the embodiment of the ideal Cynthia had dreamed about when, as a young girl, she had indulged her fantasies about a Prince Charming coming by to take her away from the squalor and make her his own.

Her legs trembled. The two women seemed to be evaluating her the way a connoisseur would look over a piece of fine china. She recognised the attitude from many years of having watched men do the same thing. But in this situation she felt none for the ordinary reactions, neither flattered nor degraded. She performed a small series of movements which reflected her ambivalence, patting her cheek, turning her head to one side, touching the instep of one foot with the toes of the other. All the while they held her in the embrace of their observation, and she saw that they could see everything which went on inside her. She grew flustered. She wondered what they knew about her that she didn't know herself; she acknowledged their greater experience, and that coupled with the strength of their presence was almost enough to convince her that her wisest course was to put herself in their hands. Tt would only be for the afternoon,' she said to herself, 'and it will always remain an experience to look back on.'

She held their stare and returned it until the three of them were locked in a circle of mutual recognition and responsive to all the levels of exchange that took place among them. 'I might not be doing it for the reasons you might think,' she said at last.

Maureen spoke and her voice came out like an oracular proclamation. 'We all have our reasons,' she said. 'What you are now thinking will become a part of what we are all feeling. We are moving toward an end to separateness, don't you see? We are renouncing the discontinuity of the male and entering the continuous flow of the female.' She said the words with tremendous fervour and then walked forward until she stood a little forward and to the side of Cynthia. Take off your clothes/ she said, 'and that will be the sign that you will spend time with us without the false restrictions which forbid us to love one another's bodies. Let us see those full soft breasts which are our breasts, the breasts of woman, and the deep pulsing cunt which is our cunt, the cunt of woman.'

Maureen held her hand out and Cynthia grasped it. Maureen pulled and Cynthia stood up. Jackie walked to stand on the other side of her. Up close the two women she had a sudden memory of a moment on the desert. It had been a little after noon and the temperature was almost a hundred and thirty degrees. The air was so clear that mountains hundreds of miles away showed minute details to her naked eye. She stood in the shadow of a huge barrel cactus, having stepped out of the car to taste the power of the day, and unexpectedly she had become one with the plant in a moment of transgeneric empathy. For a few scintillating moments out of time she knew exactly what it was to be that plant and remain unmoving in the lonely stretches of cracked earth, bearing the brunt of the sun and the bitter cold of the night. Now she looked from Jackie to Maureen and saw herself through their eyes. She looked at the white curved legs, the short pants which outlined more than they hid, the flat belly rising into round bulging breasts. She saw her sensitive mouth and moist eyes. She saw a young woman, lovely, nervous, unknown, but wanting something that she had spent her life hungering for without being able even to define, and wondering whether here, with these two others, she might find another piece of the key.

'I. ..' she began to say.

'Yes, you,' Maureen said, and brought her fingers to Cynthia's lips, holding them there, and then trailing her hand over her chin and throat, onto her breast, over her belly, and across to her hand, bringing palm against palm, fingers between fingers.

The words become absurd/ she said, 'because we all know the same thing.'

'Everything you're feeling now, we've felt,' Jackie whispered, and came a step closer to take Cynthia's other hand into her own. 'This is our greatest pleasure, reliving through you the rapturous moments of our own first lovemaking.'

Cynthia's throat was dry. 'I don't know what to do,' she said.

Maureen brought her lips against Cynthia's ear, and when she spoke it was more the effect of the breath that moved her than the content of the vocal message. 'Do nothing. Be everything. Go into yourself and find who you are and when you emerge through the expressions of your body, we will be there to hold that movement in our arms.'

They walked with her into the bedroom, Maureen's arm around her waist and Jackie leading her by the hand. There was a buzzing in her brain and everything she looked at was darkened by a violet hue. With every few steps an attack of trembling shook her legs. They had her lie down on the great circular bed which dominated the centre of the room with its posts and curtains and the round mirror which was cemented to the ceiling over it. She knelt on the edge of it, crawled to the centre, and rolled over on her back. Before she closed her eyes she saw herself looking as though she were floating idly on the waters of a zebra-striped lake.

Maureen and Jackie lay on either side of her and for a few minutes did nothing but watch her, their eyes drinking in the body which they were soon to uncover and taste. Then, as though on signal, they came toward her and began to kiss her hair, her temples and her eyes. At first tentative as a mother brushing her lips against the forehead of a sleeping child, when they reached her cheeks they pushed their mouths into her with a greater pressure. Cynthia felt them as questions on her skin but was not ready to respond. Then their lips glided to hers and she felt the first jolt from their contact, the electric fusion of their mouths. The reaction began in her stomach and rolled to her head with the jagged velocity of a tyre that has spun loose from a speeding auto and is careening across the width of road into the blackness beyond. She made a sound in her throat and her hands curved up to cup the necks of the two women who were kissing her. Their tongues fell from the rapidly opening mouths as Cynthia flushed with a sexual yearning she had not thought would appear that afternoon. Ready to proceed with the programme as though it were an experiment from which she would learn something, but not really enjoy, she thrilled with surprise at her nascent feelings. Maureen and Jackie moved closer until each of them had hooked one leg over one of Cynthia's thighs, and as they swam into her on one end, they slowly pulled her open at the other. Cynthia sighed as they opened the portals to her cunt and her tongue curled and swept back and forth until it was seized by the others and held for a tingling moment. The structure collapsed and their lips, writhing like snakes, flew into the turbulent centre. They gave themselves to the dance they had created, their energy going into the unity of contact instead of between any particular personalities. They strained to press their mouths against their mouths until it seemed they would bruise the tender flesh. Cynthia rode the crest until she could not absorb the tension and then her lips flew open once more, wide and gaping, wanting penetration. The others seethed inside her, licking her teeth and cheeks, burrowing into the opening as though they wanted to devour her. They bit her lips and let saliva drip into her throat. Cynthia swallowed them whole, accepting all the sensation they showered upon her, and then surged up to reply. Her tongue, that arcane organ of intelligence, spoke without the resonated breath it usually uses to make words; it talked directly through touch, discarding the cumbersome vehicle of projected speech. The others felt, and understood, and replied. And for a very long time the three women, their bodies locked and vibrating, moved their mouths in a wide shifting embrace, their tongues slithering in silent sentences. The messages which were passed could never be conceptualised. Some were humorous and she smiled inside herself; some were sad and her eyes grew moist; some were so beautiful that she took the hands of the others and pressed them to her own breasts.