Contours of Darkness (23 page)

She was startled by his voice. It was the first time in seven weeks he had said anything to her except 'Good afternoon', once as she arrived and once as she departed. 'Evil,' she repeated, encouraged to have sparked a response. 'The first thing I think of is an animal, an animal covered with dirt.'

'Dirt?' said the man.

'Filth,' she said. 'Schmutz.'

'Ah,' said he, 'sex.'

At the mention of the word a slow blush tinged her cheeks crimson and her lips trembled. Her hands flew to cover her breasts and her knees locked together. She was as chaste and wanton as a nun in prayer, desiring that which she found most fearful, penetration by the power above her.

'How beautiful she is,' the man thought. 'What a joy it would be to make love to her, to take her through all those fears, to let her blossom and become free.' He frowned. 'That's all in the past now,' he said to himself, and recalled the years of his engagement and early marriage, when fire had snorted from his nostrils as he sniffed cocaine and was stampeded by surges of raw intellectual power that had women swooning at his knees. But when he reached his mid-forties the whole process of sex came to bore him, and he poured himself exclusively into his work. To have met this woman when he was still in the beginning passion of discovering the principles of analysis would have been a challenge to his soul, and he wondered whether he might not have developed even further techniques with her to rouse him. Now he was content to channel his energy into the hope that she would break through the confines of her neurotic paralysis.

'And if she does,' he said to himself, 'where will she find a man?' He recalled meeting her husband and seeing at once that he was obsessive, a classic anal retentive. 'Oh, theses compulsives and hysterics do seem to seek each other out,' he had mused. Now he consoled himself with an idea. 'Well, if she is cured, I will suggest a month's visit to Rome. She will find a man quickly enough there who will extort the moans of ecstasy now locked in her fluttering breasts.'

The woman twisted her head to look back at him and saw him still sitting impassively in the chair. Conrad attempted to catch her eye but she seemed to look right through him. 'I wonder what he's thinking,' she said to herself and bit her lip. 'If he would only speak. But he's told me that I must proceed totally on my own, that he's there only to assist at crucial moments. But what if I never have a crucial moment?' For perhaps the hundredth time, doubt assailed her. 'What if he's a charlatan,' she thought. 'What if he's actually just another man like my husband, more clever but just as unable to understand what's going on inside me?'

'Please,' she said directly to him, 'you must help me.'

As she looked at his face, an expression of stern coldness seemed to pass over his features. His face darkened with wrath. His eyes burned with malevolence. She shrank away from him, suddenly convinced that he was very angry at her, would leap from his chair and strike her. She turned from him, half fearing and half hoping that he would fall upon her and cover her with blows. And at that point, for no reason she could think of, she recalled her father, a man she hadn't seen for almost twenty years.

Her memories raced back to her childhood, a world of confused yearnings and rigid schedules. Days were spent in listless lessons with a governess and formal encounters with her mother. Evenings were a progressively more anxious preparation for her father's homecoming, for they never knew when he would be in one of his black moods and make the house tremble with his terrible wrath.

One night returned with absolute clarity, and as the details of the evening came together in her memory, she closed her eyes tightly as though to block it out of consciousness. But it burst into her with the power of a fist, and she curled into a ball on the couch, uncaring about the impression she made on the doctor. Conrad peeked into the mind of the woman of his dream.

She was six years old and sitting at the dinner table. Her mother had discovered her playing with the neighbour's son of the same age; they had been in the attic with their clothes off, examining one another's bodies. When the door opened she was lying on a trunk, her legs apart, with her playmate inserting his fingers into the slit between her legs. Her mother had whacked the boy and sent him home, and then slapped her until she was dizzy, all the while shouting, 'Just wait until I tell your father, wait until I tell your father.' When he came home, her parents went into his study and did not come out for fifteen minutes, and when they did her father stared at her as though she was something terribly ugly.

'I think you had better come with me,' he said at last after the meal had been eaten in stony silence.

'Don't be too hard,' her mother said.

He took her by the arm and led her into his bedroom. He closed the door behind him, and she recalled the rush of blood to her head and the roaring sense of dizzyness as he walked toward her. 'You have done something that is so shameful I can't even speak about it,' he said, 'and what I am about to do is to teach you never never to do anything like that again/ Her eyes went wide as he took off his jacket and slowly unbuckled the wide leather belt around his waist.

'Come here/ he said and grabbed her around the waist. Her breath caught in her throat as he lifted her off the ground and laid her across his thighs in a single motion and sat at the edge of the four-poster bed. 'And this is to insure that you feel this properly/ he said, his voice sounding distant and choked. The woman on the couch squirmed as she relived the intense frightening excitement of the moment.

His hands went up her legs, lifting the dress over her waist. He pushed it until it covered her torso and head, and she lay wrapped in darkness, unable to see what was happening below. She felt his fingers tugging at her panties, pulling them down and off her body. She blushed until she thought she would burst into flames, knowing that the naughtiest part of her, the part she was never to even think about or touch, or let anyone else see, was bare and expose to her father's eyes. The pungent smell of his trouser leg and the exact shade of brown of the rug under his feet, the giddyness of being suspended and the pressure of his legs against her belly, all came back vividly.

He rubbed her buttocks with one hand and said, 'Now, we'll teach you what happens to wicked little girls.' His fingers tickled and for a moment a current of pleasure ran through her, and without thinking she contracted her cheeks, pulling them in toward the centre.

'What?' he said, and grabbed the flesh in his fingers. 'Oh, you are a dirty little girl, an evil little girl.'

There was a brief pause, a whistling sound, and the strap hit hard and flush across her skin. Before she had time to register the effect of the blow, he hit her again, and then again. A slow burning began, barely painful at first, but growing deeper as the strap continued its relentless punishment. Soon she felt that her flesh was being sheared off, and she howled in anguish.

On the couch the woman clenched her fists, curled her toes, and whimpered. The man in the chair watched. 'Hmm,' he said, 'there seems to be something going on inside her. Perhaps after she goes through it the words will come at last.'

The little girl lost all control. She beat her arms against his legs, she kicked violently, she screamed at the top of her lungs. But the more she reacted, the more heavily he beat her. She reached a point where she felt she could no longer bear what was happening to her, and saw in a flash that she had no choice for she was pinned by a strength greater than her own. Unconsciously, she surrendered, and her body went limp. His arm rising and falling, his eyes locked in a hypnotic stare at the rash-red buttocks and the first hint of a crack beneath them, his breath whistling in and out of his mouth, he was blind to his own actions.

He let the strap fly out of his hands and brought his hand down on the firm curved arse, and as his lips working noiselessly brought one finger forward, slipped it between the defeated thighs, and thrust it rudely into the tiny vagina. She groaned once and lost all control of her bladder, letting a stream of urine splash onto his lap, down his legs, and into his shoes.

'Pig,' he shouted.

At that moment the door flew open and her mother came in. 'Max,' she screamed, 'my God, what are you doing to her?'

And he had stood up calmly, dumped the child off his lap, and said in a narrow voice, 'See what an animal she is, she pissed all over everything.' And left the room deliberately, leaving her to stare up into the dawning envy in her mother's eyes.

The woman on the couch felt the heat in her groin, that same sense of peeing freely, forgetting all concern and letting the warm liquid spurt and dribble from the hole between her legs, making the hair sticky and salty, slick and pungent. She linked it to all the times she had begun to feel some excitement between her thighs when her husband imposed himself on her physically, as he did, his body rigid, his jaws clenched, his eyes unseeing, his hands turned into knots. And always she would retreat from the warmth, always hold back.

She was intelligent enough to know that the man she had sex with did not allow her her fullest range of feeling and expression, but she suspected that there was something deeper in her problem, something she could not find by herself. And then had heard of the wonderful doctor that all society was gossiping about, the man who gave woman the freedom to have orgasms.

She rolled to her back one more and wondered whether she had come to the root of her neurosis. Her body went slack and her legs tingled with anticipation. She felt her breasts as quivering mounds on her narrow chest, and her mouth was an open invitation. Warm pulsating life throbbed in her cunt and the room was filled with the oceanic aroma of her secretions. Conrad began to get an erection. The man sat up in his chair.

'Now,' he said to himself, 'if she escapes transference on one side, and the strictures of the super-ego on the other, she will make it through to the articulation. And once she says it, she will be free.'

'No,' said Conrad out loud, 'it's time for action.'

'Right on,' said
Jerry,
staring through the windscreen.

The characters in Conrad's dream paid no attention to his shout. The woman brought her legs up slowly, deliberately. She moaned and reached her arms up in a silent prayer for someone to hold her, to take her beauty in his arms and bring it to fruition. The man's chair creaked. He leaned forward, his eyes closed to what he did, and waited for the words to come, listened intently for the words.

Conrad sat up.

'Who's Cynthia?' Jerry asked, looking at him through the rear-view mirror.

Conrad shook his head to clear it of sleep. The pressure in his bladder increased sharply each time the van swayed. 'Can we stop?' he asked, 'I have to pee.'

Jerry drove for a few minutes until the shoulder widened and he pulled over onto a grassy space which overlooked a steep drop. They were on Highway 1, deep in the embrace of Big Sur, going south between the awesome powers of the mountains and the ocean. The two men swung out of the wide doors and tramped to the edge of the precipice to stand side by side and relieve themselves on the rocks below. There was no moon, and the stars burned with a blue-white light. Behind them the hills loomed as fearful shadows, guarding the tract of untouched wilderness that stretched eighty miles inland. There was no other evidence of human presence anywhere in sight.

Conrad zipped his fly, stretched, and walked back a few feet where he sank to the ground and sat crosslegged facing the sea. 'She's the old lady of the man who was in my room when you came in,' he said.

Jerry turned to face him. 'That was a strange scene,' he said. 'He looks like a pig. It really blew my mind.'

Conrad smiled. 'You went through a few changes,' he said.

Jerry ran his fingers through his hair. 'You called out her name four or five times when you were asleep. It sounded like you were really suffering. What's your scene with them?'

Conrad reached into a leather pouch hung around his neck and fished out a small piece of hashish and a tiny wooden pipe. Jerry had come to his house to tell him that the money had arrived, and they could proceed with the plan to pick up the explosives. Conrad had been approached several weeks earlier by another member of the violent faction of the underground and asked if his grass contacts in Mexico could also supply dynamite. Conrad arranged a deal with Arturo, his dealer and friend of several years, a man at whose house he had shared peyote and whom he could trust implicitly. And Arturo, after a few days of his own explorations, had returned with the news that it could be done.

'I have a cousin,' he said. 'He drives a milk truck through the border every day for almost the year now. The guards don't even make him slow down anymore. When you have the money you will come down and meet me here. We will put the dynamite in plastic bags in the bottom of the vat. Then my cousin will drive to his station. But first he will stop at a garage in the American section of the city. You will meet us there, and we'll make the transfer. You give me half the money when we load the stuff, and the other half when we put it in your truck.' He had smiled. 'It will be very easy. We can lift it right from the warehouse. It is very good quality, straight from Czechoslovakia.'

When Jerry had burst into the room, Conrad was privileged to watch the incarnations of the two extremes of his social existence meet face to face. He was amused at both their reactions, Jerry jumping back as though he had stepped on a hot coal, and Aaron turning with with fear. When Aaron had stood up and began dressing quickly, Conrad wanted to say something to reassure him, but realised there was nothing he could do at just that moment. He knew why Jerry had come, and the business was too dangerous to allow Aaron to stay around even for a few minutes. He misjudged Aaron's susceptibility to shock, however, and did not know that the incident was to be a prelude to Cynthia's disappearance. He made a note to himself to straighten the situation out when he returned from Mexico.