Contours of Darkness (28 page)

The woman smiled again, and this time her lips held the slightest trace of humour. 'I'm afraid we're not that well-equipped,' she said. She paused a moment. 'Would you like to go in now?' she added.

Aaron nodded, and the woman looked past him to the line of girls. 'Who's next?' she asked.

Aaron turned to see a thin grey girl of about twenty-two stand up. Her attitude had the same stolid air of defeat as the woman in
The Absinthe Drinkers.
She seemed monumentally weary, and he wondered whether she would even have the strength to rub his body for an hour. She came up to him, smiled without looking into his face, and shuffled past through a curtain to the left of the desk. She stopped and looked back. 'This way,' she said.

On the other side was a hallway with four doors on either side of it, spaced several feet apart. She took the first one on the left. 'The shower is down the end of the hall,' she told him, 'and then come back here.' It was only when he turned from her and started for the back that he realised that the place was a whorehouse, and the insight shocked him. He was sophisticated enough to assimilate the data instantaneously without tripping over it, but he trembled a little from the impact of finding the activity right off a main street in the middle-class section of Berkeley. Had he gone at six in the evening he would have found businessmen just returned from their offices stopping in before going back to their wives.

In the tiny shower room he took off his clothes, and undressing in that place aroused him in a way that reminded him of his teen-age. There was something smutty and forbidden about it which took him back to damp gropings in the back seats of cars. He relished the element of naughtiness, as proper to sex as seasoning is to food, which had almost been rubbed out by the pornographers on one hand, with their crude hyperboles, and the sex-hygienists on the other, with their claims that sex was as wholesome as brushing one's teeth.

He soaped himself three times, making sure that all his crevices were clean. He did not know exactly what sort of activity would be offered and he felt a certain shyness about presenting his body to a strange woman, lying under her while she explored him with her hands and eyes. He reflected that he rarely took as many pains when fucking Cynthia, and it occurred to him that it was the lack of a certain level of care, such as professionals insist upon, which often took the fine edge off the sex life of the lay amateurs.

He dried himself and padded out into the corridor, his clothes in a bundle under his arm, and went into the room where the girl waited. It was a cubicle about seven by nine feet, as big as a prison cell, with a massage table in the middle and a smaller table in one corner, holding an array of oils, lotions, powders, and electric appliances. He dropped his clothes on the chair by the door and turned to the girl. 'Should I leave the towel on or take it off?' he asked.

'Any way you like,' she told him.

She wore a skirt that fell to her ankles and a white short-sleeved blouse. Her dark brown hair, lacklustre and without body, was pulled behind her head and hung in a ponytail halfway down her back. The sallow face and eyes which always glanced off at an angle from the direction her nose pointed suggested a pernicious illness, a massive vitamin deficiency which had affected her soul. He unhooked the towel and held it out to her, and when she took it her attitude seemed to cry out for violation. She was the kind of woman who infects men with the itch to strangle.

He lay down on the table and looked up at an unfinished plywood ceiling. 'Do you want oil or powder?' she said. 'Whichever is easier for you to work with,' he answered. She reached for a bottle of yellow fluid. 'The powder makes me sneeze,' she said, an apologetic tone in her voice.

Aaron closed his eyes and waited. He was slightly tense from anticipation, wondering how the offer of sex would be made, and whether he should do or say anything to initiate the contact. She poured the oil on his chest, letting it trickle between his nipples and down to his navel, put the bottle down, and with both hands spread it over his entire torso. She stood to the side of the table and leaned over, bringing her hands up from his belly in a straight line to his throat, increasing the pressure as she reached the pectoral muscles, and then moved down again, tracing a line to his hips, stopping, and coming to rest on his belly. She made a dozen passes, and with each one seemed about to touch his nipples or descend into his pubic hair, but she always missed, always came close. Aaron speculated that he was being teased and found himself straining his body so that her hands would go where he wanted them to, producing a tension which defeated any benefit the massage might have had.

She changed rhythm and on the next upward swing dug her fingers into his shoulders, finding and attacking a knot of concentration that was painful to the touch. He shuddered with relief as she worked the tightness out of the muscles and tried to relax under her ministrations. He saw that the greatest benefit and pleasure lay in passivity, but that was a state he had difficulty attaining. The erotic portrait of himself lying naked under a woman who, for a time, was bonded to service him, did not allow his accepting the simple reality of her touch on his skin. In the same way that a person will look at an abstract painting and ask what it
means
, Aaron was unable to accept a caress without leaping to ask where it would lead.

'My name's Charlotte what's yours?' she said all in a single phrase.

Her voice startled him; hearing the mundane ritual of introduction under such extraordinary circumstances made him smile. For, after discounting the fact that the establishment of a business context gave their current tableau a socially acceptable rationalisation, it was somewhat bizarre to reach a point of nudity before exchanging names. He opened his eyes and looked up at her. Under the stimulation of her hands his perception of her changed. In the way that a piece of bread will hold value in direct proportion to the hunger of the person holding it, so a woman will manifest beauty in exact measure to the degree of a man's desire for her. What had been a thin mouth was seen as sensitive lips; and what had been a distraction in her eyes came to appear as a demure look.

⁴
My name is Aaron,' he said.

She nodded, as though he had given her the answer to a question which had troubled her for years. He was taken by a curiosity about her, and like many men before him had the fleeting notion of asking her to go to his place later. But at that, the thought of Cynthia intruded and the situation he had gone there to forget slipped into the room. Charlotte picked up the bottle again and poured oil on his right leg, tracing a thin line from his toes to the top of his thigh, and then rubbed it over the surface with a circular motion, sliding up from his ankle to his knee and stopping short at his crotch. He kept looking at her and wondered what he would feel like if she were Cynthia, giving massages to strangers, looking at a succession of cocks, stroking body after body. It was the only handle he had with which to grasp the woman in any human aspect. Only an analogy with someone he knew could let him see her as anything but a machine geared for anonymous intimacy.

As she moved her hands up his leg she came to within a fraction of an inch of his cock, slid away and then back again, almost touching it but stopping short. He had to exert his will to keep from rolling on his side, pushing his cock toward her. Unschooled in the joys of being teased, and increasingly uncertain as to whether his initial insight into the nature of the place was correct, he began to compound his frustration into greater tension. He sought the release of having his body soar up and into her, to feel his hands on her flesh, grabbing her arms, and forcing the tantalising fingers to hold his cock. It was grandiloquent testimony to the power of the sexual drive that after thousands upon thousands of fucks in his lifetime, after two nights of multiple scenes, and just a few hours after masturbating, going into a place to treat himself to an hour of relaxation and refreshment, he was once again working himself up to a pitch of excitement in his struggle to have his genital organ fondled.

What made the situation, from a standpoint of sanity, somewhat more bizarre, was that the woman had no desire for him; she was merely available. There are certain times when a woman wants a fucking, and she will transmit that request on a board beam to all men in the area through a system of vibrations, clues and overtures. It is only dull male pride that leads a man to think there is something in himself which calls forth the woman's passion. The stud with the correct chemical composition will be drawn to the rutting female and they will couple for a given period. It has nothing to do with the so-called civilised aspects of behaviour, and the talk, contracts, and social rituals are rationalisations to make the animal truth of the matter palatable to weak sensibilities. The deep grooves of acculturation have all but wiped out the indifferent manifesto of the biological summons, and consideration of property and propriety have come to assume more importance than questions of humanity.

But this woman had no interest in being fucked, and Aaron's sudden stirring underscored the basic nature of male sexuality. A man may be walking by a wooden fence and be told that on the other side of a knothole a woman, any woman, has snuggled her cunt or her mouth or her arse against the opening, and will, unless his conditioned inhibitions restrict him, glibly stick his cock into the waiting receptacle. To the degree that he has refined his libidinal urge he will construct a hierarchy of qualities concerning precisely what he prefers to be placed behind the fence, but that reflects a change only in the superstructure of his essential character.

As Charlotte's kneading his muscles released energy in his body the way pumping a handle will raise the level of water in the pipe, he translated the accumulation of feeling into a preparation for the action which seemed called for by the milieu. The more she massaged him to ease him into a state where he would appreciate the sexual favour she would, for a price, offer him, the more tight he became. She was aware of what was happening, but not interested; it seemed odd to her that he was unable to relax, but her purpose in being there was to make money to live on, not to solve the psychological problems of the men she dealt with.

She oiled his left leg and repeated the pattern, but with a difference. For his cock had been inclined to the left, and when she moved her hand to the top of his thigh, it brushed against the tip of it. The touch was casual and momentary, but to Aaron it was electrifying, like sliding against a woman's arse in a packed bus when she is wearing only a cotton dress and brief panties underneath. But Charlotte's mood did not change; she worked with the same dispassion, the same lack of personality. She swept her fingers against his cock a number of times and it began to grow hard, like a lizard waking up. It was a peculiar feeling to have his erection flourish for a woman who remained coldly uninvolved with his reactions, but he did not balk at such niceties. He ignored the touch of her hand over his entire leg, and only waited for the brief instant when it would approach his centre. Like a psychologist who has learned the superiority of sporadic reinforcement, she found his arousal increasing if she did not touch his cock at every pass. He tightened his sphincter, forcing the penis to swell with blood. He held his breath, waiting for her hand to seize the shaft and relieve him of the accumulating tension. And just when he was sure he could take no more, she abruptly stepped back and said, 'All right. Roll over on your stomach.'

The instruction was like cold water thrown on two dogs stuck in a genital spasm. He went into instant shock and his erection shrivelled. He was like a fire hose from which the water had suddenly been cut off, and he collapsed in upon himself. He obeyed her heavily, reversing his position on the table as she turned her back to him and busied herself with her equipment. He saw her setting an electric timer.

From his new vantage point, he lost the sense of thrust which had propelled him toward her, and was forced to yield total initiative into her hands. It relieved him of responsibility and for the first time since lying down he was able to let himself go a bit and relate to the purpose for which he had come in the first place: to enjoy a massage. He adjusted his bulk and settled into the thin mattress. He took a deep breath as he felt the oil hit his spine.

'You have a nice back,' she said. 'Do you exercise a lot?'

'I used to,' he told her.

She smoothed the balm over his skin and worked silently for a few moments. Aaron felt a pleasant calm enter his being, and the level at which he related to the woman changed.

'Have you been doing this long?' he asked her.

'A few months,' she said. 'The woman who owns the place taught me how to massage.'

'And you make a living at it?' he went on.

'I guess,' she answered. 'I only get paid for what I do, and if nobody comes in I just sit there, sometimes for four or five hours, and don't get a penny.' She rubbed his neck. 'I'm too lazy to work,' she added. 'I guess this is the next best thing.'

Now that he was temporarily forced to forego the possibility of sexual contact he could appreciate the second half of the rubdown. He felt her warm hands across his skin, following the contours of his bones and muscles, giving him the essence of what love is: the healing massage. He abandoned his thoughts and succumbed to her rhythms as she chased the tiredness from his body, stimulating his circulation, giving him a sense of solidity by acting as the living limitation to his physical boundaries. Her movement was like a dance which he saw with his nerve endings, and he sighed repeatedly as she worked up and down the length of him, across the flat planes between his shoulder blades, into the fleshy buttocks, and down the muscled calves. It occurred to him as he lapsed into sweet ease that he was receiving more concentrated physical attention from this sad stranger than he had received from Cynthia in a year. He wondered idly why it was that people who begin to fuck one another end by not touching each other except to achieve a sexual response. 'What a great treasure we sacrifice for that limited genital stimulation/ he thought, but he did not pursue the idea as the sensations on his back claimed all his attention.