'What do you want from me?' Aaron said.
'I don't know,' Conrad told him. 'I want to fuck Cynthia, but that doesn't have anything to do with you. Except the two of you keep pretending it does/ He paused. 'Either she's free, or you should make her a slave, which means that you would have to act like a master, and I don't think you can handle that one. But as it is the two of you don't know what you're doing with each other.'
'She's free to do what she wants,' Aaron said, and as the words came out of his mouth he knew he was lying. 'That's a lie,' he added immediately.
'Bet your arse it's a lie,' Conrad replied.
'I'd like just to fuck her too,' Aaron said after a moment. 'But I have to live with her to make sure she's there when I want her.'
'That's right,' Conrad agreed. 'That's how it works. Now the question is, how do you break it up?'
'You mean, leave?' Aaron asked.
'No, that's not it. I mean, how do you stop playing that game with her?'
'She has to help,' Aaron said.
'No,' Conrad shot back. 'You have to get to be straight with yourself as a man, and then she'll automatically be straight with herself as a woman. Or she'll split, and find some other ninny to play house with.'
Aaron was stung by the epithet, for although it wasn't directed at him, in that context it described him. The exhilaration which grew out of being able to speak so honestly overcame his trepidations about revealing things which could somehow be used against him. Conrad seemed to have such an utter unconcern about anything Aaron said that it was easy to speak freely with him. He estimated that it would be impossible to shock the young man.
'What do you do with women?' he said at last.
Tuck with them, talk with them, that's about it. If I'm not really getting it on with a woman, either with my head or with my cock, then I'd rather be alone, or with some trees, or with other men.'
In an over-thirty voice with establishment overtones, unaware that he was lapsing into a role shaped for him by
Time
magazine, he said, 'I don't know too much about this revolution you people are always talking about, but it seems to me that what you just said is precisely what woman's liberation is combating. How do you explain that?'
Conrad let out a mirthless chuckle. 'Jesus Christ!' he said, causing Aaron to feel that he had just said something stupid. He picked at the rug in front of him, and after a long while looked up.
'What do you want out of life, man?' he said. The seriousness of the tone and the directness of the delivery made Aaron check his automatic response, which was to dismiss the question as childish. He realised with a start that all the times he had asked himself that question he had been thinking in inane categories, answering it with words like 'better work conditions', and 'marriage', and 'peace'. Now the response flowed out with the power of a waterfall.
'I want to know who I am,' he said.
Conrad nodded. 'And of all the women you have ever known in your life, how many have helped you in that goal, and how many have done nothing but fill your head with hysterics of one kind or another?'
'You're really down on women, aren't you?' Aaron said.
'I love women,' Conrad said loudly. 'But I never forget that they're one kind of animal and I'm another kind. We make babies together, and that's about all the essential business we have to transact. The rest is optional, and you have got to find out how you are going to relate to them. You can't use the patterns society give us, those are all too stupid to even talk about. I have my fix on women, and women and me never argue. A lot of them don't dig my scene, but that still leaves plenty who do. More than enough to get on with.' He leaned forward. 'Don't you see? Once you make a decision about where you stand, you don't have to fight any more. Everyone who has come to the same conclusion finds each other. The rest go live someplace else and do something else. And when you get bored you can always go see what the freaks next door are doing.' He waved his hand. 'Don't believe all this political bullshit. The only question is people, and how we are going to live on this small planet without somebody always trying to make everybody act the same way.'
'I had thought that Cynthia and I had found the same space.'
'No,' Conrad answered. 'You only found each other, like two children in the dark, and you're both hanging on for dear life. Except that the clinging is killing the both of you.'
Aaron put his head in his hands. The talk had exploded into the foyer of the practical, and the juxtaposition of the airy way in which he was dealing with his problems at that moment with the hard fact of Cynthia's powerful presence in their bed clashed like cymbals in his mind. In a quick flash he saw himself returning to the house filled with brave notions based on the grass and Conrad's words, and very quickly spilling it all out into Cynthia's ears and Cynthia's mouth and Cynthia's cunt, and having no energy to deal with the ideas in terms of action. He remembered watching a filmed sequence of a female black widow spider luring a male to her nest, and the undeniable dance of rapture that he indulged in while fucking her, and then his rapid attempt to flee before she pounced on him, pierced his skull with her fangs and sucked his body dry.
'Conrad,' he said, 'I'm afraid of her.'
'Sure,' the younger man nodded. 'A woman can tear you to pieces, and if she likes you, will, if you let her. But you know, you're physically stronger than she is, and she can't do anything to you that you don't allow her to do. YcfU're afraid of what you want her to do to you, what you would really dig.' He narrowed his eyes. 'Have you ever let her tie you up and whip you?'
Aaron bit his lip. 'No, but I do things that are close to that all the time.' He furrowed his brow. 'I almost killed her once,' he said. Recalling the scene in the baroque atmosphere of Conrad's parlour, Aaron spoke with hesitation, the event coming to life as though through an unfocused lens at first, gradually attaining clarity. He had not spoken of it to anyone before that moment.
'I came home one night in a strange mood,' he began. 'A dozen things had gone wrong during the day and my anger started building early in the morning and went right on through the drive home. As I was walking up the stairs, it began to spill over and I remember hoping that Cynthia wouldn't be there so I could just sit and fume for a while.
'But she was, standing in front of the stove. Something in her posture or her vibration made the hair on the back of my neck rise; she had a certain attitude of vulnerability that attracted my feeling the way a rod pulls down lightning. I didn't know what I was doing. I walked up behind her and slipped my arms around her waist, putting my hands on her belly. She was wearing a thin cotton housedress with nothing on underneath and I could feel the fullness of her under the sliding cloth. She closed her eyes and leaned back against me as though she were yielding herself up, I slid my fingers down to her cunt, electricity sizzling where I touched her.
'I began to say something, but the heat from between her legs distracted me, and I plunged into her with all my energy. I forgot where I was and who I was with; some deep and strong feelings were swamping my critical faculties. I bit her neck, it must have been very hard because she cried out, but at the same time she pushed her arse back and rubbed it against my cock. Whatever it was I was into, she was ready to be the other half.
'I pressed into her, excited by the liberty I sensed she was granting me. Her cheeks fit right into the hollow of my groin.' He paused to glance at Conrad who was lighting another joint. 'You know how luscious her arse is,' he added. Conrad nodded. 'Indeed I do,' he said, and the two men smiled at one another, Aaron relieved to be able to talk about Cynthia's body with someone who also appreciated its beauty from firsthand experience. A glow of euphoria puffed through him as Conrad passed the stick to him and smiled again, a signal of camaraderie.
'It's a groove to talk about chicks in the locker room, ain't it?' Conrad said, his whole body relaxing in a deep internal stretch.
Aaron hunched forward. 'She got very soft, and I didn't know where to put my hands first. I held her breasts and rubbed the nipples until they got stiff and wrinkled. I grabbed her shoulders, her waist, her thighs. I pulled her buttocks apart so I could snuggle into her even closer. And she did nothing but be there, and in a way I couldn't figure out, telling me that whatever I did was all right, that she didn't want anything but to feel me doing my thing.'
He stopped and rubbed his chin which had the first bristle of beard on it. This was the first day in over two years that he hadn't shaved. Tm starting to talk like you,' he said. Conrad took the joint and dragged on it. 'No, we're just learning how to talk together,' he said, 'and that means picking up on one another's language.' He shot his chin forward. 'But go ahead,' he said. 'What happened?'
'I pulled her dress up to her waist, and her partial nakedness added a shade of obscenity to the tableau. She made a small choking sound and then bent forward, offering me her rear. I unzipped my trousers with one hand, let my cock edge its way out, and then pushed into her again. All I could see was the stove and I felt like a cook balancing the ingredients of a meal. I touched her every place, and it was like the first time I ever put my hands on her, and was pinching and stroking and slapping. Her knees began to tremble. I slid my hand over one cheek and into the crack of her arse, feeling the hair and the heat, and getting high on the smell. Then, it was like stepping into a puddle unexpectedly, one finger slipped into her wet cunt, and I arched my back to bring my cock up and out, to point it. I stepped into her and it slipped right between the lips and into the socket.
'She let out a groan, as though she had just been squashed, and collapsed onto the stove. The wooden spoon she was holding fell on the floor. I reached over and turned the burner off and moved the pot to the back, wondering that part of me could stay so cool while the rest of me was exploding. And then I just settled into fucking her.'
The narrative stopped and Aaron stared off into space, reliving the experience within himself before continuing to dissipate its power over him by spilling it out in words. 'I stood back,' he went on, 'and was like a painter admiring a work I was doing, watching my cock slide in and out of her, checking the colour changes in her cunt and arsehole. She went from tan to dark brown to purple within two minutes, and I was complimenting myself on my good taste in women. You see, it was as though she were only an object that I could use for my pleasure, and had no existence apart from that.'
That's the problem,' Conrad broke in, 'because that aspect is true, too. We are objects for each other's pleasure, but not only that. Every time you discover something, you get hung up on it and blot out everything else.'
'I felt tremendously guilty,' Aaron responded. 'And that got my anger going again. I braced her by the thighs and pushing her head down until she was bent over like a woman trying to touch her toes. I kept my cock pressed into her, and her cunt felt like it was filled with glue, holding me inside. I was staring down on her and all I could see was the white circle of her arse and the dark slit down the middle, and I kept thinking that somehow the secret to all my problems lay in what I was looking at, if I only knew how to interpret it. Her arse assumed some kind of cosmic significance in my mind.'
'You were really getting it on,' Conrad said.
'I bucked into her, and braced my feet against the refrigerator behind me to ride her hard. Every time I piled into her she bucked and reared, raising her cunt so I could slam into it more powerfully. I was like a steamhammer gone berserk, punishing her cunt.
'She let out a high keening wail, like hearing an ambulance siren screaming through the streets late at night. I went wild, pulled her shoulders back, shook her unmercifully. I put one arm around her throat and with my free hand I. . . opened the oven door. I let her fall forward and her head dropped into the black space. And then, I can't describe with what horrible fiendish exultation, I turned the centre dial and in a few seconds the oven erupted with heat.'
Aaron's hands began to tremble. 'At that moment,' he said, his voice rough with emotion, 'I wanted to kill her. Do you understand? To
kill
her.'
Conrad rocked back on his spine. 'At least you know it,' he said. 'Most of the rest of us pretend we don't have that inside us, and we try to act nice, and then it comes out in distorted ways. We have wars, we cut each other with words, we rape.'
'But what I'll remember most for the rest of my life was that as the heat engulfed her, her whole body went limp and she said, 'Oh God, yes.' It sounded like a prayer. I pinned her in that position, and went on fucking her. She was sprawled like a dead deer over a pole, and I was some ferocious beast tearing at her with cruel intensity. It was as though I were rooting for something, something incredibly precious, and I was willing to rip her open to get at it. Her cunt has never been so open, before or since, and as I slammed into her the most violent visions passed through my mind, and at one point I saw myself plunging a sharp long knife right into her centre. And all the while wondering whether she might actually suffocate. But I was beyond stopping, even if it meant taking her life. I still can't accept, that. Part of me reasoned that she wouldn't die, but I acted in such a way that showed me I didn't care if she did. I was going after what I wanted at any cost. Only I didn't know what I wanted.