Congruent with his nature, as the white viscous fluid exploded from the tube designed by the ironic fingers of evolution to function precisely as a cannon to attain sufficient force to launch new life, he suffered the brunt of the recoil, sensing it as a dull sickening swoosh which breathed on his soul and caused it to shrivel. It was merely the biological dues a man pays for pleasure that has been grated onto the sexual act to insure that the species propogates itself. It was the reason why fucking is, for a balanced man, a labour of love which he undertakes only for the most exalted or most practical reasons, either to beget a child or to share his sense of the sublime with a woman who can appreciate the sacred quality of the act.
Yet Aaron knew only disappointment, for he shared his vision with a fantasy, and his seed found no warm deep niche within which to bury itself. He winced, turned his head to one side, and flung himself into sleep, to lie for a few hours of respite from his dreams.
When he awoke, Cynthia had not returned. It was eleven in the morning, and the sun threw an oblong of bright yellow across his chest. There was a brief instant in which his consciousness flourished without context, and then with sudden weight memory fell upon him and crushed him with despair. He sat up quickly to relieve the pressure, but the feeling had already sunk its barb into the emotional centre and began to burn with the sour pain of a cactus thorn. Cynthia's absence was palpable, a force as powerful as her presence had ever been. In the clear light of daytime his fear retreated just past the point where he might confront it, and was replaced by a bitterness which gave him an illusion of strength. He sat at the edge of the bed and stared at the wall, his eyes not focused, and gravely admitted that Cynthia was, at that moment, in all probability looking into the eyes of another man as he made love to her. He reasoned that he might have been able to accept her night of passion and excuse it on the grounds of the turbulent emotions roused the day before, but the notion that she should wake up in a strange bed and with a calm mind give herself to another tore at all the threads of affection inside him. The jealousy which had sprung from the poignancy of loss was now laced with tips of hatred, which formed the first line of defence against pain.
He put his hand to his cheek and was surprised at feeling the bristle which had begun to look like a beard in process. With his hair uncombed, his face unshaved, his clothes rumpled and stained, he bore little resemblance to the man who had returned so confidently from work two days earlier consumed by a desire to take Cynthia in his arms. And while he could ruefully admit that the break between them had been threatening a long time and may have been for the best, he boggled at the ferocious speed and abrupt manner with which it showed itself.
He looked down and saw that his cock still hung from the open zipper, and he roused himself to change his trousers and shirt, throw some water on his face, put his shoes on, and light the first cigarette of the day. As he dressed he realised that he would not be going to work this morning either, and decided he needed the rest of the week off. He reached for the telephone, knowing he would have to lie again, that there was no way he could address the principal as a man, explain in a straightforward fashion what was happening in his life, and simply say he needed time to pull himself together. The tale of drugs, multiple sex, and association with radicals would be cause for instant dismissal; and as he dialled the number he wondered how he he would be able to integrate himself once more into that world of schedules, programmes, and superficiality. He faced the bleakness of having attempted to swing from one context to another, failed, and fallen, like Icarus in the painting by Brueghel, unobserved into the anonymous sea. That he would force himself to continue what he had difficulty in referring to as teaching was a foregone conclusion. He had seen with impressive intensity that, given his propensity for extremes, any further efforts at breaking loose from the system would hurl him quickly into the world to which Conrad had given him an introduction. Yet the thought of submerging once again into the miasma of the classroom made it difficult for him to breathe.
He was put through to the assistant principal, a black man of fifty with whom he had worked for two years, and who now seemed as distant as a telephone operator. He had painstakingly climbed up the hierarchy of the San Francisco Board of Education by steadfastly refusing to do or say anything which was not covered by one or another of the countless regulations which braced the bureaucracy like stays in a corset. Aaron recited a list of symptoms, was told they had a substitute for the week, and they hoped he felt better soon and were looking forward to seeing him again on Monday. When he hung up, the sound of the receiver hitting the cradle crashed in his ear with an unsettling finality. His alternative to going back was to put himself up for sale in the employment marketplace once more, and the mere thought of searching for a job, with its boring and humiliating ritual, made his knees weak.
At that he realised that the same was true of finding another woman. He went into the kitchen and began to put breakfast together, gathering bacon and eggs and coffee, finding a quick spiteful glee in his freedom from the bland grain mush that Cynthia had taken to fixing in the morning, and which he, out of laziness, glumly spooned down. As the strips of pork started sizzling in the pan, he mused that there was somewhere in the world, right then, a woman that he did not know who would one day be involved with him in the deep complexities he now shared with Cynthia. The idea exhilarated him and made him tired at the same time. It amused him to imagine what she might look like, and he gave himself over to the construction of a body, shaping the parts to create an ideal type for his present mood. She materialised before him, taller than Cynthia and thinner, with smaller breasts and a narrower arse. Her mouth was more full and her eyes were green. Her cunt had an archetypal grandeur that had him smiling to himself in anticipation, and he had progressed to the first caress of her thighs when the water in the coffee pot boiled over and broke the spell.
As he turned down the flame, cracked two eggs into the sizzling bacon grease, and put two slices of bread into the toaster, the rankling voice of the super-ego called an end to the honeymoon, reminding him of the patterns of his past. He had lived with two women before Cynthia and each relationship had, with variations, been studies on the same theme: the inexorable march of personal appreciation into sexuality, and from sexuality into ruin. A new woman was merely fresh information; the structure did not change. And at a time when he was having to accept that he did not have the courage to break out into a more daring lifestyle, he was constrained to admit that there was no evidence that a marriage with another woman would turn out any better than the previous three. The lesson of his acid experience concerning the almost unassailable power of one's conditioning now showed itself in one of its concrete manifestations. The only functional models he possessed with which to think about relationships with women were lifelong monogamy and bachelor promiscuity. He had tried both and found each unsatisfactory and impossible to maintain. He wondered whether there was some way to mix the extremes of behaviour to find a comfortable middle way, but the very changes in attitude he was too timid to undertake were the only viable means to find an alternative method of dealing with the dance between the sexes.
He sat down to eat, confused but calmer. The first few mouthfuls of food entered the ambience of his inner state and radically altered it, infusing the system with a rush of energy. He felt stronger at once, and the shift of focus from his brain to his stomach took the sting from his thoughts; he began to return to an awareness of his body. The floor solid beneath his feet, the chair firm against his back, the table hard under his elbows, he gradually ceased being a creature of entanglements and became a man with presence. He straightened his spine and heard the vertebrae crack.
T really have nothing to worry about,' he said to himself, and treated himself to a space of forgetfulness in which nothing mattered but the tastes in his mouth and the rapid revival of the trenchant tunnel vision which he habitually identified as good spirits. No sooner did the shift in psychic posture establish itself on the basis of the infusion of fuel through his mouth, than he started to mount another production on its back. Now he was the
Playboy
man, a suave sophisticate with a funky pad and esoteric sports car. Like ivy growing up a wall, a spate of fantasies twined their way up the image. Chronically incapable of accepting the unadorned reality of his condition without dressing it in some costume from the rack of unfulfilled wishes, he toyed with pictures of himself speeding along the shore highway, a well-groomed woman running her fingers through his hair and imploring him with her eyes to make a savage spontaneous love to her. Unconsciously he flexed the muscles in his arms.
The sharp unexpected ring of the telephone caused a startled reflex which spun his head halfway around. With that strange conviction which often makes a person more certain of his hunch than is justified by any law of probability, he knew it was Cynthia. He sat immobile, as though she could detect any movement in the house while her electronic summons probed its rooms. The rings continued, and he counted as they assailed his attention. Eight, nine, ten, eleven, and then silence. All the while he held at bay the entire world of confrontation which awaited him when he would see Cynthia again. He did not want that moment to be just then, and he would not have been able to answer, if he asked himself, whether he w
r
ould have preferred Cynthia's message to be that she was never returning, or that she had innocently spent the night with a girl friend and was on her way home to his arms. He had temporarily sealed off access to the stormy submarine world of their relationship, and /while he might later want to dive into it once more, at that moment he wished to maintain an aloofness from its complications, a distance in which to take an unhampered breath.
He decided to spend the day away from the house, to seek strength through removal from what seemed like the web to which the spider might return at any moment. He did not think of her as evil, having had his more terrible emotions burned away during the night; she was simply a force he did not want to deal with for a while. Leaving the dishes on the table, he put his money and keys in his pocket and left through the back door, cutting through the yard, and coming out on the next street over. It was another cloudless day and the air sang with vitality.
Aaron had a deep love of walking. His happiest days had been during boot camp in the service w
r
hen his company was taken for twenty and thirty-mile hikes.
There was something about the rhythm of moving forward at a good pace, the easy swing of the shoulders, and the regular deep breathing it brought about, that pacified his spirit and brought his body to life. It was one of the few times he felt free, for the primal simplicity of the exercise washed his mind, and his penchant for introspective rumination was dispersed. Watching the curves of the land change, passing by trees and rivers and hills, sensing the spaciousness of the sky and the gravity of the earth, he attained a joy which no other activity gave him.
He walked with no goal in mind, changing directions at a whim, zigzagging through the streets of the town, absorbing the changes in tempo and texture from section to section. He climbed to Arlington, followed its tree-lined ascent to the edge of Berkeley and into Kensington, and then doubled back to hike as far as the Rose Garden where he breathed in the sweet perfume of its flowers and gazed out onto the panoramic view of the bay. From there he descended once more to the plain, thinking of how beautiful the land must have been when only the Indians lived there, before the imposition of concrete and steel and industrial fumes and great ugly bridges. It had been quite a while since he had enjoyed such a solitary meander, and he wondered whether the nature of his job, with its restrictions on mobility, was not essentially harmful to his well-being.
By the time he had reached the outskirts of the business section, a pleasant physical fatigue had made his legs heavy. It was a healthy contrast to the exhaustion which came from struggling with his thoughts and emotions. As he paused at a street corner to wait for a light, his eye fell upon that advertised massage. It hung over a storefront window which was covered by heavy curtains, giving it the air of a gypsy fortune-telling place. The thought of a shower, a steam bath, and a rubdown exerted a strong appeal. He felt tired and grimy, and in need of an actual and symbolic cleansing. He had never been in a massage parlour before, and the novelty of the idea tipped the balance in its favour. He was somewhat apprehensive, but he crossed the street and went inside.
The first quality he perceived was its dimness. He stepped into a long narrow waiting room painted institution green, with a worn carpet on the floor. Along one wall sat four young women in a row, like hostesses at a dance hall. In unison they turned their heads to stare at him as he entered, and he walked the gauntlet of their eyes to a desk at the far end, the domain of a fifth woman, noticeably older than the rest, who managed to make her automatic smile seem personal.
'Can we help you, sir?' she said.
'I'd like a massage,' he told her, and his words struck an incongruous note in the thick atmosphere. He shifted his weight to one foot. 'How much is it?' he asked.
'We charge twelve-fifty for a one hour massage,' she rattled off, 'and that includes the use of the shower.'
'Do you have a steam room?' he went on, sensing some undercurrent which he could not yet define.