If you want to see me after work,' she said, 'I can meet you someplace.'
And with her words a terrible prophetic truth appeared to him: the women would always be different, but the moment would always be the same, and he saw himself going through the years seeking in their arms an end to the pain with which their eternal otherness pierced his heart.
'I don't think I can,' he said, 'I have a girl friend I live with.'
Charlotte tilted her head forward. 'Most of the men who come here do,' she said.
'Well, good bye,' he said, the formality sounding grotesque after the scene they had just shared.
'Come back again,' she said, but her voice had already begun to fade into a monotone of impersonality. He watched as the stranger before his eyes once again donned the mask of a stranger, saw that the few moments were over, paid for.
He turned slowly away and began to go through the door. He looked back and saw her stripping the wrinkled oil-stained sheet from the table, and as he spun around to leave almost bumped into another girl who was leading another man to one of the other tiny rooms down the narrow hallway.
Klein Worms
'Each human being has a single folly, a characteristic preoccupation which defines that person's refusal to relinquish the reins of desire,' said Clive, tossing his head so that his mane of hair shimmered around his head. 'Unfortunately for the history of our species, most of us rarely choose a harmless hobby to indulge in, but get caught up in pursuit of one of the classic vices, dedicating ourselves to the attainment of wealth or fame or knowledge or sanctity. In our generation, the fashion is the accumulation of experience, some seeking variety, others tending towards intensity. The problem, from a psycho-economic point of view, is that folly is the primary shield we possess to protect ourselves from truth, which demands effort, and an ability to sustain a fair amount of terror. If the choice is between some socially sanctioned form of foolishness and a silent inner eye fixed on the nature of reality, there are few who would decide for the latter.'
Clive put his palms and fingertips together, before his chest, as though in an attitude of prayer, and closed his eyes for a few seconds. When he looked up again he was staring into Cynthia's gaze. 'When I was younger,' he went on, 'my folly was a passion for women, in all their guises, and in themselves. I worshipped women with such consummate single-mind-edness that I equalled any monk in my ability to discipline myself towards reaching some goal. For me, all creation served merely as the backdrop and stage which enhanced and surrounded the beauty of the beloved. I swooned with all the earnest affection of a swain in a Shelley poem. I would often spend an entire day gazing upon a photograph and fondling a lock of her hair in my fingers, counting each second before I would see her again and be able to lavish my attention on her once more/ He picked up the long-stemmed glass on the low table in front of him, swirled the martini around three times, and downed the remainder of the drink in a single gulp. 'Until I had imbued her with such unearthly perfection that she glowed with celestial virtue and became the purest of all things to ever have existed in this universe. I beheld her with such exalted vision that her every breath assumed meaning, for each moment that she remained alive was an occasion for one more prayer of intense thanksgiving. And to the inexperienced, I was irresistible. And it was, of course, only the naive woman who interested me, for only she had not yet learned to guard her vulnerability.'
Cynthia sipped her coffee. She had not yet fully recovered from the shock of walking into Jackie's living room and finding a man standing there, leaning against the window at such an angle that it seemed he was about to fall. He was talking when she entered, and had not stopped once during all the time she was with him. Well over six feet tall, with gold-glinted auburn hair cascading over his shoulders and down his back, wearing tight violet velour trouser and a black leather vest open down the front, his face was like that of Botticelli hermaphrodite, and there was the faintest hue of silver lipstick on his mouth and a delicately applied blue shadow over his eyelids.
She had awakened three quarters of an hour earlier to find only Maureen lying next to her, already awake, stroking her belly. Before she had time to open her eyes completely, the dark woman slid to her and half-covered her body with her arm and leg. Cynthia's first conscious moment was the sight of Maureen's smouldering eyes pressing into hers, so that as her waking ego coalesced to begin another day, it was imprinted with the urgency of Maureen's desire. She had no time to think before she found herself in a deep embrace, the thin curved lips nestling into her own. When she took a breath, the air came from Maureen's lungs.
Without saying a word, Maureen lay on top of her, her legs together, her hands tight in Cynthia's hair, pulling it back so that her face lost the defence of its features and became the raw mask of the person she was. Maureen looked at her a long, long time, seeming to read some tremulous message in her skin. She sighed and kissed Cynthia again and again, stopping after each score of kisses to pull back and gaze at her again in that poignant way which made her appear so sad. Her mouth was never the same twice; it always presented a different texture, a new mode of expression. Cynthia gave way under the prolonged continuous assault upon her lips and tongue. Maureen's body was hot with urgency and calm with patience, and Cynthia could do no more than offer the ever-opening gift of her mouth to the exquisite demands of Maureen's virtuosity.
Then, as naturally as a seed bursting open and pushing its way into the light, Cynthia was called to the moist dark centre between Maureen's thighs. An unmistakable pressure urged her to go down; like a hand inside her chest, heavy and ineluctable, the force seized her will. It did not come from the other woman, but from within herself. It was an impulse that demanded recognition. She slipped her hand down Maureen's back, over the protruding vertebrae of her spine, and onto the thin buttocks. Her breath came in ragged gasps and her sight blurred. She clamped her fingers into Maureen's muscles and began to pull herself down along the length of her body, and as she crumbled in a chaos of feelings, Maureen's mouth closed on hers one more time and sucked the vulnerability from her lips.
'Oh God,' Cynthia whispered as she tore her mouth loose.
'But having effected this transmogrification in my perception of the woman to the point where she transcended all imperfection, I then proceeded to ravish her, methodically and with precision, burning in her the flames of my rage to defile the beauty I had come to adore: I used my cock and hands and teeth to arouse the beast in the breast of the angel I had created.' Clive drew a Gitanes from the pack in the inside pocket of his vest and lit it with a wooden match. He had the assurance of the experienced story-teller who is able to do a bit of stage business knowing that the audience will hold its attention on him, waiting for him to begin again. 'I did not rest until I had brought the two elements of her essential nature to fullest flower at the same time,' he said through a cloud of smoke, 'so that I might know the ecstasy of holding both ideal form and formless energy in my arms at one moment, all in the person of a single enraptured woman, and then watch as her tender heart and delicate mind swooned before the voracious animality of the body which contained them.' He frowned and stared into the space in front of him. 'But each time, and there were dozen of times, that I attained my goal, I found that the woman was of no further interest to me. And like an artist who has finished a work and is anxious to proceed to his next project, I put her behind me.' He nodded at Jackie. 'It was my dear sister who finally forced me to see that the material I was using was the souls of other human beings.'
Cynthia nestled more deeply into the couch. Jackie's arm was over her shoulders, and her hand was idly stroking Cynthia's breast. Cynthia crossed her legs and felt her cunt quicken each time Jackie touched her nipple. She still found it somewhat strange to be sitting naked in front of a man she didn't know while the woman at her side fondled her body. But it was pleasant to have conversation and physical stimulation at the same time, without the currents of one impeding the flow of the other. It was one more entry to be filed in the notebook of events she was keeping in her mind. She thought again of what had happened after waking up. When she had started her rocking ride down the contours of Maureen's body, she had seen with brutal clarity the desire which drove her was indistinguishable from the same feeling which, so often in the past, had sent her slithering to Aaron's cock. The insight surprised her, and opened an understanding into the difference between the wellspring of her own sexual drive and the object it cathected to. The question of promiscuity, ordinarily a fairly theoretical concern, flashed in her mind with an uncanny vividness, and she saw
T
at a glance how it would be possible to sever all connections between what she was feeling sexually and the person who gave rise to those feelings.
Maureen, sensing the purpose in Cynthia's movements, fell back, closed her eyes, and let herself go slack. In a single complex gesture, Cynthia licked and kissed Maureen's mouth, chin, throat, breasts, and belly as she worked her way down the long twitching body. Her mouth was a succession of leeches and wasps-under-glass, leaving sizzling rashes as it leapfrogged and lapped the dark rich flesh. The sound which came from her was a mournful wail that dipped into a whimper and exploded into a shout of primeval yearning. She drew a breath and lowered herself to Maureen's cunt, gaping at its presence. The outer lips of the hole flared like nostrils on a rearing horse, the middle fold gaped in throbbing openness. The cunt was black and dark purple throughout the entire shell, with the opening at the core like a blood-red pearl. It seethed like a dragon facing battle.
'Oh yes,' Cynthia said, and brought her trembling mouth to the glandular orifice, sucked the cunt between her lips, and slid her tongue into its pulsing centre.
'Oh Cynthia/ Maureen moaned as her hands went to the top of Cynthia's head as though in benediction. 'My sweet Cynthia, my darling Cynthia, Cynthia my dearest love/ she crooned.
Later they had lain locked in one another's legs, their cunts kissing, and done nothing but feel the heat flowing from hole to hole, bathing in the emanations from one another's body. They held their eyes steady as their mouths fluttered with flickering smiles. 'This isn't how I planned to start this day,' Cynthia said, her first connected sentence of the morning gliding flatly out on the space between them.
'What is your plan?' Maureen said, imitating a Hungarian accent.
'I've got to get back,' Cynthia told her.
Maureen disengaged and rolled off the bed. 'Why don't we talk about that after breakfast?' she said, and left for the back yard, to do her morning yoga, parting from Cynthia with a shower of kisses and caresses. Cynthia lay back and stretched, relishing the delicious tingling of her muscles as she prepared to get out of bed. And as she sat up, the first thought to come to her mind was Aaron.
He appeared to her the way dead people appear to the living in dreams, with frightening intensity and sharpness, but disconnected from any relationship with immediate external reality. She could see him in her mind, but could not feel him with her body, all sense-memory of him having temporarily vanished. He was a presence she could not avoid, but neither could she relate to him. She wondered what he was doing and whether she should try to reach him. There was nothing special she needed to say at that moment; her reaching out was for reassurance. Without judging her action she picked up the phone and called his school. When they told her he wouldn't be in for the rest of the week, she felt a pang of worry, and called their apartment. The phone rang eleven times, and she had the peculiar intuition that he was in the house but not answering the phone in order to punish her. She knew him well enough to realise that he was almost certainly steeped in a swell of jealousy, and she wondered what she would tell him of the night's activities. She smiled to herself when she saw that to tell him the truth, that she had spent the evening with two girl friends, would halt his flow of suspicion. She doubted that even Aaron's imagination stretched to the point where he appreciated the fact that women could be an even stronger temptation for a woman living with a man than other men might be. His pride would not allow accepting a woman as a sexual rival.
'Maybe he's with Conrad,' she said to herself as she hung up the phone. The thought cheered her. She saw the young man not only as a possible sexual partner, but as a friend, someone she could confide in. She knew with absolute certainty that she would tell all of her adventures to Conrad, and enjoy his responses and listen to his advice. And upon that, she also admitted to herself that she would fuck with him. It was clear that, although it contradicted her image of herself, if she and Aaron split up, she would not spend a long period of time in tearful loneliness, but would call Conrad immediately and have him take care of her. She knew that his liking of her went deeper than wanting a casual affair, and was prepared to lean upon his affection, like a convalescent leaning upon the arm of a nurse. She mused that it would be pleasant to do nothing for several months but have Conrad fuck her, feed her good grass and hashish, introduce her to mescaline, and show her the workings of his life. And failing that, she had Jackie and Maureen to support her for a while.
She ripped herself away from the direction of her thoughts, for a great deal depended on Aaron's state of mind, and her own reactions to seeing him again. She looked around for her clothes, but they were nowhere in sight. Instinctively she went to the closet and found Jackie's wardrobe, hanging like a fashion display, with one article of clothing to fit exactly each of the several dozen social scenes a sophisticated wealthy woman might visit, from an elegant evening gown to a pair of tailored tennis shorts. Cynthia could not suppress a moue of chagrin at the money and taste exhibited in the layout, especially in light of the fact that on the three occasions she had seen Jackie she was dressed in the same jeans and sweatshirt. Cynthia's things weren't there and she decided it would not be irregular in that house if she remained naked. She closed the closet door and spent a long time looking at herself in the mirror, seeking for any change in expression to indicate that the night's and morning's lovemaking had wrought some external differences in her. But she saw nothing extraordinary except for a flush over her cheeks.