Cynthia listened with wide eyes, disturbed by the elegance of the picture Clive painted, needing for some reason to find a flaw in it, to mar its sheen of perfection. 'It sounds like a world without love,' she said at last.
'Ah, what a word that is,' Clive said. 'Whenever we are taken to the outermost limits of our condition and there perceive that no possible utopia can ever hope to compensate for the essential poverty of our souls, we reach for the idea of love like a beggar lunging for a coin. But what is it, after all? We sit on a beach and smell the clean salt air and some ineffable joy fills us, and we call it love; or we swoon in our lover's arms, and we say we are in love; we inject amphetamine into our veins and feel indescribable physiological exhilaration, and identify that with feelings of love; we project all our idealised yearnings onto another human being, and claim that we have fallen in love. But all this is to confuse a tickling of the ego with a rapture of the spirit, to make gratification for bliss. For all the conditions we usually ascribe to love are a result of some action on our part, and the one absolute quality of love is that there is no way for us to call it to us. It enters us at its discretion, not at our volition. Whenever we try to trap it or define it or rouse it in our hearts, we remain sterile and dumb. And then, just as we have forgotten about our quest, like a sudden breeze it's upon us, and we are transformed by beauty and power and understanding. Yet these moments are not of our choosing. All we can do is live our pitiful lives, more or less comfortably, more or less intelligently, and be thankful for the crumbs from God's table. It's a gift we can't do anything to have given to us, and it is taken away as capriciously as it is bestowed. Separation of the sexes can only be discussed in pragmatic terms; it has nothing to do with love.'
'Who you sleep with is a political decision,' Jackie said.
'Or a philosophical one,' Maureen added.
Clive took a drag on his cigarette and leaned back on his sitting bones. He let the smoke out in large puffs and with an audible explosion of breath. He raised his eyebrows and looked at the three women. He ran his fingers through his hair.
'You said you were a prostitute,' Cynthia said to him.
'It was Jackie who mentioned the fact,' he said, 'but it's true. I am the queen of the
Cock'
Cynthia stared at him.
'The Flaming Cock,'
Clive said.
Cynthia's expression widened into confusion.
It's a gay bar,' Maureen told her.
'If you can call that grim pesthole and the ghouls who haunt it "gay", then I guess you might say it is a gay bar,' Clive said. 'But never has a word been so misapplied to describe a condition. The place is the ultimate conclusion of our commercial civilisation. It's where the niceties of personality are discarded and the interest stays focused on the bodies. It's the meat market, the killing ground of human dignity.'
'I can't imagine it,' Cynthia said. T don't know what you are referring to.'
Clive hunched his shoulders and seemed to look inside himself. 'Think of yourself lying on the floor in the middle of a largish room,' he said. 'You rub your clitoris furiously and spread your cunt lips open with your fingers. Your eyes are closed and your mouth is open, gaping wide, your tongue curling over the edges. You bring yourself time and again to the edge of orgasm, and always stop, quivering at the brink. You are building desire in yourself, the way a cyclotron gathers energy. Your breasts jiggle provocatively, your arse is a cleft mushroom waiting to be pierced. From your throat breaks a stream of hoarse cries which match the excruciatingly vivid fantasies that splash across your mind like swirls in a Pollock painting. You are in the midst of a most private masturbatory moment, giving yourself to yourself, submitting to the only master you will ever recognise: your own unquenchable need. But while you are exposed in this ultimately intimate manner, hundreds of men cluster around you, old men, young men, lovers, sadists, copro-philiacs, priests, satyrs, heroes, impotents. They comprise the full spectrum of mankind on earth and they have but one thing in common: they are riveted to you by the implacable lust that your performance gives rise to. And what feeds you more than anything else, more than your thoughts or movements or sensations, what makes the moment one of such unimaginable ecstasy, is the fact that they are watching you, wanting you, closing in on you, to use you as a sponge for their raging desire, to plunge their fingers and tongues and cocks into all your openings and cover you with excretion until you swim in sperm and urine and faeces/
Cynthia took a deep breath. Like a debator trained by Jesuits, Clive had the knack of opening a conversational movement with an innocent-seeming gambit, and then building logically upon that until the listener had been forced into an acceptance of the conclusion by following the line of reasoning. The one difference was that Clive's logic was imaginistic instead of linear.
T can't dream of ever doing anything remotely like that,' Cynthia said.
Clive nodded. That may have more to say about your unwillingness to accept your potential than about the potential itself.'
'But no one does things like that,' Cynthia responded, slightly piqued.
'In the back of the bar I reign in, there is a room such as I have described,' Clive said, 'a large square space with nothing in it except a half dozen foam rubber mats strewn about the floor. It is kept very dark, and after buying a few drinks in the front, most customers proceed to the rear, where there is almost always some chaotic sexual production being mounted. On a busy night there may be as many as a hundred and fifty men in there, in various stages of dress and undress, engaged in acts that range from the passively voyeuristic to the monstrous and sadistic.'
Maureen stood up and stretched. 'I'm going to make breakfast,' she said, 'I've heard these tales of the mid-dle-aged mariner more than enough.' She kissed Clive on the forehead. 'I love you dearly,' she said, *but this compulsion to describe the details of your sexual hijinks is really very vulgar.'
'It's merely to elucidate and educate that I'm telling all this/ he said. 'All of my stories have socially redeeming value.'
'I'm not sure what I'm learning,' Cynthia said, 'but I must admit that I'm fascinated to hear it.'
'You see, I'm exonerated,' said Clive. He kissed Maureen's hand. 'And please, don't put any curry in my eggs,' he added, 'it makes me nauseous.' He turned his attention back to Cynthia, leaned forward and wrapped his arms around his knees. He rocked back and forth a few moments, looking up into her eyes. His gaze roamed down her face and came to rest on her breasts, and for an uneasily long time he drank in the lushness of her body with frank admiration. He moved down to her cunt, and then trailed slowly over her thighs, down her calves, and to her feet, only to snap his glance back to her eyes, catching her watching him watch her. The look they exchanged hid nothing, and the compact of admitting their mutual sexual attraction was made. It promised nothing specific, but provided a firm base for negotiations.
'A man approached me at the bar,' he went on, his voice lower and more direct. 'He was an Oriental, about forty-five I'd guess, although he appeared younger. He was slightly over five feet tall, wore a suit and tie and steel-rimmed glasses, and looked frightfully intelligent. We appraised one another for a few moments, and he bought me a drink, having only 7-Up for himself. I waited for him to begin the conversation, expecting the usual small-talk as a preliminary, something about the weather or the time. But he remained silent, observing me. I began to get very interested. I prostitute myself for many reasons, and one of them is the fact that from time to time I meet extraordinary people to have sex with. His first words were, 'Are you as competent as you appear?'
'I took his measure, judged that I could supply the level of excellence he seemed to be requesting, and answered, "Yes." "I wonder," he said. "What do you need?" I asked him. His reply came with a
sang froid
that curdled the edges of my sophistication. "I want you to take me into the back," he said, "and feed me to the others." He looked at me seriously. "You understand what I mean?" he said. "I think I've been waiting for you," I told him.
'We stared at one another like two lovers at the edge of a high cliff, ready to lock ourselves in one another's arms and leap in to the chasm before us. "How much do you receive for your services?" he asked me with an easy formality. His breath was light and rapid; what he was suggesting went beyond the limits of the usual swinish rooting that goes on in the orgy room. He had consciously conceived the act he wished to perform, and was prepared to execute it, enlisting a perfect stranger as a partner. But then, we are all members of the same body, aren't we? It takes a broader vision than most people are capable of to perceive that intimacy is merely a matter of recognition.'
Clive shook his pack of cigarettes and found it to be empty. 'Take one of these,' Jackie said, offering him the wooden box filled with English Ovals. Clive picked one up, sniffed it, lit it, and took a shallow puff. 'These are faggot fags,' he said, 'they have no bite to them.' He looked up at Cynthia who was rearranging her position on the couch.
'He appeared well-heeled, so I said, "Fifty dollars." I was all ready to accompany him without payment, for the simple pleasure of working with a man who understood his nature well enough to ask for precisely what he wanted. But it is the heart of playing prostitute to take money for services. Our dear dull dad's will has left me in a position where I don't ever need to earn money again, but there is something about being handed a ten dollar bill after kneeling behind a clump of bushes and sucking a cock through an open zipper, or bending over double in the back seat of a car to have my arse used and abused, which adds the quality of degradation that alone infuses a whore with nobility.'
Cynthia shook her head. 'You're talking backward,' she said. 'How can being degraded be noble?'
'Because it is a service that one sells. Have you ever been a whore? I mean, an honest whore. Or have you spent your life pretending that you are doing something else with men besides getting one form of payment or another for your sexual favours? Taking emotional dues, or social stability, or morning-after affection for the use of your cunt, instead of putting your hand out and demanding immediate real greenbacks for your labour? It is only when you see sex as a commodity that you can appreciate it as an act of freedom. So long as you pretend that the element of buying and selling, which pervades every last vibration in our entire civilisation, does not invade the contract of the genitals, then you flounder about in a constant confusion. To live honestly in this world, you must learn first to be a whore, come to terms with that reality, and then concern yourself with the more ineffable aspects of your intercourse with your fellow human beings.
'He gave me the money without argument, and we sat for a while, finishing our drinks. After a while we rose together and went off to the back, like a man and his second approaching the duelling ground. On the other side of the curtain, it was business as usual. Half a dozen blowjobs, ten or twelve rectal penetrations, an unspecified amount of vague groping and fondling, twenty or so timid voyeurs tentatively fingering themselves as they watched, and on one of the mats a fairly energetic soul who had pulled three men to himself and involved them all in an angular daisy chain. There was not a glimmer of imagination to the found anywhere.
'The man at my side, I later learned his name was Feng, stepped toward the centre of the room and stopped. He stood erect and calm, surveying the scene with the majesty of an eagle. I walked up next to him and after several deep breaths began to undress him. At first it was ludicrous, removing his glasses, loosening his tie; I felt like a valet. But in short order, we were noticed, and while no one else there, I'm sure, appreciated the nuances or understood the interior dynamic of what he was allowing to be done to him, they didn't miss the major point: a human sacrifice was in their midst, someone itching for immolation. I reflected that the deed was not unlike a monk's setting himself on fire to protest the war, except that Feng would survive this ordeal, and he seemed totally unconcerned with the social symbolism of his act.
1 pulled off his shirt, his trousers, his underwear, his shoes and socks, until he was stark naked, not only in body but in intention. Gradually all the other activity in the room quieted down as this slim yellow man, by his sheer presence and the audacity of his behaviour, commanded their attention. I stepped back, wondering how I would proceed, but he took the lead. He bent his knees, put his arms out loosely in front of him, and launched into a long soft graceful dance that I immediately recognised as the swaying pattern of Tai Chi Chuan. He was a master of the art!
'I don't know whether you have ever seen the full ritual performed; it is perhaps the single most exquisite formal pattern of movements ever choreographed by man. In it are contained the fluidity of nature and the structure of mind, in a single comprehensive gesture that takes almost a half hour to complete. It is as though a rock garden could move. Everyone there, including myself, was stunned at first, and I could gauge by the expression of many of the others that they thought he was mad. And, in a sense, of course, he was. But when insanity finds its proper expression, we can only call it art.
'A certain uneasiness went through the crowd, as always happens when the unexpected is sustained. But slowly, the magic of his movements captured us and we sat in a circle around him to watch and marvel at the exhibition. I knew, and Fm certain that some of the others did, that this entire scene was foreplay, an introduction to his major purpose, which, slowly, came into focus. He was manifesting his absolute control of his mind and body, showing us the totality of himself. I don't know the precise instant it happened, but at one point the austerity of his dance was infused with the erotic flavour of the setting in which it took place, and all of a sudden it was as though he were a dancing girl, performing nude for a smouldering audience. For what all the men had come for, to see and touch other bodies, was being fully given to them. Feng ceased being merely an object of contemplation; he became an object of desire. His delicate legs, his sensitive hands, his heavily lidded eyes, his curved lips, his strong buttocks, his nascent cock, were all on display. Several of the men began to edge towards him.