Cynthia was both happy and confused, for in the midst of all their difficulty they were still able to reach this point of union, and she found that the sum and substance of their relationship was merely an experience, and as such had no more weight than any of the countless other things which happened in her life. It was only the investment of such moments with value that gave them worth, and it had become impossible to gild the contours of their fucking when all the rest of their intercourse was permeated with pain. 'It's everything I can hope for/ she thought, 'and it's not enough.'
She turned her head to look into his eyes, to see if his mind was still attuned to their fucking, or whether he had drifted off into some interior domain. And just then, spurred on by the demands of his cock, Aaron began to ride once more. Obliterating the ethereal pleasure that had been bestowed upon him, he hungered for the grosser fulfilment. He hunched his spine and began to grind his pelvis into her hairy cunt. Her fingers formed into a mudra of questioning over his head, but when she realised that everything else would have to take second place to his drive toward ejaculation, she sighed and gave herself up to the inevitable. She knew that she would respond and offer herself as a vessel to be entered again and again until heat and friction had worked their magic upon her nervous system and he spilled his fluid tension into her. Her legs spread wide, her cunt slack, she let him fuck her as he wished.
Aaron pumped his cock into her. He growled in his throat and pinned her with his weight. He brought his head down and began to bite her nipples. She raised her knees, allowing him deeper penetration. And they started the kind of fuck that they had performed a hundred times, she swooning with sensation as he urged himself on to completion. But some lever clicked inside him, and he dissociated from the sexuality of the moment in order to set it as some cinematographic production, as though the two of them were suddenly thrust before a camera and it became incumbent upon him to satisfy the voice of the director shouting in his ear.
'Hurt her,' the voice said, 'make her cry, make her squirm. You know she likes it. Hit her, bite her hard.
Make her go wild. She's just a cunt, a hot crazy cunt. Forget all that nonsense about human relationship. There's only this under everything else. Just your cock making her faint. Stick it in her, all the way in her. Put it in her mouth, up her arse.'
Large drops of sweat formed on his forehead as he worked inside her, like a man straining to finish a hundred push-ups, forcing himself to the limits of his capacity. He slammed his weight between her thighs, crushing her tender cunt with his strokes. She put her hands under her knees and pulled her legs as far back and as far apart as they would go. His cock smashed the walls of her cunt, causing her to wince with trepidation that he would break through the vaginal wall. But the harder he moved, the more she relaxed, and found that she could accommodate anything he wanted to hurl into her.
He lost awareness of who they were and pressed his teeth into her nipple. She grabbed his hair and pulled it until the pain she inflicted equalled the pain she received, keeping him at bay through a balance of retribution. He snarled and shook his head like a dog tearing at a piece of meat. Her nails dug in at his neck and pulled ten strips of flesh down the entire length of his back to his buttocks. The hurt coursed through him like the shock of ripping tendons and fed the conflagration in his groin. Their battle returned Cynthia to her position of distance from her activity. For the few minutes when they had been joined in the sheer exultation of their coming together in a welter of feeling, all the problems that surrounded them had been shunted to the background. Now those questions returned with greater fury and her mind exploded with a thousand jumbled frantic thoughts. But she had no space within which to sort things out, for Aaron's insistence had become monumental. She tore at his skin with undisguised viciousness.
Aaron plunged into recklessness. He knew that if he continued to fuck her in this manner he would come bucking her will, and that such an orgasm would leave him dissatisfied and surly. It was clear that to go on with his physical assault would probably drive the final nail into the coffin of their affection. But like a man about to get into a fight, he needed the excitement of the combat more than his concern for life and limb. He forgot the future and hurled himself into the frenzy of the present.
Cynthia put her hands at his throat and began to choke him. He grabbed her hair with one hand and slapped her again with the other. The blow stunned her momentarily, and then to their mutual surprise she laughed, an eerie pealing sound. With astonishing speed she shot her mouth forward and fastened her teeth on his right cheek, biting down until she could almost feel the skin breaking. Aaron shouted in pain at the same time he bucked into her with renewed vigour.
As his cock and pubic bone pounded the sensitive tissues of her cunt, like a barrage of war ships on a hostile shore, she ground her teeth together and bit into his face, severing the flesh and causing a shower of blood to burst into her mouth. He screamed once, a high-pitched shriek that resounded over the entire street outside the apartment, and at that Cynthia yelled, a cry of liberation that set her entire body tingling. As the hot thick blood spilled over her lips she thrust upwards and tightened her muscles, swallowing his cock with a single vaginal gulp.
He became a screeching nerve against her body, all the myriad postures and character structures of his many roles lighting up like neon advertisements for the human race, overlaid against the basic formless energy which sustained them. He had gone past all convention and she had soared beyond all inhibition. He saw that every idea he had ever held was as ephemeral as the clouds; there was nothing real but the raw insatiable drive of life itself. He had reached the point where he had nothing more to lose, and could literally destroy the foundations of his slavery by demolishing the physical structure in which it had found expression. Their attacks on one another's body were only the symbols for the deeper desire to abolish the conditioning inherent in their bones and muscles and nerve endings. He sought her centre, to become one with that anatomy and attitude of cunt which was indistinguishable from her most private understanding of herself. And with an ululating cry that contained the eternal pain of birth in its cadences and tones, she surrendered the struggle and flung herself into the boiling cauldron of intense occurrence.
She burst against Aaron's body, taking it in its full impersonal strength and hardness, no longer asking who it was that fucked her, or whether the heart of the man cared for her in any special way. She became a free woman, courageous in her acknowledgment that she must take upon herself half the sadness and fear that men and women bear as the penalty for waking up to being alive in one another's arms. She stopped reaching out for him to sustain her in the terrifying dizziness of ecstasy, nor did she shrink from the heights she had attained. And in her own release, she set him loose. She sang out in full-throated totality of being, in complete acceptance of her essential solitude, no longer requiring the man to console her.
Aaron felt her at last, after all the years of despairing of reaching the core of Cynthia. It had been necessary to lose her and destroy her inside himself before he could find the true woman that slept beneath the form of a woman's body. And although he didn't realise it, it had been equally necessary for her to acquiesce to his desire to kill her before she could let him possess her as he needed to. For a few seconds their hearts and minds and bodies merged in a single vibration, a union which subsumed all the names of God.
And then Aaron exploded into orgasm. Trembling, melting, crying out, he tumbled into Cynthia, who held him as a hammock holds a fragile body, cupping and curving her cunt to absorb the seed which spilled from him. She climaxed quietly, throbbing deeply in her womb.
At the precise instant his sperm left him, all his searing intuition and powerful focus collapsed. He felt like an empty tube, no longer useful to her or to himself. It seemed, somehow, in some undefined way, that he had failed at some crucial test, and he whimpered once as his consciousness clouded over and he began to dissemble into sleep.
And the first thought that entered Cynthia's mind as she unhooked her legs from around his was, 'Perhaps I should stay with him long enough to get pregnant. All I really want from him is a baby.'
'You'll have a scar just like Conrad's,' she said.
Aaron lit the pyramid of paper, sticks and logs in the small fireplace and sat back as the flames began to consume the kindling. He put his hand up to his cheek and felt the bandage. Cynthia had washed the wound with hydrogen peroxide, smeared it with vaseline, and covered it with gauze and tape. The night was warm and the fire was like a sweater on a spring evening, unnecessary but reassuring. A bottle of wine and two glasses between them, they watched the fire and listened to the low music coming over the radio.
'Does it frighten you?' he asked. 'The violence, I mean.'
'Of course it does,' she replied. 'But I find it exciting too.'
They fell into silence, pacing themselves before reaching the question that had been asked earlier but not dealt with. They both were aware that they had to come to some reasoned conclusion concerning whether they would continue to live together. It was obvious that the power of their sexual attraction would bind them in a relationship which might be damaging to both of them, compounded as it was by several years of habit, a genuine concern for one another, and a mutual realisation of the immense difficulties which face a man and a woman who attempt to couple. One of the logs began to crackle.
It's like the old days,' he said, 'when I was living on the Great Highway, before you moved in. Do you remember those long walks in the fog, and then going back to my place and lighting a fire and drinking hot rum?'
'How could I forget that?' she said. She poured wine into their glasses.
'And that tiger rug? Making love on the thick fur and then falling asleep on the floor and waking up in the middle of the night with only embers glowing. I used to carry you to bed and we'd smother ourselves under the comforter and lie so close together, breathing in one another's mouths.'
'It was very beautiful, Aaron. I loved you very much then.'
'What happened?' he asked.
'I think you got bored with being happy,' she said.
He frowned. 'No/ he replied. 'It was you too. Something in you changed.'
She shrugged and sipped at her wine. 'We began to live together and lost our individual identities. I forgot to ask myself what I wanted and began to worry about what you needed.'
'That simple.'
'And all the rest of it,' she continued. 'I began to see that everything I thought was sustaining me was actually stifling me. My job was inhuman, the city got to seem unliveable, and our relationship was holding me back from tasting all the things I wanted to explore. I felt I was incomplete, living in a kind of genteel drudgery.'
He sniffed. 'Pity the poor middle class,' he said. 'We have too much to be resigned to poverty and not enough to feel rich. We can't be capitalists and we're too frightened to be revolutionaries. And the only place we maintain any real life at all is between our legs.
And even there we thrash around, unsatisfied with what we have.'
Cynthia levelled a gaze at him. 'What are you going to do, Aaron?' she said.
'Do?' he said. 'What is there to do? Just continue. Keep on living. Get up every morning, morning after morning, until one morning is the final morning, and that will be the end of it. And all of this life, this thing we're involved in at this very moment, will have been a strange dream.'
'I think I'm going to leave,' she told him. He cocked his head, the only indication that he heard her words. 'I have some money saved,' she went on, and a boulder rolled through her mind as she thought of the five hundred dollars Clive had given her. 'And I'll just take off for a while, be by myself, get in touch with who I am again.'
'I'll be here,' he said glumly, his body tingling at her words, his entire system attempting to assimilate the fact that the threatened split was finally taking shape.
'You know the chances that we'll come together again are small.'
He downed his wine in a single swallow and threw his glass into the fireplace. 'Oh, what difference does it make,' he said, 'if I suffer with you or I suffer alone? I'm finished with believing that having a woman in my life is going to make any difference at all in the nature of my living. This notion of trying new lifestyles is a myth. Life is a choice of pain, and changing partners or refusing any partner at all is nothing more than replacing the instrument used to torture you.' Incongruously, he laughed. 'I'm beginning to get Jewish again. You know, I used to hear this kind of talk from my parents and teachers when I was a kid, and when I left that scene I put it down as so much
Semitic
defeatism. But the more I see of life, the more I understand the wisdom of that viewpoint. God is an ironist, and there is no chance for anything but to continue as we've been doing, trying our best to keep from damaging one another, all the while knowing that we are condemned to inflict pain on those we love, beginning with ourselves.'
Cynthia's face twisted into a mask of resistance. His words, and the conviction with which he spoke them, were terribly convincing, especially at a moment when they were sealing the doom of their relationship. But she did not want to succumb to his bleak vision. If I accept that, I'd kill myself,' she said. 'I have to keep looking for a way out. There must be some way for us to become something else than what we were raised to be. Even if it means tearing down the entire civilisation with our bare hands.' She thought of Conrad and Jackie and their sweet rational optimism that sustained all their equally dour analyses of the situation. 'We seem to be the only species of animal that is not at peace with itself,' she went on, 'and we have to find the solution to that problem.'