Everyone in the place was young or black. Aaron sipped his drink and felt slightly out of place. Since moving to Berkeley he had become sensitive to his appearance as anomalous in many of the sections he walked in. He closed his eyes and disconnected considerations of the external. He let the music wash over him like a cleansing waterfall, and with the gift he had for entering internal space, he was soon immersed in the stream of sound.
When he came to, the set was ending, and he found himself staring into the eyes of the bass player. The man's lined face was a mask of compassionate indifference offering no comment, exhibiting no personality. 'I don't even want to know you,' it said, 'just to watch you from behind my stage.' Aaron had the uncanny feeling that the man could read his mind, and if asked could recall the past and peer into the future.
Then the woman came and sat next to him.
It was clear that she was a whore, and Aaron, switching his gaze from the white-haired man, looked full into her face and with relaxed certainty knew he would go home with her. She was in her late thirties, broad in the waist, with heavy legs and still firm breasts. Her face was flat, the nose broken along the ridge, her lips bulbous. In any sense that he had ever used the term, she was not attractive, and her expression of deep boredom lessened what little appeal she had. He had no desire to fuck her, and yet was powerfully pulled. She looked as though she could teach him something.
'How much?' he said.
'Forty dollars,' she replied.
Tor a week?' he said, his voice mocking.
She looked at him blankly for ten or fifteen seconds, as though she had been hit a chop on the back of the neck. Then the response rose inside her; he could see it the way one sees a sunrise. And when she fully understood that he was joking, the laughter tumbled out like a series of puffing breaths of someone who had just run a long distance.
Til give you twenty,' he said, estimating that to be five dollars more than the absolute minimum. But he wanted a certain largesse from her, and knew that it would be more easily forthcoming if he paid for it, as it is necessary to pay for anything one receives from another, either in money or in services, or in the toll taken by the simple fact of having been worked on by another.
She nodded. 'Don't plan on spending the night,' she said.
The waitress returned, her manner more formal, and Aaron paid for his drink. He stood up and the woman followed suit. As he turned to leave he glanced towards the stage; the bassist was still watching him. He led the way out and at the door let the woman go first. She took him ten blocks off the main street, past dozens of two-family homes neatly manicured all in a row. 'The black ghetto of Berkeley,' Aaron thought, 'has a higher standard of living than the middle-class white sections of Queens. I wonder if any of these people have ever been to the slum sections of Harlem. It would singe their eyelashes.'
She took him to a brown frame house and ushered him inside. He tingled with an anticipation that was not yet genital. She wasted no time on ceremonies, showing him where the bedroom was, instructing him to take his clothes off, and going into the bathroom. He undressed and she came back in, a white towel draped over her arm, wearing nothing else, like a stunned waiter in an Abner Dean cartoon. He laughed.
'What's so funny?' she said.
'It's all very professional,' he said.
She handed him the towel and began to remove the bedspread, peeling it back carefully. 'Well, what do you think?' she said. 'That we're in love?' And laughed harshly again, as she had in the bar, without humour. She stood at the foot of the bed facing him. 'You want me to make it pretty for you?'
A look of pain crossed his face. All at once he wasn't sure whether he would be able to fuck her. He wished desperately he were with Cynthia, with the familiarity of her, and he saw what it was he had sought in the woman, a texture of contrast, something to inject the routine sexual act with unusual excitement, an excitement he could transfer back to his lovemaking at home. The whore watching him saw his struggle, and although she was ignorant of the details, she recognised the pattern. For a second she almost suffocated in ennui.
'The extra touches cost you more,' she said. She turned off the overhead and flicked on a low lamp with a blue bulb, casting the room into a qualitatively different mood, making her skin glow with subtle and mysterious shadows. She bent over to put on the stereo and Aaron noted the absolute blackness that ran down the crack between her cheeks. The electronic ghost of Billie Holiday entered the room, singing as vibrantly as her live body had ever done. The woman fluffed the pillows and smoothed the sheets. She took out a bottle of rye and two glasses from the cabinet next to the bed, went into her handbag and fished out a pack of Pall Mall, dropping it next to the ashtray. 'You get in now,' she said, and he lay down on the soft mattress, pulling the crisp violent sheet up to his belly. She waddled to her dresser and came back with an atomiser, and with a gesture he wasn't sure wasn't ironic, she sprayed a fine mist of scent over his chest. 'You feel better now?' she said.
Without waiting for his response, she went into the kitchen, and he could hear her fiddling with an icecube tray. That she could be whimsical without self-consciousness captivated Aaron's attention, and like a million men who have paid for a woman's body, he grew curious about her soul. It was easy to picture her working, as so many black women did, behind the counter of a luncheonette or in a dime store. He wondered how she began this trade of selling the use of her cunt instead of the use of her hands or her back in one of the other forms of wage slavery open to the majority of people in the nation. She returned with a bucket of ice, standing in the doorway a moment, posing. There was nothing lovely about her. Her legs were running to fat, her torso was squat, her entire attitude was one of hardness, her eyes held only calculation.
'This is the deluxe treatment,' she said. 'It's going to cost you ten dollars more.'
'I didn't ask for any of this,' he said. He paused. 'Maybe,' he added. 'I'll have to see how I feel afterwards.'
She walked towards him exuding scorn. She put the ice down and stared him into discomfiture. She turned quickly and was reaching for the light switch, to explode the ambience, to take back the small niceties she had proffered. He reached out and grabbed her wrist, pulling him roughly towards her. He expected her to fight but she just went stiff with distaste. 'Go ahead,
mister
,' she spat at him. 'If you want me this way you go right ahead. You're paying for pussy and pussy is all I got to give you. You can just get on top and bang away until you come. But if you want me to treat you nice, you have got to
pay
.' She took a deep breath and said, more in exasperation than in anger, 'Don't you understand that yet? Anything you get from a woman, you got to pay!'
He looked at her dumbly; the force of her words stunned him and he felt extremely foolish, the smell of the perfume adding a bizarre dimension to the sterile scene. He let go of her arm, and the tension went out of her muscles. She seemed to regard him as though from a great height. 'What's the matter with you,' she said, 'you ain't a kid.'
With a subtlety that surprised him she stretched her back and pushed her arms above her head, exhibiting the sinuous body that still lived beneath the age and weight. Her breasts jutted out and her arse flared. 'I been in this business a long time,' she said, her voice husky and low. 'Don't think there is anything I don't know, a hundred times over.' She leaned forward. 'It's just like with the woman you must have at home. I'll do what you like, but you got to coax me. You got to make me want to do it.' She brought her face right to his. 'You got to make me hot,' she whispered.
'With money?' he said, his voice sticking in his throat.
'It's as good a way as any,' she told him. 'And better than most.'
They hung in the balance, their contract dangling. He wanted to fuck and she wanted as much payment as she could wring from him. Neither was willing to be exploited in any manner by the other. There seemed no way out of their impasse. The slightest indication that either of them might give would automatically be ruled as capitulation by the other. They were like diplomats negotiating at a peace conference, locked into suspicion.
'Then why are you treatin' me so mean?' sang Billie Holiday, her spirit sustained by electric energy. Aaron and the woman heard the line at the same time and in the same way, and with absolute simultaneity acknowledged the absurdity of their situation.
'Twenty-five is tops,' he said. 'I have to work for a living too.'
She straightened her shoulders, tossed her head back, and wrinkled her nose. And to his surprise, she smiled. 'Well, all right,' she said, 'let's do it.' And fell upon him like warm wet concrete, enveloping him, smothering him with flesh.
He got hard instantly, but did not hurry to enter her. Her body was soft and hot against his. For a long time he lay under her, sucking in her presence. He touched her not only at the surface, but seemed to sink into her, the layers of her skin peeling back, allowing him to merge with her. 'I have all of it to feel, to explore,' he thought and grew lightly giddy at the wide expanse which opened to him. He had her entire exterior to lose himself in before he needed to even consider entering her.
He pushed her up and over, rolling her to her back. She let out a grunt of surprise, having thought that he would lie there while she sucked his cock and fucked him. It always amazed her when men paid her for sex and then got on top and did all the work. She tended to have less respect for a man who wasn't easy enough simply to lie back and let himself be made love to, but who had to climb on her and perform. But it meant less energy for her to expend, and she was quite content to close her eyes and
let
him loose. 'Knock yourself out,' she thought.
Aaron looked down at the strange body like a lion over a freshly killed carcass. Waves of unreality washed through him. It was only the fourth time that he had been unfaithful to Cynthia, and the sensation of having all his familiar sexual attitudes with a woman he had never seen before filled him with a sense of the peculiar. But it was that more than anything else that he had come to experience. He shook his head to clear his mind of thoughts, and addressed himself to the piece of cunt, the piece of arse, the piece of tit, the piece of mouth before him.
He started at her head, licking the coarse hair, gnawing at the crown of her skull lightly, chewing with the side of his mouth. He sniffed and grunted down the back of her neck, getting drunk on the raw smell of her. He had to restrain himself to keep from going in too many directions at once and dispersing the core of excitement now growing inside him.
'She's mine,' he thought, 'because I paid for her.'
He licked her forehead like a dog lapping ice, and planted a suction kiss over her right eye, teasing the eyeball with the tip of his tongue, reaching under the eyelid, treating her to a thread of jagged pleasure. He bit her nose and ran his tongue across her cheeks, over her temples, down to her chin, and finally over her lips, teasing her with the unaccustomed sensation. Her mouth opened to say something but he thrust his tongue inside. 'Mmmwhmwmwm,' he said, the rough wetness of her blending with his own saliva, making the cave they created a basin for their secretions.
Aaron nibbled at her lips, kissed them with his own, and sucked them into his mouth. She gasped, trying to catch her breath, and the movement carried over into her entire body, causing her to jerk and tremble. 'You are delicious,' he said. He dived under her chin and fastened himself to her throat, biting the tender tissues, causing her to yelp while she held on to him tightly, as though reassuring herself of his actual presence. The effect of her move was to make him feel he was being drawn in closer, and he clamped on her right ear, tonguing it, sucking it out, and humming so that the vibration tickled her skull. She tossed her hips from side to side, the currents of pleasure buffeting her like winds pushing a small car from lane to lane across a high bridge.
'Why are you doing all this to me?' she said. 'You don't have to make me feel so good.'
He pulled back, and with a sigh of such delight that it surprised both of them, he buried his face between her breasts. What he had had up to that moment was luscious, and he enjoyed it the way Italians relish the ultra-lean meat on the skulls of calves, and their roasted eyeballs and sizzled brains. But now the first substantial dish was being served, and he set to with appetite.
They seemed too big to get into his mouth. He tried to suck one entire breast inside him, beginning with the nipple, letting it slide over his lips, bunching more of it after that, feeling the fibrous matter under the skin soften as he swallowed it, and still more, until his lips stretched and his mouth began to ache, until his jaw would go no further without unhinging, and then with a mindless bravado discarded his human consciousness and became a boa constrictor swallowing a whole pig. Although he was sure it was physiologically impossible, the entire melon breast disappeared and he felt his teeth hit the hard bones of her rib cage. She cried out once, long and loud, tasting fully the impacted visual and symbolic reality of the act.
And then he slid back, feeling each eighth-inch of breast as it came out of his mouth and reshaped itself on her torso. When he had regurgitated half, his tongue could work again and he licked the sombre sodden underpart of the tit until he came to the nipple again, and this time pressed it hard between his lips, mauling it and lashing at it with the tip of his tongue. She squeezed her eyes shut and pounded the mattress with her fists. And he collapsed on her belly.