Kenneth set off on the hotel’s little circular trail with the sad knowledge that he was going to be exposed to more ticks, midges, poison oak and sock-soaking streams, as well as the lethal rays of the setting sun winking at him through the branches of another gloomy redwood grove. He toyed with the idea of walking down to the highway and hitching a ride to LA. He could become an ambience manager again, pimping and scoring for rock bands; half-eaten sandwiches on top of his TV in the Château Marmont, a telephone like an injury permanently crooked in his neck. Those were the days.
Kenneth stood halfway down the path, conflicted and uncertain. The dark wood lay ahead. Maybe he should go back to the bar and have a drink. Maybe he should think about what he was doing, maybe he shouldn’t. Yesterday he had felt inspired, not by charlatanism, his usual source of seriousness, but by that gratuitous vitality which had filled his body during the drumming. The trouble with this inspiration was that it made it impossible for him to cheat Brooke. She so longed to be treated with enthusiasm, rather than the cheap deference commanded by a plutocrat. Some gallant part of him, buried under the ambience manager and the sterile guru, wanted to give her exactly what she needed. Tonight he must delight not in what she was but in how she was.
He pressed on into the wood, alarmed by the task he had set himself. With her thin hair and her tired face and her expensive clothes, and that unstable combination of imperiousness and diffidence, it was easy to overlook the passionate woman asleep inside Brooke’s body. When he thought of the awful simplicity of the question she had asked in the car, ‘Do you want my cunt?’ he couldn’t deny that the obvious answer was ‘No’. But when he considered her courage in asking the question at all, the opposite answer shimmered into view. There was no way to resolve this conflict, he thought, inadvertently stepping into a puddle, except to revive the vitality he had felt the day before and share it with Brooke.
Back in the room, Brooke had found that twenty candles were already a fire hazard and she put the last thirty into a drawer, unlit. Taking Kenneth’s vision quest into account, she had run the bath scaldingly hot, until thick wisps of steam curled on its surface. With an oil spillage of L’Heure Bleue in the tub, the seething and wobbling refulgence of the golden candles on all the walls and ceilings, the bedroom floor ankle-deep in red rose petals, and logs burning silently behind fireproof glass, the cottage had taken on an exotic appearance. Heaped on a plate beside the bed were the wild strawberries she would feed Kenneth as they lay in post-coital calm among the moistened sheets.
It was pre-coital calm which eluded her grasp. Her secret aphrodisiac, and her most brilliant act of long-distance shopping, was the CD of Mtumbe’s Drums of Africa, the very sound which had transported Kenneth the day before. She had found the perfect volume, tested the remote control from every point in the room she could reach without climbing the walls, and finally put the disc on ‘pause’. Now, there was really nothing left to do, except to stand in front of the mirror and adjust her bathrobe for the twentieth time.
Kenneth approached the cottage along a manicured forest path. If he was going to do this thing he must do it right. He stopped to watch the bloodstained fingers of the sun drag the slaughtered day below the horizon. He breathed deeply a few times, walked the last few yards, and knocked on the artistically rusted door.
* * *
Jason leant forward, caught one of Angela’s breasts in his mouth and gave her nipple a little bite. Women loved that, didn’t they? He was already shagging her and rubbing her clit, so she ought to be well happy. Get them every way at once, that was his policy. It blew their circuits. And she couldn’t complain that he was fantasizing either, because he was totally in the present, thinking about what a great time she must be having thanks to him. What really turned him on was the thought of how much he was turning on the women he was with. The truth was that unless he hadn’t come for ages, he really didn’t feel that much physically. His record for not coming was ten days. It was a sort of experiment to see if it made him more intelligent.
Until a couple of days ago, Angela had been dead keen on his performance in the sack. Then she had been exposed to a bit of Tantric propaganda and suddenly she was the Teacher, with a capital T, going to show him how to have a totally spiritual shag. Of course he wanted better sex (who didn’t?) but he hated being patronized. The horrible thing was that Angela could tell if his mind was wandering. Luckily, he wasn’t making up a fantasy at the moment. Unless he was fantasizing that she was having a good time. Fuck, this whole thing was a nightmare. She was ruining his life.
Jason pumped away indignantly.
Angela could feel that Jason’s energy was blocked. She prayed to the Goddess to release the block and let the shakti flow between them. She really wanted Jason to feel that connection, that beautiful connection, to the Goddess.
‘Let go,’ she whispered.
Jason released her breast and fell back onto the pillow.
‘I didn’t mean let go of my breast,’ said Angela. ‘I meant let go inside, inside yourself.’
‘Just stop ordering me about, will you?’ snapped Jason. ‘If you wanna let go, let go. And you can let go of telling me to let go while you’re at it, because half the time I have no fucking idea what you’re on about.’
‘You have a lot of anger around this issue,’ said Angela, abruptly disconnecting her genitals from his and kneeling some distance away.
‘Oh, so you’re letting go of sex as well, are you?’ said Jason. ‘Great.’
‘No, I just thought we should try yab yum.’
‘What’s that, then?’ said Jason wearily. ‘Sanskrit for “processing”?’
‘No, it’s a position where all the chakras are aligned opposite each other and we can really balance the energy, and become a channel for the Goddess.’
Jason hovered on the edge of rage, but something restrained him and tilted him towards honesty.
‘I’d like that. I mean, I can see the problem now, but I can’t even imagine the solution. For me, during orgasm, that’s when the body takes over from the mind and there’s zero fantasy, or whatever you want to call it.’ Jason struggled to make progress without the crutches of facetiousness and aggression which usually swung him forwards. ‘The ideal would obviously be some permanent state of orgasmic freak-out,’ he suggested, ‘but that’s not possible, is it?’
‘I believe it is,’ said Angela, ‘although that’s not exactly how I’d put it.’
‘Well, let’s go for it, then,’ said Jason, all charm. ‘What exactly is this position?’
‘Just sit up cross-legged like you are meditating.’
Jason followed her instructions.
Angela, noticing that his erection had dwindled during their discussion, made a ring out of her thumb and finger and rubbed his cock up and down. As it stiffened she bent down to meet it, put her lips around the head, and let it slide gradually down her throat. With her middle finger she searched for his perineum, the stretch of skin just beyond his balls. She loved that part of him, the buried root of his cock. It was thick and hard under the softness of the skin. She scratched him lightly there while her head rose up and down on his cock.
Jason groaned appreciatively.
‘You like that, huh?’ said Angela, looking up.
‘Don’t stop!’ cried Jason.
Angela ignored his command and sat up.