In Touch (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  The people responded gradually as the throbbing rhythm took possession of the space. Their movements were tiny at first, and guarded. But within a few moments they started to stretch out. They caught the infectious mood and began to twitch and roll about on the floor. Lydia herself started a slow shuffle, her hips rolling, her breasts jiggling. Some of the others got to their feet and began to dance, flinging themselves about in response to the demand of the insistent drums. Most of the people still had their eyes closed, following the logic of their inner impulses.

  But just then, Judy Bachrach went wild. She let out a wild scream and tossed her head insanely back and forth, causing her long silky hair to whirl about her head. She flung her arms out, flexed her legs, and leaped high into the air, and when she landed she started to dance with a manic intensity. The others all opened their eyes to look at her.

  John Abbot was pumping his pelvis into the air and grunting. Nora was wailing. And when she took the entire room into awareness Lydia realized that there were thirteen naked people going wild to the jungle savagery of booming drums.

  When the keynote of liberty was struck, everyone in the room gave vent at once to a wealth of suppressed feelings. Anger, fear, violence, shame, lust . . . all emerged in pure form, without the distorting covers of language, clothing, and social role. And because the expressions were pure, they were beautiful.

  For an instant Lydia was overwhelmed by the raw power that had been unleashed. Naked men and women were throwing themselves about in total abandon, yelling, crying, whispering to themselves, their bodies flailing in time to the swelling music. It was a primitive spectacle, totally innocent. The scene might have been defined in a variety of ways, and a hundred interpretations given to it, but all would have fallen short of the sheer energy of the life force that had been released.

  Lydia danced around and through the others, her body taking on a thin coating of perspiration. If she had gone over a waterfall in a barrel, she could not have experienced a greater din, a more saturating chaos.

  “This is what Marsha saw,” she thought. “We are in the state where reality is the same as fantasy. Each of us has gone into our sense of ourselves as animal or angel or killer or god, and in doing that, thrown away the clothing and the petty social identity and so entered a different space, a dangerous space, a space in which we are aware of the wonder of our strength and beauty. Why, if we were to pick up spears and run into the street now, we might conquer the city.”

  Lydia suddenly saw why it was that barbarian tribes overthrew old cultures, because the civilizations got tired and mired in a humdrum common reality, while the barbarians still felt the pulse of unfettered life running in their veins.

  She didn’t know what made her do it, but she ran over to the wall and threw the switch. Suddenly, the room was pitch black.

  “That’s the last barrier,” she cried. “Now we are in the heart of chaos. And there is no truth except what comes from inside.”

  The bodies found one another. Like living magnets they were pulled to that which called them most truly, forces which had nothing to do with any of the usual markers of the senses, including thought. For their minds had gone beyond rational categories, and they were blind and could hear nothing but the infernal music of the jungle and their own cries. They leapt into the embrace of their most basic nature, being informed by smell and touch and taste, impelled by nothing except brilliant and voracious desire.

  And so it was that someone leaped next to Lydia, sniffed loudly, reached out and grabbed her, ran hands over her breasts and down her belly to her thighs and ass, and then pulled her close, covering her cunt with a hot questing mouth.

  The music left the track and the bodies collided and coalesced, beginning in twos which fell to the floor, rolled, met with other coupled bodies, blended, until every person in the room was part of a single mound of pulsing, twisting flesh and all distinctions were lost.

  Now nothing existed but sound and movement in the dark. It may have been like the first consciousness the universe ever had of itself, an empty and unconnected impulse reaching out. Skin slithered over skin and hands groped parts and tongues licked whatever was in front of them. Fucking and fingering took place and the mass began to give off the aromas of sweat and sperm and vaginal secretions and saliva. The line had been crossed and the people had entered the realm of orgy, the finite return to the cosmic erotic state. The fragmented egos had melted into simple sentience. The stiff bodies had flowed into writhing life forms. The rigid social roles had collapsed into a single feeling—action that subsumed all possible identities.

  But in the midst of it, Tom Norwood, having climaxed in an unidentified orifice of an unidentified person, and suffering a sudden overpowering spasm of disgust, staggered to the light switch and threw it on. At that precise instant, the record ended. And the transcendental experience was abruptly thrown into the most stark and negative judgment. It suddenly became a grotesque group-grope, a wallow of middle-aged people on a therapist’s rug in a musty apartment off Central Park West.

  Everyone froze.

  “Whew,” said John Abbot. “Cat’s got a strange sense of drama.”

  Torn between the need to continue to individual and group climax and the terrible presence of Tom Norwood who glowered like an Old Testament prophet trying to whip them with his eyebrows, they blinked against the harsh glare.

  Nora Norwood was lying on her belly, Marie Jorgenson’s cunt against her mouth and Robert Madison’s cock in her ass.

  Tom began to tremble with what he considered to be a justified rage.

  “Get up out of there, you slut!” he ordered.

  Nora winced, and for an instant seemed that she would respond, but some deep slow change flowed through her and her entire attitude was transformed into the opposite of what would have been her conditioned response.

  She raised her head.

  “No,” she said.

  “SICK!” he screamed. “This is sick. You’re all sick. Nora, come with me.”

  “No,” she repeated simply.

  “You get your whore’s ass out of here right now and come home with me or our marriage is finished,” he threatened.

  “Then it’s finished,” she told him. “I’m not moving.”

  “All right,” he said, his jowls shaking. He walked over to where his clothes lay and began dressing rapidly. “But don’t come back,” he went on. “I mean, don’t even try to get in the front door. I’ll pack your things and put them in storage and you can get them when you want. But I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  “But Tom,” Lydia said. “You were just as much a part of this as she was.”

  “You hypnotized me,” he charged. “You hypnotized all of us. You call yourself a therapist, but you’re only a madam.”

  “I’ve been telling you all along that what’s happening isn’t therapy,” Lydia protested.

  “I’m sure the police will be interested in your little scene, and the psychological association.”

  He turned to his wife again. “Well, are you coming.”

  At just that instant, however, Nora was squirming slightly to readjust the angle of Robert’s cock in her asshole. The gesture was all the answer anyone might need.

  The scathed husband backed slowly out of the room, raking everyone with beams of hatred and, in a symbol of futile defiance, turned the light switch off once more as he went through the door. The room was plunged into darkness again.

  “Mmm, that’s better,” Eileen murmured as she slid her mouth over John Abbot’s cock again.

  “Lydia?” Nora said.

  “Yes?” Lydia answered.

  “Can I stay here? Can I stay with you?”

  For an instant Lydia thought Nora was asking if she might stay for the night, or for a while until she found another place to live. But something in the other woman’s voice told her that
something deeper was happening.

  “What do you mean by ‘stay’?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to go back to the old way. Not just to Tom, but to the old civilization. I mean, you’re my family now, my real family. I want to live through my fantasies all the time. I think I’d die if I had to go back to the world of dumb reality. I want to create a new reality, with you.” She paused. “With us,” she added.

  “Wow,” John said, half in response to the wet warmth of Eileen’s tongue as it licked his cock, and half to the full significance of what Nora was saying.

  A fist of fear bunched in Lydia’s stomach. Suddenly, she had become the leader of a new tribe, the founder of a different culture, a twentieth century matriarch. The fear was all the more paralyzing because it was in response to a real stimulus. She had blundered and wormed her way into a position of enormous responsibility, and it was now impossible for her to go back either. She and Nora were wedded. And she knew there would be others. Some of the ones already in the room, and more she had not even met yet.

  The fear exploded and in its place there arose a shimmering vision. The deep and ineradicable hope which exists in every human being for a beautiful world suffused her entirely. The notion that it was possible to create a society which would not degenerate into stupidity or staleness or violence or fatal lassitude came to her as a form of knowledge. Suddenly, she knew that it was possible.

  “Look,” Marie said.

  Lydia’s body was encased in a low, shimmering light. Her aura had begun to glow.

  “Of course,” Lydia said. “Of course you can stay with me.”

  Her voice was golden, mellifluous.

  “What about me?” Eileen asked.

  “And me?” John added.

  “And the rest?” Lydia asked.

  “I haven’t come yet,” Robert said. “I don’t want to make any decisions until I come.”

  “All right,” Lydia said, laughing. “Let’s finish the orgy, and then we can talk.”

  7

  The fountains murmured continuously as the waiters moved about on the thick rug, their footsteps silent, their manner so calculatedly unobtrusive as to constitute a minor art form. Perhaps thirty people were having lunch, but the space was so wide and the atmosphere so still that each table seemed cut off by itself, an island of casual interest. The restaurant was based on the premise that those who could afford to pay extravagant sums for the privilege of initiating an imitation of royalty would overlook the essentially mediocre cuisine and the callousness—camouflaged as poise—of the help, and consider themselves participating in some form of chic.

  Lydia studied the menu with distaste. It offered a series of French dishes which amounted to little more than several kinds of meat smothered in several kinds of sauce. But she had agreed to have lunch with Fred and felt that voicing her repugnance for the artificial ambience would be impolite.

  The rationalization she was using in her work was that no one was being forced to attend, so their presence implied a certain agreement with the ground rules of the scene. She reasoned that she owed the same respect to The Four Seasons. She could stay outside and criticize its blatant vulgarity, but if she went in she owed the place a certain minimum of civilized response.

  As she peered at the menu, Fred watched her. He had stayed away from her for a month, hoping that when he saw her again she might have come to her senses. He felt a measure of responsibility for the direction her work and life had taken, for he had spent two years mocking her therapy fetish and goaded her into breaking out of what he called “the context bag.” His taking her to Provincetown, he judged, helped push her over the edge of her faith in therapeutic justifications. He was convinced that she was trying to emulate what she’d seen that weekend, and getting herself more and more deeply into a conceptual quagmire.

  Fred had always seen fantasy as a mode of escape. There comes a point in every man’s life when the raw, grey truth of physical existence becomes the inescapable parameter of whatever else he might think or feel about the universe. The splendor of the galaxies, the thunderous brilliance of the sun, the surging mystery of creation itself, might all provide pleasant, exhilarating or terrifying moments during the daily round, but they could not remove the sting of mortality from a man’s consciousness. When that awareness became intolerable, one could skew one’s angle of perception and change one’s attitude in such a way as to blunt the edge of knowledge. And if one did it consistently enough, a basic philosophic attitude slowly crystallized.

  He reasoned that the religions of the world were nothing more than taking a specific fantasy and defining that as the primary principle of reality, and then living out that principle through the fluctuations of life’s changes. Each age developed its own idiosyncratic myths, and the myth which concocted the most high-blown phraseology, or commanded the most persuasive teachers, or allied itself with the dominant political movement, emerged supreme for that era. Buddhism, Christianity, Islam. And in the twentieth century, a gap had opened in which a series of contending world views fought with one another to become the major model for the world-system which was forming and would hit its stride in the following century.

  Of course, the dominant myth was never recognized until it had peaked. Catholicism, for example, did not seem anything special to the peasants of the eighth century; it was simply the way everyone looked at things. It was only at the start of the Renaissance, when a new myth was struggling for supremacy, that the church became a self conscious entity, grew into a horrid vehicle for oppression and torture during the Inquisition, and finally degenerated into a pathetic toothless tyrant several hundred years later.

  Fred’s deepest feeling—and he rarely admitted how serious he was about it—was that theatre, not communism, formed the essential myth of the era. That movies had changed the consciousness of the world, and that television was completing the process. His notion was that a housewife watching a soap opera was performing a metaphysical act, in the same way as a Jew going to Temple, or a Jain walking barefoot into a Mosque. The soaps took the raw reality of daily life, codified it, amplified it, and fed it back to the source from which the material originated. The myth of the twentieth century, he reasoned, is the banality of existence, the despair felt by the species as a whole upon the final and total acceptance, of the fact that we are merely a strange kind of monkey, perhaps the newest experiment of Nature, and no more privileged and probably less long-lived than either the dinosaur or the cockroach. That we probably have a lower consciousness than trees or lizards, that we live on an insignificant hunk of rock circling a middle-aged star, that we are really nothing special. And the medium of that myth is television, the metatheatrical instrument par excellence.

  He had tried to show this to Lydia, to point out how therapy was an unhip effort to do the same thing, a process that was limited, expensive, and overlaid with suffocating theoretical horseshit and a mountain of rationalizations born of ontological insecurity. He had been pleased when she began to break out of that mold. But she had gone too far, had misunderstood what he was saying. She had tried to take the therapeutic myth and hype it to a new level. This bordered dangerously on political radicalism. And if Fred knew anything, he knew that any attempt to thwart the machinery of history was doomed to end violently. He felt that Lydia was being carried away by an orgasmic hysteria, and allowing herself to be committed to a way of action that he was certain she would eventually disavow, but perhaps too late to escape having damaged herself and others. She seemed to have lost the sense of irony he felt was the only attitude an intelligent person in the twentieth century should display. Irony, he thought, was to the twentieth century what piety was to the tenth.

  He glanced at Lydia as she made faces at the menu. He knew she was offended by the restaurant, and he shared her feelings. The dimension she missed was the ability to be amused by the place, to see it with a certain detachment. He was a
ble to float through the environment, and this quality of floating was at the heart of successful fantasy evocation. He considered it absurd to lock oneself into a room with a group of people and pretend to be sharing a fantasy when one could not perceive the fantastic in the day-to-day reality.

  “Have you decided yet?” he asked.

  She put the menu down.

  “Fred,” she asked, “why this place?”

  “Well, I haven’t seen you in a while and I thought I’d bring you to a posh restaurant.”

  He smiled his most disarming smile, but she remained unaffected.

  When he had called her, he half hoped he would find the old Lydia, the slightly stuffy therapist, filled with stifling ideas who, once she took her clothes off, became an uninhibited animal, someone he could still tease, and slowly bring around to his way of thinking. But as they had a drink in her living room, and she told him what she’d been doing, he became increasingly discouraged. The nude groups had been bad enough, but now she had five people living with her. He couldn’t believe she was actually starting a commune!

  “It’s so square,” he had said.

  “What about your friends in Provincetown?” she replied.

  “All the difference in the world,” he told her. “Those people come together out of a pattern of individual liberty. Your group is put together by insecurity and fear.”