Of course it was easier to pay attention when you got some new flesh, especially a dishy, turned-on, tuned-in girl like Angela. For a while his experience could map over his desire for conquest, novelty and accident. There was still a subtle gap. The contours of longing might be perfectly traced by his lived experience, but the tracing paper still intervened. Jason wouldn’t even have noticed this gap if it hadn’t been for something Angela had said the night before. It had really got on his wick at the time.
‘You don’t have to leave to experience pleasure, the pleasure is right here,’ she had said, and she had given him a little squeeze with her vaginal muscles.
Normally he would have found it dead sexy, but he was too pissed off. The truth was that he had been fantasizing. Not about anything gross like another woman, Angela would have to wait a few weeks for that, but about another version of themselves. He was a famous rock star, of course, and she was an adoring groupie. They were in his vast hotel suite, and she was overwhelmed that he had chosen her out of all the groupies and was having the most unforgettable experience of her life. And then she’d said, ‘You don’t have to leave to experience pleasure…’
Crash. That had really brought him down. He’d played all hurt and innocent, and he really was all hurt and innocent because he wouldn’t have noticed the fantasy if she hadn’t said that.
And now, when they were supposed to be having Tantric wondersex, they were sitting on the bed naked, talking about their feelings.
‘So give me a weather report,’ said Angela. ‘What’s happening for you right now?’
‘I was just thinking, “Girls aren’t for getting on with, they’re for getting off with.”’
‘To begin with I’m not a girl, I’m a woman. And secondly, that’s the most—’
‘Joke!’ said Jason. ‘What I was really thinking was that I used to enjoy sex, but now I’m worried that if I spice it up a bit the fantasy pigs’ll nab me.’
‘What fantasy pigs?’ asked Angela, thinking that Jason’s problems might be more serious than she had imagined.
‘It’s an English thing,’ Jason explained. ‘It means police.’
‘I’m not the police,’ said Angela. ‘I was just saying that you don’t have to fantasize to experience pleasure. And I also want to say that there’s an element of disrespect – you’re inside me, and you’re thinking about something else.’
‘That’s what sex is,’ protested Jason. ‘Doctors have proved that it’s all in the head. This is where the orgasm is,’ said Jason, tapping his skull.
‘God, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Consciousness is everywhere in your body, Jason. This is the wound of men, this is the Beast of Society that Barry Long talks about. It’s—’
‘Barry Long Dong,’ chuckled Jason.
‘Can’t you ever be serious?’ said Angela. ‘You know, I want what John was talking about, I want the amrita, the female ejaculate, but I’m not going to surrender to someone who’s jerking off inside me, thinking about another woman.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about another woman, I was just being a rock star, that’s all,’ said Jason. ‘It’s practically not even a fantasy.’
‘The point is I could feel your absence,’ said Angela. ‘Yesterday you had to be a rock star, tomorrow I’m going to have to be a movie star. Pretty soon, we’ll be a couple of fantasy pigs making out in a fantasy pigsty.’
They looked at each other, and luckily they burst out laughing.
Jason grabbed Angela by the waist and started snuffling around her body making porcine noises. He was secretly impressed by how much more focused Angela became when she was angry.
‘Can we just try it the way John suggested?’ asked Angela. ‘Plenty of eye contact, communication and conscious breathing. I want the amrita, Jason, I want to realize my sexual potential, that’s why I’m in this workshop.’
‘No problem, doll,’ said Jason. ‘There’ll be amrita dripping from the ceiling.’
* * *
‘LAM … VAM … RAM … YAM … HAM … OM…’ Karen intoned.
Stan got the RAM and the YAM the wrong way round and was lagging behind on the rest.
John had said you could tune your chakra system like a guitar.
‘LAM,’ Karen began again, tuning her base chakra and imagining the colour red.
‘VAM,’ she said, tuning her genital chakra. This time she could remember the yantra – the sacred shape – that went with the mantra – the sacred sound – because it was like a smile, a horizontal crescent. Yes, she was smiling from hip to hip. She could feel it!
‘VAM,’ said Stan, thinking how hard it was not to think of van.
‘RAM,’ chanted Karen, moving up to her navel. Wasn’t that the name of God? She had read somewhere that Gandhi had said ‘RAM’ when he was shot. Or had she seen that in the movie? What a wonderful person Gandhi was. It was a privilege to be a human being when there were people like Gandhi to show what human potential really was.
RAM, thought Stan. A male goat, that at least was more appropriate than van. They really oughta take van out, in his opinion.
‘YAM,’ said Karen and she felt her heart opening out and just pouring love into the room. The colour was green, like spring.
YAM, thought Stan. Was that a fruit or a vegetable? HAM, the next one up, was definitely a meat, like LAM. Stan started to imagine the LAM and the HAM and the YAM being driven round in the van, sort of like a grocery service. Gee, he really wasn’t entering into the spirit of the thing. These were sacred syllables imbued with thousands of years of practice. Maybe you could tune your chakras. Maybe he could tune the old second chakra and get a hard-on.
‘HAM,’ said Karen, imagining blue light radiating from her throat. She hoped she would find beautiful words to speak to Stan during their lovemaking, words to reassure and inspire him, and words to express her own needs as a woman.
‘HAM,’ said Stan. Where were they now? The throat? Nothing wrong with his throat. Mind you, John had said a lot about ‘allowing sound’, which evidently meant keeping your neighbours up all night, since John had described being thrown out of a couple of hotels for allowing a little too much sound. ‘Tell them you’re on honeymoon and they’ll cut you a lot of slack,’ was his advice. Maybe Stan could make the folks next door bang on the wall and beg for sleep!
‘OM,’ chanted Karen, visualizing a purple circle spreading from her third eye and then, as it rose over her forehead and hovered over her crown, turning into a thousand-petalled white flower.
Stan figured that OM was the most famous mantra. You knew where you were with OM. He’d even heard about it way back in the sixties when he was about as square as you can get. It also didn’t mean anything in English, which was a help. Now, he really must concentrate next time round. Tune the old second chakra. ‘LAM,’ they began again.
* * *
Brooke told Kenneth to go for a ‘quick vision quest’ while she prepared the room. She was relieved to find the fifty honey-coloured beeswax candles, twelve dozen red roses, and the punnets of tissue-wrapped fraises des bois she had asked Moses to send down from San Francisco. She already had some Guérlain L’Heure Bleue to put in the deep grey-tiled double bath.
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 charlatanis
m, 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.
‘Oh, no,’ said Jason. ‘That was great. Your throat was so tight.’
‘Wait,’ said Angela. Kneeling above him and taking his cock in her hand, she parted the lips of her cunt, and then, guiding it inside her, sank slowly down. She settled comfortably in his lap, wrapped her legs around his back and sat still.
‘This is yab yum,’ she said. ‘You see all our chakras are facing each other.’
‘Fantastic,’ said Jason, feeling something like wonder. ‘Yab yum, eh? Make a great title for a song.’
* * *
‘Spring has returned to the mountain!’ roared Stan. ‘I’ve got a hard-on.’
There was muffled applause from the room next door and a cry of ‘Way to go!’
‘Oh, my love,’ said Karen, ‘I’m so happy for you.’
‘So is half the building,’ chuckled Stan. ‘Evidently my throat chakra is in pretty good shape too.’
Stan pressed his palms on the bed and arched above Karen. He looked down into her eyes. For forty-two years he’d been looking into those kind eyes and for forty of them they’d been the eyes of his wife. They were glittering now, with tears, and with a mischievous look which hadn’t changed since the day he’d met her.
‘You’re a good woman,’ he said.
She laughed and the tears spilt out of her eyes and ran down the side of her face.
‘I guess I won’t be needing Walking
Eagle’s special ceremony now,’ said Stan breezily.
‘That’s right,’ whispered Karen.
She had secretly arranged for Walking Eagle to perform the ceremony during their trip to Esalen, but she wouldn’t have told Stan that for all the world.
* * *
Kenneth and Brooke lay breast-deep in the bathtub, inhaling the fragrant steam, sweat tickling their cheeks and brows.
Kenneth felt himself sliding into some kind of collective male exhaustion. For a thousand years he had been fighting in the salt marshes, hacking with a blunt sword at other angry and exhausted men. His body was covered in cuts, there were purple bruises on his ribs. He was tired from shallow sleep, from a thousand years of sleeping with a sword in his hand. His arms ached from hacking at shields and shielding himself from hacking blows. He wanted to rest, he wanted to surrender; victory lay in surrender. He wanted to stop pretending to be anything except tired, stop pretending to be competent, stop pretending to know what was going on. Brooke was here to accept his surrender, to disarm him and to kiss those buckled muscles, to kiss that grazed skin.
Brooke was beginning to think that Drums of Africa might not be the perfect music for the occasion. Thanks to the grey pallor of his complexion, his gaping mouth, his closed eyes, and his appearance of being crucified against the side of the bath, Kenneth looked extremely drunk, perhaps dead. She slid across to the other side of the bath and leant towards Kenneth, not quite daring to touch him. Hearing the water swirl, he opened his eyes and smiled wearily.
‘I’m so tired,’ he said. ‘I mean really tired, tired in my marrow. Not just physically, either. I’m tired of all pretences.’
He’ll be telling me he’s got a headache next, thought Brooke, but she could see that Kenneth was not preparing her for sexual disappointment, he was telling her something essential. His defences were unravelling irresistibly, he was falling apart in the heat of the water. She also sensed that there was more trust in his helplessness than in any sexual act he had ever performed. She suddenly felt touched by the survival of their friendship, despite all the misunderstandings about sex and money. Besides, what else was there to do with sex and money except have misunderstandings about them? They were there to liberate the rest of life for some loftier purpose than bickering, lying and sulking. For the moment she didn’t care whether Kenneth desired her, she just wanted to heal him, to touch him where he was helpless, and to enjoy the trust which his helplessness revealed.
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