On the Edge A Novel (26 page)

Instead, to his surprise, he found her lying naked on a padded white massage table next to a strange man. They were whispering conspiratorially.

Jerome was cool. He had lived through the sixties; he had an open relationship with Sabine; he knew that she had an issue with him that evening, and he owned his part in it.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he asked.

Sabine turned round slowly and looked at Jerome.

‘Oh, my God,’ she said, bursting into uncontrollable giggles, ‘you look so funny.’

‘I asked you what you were doing,’ said Jerome, letting the petals fall from his hands.

‘Having a great time,’ said Sabine. ‘This is Paul. Paul, meet Jerome. He’s not in a very good mood,’ she whispered to Paul.

‘I can’t believe you’re doing this,’ wailed Jerome.

‘Doing what?’ asked Sabine.

‘Lying here naked with another man on the night of our Tantric seminar.’

‘I sense I oughta leave at this point,’ said Paul.

‘Oh, don’t go,’ moaned Sabine. ‘We were having such fun.’

‘I take back my love,’ screeched Jerome, suddenly losing his temper and tearing off his lupin bracelets. ‘I take back my devotion.’ He threw his sash of yellow poppies to the ground. ‘I take back my passion,’ he concluded.

‘And why don’t you take that stupid crown off as well?’ said Sabine, flicking the Mexican daisies off his head. ‘You make a lousy King.’

‘You’re acting out your abuse issues,’ said Jerome coldly.

‘Don’t try that, you fucking man,’ said Sabine, pushing him on to the neighbouring massage table.

‘I sense that you have some personal issues to clarify at this point,’ said Paul. ‘I’m really going to leave now.’

‘Great,’ said Jerome. ‘Take a hike.’

‘For your information she told me she was alone,’ said Paul, pointing a finger at Jerome’s nose.

‘You said that?’ said Jerome.

‘I thought maybe the three of us could have some fun together,’ lisped Sabine, looking down coyly.

‘Oh, I get it,’ said Jerome, with a relief verging on glee. ‘Poly’s here tonight, isn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ said Sabine girlishly. ‘Poly wants more than one.’

‘Jerome knows what Poly wants.’

‘Yes,’ said Sabine, picking up the daisy crown and placing it back carefully on Jerome’s head. ‘Jerome is Poly’s hero. Jerome is King.’

Paul hesitated. Sabine was the most attractive woman he had met in years. On the other hand, there was a question mark over her mental health.

‘You’re a very lucky man,’ said Jerome, putting an arm around Paul’s shoulder. ‘This beautiful woman, this quintessence of erotic … I tell you, man, she’s hot.’ Jerome punched him in the shoulder a little too hard. ‘This vision of loveliness has chosen to share her
shakti
with you this evening.’

He looked deep into Paul’s blue eyes, his face paralysed with friendliness.

*   *   *

Crystal sat on the bed, cross-legged and naked, her brown hair falling in spirals down to her breasts. The darker curls of her pubic hair were half hidden by her heels.

Nervous in his underpants, Peter stood at the end of the bed, at once seduced and reproached by her physical ease. The atmosphere of giddy spaciousness that had surrounded her in the Dzogchen workshop radiated even more strongly from her nakedness. She wasn’t going to tell him to relax because she was so relaxed herself that she was immune to his nervousness.

How could he offer her his pale body with its tufts of wiry black hair? Was it bad manners not to be naked as well? Would it be better to have an erection, or should he be content with what he had learned to call a soft-on? His waist was not narrow enough, his cock was not big enough, his throat was too dry, his …

‘Hi,’ said Crystal.

‘Hi,’ said Peter.

Peter crawled across the bed and sat opposite Crystal.

‘You look as nervous as a virgin,’ said Crystal.

‘I’m trying to relax,’ Peter defended himself.

‘Why? It might be fun to be a virgin.’

‘The only time I tried I was confused and incompetent.’

‘Let’s get it right this time,’ said Crystal, placing a hand on Peter’s chest.

He felt his shoulders sink a couple of inches. She reached out with her other hand and cupped it under his balls. John had spoken about these funny hand positions which ‘ran the energy’ from one chakra to the other.

‘Is this a mudra?’ gulped Peter.

‘Yes,’ said Crystal. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Peter. ‘Only I feel like crying.’

Crystal smiled at him.

He felt a warm current flowing upwards between Crystal’s hands. She was definitely running the energy and now the energy was running him.

He smiled back at her.

‘You’re so lovely,’ he said.

*   *   *

Whereas Jason was well capable of getting depressed about his career, he had absolutely no worries about his body. His compliments to women were adjuncts to his self-congratulation as a lover. ‘You’re not bad yourself,’ he would say, or ‘It’s nice to be appreciated.’ He knew his wizzer was above average, and he offered women his genital confidence with the breezy conviction that it might blow their circuits if he were to offer them anything more. He certainly felt no need to give a woman his attention while he was making love to her. If she was lucky enough to be getting his pelvic thrust, his mind was free to stalk through the masturbatory routines which had drained him since adolescence. His sexual formation, like that of almost all his friends, had taken place among inaccurate rumours, dirty mags, clumsy gropings and hopeless hopes. Nothing had made him question the mental habits which grew from this thin soil.

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 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.