Free Contours of Darkness by Marco Vassi

forethought; with nothing but sheer elegant style. They produced lines and harmonies that they would never reproduce, and which would never be recorded.
    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