Free Contours of Darkness by Marco Vassi Page A

would be able to fuck her. He wished desperately he were with Cynthia, with the familiarity of her, and he saw what it was he had sought in the woman, a texture of contrast, something to inject the routine sexual act with unusual excitement, an excitement he could transfer back to his lovemaking at home. The whore watching him saw his struggle, and although she was ignorant of the details, she recognised the pattern. For a second she almost suffocated in ennui.
    'The extra touches cost you more,' she said. She turned off the overhead and flicked on a low lamp with a blue bulb, casting the room into a qualitatively different mood, making her skin glow with subtle and mysterious shadows. She bent over to put on the stereo and Aaron noted the absolute blackness that ran down the crack between her cheeks. The electronic ghost of Billie Holiday entered the room, singing as vibrantly as her live body had ever done. The woman fluffed the pillows and smoothed the sheets. She took out a bottle of rye and two glasses from the cabinet next to the bed, went into her handbag and fished out a pack of Pall Mall, dropping it next to the ashtray. 'You get in now,' she said, and he lay down on the soft mattress, pulling the crisp violent sheet up to his belly. She waddled to her dresser and came back with an atomiser, and with a gesture he wasn't sure wasn't ironic, she sprayed a fine mist of scent over his chest. 'You feel better now?' she said.
    Without waiting for his response, she went into the kitchen, and he could hear her fiddling with an icecube tray. That she could be whimsical without self-consciousness captivated Aaron's attention, and like a million men who have paid for a woman's body, he grew curious about her soul. It was easy to picture her working, as so many black women did, behind the counter of a luncheonette or in a dime store. He wondered how she began this trade of selling the use of her cunt instead of the use of her hands or her back in one of the other forms of wage slavery open to the majority of people in the nation. She returned with a bucket of ice, standing in the doorway a moment, posing. There was nothing lovely about her. Her legs were running to fat, her torso was squat, her entire attitude was one of hardness, her eyes held only calculation.
    'This is the deluxe treatment,' she said. 'It's going to cost you ten dollars more.'
    'I didn't ask for any of this,' he said. He paused. 'Maybe,' he added. 'I'll have to see how I feel afterwards.'
    She walked towards him exuding scorn. She put the ice down and stared him into discomfiture. She turned quickly and was reaching for the light switch, to explode the ambience, to take back the small niceties she had proffered. He reached out and grabbed her wrist, pulling him roughly towards her. He expected her to fight but she just went stiff with distaste. 'Go ahead, mister ,' she spat at him. 'If you want me this way you go right ahead. You're paying for pussy and pussy is all I got to give you. You can just get on top and bang away until you come. But if you want me to treat you nice, you have got to pay .' She took a deep breath and said, more in exasperation than in anger, 'Don't you understand that yet? Anything you get from a woman, you got to pay!'
    He looked at her dumbly; the force of her words stunned him and he felt extremely foolish, the smell of the perfume adding a bizarre dimension to the sterile scene. He let go of her arm, and the tension went out of her muscles. She seemed to regard him as though from a great height. 'What's the matter with you,' she said, 'you ain't a kid.'
    With a subtlety that surprised him she stretched her back and pushed her arms above her head, exhibiting the sinuous body that still lived beneath the age and weight. Her breasts jutted out and her arse flared. 'I been in this business a long time,' she said, her voice husky and low. 'Don't think there is anything I don't know, a hundred times over.' She leaned forward. 'It's just