Edward Aubyn - On the Edge

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.