The Sensual Mirror (11 page)

“She was the only person who ever made me unhappy,” Martin began. “I know that sounds wicked, but I mean it in a very loving way. I’ve always been a pretty simple person, cheerful and dumb, not too concerned with mysteries. For me, a spring day, a cold beer, a playful woman, summed up everything a man might need to experience in life. But behind that lurked the suspicion that I was missing out on something meaningful. I often felt like the person who had missed the point of the joke and was wondering what everyone else was laughing at. I never understood poetry, for example. Oh, I could enjoy a good description, but I had no idea what sent people into raptures. I once dated a girl who accused me of being shallow, and I felt the sting of that for a long time, I guess that deep down I believed it was true. After all, I was just a jock.

“But Julia changed all that. She made me feel pain and excitement. She made me think about my life. And about having children. I guess she forced me into maturity.”

“Which you consider unhappiness?”

“I was much better off when I was ignorant and naive.”

“But you can’t stay a child forever. You have to pass through the stage of knowledge, of knowing that you know. And then it is possible to find a new level of innocence.” Robert spoke with animation. He was beginning to see Martin’s life unfold in terms of the basic structures of the spiritual search. He had suffered the same torment. “So she was a kind of teacher to you.”

“Once, when we were in Italy,” Martin said, “we came to the edge of a high cliff. We had been irritated with one another all morning and it was good to find a place where there was so much emptiness and silence. I sat at the edge and fell into a reverie and Julia wandered off a bit behind me. I guess fifteen or twenty minutes passed, when suddenly I heard a tremendous sound. Something had fallen from the cliff and crashed into the forest below. For a split second I experienced nothing more than a startle response, and then I thought, ‘Julia!’ I rushed over to where I had heard the sound come from, calling her name. She didn’t answer. I grew frantic, running back and forth along the edge, until I saw her jacket and handbag piled in a neat bundle under a tree. A shudder of relief went through me, for I realized at once that she must have gone for a walk and gone further than expected. But when I got to the spot where her things lay, I found a note pinned to her sleeve. It said, ‘Goodbye. Remember me. Julia.’ I must have gone mad. I began wailing like an animal over the body of its dead mate. I was seized by pictures of her hurling herself from the precipice, her body smashing to pieces below. It was a three-hundred-foot drop. It was impossible she could have survived. But more hideous than any of that were the unmistakable flashes of relief that flushed through me. For all my anguish, for all my grief, a little voice danced in my brain, shouting, ‘We’re free, we’re free!’ And then I heard her laugh. I whirled around and she was standing there, at the edge of the woods. She was naked except for her boots and hat. I exploded into a ball of fury and leaped on her. I slapped her and threw her to the ground and kicked her and then threw myself on her and fucked her brains loose. Afterwards, we slept and when we got up I was nauseous and stiff, and had to spend the next four days in bed with a fever. Julia suffered a black eye and bruises on her legs.”

Robert clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Was there a moment when it occurred to you that you might actually throw her off the cliff yourself? I mean, you had the note. You were in a strange country. You probably could have gotten away with it. Poetic justice.”

“No, you don’t understand. I was furious at her, ready to kill her, but at the same time totally enthralled. I had never known anything remotely like that in my life. There was so much feeling. I’ve never taken drugs, but I imagine it must be the same. The sensation is so strong, so convincing, that one has to go back to it. Except that Julia wasn’t a powder or a weed, she was a human being consciously moulding my mind.” He paused, a certain parallel suddenly dawning on him. “I guess it was something like your guru does.”

“With all the difference in the world. Babba doesn’t want anything from anyone. It sounds to me like Julia is a sponge for attention.”

“Yes, there’s the spoiled child in her. But I suppose that’s what made her so irresistible. Sometimes she’d pout, just like a six-year-old girl. And I would take her on my lap and try to cheer her up. Her mood was real, so I’d get lost in the game, and pretend that she was my daughter. Until I felt her squirming on my thighs, and my cock would stir. She’d put her arms around my neck and talk baby-talk, pressing her breasts against me, her cunt hot through her panties and skirt, through my pants and shorts. She got like a fire sometimes, and it drove me mad. Some nights I would have fantasies of her fucking a dozen men at once. I had no doubt but that she could handle it and walk away swaggering. The extremes in her strung me out, the little girl and the pornographic nymphomaniac all in one.

“Then, when we got down to it, I sank into her like a stone in mud. I wasn’t anything near being a virgin when we met. I’d had my share of women, ranging from nice girls next door to Mexican whores. But Julia was something else. There was a quality in her eyes, a kind of hurt pleading that used to rise up like mist from a swamp and totally engulf me so that I couldn’t see anything but that strange burning in her brain. And all the while she did shameless things with her body, her cunt sucking at me like a gaping toothless mouth, slurping, drooling. Time stopped and space disappeared. At times I felt like I was dying, because the world had become an emptiness, and I was being sucked into the whirlpool, a blazing comet doing a swan dive into a black hole from which there could be no return or escape, ever.

“Then she’d start to talk dirty. ‘Fuck me,’ she said over and over again. ‘Come on you humpy jock, you big juicy hunk of meat, do your dirt all over me.’ I’d get scared and look at her to see if she had flipped out, and there was no recognition in her eyes. She had become a mindless moaning cunt leaching at me as though she wanted my very blood.”

“Wow,” Robert said under his breath. “Wild.”

“And it went on for hours. You know that I’m in pretty good shape. And I know how to hold my come. Sometimes we’d start after dinner and by the time I got up it would be three in the morning.”

“I’m impressed,” Robert said. “If you make me your agent I could make you a fortune. Of course, you’d have to break this prejudice you have concerning the gender of your sex objects.”

“She wasn’t impressed,” Martin said. “After a bout like that, she’d get up, smoke a cigarette, and start chattering about how she had to get up early for work, and then go off to pee and make coffee and pick at her face in the mirror for a half hour before she came back to bed, gave me a friendly kiss, and rolled over, shoving her ass into my crotch as though I were some pet teddy bear she kept for comfort. The worst part was she wouldn’t even ask me whether I wanted any coffee or not.”

“Tell me, what did you do when you weren’t mounting these erotic melodramas?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What?”

“It’s all a blur. Somehow we passed a lot of time. I don’t know. We went out, to movies, plays, that sort of thing. We had friends, I guess. But the more I think of it the more I realize that they were just acquaintances, not people I cared about or who cared about me in any deep sense. We watched television, read, took care of the household chores. Each year we took a vacation. Two weeks in the sun.”

“So you vacillated between boredom and a kind of terrified ecstasy.”

“That’s pretty much it. But that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Which can’t be described. Which is what you asked me about. Which is love.”

“Yeah,” Robert breathed, and in that single syllable encapsulated a lifetime of searching.

“That was the air we breathed. It was the stage that all this happened on. Whether we fought or laughed. Whether we fucked with desperation or made love with joy. Whether we flew through Europe or languished in boredom in New York City. Through and below and above all that was the love we had for one another. And I don’t know what to say about that. Sometimes we sat in the living room paying no attention to one another, me reading and she listening to music, when a light would fill the space, a radiance that was an unspeakable bliss, and I’d look up at the same time she would, and her eyes had turned to angel’s eyes. Or we’d be walking down a street in a hurry to get somewhere, dodging traffic and swimming upstream through the heavy vibrations of the thousands of others rushing about, and she’d stop abruptly, and touch my arm, and when I turned to her she’d look at me as though she had never really seen me before and say, ‘I love you.’ Or in the middle of the night she’d wake up from a nightmare and be sobbing, remembering her mother, and burrow into my arms and cling to me in a way that I don’t think any woman ever will again.

“And even these don’t capture it. Now, I get along. I earn a good salary, I’m in the process of finding a new apartment, and I feel free. I don’t think I could go back to living with Julia the way we were. It would only destroy us both again. Yet, at odd times during the day, when I haven’t thought of her for several days and am beginning to think of which of the ladies at the club I’m going to grace with my marathon cock, I’ll see her face in the air, and my heart will stop. Not figuratively, but actually. Stop. And for a few seconds, I know I am dead.”

Martin’s words hung in the air for a long time after he finished speaking. By now the sky was black and a slight chill had entered the air. The two men sat side by side and watched the sluggish polluted river. The far shore was ablaze with lights and the rim of industrial civilization was reflected in the oily water. They were silent for many minutes. Several times Robert had to check an impulse to put his arm around Martin’s shoulders. He could not trust that the other man would understand the meaning of the gesture.

But then, do I understand my own motivation? he thought. The images unleashed by Martin’s narrative surged through his mind like waves over a stormy sea. The raw eroticism, the sweat, the grunting exorcism of the devil of lust, all sang in his bloodstream. But in the movies of his imagination, it was not Julia that spread herself beneath the athletic warrior of the sheets. It was himself. Yes, he lay face down and bereft of all context as Martin ranged over him, moving in hot, tight circles, both of them silent and deep, deep into that realm where each breath, each thought, each atom of awareness hummed in a sea of infinite emptiness. It was something that he could never reach with a woman, for what woman could ever penetrate him, take him, enter him, make him moan with surrender? And it had never been enough, for it was temporary, a thing of a few minutes or even hours. And it gave him an insatiable yearning for eternity, for that was what it was. When all the fear of homosexuality and all its false chic had been seen through, what it was was the endlessness of the self knowing the self as the self. And the body alone was not sufficient vehicle for such a realization, for the body was transient, limited. No, the truth of homosexuality was the truth of knowing the gods, and once one had sported among the gods, it became necessary to know God. And so he had met Babba, who had inspired in him that same surrender, before whom it was a joy to kneel and touch one’s head to the floor. Yet, he was still tempted by the sensations of the flesh, forgetting that they were not truth but only the messengers of truth. Babba was patient, and allowed him his lingering love affairs with those messengers, but warned that with each encounter Robert risked losing sight of ultimate reality, forsaking the infinite forest for a single phallic tree.

Now, with Martin, he felt the tearing along his metaphysical seams. He knew that the man needed to see Babba and to know what the guru meant. But at the same time he intuited that Martin would blossom in an entirely different way if he could simply slip through the grid of his heterosexual conditioning and fall gently into the arms of a man who might love him.

“Well,” Robert said at last, “I wouldn’t worry about it. After all, death is nothing more than a commercial for God. It’s his way of making sure that we don’t forget him.”

Martin, climbing slowly out of his reverie of Julia, was perplexed. He couldn’t filter out the meaning from the humor in Robert’s remark.

“I mean,” Robert went on, “if we were immortal, we could play at life with much more aplomb, couldn’t we?”

“I suppose . . . “ Martin began, uncertain as to where this was leading.

“Your problem with Julia,” Robert continued, now a bit reckless, “man’s problem with woman. That’s at the core of it, don’t you see? Without them, we can maintain the illusion of immortality. Even as we die, we live forever. But a woman denies all that by her very existence. She reminds us that we are nothing more than the detritus of her bloody hole, and every time we gaze into her eyes, we see the grave. Which is why she holds such a fascination for us. And why some of us have fled her. But you are bound by the horrible beauty of her reality. For you, on a very deep level, Julia is your last defense against God, and your last defense against accepting yourself as a man, a creature who must find his own salvation.”

A huge ocean liner sailed past, heading for New York Bay and the ocean beyond. Robert stood up. He grabbed Martin under one arm and helped him to his feet. The gesture was so straightforward, so brusque, so conventional, that not a whisper of homosexuality was there to gossip about the contact between them.

“This is getting too murky,” Robert said. “Let’s go see Babba and have some light thrown on the matter.”

They turned their backs on the river and walked east, to the loft where Robert’s guru was holding sat-sang with all those who had been drawn to him.

When the doorbell rang, Julia’s long evening of preparation fell apart. Gail’s arrival, interesting to deal with from the vantage point of silence and solitude in a warm bath, hit like a large rock in a shallow pool. The impact of what had happened the previous night, how it would be resolved now, caught her up breathless.

When she’d felt the impulse to fuck Eliot the night before, all the considerations which might have stopped her were quickly and easily swept away into the hollow tube of erotic tunnel vision. She dismissed the problem of Martin. They were separated, and anyway, he would never find out. Besides, she had already cheated on him with Eliot a year earlier.

Dealing with the question of her relationship to Gail was a bit more tricky. Eliot slept with many other women; Julia knew that. So it wasn’t as though she were taking a faithful husband away for a rare fuck. Also, Eliot wasn’t Gail’s husband and probably would never be. Gail hadn’t spoken too much about their affair, but Julia got the impression that her friend, while deeply involved, had not let herself fully fall in love. At least, Julia had never heard Gail say the word. All in all, she had been ready to have her brief fuck with Eliot and then drop the incident into the garbage bin of history, to pretend that it never happened.

Then the roof had come crashing in. First Gail’s call while Eliot was still there, naked and contented. His hurried dressing and leaving while she had to go through a universe of changes in order to talk to her friend. The idea that Eliot would have stood Gail up in order to be with her was fraught with almost too much madness. Eliot was ten kinds of bastard in his way, but he was not a careless or thoughtless man. Such a thing was practically inconceivable, not because of any tenderheartedness on his part, but because he was always such a meticulous planner. The long long conversation with Gail which had to go on until Eliot reached her place was pure hell, including the paranoiac undertones of wondering whether Gail suspected that Eliot had been there.

Julia began the next morning, this morning, ready to tear Eliot’s head off, but the only trace of him was a message left with his office secretary that he would be out of town for two days, whereabouts unknown. Her morning coffee, a cigarette, and the Times had been the next order of business. She was to see Gail in the evening and wanted to be totally together, the previous evening utterly erased. That small hope was shattered by the first phonecall of the day, Gail calling to tell her that Eliot had proposed, that she was going to accept, that she realized that perhaps she had loved him all along.

The day had been spent nursing a dull headache, and while it shied back somewhat when treated with aspirin, the way a vampire is supposed to flinch at the smell of garlic, the pain settled in for a long visit. The obviousness of its cause was not a factor in its cure. Julia had one of two very unpleasant roads to travel: telling the truth or telling a lie. And each time she swung from one to the other, her head hurt a bit more. She considered canceling the date for the evening, but she knew she would have no rest until she’d seen Gail, talked to her, and either found a new way to relate or else lose the friendship altogether.

Thus, after work, she plunged herself into hot water and grass, hoping to find some rest from the dilemma, so that when the moment of confrontation arrived, she might at least act spontaneously. The spell of relaxation had removed her headache, but had not indicated what her decision ought to be.

Julia sighed, walked to the door, and opened it. Gail rushed in, threw her arms around her, and hugged her, dancing up and down. Julia remained rigid in the embrace, her body unyielding.

“Isn’t it fantastic!” Gail almost shouted.

Julia looked at her through lidded eyes and didn’t say a word. She was so silent, so stem, so set in her posture of withdrawal that the mood cut through even Gail’s reckless mirth. Gail’s mouth went in and out of a smile half a dozen times. Her eyes were like birds on a beach just before a storm, electric, sharp.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Gail said at last in an exaggerated drawl which embraced the worst that a little child could possibly be experiencing and letting it know that whatever the problem was it could be fixed up in a minute. It was an attempt at humor, that quality which is born halfway between abandon and concern. Even her expression was like that of the schoolteacher she played to children each day.

Then she looked into Julia’s eyes. Then she knew that whatever it was, it was bad, very bad.

“Should we sit down?” Gail said. Her first thought was for her friend, guessing that something had happened to Julia, perhaps in relation to Martin. Or maybe it was the death of a relative or friend. Or grim news from a doctor. Gail was ready to drop all of her excitement and go to the aid of her friend.

Julia saw that, knew the depth of Gail’s friendship, knew that she herself would have acted the same in reverse positions. The brief bit of limited passion the night before now loomed as such a terrible mistake and Julia wondered how she could have rationalized it even for a second.

It didn’t seem like much at the time, she thought. I didn’t know he had a date with her. I didn’t know he was going to propose to her.

Gail took Julia’s hand and began to lead her to the couch.

“Should I put some coffee on?” she asked.

But Julia stopped. She knew it was then or never. The longer she stayed in Gail’s presence, the more difficult it would become to tell her. It would be impossible. And then she would have to live with it. She would be asked to be Maid of Honor at the wedding. And afterwards, how could she spend time in the same office with Eliot? She now swung as wildly into the direction of blame as she had gone in the direction of nonchalance the night before. She was taken with the worst symptom of panic—not knowing that one is in a panic. She turned halfway around to face Gail who was a step ahead of her on the way to the sofa. The room seemed carved out of flawed crystal. Everything stood out with stark precision, and yet nothing was whole.

“He was here,” Julia blurted out. “When you called last night. Eliot was here. When you called . . . he had just finished fucking me in the ass.”

Perhaps a society is possible in which the simple communication of mundane sexual activity might be noted and accepted with as much flurry as is given to, say, a listing of what one had for breakfast or dinner. Had Julia said, “When you called last night. Eliot was here. When you called . . . he had just finished eating an onion bagel with cream cheese and Nova Scotia salmon,” no one would have made much of it. The terrible contraction which the species had developed in relation to its erotic activity, however, propels people to rank melodramas of the most turgid variety, sometimes to physical violence and even murder. It is possible to envision a society in which an announcement such as Julia’s might be made with utter ease and received with some simple, offhanded remark? A “how droll” perhaps, or even “how icky.”

But the two women, intelligent, perceptive, experienced, and friendly to each other, could not, in light of all their conditioning, do anything but take the steps they did. Gail sucked her breath in sharply. Julia reached toward her. Gail drew back. Julia turned her head away. Gail looked out at Julia with eyes that signaled warmth through an iron grid of pain. In short, they did the dance of heavy news, taking an intrinsically neutral event and straining it, through the cheese cloth of social dilemma, into a cause célèbre, a scandal which eclipsed famine in Africa and earthquakes in Italy. It, in short, really gave them something to talk about.

“If you tell me you hate me and turn around and walk out and never speak to me again, I’ll understand,” Julia said.

Gail weighed the offer. Calculations ran through her mind like sand through an hourglass. But since all manifestations of everything which exists in the universe can be reduced to the result of three forces, even the seemingly complex rush of emotions that ransacked Gail’s wardrobe of rationalizations resolved itself into three factors: herself, Julia, and Eliot. Eliot was out of town for two days. He had left her apartment at eight in the morning and told her he wouldn’t be back until Thursday. Now she understood the real reason for his leaving. She wouldn’t be able to deal with him until he returned. His surprise would be a strong one for he couldn’t have imagined that Julia would tell.

“Don’t be absurd,” Gail replied. “I’m too much in shock right now to know whether I’m more angry or hurt. And in any case, it’s done. If I walked out now, in ten minutes I’d be crazy wanting to talk to you about it. So. Let’s talk.”

“I’d make some coffee?” Julia suggested.

“Wine would be more like it,” Gail said.

“Well,” Julia said, the word almost a sigh. “Why don’t you have a seat? Make yourself comfortable.”

The sudden stilted structure of the distance between them was as noticeable as an elephant in a rose garden. Each woman was filled with a score of tiny impulses to do something to break the tension. But there was no quick route to relaxation. A lot of words had to be spoken, many feelings had to be exchanged, certain understandings had to be reached. It would be a long evening.

Gail shrugged, indicating that she saw as well as Julia did how awkward the situation was and yet how thin the pane of glass that separated them. Julia nodded, and then turned to go to the kitchen. In a few seconds she could be heard in a dialogue with glasses, bottles, ice trays. Gail looked around the large space. Her glance fell on the bed at the far side of the room.

It must have been there, she thought.

Now that she had a brief moment to sort herself out, she realized at once that whatever she felt, it wasn’t jealousy. Relieved, she was able to toss that label out of the box of rubber stamps she used for cataloguing her experience. She knew that Eliot fucked other women, and even as she considered marrying him she was aware that fidelity was out of the question. She had never asked that of him; all she wanted was discretion, consideration, tact. The fact that one of the women he fucked was Julia, however, brought her up short. How long had they been making it? Should she consider herself betrayed? After all, until the night before, she had no special claim on Eliot. She was just one of his cunts. Probably his number one, but that carried no status which anyone, including Julia, had to respect. But as a friend, shouldn’t Julia have told her? On the other hand, how did they define friendship? And perhaps this was the only time, and if so, then Julia was honest because she did tell. And what of Eliot? Gail was forced to smile when she thought of his performance the night before. No wonder he was so flustered. If he had made it with just any other woman, he wouldn’t have been so completely thrown. Then what about the proposal? Was that just a panicked coverup? Yet he did have deep feelings for her. It was all very interesting, very subtle.

I’m the injured party, and with that insight her mood shifted. She could afford to wait, to let the others do the explaining and apologizing. But even as she felt that, she was ashamed. Eliot and Julia must be suffering quite a bit. And they weren’t villains.

She sat on the rug in front of the couch just as Julia came back into the room with a tray of wine and crackers and cheese.

“It was supposed to have been dinner,” Julia said. She sat down on the floor, putting the tray down next to her. “I was going to make veal, but . . . “ She couldn’t finish the sentence. Unaccountably, she began to cry. Her shoulders shook, tears wet her cheeks, she covered her face with her hands. She made no sound. She wept like an actress in a silent film.

Gail watched her for a few minutes, coldly at first, detached from the other’s sorrow. But then something stirred in her breast, a sympathetic warmth, a tiny flickering like that of a candle name. Julia’s feelings flooded the air, and Gail breathed them in with every breath. She saw that Julia was not weeping only for herself, but for all of them. For Eliot with his super-controlled life, in which each encounter ran on as strict a schedule as German trams. For her, for Gail, a nobody schoolteacher being kept by a wealthy man, finally having her bondage made respectable by a marriage license. And for all the poor people on the planet, trapped in their pitiful limitations, in their paltry possessiveness, in their rancid identities.

Not surprisingly, Gail felt her own eyes go moist, and without thinking she reached out and put her arms around Julia’s shoulders. Julia stiffened, then let go, and in a second the two women were embracing one another tightly, sobbing fully, letting themselves be overwhelmed by the cataract of rushing feeling, the sweet release that even pain provides when it is expressed, given the full range of fecundating power.

They cried for a long time, while a world spun on, unconcerned. In the same building, a score of other dramas unfolded. A man and wife entered the ninth hour of a fight. They had reached the point where they were dredging up little tender secrets they’d told each other a year earlier, things they’d whispered late at night after making love, and had now shaped the truths into sharp barbs, dipped in the venom of anger and meanness, and were hurling them into each other’s heart, purposely, viciously, wanting to hurt, to tear, to destroy, like outer-directed scorpions doing a dance of destruction. An eighty-five year old woman lay on her bed and felt her body protest each time she took a breath. “It wants to die,” she said out loud to the empty room, “but I don’t.” And for the hundredth time that day she dozed and strolled down the long lane of memory to see if she could remember who “I’ was, knowing that death would come that way, surreptitiously, as she bent over to smell a flower that had bloomed before the century was born. On the roof a young boy had attained the goal he’d worked on for almost a month. A thin, pouty girl had consented, after much attention, false promises, and concentrated mauling, to pull down her jeans and let the youth roam inside her sticky cunt with the middle finger of his right hand while she rubbed the bulge in his pants with the palm of her left hand.

Beyond that multi-leveled stage, the city throbbed its night song. Millions of bulbs burned with indifferent heat upon the full range of human behavior. A surgeon in the emergency room of a city hospital stitched up a split scalp; a mugger stepped out from behind a truck and waved a gun at an elderly man; a hundred thousand people lifted glasses to their mouths in an effort to get drunk; a scholar discovered a nuance in an ancient Hebrew text; a priest put on street clothes and walked up and down Eighth Avenue until a hooker caught his eye; a mother hummed a lullaby as her two-day-old infant sucked at her nipple.