The Sensual Mirror (13 page)

“No, it’s all right. I wanted to hear about it. I guess I want to know whether I should marry Eliot. Every marriage tale I’ve heard sounds pretty much the same, and I guess when anyone gets married they think, ‘Mine will be different,’ and then it never is. I’ve been consoling myself with the idea that money will make the difference. We can even afford to maintain separate apartments, and Eliot travels a lot so I won’t even be seeing him a lot of the time.” She reached over and put her hand on Julia’s arm. “Am I being too cold, calculating it all like this?”

Julia took her friend’s hand and held it. “No, baby, not at all. You’d be a fool if you didn’t. The only thing is, you never really know until you do it. Once that piece of paper is signed, it’s like living in a foreign country. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like hearing a door slam behind you.”

“Isn’t there anyway out? Does it have to be like that?”

They slowly disengaged. Gail’s hand was on fire where Julia had held it. Julia’s heart was beating rapidly. Both women were breathing hard. They fell back as though exhausted, the extremely powerful marijuana amplifying each nuance of feeling a hundred times. Julia’s reality crashed in upon her. Time telescoped and psychological space turned in upon itself. Telling the story of her relationship with Martin had impacted that experience so that she felt his presence very strongly in the room. Superimposed upon that was the hangover from the fucking she’d received from Eliot the night before. And now there was this abrupt and titanic breakthrough with Gail. And she had no resting place in the rapid flow of events within which to integrate, to allow it all to be absorbed into the wider stream of awareness that was her life. She felt flushed, undone. She slid forward even more and lay completely on the floor. She heard Gail do the same. The woman next to her had become a mixture of threat and consolation. Gail’s presence was filling her entirely, and at the same time crowding something in her, some wall of privacy that rarely got approached, much less climbed. Not even Martin had touched spots that were, madly, surrendering themselves to Gail’s vibrations. Julia had a wild impulse to tear her robe off. She sighed, arched her back, and tried to melt into the floor. The first record dropped and she realized she had not heard a note. With the second, the strains of Judy Collins filled the room. She was singing about clouds and life and somehow coming to understand that it is impossible to understand. She stretched. Her left hand touched something. It was Gail’s hand. She began to pull back with the unquestioned reflex of social nicety, but Gail’s fingers closed over her own. For an instant Julia panicked, not knowing why, but suddenly afraid. And then she took a deep breath, and relaxed. The contact was made, accepted.

Gail could barely contain herself. Insights galloped through her mind like steeplechase horses before the pack has thinned itself out. Thundering hooves pounded the turf of her consciousness, and then tons of muscle and bone lifted itself in the air to fly giddily over the hurdle of an ancient resistance, to come thudding down on the other side, pursuing the race. Every now and then, one didn’t make it, and horse and rider went sprawling crazily across the earth. The images in Gail’s mind were now too sharp, too vivid, to be denied. There was no hazy distance across which she needed to peer to discover what she wanted. She was hungry for Julia in a most direct, physical way. She wanted her friend in her arms, their breasts mingling, their thighs pressing tight. She wanted Julia’s kisses, her ripe mouth and tender tongue. She wanted to smell the pungent heat between Julia’s thighs, to savor the tart taste, the viscous musk of slow excitement.

This is insane, she thought. / have to get a grip on myself. But even as she forced herself down against the rug, biting the inside of her lip, Julia’s hand found her own. It was a moment of such electrifying intensity that Gail’s scalp crawled. It took superhuman effort to keep from rolling over violently and flinging herself on to Julia, raping her vulnerability. She felt Julia begin to pull away, and her heart dropped at the idea that she would lose even that little precious contact. So all her life’s conditioning to the contrary, she seized her friend’s hand.

And then, all at once, it was easy. They were lying side by side, relaxed, breathing fully, holding hands.

All that just to reach something so simple, Gail thought, and allowed herself an inner sigh of relief. I almost made a fool of myself. The actual, full, direct physical contact had skimmed the cream off the top of the tension that had built between them. And with that, they both subsided into a long, deep dreaminess, striking into the music, enjoying the soma that spiced their mundane physiology. They drifted along the edge of wakefulness, flirting with sleep, at the thin edge of hypnogogic ecstasy, the most exquisite jewel on the spectrum of consciousness. Around and between them, a subtle energy flowed. The full release of waking structures liberated the electricity of expression. And since they were totally inert on the gross level, the energy was free to dance like transparent flame over their bodies. Their fingers loosened and their palms became conductor plates through which flowed the essence of their selves. They entered a union so profound that it was attached to no experience whatsoever.

In time as measured by the clock, a half hour passed. In time as measured by the music, months passed. In time as measured by the depth of the women’s breathing, eternities had come and gone. When Julia finally stirred, moved a finger, opened her eyes, she experienced what she imagined an infant must feel, that chaotic sense of wonder at color and shape. When she went to move her left hand, she found that it was glued to Gail’s hand. Disengaging was not a mechanical process, but had become a radical alteration in the nature of her relationship to the world. As she began to pull away, Gail moaned softly and her eyelids fluttered.

“Wow, where were we?” Gail said at last.

“Another universe,” Julia replied.

“I’ve done that alone, but I never went there with anyone else before.”

“Me neither. In fact, I usually can’t space out that much. When I’m alone my thinking usually takes over. But with you—I don’t know. It’s like you took the place of my thoughts.”

“Did you feel my presence?” Gail asked.

Julia pulled herself up a bit, rested her shoulders against the couch. “Yes. There was a place when everything turned violet.”

Gail also sat up, excited. “Right. It was a kind of mist, with mountains barely showing through.”

“Right,” Julia chimed in, “and something that looked like a huge lake in the distance—it was a deeper purple.”

Gail opened her eyes wide in astonishment. “That’s exactly what I saw,” she exclaimed. “We were there together.”

“Telepathy!” Julia said, awestruck. “It’s real. And it’s not like reading somebody’s thoughts. It’s going to where thoughts go, only in your mind with someone. Oh, I’m not saying this right.”

Gail smiled, reached out and held Julia’s hand again. “You don’t have to. Don’t you see? We shared it together. We don’t need the words.”

“We . . . don’t . . . need . . . the . . . words . . . “ Julia repeated, the full impact of the words hitting her with methodical repetition, like the left jabs of a master boxer slamming into an already groggy opponent. Julia shivered, a chill shaking her so violently that her entire torso shuddered.

“Oh dear,” Gail said and spontaneously moved forward and put her arms around Julia, holding her tightly. Julia shook in her friend’s embrace for almost a minute, the energy exploding playfully up and down the nerve nodes of her spine. Not having any knowledge of the relationship between astral events and physical reactions, never having been introduced to the concepts of kundalini and chakras, both women experienced the phenomenon in ignorance, which meant that they tasted more fear than they might otherwise have, but at the same time appreciated the occurrence more nakedly, without a superstructure of rationalizations.

Finally, Julia calmed down and Gail’s embrace became looser, warmer. Soon, there was no need for Gail to be holding her at all, and yet neither woman made a move to pull back. Julia’s arms moved up slowly, tentatively, and made their way around Gail’s waist. When the contact was made, the moment and its implications accepted, they fell further into each other’s arms, holding on with all the ardor of lovers.

As sensitive to each other as they were, each minute aspect of the embrace hummed its separate song. The most immediate, the most obvious, was the pressure of their breasts as they brought their chests together. Neither of them had ever hugged another woman before in quite that way, so intimately, so long. The brief embraces of social convenience with relatives and acquaintances never reached the point at which they could feel the details of the other’s body. Julia’s robe was open and her breasts bare. Gail wore only a thin blouse, two-thirds unbuttoned. The heat where valley met valley climbed to troubling temperatures.

And yet, it was not quite erotic, for neither was prepared for such a reality. It seems like such a small step, to go from an embrace to a kiss, from a kiss to a caress, from a caress to a penetration. Yet there is a point at which quantitative change become qualitative, and then one is in another realm entirely. Such is the realm of eroticism. At a time when the casual fuck is the official insignia of the culture, when its only rival is the sanctified fuck of marriage, the notion of fucking as a branding of the soul, an alchemical transfusion from essence to essence, has fallen into disuse. Even the cross-cultural borrowing from tantric buddhism has not quite made the point, for those who study its methods and metaphysics tend to see merely technique or discipline or transcendence or union. And in relation to what fucking really is, these qualities are unspeakably petty, although from the point of view of the common person, they are held up as surpassing goals.

We all know this instinctively, and yet we forget, we have it trained out of us, along with all the other wisdom which is our birthright as children. And we go through all the dreary stages along the path of erotic development so-called, from shy romance to hard-edged debauchery, until we are caught in some mechanical routine, which may be garlanded with flowers of the most subtle sensuality, but remains essentially lacking in meaning.

Gail and Julia understood, inchoately, dumbly, that under no matter which rubric they might take their clothes off and plunge into the arms of Eros together, they would be transgressing the bounds of social safety, that they would become, on the spot, bound to one another. And even if they casually parted the following morning and treated the incident as a marijuana excess, the mark of erotic love would have been burned into their souls, and there would be no going back from that, for to be born again is as ineluctable in its implications as being born. For each time one is born again, one must die again.

They disengaged and pulled back slowly. When they were no longer touching, they looked into each other’s eyes.

“Gail,” Julia said. “I love you.”

Gail’s eyes were moist. “All this time. Three years. We’ve been in love for so long and never known it.”

“When we met, there was that sparkle, that joy, that sense of adventure. If you had been a man, I would have recognized it at once.”

Gail nodded. “What was it? The sex? Is it that we were afraid of sex and so we couldn’t accept love?”

“There’s no love without sex,” Julia said. “You know that. Not love the way I’m feeling it now.”

Gail closed her eyes in agreement, and when she opened them she looked out with the trembling ingenuousness of a teenage girl feeling herself turn into a woman for the first time.

“Do you want to have sex?” Gail asked.

“I feel it,” Julia replied. “You do too, don’t you? But actually doing it. I don’t know. What would it mean? Where would it lead?” She paused a moment and then her face broke open in a laugh.

Gail watched her and did not change expression. Julia subsided into a smile. “I just got a picture of Martin and Eliot as we called them in for a conference and then announced the news that you and I had become lovers.”

Julia grinned and looked at Gail, expecting a smile of corroboration. But Gail was stonefaced. “What is it?” Julia asked finally. “It’s not a cheap joke,” Gail said evenly. Julia’s eyes widened. “Oh Gail, I didn’t mean . . . Hey,don’t be so serious.”

“Why shouldn’t I be serious?” Gail snapped. Julia was silent for several seconds. “Now I do need a cigarette,” she said. “I think I may have some next to the bed.”

She got up and pulled her housedress about her, cinching the cord at the waist, then walked over to the far end of the large room She staggered slightly, a bit more affected by the wine and grass and heavy run of emotions than she had realized. She rummaged in a drawer of the night table, found a wrinkled Pall Mall, smoothed it out, lit it, and inhaled with intense concentration, then let the smoke out with an almost exaggerated sigh of relief. She ran her hand over her face, made several gestures which might, if she were an actress on stage, indicate to the audience that she was clearing her head, and turned to go back to the couch. She stopped halfway there. She couldn’t see Gail, but was able to sense her. Some strange and unsettling emanation came from the area behind the couch. A premonition of dread chilled her heart and she rushed forward suddenly, hair flying.

“Gail?” she called out. She couldn’t see Gail on the floor, and for a wild millisecond surmised that her friend had vanished, utterly disappeared. She turned the corner around the back of the couch, and found Gail lying on its pillows, stark naked.

Julia’s breath caught in her chest. In her confusion, in the low light, she thought she was looking down at herself. Her experience with nude female bodies was extremely limited. Several times, at the health club, a woman had come into the steam room without a towel around her, but that had been so formal, so public, so in keeping with the context, that Julia could view it the way she might look at photos in a nudist magazine. Before that, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen another woman without clothes on. The only naked female body she was familiar with was her own, and that was precisely the image which her mind hastily conjured to throw over Gail in the same way that a passerby might cover an accident victim with a coat.