The Sensual Mirror (5 page)
“What if he asks me to marry him?” was her first thought. And immediately upon that came the certain knowledge that Eliot wanted a child.
But no mention was ever made of that, and the moment of naked encounter was slid into the pouch of the past and never referred to, even telepathically. Months stretched into a year, and as Gail chugged to Julia’s apartment in the rusted Checker cab, fourteen months had passed since the night Eliot first took her out. Their meetings had become somewhat routine. He was out of town about a third of the year. During those times, she was free to do what she pleased. When he was in the city, however, it was tacitly understood that she was on call. He might see her four times a week, or not at all for ten days. Without an explicit agreement ever written down, she understood that she should be home no later than midnight on any night when they didn’t have a firm date, in case he should want her at the last minute of his day’s schedule. This in itself was not an overly irksome bind, for in any relationship the details of time and space must find some agreement. And when two people are fond of one another, considerate, and genuinely in touch, their desire to be together authentic, what might be a frustrating responsibility becomes a pleasant discipline. Since the night when Gail realized that she and Eliot had feelings for one another which subsumed all the differences of age and looks and wealth, an attitude of forgivingness spontaneously arose in her and bathed all their dealings with a soothing oil.
Then, the night before, Eliot stood her up. He was to have picked her up at her apartment, a place he disliked intensely because it was so small, so inconveniently placed in relation to his usual route of movement, and because it was so, as he put it, “poor.” Two hours passed beyond the appointed time, and she began to go through that well-known misery of worry born between anger and fear. She called his Madison Avenue penthouse, but there was no answer. Even his manservant was not home. She speculated that he’d been called away on business, but he would have phoned. The only alternative was that he had been seriously injured or killed. She was astonished, and laughed out loud, when she saw that her first thought upon considering that he might be dead was the hope that he’d left her a lot of money in his will.
As it was, she accepted nothing from him on any sort of regular basis. The gifts and treats were fine, but she insisted, despite his urgings, that she keep her job, her apartment, and her general lifestyle, including the way she dressed. The ermine stole hung in her closet. She wore it occasionally, around the house, after showers when she needed something to serve as a housecoat. She knew by untaught intuition that if she became financially dependent on him the resultant bondage would destroy them both.
When three hours had passed she was beside herself with agitation, talking out loud to herself, cursing Eliot, praying for his safety. Finally, she had called Julia, who seemed distant, involved in her own problems, and who offered her nothing but cliches, a litany of probabilities. But the voice was comforting, and the reassurance of an ancient context, the embrace of women when men are off to war. Julia was at the point of telling Gail for the tenth time that Eliot was probably all right when Gail heard the lock snap in the front door, and saw Eliot walk in.
Now that he was there, now that he was palpably safe, the tension between worry and anger cracked, and all the energy that Gail had been using to keep her fears at bay was suddenly released to roar full force into the more violent wing of feeling. At once she was furious, vindictive, mean. Now no excuse of his could possibly suffice to placate her. He had offended her beyond words, and she would tear him apart.
None of this proceeded as a conscious process, nor was it immediately apparent in her behavior. She simply looked at him while he removed his jacket, his tie, kicked off his shoes and loosened the top button of his shirt.
“He’s here,” she said into the phone, her voice level.
“Oh, how wonderful,” Julia said. “You see,” she went on, “you did all that worrying for nothing.”
“Yea-a-ahhh,” Gail drawled. And then, after a pause, giving Julia the warm back draft from the malevolence she was beginning to thrust at Eliot, she said, “Thanks an awful lot, love. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
When Eliot finally glanced over at Gail, he knew he was in for it. What made it worse was that he was guilty, in large letters. And in a way that was totally beyond his ability to expiate. He had been with another woman, but the woman was Julia.
He and his secretary had already had a fling, more than a year ago. It had run its course within two weeks, and had included three nights of pernicious ass fucking, acting out the slave-master undercurrent that informed all their daily business vibrations but which they were too civilized and too fixed on fiscal efficiency to get mired in. They rationalized the affair as a necessary blowing-out of gaskets, the way a person who drives a car in the city all the time will occasionally take it on the highway and run it at a hundred miles an hour just to give the engine its head, let it feels its power, and blast an the accumulated soot of mediocre speeds from its metal chambers.
When they met for the final night, they decided that that would be the final night. Julia’s guilt over Martin, the potential havoc that an emotional storm might have on the business, and the fact that they enjoyed the carnal combat a bit too much for comfort, brought them to this reasonable conclusion. But they had tasted blood, and both sensed that one day they would return for another bite, if only a quick one. Often, when Eliot watched Julia move past his desk, a taut curve in a tight dress, he remembered her kneeling under him, sucking at his cock with her asshole, her buttocks opening and closing like spastic clamshells. And she caught his glances in the pit of her tight hole, twitching momentarily at the thought of all those millions of dollars’ worth of raw force distilled in a hard cock and mean mind reaming her until she fainted, overwhelmed and corrupt.
That afternoon had proved the destined time. Julia was sending off the horny news that there was no longer any man in her bed. Eliot had known about the formal breakup, of course, but it took a week for the impact of the fact to hit them both, and almost two months to detonate. And when it did strike, they fell like soldiers before machine guns. Eliot, who hadn’t been thrown off balance in twenty years, allowed himself the mistake of not even calling Gail to cancel their date.
He couldn’t stay at the office or go to his own apartment because Gail would be calling both places, and even he wasn’t callous enough to be fucking Julia while his mistress and her best friend was ringing the phone. So, when the space between him and Julia got so thick that they could barely talk, he offered to drive her home after work. She accepted, her knees a bit weak. And they were on her bed, drinking coffee and relaxing after a two-hour fuck when Gail called, using the special signal—two rings, hang up, then call again—that Julia had given to her friend because she wasn’t answering the phone to anyone else.
“Oh Lord, that’s Gail,” Julia had said, realizing for the first time that she was not only putting herself in a situation in relation to Martin should he find out, but also to Gail. She was in bed with her best friend’s lover. Yet she felt compelled to pick up the receiver.
As Gail spoke, spilling out her worry, Julia understood the deeper horror of the situation. Eliot had stood her up in order to accomplish this tryst. As her eyes narrowed, Eliot saw that he was in double jeopardy, and should Martin find out, it would be triple. He and Julia carried on a conversation in gestures and eye contact as he dressed and maneuvered his way out of the apartment. He sped to Gail’s place and found her still on the phone when he arrived. He saw from her look that Julia had not told her the truth, so he was off that particular hook. But he now had to face Gail’s anger. And he was wise enough in the ways of the world to know that she would use this incident as an excuse to unload on him every resentment she had garnered for the past year.
“A beast of a day, darling,” he shouted out with gruff forced humor. The best tactic was to smooth over any reference to the fact that he had kept her waiting for three hours. They both knew it, but any words calling attention to it would merely serve as detonator for the explosion. He needed to buy time and space. The first to allow her to go through some changes on her own before focusing on him, and the second to take a shower. For if the fight went as these things usually did, it would end spontaneously in a fuck. But he still had vaseline and Julia’s secretions in his pubic hair and on his fingers. It might go unnoticed, but that was taking a very big chance. He was prepared, as a last-ditch concession, to admit that he’d had another woman, a prostitute he would say, but preferred not having to go that far.
“I suppose you’re going to explain,” Gail said. Her voice was fingers stuck to an ice cube tray pulled right out of the freezer. Her eyes were those of the captain of a life raft looking down as he clubbed your fingers off the rim because your weight was dragging the boat down. She had all the force of moral righteousness behind her, that quality which has launched crusades and bloodbaths of all kinds. His crime had tied him to the post and she was flicking the whip to test its power of attack.
He was caught edging back toward the bathroom. He was so far off guard that he imagined his smell carried across the room and that Gail was already picking up the aroma of an alien beast.
It’s so fucking feral, he thought. We pride ourselves on our sophistication and intelligence as human beings but the only thing we get from our big brain is the ability to deal with our biology in a more shifty way.
“I’m sorry, darling, you know I am,” he said, knowing that his best tactic would be to soften his posture, to move toward her, to say in body language what could only be exacerbated by words. But there was the smell. He couldn’t afford to get too close.
“It’s like being a teenager again,” he said to himself. “Be home by nine o’clock, don’t stay with that rough crowd, do your homework, brush your teeth.”
“I’m an awful mess,” he said out loud. “I just have to have a shower before anything else.” And then, with a stroke of virtuoso daring, “Would you be a sweetheart and make me a drink? I’ll just be a minute.” And before she could recover from his request, before she found the pacing once more, he had zipped away and was inside the bathroom with the door latched behind him.
She glared at the door for a few seconds, and then went into the kitchen to prepare a vodka martini. The first broadside had ended without any serious damage on either side, and was more like a skirmish than an outright battle, having the flavor of two battleships feeling each other out before getting down to serious warfare.
Gail smiled grimly to herself as she made the drink, acting out the ritual of tumbler, ice, alcohol, and lemon. Part of her couldn’t help but be relieved that he was back; her worry had been genuine. But now he had to pay for making her worry, and she was to be allowed to whip him until her anger was drained. Afterwards, she knew, they would make love. It was perfectly obvious to her that he had been with another woman. Its very transparency, in fact, provided the edge of amusement that kept her anger from total venom. She knew that he was at that very moment washing off the traces of the crime.
Gail wasn’t jealous of Eliot on the level of superficial encounters. She knew the sort of appeal he had, and the amazing resources of erotic energy. During an average day, he would come into contact with several high-powered attractive women, or young impressionable secretaries. It’s odd, she pondered, one thinks of a secretary as somehow being in a different category from a woman, as though it were a species all its own. She knew that Eliot loved her, insofar as he was able to love, given his enormous defense against feelings. He often reminded her of the little boy who, at the end of the cowboy film, is disgusted that the hero kisses the heroine instead of his horse. She would have been threatened to the core if she had had any suspicion of his approaching a serious relationship with someone else; but when she imagined him with a woman, it was always in the form of a conquest; and that gave her a small sexual jolt between her legs. No, her state of mind at the moment was not rooted in jealousy, but in simple indignation at having been left waiting and worrying.
Eliot’s passage was not so straightforward. He was in potentially very serious trouble. If Gail ever learned that he had been with Julia, there was no telling how violently she might react. A brief image of her rushing at him with a kitchen knife flashed through his mind. Or she might just collapse, which would be more difficult to deal with. Gail sitting woodenly in a chair, her eyes vacant, her jaw slack, the sorrow of double betrayal turning her skin to chalk held far more terror for him than any histrionics of anger ever could. But that was only the beginning. For after her came Julia. She had not known that he had a date with Gail at the very moment she was arching her buttocks and inviting him to penetrate her and drive her to that form of shameful glory which we call the orgasm. Their meeting was touchy enough, but they tacitly excused one another on the grounds of prior agreement, and the fact that they had already proved they could fuck without its spilling out into their lives. Besides, there had been a sense of fitness in their getting together, a karmic balancing that could not be defended on rational grounds. But when Gail called, and Julia learned what the situation was, the vibrations in her apartment began to fog all visibility beyond the strong message that he had better leave at once. His only salvation with Julia lay in his certain knowledge that she would not hurt her friend by letting her know what had happened. But she could and probably would make life very difficult for him at the office for a few days. As he soaped his crotch a second time, feeling foolish about doing it, he tried to take a quick inventory of exactly how vulnerable he was to Julia. He shuddered. She had enough on him to send him to jail for ten years. Not that he had ever done anything blatantly crooked, but that more than a few of his deals resulted in safety variances being waved via judicious gifts to mine inspectors. He just knew that a prosecuting attorney would consider the payments bribes, and that was an ugly word for which people were arrested and put in prison.
