The Sensual Mirror Read online

  “It wasn’t wrong, it wasn’t wrong!” she said to herself all at once, thinking of the night before, of her raging need to have a man inside her, of Eliot’s raw strength, and then the phone call, Gall’s worried voice.

  Julia roused herself and leaned forward to pull the plug, letting water out of the tub. As it drained, she shivered again, and thought she heard a sound in the next room. The apartment held its breath and peered in upon itself through her consciousness now as alert as that of a mouse in a room with a cat. The silence of inanimate presence pressed against the noisy consciousness of animal life. Julia shook her head. It was nothing, only her imagination or a stray noise from the street. The only actual sound now was that of the tiny whirlpool doing its dance of dissolution into the copper drain. Julia sat motionless, spectator and actress on the stage of her life. Martin’s absence had become palpable for a moment, and for a few seconds she feared breaking down into tears and self-pity. She was alone, a lively corpse taking a bath. And all the manifest universe, for that instant, served as little more than scrollwork around the mirror of self-absorption.

  Rousing herself from the posture of fixation, she put the plug back in and turned the spigot to let more hot water into the pool that had become her life raft. She was tripping freely, the push given by the marijuana continuing to swing her loose from the moorings of any fixed viewpoint, so that considerations about her job, memories of her husband, and the tingling recall of the morning’s groper could not claim her attention for more than a brief cycle of development. She let the water run until the bath was almost scalding, turning her skin pink. In the rising steam, she saw Gail’s face.

  Gail was her oldest New York friend, and Eliot’s lover for more than a year. Their relationship had quickly assumed that cinematic intimacy which marks closeness in our time, a way of being together which combines conversation about the most intimate matters with a brassiness of style, resulting in a tinny authenticity. Gail was coming over for drinks at eight and Julia was going to have to tell her what had happened or not tell her, two equally unpleasant possibilities.

  “I can’t deal with that now,” she said to herself, and closed her eyes and slid back into the water, letting the heat take her away, away from all linear thought and concern for three-dimensional realities. She drifted gently, by degrees, into a soothing trance. Her senses disconnected from the associative centers of her brain. She still saw and heard and felt, but none of it registered, none of it meant. Her state went beyond even pleasure, for experience itself would have been too active, too brutal a process.

  Thus, when a deep and familiar throbbing began in her belly, it carried no more import than the faint sound of traffic from ten stories below. And when the movement infiltrated her loins and crept past the walls of her cunt, slithering inside like guerrillas taking command of a forest while remaining invisible to the enemy army, she did not stir. Only a fantasy formed in her mind and she rose from her oceanic oblivion at random moments to watch the screen, much as a couple might catch glimpses of a movie between prolonged spasms of necking.

  It was an astral masturbation, and its manifestations reached with measured slowness toward the physical. At first, her body made no gross movements at all. Her hand did not ease between her thighs nor did her fingers slide into folded moist places. Even at her most frustrated, Julia rarely masturbated, for she found erotic tension much too interesting to discharge in a bit of theatrics which had no audience. She knew that the modern liberated woman was supposed to masturbate and to find ideal pleasure, even identity, in the act, but Julia had always considered it a petty satisfaction, bereft of imagination, humor, and conversation. One had to be stupid to masturbate, she thought, unless it were done with someone else there. Her last attempt, two years earlier, had ended when, at the point of orgasm, she opened her eyes and saw herself reflected in the mirror which backed a closet door next to the bed. She looked like an arthritic acrobat trying to do a backbend as she pumped her hips spastically at the ceiling while rubbing her clitoris vigorously with the middle finger of her left hand. The grotesque visual once and for all imprinted its message of silliness on the act and two subsequent attempts had never got past the squirming stage. Of course, Martin’s almost daily assault left little energy for languor, and so the whole issue had faded out of awareness. But now her two months without sex made more keen by the morning’s groper and the previous night’s appetizer with Eliot inclined her toward perceiving the value of something she had been too ready to dismiss.

  She became formless, pure breath, and her subconscious perked like coffee on a hot stove. A boy, who had pulled her panties down when she was six and put his finger as far inside her as anatomy and bravery would allow. Sitting on her grandfather’s lap eating an apple and feeling a hot tingling in her bottom. Her father glancing at her one night as she passed him in the hallway on the way to the bathroom; she was wearing a gauzy nightgown and nothing underneath, and when his eyes locked on her breasts her stomach clenched. The professor of anthropology who had been the first to take her anally, and then had free-associated in her ear throughout the entire time so that she had trouble paying attention to what went on between her buttocks. The first time she tasted sperm, sucking Martin a month after they had been married and suddenly seized by the hunger to have him fill her mouth.

  And then even the images disappeared and she became pure physiology, a smorgasbord of functions. Heartbeat, circulation, vegetative pulses, plasmatic oozings, neurological twitchings. From the depths of inwardness a spark of pure erotic awareness was struck and a flame begun. In the region of her chest, in the vital center near the heart, a fire started to burn. It was sexual and spiritual both, and yet neither, for it was at the source of all manifestation, the source from which all levels of creation spring. She felt an intimation of reality itself, void, resplendent, having come upon her unexpectedly, unbidden, and during a period of bathtub catatonia. Yet Julia could not identify the state, for all her education had trained her to view that thing commonly called God as a mythic figure or an abstract concept. All she now knew was that her whole body had become a single yearning, a scorching poignancy, a cry for return. The heat in her body and the heat around her body, the divine flame and the prosaic hot water, were one and the same, and had the momentary dissolution of ego state been other than the result of a temporary conflux of circumstances, she might have sipped longer at the sweet satori.

  But her focus snapped back with the harsh abruptness of a door’s being opened into a dark bedroom and glaring white light’s falling upon half-closed eyes. Julia sat up in the tub, lifting gallons of water with her, like a ghost trailing mists as it rises from the grave. For a few seconds she was in a blind panic. Shreds of thoughts flapped through her mind like demented bats, her skin screeched its protest at the sudden contact with the air, her heart thudded like loose baggage banging against the hull of a heaving ship in a storm. The room seemed to spin wildly about and for a moment she was certain she would faint. The fear of splashing back into the water, sliding down, her mouth and nostrils filling up, a sputter and a gasp, and then the harsh drowning, filled her all the way into their fingertips and caused her to grasp the sides of the tub. She held on for a full minute until she had regained her inner balance and began to calm down.

  “That’s pretty strong grass,” she said out loud, happy to hear her voice.

  She reached forward and pulled out the plug again, then sat hunched over, her breasts against her thighs, her arms around her shins, until the tub was completely empty. For a long while she could not move, and it took no little effort to stand up, draw the curtain, and start the shower running. She soaped herself vigorously but when she came to washing between her legs she was surprised to notice the secretions that had oozed from her cunt. She parted the lips and a brief flow of viscous fluid, pearly white, seeped from the pink petals and edged toward her thigh, to be stormed upon and swept away in a turbulent stream of water. She
caressed her clitoris experimentally and her knees wobbled. She had built a charge of erotic energy far more powerful than she had been aware of.

  Suddenly she wanted to be lying on a rug, her back lacerated by bristly animal hair, her legs hung wide, while a strong man moved with inexorable slowness and majesty into her, screwing her to the floor and soaring with her off the edges of brilliant precipices.

  “Fat chance,” she muttered as she stepped out of the tub and stood drying herself in front of the full length mirror, viewing herself with exaggerated scrutiny, wondering by what alchemy she might become a seething volcano of lust erupting to the beat of a man’s steady want. Once again she was troubled by the notion that an itching in her crotch could, amplified and ramified, transform her into a pornographic movie.

  She stepped out of the bathroom and into the apartment proper, originally three medium-sized rooms that had been converted into a single space by tearing the inside walls down. It had seemed a good idea when they moved in, flushed as they were with togetherness and the prospect of more spacious living. The total lack of privacy had, however, over time, proved deadly, and they reached that point, known by so many couples, where the mere presence of the other felt like sand in the eye.

  But with Martin gone, the place was quite impressive and more than adequate. Sixty feet long by twenty-five feet wide, with windows on three sides. It was on the tenth floor of a turn-of-the-century building in Washington Heights. The views were of the entire lower two-thirds of the island of Manhattan with its spires and smog, of the Hudson River and the Jersey miasma behind it, and of the George Washington Bridge, path to the open spaces to the north and west. When the sky was clear, the sun set right through the four main windows, as it was now doing, turning everything golden. Julia stood there for several minutes, transfixed.

  It’s worth it, she thought, the loneliness, the insecurity, even the randiness. All of it is worth it just to have this solitude.

  She gazed over the expanse of the apartment, its uneventful features and sparse furnishings made magical by the extraordinary light. From the kitchen against the far wall to the bed and bureau against the other, with the middle space filled with floor pillows, some chairs, a television, stereo and odd pieces, the place had the air of a stage set on which a bit of off-Broadway theatre was about to be enacted.

  Julia glanced at the clock. It was six-forty. Gail was due in an hour and twenty minutes. Julia went to the clothes closet, picked out a semi-transparent nightgown and shrugged into it. Then she fixed herself a vodka and tonic and sat down to try to figure out what she would tell her friend.

  Martin threw off his towel, stretched, and stepped into the steam room. At thirty-five, he owned a physique that made most men wince in secret envy. He was fairly tall, a bit under six feet, and his entire life, from the age of fifteen, had been devoted to physical exercises. He had majored in Physical Education in college and earned a Master’s Degree in Gymnastics.

  His body type was closest to that of a swimmer, lean, lithe, the muscles flat and smooth. He had no sympathy for the bulk attained by weightlifters, knowing it to be detrimental to the most efficient functioning of the body. His own preference was for the parallel bars where he twirled himself about with lazy precision, belying the terrible strength necessary to accomplish the repertoire of rolls, twists and balancing postures.

  He slid the glass door shut behind him and moved into the dense white cloud of heat. At once all his muscles relaxed. This was the most precious moment of the day for him. For the past three years he had worked as Manager of the West Side Health Spa, one of the dozens of emporia catering to the sudden compulsive interest in fitness among the office workers of Manhattan. It was as though, as the city itself continued its long slide into full decay, large numbers of people began to seek salvation in the care and grooming of their bodies.

  The job itself required very little in the way of physical exertion. He planned exercise programs, interviewed prospective members, and exerted a general influence over the staff, mostly out-of-work dancers and actors. It was something he had seized upon when he moved to New York with Julia after their year in Europe. It did not provide the satisfaction of infusing young boys with a sense of the beauty of the body, but it paid more than three times as much as teaching and did allow a certain pleasure of prestige. In any case, he was forced to agree with Julia that it would be pointless to return to small town life and attempt to pick up where they had left off.

  The other advantage of his current position was that he had use of its fairly sophisticated facilities. He worked out every evening, an hour before closing, serving as an incentive or a discouragement for those members who were there to watch him in his narcissistic dance through space. Then, when everyone but the staff had left, Martin, sweating and happy, went to his office, shut off the Muzak, and strolled to the steam room where he sank into the tingling oblivion of athletic exhaustion.

  Now he lay down on the raised tile platform, sighed, and let himself melt. It was the single most exquisite experience he knew. More profound than sleep, more subtle than drink, more satisfying than sex, the utter abandonment of focus following the period of formal intensity provided Martin with the enjoyment of a state he could only describe as bliss. At such times he often drifted into a deep trance within which vast movements occurred. Awesome galaxies of obscured meaning drifted past brilliant rays of pure light which seemed to emanate from the very source of creation itself. Or memories of childhood might skip across the screen of his adult consciousness. Yet he was completely without a vocabulary with which to appreciate, and thus distort, awareness.

  This night, as he let go, as his fingers uncurled, and the subliminal tension in his eyeballs dissolved so that he stopped the habit of looking which usually persists even with the eyelids down, a vision of Julia arose like a specter from the grave to embrace him with icepick anguish. The history of their relationship skimmed across the surface of his memory.

  When they met she was teaching English at the same school and their nodding acquaintanceship, lunches, dating, sleeping together and marriage had followed a pattern totally without surprises. The surprise came afterwards when Julia began to manifest a sharp restlessness that Martin had never suspected in her. She began to complain about the small town they lived in, the tedium of spending the bulk of one’s time with teenagers, and the meaninglessness of processing students year after year like cars on a conveyor belt. There was nothing in which she said that he hadn’t given thought to, but she had imparted an urgency which he found compelling.

  Their years in the city had been tumultuous, beginning with finding a new apartment and ending with their final fight about Martin’s desire for a child. Instead of enjoying their marriage, they merely defended it or held on to it. And finally, they abandoned it. The breakup had come two months earlier when, in classic style, Martin packed two suitcases, and three boxes of belongings into a friend’s car and moved to a hotel.

  The door to the steam room slid open and was quickly closed. There was a slight drop in temperature as a bolt of cool air was sucked into the space. Martin was abruptly pulled from his reverie, something which ordinarily annoyed him. But now he welcomed the interruption, for thoughts of Julia invariably ended in upsetting fantasies, seeing her with another man or getting mugged or raped. He turned his head to one side to face the door.

  “Sorry lo disturb,” a soft melodic voice said.

  “Oh, Robert,” Martin replied. “It’s you.”

  “It usually is,” the other man said.

  Robert’s tall thin body suddenly emerged from the hot white cloud. He was the yoga instructor at the spa and by this time the only one who had been there longer than Martin. Teaching yoga was his chosen profession so, unlike the other employees, he manifested a certain professionalism which Martin appreciated. The two men had developed that kind of intimate anonymity which acts as social currency in most work situations.
Over a period of time they had accumulated a great deal of feeling for the texture of one another’s lives and had learned to read each other’s moods with almost complete accuracy. Yet, neither knew the other’s exact address. Their central conversation revolved around a discussion of the various virtues of yogic versus calisthenic approaches to fitness. And whenever they finished talking about the matter on the level of physiology, Robert would add, “But the yoga that you see, the actual postures and movements, is only the vehicle for something else. It isn’t an end in itself.” He had steadfastly refused to discuss that aspect of it further, saying that it would reveal itself when Martin was ready.

  Aside from this, what he considered a tone of surperiority in Robert’s attitude, Martin liked the man well enough, and even felt drawn to him. His involvement with his relationship to Julia, however, absorbing to the point of obsession, had kept him from fuller contacts with anyone else, including Robert.

  “You do the corpse pose better than anyone I’ve ever seen,” Robert said, referring to Martin’s posture on the slab, lying on his back, legs apart, arms at his sides. “Sometimes I’m afraid you’ll get into it so deeply that I’ll come in here and find only your body remaining.” He sat down on the lower tier just below where Martin lay.