The Sensual Mirror Page 4

  After classes, she’d returned home and spent the afternoon literally fluttering about, bathing, getting a bit high, staring out the window, playing with her cat. She was going to see Julia at eight, and until then had nothing to do but think about the extraordinary event of the night before, Eliot’s proposal of marriage.

  It had been a year since she’d met him in Julia’s office. She’d been somewhat put off by the short, squat man with his blunt fingers and vulgar staring at her breasts. But at the same time, something in her had tingled. Perhaps it was the wealth he controlled, or some unworked-out fantasy about being whisked about the world in a private jet. The speculation about prostitution, which visits most people who are honest with themselves, had struck her sharply, given that fact that it could become a reality, and it carried more clout than she’d expected. She was old and knowledgeable enough to understand that her probable destiny, given the way her life was moving, held nothing more fascinating than becoming a spinster schoolteacher, or the wife of a high school principal. Unless she were rescued by some utopian adventure or a pleasant bit of wickedness, she had many dull years to look forward to.

  When Eliot came on to her, directly, strongly, holding out a promise of promises, she found herself responding to the potential behind the invitation. He took her number, called her two days later, and that night she was lying on his bed, looking at herself in the mirror fastened to his ceiling, as he reamed her wildly and piled into her like a fullback blasting into a line. That much she was prepared for, but what took her totally by surprise was the tenderness that followed. Her orgasm had been hard and fierce, a grinding affair which had her tucking her cunt down between her thighs, contracting her buttocks until they were rock hard, and offering Eliot nothing but a simple hot hole to fuck. Her pelvic resistance was offset by the wealth of expressiveness showing on her face. He had to fuck her for more than an hour to get past all the obvious defenses she threw up around letting go. It was a game he enjoyed more than any other. It was always a bit strange for him when beautiful women went to bed with him. He knew that they were usually mesmerized by his wealth, but he didn’t understand how that translated into the odd forms of abandon they manifested once they were both naked. He did not have the capacity for abstract thought which would have uncovered the connecting factor: the same force which drove Eliot to power and money revealed itself in his love-making, a kind of sensitive brutality almost irresistible to vulnerable women.

  Gail’s attitude had been, “Let the son of a bitch work!” She found herself curious about what he would be like, what it would feel like to have all that energy exploding inside her. But she wasn’t going to give anything away. Ironically, by holding back, she gave everything away. For Eliot knew how to go after a woman, how to punish and how to caress, how to thrust and how to hold back, how to tease and how to satisfy. And he was tireless. And a true enjoyer. He moved into her from a score of different angles, moving until he could feel the juices flowing in her and then, before she could reposition herself, would shift direction and speed, catching her off guard, probing yet another stretch of her secret cunt. All the while his hands and eyes glutted themselves on the feast beneath him, the naked breasts, so bold and defenseless, and her priceless ass, lean and lush.

  The part he liked best was pressing his lips against her mouth and catching her moans in his throat. After a long time, she began to break up inside. Her legs parted and rose into the air, her arms circled his shoulders, her tongue flooded his mouth, her eyes flew back inside her head, and she pumped her hips steadily and wantonly into his pistoning cock. When she began to come he felt the beginnings of his own orgasm. They held on to one another tightly and then let go, forgetting who was tall and who was short, who was beautiful and who was ugly, who was rich and who was poor, who was man and who was woman.

  Later he was solicitous, kind, even making them both a midnight snack, and over coffee they talked about their lives, openly, simply. The magic of sex had worked its wonders once more and two people who had been anonymous creatures now saw one another as intimates.

  When Gail woke up the following morning, she suffered an emotional hangover. There were several minutes when she might have pushed herself out of bed, dressed, and left without a backward glance, glad to have had the experience and even happier to be finished with it. Eliot lay on his side, his face darkened by a one-day growth of beard, showing his age in the texture of his skin. She slid over to the far side of the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress. Something caused her to hesitate. She felt his eyes on her back and knew he had awakened also. He rolled over toward her. She half turned. It was a very naked moment. They did not have the excuse of nighttime intoxication; of the wine, of the adventure of exploration . . . the almighty first time. They knew each other’s smells and blemishes and evidences of mortality. They had heard each other’s stories. They had served as handles for each other’s fantasies. They were even, and could quit clean, without blame, without bad feeling, without any imbalance.

  But something drew her back, some shifting heaviness in her chest which had her sagging back, falling by degrees onto the sheet, her face coming to rest on his thigh. She shuddered, closed her eyes, and took his cock into her mouth. As she went down on him, he ran his fingers through her hair. She blew him until he came and she swallowed his sperm, the first man with whom she’d done that in nearly a year.

  They saw each other heavily for two or three months after that. She wasn’t taken for a ride in his jet, but she ate at restaurants she hadn’t known existed, places which had no sign out front and no prices on the menu. She got to know what it felt like to drive to East Hampton in a Bently. Expensive trinkets collected on her dressing table. When he gave her a brooch worth eight thousand dollars she knew she had crossed a definite line. And it took nothing for him to slip a folded packet of hundred-dollar bills into her hand and say, “Why don’t you treat yourself to something beautiful, Beautiful?”

  One morning she could no longer hide from herself the fact that she was hooked. She liked the sensation of floating about on a magic carpet of money. She liked the flow which surrounded powerful people. She liked the way he fucked her.

  “All right,” she said to herself, “I’m a kept woman. I’ve had fantasies about it, and it’s happened. Now what?”

  Then the game began to get really interesting. For while he had her, she also had him. He had developed an addiction for the taste of her, and he followed that through with the same practical ruthlessness which marked his business dealings. One night he slid beneath her, his mouth sucking at her cunt, and asked her to pee on him. She had grown faint and for the first and only time in their relationship, made a mistake. She was thrown into a scene for which she had only a hearsay scenario, and so she told him to beg for it, which she guessed might be what he expected. He had pushed her off him so hard she landed on the floor, flying five feet from the middle of the bed. The fall knocked the wind out of her and when she opened her eyes he was standing over her. His face was a frightening mask.

  “You get to me,” he said, his fists clenched. “And I’m a little crazy about you. So much so that I want to drink your piss. Which is as weird for me as it must be for you. But don’t you ever lose your respect for me. Even if I’m licking your asshole, don’t you lose your respect for me. And I’ll return the favor.”

  An illumination filled her then, and she felt something which she had forgotten could exist, that sudden direct perception which brings another human being into powerful focus. She could see him with total clarity, down to the lines of his thought. To have called it love would not have been accurate, but in terms of the complete emotional awakening she experienced, the effect was the same.

  “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 t
he 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 focusin
g 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.