The Sensual Mirror Read online

  “But why did you get so upset? Is marrying me such a traumatic thing?”

  Eliot turned his face away. The next line would be the most difficult he would ever have to deliver, and yet it was necessary.

  “I was afraid you might say no,” he told her, looking at the wall over his shoulder. The minute he spoke the words, the thought flashed into his mind. Maybe she will say no. Again, exhilaration and insecurity zipped through him, and he turned back quickly to look at her, actually curious as to how she would reply.

  A thousand years of conditioning seized Gail at that instant, and when she felt the weight of his penetrating glance, she hid behind a faint blush and went all over coy. He had presented her with his heart and mind and testicles, now resting in the palm of her hand. The feeling of power was delicious, and she didn’t want to relinquish it on the spot. It was not the man that she had power over, but the situation. The ball was in her court, and the nature of the game was such that she could take her time in returning it.

  “I . . . don’t know,” she said, her voice clear and perfectly enunciated like that of a British actress on a small stage.

  The relief that both of them felt was so palpable that the cat, disgusted at the crust that had formed over the meat in its plate, came back into the room, and sprang onto the couch between them, insinuating its body directly into the field of force generated by their mingled auras. They looked down at the animal and both smiled, their hands touching as they reached simultaneously to pet it. It was at once the ideal distraction and symbol, for in its presence they saw the child that would issue from their union.

  “I’ve never been married,” Gail said.

  “Neither have I,” Eliot told her.

  “What does it mean?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. There’s the license and all the legal business. And it’s customary to live together. And then to have children.”

  “And aren’t there fights, and infidelities, and all that?”

  “I have friends who are married,” Eliot said. “And they manage the situation in quite a civilized manner. As far as fights are concerned, this is the first we’ve had in over a year, and it wasn’t much of a battle. Both of us are basically killers, so we aren’t likely to get into scraps. Only clumsy and mediocre people squabble. As far as infidelities are concerned, I imagine we can both be relied upon to continue the discretion and tact we’ve been practicing. I don’t know what you do with whom when I’m not with you, and I don’t want to know. I only ask that you act intelligently. And that you return me the favor.”

  “We’re talking as though it were already settled.”

  “It is in my mind,” he said, and when he checked into his mind he found that indeed it was. The decision had come upon him by surprise, but then he had earned a fortune by making just such snap conclusions. He believed that the intuition worked behind the scenes of consciousness, and when it emerged to take a bow, a wise man let it steal the scene. Thought, the rational faculty, served its purpose by figuring out how best to carry out the dictates of the hunch. Also, he worked very quickly totting up the variables. It would be pleasant to be married, to have a home to return to, to be able to escort Gail around in a legitimate manner. Also, as his wife, she would quit her job, and be free to travel with him. It would be fun to show her the world. She’d never been further from New York than Philadelphia, a fact he still couldn’t fully assimilate, having been in every country in the world except China. And on top of that, there would be the children. He already envisioned a son and a daughter. “And you?” he asked.

  Gail stood up and walked to the window. It was a highly dramatic moment for her, and she surprised herself by feeling all the conventional emotions, going through all the stereotyped reactions. And then there was deep pulsation in her womb, where Eliot’s seed would be planted. At the same time, part of her could not deny its lust for the lifestyle his wife would lead, the travel, the charge accounts, the apartments in the major cities of the world. The sheer prospect of it made her dizzy. And Eliot was fifty-four, twenty-six years older than she was. When he died, she would still be young, and very wealthy. She immediately drove the thought away as unworthy of her, but it had made its point.

  “I know this is going to sound adolescent,” she said after a while, “but I need time to think about it.” She watched his face map out his feelings, going from expectancy to disappointment, and she relented at once.

  “Oh, that’s not true. It’s just that I want to savor it, to sip at it for a few days. And besides, if I say yes too quickly, you’ll think I’m easy.”

  Eliot leaned back against the couch. The cat curled up in his lap. It can’t be bad, he thought. I don’t really lose anything, and I gain an awful lot.

  But his self-congratulations were interrupted by Gail’s exclaiming, “Oh, won’t Julia be surprised!”

  That called Eliot back to the trigger which had detonated this entire train of events, the fact that just a few hours earlier Julia had whipped her panties off and thrown herself face down on her bed and rasped, “Come on, you prick, give it to me. Give it to me dirty, the way only you know how.”

  At the memory, his cock stirred. The cat became uncomfortable with the development and moved away to the other side of the couch. Eliot looked at Gail. She was a very attractive woman. And under that robe she was naked. And now he had not only her pussy, but her womb itself.

  He stood up.

  “How about another drink?” he asked.

  She glanced shyly at him. She knew exactly what he had in mind. Or so she thought. And so he thought. But it didn’t matter whether they did or not. Not that night. For passion was ascendant, and for them passion ruled.

  They burned the sheets until dawn, slept three hours, and then went off to their work, he to the office, she to the school. She called Julia and told her what had happened. “Let’s get together tonight,” she had gushed.

  Julia hesitated before she agreed. Gail was perplexed. They made a date for seven o’clock to talk about their lives.

  Robert and Martin ate at The Peacock, an Italianate Italian restaurant that featured home-cooked soup, pre-Raphaelite paintings, and a steady supply of Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mozart and Mendelssohn. It was a perfect afternoon restaurant for bookish cruising, the women generally self-contained and remote. A perceptive man, however, that is to say, a man on the qui vive, might notice that as the mousy librarian type in the corner hung over her coffee cup and peered into her Proust, her chest might heave with a most unladylike sigh, or her nostrils widen with a tremor of quaveringly suppressed passion. Further inspection might reveal trim ankles, delicate fingers, and, when she noticed him perusing her and looked up to cross glances, four hundred pages of brown eyes complete with an index.

  But in the evenings it was taken over by couples. Single couples, couples of couples, tablesful of couples. Martin had gone there with Julia at least a dozen times and felt that mixture of resentment and reassurance that comes when we see ourselves so blatantly reflected in the social mirror. Each couple was precisely the same, down to the detail of viewing themselves as unique. Martin remembered one dinner hour spent gestalting each woman in the room and reminding himself that only the most outlandish quirks of fate resulted in his being with the woman he was with, that his feelings of love, desire, and even friendship were innate and might be attached to any object. Once that object had been chosen, however, there was a tendency to turn it into a fetish, to make it a prized possession, a there-is-no-one-in-the-world-quite-like-you bit of sentimentality. And yet, when he did not look back at Julia, he realized that he did love her, cherish her, and not any of the others, thet they all existed in alternate or parallel universes. The sensation of being sealed off in a plastic bubble with Julia, forever cut off from the rest of the world, overwhelmed him with such a rush of claustrophobia that he had to go to the men’s room and run cold water on his wrists.r />
  Now he sat with Robert, at the table right next to the one at which he had been with Julia.

  In a sense, Robert and I are a couple, he thought. We came in together, we are focused on one another, we are excluding the rest of the room from this intimacy. And yet, I don’t feel that sense of oppression, of being tied to a stake. There is no anxiety, no clutching, no undertow of echoes.

  “This place all right?” Robert said.

  “It brings back a few memories.”

  “You came here with your wife?”

  Martin nodded.

  “Do you miss her?”

  “Only when I’m horny,” Martin said, then laughed. He was silent a few seconds and added, “I don’t mean that the way it sounds, and yet I do mean it in a way. There are times when I want to be with her, want to very badly. Sometimes it’s to fuck. My very cells cry out for her. At other times, I may remember a word or a gesture, and be almost crushed with the desire to be near her, to smell her, to bury myself in her, not to fuck, but to get lost, to find living oblivion. But the most poignant times are in movie theaters. There are certain films that I know she would love, and just how she would love them. And when the picture is over, I turn and find the seat next to me empty, and then I almost cry out her name.”

  He finished his narrative with a tonal flurish, turning the self-revelation into a sally instead of a cul de sac. He felt, on one level, that he was revealing too much too quickly, and yet something in Robert made it so easy for him to spill these things out. And aside from a long talk with his mother and a fairly brief conversation with a friend, he hadn’t talked about his feelings with anyone. The marriage, the breakup, and the two months since were all locked up inside him. To compensate for his trepidation, he put a lilt to his voice, keeping the mood light and conversational. He was afraid that if he entered the confessional too fully, he might begin to crack up.

  “Have you been in touch with her?” Robert’s questions were gentle, almost tender, but penetrating. It was not so much what he asked, but the quality of genuine curiosity which infused his words. He gave the impression that he really wanted to know, that the information was important, a means of getting to know a person better, something that seemed the most important concern in life.

  The waitress shuffled up. It was the sixth hour of her shift and she began to look like a soldier who was nearing the end of a thirty-mile hike. The image of soaking her feet in hot water and Epsom salt hung over her head like a balloon in a cartoon strip. She flipped two menus onto the table as though they were the first cards being dealt in a hand of blackjack. Knives, spoons, forks, napkins followed. And the reflex action of whipping out the pad, pencil to the ready, a posture she must have assumed several hundred times that day, a proletarian mudra which, manifesting in materialistic society, was not awarded any special significance by those who saw it, even to the point of not accepting it as a signal that she was ready to write down an order.

  “Something to drink before you order?” she rasped.

  “Milk,” Martin said.

  “Tea,” Robert told her.

  The men settled into their chairs and studied their menus. The beverages came. They drank and gave orders for food. Then they sat back again, and watched each other in silence for a while. Martin noticed that Robert had blue eyes, something that he must have registered as a fact of perception. But this was the first time he realized that Robert’s eyes were highly appealing, crisp, intelligent, alive with an inner light.

  It must be all that yoga, he thought.

  “Have you seen her since the breakup?” Robert repeated his question.

  “Oh! I’m sorry,” Martin replied. “I forgot you’d asked me that before. No, not really. A few letters. One phone call. But there is a strong tacit agreement that we leave one another alone.”

  “A cooling off period?”

  “In a sense. But I don’t have any notion that we’ll get back together. Aside from those times when I miss her, frankly, it’s such a goddamned great relief to be alone, that I have trouble imagining putting my neck back into that noose. Living like a teenager again. Home every night right after work. Tied to one another’s schedules and moods. Resenting the way she cuts in on my liberty, and even hating the way I cut in on hers. And there’s nothing to do about it. All that emotional baggage, the fear, the jealousy, the insecurity. Taking two adults and reducing them, through a process of pressure that would make a prisoner-of-war camp seem like a playground, to nagging, sulking, seething monsters who are unable to feel the slightest impulse toward unstructured pleasure without having to swallow a bellyful of guilt.”

  “My Lord, but you sound bitter,” Robert interjected. “But then, so did I after I broke up with Norman.”

  “Norman?” Martin repeated, his eyes opaque with sudden stupidity.

  “We lived together for five years, and it was the same thing. For the first three years we thought it was sex, because we were both so possessive. But then we got over that, and each of us could go out tricking whenever we wanted without any hassle on that score. Sometimes we even brought our good fortune home to share. But beyond sex lay the problem of unstructured time, which isn’t all mapped out by the unrelenting presence of another person in your life, night and day, forever. Oh God, what a nightmare that was! And the worst part was that we still loved each other. But there wasn’t anything we could do. So he finally left, didn’t tell me he was leaving, did it in classic style with a note on my pillow—tear-stained pillow, I might add. I didn’t think I would take it so bad, because we both knew it was coming. So I went out, and partied and did this and that, but I was miserable. And maybe even ready to do myself in. And that’s when I met Babba.”

  “I didn’t realize you were homosexual,” Martin said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, no need to be sorry,” Robert told him. “My mother has quite accepted it.”

  The transposition of keys went by a bit too quickly for Martin to grasp, so he let the implications flutter by and went on with his train of thought. “I mean, I’m sorry if I led you on. I was just being friendly, accepting this invitation, and didn’t want to give you the wrong idea.”

  Robert looked at him with wry affection. What a dumb hunk, he thought. The Lord sure had a sense of humor when he put that conditioning in that body.

  Martin squirmed about in his chair as though he were about to stand up and leave.

  “Well, you can relax,” Robert drawled. “I promise not to fling myself at your knees and beg to wail on your dangling wang. My intention was also friendly. If there was any ulterior motive it’s that I’ve been sensing that you are troubled, and I wanted to talk to you, to get you to talk, to see if it would make you any clearer about whatever it is. And I wanted to bring you to Babba. He saved my life, as melodramatic as that sounds. And I thought that, if he was in a good mood tonight, he just might save yours.”

  Robert’s rapid switches from sincerity to sarcasm left Martin a bit breathless in the mind, but that was a sensation he found highly exhilarating, much like skiing down a very fast slope and coming upon rock outcroppings all of sudden, and having to swivel, pole, kick, and shoot past in a single fluid motion without a trace of hesitation for in that would come immediate disaster. He was never that quick cerebrally, but because he was an adept on the physical plane, he could recognize mastery in others on other planes.

  “I guess I must sound a bit stereotyped,” Martin finally admitted. “But that, uh, homosexuality, is about as familiar to me as workings inside the Kremlin. It just makes me nervous.”

  “It makes me nervous too,” Robert said, and they both laughed, past the first hurdle, already having shared a moment’s uncertainty, intimacy.

  They fell silent again, each staring down at the tablecloth, fingers busy at twirling a bread stick or plucking at a string. Martin glanced up surreptitiously and found Robert looking back at him. He looked ba
ck down immediately, and then laughed briefly, and returned the gaze. He was extremely embarrassed, at the level of a child who is afraid his parents will do something mortifying in public. His ears began to burn and a warm large ball began to glow in his stomach. As he examined his sensations, he realized that he was feeling the same sort of excitement that he used to feel before a football game during his college days. He recalled the stench of tension as he put on his uniform and drank in the brute power of fifty young men, all big and powerful. It wasn’t something he would ever have assoicated with erotic feelings, even though the slight breathlessness and tingling were the same.

  In the restaurant, two women sipped capucino and watched the two men. Robert, tall, thin, each movement quicksilver sparklings through the smoky air; Martin, compact, strong, drenched in all his boyish ingenuousness. The women caught each other staring, and made moues at one another. One lifted an eyebrow, questioning. The other wrinkled her nose.

  “Gay,” she mouthed, without sounding the word.

  The second women looked back at the men, her expression halfway between puzzlement and dejection. She had been troubled for some time now over the fact that more and more attractive men seemed to be homosexual. In fact, it had become a rule of thumb that the more goodlooking a man was, the more relaxed, the greater the probability that he was gay.

  “It’s odd,” Martin said after a while. “We’ve spent so much time together and never really got to know one another. And now I’m sharing things with you that I’ve never shared with another man.” He paused, took a breath, frowned. “Is this what homosexuality is about?” he asked. “Just this kind of intimate talking?”

  “Why give it a sexual twist? Why not call it friendship, or simply humanity?”