The Sensual Mirror Read online

  “I don’t really know what to say,” Martin said. “You act and sound like you’d inherited a million dollars, and I can only be happy for you. But it’s no money in my pocket, and then, for all I know, you may be hallucinating and projecting like crazy.”

  “I wouldn’t expect any other response,” Robert replied at once. “If someone had come on to me that way three years ago, I would have reacted in exactly the same way. And maybe not even as gently as you are doing.”

  “Is it ever possible to upset you?” Martin said abruptly.

  “If you can find a me in me, I guess you can upset it,” the other man shot back. And then smiled shyly. “That’s a bit of a boast,” he went on. “That’s the ego claiming that there is no ego. If I were to say something like that in Babba’s presence, he’d whack me with his stick.”

  “What about his ego?”

  “Babba is a perfect and authentic manifestation of Divine Consciousness in human form,” Robert told him. And then, seeing the look that crossed Martin’s face, added, “But unless you are touched by his Grace, those words will only put you off.” He glanced down at his wristwatch. “We have a half hour. Why don’t we walk over? We’re meeting at a devotee’s loft tonight, on Chambers Street down near the World Trade Center.”

  Again, Martin felt a tug of hesitation, and when he examined it saw that it was a conditioned reflex from his days of living with Julia when he was continually subliminally on schedule, when they called each other to say they’d be a half hour late, when they had no liberty of movement. Now he saw that was as much a security as a fetter, for while he had been denied the freedom of exploration of time and space he was also protected from wild and ragged influences. As he paid his half of the bill, and the two men walked out into the spring evening, he was taken by an unreasoning excitement, a sense of high adventure out of all proportion to merely walking twenty blocks to see an Indian holy man.

  It must be an indication of the degree to which I’ve been leading a sheltered life, he thought.

  “I’ll follow you,” he said to Robert, and the tall man turned right, heading southwest toward the river.

  They walked down Greenwich to Seventh Avenue and then headed for Sheridan Square. They didn’t talk for a while, enjoying the kinesthetics of their stroll. Martin strode with an almost military precision, his arms swinging widely in exact counterpoint to the movement of his legs. Dressed in loose slacks and a sports shirt, all in dark blue, he might have been on parade. Robert wore his customary white—baggy yoga pants and a loose madras shirt. He moved more like a robot on skates, his feet sliding forward while his legs followed unbending and his torso glided without torque. They drew more than the average number of glances for the attractiveness of each was compounded by the presence of the other. For most of the way, it was Martin’s erotic turf, for the warm night had flushed thousands of scantily dressed women onto the streets, and they now minced, pranced, strode, strolled, marched, and ambled past, in skirts, jeans, shorts, and dresses. Martin could not control his eyes. The lurch of breasts, the sway of buttocks, the bulge of cunts rubbed images against his brain like the eardrum-raping klaxons of fire engines blasting their way through traffic. His cock stirred and grew stiff enough to provide an embarrassment and he forced himself to stare at the sidewalk until the tingling tumescence had been strangled at its psychic root and starved into submission to social reality.

  But when they turned onto Christopher Street, the number of women on the sidewalks dropped to practically zero. The change was so abrupt that one might expect it to be more noticeable to a casual passerby, in the same way that the shift from concrete to grass at the edge of a park impresses itself upon the attention. But Martin had already retracted his sensors, and so remained oblivious of the shift of gender.

  Now it was Robert’s turn to run the gauntlet. This was the most notorious homosexual neighborhood in the country, the place where the historic Stonewall riot had lit the torch which flamed into the movement known as gay liberation. Here, to be heterosexual was to be out of place. Every half block a bar spilled its particular variation on the subculture into the streets, so that one passed clusters of men dressed in levis, or in leather, or as cowboys, or others whose clothes suggested those of women. Bookstores offering homosexual literature and movies and backrooms where orgies took place served as beacons of identity. Men held hands openly, and late at night it was not uncommon to find men necking in hallways, sucking one another in parked cars, or screwing each other behind the trucks parked near the river.

  Robert’s eyes were magnetic mirrors, attracting and reflecting glances all up and down the narrow boulevard. He was well known here, and within a few minutes had acknowledged looks from five men he’d had sex with during the past month. But such was the attraction of the strip that hundreds of new faces appeared each week, from other neighborhoods, from New Jersey and Connecticut, from Europe and California. This was the support that Robert had spoken of earlier when he explained why he had decided on the gay life. A man arriving in a strange city usually ended in a sterile hotel room without company or knowing where to find conversation, food, sex, or relaxation. But a gay man had all that prepared for him. The bars, the baths, the special neighborhoods, all guaranteed that unless he were very old or very ugly or very contankerous, he would be able to find all the necessities and a few of the luxuries within a few hours of arrival.

  By the time they reached Hudson Street and began walking south toward the twin towers whose lights had begun to blaze in the polluted gloom of twilight, Robert was more than a bit nonplussed, his nerve endings twanging deliciously. Martin, unconscious of the ambience he had just passed through but no less affected by it, asked, “What does Babba say about sex? I thought that people who became spiritual had to be celibate. Or at least monogamous.”

  Robert smiled. “See that church over there?” He pointed to a small, neat stone structure next to a large garden. “Every Thursday night about a thousand people gather to listen to a wacky old woman cackle about God. She talks like Archie Bunker’s wife and claims she’s having an astral love affair with Pericles. Thirty years ago she and a friend took a few hundred dollars and went to India on a sort of lark. She came back strange and holy and wild. But she has a real power, and she is building a strong following. Anyway her leaning is toward celibacy. Shooting the juice up the spine instead of out the lower plumbing. And that’s valid for those who are in sympathy with her. What I’m trying to say is that there is no one way to God, since God is all there is. Only God exists. Everything we know is just one or another modification of that eternal consciousness, that infinite energy. To know God you only have to become yourself totally. And that, as you know, can take a dazzling variety of forms.”

  “So you can kind of do whatever you like?” Martin asked.

  “Sure,” Robert replied, “so long as you know who you are. If you think that you are this individual named Martin Gordis, so tall, so many pounds, then whatever you do is a product of delusion. But when you know, not just intellectually, but throughout your entire being, that you are the universe and all that it sustains, then you are free. Because at that point total freedom and total lawfulness are one and the same.”

  “More paradoxes,” Martin muttered.

  “Nothing but,” Robert said.

  “So are you at that stage?” Martin asked. “Is that why you can be homosexual?”

  “Not at all,” Robert laughed, as though it were the most amusing thing he’d heard all day. “Although there is no discrepancy between enlightenment and being gay. Babba says that when you are clear, there is no fixed form that you must take. But until you are clear, you should enjoy the form you are in, understanding it, rendering it harmless to others, while the deeper process of understanding works inside you. When you attain realization, then you may continue in that way or not.” Robert laughed again. “When I went to Babba with my homosexuality, I was ready to give
it up, you know, to make a big sacrifice in order to be saintly. But all he did was to wrinkle his nose. Then he leaned forward and said, ‘You find pleasure in the hole where the shit comes out?’ Well! That coming from this holy man, in a thick accent yet! I almost fell over. But he repeated the question and stared at me until I nodded my head. He looked around at the others in the room, mock consternation on his face, and then launched into a long story about a monk who had a binding passion for mangoes.”

  The two men walked along in silence for half a block before Martin realized that Robert had finished the tale. “That’s it?” he asked.

  “It was enough,” Robert replied. “It put the whole thing right in its proper perspective.”

  “And you had to do all this in front of a room filled with people?”

  “But don’t you see,” Robert said quickly, “that he took the thing I was hugging to my chest as my own private problem and put it in such a humorous and wide context that the thing just fell away. What Babba was saying was that sticking your cock in another man’s ass is a rather bizarre bit of behavior, but no more or less remarkable than someone’s having a passion for a certain kind of tropical fruit. It isn’t the fruit or the asshole which provides the impediment, but one’s attachment to the thing, to the sensation, to the need. And when it was exposed to all the others in the room, everyone had a chance to examine his or her own pet problem, whether it be drugs or booze or romantic love or money or fear.”

  “So he gave you permission to do whatever you wanted sexually?”

  “No, he let me know that he wasn’t going to take the responsibility for my choices. He’s not a leader or a teacher in the conventional sense. He’s a guru, which means that he does nothing but show us the living reality of God in human form. When you see that, then your life begins to change, even though it might appear on the outside that you are doing exactly the same things. He rarely gives an order, or even makes a suggestion. So, when that pressure was removed, I stopped assuming any postures in relation to being gay, and just began to be it. And when that happened, I did begin to change. I stopped using grass and poppers. I had also been on the road to getting into a heavy S & M trip, and that stopped. I extricated myself from the more kinky loops of the gay belt. I stopped hurting myself in such gross and obvious ways. And it was then that I discovered yoga, and became a vegetarian. And Babba didn’t tell me to do any of this. He just gave me his Grace, and a certain kind of light began to flow through me.”

  “It sounds quite beautiful,” Martin said, a bit sourly. He had reached the point where the effulgence of another person starts to cramp one’s own basic dissatisfaction. They walked for another block in silence as Martin’s mood grew heavier.

  “Why don’t we cut over to the river?” Robert said. “We have a few minutes. We can sit down and watch the last bit of sunset over the Jersey slums.”

  “You’re the guide,” Martin said, but the change in direction and topic halted the movement of his funk, and he regained a sense of curiosity and excitement as they came in view of the water.

  The space immediately in front of them was a huge construction site where nearly five thousand acres of river had been corraled and was being filled to provide the ground for Battery City, a complex of high-rises, parking lots, shopping centers, and parks. Behind them rose Liberty Village, five forty-story buildings with as much élan as a Moscow suburb, drab brick structures which managed, despite their newness and height, to appear gray and squat. The whole area was dominated by the twin towers of the World Trade Center, latter-day pyramids erected as monuments to a dead civilization. This was old New York, the first portion of Manhattan to be settled, then forgotten as the action moved uptown, leaving behind Wall Street, the Fulton Fish Market, and block upon block of warehouses. Now the turf was being reclaimed. As usual, the artists had arrived first, moving into deserted lofts, turning sooty and abandoned spaces into airy studios. The developers followed suit, blotting out the sky with expensive projects. And after them, pots and pans clanging on the sides of their buckboards, the merchants. Finally, to give the kiss of completion, the former owner of Max’s Kansas City chose Chambers Street as the site to open his new bar-discotheque-restaurant, and with that came the progression of self-conscious scenicruisers, to be followed, ultimately, by teenagers from Queens anxious to discover the in crowd.

  Martin and Robert sat on a thirty-foot length of rusty pipe large enough to hold a Great Dane. The sky was the color of cement. Cars and trucks thudded by under the closed-down West Side Highway. Two drunks sat in front of a deserted pier building and waxed philosophical over a pint of burbon that they passed back and forth like lovers swapping spit.

  “Julia’s probably taking a bath,” Martin said. Robert continued to stare ahead. His mood had suddenly turned pensive. But Martin was speaking more to himself than to the other man and so Robert’s inattention made no difference.

  “She used to complain that I came home too early every night and spoiled her favorite hour. She said that she looked forward to that hour of solitude all day. I began going home an hour later but that didn’t work either. There was no way to hide the fact that I was an intrusion into her space no matter when I arrived.” He balled up both his hands into fists. His face had become hard, tight. Old angers licked at his mind.

  “Maybe I should have been more forceful. A few times I found her lying on the couch wrapped in a towel and I took her right there, thrusting into her mood with as much strength as I plunged into her body. And it was glorious, to transform her in that way. But when it was finished, the lassitude returned. We would make dinner and drift toward night, but I was no closer to her for having made love to her.”

  “It sounds more like fucking than lovemaking,” Robert said, suddenly returning to the conversation.

  “Well, what else can you do when the person you’re with doesn’t respond except physically? Yes, you’re right. It was fucking. And for the brief time I was driving her to orgasm, she was alive to me, like a corpse being prodded with electric current. And her very distance drove me mad. All her beauty was there in my arms, her mouth sucking on mine, her fingers digging into my shoulders. And all the signs of passion appeared, the wetness, the sounds, the tremors down the spine. Her legs were like arms, supple and vital around my waist, my back, even reaching around my neck. You know? She held nothing back, but it meant nothing. Because the moment we finished, she drifted off into her reverie, her endless self-absorption.”

  “It’s difficult for me to comment,” Robert said. “I take what you’re saying at face value, but I’m hearing only one-third of the story.”

  “A third? Don’t you mean a half?”

  “No, in any relationship there are three people. Him, her, and us. To understand it all I’d also have to hear her out, and then see what patterns the two of you act out that neither of you as individuals are aware of.”

  “I suppose you’re right. And I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Except that whoever you get involved with next will present you with an opportunity to face these questions again, and not so academically as you are now doing with me. Unless you’re going to become gay or celibate, you are going to go through the same mill again.”

  “You mean I’ll pick someone like Julia again?”

  “Not necessarily. But any woman you live with will provide you with the force of her being, and that presence will flush out all your tendencies, negativities, weaknesses, patterns of withdrawal, power games. Ultimately, it is yourself you have to deal with. This is what any discipline does, it forces you to face your intrinsic waywardness. But when the source of that discipline is someone emotionally involved with you, the issues get confused, which is why it’s better to make that kind of primary relationship with a guru, who remains stable and doesn’t get petulant.”

  “But you can’t fuck a guru.”

  “Fucking’s not the issue. I’m
sure you’ve fucked quite a few women. But none of them put you through these kinds of changes, did they? I think that the problem comes from the way in which we transfer the sort of interpenetration we experience in sex to other areas of our lives. When someone’s giving you head you cry out, ‘don’t stop.’ But when you wind up living with that person, you need to cry out, ‘Please stop.’ The hardest thing in the world is to find the proper distance on the morning after the intimacies of the night before, and to do that as an ongoing process, day after day. I’m trying to do that with Babba, who’s a master of that game, and we’re not having sex. And with all that, it’s terribly difficult. For a man and woman to try it, in the pressure-cooker of a marriage, without a teacher to help them, is practically suicidal.”

  “I reached that point,” Martin said, riding the crest of the other’s verbal wave. “I used to sit in my office at the club and toy with the .38 that’s kept in the desk for protection, taking the bullets out and pointing the barrel at my temple and pulling the trigger. One night, and it makes me almost piss in my pants just to remember this, I actually played a game of Russian Roulette. I kept one bullet in the barrel, spun it, and took the chance.”

  Robert turned his head and looked at Martin with a kind of curious respect. He did not for a fraction of a second doubt that Martin was telling the truth, and the idea that this very conventional man, almost obsessed with health and physical perfection, should take such a risk was exhilarating.

  “I take it that the bullet didn’t go off,” he said. “You must have been in quite a state.”

  “There was barely a me to be in a state,” Martin replied. “That was a good part of the trouble. I got so involved in her, in us, that I lost touch with myself. By the time I started playing with the gun, I was a walking catatonic. I went through the paces, but everything had lost its flavor. I even stopped looking into the women’s locker room on the closed circuit t.v.”