The Sensual Mirror (10 page)

“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.”

“I didn’t know . . . “ Robert began.

Martin glanced quickly at the other man, looking both sheepish and proud of himself. “It’s a deal I made with the company who installed the security system in the lobby. Three firms were bidding for the contract, but the salesman from one of them offered me a bribe. He set up a hidden camera in the woman’s dressing rooms and ran the line to my office.” He held up one hand toward Robert. “But you musn’t breathe a word. If anyone found out, every woman who belongs to the club would sue us silly. And I’d probably end up in jail.”

“Will you let me come peek?”

“I thought you didn’t like women?”

“I’ll just look at their asses,” Robert said. He smiled at Martin. “I assume you’re feeling better now and using the thing again.”

“Well, now I have the opposite problem. Looking at those wet naked bodies drives me crazy. I’m not a sex-saturated married man anymore.”

“If you’ll pardon my indelicacy, just what’s keeping you from getting laid? I know there are at least ten of the ladies who come to the club who would like nothing better than to drain you of your excess sperm.”

“I suppose,” Martin replied, “that I’m still hung up on my wife. I haven’t had another woman for five years, not counting that little episode in the massage parlor, which was so peripheral I barely felt it. I think I’d be embarrassed with another woman. I wouldn’t know how to hold her or kiss her or talk to her in that sexy way.”

“Nonsense,” Robert exclaimed. “It’s like swimming or riding a bicycle. The body remembers, even if the personality doesn’t.”

“Well, perhaps,” Martin said, but his tone was not convincing.

Robert looked at Martin for a long time, seeing the slope of shoulder, the tension in the brow. He was struck by the contrast between his friend’s powerful physique and weak self-esteem. He was convinced that Martin had no idea how beautiful he was, for in the world of maleness he inhabited the only acceptable word to use would be “handsome.” If he were a bit younger, more impressionable, more given to impossible passions, Robert would have been quite smitten by the other man. But he was able to be somewhat objective, viewing him in part through the eyes that had been trained to see by Babba. More and more he looked at other people and saw their hidden suffering, beneath all their entertainments and smiles. He would have loved to embrace Martin, to hold him and urge him to cry, but he knew that such a gesture would be utterly misconstrued. Instead, he caressed Martin with his voice, trying to reach inside him to touch the core of sorrow.

“Tell me about her,” he said. “Not the problems you had, or the things she did. But about her. Her soul, her heart, her mind, her cunt.”

“I was just wondering whether she’s with someone now,” Martin said after a long while.

“Not that,” Robert urged with intense gentleness. “You loved her. You still love her. Tell me about that love.”

The sky was almost black. A tugboat chugged by on the wide river. On the other shore, lights signaled the existence of an entire world. Homes, offices, factories. Hundreds of thousands of people were finishing dinner, going out for an evening’s pleasure, or settling in front of their television sets. It was all so distant, and yet so immediate. Each light signified a life, and all those lives had their stories. Love, marriage, divorce, children, death, ambition, empires which extended across vast oil refineries or no further than an intimidated spouse. In the face of all that, one man’s tale could only seem trivial, but then, from the viewpoint of God, the whole human story, the entire history of earth, the solar system, the galaxy, the very manifest universe, was equally frivolous. Robert smiled to himself. He felt the glow of Babba’s Grace in his chest. Soon he would be in his physical presence. And maybe the guru would be able to reach out and touch Martin’s heart.