The Sensual Mirror (20 page)

The girl glanced professionally about the room, gauging the number of empty tables with her estimate of how crowded they would be that night, balancing the actuality of a small order against the probability of a full dinner, and decided that they could be seated. That art of judgment had been taught to her by the owner of the place. His legendary successes in the bars and restaurants he’d already opened were based in part on the fact that the help had to be smart as well as good-looking.

They sat at a small round table and ordered coffee and pie with ice cream. For a few minutes they didn’t speak, simply letting themselves become accustomed to the ambience, both more quiet and less intense than in the front room. The people here were mostly in groups of two or four, couples who had traded in the hungry excitement of the jungle for the well-fed regularity of the farm. It was not, however, that the current of erotic truth became nonexistent, but that it was insulated, not so naked. After all, when one is alone, the expressions one wears when assessing a strange piece of meat are of one’s own concern only; but if there is a mate or date nearby, it is necessary to become guarded, discreet, sophisticated.

“So. How do you feel?”

Martin pulled his attention back from its global reconnaissance and directed it toward Robert.

“I don’t know. I’d like to report some drastic change as a result of what happened. But I don’t really feel any different at all.”

“Don’t you find that a bit . . . unusual?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when people go through that sort of experience, they usually go on and on about their insights and how they understand it all now and so forth. You may not have been into any of the current crop of salvation therapies.”

“You mean like Primal Scream?”

“Primal Scream, Gestalt, Rolfing, bioenergetics, the whole neo-Esalen grab-bag of fundamentalist psychology. There you get to yell and scream, or to sound off, or to lie on a mattress and curse your parents, and afterwards you and the therapist congratulate one another on the breakthrough and chalk up your insights on the wall, like racking up points in a game of billiards. But they all miss the boat, because they still think that experience is worth something. They operate on the premise that if you have enough experiences, some kind of cumulative effect will take place and one day you’ll have somehow learned something. What’s worse, they begin to get competitive about their experiences, creating a kind of World Series of breakthroughs. And it becomes just another kind of drug.”

“I can see that,” Martin said. “I’ve never been involved in any of that, but I’ve always had the suspicion that it was a fancy kind of masturbation.”

“It is, and it is necessary for a lot of us because you do have to be able to masturbate without guilt before you can learn how to fuck or make love.”

“How is Babba different?”

“Because he is pure consciousness, he never discriminates among different types of experience. And so those who stay with him gradually learn how to approach life in the same way. He never says ‘do this’ or ‘don’t do that,’ but just by being in his presence, one learns how to live. It’s like sitting next to a stove on a cold day. The stove just gives off heat. You sit next to it and you get warm. It’s very simple. Well, Babba gives off consciousness. All the time. It isn’t something he does, it’s something he is. So when you go to him, no matter whether you’re in a good mood or bad, whether you think you’re king of the world or a worthless piece of shit, he looks at you in precisely the same way. Because he doesn’t get trapped in forms or different states. He remains in that one place, that pure consciousness, that eternal energy. So when you went through your heavy emotional changes, nobody there identified with you. Nobody said ‘oh poor you,’ or ‘what a marvelous breakthrough.’ We all understood that it was a very powerful, personal experience, but we also all understood that it was just another manifestation of God, nothing to get all wrought up over.”

The waitress came by with a round wooden plate. She put down the coffee, the pie and ice cream, forks, spoons, napkins. She took a breath and stepped back from the table, checked it out to see that everything was there and in place, waited until one of the men looked up and nodded his affirmation, and then turned to her next table. She had a twenty-minute break coming up in seven minutes and she was almost frantic to take her shoes off, have her own coffee, and smoke a cigarette. After that she had three more hours, and then home where her husband would be up late, studying. A thick black curtain closed over her heart momentarily and her mind lit up with a brilliant image in which she took her Friday paycheck and tips and got on a Greyhound Bus headed for Key West where she would get a room and a job and live a life in which she wasn’t responsible to someone else every minute of the day, where she could stay out all night or spend weekends at the beach and not have to report in or explain. But the image passed. She was two weeks late on her period. She would probably have a baby. And that took care of the next twenty years. Her parents would be pleased, his parents would be pleased, he would be pleased, and she would smile, forget that she had any identity outside of the net of family and friends, and she would be pleased. Table fourteen needed something. A man was sticking his hand in the air like a small child in class asking the teacher if he might leave the room.

“I must say that I surprised myself,” Martin replied after they had put sugar and milk into their coffee and had begun to eat and drink. “I would never have believed I could do something like that, much less do it in public. And then to be so blasé about it afterwards.” He paused, fork in the air. “It’s strange. I’m impressed, and yet I don’t feel impressed.”

“Babba says it’s the difference between drinking water and drinking soda when you’re thirsty. Both will quench your thirst, but the soda will leave a residue in your mouth, which will make you crave more. Truth is like water. It just does the job. And you hardly even notice it.”

“I was really angry with him afterwards,” Martin went on. “For just dropping me like that. I’m afraid I had a few unkind thoughts about him. And probably still do.”

“He’s been called more names than you can imagine. There are times when I’ve been so furious at him I could have hit him with a bat. Once a man tried to shoot him. But when these things happen, you just take a breath and look at what’s really happening. That man isn’t doing anything. He hasn’t asked you to sit with him. You go out of your own free will. And when there, he simply sits and talks. He doesn’t move around very much or do very much of anything. So when you get murderously angry, you ask yourself ‘where is this coming from?’ It’s not from him, so it must be from inside you. And then you realize once more what a guru is. He’s someone who lives continually in a state of consciousness that we can only glimpse. In relationship to him, we find out our own quirks and stupidities and distorted emotions.”

Robert leaned back in his chair, raised his arms over his head, and stretched voluptuously. His spine cracked in several places. He brought his arms back down, leaned forward, and looked into Martin’s eyes.

“So. It’s been quite a night, hasn’t it?”

Martin was made slightly uncomfortable by Robert’s gaze, but for the first time in his life he was aware of the discomfort, and he forced himself to look back, sharing a look of warmth and intimacy with a man.

This is a change, he thought.

“You know,” he said out loud, “when we left the loft I was sure I never wanted to see him again. But now I feel very much that I want to.”

“Your face and eyes are so much softer,” Robert said. For a second he had let himself speak freely, as he would to another gay man, letting his feelings inform his words, without the constant subliminal habitual defense that men assume in the world of daily combat. He was somewhat shocked that he could let himself be that loose with someone who practically personified male rigidity. Martin blinked. It was something that would have made him uncomfortable even if expressed by a woman. But to hear a man tell him that, with such gentleness of voice and ease of expression, ought to have sent him scrambling back inside his cage of reaction.

Instead, he simply smiled. “Thank you,” he heard himself say, and was surprised to feel his impulse to reach out and take Robert’s hand, not to shake it in some stiff, formal fashion, but just to hold it, to feel its warmth, its texture, its wondrous humanity.

A week of Sundays had passed. From the point of view of the immeasurable, sprawling, fantastic, blissfully indifferent universe which was but one of as many universes as it itself contained of atoms, and beyond that, where the mind, boggled beyond belief simply says, “Aw shit!” and goes fishing in a local philosophical pond where it catches itty bitty little wrigglers of wisdom, intelligence, insight, compassion, and only glimpses the big ones, mystery and enlightenment lurking behind rocks . . . from that point of view, nothing happened. Even if one were to regard things from the sun, no change would have been noticed. The planets rotated and revolved, the galactic drift continued, stray comets came and went like horny bachelors hitting every discotheque in town on a Saturday night, leaving a karmic trail blazing across the essential darkness of space. Lower still, seeing things from the vantage point of life, after two billion years, trees had attained the highest form of vital intelligence yet evolved. Below that, a loud, dirty, obnoxious species had succeeded in breeding itself practically to the point of starvation and using its tawdry evolutionary gimmicks, the thumb, the upright posture, and the big brain, to precipitate a crisis of staggering proportions, threatening to take most of the other life forms on the planet with it when it finally burned itself to a cinder or suffocated in its own garbage. At a lower level yet, in its own historical terms, the same species was mired in its ten-thousandth year of warfare.

Given all this, the relatively insignificant changes in the lives of four people living in a concrete human-heap assume their proper sense of proportion . . . to anyone that is, except the four people themselves. They shared the essential stupidity of the species, the notion that what we do or think or feel, or even whether we survive, is of any interest to anyone at all.

And yet, this life is our stage, these words our roles, this body our costume. And perhaps the teachers who articulated the final esoteric truth in all the traditions are correct, that there is no One Mind, no Ultimate Source. That there is nothing, indeed, but the simple facticity of direct perception, that the awareness of what-it-is is none other than the awareness of that-it-is. Then a soap opera would once again be a soap opera, and whether it appeared formally on a television screen or informally in someone’s living room, would make no difference. An egalitarian existentialism would drive a stake through the third eye of anyone who assumed that he or she had some special or more significant viewpoint than anyone or anything else, whether it was the podium of cosmic consciousness, enlightenment, or direct communication from God.

Martin stretched, forced his eyes open, rolled off the bed and landed on the floor in a crouch. He straightened up, went to the bathroom to piss and splash some cold water on his face, and then walked to the living room where Robert had his altar. It was only a large wooden crate covered with a madras cloth. On it were Babba’s picture, showing him wrapped in a grungy blanet lying next to a dirt road near an Indian village. His expression was that of a man who had just been bitten on the toe by a large ant. On either side of the photo stood a candle and an incense holder. In front of it a bowl with several pieces of fruit. Twice a day, followers of Babba’s were expected to sit in formal meditation before his picture, offering him a piece of fruit and receiving his Grace in return. Since he taught that his physical presence was only an illusion anyway, a photo could prove as effective a channel for Divine Power as a body.

Martin lit the candle and the incense. He stepped back, sank to his knees, and bowed three times, hitting his head to the floor with each prostration. Then he slipped a pillow under his buttocks, crossed his legs in front of him, and with a deep sigh, began his sitting. The instructions were simple. He was to keep his back straight, his hands folded on his lap, his eyelids lowered but not closed, and to put his attention into his breathing, following the swelling and emptying of his belly with each inhalation and exhalation. He was not to become occupied with his thoughts. It was explained that they would come and go, and that he should neither try to suppress them nor indulge in them. And his heart was to become a fountain of yearning, a fireplace of flame, an open embrace welcoming Babba, the Guru, the Bringer of Light, the Godman, the living realization of Divine Truth.

After his initial meeting with Babba, Martin had become fast friends with Robert. They went to films together, they talked to one another on the phone late at night, they even went on tours of Robert’s gay haunts so that Martin might lose some of his prejudice and fear about homosexuality. They went to see Babba several times a week, and after a month spent a weekend with him at an upstate New York camp that had been rented for the occasion. Without his knowing precisely when, or how, Martin crossed a line. It was just that one afternoon, as he was walking down Seventh Avenue, he realized that he wasn’t looking at tits and asses, not with that perpetual frisson of clenched excitement which he had learned to control so that no more than a spasm of light flickered in his eyes. And he saw that he wasn’t thinking about Julia or fretting about what he was doing with his life, but was meditating, quite spontaneously and happily, on Babba and on God. He had, to a small but noticeable degree, detached himself from manifestations and was perceiving the emptiness with which they played out the game of figure-ground. He had called Robert and told him about the experience and Robert said, “Good. The Guru’s grace has been activated in you. Now it will work in you forever, no matter whatever else you do.” That idea, that what flowed from Babba would always be part of him, filled him with such unbounded joy that he spent the next three days floating through his routines in a state of absolute euphoria.

Then Robert had asked Martin to move in with him.

“I won’t make any passes at you, you bastard,” Robert said.

“Then what for?”

“My roommate moved out. I can use someone to share the rent. You must be tired of hotel rooms. We’re good friends. We are both into Babba.” He counted each reason off on one of his fingers. “You’ll have a private bedroom. It’s perfect,” he concluded.

Martin pressed his lips together, frowned, and agreed. And moved in that night. It had been an ideal situation. The two men found that they could live together without a smidgin of friction. They kept the same hours at work, and so their schedules allowed them to divide their days without conflict. They often meditated together, once Robert introduced Martin to the practice, pointing out that sitting was a marvelously subtle technique independent of its virtues as a magnet for Babba’s influence. They fell into the habit of playing chess, and continued going to Babba’s meetings. The one discrepancy came on those nights, once or twice a week, when Robert manifested a certain edgy restlessness, prowled the apartment a bit, and then announced that he was “going out for a bit of air.” Martin knew that he was headed for the bars or the bookshops or baths, and drew a curtain in his mind over the pictures of the things he knew Robert must be doing there.

Now, as Martin sat, he wondered where Robert had spent the night. Usually the tall yoga instructor was up at six, did an hour an a half of yoga, and then sat for half an hour before eating and going to work.

“I guess he stayed the night with someone,” Robert thought.

He reflected on what his feeling would have been had Julia done that. It was absurd. He and Julia had treated one another like children, forcing each other to be home each evening, to explain where they’d been. And why? Was it because of sex? If he and Robert were to become lovers, would they evolve the same sort of strangling hold on each other? It was interesting that the word “lover” was used to describe someone you had sex with. But no sooner had Martin begun to board that train of thought than he realized he was drifting again, getting lost in his thoughts, and he pulled his attention back to his posture, to his breathing, to his feelings for Babba.

Yet, some seed had been planted, for after he finished his formal meditation, after breakfast, and all during his day at work, a certain unease steadily grew on him like the sense that one might have left the oven on three days earlier when leaving for vacation. He alternately nagged at it and pushed it away, but when he found himself absentmindedly stroking his crotch while talking to a woman on the phone, the fact could no longer be denied. He was hungry. Hungry for a woman. Hungry for the smell of hair, the taste of cunt, the texture of mouth, the sound of female voice slipping over the edge of awareness into orgasm, hungry for the heft of a tight, full ass pressing into his groin.

But he was not the simple creature he once was. Before he got married, he would simply have called one of his girlfriends. While he was with Julia he would have gone home and hoped she was in the mood. And up until two months ago he might have gone to a massage parlor or taken up one of the women in the club who were usually on erotic standby. Now, however, he had his image of holiness to contend with. And even though Babba himself had indicated that once a person was enlightened there was no single pattern of sexuality he or she would follow, Martin still carried over the hierarchical prejudice which places random, anonymous promiscuity at the bottom and celibacy at the top.

“If Robert can go out and suck cocks, why can’t I go find myself a cunt?” he said to himself, trying to find justification for what he knew he had to do.

Finally, he compromised. He would take a middle road between outright getting laid and downright going home and gritting his teeth. He leafed through a copy of the Village Voice and turned to the “Socials” section which listed all the alternatives to bars for singles who wanted a more genteel cruising ground. Lectures, public parties, discussion groups, tours. He let his eyes roam around the offerings until he found one that caught his attention. He couldn’t say why, since it seemed no different from a hundred others on the page, but he went by his hunch. It was a meeting of the Humanistic Society, listening to a talk by a Rabbi on “Marriage: The Rose and the Thorn.” It was at the Unitarian Church on Central Park West, and admission was three dollars.

Humanitarians, Unitarians, and Jews, Robert thought. It ought to make a nice contrast to the steady diet of Hindus I’ve been getting, and allowed himself the first laugh at himself in months. He was learning, even though he couldn’t begin to understand the process in that way, that one of the uses of the Guru is as a springboard from which to jump into enticing pools.

All the way uptown on the subway, as he walked to the church, and inside the hall, the gender mood was upon him. He was brimming with male energy, the result of constant interaction between himself and Robert, himself and Babba, himself and himself. And like a Leyden jar riding a tide of electricity, he needed to discharge the tension of fullness, the bursting skin of ripeness. And woman called to him like the original Sirens singing their songs to Ulysses and all the sailors who rode by the treacherous rocks on which they perched, beautiful, long-haired, irresistible in the Sicilian sun.

It was a peculiar form of hominess, not centered primarily in his cock, although that venerable and single-minded organ, sensing that the lash of assumed spirituality and grief of separation from Julia might be lifted for the first time in months, raised its cowl and dared to sniff at the emanations of the millions of cunts that fluttered, flounced, and fretted in giddy profusion all around the town. It arose as though from a long, long nap, a bit cranky but refreshed and hungry. This very night, it might have thought if it could think, I may be gorged with blood, thick, hard, mighty, running amok in the luscious wet folds of a gaping clutching loving valley between a wanting woman’s thighs. And at that, it stirred, causing Martin to smile, just as the young Unitarian minister walked up to him, held out one hand, and said, “Welcome. My name is Jim. I hope you’ll enjoy our program tonight.” Martin shook his hands and began to mumble something but by the time his tongue would function the minister had moved on to the next arrival, a portly man of about fifty-five who smelled like damp parchment.

Martin paid his money to a pleasant matronly woman in her early forties, plump, abandoned by any hope of eroticism, and walked into the church proper, a large vaulted chamber with chairs instead of pews and the most rudimentary suggestion of an altar. It was as though the Unitarians, in their frenzy to disavow any connection to the Christian tradition from which they sprang, made sure to destroy any evidence by which their origin might be traced. A crucifix would have been as out of place there as a male truck driver in a lesbian bar.

Martin felt awkward and displaced. Like a pilgrim driven by a vision who arrives at his particular holy land to find nothing other than surly, hungry beggars, flies, and the stares of demented children, Martin questioned the wisdom of whatever lust took him to this place.

It must be just lonely losers who come here, he thought. Happy people, successful people, wouldn’t be found dead in a place like this. He scanned the crowd, and his spirits rose somewhat. He saw, here and there, an attractive woman. He had to remember to remind himself that he had not come strictly to get laid, nor would he avoid that possibility. He was going to continue as he had been doing, keeping his attention on Babba, on his awareness that the world of appearances was not the only reality. And at the same time stay in touch with his need, the need to do something with the growing sense of power, of centeredness that now made him feel nothing at all like the man who had lived with Julia and turned into a whiner, grumbler, and pussy-whipped bully.

Martin ambled around for a few minutes until the minister called for the attention of the crowd. He struck that pose of authority which lies at the heart of every man’s ambition who enters one of the forms of priesthood, and proceeded to welcome all the people he’d welcomed as individuals now as a group. He was in a peculiar situation. Possibly the youngest person in the room, and theologically committed to the most vague, faint affirmations about the nature of reality, yet by virtue of title and property he was able to gather enough of a semblance of a pose in order to dissemble. He made several feeble jokes, announced that there would be coffee and cakes afterwards, and asked for a nice welcome for Rabbi Gelberman.