The Sensual Mirror (21 page)

The Rabbi materialized from a pocket of gloom behind a partition next to where the minister stood. He was a short man, not quite five and a half feet tall. He wore a pair of tan slacks and an orange turtleneck shirt. His hair was cut short and his beard trimmed neatly. He looked as though he had come from the same seminary as the minister. And in fact the two had become friends when they met at an ecumenical council where it had been decided that God was something of an embarrassment to religion. The Rabbi, however, came from a strong tradition, so his revolt into modernism carried a bit more zip to it. He could even be irreverent since he was close enough to a religious sensibility that still carried traces of wonder at the fact of creation.

“How many here never been married?” the Rabbi asked.

Three people out of the seventy-odd raised their hands. One of them was the minister.

“Out of all those who have been married, how many are still with their mates?” the Rabbi went on.

Not a hand went up. The people in the room glanced around at one another, with a certain stiffness at first, and then with a growing humor. They were all in the same boat.

“A lot of thorn, not so much roses,” the Rabbi concluded, and a number of people laughed.

From then on, it was progressively delightful. The Rabbi was a born entertainer. Had he not gone into the formal aspect of religion he would have gone into that informal mode known as show business. His pacing was excellent, and he moved from joy to sorrow, from laughter to tears, with the ease and regularity of a shuttle craft. He told stories of the shtetl, although he’d never been to Europe, and he told stories about his friends. He told stories about his own marriage, and in short order elicited contributions from the audience so that people were unburdening themselves, sharing the private pains and memories of happiness. He effected a real communion, which is the heart of true religion, and a kind of grace entered the room. The mood lightened, a gentle aura emerged, tensions were relaxed. Martin found himself thinking of the way the Rabbi dealt with spiritual stuff in contrast to Babba’s approach. And he decided that the essential difference was cultural. The Rabbi was an American, a regular guy, a mortal. Babba had spent much of his life in a jungle, and his level of consciousness was not such as one might ordinarily find in a divinity school. And yet, once the juice began to flow, once people rose out of their masks and postures and let their souls mingle, then it didn’t matter how the effect had been achieved.

After some two hours, the Rabbi began to wind down, and he called a halt to the proceedings. He took a question from a woman and announced that that would be the last one, and then they could all descend, like locusts, on the food and drink. As Martin turned to look at the woman asking the question, something caught his eye. He couldn’t tell what or whom, but a very brief disturbing flash went off in his head. Since it didn’t seem related to anything he could identify, he dismissed it.

At the refreshment table, everyone was jolly. A good deal of group subconscious had been uncovered and dispersed and the sense of unity was high. It was destined slowly to decline again once the people started to use the energy to begin yet another cycle of behavior exactly like that which led them to this place to begin with. They were like povertystricken workers who suddenly come into a lot of money via a sweepstakes. For a while they expand as far as their dreams, but before very long they discover they are still loutish, uneducated, surly, mean, jealous, petty, and cruel, the only difference being that they now have a six-figure bank account.

Euphoric, temporarily released from all his disciplines, both neurotic and wholesome, Martin cast his eyes around the room. He stood alone, watching the others talking, saying things that people who have just had such an experience should be embarrassed to say, not because of the content, but because they are already sliding into a realm where awareness is put to sleep and only the mouths continue, moving, making noises. Fifteen feet to his side and in front of him, he saw the most attractive woman he’d spotted all evening. She was medium height, wearing a tight black dress and high-heeled shoes which lifted her legs just enough to accentuate the calves. Her hair was short and glowed with an accent of red. Her buttocks were superb, and he was won over. He sipped his coffee and nibbled his cake and began to sidle over to her. She was in fairly animated conversation with a middle-aged man who obviously had the same ideas as Martin. Martin felt both adventuresome and foolish, like a teenage boy at a dance. He took four or five steps, stopped, looked around, waited, then took a few more steps, all the while trying to look as though he were somehow being moved along by an invisible current. But the other man spotted him coming, and his face first twitched in anger, then fell in dismay as he saw the nature of the competition. The man was no match for the perfectly muscled, young, keen jock who was being drawn to the woman’s back with ineluctable force. Martin slowed down his progress, giving the man a chance to bow out gracefully. The man’s words dried up, and in a few minutes he was withdrawing, smiling, but casting glances over the woman’s shoulder.

“She’s magnificent,” Martin thought as he got closer. His need, so long dormant, now threatened to seize him entirely, and he found an impulse to wrap his arms around the woman, cupping her breasts, pulling her high, hard ass into his crotch.

The woman half-sensed his presence, half-gathered from her conversational partner’s reaction that something was going on behind her, and as Martin drew up she turned. He could not look at her directly all at once, nor could he avert his eyes. What he received was a blurred, shifting set of images. Deep-set breasts, a flat stomach, a trace of perfume, a face of sharp features.

There was nothing for it. He had gone this far, and, fighting all the shyness of the man who knows he is not verbally agile, Martin smiled with forced gusto and looked into her eyes.

“Hi!” he said.

She did not reply, but stared at him evenly, a response so cool and unexpected that it totally flustered him. Like the wallflower who has waited all night to ask for a dance in fear that he would be turned down and is then turned down, Martin suffered the hell of the loser.

He was utterly confused, not only in terms of the social awkwardness, but also because the woman attracted him so strongly, with an almost demoniac pull.

“Interesting talk, wasn’t it?” Martin said, blundering forward, peering into the steam rising from his coffee cup as though he were a scientist making a discovery to change the nature of the world.

“Martin,” the woman said. Her voice was calm, flat, and yet, wildly, madly, carried a trace of exasperation.

“How does she know my name?” he wondered. And he lifted his eyes, slowly, traveling the whole length of her body, until he came to her face, thinking all the time, “Maybe she’s a woman I knew years ago. Maybe she’s one of my old students all grown up,” teasing himself with the hope that luck had descended upon him and perhaps given him a lady who was already a bit taken by him.

By the time he looked at her face his expression was set. He was smiling slightly, almost smugly. His eyes had pulled themselves together into a subtle, sharp focus. He was ready.

He looked at her for a full five seconds before he recognized her.

Oh my God, it’s my wife! he thought at precisely the same moment his mouth dropped open and he tried to say her name.

“Oh, Martin,” Julia said, her midwest drawl breaking through her patina of New York speech pattern. She looked at him the way a mother would a child who has covered himself with mud for the third time in a day. It combined the ultimate patience with the ultimate exasperation, thus manifesting an irresistible vibration of parental affection and, as its more sinister underbelly, superiority.

It was the sort of look that would have unzipped the tension in Martin’s hamstrings several months earlier, combining as it did an admission of guilt along with instant forgiveness. He would have melted then, succumbed, buried his face in the ancient valley between her breasts. Now, however, while all that did pass through him, while he suffered all the same reactions, some other force continued to operate within him. It was as though he had become the central character in his own movie and he could watch himself play his role out with humor and detachment. It was as Robert had noted one night: “It isn’t that you become someone else, some superman, some pious thickhead. You keep all your karma, and you continue to do all the asshole things you’ve done all your life. But you don’t put the same energy into it, and so it begins to fade, become transparent. It becomes light, ironic, brief.”

“Julia,” Martin said at last.

“Well, I see you remember my name,” Julia replied sardonically, “even if you did have some trouble with the face and body.”

“You’ve lost weight,” Martin said.

“Fifteen pounds. And I’ve cut and tinted my hair.”

She regarded him with an appraising eye. “What have you been up to?”

He didn’t know what to say. Julia was standing in front of him. Their whole life together assailed him at once, from their first meeting in the school cafeteria, through all the months and early years of euphoria, to the growing darkness and confusion, to the last days of absolute sorrow and anger. And since then, his friendship with Robert, his devotion to Babba, while Julia seemed to fade further and further from his consciousness, until it seemed she no longer existed, had never existed. Yet, here she was. And changed somehow, somehow sharper and somehow sorter.

Her appeal was as strong as the smell of baking bread to someone who’s been on a ten-day fruit fast. And for the first time he understood the erotic aspect of marriage, for this delectable woman in front of him was his wife, his. She was not a stranger, someone with whom the excitement of newness would be offset by the necessity of adjustment. They had already both done their worst to each other, they had married and all that that implied. So the price of admission was already paid.

He wanted to fuck her so badly it almost brought tears to his eyes. He remembered asking Babba about sex, and Babba had replied, “You already did it all as an infant.” Martin had frowned in noncomprehension. Babba had continued, “When you were a baby, didn’t you suck at the nipple for hours? Didn’t you kiss and stroke your mother’s body? Didn’t you try to bury your head between her thighs?” Martin had nodded. “So,” Babba concluded, “has anything changed?” This was the new ingredient. For even though his desire raged, the nascent awareness that had begun to act as a counterintelligence in his daily life was not burned. As Julia’s presence pulled him with the force of a thousand-foot fall at the edge of a precipice, he clung to the memory of Robert and Babba as he would have to thick tree branches. No matter what else happened, he must not let go of his friendship and of the teaching, for then he would be a single man using all his energy to stand firm amidst the hurricane of Julia’s roiling energy, and he would succeed in resisting only at the cost of defending himself against her, or he would succumb and be sucked into the same marriage they had had before.

“Oh,” Martin replied after a while, “I’ve been working. And I’m sharing an apartment with a friend. Maybe you remember Robert. The tall yoga teacher who works at the club. And I’ve been seeing . . . “ He stopped. For an instant he felt that it might be blasphemous to mention Babba’s name. What if she laughed, or mocked?

I’m afraid of her, Robert realized. I’m actually afraid of her. Why? He focused his eyes and looked at her. She’s just a tiny little thing. I could break her in half with one hand. Why am I afraid?

“Seeing . . . ?” Julia added.

There was something about him that bothered her, and she couldn’t tell whether her feeling was annoyance or excitement. He seemed a bit smug, and yet she found that somewhat enticing. She wondered whether he had another woman.

“A man. A teacher. A man called Babba,” he said. “He’s a . . . guru.”

The information nonplussed her. She had no ready response, nor any way to gauge his relationship to this new situation. Martin was the last person in the world she would have expected to get caught up with some Eastern teacher. He had even refused to see a marriage counselor or a therapist. Then she made the connection. Robert. The yoga teacher. Martin was sharing his apartment. This must be part of the involvement. Once again she saw Martin’s suggestibility, what she considered his inherent weakness. A bitter husband once remarked, “A woman does all she can to domesticate a man and then despises him when she succeeds.” Martin was held in that double bind, although the yoke was not so heavy on his shoulders now that he stood somewhat apart.

“Oh. How interesting,” she replied, noncommital, cagey.

“And what brings you here?” Martin asked.

“I thought I might meet a man,” Julia said without hesitation.

An old familiar icepick poked at his entrails. And before he could remember to take a calming breath he shot back, “Horny?”

“A bit,” she told him. “But not desperate. Otherwise I’d be in a bar. I thought this might be a genteel way to feel my way around.” She glanced up at him. “After all, it has been almost four months, you know.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve been celibate all that time,” he said, falling into the rhythm of their joust.

“I won’t tell you that,” she replied.

There was a very long, icy pause. And then he broke, unable to maintain any facade of being cool. “Have you been?” he asked.

She appraised him again. The front of her body was about ten degrees warmer than the back. Standing in front of Martin was like being next to a stove. She felt as though her dress might peel right off. And she could have him if she wanted him, she knew that. If she swayed just an inch he would grab her, might fuck her right on the spot, in front of the Unitarian minister and his arched eyebrows, in front of the Rabbi and his go-go wife, in front of the tepid crowd of mediocre people who collectively couldn’t muster up as much élan vital as a healthy whore on Second Avenue. But what would the terms be? Could they enter and exit cleanly? She took a breath and opened her mouth and let the words slide out without thought.