The Sensual Mirror (22 page)

“I had one man, about two months after you left. I had him once. I didn’t spend the night with him. That didn’t seem right.” She looked at Martin to see how he was taking the news. His face was several shades whiter, but the lines showed that he was nowhere near the danger point. She waited for his reaction.

“That seems . . . reasonable,” he said. And then added, “Thank you.”

“It wasn’t for you, you creep,” she said. “It was because of the way I felt.”

“Thank you anyway,” he said.

This was his equivalent of her exasperated mother ploy. This was his rendition of the Noble Husband, strong, firm, warm, accepting, and grateful. It was practically irresistible and Julia might have weakened somewhat except she remembered one evening she’d spent with Gail and they’d talked over possible scenarios that might take place when Julia and Martin finally met. Julia had said, “Oh, at one point he’s sure to do his Noble Husband number. He knows that my knees get weak when he starts gazing into some sorrowful distance.” And they’d both laughed at the image. Now that he was actually there in front of her, actually doing it, the remembered humor returned to put his act into perspective.

“So,” he added, “you’ve had sex with one more person than I have.” This thrust was the hidden dagger behind the Noble Husband stance. The game was to soften her up and then slip the blade between her ribs. However, he hadn’t noticed that the first half of the act did not work its usual magic, and that his thrust would be aimed at an alert and waiting opponent.

“If by that you’re implying that you haven’t been to bed with anyone, then I’ve had two more people than you.”

“But you said there was only one man,” he protested, as outraged as a soldier who had just stepped on a boobytrap.

“That’s right,” she told him. “Only one man.”

He shook his head, blinked his eyes, looked stupid. His brains had begun to flop around inside his skull. The logical progression was beyond his ken, so his thought patterns were bogged down and his cerebral engine was whirring and whining, trying to get the conceptual wheels out of the mud.

She waited until he had gone through his entire repertoire of indicating that he didn’t understand, and then she smiled very sweetly.

“The other person was a woman, darling.” And, after a pause, “Is a woman.”

“A woman,” Martin repeated as though it were the first time in his life he had heard the word and was fascinated by the sheer sound of it. “You mean, a lesbian? You’ve been with a lesbian?”

“The next question you are bound to ask is whether or not I’ve become queer. Shall I answer it for you? Actually, I consider that I’ve become de-queered. I look back on my past life and wonder how in the world I came to the conclusion that the only way to live it is in a tight, exclusive, suffocating nasty little closed circle with a man. I can only attribute it to the power of conditioning. If you start feeding a child poison at an early enough age, she will eventually develop an immunity to it. And from the day I was old enough to understand, they began giving me dolls, telling me that I would one day be a mother, and teaching me how to play house, because one day I would be a wife, and telling me how to handle boys, because one day I’d have to capture one all my own. And women? They became rivals, enemies, bitches. I could have pleasant acquaintanceships with them, but no passion, no commitment, no meaning.”

“Yes,” Martin said, “Yes, I see.” He spoke in a whisper, his eyes focused on some distant spot in the room. It was as though he had gone into a trance. It made Julia nervous.

“See what?” she said and twisted her head around to peer in the direction he was looking. But there was nothing there except the far wall of the large hall. She glanced back at Martin. He had the expression of a child who has finally understood the problem in mathematics given by the teacher. For an instant she wondered whether he had gone mad.

“Are you all right?” she asked stepping a bit closer to him and pulling lightly on his sleeve.

The action pulled him back to the moment. “All right? Oh, yes, yes, I’m fine.” He blinked several times. clearing a film from his eyes. He looked at Julia, drinking her in.

“It’s you,” he said. “This is fantastic, really fantastic. Coming to this place and finding you. It’s good to see you, really good to see you.” And without warning he put his arms around her and pulled her tightly to him. For an instant she resisted, the surprise causing all her muscles to tense. But he was so strong, so overwhelming, and she was so truly hungry for the touch of a man, that she melted by degrees, yielding first her shoulders, then her breasts, then her belly, and finally her thighs and crotch, until she was plastered against him.

“Martin, I don’t think we should,” she said after a few minutes had passed. “People are looking.”

“You’ve got so thin,” he said. “And you cut your hair and dyed it. I didn’t recognize you.”

“I know,” she told him. “You were going to try to pick me up until you saw who I was.”

“Can I pick you up anyway?”

“Let’s go slowly, Martin.”

“Sure. How about going for coffee? If you were a strange woman and I’d picked you up here, that’s exactly what I’d do. I’d take you for coffee.”

“And then?” The heat between their bodies had risen considerably.

“And then we’d tell each other stories.”

“And then?”

“And then we’d try to figure out whether we were going to go to bed or not.”

“You might think I was a loose woman,” Julia whispered as Martin nibbled her throat.

“From what you’ve told me so far, you’re far worse than that. Do you go to bed with men anymore?”

She pulled back just far enough to be able to step on his toe with some force. He pulled his foot back and let her go, an expression of surprise and slight pain on his face.

“Don’t try to shmooze me, you bastard,” she said, her voice suddenly sharp. “I came here for the same reason you did, to pick somebody up. I have my diaphragm and foam in my handbag. I was ready to actually go off with someone and have him stick his dick inside me, if he was healthy-looking and polite and showed some sense of tenderness.” She stepped back a couple of feet and stared at him with half-lidded eyes, and then, incongruously, smiled, a tough, warm smile of camaraderie. “And I won’t hold it against you that you’re my husband, if you meet all the other qualifications.”

He held his hands in front of his chest, palms forward, a gesture of conciliation. “Almost a fight,” he said. “A few months ago this would have been enough to start us off for a whole weekend.”

Julia began to say that she had changed, that she now didn’t stand alone but had incalculable support from her relationship with Gail. The two women now saw each other four or five times a week. Two or three of those times they slept together. Gail and Eliot had married a month earlier. When Gail told him of the situation he had suffered approximately thirty difficult seconds, and then asked, “You mean I’m off the hook?” He’d had to face a bit more flak from Julia who spent the better part of one morning at the office tearing him up one side and down the other, throwing in her newly formulated opinions about a number of aspects of his business. True to form he had asked, “Can we have threesomes?” to which Gail replied, “Only if you’re a very, very good boy.” And added, “And also depending on what Julia works out with Martin.”

But as all this went through her mind, she found herself observing Martin. He too had changed. There was a calm about him, a sense of self-assurance that went far deeper than what was usually afforded him by his muscles. She didn’t know precisely what it was about him but whatever it was she liked it.

“Come on, buy me a coffee at least,” she said.

She went to pick up her handbag and walked toward the door where he caught up with her. He took her hand and they headed for the exit but were intercepted by both the Rabbi and the Unitarian minister.

“Excuse me,” the Rabbi said. Martin and Julia shot each other a glance of complicity, and in that instant, four months fell away.

Being tripped into a social role in which they had to assume a unity against an external force, the very essence of what it is to be a couple was activated in an instant. The four months dissolved. The distance, the pain, her night with Eliot, his friendship with Robert, her love affair with Gail, his devotion to Babba. It was an utterly terrifying, extraordinarily delicate, totally heartrending moment. It was that instant again, that single penetrating glance into the fact of each other’s grave. It was all there, the transient beauty, the fleeting joy, the fragile sorrow, the poignancy of existence, the magical embryo, the mystical child, the impassioned adult, the wrinkled old woman and stooped old man, the parchment corpse, the smell of moist earth, the scrape of spades on stones, and then the transmogrification into ooze, into ick, into mulch, into bones, into dust.

Martin and Julia stood transfixed. The fantasy of their time before their marriage, the nightmare of their marriage, the dream of the months apart, all impacted to implode the present moment. The look they exchanged was so momentous that the Rabbi took a solicitous step forward as though they were children playing too close to a high voltage wire. The Unitarian minister saw a dark hotel room with flaking paint and a young, dark-skinned whore with red lips and a more copious flow from her vagina than he had seen from his fiancée any twenty-five times put together.

“You look very blissful and yet filled with dread,” the Rabbi said. “Excuse me, but your embrace, your whole attitude, is so striking that . . . well, frankly, I’m bursting with curiosity. Was it something I said in my talk?”

Martin and Julia smiled, grinned, broke out in titters. Then, realizing the rudeness, turned to the small man in the black suit.

“We’ve been separated for four months. We’re married for five years, and we’ve been separated. And we met here tonight. I mean, neither of us knew that the other was coming.”

The minister nudged the Rabbi in the ribs. “A miracle, Ephraim. What do you imagine the others would say if they heard we pulled off a miracle tonight?”

“It’s just a coincidence,” the Rabbi said, “Or, as our recently popular Eastern sages might put it, ‘karma.’ “ He glanced shrewdly back and forth between Martin and Julia.

“So this is a joyous moment, but it creates problems, right?”

Martin smiled embarrassedly. Julia looked away.

“No need to be shy,” the Rabbi went on. “That’s what the talk was all about, if you remember.” Then, recalling himself, he stepped back. “But I’m sorry, this is an intrusion. It’s just that you two, well, you put on quite a spectacle. And I wondered what the story was.” He stepped back another few feet. He waved, his hand making an arc in front of his chest. “So, good luck,” and then edged off the way a spectator might after having pushed through the crowd to see the accident victim lying on the pavement. He caught the minister’s arm and led the young man away. They moved into a far corner where they discussed the meaning of the Minister’s and Rabbi’s role in a society which is attaining complete fragmentation.

Martin and Julia walked out into the night, holding hands. It was almost eleven o’clock, the air as warm and soft as a kitten’s belly. Without a word, they strolled across the wide avenue and into Central Park. Old women sat on benches, young men walked their dogs, a policeman stood in alert boredom keeping an eye on a derelict who looked as though he hadn’t slept in a bed for several weeks. The man couldn’t be dangerous to a tough ten-year-old boy, so decrepit was he, but he might do something to offend the sensibilities of the dowagers, to unzip his fly and piss on the bench, perhaps, or perhaps to pitch face forward and die.

They walked to the point where the overhead streetlights ran out. There was only one other person, a short, heavily muscled, bald black man with two Doberman Pinschers on chain leashes. He had the air of the truly insouciant, like an eighth-degree black belt in Karate strolling along a waterfront dock where large, drunken, clumsy sailors might frighten less protected mortals. This was the beginning of mugger territory, where rapists were said to lurk, where sociopaths giggled behind trees.

It was not a place where Martin would have ordinarily gone, even though his superb physical conditioning and ability to kick, jump, and move with blinding speed would make him a sorry choice for even a pair of muggers armed with knives. But Martin had two talismans. One was the sense of peacefulness that had been developing in him through his association with Babba, and the second was the presence of Julia. Being with her infused him with such a sense of unreality that the terrors of the physical plane had no meaning for him.

Julia was slightly apprehensive at first, but once Martin had explained that the man with the dogs was like one of the demons that stand guard at Tibetan temples, put there to scare away those whose quest for truth is not wholehearted, she relaxed. And he gave off an aura of such self-assurance that her fear shriveled and blew away for lack of nutrients. Martin walked with her until they came to a spot behind a row of shrubbery. He took off his jacket and spread it on the grass. Julia sat down on it and he sat next to her, cross-legged. It was almost pitch black.

Like two children in a closet, they were overtaken by a sense of naughtiness. The darkness, the total seclusion in a completely public place, the distant vibration of violence, the hum of the city beyond the perimeter of the park like a vast and aspirated chant, the electricity of their sudden presence together, the rising up of the realization of the initial erotic expectation for the evening, all combined to brush away, for the moment, all other considerations except their actual contact.

Martin took her in his arms, and in five seconds they had become a thrashing, moaning, biting, sucking, grabbing, thrusting, rolling animal, a sound in the woods, a movement under the stars. They wanted to do everything at once, to squeeze a universe of rediscovery and new discovery into the relatively limited vehicles of their bodies and minds. And the only tools they had were hands and mouths and genitals bursting with sensation.