The Sensual Mirror (23 page)
“Oh, oh, oh,” Julia whimpered and Martin thrust his hand under her skirt, slid the cupped palm up her thighs, and closed on the moist hairy center, naked, unobstructed by panties. She fell back as he kissed her throat, sucking on the point where her jugular vein throbbed, her own hands groping wildly, fluttering on his chest, scratching his back, cupping his buttocks, sliding over his hard, madly rearing cockhead.
Rain on parched earth, cool water on dry tongue, divine grace into a sinner’s heart, sunshine on upturned flowers, none of these is more satisfying than the sweet surrender of female and male, shakti and shiva, cunt and cock, mind and mind. There was not a millimeter of space upon which to perch a thought, an idea, a fantasy. Their embrace was pure process, an event without a trace, a progress without a track. Like the primordial bleak black intelligence which is the true eternity in the palms of which infinities dance like dust motes before a pane of glass, their act of sheer erotic facticity manifested every conceivable conception, all of which, bound together in a maddening unity, curved into a gentle, ineffable smile.
They pulled off shirts and kicked off shoes. Then her breasts were in his hands and he pummeled the resilient mounds, pushing them flat against her ribs, pinching, cuddling, stretching, rubbing the nipples between his fingers. His lips covered one breast, and he sucked the whole bulge into his mouth, all the while licking the nipple with his tongue. He sucked her tit into him and let it slide out, trembling on the awareness of the thing, the extraordinary reality of having the sensitive, proud, shy breast between his teeth.
She arched her spine and pushed her breast into his face, at the same time pulling his head forward. Three fingers of his right hand were swiving her cunt, twirling, thrusting, pulling back and caressing her large, serrated clitoris. Her hand grasped his cock and squeezed. It was hot to the touch, and volatile, turgid, thick, explosive. They both squirmed about until they lay in opposite directions, and dove into one another like sharks cutting into the body of a whale. Her legs parted as he sank his face into her crotch. The sticky lips of her cunt parted and a white viscous trail oozed out from the bottom of the fold and trickled into the valley between her buttocks. He closed his eyes, and with his tongue wide, flat, and curved under, he licked her from hole to hole.
Simultaneously she opened her mouth wide and took his cock inside, sliding foward until the head was at the very opening to her throat. She took a deep breath, opened wider, and forced her head down until his cock slid past the curve downward into the esophagus and burst into the narrow channel down which passed food, water, and air. It was a death grip, for if he didn’t move, she would suffocate. She choked on his cock until she began to grow faint from lack of oxygen, and then disgorged it, her head flying back, a mouthful of spit exploding and drooling from her lips, her belly and cunt contracting, her tongue licking the air.
“Ohhhh,” he moaned, his mouth glued to her cunt, his lips touching her lips with the intimacy of a glance, his tongue steadily, patiently, thirstily licking the constant flow of secretion, and then the quick breath, the gulp, as he drank her down. His cock vibrated in the air, wild with the sudden expulsion. Her lips puckered and smacked together as she yearned toward him again. He lifted his pelvis toward her and once again his thick hot cock slid into her mouth.
They ate at one another for more than a half an hour, rising and falling, swinging through cycles of frenzied mashing, of silent nibbling, of animal devouring, of pornographic yielding and realization. They became wet, grass-stained, and their hands were voracious, digging into each crevice, exploring each stretch of flesh. A hundred times they hovered on the brink of orgasm, but each time they edged back, not consciously by design, but as part of the natural rhythm that had been established. Just when Martin thought he would erupt, pulsing sperm flooding Julia’s mouth, she would drop back, change pace, take her lips away completely. And each time Julia flattened out ready to come, baring her cunt the way a cat bares its teeth, spine curved, legs stretched taut, fingers curved into claws, he would slip lower, going from clitoris to inner lips, from inner lips to asshole, from asshole to thighs.
Then, on signal from some source that was accessible only to them at that moment in that spot, they spun around, JuUa rolling onto her back, Martin kneeling between her thighs. He lowered his torso as she spread her legs. His cock floated forward until the tip of it hung poised at the core of her intensity, and then he let himself sink completely, his body covering her, his cock penetrating into the spongy, slick, quivering walls of her cunt.
Then there was no question of delay any longer. The force that seized them would admit of no interference by an ego or will. They were as powerless as dry logs in a fire. There was no point in attempting to negotiate with the flame. Her thighs parted as wide as tendons would allow. She grabbed her ankles with her hands. She made him an open present of her cunt. He slipped his hands under her buttocks. He began to ride her the way an experienced mount rides a horse, by becoming one with the beast underneath instead of trying to control it. They got very silent; the only sound that arose was the steady beat of guttural breathing. She pumped into him, meeting his thrusts. Her vaginal walls contracted, let loose, contracted, let loose. His cock sang with scintillating consciousness.
And then the spurts. The tart, thick globs of the seed of life tearing loose from the tube, dying as they fly, programmed with two billion years of complex wisdom to attain the most simple result: contact; the piercing of the egg. Martin cried out, a high-pitched sob. Julia blacked out, her soul a single spasm. And the vegetative energies romped like dolphins at play, causing their spines to shudder, legs to tremble, minds to spin out of control. The orgasm went on and on, rippling, diminishing, flaring up, transforming itself into feelings and insights, and then returning to brute vibration, until they finally came to rest, lying still, breathing with long voluptuous breaths, clinging to each other like wet leaves on park bench staves in Boston on a rainy autumn day.
And like any travelers to an exotic land, they then had to face the voyage home, knowing that the trip was over, that it would soon devolve into memory, and then not even that, but a kind of formal recollection. And the force of daily life would reassert itself, and one would have to deal with things that are death to shipboard romance. They would have to become people once again, names, identities, routines, commitments, schedules, bundles of feeling, packets of conditioning, matrices of need, orchestras of want, things trailing a past into a future, almost invisible in the present. And they would have to do that knowing what it had been like to merge with the primal energy, the unimaginably mighty power of raw creation.
Understandably, there was a reluctance to break the clinch, but after a while the exigencies of the relative world got to them. Ants crawled on their backs, grass stuck to their skin, and a certain chill of nighttime made them shiver slightly. They pulled apart, with no words possible yet, and stood up to brush themselves off. Then the groping for the clothing in the dark, and the humorous efforts at dressing, hopping around, losing balance, slapping at a stray mosquito.
Finally they were clothed and composed, except that Julia still swayed a bit as she tried to walk and Martin couldn’t remember from which direction they had come. They held hands, he to steady her, she to lead him back to the path.
“Do I still get that cup of coffee or is that no longer relevant now that you’ve had your way with me?” Her voice was light, her tone lilting, almost teasing.
They strolled slowly back into the wider context. The man with the dogs was gone, and so were most of the people who had been on the benches and walk when Martin and Julia entered. The policeman still stood, now about fifteen feet away from his former spot, and the old drunk was fighting sleep on the bench. The two times he had slipped over the policeman had walked over to wake him. It was extraordinary that a young man, in the prime of health and vigor, wearing an official uniform and carrying a deadly weapon, equipped with two-way radios and several pounds of notebooks, billy clubs, handcuffs and spare bullets, earning more than eighteen thousand dollars a year, should have nothing better to do than keep an old man from his rest. Yet it was considered normal. No one even questioned it, not even the old man.
They turned left and walked four blocks to the Dakota, now suffering a vogue, and went west on Seventy-second Street, past bakers, boutiques, Greek sidewalk cafés, a chess club, a vegetarian restaurant, and window upon window of.second-story astrologers, psychics, therapists, and drama coaches. But they were oblivious of all that, being caught up in the rhythm of walking together again, of the texture of their hands, the tinglings of the experience they’d just shared in the park.
Martin stopped near West End Avenue at a coffee shop with a glassed-in enclosure that extended a quarter of the way onto the sidewalk. It was called Sahbra, and was run by an Israeli who proved that the foundation of a nation would not cure Jews of their restlessness. He was a man whose parents had been born in Europe and migrated to the United States and then gone to Israel to partake in a vision. Their second son, having killed three Egyptians at close quarters and having watched them die and begin to fester in the desert sun, decided that no fantasy of a return to the homeland was worth the continual tension and threat of warfare. He took his portion of the extraordinary energy which sustains that small state and within three years of living in New York had opened a restaurant. He was on his way to buying the building that housed it.
They went inside and sat at a table next to the window.
“First the Rabbi and now this,” Julia said. “This must be our night for Semites. Interesting symbolism.” She had already begun to pull herself together and was casting about for a way to extricate herself from any intimation of commitment to a reinstatement of their marital status quo. Martin was holding on to the same edge, his fingertips figuratively white with grasping the cliff of constant identity represented by his relationships with Robert and Babba. And each feared that the other would force the issue and cause a scene that would instantly catapult them back into the big bicker.
The waiter came by, tall, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt, sporting a blasé mustache which hung like tendrils of moss over his upper lip. His eyes were glazed over in an expression of longterm boredom. To place an order with him was to expose oneself to scorn, to have one’s taste openly and silently examined and dismissed with disdain. He held a Master’s Degree in Economics from New York University, was twenty-seven years old, and currently held four women in thrall, juggling them with careless anxiety so that he never spent a night alone nor heard a complaint about anyone else’s having to do iust that. His current pique derived from his thwarted desire for the waitress, one of those maddeningly erotic types who spice the ambience of the city, women with dancers’ rumps and little girl breasts and eyes that gaze perpetually on the face of fear, whose souls cry out for a pain to distract them from the terror of their condition, who end up groveling before they bottom out completely, have a child, and become Greenwich Village mothers with streaks of gray in their hair and a history that makes them smile when they recall their youth. The waiter, for all his arrogance and expertise in treating women badly, was no match for the Israeli owner, who also had money, and a willingness to use his hands to bruise.
Martin and Julia ordered humus and pita and coffee. The coffee was all they wanted but they were intimidated into ordering something else and the ground chick peas were the only thing that came easily to their lips. There was a rumble of thunder from outside, the first signal of a shift in the weather.
“Remember the lightning on the beach in Greece?” Julia asked.
“I kept missing it,” he mused. “We’d made love for hours and I was falling asleep.”
“And then that one flash that turned the whole room stark white.”
They fell into a silence and gazed at each other across the table. They did everything in the way of holding hands except to hold hands. Behaviorally, legally, and on the surface of their feelings, emotionally, they were a married couple out for a bit of refreshment, some coffee, a look at the streets, a browse in a bookshop, rubbing auras with people. They had just made love, and they had even negotiated a skirmish at the edge of a fight. The previous four months was relegated to the past, which indeed it was, and nothing stopped them from picking up where they had left off the night that Martin walked out of their apartment. They could have it all back, the intensity, the fierceness, the attachment unto death, and the use of one another as targets for the existential fury which attacks all human creatures who have evolved far enough to be aware of their mortality but not so far as to accept it with perfect ease.
And the temptation was strong. The waiter brought the coffee and humus and bread. They did not bother to look at him. They put in sugar and milk and tore apart pieces of pita and dipped it into the soft spread of beige paste. There would be nothing to it, to have Martin return home with Julia, for them to spend the entire night fucking, for both of them to call in absent at work, and then to play for the whole weekend, three days of discharging the enormous energy that had been built up during their separation. And the next step would be easier still, for Martin to begin to move his things back in. First toiletries, then some clothes, then his papers and books, and finally the entire accumulation of possessions, now swelled to three suitcases and four boxes over the original two suitcases with which he left, a careless and haphazard addition of things that simply accrete to a person over time.
And then the accounting. The slow dance building to a frenzy of destruction in which each would force the other to deny all the beauty and truth and pleasure that had occurred during the intervening third of a year. Martin would begin to make jokes about Babba, denigrating remarks about Robert. He would tell stories, and in telling them begin to take into account Julia’s possible reactions and before she could even have a response would tailor the tale to meet that expected emotion. And then blame himself for selling himself short, and then, after a flash of unconsciousness, blame her for seducing him into the trap. And Julia? Well, she would have to dismiss Gail, and put aside everything they had known with one another, everything they had promised. She would have to bear the brunt of Martin’s jealousy, his snide remarks, and there would very soon come a day when Julia and Gail would no longer see one another, no longer talk to one another.