The Sensual Mirror (26 page)

They turned the corner of Eighth Avenue and began to walk uptown once more. On the next street over, peering down the block, Martin saw a large, red neon sign: Dixie Hotel. It was the place where the whores took their tricks.

He pulled Julia a bit more closely to him and guided her down the street. At the entrance, he stopped. She looked up, a bit perplexed.

“Here?” she said.

“I think it’s perfect,” he told her.

“But what will we do here?”

“We’ll make love all night long, listening to the hookers fucking strange men through the cardboard-thin walls, and we’ll be naked without clothes and without possessions and then, in the morning, we’ll . . . we’ll . . . “

Across the city, Robert knelt naked on a concrete floor in a bar called The Toilet while a burly man pissed on his face.

Twenty blocks away, Gail called Julia’s number for the fourth time in less than an hour. She was upset because she suspected that Julia might have met a man at the meeting she said she was going to, and was beginning to feel the first twinges of insecurity, and had already begun to mistake the sensation for that of jealousy.

In a penthouse overlooking the city, Eliot stood by the parapet of his sun deck and sipped at a martini. He was tingling with the rare joy of conscious solitude.

And in a spacious room in an antique apartment on the upper East Side, Babba watched a Joan Crawford movie on color television while he puffed on a pipe filled with potent and aromatic hashish, shaking his head from time to time and wondering if any of the thousands of people who called themselves his followers and devotees had even begun to get the point.

The earth continued to turn and Julia’s question was gently whisked into the night. Martin had no answer. And so they stood there, uncertain, hesitant, filled with need and suspicion, like children at a horror movie, afraid to look yet unwilling to look away, peeking through their fingers at the screen.

While, from across the street, two pimps talked about the incongruous couple and made rapid estimates on where they might have come from, why they were standing there, and what they would do next. The conversation ended with a fifty-cent bet as to whether the man and woman would go into the hotel. They leaned against the building, picked their teeth, and waited to see which way the species would turn.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1993 by Marco Vassi

ISBN 978-1-4976-3464-0

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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