The Sensual Mirror (8 page)

Robert looked at him with wry affection. What a dumb hunk, he thought. The Lord sure had a sense of humor when he put that conditioning in that body.

Martin squirmed about in his chair as though he were about to stand up and leave.

“Well, you can relax,” Robert drawled. “I promise not to fling myself at your knees and beg to wail on your dangling wang. My intention was also friendly. If there was any ulterior motive it’s that I’ve been sensing that you are troubled, and I wanted to talk to you, to get you to talk, to see if it would make you any clearer about whatever it is. And I wanted to bring you to Babba. He saved my life, as melodramatic as that sounds. And I thought that, if he was in a good mood tonight, he just might save yours.”

Robert’s rapid switches from sincerity to sarcasm left Martin a bit breathless in the mind, but that was a sensation he found highly exhilarating, much like skiing down a very fast slope and coming upon rock outcroppings all of sudden, and having to swivel, pole, kick, and shoot past in a single fluid motion without a trace of hesitation for in that would come immediate disaster. He was never that quick cerebrally, but because he was an adept on the physical plane, he could recognize mastery in others on other planes.

“I guess I must sound a bit stereotyped,” Martin finally admitted. “But that, uh, homosexuality, is about as familiar to me as workings inside the Kremlin. It just makes me nervous.”

“It makes me nervous too,” Robert said, and they both laughed, past the first hurdle, already having shared a moment’s uncertainty, intimacy.

They fell silent again, each staring down at the tablecloth, fingers busy at twirling a bread stick or plucking at a string. Martin glanced up surreptitiously and found Robert looking back at him. He looked back down immediately, and then laughed briefly, and returned the gaze. He was extremely embarrassed, at the level of a child who is afraid his parents will do something mortifying in public. His ears began to burn and a warm large ball began to glow in his stomach. As he examined his sensations, he realized that he was feeling the same sort of excitement that he used to feel before a football game during his college days. He recalled the stench of tension as he put on his uniform and drank in the brute power of fifty young men, all big and powerful. It wasn’t something he would ever have assoicated with erotic feelings, even though the slight breathlessness and tingling were the same.

In the restaurant, two women sipped capucino and watched the two men. Robert, tall, thin, each movement quicksilver sparklings through the smoky air; Martin, compact, strong, drenched in all his boyish ingenuousness. The women caught each other staring, and made moues at one another. One lifted an eyebrow, questioning. The other wrinkled her nose.

“Gay,” she mouthed, without sounding the word.

The second women looked back at the men, her expression halfway between puzzlement and dejection. She had been troubled for some time now over the fact that more and more attractive men seemed to be homosexual. In fact, it had become a rule of thumb that the more goodlooking a man was, the more relaxed, the greater the probability that he was gay.

“It’s odd,” Martin said after a while. “We’ve spent so much time together and never really got to know one another. And now I’m sharing things with you that I’ve never shared with another man.” He paused, took a breath, frowned. “Is this what homosexuality is about?” he asked. “Just this kind of intimate talking?”

“Why give it a sexual twist? Why not call it friendship, or simply humanity?”

“Because this isn’t anything I do with other men, even men I’ve known a long time.”

Robert gazed at the wall over Martin’s head for a few seconds and then replied, “I guess that the major advantage of homosexuality is that it tends to remove the fear of homosexuality. Two men who get close usually get frightened. Will he embrace me? Will he kiss me? Will he grab my cock? And all that. But when you’ve already done all that with a man, there is no fear. Then, so what if he does? The trouble with homosexuality is that it often tends to get fixated at that level, so that a gay man will often opt for a bit of flesh friction before he even exchanges names. I think I’ve pretty well cooled out both extremes, with Babba’s help, so when I’m close to a man I don’t necessarily want to fuck him, nor will I necessarily push him away if he wants to fuck me. I can just be with him, without innuendoes or undercurrents.”

“And women,” Martin asked. “What about women?” He was hungry for knowledge, and he did not know how to find it. With Robert, suddenly, he thought he had found a handle and he would pump it until the well produced the water of truth to slake his thirst.

“Women are a problem to men,” Robert said simply. “Because we issue from the womb of a woman, we have a tendency to mistake the hole between her legs for the Source of All Creation. Mother Nature and all that. We wind up worshipping pussy instead of God. We turn cunt into a fetish. And the ladies, as you know, are very suggestible. If a man looks at one with moons in his eyes and tells her that she is the most important thing in the universe to him, she will have her head turned and believe him, never suspecting that it is his cock talking and using his mouth like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Then, when his desire is slaked, which takes anywhere from one night to one year, depending on how much charge differential there is between them, he begins to see the stretch marks, and finds her asshole less than marvelous, especially since she, from time to time, farts under the sheets. At this point, he usually turns on her, and blames her for not being perfect, which is what God ought to be. She accuses him of being unfair. He flexes his muscles. She has an affair. Etc. etc. etc.”

During the entire discourse, Martin nodded his head, again and again, more and more forcefully as Robert detailed the graph of modern relationship. At the end he took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh.

“Oh, don’t you know it,” he said.

“The foolish worship of women is counterbalanced by an equally absurd phobia. The monthly blood, the hideous emotionalism, the inability to think coherently, the essential whorishness, and all the rest of that trip. It’s the same in the gay world, from the usual refusal to even touch a woman to the Judy Garland cult. And beneath all that, somewhere, is a creature that is of the same stuff as us, in fact, of the same stuff as all creation. Women are just one more manifestation of God, although a very thorny one. Not nearly as easy to deal with as, for example, trees.”

The waitress arrived with a circular black tray nearly three feet in diameter. She put it down on the adjoining table and transferred the various bowls and plates to the space in front of the two men. She had heard the last two sentences of Robert’s talk, and it might have fascinated her under other circumstances, but at that moment the insistent ache in her arches took dominance over the most airy and delicately articulated metaphysics. She had an hour and forty minutes to go. It would be a long stretch.

Outside, on Greenwich Avenue, thousands of people swept by, strolling, rushing, prancing, shuffling, cruising, shopping. Most of them were fixed on a goal, a destination, oblivious of automobiles, dog shit, and the setting sun. They operated on automatic pilots, their bodies mere vehicles to get them from one psychic melodrama to another. A few paused every now and then to wonder at the wonder of it all. Occasionally a street crazy ambled by, talking out loud, gesticulating to an invisible audience. It was a circus of conditioned anarchists, choreographed by an industrial afterthought.

“Have you ever been . . . involved with a woman?” Martin asked, wondering whether he might be transgressing the bounds of civility.

“Oh, a few,” Robert said. “I’m even a father. Had an affair with a girl in California when I was nineteen, I left for New York shortly thereafter, and received a letter from her telling me she was pregnant. I sent a telegram telling her I would pay for an abortion, but she wanted the baby. She later married a Navy Lieutenant stationed in San Diego. And then there was Anita, who broke my heart. And a hooker who got to be my friend and used to drop by to talk and have coffee and give me free fucks. I think I’ve done most of the basic scenes that a man can do with women.”

“Will there be anything else?” the waitress said. She had been standing at their table since putting the food in front of them, waiting for them to notice that she had indeed served them. Martin glanced up sheepishly.

“No, no, thank you,” he said, and made a note to himself to give her an extra large tip. She grimaced and walked off. Her ploy of anguished intimidation made her approximately fifteen dollars a day more in tips than she might have ordinarily accumulated.

The two men picked up utensils and spent the next several minutes concentrating on their food. They were both slightly ravenous and ate rapidly, Martin taking large bites and swallowing almost at once while Robert chewed each mouthful exactly twenty times. It was only after they had consumed half the volume of stuff on their plates that Martin went on.

“I really don’t mean to pry . . . “ He stopped and checked himself. “I’m sorry, that’s foolish. I do mean to pry. I’m very curious, and everything you’ve said so far is opening up my thinking tremendously. What I don’t understand is why you . . . “ He let the sentence trail.

“Why did I become a homosexual?” Robert finished. “Is that what you want to know?”

Martin nodded.

“Well, it was summertime, and we were cruising the Caribbean. There was a moon, and the music from the lower deck, and . . . well, I know it was a mad, mad thing to do, but Dirk was so handsome, so irresistible, that when he took me in his arms I . . . “ Robert had undergone a complete transformation. The pleasant, soft-spoken man of a few moments earlier had turned into Holly Woodlawn. He talked in a throaty falsetto and waved his arms about, his hands fluttering like spastic moths. For an instant Martin could see the invisible shawl he flourished in the air. But in the middle of his monologue he stopped, froze, and stared Martin in the eye. It was another of those sudden shifts which left Martin stunned and totally at a loss as to what to say. Robert saw the other’s consternation and smiled.

“I hope it doesn’t upset you when I dash off like that. It’s just that you get so serious sometimes I can’t help myself.”

Martin blinked. “It’s all right,” he said, clearing his throat, “it’s something like watching a frog turn into a prince before my eyes. But I suppose one can get used to anything after a while.” He watched Robert watching him for a few moments then went on, “But seriously, why did you . . . ?”

Halfway through the sentence, however, he heard his own voice and the incongruity of what he was saying and how he was saying it struck him. “But seriously, why did you become a homosexual?” was the full question and in such a form could give rise to nothing but laughter, which it did. The two of them sat in their chairs and laughed, long and loud, Martin ending in a high-pitched giggle and Robert in a low chuckle. All through it Martin thought, I’m laughing, I’m really laughing, I must be having a good time.

They settled down after a while and resumed their meal. The other people in the restaurant withdrew the covert glances they had cast in lieu of open and friendly attention. The two women who had looked them over earlier now exchanged expressions of smug certification, a harmonic I-told-you-so humming between them like a bridge across which an army is marching in locked step.

Somewhat abashed, the two men finished their food, and watched the table be cleared and fruit brought for dessert before they went on talking.

“Homosexuality is one of the simplest and most complicated of all human syndromes,” Robert said at last. “I mean, what could be more natural than two people’s liking one another, showing affection to each other in a physical way? But then you can go to the libraries and bookstores and find literally thousands of volumes written on the subject, analyzing a kiss or a lick between men to such murky roots of motivation that it makes your head spin. For me the choice was very simple once I realized that being gay was no more or less peculiar than being, say, a gasoline truck or an avocado. I’d had a child, I’d had an affair of the heart with a woman, I’d had hard-edged hooker fucking, and that just seemed enough of that. I decided to go with men because it was more pleasant, more friendly, healthier. I know that may sound weird, but it’s the truth. All of the married couples I knew were busy strangling one another, playing Woman in the Dunes on one level or another. But the gay world gave me support, understanding, a way of life that was expansive, not continually contracting.”

“But what about sex itself?” Martin broke in. “Is it as pleasurable with a man as with a woman?”

“I miss cunt sometimes,” Robert admitted. “But I just look upon it as a drug I once enjoyed and have given up.”

Martin’s mind was swarming with fragments of photographs. He tried to picture Robert with another man. What did they do? Did they embrace and kiss and hold hands? Who fucked whom? Did Robert suck cock? The images proliferated and filled his mind with pressure which could only be relieved by his asking more questions. And yet he was loath to say such blatant things, afraid he might be offending or embarrassing his newfound friend. The result was that a fierce excitement began to build in him, a need to explode which came close to having him squirm in his seat. Robert watched the man go through his changes, and had he been a bit less sophisticated he might have thought that Martin was getting in touch with a strain of repressed homosexuality. But Robert had for a couple of years resigned himself to the knowledge that Martin probably had no closet to come out of along those lines. The man sitting in front of him needed to be awakened, to be liberated, to be shown the reality of God. If, in the process, Robert could wrap his lips around the other’s sizable cock, that would be a bonus in a good cause. But it was unlikely to the point of impossibility.

“I almost wish I could be that blithe about it,” Martin said. “I’ve been without a woman for two months now.” He leaned forward and added in a lower voice, “Well, I did stop in at a massage parlor three weeks ago and got blown but I hardly count that. I mean, the girl didn’t even undress. For all the contact I got, she might as well have been . . . “