The Sensual Mirror (9 page)

Again he was forced to stop before completing a sentence. Talking to Robert elicited more references along the lines of homosexuality than he had ever known in a conversation, yet each was decidedly difficult.

Robert had caught on to the intended last word and rescued Martin from his momentary dilemma. “One of the idiocies of the conventional condemnation of homosexuality is that we engage in unnatural acts, like assfucking and cocksucking. Yet no man thinks a woman unnatural for going down on a man. And as far as I can tell, a mouth or an asshole doesn’t have any gender.”

“That’s the way it felt,” Martin admitted. “It could have been a man. And it wasn’t enough just to come. I wanted to touch her and taste her and smell her. You know, get down between her thighs where it’s hairy and wet.”

“Ah yes,” Robert sighed. “Pure nostalgia. Let’s take a walk down memory lane, there where the pussy willows grow.”

“Then there are times when it all seems like a dream,” Martin continued. “I look at women on the street and they might as well be mannequins. I try and try but I just can’t remember what the cunt even looks like. All I have is an impression of a mat of hair and some movement underneath. I think of myself lying on a woman, my cock inside her, moving around, grunting grabbing, pumping, and then the sperm scalding my tubes, and it doesn’t feel anything like me. I know I used to do that, and I know I’ll do it again, but right now I’m outside the pale.”

“One of my big revelations,” Robert said, “was looking through a men’s magazine. They had photos of some woman lying across a bed, you know, with her fingers in her bush and her tits flopping to either side and this look on her face that said, ‘Ain’t I the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?’ And I really studied that picture until I found out the hidden message, which is that she is supposed to be a kind of mindless pit of pleasure, and a man proves himself by giving her orgasms. I was right back at the old worship syndrome where women are regarded as some kind of rare object.”

Martin was leaning back in his chair, his eyes unfocused, his chest rising and falling with his breath. For an instant Robert was concerned. “Anything wrong?” he said.

“Oh? No, nothing, nothing really.”

“You look pale.”

“I was thinking of Julia, that’s all.”

“That strong, huh?”

“I loved her very much. Well, I still love her, whatever that means. I don’t know, when I get to feeling cynical, it seems like loving is just another kind of addiction. And missing her is nothing more romantic than going cold turkey on heroin.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I realize that I’m saying that a lot, but it feels good to admit it. One of the horrors of my marriage was that I always had to know, always had to be on top of things, always had to make sense.”

“That’s one of the horrors of civilization. We need to use our knowledge to earn a living and yet the way to God is by daily discarding what we know, cleaning out the mental attic of old informational shoes and dusty bits of data so that Divine Grace can pour in.”

“Excuse me,” Martin put in, “but I still kind of wince when anyone talks about God.”

“So did I,” Robert said. “And probably because my early training was so ridiculous, picturing God as an old man on a throne. Later, after my atheistic phase, I got to think of God as a concept, the Supreme Idea. But when I met Babba, the bottom fell out of all that. God is the basic, eternal reality. God is what scientists are chasing when they search for ultimate particles or origins. It is what philosophers seek in their quest for meaning. It is what poets and lovers find in the embrace of their muse, the kiss of their beloved. It is what the conventional man seeks in his marriage and his work and his children. It is what the homosexual cries out for as he sinks to his knees before a throbbing erection. God isn’t to be found apart from any experience, any manifestation. But God isn’t these things.”

“I’m a bit confused,” Martin said.

“There are two basic errors that human beings make. The first is to deny that anything exists except what they can experience. These are what might be called materialists. For them, if it can’t be registered by the senses or by instruments which are extensions of the senses, it doesn’t exist. It’s an attitude so provincial, so limited, so stupid that one wonders anyone can entertain it for more than a second. And yet, entire nations are ruled by such thinking. The other mistake is thinking that what we experience is only an illusion, that there is some kind of ultimate reality of which this palpable universe is merely reflection. These are the idealists, the ones who hate life, who despise the fact that we are transitory, fragile, fated to live under the conditions of mortality. They are weary of earth, so they conjure up a heaven in which there is no pain, no separation, no death. And to rule over this place, they invent an idealized version of themselves and call it God. Any adolescent with a trace of intelligence is capable of seeing through this nonsense, and, unfortunately having no alternative in the culture, shucks the whole question. Thus people grow up vapid. And as they get older, they thrash about, trapped in the inevitability of their demise, grasping for some of consolation. Some get so bitter and frustrated they burst out in violence, or sink into debauchery, or run for president. Anything to keep from facing their ingrown mediocrity. That was the place I was at when I met Babba. And he just looked at me, and saw into my soul, and the next thing I knew I was in tears, prostrating myself at his feet.”

Martin looked at the man across the way, this relative stranger with whom he’d spent more hours over the past three years with anyone else except his wife, and with whom he had seldom exchanged a personal remark. Robert was glowing, his skin pink, his eyes flickering with an inner strobe, his hair shimmering gold in the soft light of the restaurant. Martin had heard words like that before, notably from what he considered fanatics on the street trying to give away free tickets to listen to some Korean munitions manufacturer who claimed he was the Messiah, here to complete the job Jesus never got finished. He’d picked up the same fervid tone watching Billy Graham on television one night. He was well read enough to know about the power of blind faith, the way in which the mind, when concentrated by a powerful belief, could accomplish extraordinary feats including curing disease, and totally transforming a person’s lifestyle. He even knew a couple back in Michigan. The man had been an Associate Professor of English Literature. He was a Ph.D., an urbane, witty, well-balanced man. One weekend he and his wife had gone to see a preacher who had come to town with his particular brand of Christian revival, and the couple just went around the bend. The man began telling his students that they had to put their trust in Jesus, that this was the only thing in life that mattered. His wife gave sermons at bridge parties. The incident was treated with civilized embarrassment, most people figuring that everyone was allowed at least one flip-out, that the couple would soon be over it and everyone would be able, before too long, to laugh at the entire affair. But when it persisted for more than three months, action had to be taken. The man was dismissed, and shortly thereafter the two of them left town, presumably to join the preacher’s caravan. Martin hadn’t even pretended to understand the dynamics of conversion, but then he didn’t understand the roots of schizophrenia either, and he dismissed the incident as just one of those peculiar things that happen from time to time.

“I don’t really know what to say,” Martin said. “You act and sound like you’d inherited a million dollars, and I can only be happy for you. But it’s no money in my pocket, and then, for all I know, you may be hallucinating and projecting like crazy.”

“I wouldn’t expect any other response,” Robert replied at once. “If someone had come on to me that way three years ago, I would have reacted in exactly the same way. And maybe not even as gently as you are doing.”

“Is it ever possible to upset you?” Martin said abruptly.

“If you can find a me in me, I guess you can upset it,” the other man shot back. And then smiled shyly. “That’s a bit of a boast,” he went on. “That’s the ego claiming that there is no ego. If I were to say something like that in Babba’s presence, he’d whack me with his stick.”

“What about his ego?”

“Babba is a perfect and authentic manifestation of Divine Consciousness in human form,” Robert told him. And then, seeing the look that crossed Martin’s face, added, “But unless you are touched by his Grace, those words will only put you off.” He glanced down at his wristwatch. “We have a half hour. Why don’t we walk over? We’re meeting at a devotee’s loft tonight, on Chambers Street down near the World Trade Center.”

Again, Martin felt a tug of hesitation, and when he examined it saw that it was a conditioned reflex from his days of living with Julia when he was continually subliminally on schedule, when they called each other to say they’d be a half hour late, when they had no liberty of movement. Now he saw that was as much a security as a fetter, for while he had been denied the freedom of exploration of time and space he was also protected from wild and ragged influences. As he paid his half of the bill, and the two men walked out into the spring evening, he was taken by an unreasoning excitement, a sense of high adventure out of all proportion to merely walking twenty blocks to see an Indian holy man.

It must be an indication of the degree to which I’ve been leading a sheltered life, he thought.

“I’ll follow you,” he said to Robert, and the tall man turned right, heading southwest toward the river.

They walked down Greenwich to Seventh Avenue and then headed for Sheridan Square. They didn’t talk for a while, enjoying the kinesthetics of their stroll. Martin strode with an almost military precision, his arms swinging widely in exact counterpoint to the movement of his legs. Dressed in loose slacks and a sports shirt, all in dark blue, he might have been on parade. Robert wore his customary white—baggy yoga pants and a loose madras shirt. He moved more like a robot on skates, his feet sliding forward while his legs followed unbending and his torso glided without torque. They drew more than the average number of glances for the attractiveness of each was compounded by the presence of the other. For most of the way, it was Martin’s erotic turf, for the warm night had flushed thousands of scantily dressed women onto the streets, and they now minced, pranced, strode, strolled, marched, and ambled past, in skirts, jeans, shorts, and dresses. Martin could not control his eyes. The lurch of breasts, the sway of buttocks, the bulge of cunts rubbed images against his brain like the eardrum-raping klaxons of fire engines blasting their way through traffic. His cock stirred and grew stiff enough to provide an embarrassment and he forced himself to stare at the sidewalk until the tingling tumescence had been strangled at its psychic root and starved into submission to social reality.

But when they turned onto Christopher Street, the number of women on the sidewalks dropped to practically zero. The change was so abrupt that one might expect it to be more noticeable to a casual passerby, in the same way that the shift from concrete to grass at the edge of a park impresses itself upon the attention. But Martin had already retracted his sensors, and so remained oblivious of the shift of gender.

Now it was Robert’s turn to run the gauntlet. This was the most notorious homosexual neighborhood in the country, the place where the historic Stonewall riot had lit the torch which flamed into the movement known as gay liberation. Here, to be heterosexual was to be out of place. Every half block a bar spilled its particular variation on the subculture into the streets, so that one passed clusters of men dressed in levis, or in leather, or as cowboys, or others whose clothes suggested those of women. Bookstores offering homosexual literature and movies and backrooms where orgies took place served as beacons of identity. Men held hands openly, and late at night it was not uncommon to find men necking in hallways, sucking one another in parked cars, or screwing each other behind the trucks parked near the river.

Robert’s eyes were magnetic mirrors, attracting and reflecting glances all up and down the narrow boulevard. He was well known here, and within a few minutes had acknowledged looks from five men he’d had sex with during the past month. But such was the attraction of the strip that hundreds of new faces appeared each week, from other neighborhoods, from New Jersey and Connecticut, from Europe and California. This was the support that Robert had spoken of earlier when he explained why he had decided on the gay life. A man arriving in a strange city usually ended in a sterile hotel room without company or knowing where to find conversation, food, sex, or relaxation. But a gay man had all that prepared for him. The bars, the baths, the special neighborhoods, all guaranteed that unless he were very old or very ugly or very contankerous, he would be able to find all the necessities and a few of the luxuries within a few hours of arrival.

By the time they reached Hudson Street and began walking south toward the twin towers whose lights had begun to blaze in the polluted gloom of twilight, Robert was more than a bit nonplussed, his nerve endings twanging deliciously. Martin, unconscious of the ambience he had just passed through but no less affected by it, asked, “What does Babba say about sex? I thought that people who became spiritual had to be celibate. Or at least monogamous.”

Robert smiled. “See that church over there?” He pointed to a small, neat stone structure next to a large garden. “Every Thursday night about a thousand people gather to listen to a wacky old woman cackle about God. She talks like Archie Bunker’s wife and claims she’s having an astral love affair with Pericles. Thirty years ago she and a friend took a few hundred dollars and went to India on a sort of lark. She came back strange and holy and wild. But she has a real power, and she is building a strong following. Anyway her leaning is toward celibacy. Shooting the juice up the spine instead of out the lower plumbing. And that’s valid for those who are in sympathy with her. What I’m trying to say is that there is no one way to God, since God is all there is. Only God exists. Everything we know is just one or another modification of that eternal consciousness, that infinite energy. To know God you only have to become yourself totally. And that, as you know, can take a dazzling variety of forms.”