by Marco Vassi
“I didn’t know . . . “ Robert began.
Martin glanced quickly at the other man, looking both sheepish and proud of himself. “It’s a deal I made with the company who installed the security system in the lobby. Three firms were bidding for the contract, but the salesman from one of them offered me a bribe. He set up a hidden camera in the woman’s dressing rooms and ran the line to my office.” He held up one hand toward Robert. “But you musn’t breathe a word. If anyone found out, every woman who belongs to the club would sue us silly. And I’d probably end up in jail.”
“Will you let me come peek?”
“I thought you didn’t like women?”
“I’ll just look at their asses,” Robert said. He smiled at Martin. “I assume you’re feeling better now and using the thing again.”
“Well, now I have the opposite problem. Looking at those wet naked bodies drives me crazy. I’m not a sex-saturated married man anymore.”
“If you’ll pardon my indelicacy, just what’s keeping you from getting laid? I know there are at least ten of the ladies who come to the club who would like nothing better than to drain you of your excess sperm.”
“I suppose,” Martin replied, “that I’m still hung up on my wife. I haven’t had another woman for five years, not counting that little episode in the massage parlor, which was so peripheral I barely felt it. I think I’d be embarrassed with another woman. I wouldn’t know how to hold her or kiss her or talk to her in that sexy way.”
“Nonsense,” Robert exclaimed. “It’s like swimming or riding a bicycle. The body remembers, even if the personality doesn’t.”
“Well, perhaps,” Martin said, but his tone was not convincing.
Robert looked at Martin for a long time, seeing the slope of shoulder, the tension in the brow. He was struck by the contrast between his friend’s powerful physique and weak self-esteem. He was convinced that Martin had no idea how beautiful he was, for in the world of maleness he inhabited the only acceptable word to use would be “handsome.” If he were a bit younger, more impressionable, more given to impossible passions, Robert would have been quite smitten by the other man. But he was able to be somewhat objective, viewing him in part through the eyes that had been trained to see by Babba. More and more he looked at other people and saw their hidden suffering, beneath all their entertainments and smiles. He would have loved to embrace Martin, to hold him and urge him to cry, but he knew that such a gesture would be utterly misconstrued. Instead, he caressed Martin with his voice, trying to reach inside him to touch the core of sorrow.
“Tell me about her,” he said. “Not the problems you had, or the things she did. But about her. Her soul, her heart, her mind, her cunt.”
“I was just wondering whether she’s with someone now,” Martin said after a long while.
“Not that,” Robert urged with intense gentleness. “You loved her. You still love her. Tell me about that love.”
The sky was almost black. A tugboat chugged by on the wide river. On the other shore, lights signaled the existence of an entire world. Homes, offices, factories. Hundreds of thousands of people were finishing dinner, going out for an evening’s pleasure, or settling in front of their television sets. It was all so distant, and yet so immediate. Each light signified a life, and all those lives had their stories. Love, marriage, divorce, children, death, ambition, empires which extended across vast oil refineries or no further than an intimidated spouse. In the face of all that, one man’s tale could only seem trivial, but then, from the viewpoint of God, the whole human story, the entire history of earth, the solar system, the galaxy, the very manifest universe, was equally frivolous. Robert smiled to himself. He felt the glow of Babba’s Grace in his chest. Soon he would be in his physical presence. And maybe the guru would be able to reach out and touch Martin’s heart.
“She was the only person who ever made me unhappy,” Martin began. “I know that sounds wicked, but I mean it in a very loving way. I’ve always been a pretty simple person, cheerful and dumb, not too concerned with mysteries. For me, a spring day, a cold beer, a playful woman, summed up everything a man might need to experience in life. But behind that lurked the suspicion that I was missing out on something meaningful. I often felt like the person who had missed the point of the joke and was wondering what everyone else was laughing at. I never understood poetry, for example. Oh, I could enjoy a good description, but I had no idea what sent people into raptures. I once dated a girl who accused me of being shallow, and I felt the sting of that for a long time, I guess that deep down I believed it was true. After all, I was just a jock.
“But Julia changed all that. She made me feel pain and excitement. She made me think about my life. And about having children. I guess she forced me into maturity.”
“Which you consider unhappiness?”
“I was much better off when I was ignorant and naive.”
“But you can’t stay a child forever. You have to pass through the stage of knowledge, of knowing that you know. And then it is possible to find a new level of innocence.” Robert spoke with animation. He was beginning to see Martin’s life unfold in terms of the basic structures of the spiritual search. He had suffered the same torment. “So she was a kind of teacher to you.”
“Once, when we were in Italy,” Martin said, “we came to the edge of a high cliff. We had been irritated with one another all morning and it was good to find a place where there was so much emptiness and silence. I sat at the edge and fell into a reverie and Julia wandered off a bit behind me. I guess fifteen or twenty minutes passed, when suddenly I heard a tremendous sound. Something had fallen from the cliff and crashed into the forest below. For a split second I experienced nothing more than a startle response, and then I thought, ‘Julia!’ I rushed over to where I had heard the sound come from, calling her name. She didn’t answer. I grew frantic, running back and forth along the edge, until I saw her jacket and handbag piled in a neat bundle under a tree. A shudder of relief went through me, for I realized at once that she must have gone for a walk and gone further than expected. But when I got to the spot where her things lay, I found a note pinned to her sleeve. It said, ‘Goodbye. Remember me. Julia.’ I must have gone mad. I began wailing like an animal over the body of its dead mate. I was seized by pictures of her hurling herself from the precipice, her body smashing to pieces below. It was a three-hundred-foot drop. It was impossible she could have survived. But more hideous than any of that were the unmistakable flashes of relief that flushed through me. For all my anguish, for all my grief, a little voice danced in my brain, shouting, ‘We’re free, we’re free!’ And then I heard her laugh. I whirled around and she was standing there, at the edge of the woods. She was naked except for her boots and hat. I exploded into a ball of fury and leaped on her. I slapped her and threw her to the ground and kicked her and then threw myself on her and fucked her brains loose. Afterwards, we slept and when we got up I was nauseous and stiff, and had to spend the next four days in bed with a fever. Julia suffered a black eye and bruises on her legs.”
Robert clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Was there a moment when it occurred to you that you might actually throw her off the cliff yourself? I mean, you had the note. You were in a strange country. You probably could have gotten away with it. Poetic justice.”
“No, you don’t understand. I was furious at her, ready to kill her, but at the same time totally enthralled. I had never known anything remotely like that in my life. There was so much feeling. I’ve never taken drugs, but I imagine it must be the same. The sensation is so strong, so convincing, that one has to go back to it. Except that Julia wasn’t a powder or a weed, she was a human being consciously moulding my mind.” He paused, a certain parallel suddenly dawning on him. “I guess it was something like your guru does.”
“With all the difference in the world. Babba doesn’t want anything from anyone. It sounds to me lik
e Julia is a sponge for attention.”
“Yes, there’s the spoiled child in her. But I suppose that’s what made her so irresistible. Sometimes she’d pout, just like a six-year-old girl. And I would take her on my lap and try to cheer her up. Her mood was real, so I’d get lost in the game, and pretend that she was my daughter. Until I felt her squirming on my thighs, and my cock would stir. She’d put her arms around my neck and talk baby-talk, pressing her breasts against me, her cunt hot through her panties and skirt, through my pants and shorts. She got like a fire sometimes, and it drove me mad. Some nights I would have fantasies of her fucking a dozen men at once. I had no doubt but that she could handle it and walk away swaggering. The extremes in her strung me out, the little girl and the pornographic nymphomaniac all in one.
“Then, when we got down to it, I sank into her like a stone in mud. I wasn’t anything near being a virgin when we met. I’d had my share of women, ranging from nice girls next door to Mexican whores. But Julia was something else. There was a quality in her eyes, a kind of hurt pleading that used to rise up like mist from a swamp and totally engulf me so that I couldn’t see anything but that strange burning in her brain. And all the while she did shameless things with her body, her cunt sucking at me like a gaping toothless mouth, slurping, drooling. Time stopped and space disappeared. At times I felt like I was dying, because the world had become an emptiness, and I was being sucked into the whirlpool, a blazing comet doing a swan dive into a black hole from which there could be no return or escape, ever.
“Then she’d start to talk dirty. ‘Fuck me,’ she said over and over again. ‘Come on you humpy jock, you big juicy hunk of meat, do your dirt all over me.’ I’d get scared and look at her to see if she had flipped out, and there was no recognition in her eyes. She had become a mindless moaning cunt leaching at me as though she wanted my very blood.”
“Wow,” Robert said under his breath. “Wild.”
“And it went on for hours. You know that I’m in pretty good shape. And I know how to hold my come. Sometimes we’d start after dinner and by the time I got up it would be three in the morning.”
“I’m impressed,” Robert said. “If you make me your agent I could make you a fortune. Of course, you’d have to break this prejudice you have concerning the gender of your sex objects.”
“She wasn’t impressed,” Martin said. “After a bout like that, she’d get up, smoke a cigarette, and start chattering about how she had to get up early for work, and then go off to pee and make coffee and pick at her face in the mirror for a half hour before she came back to bed, gave me a friendly kiss, and rolled over, shoving her ass into my crotch as though I were some pet teddy bear she kept for comfort. The worst part was she wouldn’t even ask me whether I wanted any coffee or not.”
“Tell me, what did you do when you weren’t mounting these erotic melodramas?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What?”
“It’s all a blur. Somehow we passed a lot of time. I don’t know. We went out, to movies, plays, that sort of thing. We had friends, I guess. But the more I think of it the more I realize that they were just acquaintances, not people I cared about or who cared about me in any deep sense. We watched television, read, took care of the household chores. Each year we took a vacation. Two weeks in the sun.”
“So you vacillated between boredom and a kind of terrified ecstasy.”
“That’s pretty much it. But that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Which can’t be described. Which is what you asked me about. Which is love.”
“Yeah,” Robert breathed, and in that single syllable encapsulated a lifetime of searching.
“That was the air we breathed. It was the stage that all this happened on. Whether we fought or laughed. Whether we fucked with desperation or made love with joy. Whether we flew through Europe or languished in boredom in New York City. Through and below and above all that was the love we had for one another. And I don’t know what to say about that. Sometimes we sat in the living room paying no attention to one another, me reading and she listening to music, when a light would fill the space, a radiance that was an unspeakable bliss, and I’d look up at the same time she would, and her eyes had turned to angel’s eyes. Or we’d be walking down a street in a hurry to get somewhere, dodging traffic and swimming upstream through the heavy vibrations of the thousands of others rushing about, and she’d stop abruptly, and touch my arm, and when I turned to her she’d look at me as though she had never really seen me before and say, ‘I love you.’ Or in the middle of the night she’d wake up from a nightmare and be sobbing, remembering her mother, and burrow into my arms and cling to me in a way that I don’t think any woman ever will again.
“And even these don’t capture it. Now, I get along. I earn a good salary, I’m in the process of finding a new apartment, and I feel free. I don’t think I could go back to living with Julia the way we were. It would only destroy us both again. Yet, at odd times during the day, when I haven’t thought of her for several days and am beginning to think of which of the ladies at the club I’m going to grace with my marathon cock, I’ll see her face in the air, and my heart will stop. Not figuratively, but actually. Stop. And for a few seconds, I know I am dead.”
Martin’s words hung in the air for a long time after he finished speaking. By now the sky was black and a slight chill had entered the air. The two men sat side by side and watched the sluggish polluted river. The far shore was ablaze with lights and the rim of industrial civilization was reflected in the oily water. They were silent for many minutes. Several times Robert had to check an impulse to put his arm around Martin’s shoulders. He could not trust that the other man would understand the meaning of the gesture.
But then, do I understand my own motivation? he thought. The images unleashed by Martin’s narrative surged through his mind like waves over a stormy sea. The raw eroticism, the sweat, the grunting exorcism of the devil of lust, all sang in his bloodstream. But in the movies of his imagination, it was not Julia that spread herself beneath the athletic warrior of the sheets. It was himself. Yes, he lay face down and bereft of all context as Martin ranged over him, moving in hot, tight circles, both of them silent and deep, deep into that realm where each breath, each thought, each atom of awareness hummed in a sea of infinite emptiness. It was something that he could never reach with a woman, for what woman could ever penetrate him, take him, enter him, make him moan with surrender? And it had never been enough, for it was temporary, a thing of a few minutes or even hours. And it gave him an insatiable yearning for eternity, for that was what it was. When all the fear of homosexuality and all its false chic had been seen through, what it was was the endlessness of the self knowing the self as the self. And the body alone was not sufficient vehicle for such a realization, for the body was transient, limited. No, the truth of homosexuality was the truth of knowing the gods, and once one had sported among the gods, it became necessary to know God. And so he had met Babba, who had inspired in him that same surrender, before whom it was a joy to kneel and touch one’s head to the floor. Yet, he was still tempted by the sensations of the flesh, forgetting that they were not truth but only the messengers of truth. Babba was patient, and allowed him his lingering love affairs with those messengers, but warned that with each encounter Robert risked losing sight of ultimate reality, forsaking the infinite forest for a single phallic tree.
Now, with Martin, he felt the tearing along his metaphysical seams. He knew that the man needed to see Babba and to know what the guru meant. But at the same time he intuited that Martin would blossom in an entirely different way if he could simply slip through the grid of his heterosexual conditioning and fall gently into the arms of a man who might love him.
“Well,” Robert said at last, “I wouldn’t worry about it. After all, death is nothing more than a commercial for God. It’s his way of making sure that we don’t forget him.”
; Martin, climbing slowly out of his reverie of Julia, was perplexed. He couldn’t filter out the meaning from the humor in Robert’s remark.
“I mean,” Robert went on, “if we were immortal, we could play at life with much more aplomb, couldn’t we?”
“I suppose . . . “ Martin began, uncertain as to where this was leading.
“Your problem with Julia,” Robert continued, now a bit reckless, “man’s problem with woman. That’s at the core of it, don’t you see? Without them, we can maintain the illusion of immortality. Even as we die, we live forever. But a woman denies all that by her very existence. She reminds us that we are nothing more than the detritus of her bloody hole, and every time we gaze into her eyes, we see the grave. Which is why she holds such a fascination for us. And why some of us have fled her. But you are bound by the horrible beauty of her reality. For you, on a very deep level, Julia is your last defense against God, and your last defense against accepting yourself as a man, a creature who must find his own salvation.”
A huge ocean liner sailed past, heading for New York Bay and the ocean beyond. Robert stood up. He grabbed Martin under one arm and helped him to his feet. The gesture was so straightforward, so brusque, so conventional, that not a whisper of homosexuality was there to gossip about the contact between them.
“This is getting too murky,” Robert said. “Let’s go see Babba and have some light thrown on the matter.”
They turned their backs on the river and walked east, to the loft where Robert’s guru was holding sat-sang with all those who had been drawn to him.
Two
When the doorbell rang, Julia’s long evening of preparation fell apart. Gail’s arrival, interesting to deal with from the vantage point of silence and solitude in a warm bath, hit like a large rock in a shallow pool. The impact of what had happened the previous night, how it would be resolved now, caught her up breathless.