by Marco Vassi
At hearing Julia say “Eliot,” Gail gnawed at her lower lip, and her eyes threatened to fill again. Julia didn’t see the reaction until she’d gone on past his name, and when she noticed Gail’s unhappiness, she hung her head.
“Oh Gail, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world. I don’t know what got into me. I was just so horny. I haven’t fucked in almost two months. And I guess you don’t know this, but Eliot and I had had a very brief affair, just before you met him. We’re together all the time. You know? I mean, we’re very intimate.”
She looked up to see how Gail was taking all that she was saying. Her friend had an expression that seemed to hover between pain and hatred. There was nothing for Julia to do but accept it, to absorb the feeling and transform it within herself. This was part of her dues.
“Shall I go on?” she asked.
“Yes,” Gail said, her lips tight. “I want to hear. Please.”
“Well, I know things about Eliot that could send him to jail for ten years. He’s a lot of things to me. A father figure, a boss, a teacher, a confidant. When I began to go through really big trouble with Martin, Eliot listened to me for weeks and weeks.”
“But during all that time you hardly told me what was going on.”
“I suppose I have a natural instinct to go to a man when I need help.”
“I know what you mean,” Gail replied, her bitterness hanging out.
“Anyway, there was something in the air all day yesterday. Both Eliot and I felt it. And when quitting time came, it was just obvious that we both wanted to fuck. And I worried about Martin and I worried about you, but somehow it didn’t seem to involve anyone else. After all, we were consenting adults. We were both free. And it never occurred to me that Eliot had a date with you. You know his style. His appointment book is immaculate. He even schedules a precise amount of time between appointments, enough for transportation, enough to think about the next person he’s going to meet; he even leaves himself time to piss, for Christ’s sake.”
“I know,” Gail said, and a shadow of a smile fell across her lips.
The two women stole glances at one another. A subtle checkpoint had been passed.
“So I thought we’d just do it. You know. Get the panties off, get the pants down. Cock hard, hole all greased up. Huff and puff, move the old ass around, rub my fingers on my clit, and get my fucking rocks off.”
Gail’s eyes opened wide. She had never heard Julia speak like this before. In fact, she’d never heard any woman speak like this before. She had thoughts which used those words and those images, but they were fleeting, formless things which never got translated into sound, much less communicated.
“Are you shocked?” Julia said, seeing Gail’s expression. “Well, I’d choose more fancy language, but that’s exactly the way I was thinking. I knew there wouldn’t be any gooey stuff between Eliot and me, and no traces the following day. We could both do the thing and draw a curtain over it and act like it never happened. He’s a very attractive man in his brutal way, as you well know, and a certain charge builds up over time. So we discharged the charge. And nothing would have come of it if he hadn’t proposed to you. If he hadn’t stood you up to come over here.” She poured more wine into both their glasses. “I wonder why he did it?”
“Maybe he wanted something to happen. Maybe it was his way of blowing the lid off.” Gail picked up her glass and sipped at the wine.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, look at what’s happened. Eliot wound up proposing. And you and I are having probably the first real conversation of our entire friendship.”
“It seems a hell of a roundabout way to get at things.”
“Life is funny,” Gail said.
“Life is a soap opera,” Julia amended.
The two women looked at a spot on the floor between them. The pattern of their talk for the evening had been set. It would be a series of spirals ending in resolution at each level, with a pause before going to the next plateau. The movement was endless and could carry them for the rest of their lives, defining the meaning of relationship, A melting was taking place, a process they both felt, and the unexpected blow which had hurled them together so violently was indeed proving a form of caress.
“What about . . . Eliot?” Julia asked. “Are you going to tell him that you know?”
“I’d have to, if I was going to have anything more to do with him.”
“Are you?”
Gail looked up sharply. “Julia,” she said, “do you mind if I ask something personal?”
Julia smiled broadly. “Well, what could be personal now?”
“What was there between you and Martin? I mean, really. Without any bullshit.”
Julia stirred and changed her position. She unfolded her legs and sat with her back against the couch. The white terrycloth robe fell open and revealed her thighs far up past her knees. Gail found herself glimpsing the expanse of white skin. Julia’s hair hung loose about her shoulders. Her breasts were half exposed. Her face was open, easy, intelligent. Gail caught her breath. She was caught by a brief, intense desire to put her arms around Julia’s waist and bury her head in the other woman’s soft belly.
“I guess at first it was the challenge of getting married. You know. We’ve all been handed the story from the time we could understand English. That’s the big one, right? And then there was the physical part, of course. Martin is such a stud. Hung like a horse, and practically tireless. He used to screw me so long and so hard sometimes that I couldn’t close my legs for an hour afterward.” Julia looked about her almost absent-mindedly. “Do you have any cigarettes?” she asked.
“No,” Gail replied, “but I brought some grass. Would you like a joint?”
“I’m already a bit stoned, but why not?”
Gail reached into her bag and pulled out a tiny cigarette case from which she extracted a thin, hand-rolled marijuana cigarette. “This is a present from Eliot,” she said. “Just in from Thailand. A hundred and seventy-five dollars an ounce.”
Julia made a whistling gesture with her lips, which jolted Gail with its suggestion of kissing.
Gail lit up, inhaled, ballooned the smoke in her lungs, and passed the joint to Julia. The next few minutes were given up to the ritual of the grass high, letting the weed work its subtle alchemy, setting up temporary headquarters in the brain, rearranging the pattern and intensity of signals. It was an extraordinarily powerful strain, and by the time they were down to a roach, holding the ember with the tips of long fingernails, they both found it difficult to focus on anything but the waterfall of sensations exploding in their bodies.
“Whew,” Gail said. She leaned back against the sofa, her head on a pillow. She unbuttoned the waist of her skirt and pulled the bottom of her blouse out. She slid down until she was three-quarters reclining on the floor.
“Why don’t I put on some music?” Julia said.
She got up and went over to the stereo and stacked six records on the spindle. She listened only to slow music, and her collection reflected only the most mellow of whatever genre she choose. In popular, it was, for example, Donovan, not the Stones; in classical, it was Debussy and some of Satie, not Wagner; in Indian, it was Ali Akhbar Khan, not Ravi Shankar, So it didn’t matter which records she chose; they would all reflect the same mood.
When she returned, Gail was largely disheveled, her skirt hiked up past her knees, the top four buttons of her blouse undone. She was gazing at the ceiling, her eyes somewhat glazed.
“Where were we?” Julia said as she lay down.
“Martin was hung like a horse and you couldn’t close your legs after he fucked you,” Gail replied, her voice drowsy.
Julia sighed and sank back into her story. “Right. After that, there was the prospect of Europe. He wouldn’t have gone in a million years, but I was able to mo
ve him out of that dreary little town and that absurd job and for almost a year we lived like rich people. Moving all the time. Then there was domesticity, which lasted about three months before I got bored with living a twenty-four-hour schedule. It was like having two jobs: Eliot from nine to five and Martin from five until nine the next morning. And when I looked deep into my heart, I knew that if I had to make a choice, I’d prefer giving up the job with Martin. It wasn’t as exciting, and I didn’t get paid. After that, it was just a matter of time.”
“What about him?”
“Who knows? He’s not the world’s most articulate man. But I suppose if it takes two to make a marriage, it takes two to make a divorce. I assume he got as bored for his reasons as I did for mine. Anyway, the last few months before we split up were practically unbearable. We used to lie around all night and silently hate one another.”
“I didn’t realize,” Gail said. She rolled over on her side and looked at Julia who still lay on her back. The grass had imparted a softness to her aura, and Gail suffered a momentary loss of erotic indentity. For an instant she looked at Julia the way a man might, seeing the lush. unconscious invitation of the almost perfect body, the pose of utter lassitude. When she snapped back into herself, however, the feeling did not leave. And she found herself thinking. This is desire. What I’m feeling is desire.
“That was the worst part, getting caught up in that terrible trap of the closed pair. You know, the bond between a man and a woman is so strong, so total in a way, that it shuts everything else out. There were a hundred times I wanted to call you, to talk to you. But I had this idea that I owed Martin one hundred percent loyalty, that I couldn’t be really real with anybody else. You know, I was less upset over my sexual infidelity than over talking to somebody else about my marriage.”
Julia turned her head to look at Gail. Her eyes widened and then narrowed when she saw her friend looking at her. Gail’s face was a pool of such clear water that the bottom could be seen, magnified, clarified. And the feelings that lay at the core of Gail’s person at that instant were so sharply defined already that Julia couldn’t mistake them. Except that she did, for she had not made that leap across gender lines, and any erotic component to the mood of the moment could not be registered. What Julia perceived was concern.
“Gail, what’s the matter?” she said.
“I guess I’m mixed up,” Gail replied. “Suddenly it seems like there’s a lot of people in the room.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get so depressing.”
“No, it’s all right. I wanted to hear about it. I guess I want to know whether I should marry Eliot. Every marriage tale I’ve heard sounds pretty much the same, and I guess when anyone gets married they think, ‘Mine will be different,’ and then it never is. I’ve been consoling myself with the idea that money will make the difference. We can even afford to maintain separate apartments, and Eliot travels a lot so I won’t even be seeing him a lot of the time.” She reached over and put her hand on Julia’s arm. “Am I being too cold, calculating it all like this?”
Julia took her friend’s hand and held it. “No, baby, not at all. You’d be a fool if you didn’t. The only thing is, you never really know until you do it. Once that piece of paper is signed, it’s like living in a foreign country. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like hearing a door slam behind you.”
“Isn’t there anyway out? Does it have to be like that?”
They slowly disengaged. Gail’s hand was on fire where Julia had held it. Julia’s heart was beating rapidly. Both women were breathing hard. They fell back as though exhausted, the extremely powerful marijuana amplifying each nuance of feeling a hundred times. Julia’s reality crashed in upon her. Time telescoped and psychological space turned in upon itself. Telling the story of her relationship with Martin had impacted that experience so that she felt his presence very strongly in the room. Superimposed upon that was the hangover from the fucking she’d received from Eliot the night before. And now there was this abrupt and titanic breakthrough with Gail. And she had no resting place in the rapid flow of events within which to integrate, to allow it all to be absorbed into the wider stream of awareness that was her life. She felt flushed, undone. She slid forward even more and lay completely on the floor. She heard Gail do the same. The woman next to her had become a mixture of threat and consolation. Gail’s presence was filling her entirely, and at the same time crowding something in her, some wall of privacy that rarely got approached, much less climbed. Not even Martin had touched spots that were, madly, surrendering themselves to Gail’s vibrations. Julia had a wild impulse to tear her robe off. She sighed, arched her back, and tried to melt into the floor. The first record dropped and she realized she had not heard a note. With the second, the strains of Judy Collins filled the room. She was singing about clouds and life and somehow coming to understand that it is impossible to understand. She stretched. Her left hand touched something. It was Gail’s hand. She began to pull back with the unquestioned reflex of social nicety, but Gail’s fingers closed over her own. For an instant Julia panicked, not knowing why, but suddenly afraid. And then she took a deep breath, and relaxed. The contact was made, accepted.
Gail could barely contain herself. Insights galloped through her mind like steeplechase horses before the pack has thinned itself out. Thundering hooves pounded the turf of her consciousness, and then tons of muscle and bone lifted itself in the air to fly giddily over the hurdle of an ancient resistance, to come thudding down on the other side, pursuing the race. Every now and then, one didn’t make it, and horse and rider went sprawling crazily across the earth. The images in Gail’s mind were now too sharp, too vivid, to be denied. There was no hazy distance across which she needed to peer to discover what she wanted. She was hungry for Julia in a most direct, physical way. She wanted her friend in her arms, their breasts mingling, their thighs pressing tight. She wanted Julia’s kisses, her ripe mouth and tender tongue. She wanted to smell the pungent heat between Julia’s thighs, to savor the tart taste, the viscous musk of slow excitement.
This is insane, she thought. / have to get a grip on myself. But even as she forced herself down against the rug, biting the inside of her lip, Julia’s hand found her own. It was a moment of such electrifying intensity that Gail’s scalp crawled. It took superhuman effort to keep from rolling over violently and flinging herself on to Julia, raping her vulnerability. She felt Julia begin to pull away, and her heart dropped at the idea that she would lose even that little precious contact. So all her life’s conditioning to the contrary, she seized her friend’s hand.
And then, all at once, it was easy. They were lying side by side, relaxed, breathing fully, holding hands.
All that just to reach something so simple, Gail thought, and allowed herself an inner sigh of relief. I almost made a fool of myself. The actual, full, direct physical contact had skimmed the cream off the top of the tension that had built between them. And with that, they both subsided into a long, deep dreaminess, striking into the music, enjoying the soma that spiced their mundane physiology. They drifted along the edge of wakefulness, flirting with sleep, at the thin edge of hypnogogic ecstasy, the most exquisite jewel on the spectrum of consciousness. Around and between them, a subtle energy flowed. The full release of waking structures liberated the electricity of expression. And since they were totally inert on the gross level, the energy was free to dance like transparent flame over their bodies. Their fingers loosened and their palms became conductor plates through which flowed the essence of their selves. They entered a union so profound that it was attached to no experience whatsoever.
In time as measured by the clock, a half hour passed. In time as measured by the music, months passed. In time as measured by the depth of the women’s breathing, eternities had come and gone. When Julia finally stirred, moved a finger, opened her eyes, she experienced what she imagined an infant must feel, that chaotic sense of won
der at color and shape. When she went to move her left hand, she found that it was glued to Gail’s hand. Disengaging was not a mechanical process, but had become a radical alteration in the nature of her relationship to the world. As she began to pull away, Gail moaned softly and her eyelids fluttered.
“Wow, where were we?” Gail said at last.
“Another universe,” Julia replied.
“I’ve done that alone, but I never went there with anyone else before.”
“Me neither. In fact, I usually can’t space out that much. When I’m alone my thinking usually takes over. But with you—I don’t know. It’s like you took the place of my thoughts.”
“Did you feel my presence?” Gail asked.
Julia pulled herself up a bit, rested her shoulders against the couch. “Yes. There was a place when everything turned violet.”
Gail also sat up, excited. “Right. It was a kind of mist, with mountains barely showing through.”
“Right,” Julia chimed in, “and something that looked like a huge lake in the distance—it was a deeper purple.”
Gail opened her eyes wide in astonishment. “That’s exactly what I saw,” she exclaimed. “We were there together.”
“Telepathy!” Julia said, awestruck. “It’s real. And it’s not like reading somebody’s thoughts. It’s going to where thoughts go, only in your mind with someone. Oh, I’m not saying this right.”
Gail smiled, reached out and held Julia’s hand again. “You don’t have to. Don’t you see? We shared it together. We don’t need the words.”
“We . . . don’t . . . need . . . the . . . words . . . “ Julia repeated, the full impact of the words hitting her with methodical repetition, like the left jabs of a master boxer slamming into an already groggy opponent. Julia shivered, a chill shaking her so violently that her entire torso shuddered.
“Oh dear,” Gail said and spontaneously moved forward and put her arms around Julia, holding her tightly. Julia shook in her friend’s embrace for almost a minute, the energy exploding playfully up and down the nerve nodes of her spine. Not having any knowledge of the relationship between astral events and physical reactions, never having been introduced to the concepts of kundalini and chakras, both women experienced the phenomenon in ignorance, which meant that they tasted more fear than they might otherwise have, but at the same time appreciated the occurrence more nakedly, without a superstructure of rationalizations.