The Sensual Mirror

by Marco Vassi

  The waiter filled both their cups and retreated to a five minute cigarette break in the kitchen.

  “I’ve never seen you do anything like that before,” Julia said. “I’m impressed, but it doesn’t seem very holy.”

  “That’s part of the general misconception about what spirituality is,” he told her, “one which I shared. Being spiritual means being real. Being real means feeling and expressing your feeling fully.”

  “What if it had come to a fistfight?” she asked, intrigued, because Martin was articulating things which she had been discovering in terms of her relationship with Gail.

  “I would have tried not to damage him beyond what the situation called for. That’s the paradox. You have to be free, and yet freedom is a kind of discipline. Babba says that there might come a situation in which you might have to kill someone. He said that if that happens, if it’s really necessary, then do it with as much ease as you would crack an egg for breakfast.”

  “Has he ever killed anyone? Did you ask him?”

  “Somebody did. He said that there was a really big, bad baboon in the part of the jungle where he lived. And that the two of them took themselves off to a secluded spot to settle things. And that the baboon never came back.”

  “But that’s just a monkey,” Julia said.

  “As far as Babba is concerned, that’s all any of us are. Just monkeys.”

  Julia began to remonstrate, and then something peculiar happened. She saw everyone in the place as though they were naked. She saw the raw sexuality of the men and women, the cocks and cunts that get covered up. She saw the capacity for ferocity, the predatory quality of the owner, the animal helplessness of the waitress. Everywhere people were eating and drinking and making noises at one another.

  It’s true, she thought. If you take away the clothes and the concrete, then we might all be around a watering hole somewhere. And probably doing more interesting things than talking, like combing one another’s hair and chasing each other around trees.

  Martin saw her appraising glance. “It’s weird,” he said. “That’s the thing about Babba. Everything stays the same but you start to see it differently. And all the things you used to think were the pinnacles of the human species you see as the biggest examples of stupidity and pride.”

  “Maybe I could meet him,” Julia said and the moment she spoke the words was drawn back to the actuality of their situation with one another. This was precisely the value of their separation, that they were cut loose to discover new truths, new ways of opening to the world. And perhaps the biggest error would be in trying to horn in on each other’s realities. Maybe she should let Martin have Babba and Robert and stay away from meeting them or becoming involved in any way. And perhaps Martin should not get implicated in what was going on between her and Gail.

  A veil fell between them, a thickness of darkness merely, without substance, but real. Each second they remained together dragged them more deeply back into marriage, or marriage as they had defined it. Each word spoken was a form of betrayal to the liberty they had tasted. Like climbers on a cliff who have reached a seemingly impassable spot, they could not go higher and yet it was unthinkable to back down. The other solution, one never considered, was simply to cut all lines and leave each climber loose to follow his or her own inclination, own destiny.

  “It might have been simpler if I had been a strange woman after all,” she said, reflecting the structure of the mood.

  “You were, once, and look what happened,” he replied. “If you had been a different woman, nothing would have changed. We would have only had to do it all over again to arrive at this point. Or some variation of it. You know, quitting the jobs, going to Europe, moving to a new city, deciding whether or not to have a child, arguing, going downhill, breaking up, and then . . . what? Being apart for four months and meeting by accident in a church? Why bother? We’re already here. Why start again with someone else and go through it all again?”

  Julia’s eyes became unusually bright. She looked at Martin as though he were a Roman candle exploding. “You’re right!” she said, surprise in her voice. “You’re absolutely right.”

  “It’s the mating dance. It’s only biological. That’s why we do it so well. It’s as programmed as the way birds dance or fish waggle their tails. And since we can do it unthinkingly, we like to repeat it. Only each repeat seems to require a new partner, which is hell on the bank book and nervous system. The trouble isn’t with the mating dance, it’s with what happens to the mates when the dance is over. When they settle down and try to feather the nest”

  “You’re really big on monkeys and birds these days, aren’t you?”

  “Aside from rats, roaches, and few scraggly trees, that’s about all that lives in the city. Us and the pigeons.”

  “And that’s all there is? I mean, that’s the only thing available to a man and a woman? The mating dance and then the dreary ritual of maintaining the cave or the nest or whatever you want to call it?”

  “The home?” Martin ventured. He bit his lower lip and stared out the window for a few seconds. “I don’t know,” he went on. “That’s all I can see. Unless . . . “ He broke off.

  “Unless what?” she asked.

  “It’s another one of those things that I can’t really put into words, because I’m not sure what it is. But is has something to do with men and men and women and women. I mean, my friendship with Robert is crucial, and primary. I couldn’t conceive of going back into a relationship with you or any woman which would make me put Robert into second place behind her.”

  Julia sucked her breath in sharply. “But that’s just the promise that Gail and I made with one another. That no relationship with a man would ever come between us. In fact, those are the conditions which she gave to Eliot before they got married.”

  “Eliot finally married Gail, eh?” Martin said. ‘That’s an interesting match. I suppose it finally came down to money and children.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And he saw what she meant about keeping her own place, and maintaining her own life, and having her relationship with me.” She considered telling Martin about her scene with Eliot, but decided it could wait until another time.

  “Would that work for us?” he asked.

  The question was sudden, unexpected, and harsh, even though it was the only question that really mattered between them, the barrier through which they had to pass or fail to penetrate. It might have seemed that they would have a bit more time to tool around before coming face to face with the central issue. But there comes a moment when childhood is suddenly no more, when playtime is over once and for all, when the implacable nature of reality quietly and firmly asserts itself beyond all power of any individual to contradict, when the awareness of mortality invests time with a fearsome meaning. This was the situation of husband and wife as they sat in a tawdry coffee shop and weighed the balance of their future. There was no margin within which to tease the edges of decision.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “But that’s the only chance at all. There’s no going back to the two of us locked in that terrible unrelenting embrace. I won’t do that again, Martin, not with you, not with anyone. I need space, I need an identity independent of any man.”

  “Or woman?”

  “Or woman. But I can’t live without men or women, although for most of my life I’ve tried to live without women. Perhaps if there is both, there is the slim possibility that I can cancel the two sides out and emerge as just myself.”

  “I have no objections,” he said. She raised an eyebrow. “I really don’t,” he went on. “All I want is peace, and whatever has to be arranged or shifted around to bring peace, then I’m for it. If I don’t see you again after tonight, that would be all right too. But that would seem like a false peace to me, the peace that comes from hiding from life. And I think you’re right. If we tried to move in together again and dro
pped our new relationships, we’d be at one another’s throats in no time at all.”

  The waiter returned and dropped the check onto the table. He turned and walked away quickly, like a child who will run up and hit another child and then escape to a spot behind its mother’s legs for safety. Out of habit, Martin picked up the check. They both noticed the action at the same time and laughed.

  “There must be a thousand unconscious little rituals like that which bind us together in the old way of relating,” he said.

  “As long as we keep seeing them as such, then there’s no problem,” she replied. “I guess the trick is to stay awake.”

  They stood up. Martin left a fifty-cent tip and remarked to Julia, “Here’s another one. I’m so damned conditioned I’m embarrassed to walk out without leaving a tip for that creep who waited on us.”

  “Then don’t,” she said.

  His hand hesitated over the coins.

  “I mean it,” she insisted. “Break the pattern. Liberate yourself.”

  Martin smiled, picked up the two quarters and put them in his pocket. They walked to the door where the cash register was, and he paid the bill. He turned to watch the table, to see whether the waiter would go over to clean up. He wanted to watch the man’s reaction. But the waiter was leaning against a far wall, his arms folded across his chest, a broad sardonic grin on his face. He had seen the scene at the table and had psychically positioned himself to emerge with a sense of moral superiority. He was a pro, and something like this happened to him several times a day. He knew when to cut his losses and how.

  Martin and Julia walked out into the street. It was now nearly midnight. There were still rumbles of thunder and lightning flashes, but they were further, more feeble, like a receding toothache. The sidewalk was still filled with walkers, people who for one reason or another did not want to return to their apartments. Some eight million human beings were stuffed into a space that might nicely accommodate several hundred thousand, and the enforced proximity, the crowding, the constant abrasive contact, had made them permanently mad, so much so that they had come to accept the most bizarre and aberrant living conditions as a way of life, with only the vaguest glimmerings that existence on the planet might be a gracious, spacious thing, a dance with elegance and passion, with calm and time in which to appreciate the transience of sensation.

  “I guess we have a problem,” Julia said as they turned east and strolled down the street.

  “You mean ‘your place or mine?’ “

  “Or neither your place nor mine.”

  “It’s funny,” she added. “There have been hundreds of nights when we returned to the apartment without giving it a second thought, following the rote routine of our live together, and it got to be so casual, so unthinking, that it lost all its value, all its meaning. And now that we are outside the pattern, such a simple thing as deciding where to sleep becomes a kind of exhilarating challenge.”

  “Any ideas?” he said.

  “Let’s walk,” she told him.

  It was the last quarter of the twentieth century as measured by Christian dogmatists. The world was beginning to concur in the judgement of a critic that “This is our worst century yet.” The globe had too many people on it, and they were organized into the most cumbersome and idiotic social structures imaginable, unwieldy, ugly states that imposed uniformity on larger and larger numbers of people. All the tribes had been wiped out, all the delicate and elegant lifestyles had been eradicated. And now the species was embarking on a systematic program to destroy all life on the planet. The very city in which Julia and Martin walked had produced so much garbage that it had poisoned the sea for scores of miles around, and swimming had been banned for seventy-five miles along the shore.

  Those people who tried to make things better made things worse. The ancient traditions had lost all vitality and survived as grim shells of what had once been living truth. Protestants and Catholics planted bombs in one another’s homes. Whites and blacks still smoldered across genetic barbed wire. Communists and capitalists brandished nuclear weapons at one another in an attempt to prove which system could produce the higher level of human misery. And everywhere virulent morons made speeches and ran for president or led coups or piled more bodies to shore up the decaying walls of economic empire. Fascists appeared and swept up followers in the name of God. Everywhere the barbaric practices continued, the slaughterhouses boomed, the automobile factories continued cranking out unnecessary millions of poisonous machines, and square mile after square mile of earth was covered with concrete and asphalt to make room for these hideous toys of demented apes.

  As they walked down Broadway, heading south, moving with no specific goal, no clear purpose, the neighborhoods changed. The folksy anarchy of West Seventy-second Street gave way to the lanky impersonal high-rises that had begun to close in on the old turf, great Orwellian nightmares without grace, charm, or concern for human scale, things built by huge machines, ordered by creatures who wore the human body but who possessed the souls of jackhammers, brutal, insistent, destructive animals for which a name has not yet been found.

  At Fifty-ninth Street, yet another change. They passed Carnegie Hall, a building left over from a time when the inherent horror of Western culture had not yet hit its stride in the new land. After destroying the continent of Europe with incessant warfare, foul technology, strangling ideologies, and a greed so mammoth that even life forms in other solar systems must have wondered, they came to a land that was utterly unspoiled, inhabited by the highest form of human society ever seen on the face of the earth, a diverse people of different languages and civilizations who nevertheless managed to inhabit a land for ten thousand years without leaving a scar on the earth, without wiping out a species, without leaving vain and foolish monuments, without descending to the degeneracy of enforced uniformity.

  The Europeans came, and with a viciousness made all the more ghastly because of the indifference within which it was couched, destroyed half a continent. Within four hundred years they had poisoned every body of water, polluted the very air, killed off entire species of animals and birds, and found justification on the lips of their priests to annihilate the red men, who, the sages and holy men of Christianity averred, had no souls anyway and thus could be slaughtered along with the bison, the beaver, and the trees. Where there was lawfulness they imposed laws and created lawlessness. Where there was the beauty of God’s creation, they erected testimonials to Man, and turned the land into a shit heap.

  Past the culture corner of Fifty-seventh Street, with its book shop and delicatessen for celebrities, a short stretch of automobile showrooms followed, now all dark, the bodies of the cars gleaming dully behind plate glass. Here the street was empty, dark, almost sinister. But in the distance there was a bright glow, like the reflection of a fire seen against the clouds. They walked toward it, toward The Great White Way, toward Times Square.

  As they approached, the nature of the street changed radically. Junk stores selling obscure plastic novelties that a retarded child would be embarrassed to play with. Souvlaki parlors with great hunks of meat dripping over a flame from which Greeks who had not shaved for days sliced long slivers to put on sandwiches. Movie theatres, massage parlors, the latter offering “Complete satisfaction, Yes, Complete! Only Eight Dollars!” After Forty-fifth Street, the slide into manifest decadence was swift and total. The space from there to Forty-Second Street was side-by-side sex shops. Peep shows, massage parlors with even more lurid promises, movie theatres showing XXX, and tiny stores which displayed knives, pocket calculators and dildoes indiscriminately in their windows, composing a set which would have taxed the ingenuity of an expert in Boolean algebra to define.

  Along the sidewalks, the quality of people would have stretched the limits of a Buddhist’s capacity for compassion. Pimps, heroin addicts, muggers, killers, whores, young men who existed as nothing more than a twitch of nastiness, a fes
tering scar, boys of no more than twelve or thirteen selling their bodies to middle-aged men with damp palms. And amidst all this, the police, stunned, stoned, overwhelmed, their eyes reflecting their inchoate stupefaction at how they could possibly be expected to halt the decline and death of a two-thousand-year-old civilization by standing on a street corner and brandishing their clubs.

  Martin and Julia crossed over and went to stand underneath the Chemical Tower Building, a tall triangle of glass and brick which, when compared to the Flat-iron Building, speaks several volumes on the death of architecture in the nation. This was the spot where the crowds gathered on New Year’s Eve to watch the ball drop, to signal in the new year, which is the same as the old year, except for the digits written on billions of pieces of paper from coast to coast. There several hundred thousand people get drunk and gaze fuzzily into the air waiting for the signal when they can all jump up and down and make noise. Those viewing or listening at home are switched to Guy Lombardo who still makes an effort at waving his arm although the band can play Auld Lang Syne with the perfection of a phonograph record. Then there are several moments of sentimentality and a dim flare of primordial awareness around the edge of deep unconsciousness which is the waking condition of the modern world.

  “Something is happening,” the collective mind says to itself. “There was something about . . . what was it? Time? Eternity? Wonder? Mystery? Awe? The Fact of Existence Itself? The Poignant Joy of Life? The Miracle of Love?”

  But the shades go down very quickly, and before a quarter hour of “the new year” has passed everyone is stumbling about once more, ugly robots clanking about in the dirty grooves of their conditioning.

  Martin and Julia stopped and turned to face one another. They held hands like two children about to swing round and round. They had not spoken a word for the entire thirty blocks they’d walked. There was nothing to say, and everything to say. The impact of the world they’d just passed through had both disheartened them and given them a wider perspective on their situation.