The Sensual Mirror

by Marco Vassi

  When Gail began to climax, Julia went mad. She had never been with or seen or heard another woman have an orgasm. In a way, what was happening seemed unreal, or hyper-real. She had the uncanny sense that it was she herself that was coming. The way Gail tensed her ass, the way her cunt hit a rhythm of thrusting which grew looser and faster. The sounds of abandonment, and the bringing up of her hands to caress her own nipples. The trembling in the thighs. The tautness in the belly.

  Without being consciously aware of it, Julia began pumping her hips also, pushing her cunt into the fabric of the rug. From a third point in the room, it was clear that the two women were being drawn into one pulsation of excitement, Gail on her back grinding her wet pussy into Julia’s mouth, and Julia on her stomach thrusting her pubic bone into the floor. Julia held Gail’s ass and pushed her finger more and more deeply into the now clutching asshole. She licked and sucked and slobbered like a hungry animal.

  Gail whipped her head from side to side, her cries of pleasure now loud and intense. She was very very close to climax. Julia dug into her cunt with her lips with even more fierce intensity and pushed Gail over the edge.

  “Oh my God!” Gail yelled as she came, bucking, twisting, twitching, spurting secretions and urine into Julia’s wide sucking mouth. The tart taste of the lubrication that was oozing deep from Gail’s cunt and the sharp tang of piss that exploded uncontrollably from the burning hole right under the shrieking clitoris, sent Julia into a frenzy and she fucked the floor wildly until, seconds after Gail’s orgasm, she experienced her own, thrashing about on the rug with total abandon.

  They lay still for a long time, waiting for their breath to return to normal, and when they had regained the borders of their egos, Gail pulled herself along the rug until she was turned a hundred and eighty degrees around.

  “Now me,” she whispered, and slid her hands between Julia’s moist thighs, parting them, revealing the already dripping cunt. She brought her mouth up close to Julia’s juicy mound and licked the very edge of her cunt lips lightly. Julia stirred as though from a dream, feeling the warmth starting to spread between her legs. She opened her eyes and found that Gail’s cunt was still inches from her face.

  “Oh,” she sighed, and the two women moved simultaneously, burying their faces in each other’s crotch, where they lost themselves for hours, driving one another to peak after peak of wild explosion, until they were exhausted, spent, fully satisfied, and reeking of the body’s most pungent smells. They finally crawled into bed where they wrapped their arms around one another and fell asleep kissing.

  As Martin and Robert walked south on Chambers Street, they were met by a counterpoint of music styles that alternately blended and fought, producing a sine wave of cacophony and strange harmony. From a bar came the thudding intricacy of rock, while from wide windows of a loft directly across the street spilled the undulating cadences of an ancient chant. The contrast was so precise that Martin stopped to wonder at it.

  “That’s the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club,” Robert said. “It’s owned by the guy who used to have Max’s Kansas City.”

  “I’ve been there,” Martin said, as though he’d just learned that a man he used to play cards with was the Duke of Buckingham.

  Robert arched one eyebrow. “Everybody’s been there,” he drawled. “Once it became a celebrity hangout, the slide downhill to long lines on the sidewalk with teenyboppers from New Jersey trying to get a glimpse of Mick Jagger was inevitable. So the owner sold out, lay low for a few years, and now opened this place. In the meantime he started two other places, two of the most popular restaurants and bars in the city. He’s a genius of bars. He makes bars the way Brancusi makes sculptures, trim, elegant, perfect.” He tilted his chin to the canopied entrance on the other side of the street. “It’s only been open three weeks and already the old crowd has started to hang out there. This used to be a deserted street after six o’clock at night, but now it’s buzzing with cabs, drunks, thrillseekers, and all the other scavengers that descend whenever the decadence gets thick.”

  “You sound bitter,” Martin said.

  “You might say that. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for three years. It was one of the finest places in the city. It’s a twenty minute walk to Wall Street, or to Chinatown, or to the Village. City Hall is just down the street, and the river is two blocks away. During the day there’s all the shopping and noise and marketplace liveliness you could want, and at night and on Sundays it was absolutely quiet, and safe. Then those goddamned towers opened up, the World Trade Center, Rockefeller’s pyramids. And that was the beginning of the end. The developers moved in and tore down lovely old buildings and built thirty-storey monstrosities. Bars began to flourish, and restaurants. Pretty soon we’ll begin to have robberies, and all the misery that goes with affluence and high profile. And for what? Just so a few scummy bastards can get rich.”

  Martin had never seen the other man so agitated before, nor so angry. Robert spun around and continued to walk toward their destination, a building that looked as though it had seen its best days at the turn of the century. It looked abandoned, and had he been alone, Martin wouldn’t have even glanced at it, much less considered going inside. When they reached the front door, the war of the world was felt and heard most sharply. The sound of chanting fell from the windows above and cascaded down the stairway inside the front door. The rock music blasted directly from a large jukebox situated right behind the glass that separated bar from street. Martin could see the people inside. He got a fleeting impression of beards, glasses, cigarettes, women posturing and laughing, and a low swell of animal heat.

  “I guess it’s a good place to go to pick up women,” Martin said as they entered the building.

  For a moment, Robert didn’t know which place he was referring to, the bar or the loft. Then he spotted the confusion, stopped for a second, smiled, put his hand on Martin’s shoulder, and said, “Wherever you go, it’s the women who pick you up. Your only job is to keep from getting in the way.”

  They climbed the stairs, David Bowie hooting at them as they went, his voice growing dimmer as the booming chant grew louder. Martin could now make out a drum, a stringed instrument of some kind, and snatches of the lyrics, which were not English.

  “Hana hana mooloo jeebee, hana hana mooloo jeebee,” the song seemed to say.

  To Martin, whose tastes in music were formed in the 1950’s, the foreign sounds made no less sense than the lyrics of most of the rock music that had erupted since the Beatles. He followed Robert up two flights of wooden stairs in the poorly lit hallway, halfway between curiosity and annoyance at himself. Like millions of Americans, he had read about gurus and meditation in newspapers and magazines, and he was excited to be finally seeing the thing firsthand. At the same time, part of him was still in the bar across the street. A cold beer in his hand and a hot woman on the hook seemed to offer all the enlightenment that any man might ever want.

  Robert threw open the door of the loft. He stepped aside, put his arm around Martin’s shoulders, and eased him in.

  For a moment, Martin couldn’t make out details. He was struck first by color. It seemed that orange predominated.

  He didn’t know that there were so many shades of orange, from the screaming red end of the spectrum to the diffident yellow. He looked down on a carpet of orange shirts and robes. Everyone was sitting on the floor, all facing in one direction. The air was thick with incense. And the space was thick with the chant, the very atmosphere of the scene. People swayed, their eyes closed, clapped their hands, rocked their bodies gently from side to side, and sang the words over and over again. Martin glanced from one end of the loft to the other, a distance of nearly a hundred feet long by thirty feet wide. And nearly every square inch was filled.

  There must be five hundred people here! Martin thought.

  Robert took his arm by the elbow and led him inside toward what had to be the front of t
he loft, the place where everyone was facing. Martin balked inwardly at what he took to be a bit of impoliteness, but he trusted that Robert knew what he was doing. They went almost to the front wall and sat down no more than inches from a tiny wooden platform raised a few feet above the floor. It was covered with an orange rug, and held a cushion, vases with flowers, and a few artifacts and implements which were totally unfamiliar. The two men did not cause a ripple in the crowd; no one so much as glanced at them.

  “He’ll be here shortly,” Robert whispered after they had settled themselves and merged into the mood of the place. Then he turned away, closed his eyes, and began to clap his hands and chant in unison with the others, his voice rising high and clear, adding a fresh input of energy to the common effort. His entrance stimulated a number of people around him and Martin could feel the chant growing in intensity and volume, spreading out from Robert’s chest. Martin felt the strategic embarrassment of not knowing how to behave. Joining in the song was clearly out of the question; he didn’t know the words nor the purpose in singing them; he couldn’t pretend to be in the spirit of the thing. On the other hand, he felt awkward and wondered whether he might be considered snobbish. He glanced around surreptitiously to see if anyone was watching him.

  It was as though he were in an opium den. Everyone in the room, without exception, was wrapped in some private world, communicating to everyone else by means of a fixed ritual. It was a form of fascist anarchy whereby the individual could feel or think whatever he or she pleased so long as his or her behavior was absolutely uniform with everyone else’s. Martin couldn’t help but contrast it to the bar where there was a wider latitude of behavior but a more rigid focus in terms of interior life.

  Unused to sitting cross-legged on the floor, Martin pushed back a foot or so until his back was against a wall. He now looked more openly around him, the fear of being the object of hostile curiosity having disappeared. The space was curiously bare. One corner held a kitchen, stove, refrigerator, sink, table and chairs, and shelves with dishes and foods. Nearby was a door which clearly led to the bathroom. At the very far opposite end, a sleeping loft had been built, with a staircase leading to it. Under it was a desk, chairs, small library. And that was all. Martin leaned his head against the wall, closed his eyes, and let himself be drawn into the monotonous rhythm of the chant. It was quite soothing, and his thoughts made little curlecues, like paper airplanes thrown off a cliff. He speculated on who lived there, and what all these people were looking for, and before he realized that he was falling asleep, he was asleep.

  And then was awakened by a sound he had never in his life heard before. He was awakened by the thunder of silence.

  Martin opened his eyes to find a different world from the one in which he had gone to sleep. The loft was still there, and the people were still there. But it seemed that someone had turned a great many lights on. The place was much brighter. And the people were absolutely still, sitting upright, spines erect, their hands in their laps. It was as though they had been a group of green recruits sloppily lurching across a field and then, by some miraculous transformation, instantaneously changed into crack troops, doing a precision march across an asphalt drill field.

  Martin pushed himself away from the wall very slowly, almost afraid to stir. Robert was next to him, sitting cross-legged, his gaze distant. Martin followed the direction of his eyes to the small stage. It was no longer empty. Sitting there, wearing nothing but a tiny loincloth, waving a palm leaf fan in front of him, was a plump brown man of indeterminate age, smiling vaguely into space.

  The first impression we receive always reveals the essence of the meaning a person is to have for us. We may have to work our way through the personality, the history, and all our projections, needs, and deeper perception to understand what it was we saw, but when we have reached through to the end of the entire string of egoic manifestations, the prize is nothing more than affirmation of what we’d known all along. When Martin first looked at Babba, the guru’s body was superimposed over a memory Martin had of watching Joe DiMaggio pivot and move toward left center field at precisely the instant he heard the crack of the bat against ball. Martin never forgot the spooky feeling of uncanny processes at work whereby a man could gauge exactly where a ball would land just from hearing how it sounded when it was hit with a piece of wood. That spontaneity, that accuracy, that power, that perfection of instinct, was the first thing that Martin saw in Babba, and it was that perception which rendered him acquiescent in what followed.

  What he couldn’t know was that each person saw in Babba that quality which he or she most admired. Some saw a towering intellect, others a selfless saint, yet others a magician and healer. He was felt as father, leader, teacher. And when written about, he was called the very embodiment of God, the living consciousness of That from which everything arises, and which is indistinguishable from everything that exists. To all such appellations, Babba replied with a modest denial.

  “I am the lowest of God’s creations,” was his favorite phrase. “I am no larger than an ant.” And would add, “If you wish to know God, you must become that small, so small that you go through the world unnoticed. Only then will you be free to see what is here, the splendor of God’s power.”

  The silence was thick, alive, intelligent. Through it Martin could hear the faint strains of traffic from the street and the echoes of rock music from the bar. But even those familiar sounds were rendered exotic by the quality of silence in the room. It was as though the loft had been transported all at once to a mountaintop in India and the noise of the western world relegated to a quaint memory of a peculiar time.

  All the attention was on Babba and it was impossible for Martin not to add his own curious gaze to that of the others. Babba sat, nonplussed and utterly at ease, as though he were alone by a river watching clouds turn crimson in the sunset. From a purely theatrical viewpoint alone, the performance was admirable and extraordinary. Martin had never seen anyone on a stage reflect such calm. People on stage either gave speeches or acted or sang or danced or projected a presence. But Babba did none of these. He merely sat, and the simple act was so powerful, so breathtaking in its simplicity, that it commanded attention.

  Given that implacable stillness as a ground, the slightest hint of movement erupted with the violence of a lightning flash. So when Babba suddenly sharpened his glance and sent it sailing into the middle distance, it was as obvious as if he had hurled a bright red beachball into the crowd. The recipient of the glance stiffened as though stuck with a pin, flushed pink with embarrassment, and then smiled in confusion. It was a woman in her late thirties, with all the plainness of a dime-store saleslady on a Saturday night just before closing after a day of frenzied shoppers. She wore a white blouse and a black skirt, and carried her mousey hair behind her skull in a tight bun. She was totally unexceptional, and Martin would not have noticed her if a thousand like her had passed him marching in goosestep down Fifth Avenue. But now, for a few seconds, she was a radiant star, singled out. Her eyes shone with joy and a pixie spirit danced above her head. For a few seconds, she was beautiful.

  Martin looked quickly back to Babba. The man had not so much as flexed a muscle. Whatever it was that had flowed out of him couldn’t be measured very easily in units of physical strength. Then, as Martin watched, Babba’s eyes shifted again and did some extraordinary dance, seeming to whirl around, each eyeball in an opposite direction, come together, vibrate like yoyos at the edge of their strings. The heads of the people in the audience turned from Babba to the woman and back again, and everyone laughed, as though an irresistibly funny story had just been told. The woman blushed even more, half-hid her face in her hands, and sank into the general laughter.

  Martin was confused. He had understood the earlier bit of flattery, subtle as it was, but this escaped him. He turned to Robert for a clue, but his friend was caught up in the general mood of merriment. Martin waited for the hubbub to subside
and then turned back to Babba to see what could happen next. But the guru had escaped to vapidity; his attention had turned inward, it seemed. A long time passed. Martin’s legs began to ache. As supple as he was, the unfamiliar posture was stretching muscles that were almost never used in this manner. He shifted his weight surreptitiously, and as he did Babba’s eyes turned and fixed him on the spot, catching him unaware and off balance. Worse, the eyes of everyone in the room followed the guru’s gaze to see what he was focusing on now. Martin suddenly found himself the object of attention of some five hundred people.

  He half-turned to Robert for protection. He was experiencing the first wave of a very strong panic. He had never felt so exposed in his entire life. But Robert was only looking at him with a kind of rapt imbecilic smile, and in his newfound friend’s face he saw no recognition at all. It was a moment of madness.

  Then, as quickly as it had come on, it stopped. Babba flicked his eyes elsewhere, and the concentrated energy of the room spun toward a different direction. Martin was seized by a spasm of intense relief, followed immediately by a dull throb of disappointment. For no matter how unpleasant the moment had been, it had also been fantastically explosive, a shock of impacted light, a shaft of iridescent vitality such as Martin only felt as the peak of his form atop the parallel bars when every system in his body was attuned to the complex adjustments necessary to maintain such a strenuous balance. Martin found himself straining forward slightly, as though by his posture he could lure Babba to turn back, to fix those magic eyes on him once more. Without any self-consciousness, without any word having been spoken, without a thought having crossed his mind, he had blended into the awareness of the hundreds who sat at Babba’s feet. If the Martin of a half hour earlier could have seen himself at that instant, he would have scoffed in disbelief; for this Martin had that same look of blind yearning which marked the follower of any charismatic figure. His eyes were a bit moist, his cheeks slightly pink, his mouth teasing the dawn of a smile.