The Sensual Mirror Read Free

either so repulsive or intrusive that she grew angry. Once she made a scene, whirling about and shouting, “Take your hands off me, you creep!” causing the poor man, a portly business type in his fifties to close his eyes and pretend he had disappeared in a puff of smoke. But most mornings it was not unpleasant, all comfy amidst the bodies, the brain not yet fully awake, breakfast digesting in the belly, the lurching of the train providing a compulsory rhythm to which everyone in the cars was forced to dance. Then a whisper of knuckle or a bit of tactile insouciance from a fingertip were all part of the sensual stew. It rarely went further than that, but this morning had been a decided treat, a perfect parody of woman’s magazine fantasy of a perfect experience. He got on at 96th Street, and by the time they reached Times Square he was actually massaging the space between her buttocks while she tensed her muscles ever so slightly in response. His skill was admirable and she never did get to see his face.
    That would feel good now, she thought.
    She shifted her weight and slid down a few inches further into the water. Waves lapped around her shoulders and throat. Her breasts bobbed lazily. Small tight currents played beneath the surface, making Julia aware of her buttocks and thighs as sentient wholes. She took a deep breath and some complex tension in her diaphragm let go. For the first time all day she came in touch with her body, knowing herself as a body, sensitive, delicate, capable of pleasure. Her usual state was like that of everyone else in the civilization, continually covered, armored. In clothing, in the formal distance of social convention, and in the subtle defenses she maintained against psychic abrasion, all of that stood witness to the fear that had been implanted from earliest infancy on. She had come to feel about presences and glances the way she judged caresses: they were enjoyable and tolerable only if presented with the utmost finesse and awareness of the neurotic personality which guarded the gate to surrender.
    That was the one real pleasure of marriage, she thought. At the end of a day there was someone to be naked with.
    It had been almost two months since she’d know that kind of relief, the undressing, touching, fingering, licking, and sucking. The relaxation, in short, however momentary, from the relentless aggressive alienation of daily life. Even when her sex life with Martin had become utterly predictable, there was something thrilling about simply being naked with a man, kissing with open mouths and reflex tongues, and then actually doing it. No matter how mundane, it was always fresh. Her hole going wet and grainy, mewling, obscene, as blind as a black orchid sweating in a greenhouse, and the phallic stem stirring the juices with indifferent vigor while the two people attached to the process made sounds, bit and bucked, thrashed about and fell into swoons. There was something sublimely dirty about the thing; it was such a straightforward illicit delight, so ugly and so transcendent.
    “It wasn’t wrong, it wasn’t wrong!” she said to herself all at once, thinking of the night before, of her raging need to have a man inside her, of Eliot’s raw strength, and then the phone call, Gall’s worried voice.
    Julia roused herself and leaned forward to pull the plug, letting water out of the tub. As it drained, she shivered again, and thought she heard a sound in the next room. The apartment held its breath and peered in upon itself through her consciousness now as alert as that of a mouse in a room with a cat. The silence of inanimate presence pressed against the noisy consciousness of animal life. Julia shook her head. It was nothing, only her imagination or a stray noise from the street. The only actual sound now was that of the tiny whirlpool doing its dance of dissolution into the copper drain. Julia sat motionless, spectator and actress on the stage of her life. Martin’s absence had