The Sensual Mirror Read Free Page A

become palpable for a moment, and for a few seconds she feared breaking down into tears and self-pity. She was alone, a lively corpse taking a bath. And all the manifest universe, for that instant, served as little more than scrollwork around the mirror of self-absorption.
    Rousing herself from the posture of fixation, she put the plug back in and turned the spigot to let more hot water into the pool that had become her life raft. She was tripping freely, the push given by the marijuana continuing to swing her loose from the moorings of any fixed viewpoint, so that considerations about her job, memories of her husband, and the tingling recall of the morning’s groper could not claim her attention for more than a brief cycle of development. She let the water run until the bath was almost scalding, turning her skin pink. In the rising steam, she saw Gail’s face.
    Gail was her oldest New York friend, and Eliot’s lover for more than a year. Their relationship had quickly assumed that cinematic intimacy which marks closeness in our time, a way of being together which combines conversation about the most intimate matters with a brassiness of style, resulting in a tinny authenticity. Gail was coming over for drinks at eight and Julia was going to have to tell her what had happened or not tell her, two equally unpleasant possibilities.
    “I can’t deal with that now,” she said to herself, and closed her eyes and slid back into the water, letting the heat take her away, away from all linear thought and concern for three-dimensional realities. She drifted gently, by degrees, into a soothing trance. Her senses disconnected from the associative centers of her brain. She still saw and heard and felt, but none of it registered, none of it meant. Her state went beyond even pleasure, for experience itself would have been too active, too brutal a process.
    Thus, when a deep and familiar throbbing began in her belly, it carried no more import than the faint sound of traffic from ten stories below. And when the movement infiltrated her loins and crept past the walls of her cunt, slithering inside like guerrillas taking command of a forest while remaining invisible to the enemy army, she did not stir. Only a fantasy formed in her mind and she rose from her oceanic oblivion at random moments to watch the screen, much as a couple might catch glimpses of a movie between prolonged spasms of necking.
    It was an astral masturbation, and its manifestations reached with measured slowness toward the physical. At first, her body made no gross movements at all. Her hand did not ease between her thighs nor did her fingers slide into folded moist places. Even at her most frustrated, Julia rarely masturbated, for she found erotic tension much too interesting to discharge in a bit of theatrics which had no audience. She knew that the modern liberated woman was supposed to masturbate and to find ideal pleasure, even identity, in the act, but Julia had always considered it a petty satisfaction, bereft of imagination, humor, and conversation. One had to be stupid to masturbate, she thought, unless it were done with someone else there. Her last attempt, two years earlier, had ended when, at the point of orgasm, she opened her eyes and saw herself reflected in the mirror which backed a closet door next to the bed. She looked like an arthritic acrobat trying to do a backbend as she pumped her hips spastically at the ceiling while rubbing her clitoris vigorously with the middle finger of her left hand. The grotesque visual once and for all imprinted its message of silliness on the act and two subsequent attempts had never got past the squirming stage. Of course, Martin’s almost daily assault left little energy for languor, and so the whole issue had faded out of awareness. But now her two months without sex made more keen by the morning’s groper and the previous night’s appetizer with Eliot inclined her toward perceiving the value of something she had