The Sensual Mirror Read Free Page B

been too ready to dismiss.
    She became formless, pure breath, and her subconscious perked like coffee on a hot stove. A boy, who had pulled her panties down when she was six and put his finger as far inside her as anatomy and bravery would allow. Sitting on her grandfather’s lap eating an apple and feeling a hot tingling in her bottom. Her father glancing at her one night as she passed him in the hallway on the way to the bathroom; she was wearing a gauzy nightgown and nothing underneath, and when his eyes locked on her breasts her stomach clenched. The professor of anthropology who had been the first to take her anally, and then had free-associated in her ear throughout the entire time so that she had trouble paying attention to what went on between her buttocks. The first time she tasted sperm, sucking Martin a month after they had been married and suddenly seized by the hunger to have him fill her mouth.
    And then even the images disappeared and she became pure physiology, a smorgasbord of functions. Heartbeat, circulation, vegetative pulses, plasmatic oozings, neurological twitchings. From the depths of inwardness a spark of pure erotic awareness was struck and a flame begun. In the region of her chest, in the vital center near the heart, a fire started to burn. It was sexual and spiritual both, and yet neither, for it was at the source of all manifestation, the source from which all levels of creation spring. She felt an intimation of reality itself, void, resplendent, having come upon her unexpectedly, unbidden, and during a period of bathtub catatonia. Yet Julia could not identify the state, for all her education had trained her to view that thing commonly called God as a mythic figure or an abstract concept. All she now knew was that her whole body had become a single yearning, a scorching poignancy, a cry for return. The heat in her body and the heat around her body, the divine flame and the prosaic hot water, were one and the same, and had the momentary dissolution of ego state been other than the result of a temporary conflux of circumstances, she might have sipped longer at the sweet satori.
    But her focus snapped back with the harsh abruptness of a door’s being opened into a dark bedroom and glaring white light’s falling upon half-closed eyes. Julia sat up in the tub, lifting gallons of water with her, like a ghost trailing mists as it rises from the grave. For a few seconds she was in a blind panic. Shreds of thoughts flapped through her mind like demented bats, her skin screeched its protest at the sudden contact with the air, her heart thudded like loose baggage banging against the hull of a heaving ship in a storm. The room seemed to spin wildly about and for a moment she was certain she would faint. The fear of splashing back into the water, sliding down, her mouth and nostrils filling up, a sputter and a gasp, and then the harsh drowning, filled her all the way into their fingertips and caused her to grasp the sides of the tub. She held on for a full minute until she had regained her inner balance and began to calm down.
    “That’s pretty strong grass,” she said out loud, happy to hear her voice.
    She reached forward and pulled out the plug again, then sat hunched over, her breasts against her thighs, her arms around her shins, until the tub was completely empty. For a long while she could not move, and it took no little effort to stand up, draw the curtain, and start the shower running. She soaped herself vigorously but when she came to washing between her legs she was surprised to notice the secretions that had oozed from her cunt. She parted the lips and a brief flow of viscous fluid, pearly white, seeped from the pink petals and edged toward her thigh, to be stormed upon and swept away in a turbulent stream of water. She caressed her clitoris experimentally and her knees wobbled. She had built a charge of erotic energy far more powerful than she had been aware of.
    Suddenly she wanted to be