The Sensual Mirror (15 page)

“I guess nobody’s stopping us but us,” Julia answered. She sat down on her heels and picked up her glass and began to sip slowly. Her expression was disconsolate, her posture sagged.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Gail said when she saw the change. “Why so sad?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just got a quick snapshot of what a waste my life has been, the way I’ve boxed myself in. And for a few seconds, while you were making your speech, everything got light and very very wide. It was as though I had been living in a cave and suddenly somebody came along and lifted the whole mountain off my head. And then I thought of you and me, and wondered if this was some kind of wild fantasy. And I thought of Martin, and how he would shrivel if I ever told him these things. And I thought of going into the office and dealing with Eliot. And with my whole stupid career. I got such an ugly picture of myself, hustling and wheeling and dealing and using people like machines just to get ahead, to make a bundle. Forcing myself to be ruthless, insensitive. Waiting for the day when I could take everything I’d learned from Eliot and step out on my own.” She turned wide, moist soulful eyes on Gail. “Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t know anything anymore. And I miss him. As dumb and exasperating as he is, I love him, and I miss him. I didn’t want to throw him out of my life altogether. I just wanted him to back off a little bit, that’s all.”

“It’s so fucking hard, isn’t it?” Gail said.

“And the worst part is that I’ve never even been able to talk about it. Not like this.”

“Maybe you have to get naked before you can get naked,” Gail said.

Julia smiled just as the first tears were beginning to fall. “And what about us?” she said. “What’s going to happen with us? You’re talking brave now, but what happens when you get alone with Eliot and he dismisses all this as little-girl shit? I can just hear his tone of voice, and see his expression. What if all this seems childish to you when you’re in his duplex or on his boat or in his private airplane?”

“And Martin?” Gail countered. “When you see him, and you will, can you tell him this? You said it would shrivel him. Would you take that chance? Or will you just let him fuck you again and slide all this under the table, like you were going to do with your thing with Eliot last night? Will you tell him about that? Are you going to be honest with him? How can you accuse him of being dumb if you lie to him?”

They turned away from one another. Julia gazed into the flames. Gail stared at the floor. The rush of words and feelings had momentarily emptied them, and they breathed heavily like boxers after a skirmish. Julia sat like a stone, still, drenched in millions of years of time, having watched entire forests rise and fall. Gail rocked back and forth, a thin reed in a gentle breeze. For Julia, sight had captured her entire attention. The dance of the fire mesmerized her utterly. For Gail, it was the kinesthetic rapture of drifting back and forth over her own center of balance. What they had just experienced was not an argument or fight in any of the accepted uses of those terms. Rather, it was a clash of conflicting aspects of the single will they had become, even if only for the duration of the influence of the marijuana upon their subtle bodies. It was one more adjustment to be made in the accomplishment of their union. And from a biological perspective, it was the exuberant explosion of a mating dance.

“I’m afraid,” Julia said, speaking not to Gail, not to herself, but to the silence which surrounded them. “I can see so much now, so clearly. And one of the things I can see is that I am weak. I may betray this truth. I may betray you, betray us.” She looked up sharply. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Gail said. “I feel the same way. Maybe I’m talking braver than you right now, but I have the same fear.”

“What can we do?” Julia asked.

Gail roused herself from her somatic weaving, the tracing of arcane patterns in the air. She took a deep breath. She fixed her gaze and bracketed Julia with her look.

“We can promise to be faithful to one another,” Gail said at last.

Julia blinked. “Faithful?” she repeated.

“Yes,” Gail replied. “Not sexually, because we both want men. And not sexually because we’re not sure how much that will be a part of who we are together. But on a different level altogether. On a . . . a . . . “ she groped for the word. “On the level of commitment involving our very lives.”

“You mean, like marriage?”

“Like marriage, but not that,” Gail said. “Like . . . I don’t know how to put it.” She ransacked her entire library of cultural references for a term which would describe this new concept, this primitive, powerful feeling. “Like people in a revolution who would rather be tortured and shot before they would betray their comrades, their friends, their lovers.”

“Gail!” Julia said, her voice rising with inflection, expression surprise, wonder, awe.

“Yes,” Gail said simply, “like that. A promise that we keep this sacred. This night on which we became telepathic and climbed purple mountains together. This night on which we discovered that we loved one another, as much as either of us has ever loved a man. This night on which we saw that if we stay together, we can give each other the strength not to get pulled back into the horror where a woman must turn her back on other women in order to love a man.”

“Can we really do that?” Julia said, her eyes wide.

“You got married, didn’t you? Why can’t you make a sacred promise with me?”

“My marriage is on the rocks, Gail,” Julia said. “That may not be the best analogy in the world.”

“Well, it’s the only one I’ve got right now,” Gail said waspishly. “It’ll just have to do.” She shot Julia a glance of smiling exasperation. Julia mirrored the expression, except on her it came out as frowning amusement. They locked into mutual imitation until they could no longer maintain the thrust of seriousness which had begun to propel them, and they broke up, snorting and guffawing.

They laughed until the riff ran down and were once again silent, sober. They were being sucked gently into that mood of smoldering attention which is the ground in which the flowers of eroticism grow best. It combines the gravity of the serious mood with the seductive directions of pointed humor. Those who get stuck at either extreme of that spectrum, becoming ponderous or silly, are continually attracting one another across the full range of subtle gradient possibilities in between and go at their sex either like blacksmiths at the anvil or nuns at their knitting. Gail and Julia had been fluttering back and forth throughout the entire evening, adding dollops of anger and dashes of insight to give the inevitable a proper context. But each time they passed through another series of reactions, their relationship to the center became stronger. Sooner or later they would have experienced all the ways in which they manipulated the fact of simple and powerful presence, of nakedness, of confrontation, of love.

“Well,” Julia said, “do you want to spend the night?”

Gail began to say something, but the words refused to come. She blinked, turned slightly to one side, drew her knees up to her chest, and leaned forward over the triangles formed by her legs and the floor, her breasts against her thighs, her arms folded over her shins. She took a deep breath, and then let go, her whole torso melting into the support of her legs. She closed her eyes, and leaned her cheek on one forearm. She did not move for several minutes. Julia watched her, her attention wavering between her friend and the unfamiliar trembling in her belly. It was a feeling that was poignantly familiar, but she had no memory to hang it on. Flutters and ripples, shiftings, tremors.

All at once it came to her. Sixteen years old. A date with a twenty-year-old college student who owned his own car and had a reputation for really knowing how to get a girl to do what he wanted. Elaborate cover stories to be used by her girlfriend in case her parents should call. For the whole week before the date playing over the conversation she’d had with another girlfriend who’d experienced the fabled boy first hand. She had had her bare breast fondled, and her crotch cupped from under her skirt although over her panties. She’d also mingled tongues and allowed him to press against her ass and rub until he had an ejaculation. The tale had made Julia delirious with anticipation and she’d had her friend hint to the boy that Julia might like to have a date with him. It had been arranged, and she was, all of a sudden, actually there, sitting on the vinyl covers of the back seat of his car, waiting for “it” to start. Her stomach had become a madhouse of moths.

She had begun to tremble then, and at first the boy took it as a sign of titillating anxiousness. But the symptoms had become so bad that he began to worry that something was seriously wrong with her. Her teeth rattled, her fists clenched, her ears turned red. She began to hyperventilate, although neither of them could describe the condition so precisely. Finally he took her home where she was at once put into a hot tub by her mother and made to stay in bed for two days until the “flu” had passed.

“How are you feeling?” she asked Gail.

“As nervous as a teenage girl on a first date,” Gail replied.

“Oh my God,” Julia exclaimed.

“The flutters in my belly got so bad I had to wrap myself up around myself to keep from flying apart.” She smiled at Julia. “And you?”

“Like a teenage girl on a first date,” Julia told her.

“I guess we’re still doing it,” Gail said. “Real life telepathy.”

Then there was no margin left, and each of the women uncoiled, Gail from her posture, Julia from her tension. Gail rose up, arms opening as Julia sagged forward. Julia buried her head in Gail’s belly, her arms going around Gail’s waist. Julia hugged her tightly, so hard her back began to hurt. She put her hands on top of Julia’s shoulders, as though to push her off. Then she saw the meaning of the movement, and she arched her spine, her stomach pressing hard into Julia’s face.

Julia began to work her way down, burrowing like a gopher trying to escape a hawk. Gail could feel the first delicate, tentative flickers of Julia’s tongue around her navel, the tiny strokes against her smooth skin. For a second she was about to give in, to let Julia do it this way, finding her way to the cunt in this blind, groping fashion. Yet almost at once she saw she couldn’t allow it to happen like that.

She waited until Julia had worked her way down, until her mouth was just at the edges of her pubic hair, and then she grabbed Julia’s ears and pulled back, forcing the spasmodic mouth up and away. She kept pulling until Julia’s face was totally visible, and Gail could look into her eyes.

Julia wanted to look away, to do the thing alone, unobserved even by herself. But Gail would not let her turn her head and after a minute, Julia stopped trying. She held Gail’s stare. They locked eyes.

“It’s too important,” she said. “I want to feel it coming.”

Julia bit her lower lip and whimpered.

“Oh, I’m so afraid,” she said. “I want to do it and I’m afraid I’ll hate myself for doing it. And maybe it will change me. What if . . . what if I become a lesbian?” Her voice was so filled with histrionic misery that it caught the attention of both of them. Once again, they swung back from ultra-seriousness toward humor, feeling the pull of the black hole of erotic finality as they passed dead center.

“Then I’ll become one too, and keep you company,” Gail smiled. She leaned forward, and brought her lips down to touch Gail’s mouth. Gail opened her lips slightly, with fragile wonder. They kissed, and then kissed again, and the third time their souls and hearts and minds and breath and spit and blood and tears and piss and farts and thoughts and all the longing of the single thing to be rejoined into the totality of all that is lived in their mouths and sang.

Finally, they pulled apart. Gail disengaged. She leaned back and lay on the floor. She opened her legs wide and lifted her knees, planting her feet on the rug. At the center lay her cunt, now a smear of hair resting on the split between her flattened buttocks.

Julia stared. It was so real. Even to the small pimples and blemishes on the smooth white skin. Julia brought her hands forward. She grasped the very edges of the outer lips and pulled them apart slowly, like drapes across a stage. The inside of Gail’s cunt sighed and visibly relaxed. The pink was exposed. The spongy ring around the very hole itself, the now minute opening at the core of all the elaborate structure surrounding it, the folds and fancies and curls of hair, glistened in the dying light of the fire. Still Julia stared. Gail let out a low moan and the insides of her thighs trembled.

Julia’s breath came heavy in her chest. The flutters in her belly had stopped to be replaced by a dull heat, as though a warm lead ball were sitting behind her navel. Her cunt was already wet. Her nipples hard. But more than anything, her mouth watered, hungered, thirsted, yearned for the slime that was at this moment beginning to slide out of Gail’s pussy.

Julia’s tongue slid out from between her lips and curled upward. She leaned toward the slick, aromatic pouch.

“The promise,” Gail sighed.

“Yes,” Julia whispered, her mouth already touching the sensitive, still, wet lips of Gail’s vagina.

When she made the first tingling contact, it was more than flesh meeting flesh. The meaning of everything they had said and felt and done exploded in that instant and they gave themselves to one another totally. Julia opened her mouth wide and stretched her lips as far as they would go, engulfing the pumping cunt and pulling it into the vacuum she created by emptying her lungs through her nostrils. Gail’s cunt lips surged into Julia’s mouth. She let out a sharp gasp as the sensation of blood flooding the gender membranes inflamed her imagination and she put her hands on the back of Julia’s head to push her face more fully between her thighs. She flexed the inner muscles of her pussy and filled Julia’s mouth with the soft, mucous mounds of the inside of the deepest part of her cunt. Julia was seized by a fierce flurry of gulping, licking loss of control. All the lifetime associations she had with cunt flourished in her consciousness. The piss hole, the gash, the bleeding wound, the stink pit, the sticky slit . . . all the terms and feeling of negativity governed the instant of her awareness that she was really lying on her belly digging her tongue into another woman’s hole.