The Sensual Mirror (25 page)

His hand hesitated over the coins.

“I mean it,” she insisted. “Break the pattern. Liberate yourself.”

Martin smiled, picked up the two quarters and put them in his pocket. They walked to the door where the cash register was, and he paid the bill. He turned to watch the table, to see whether the waiter would go over to clean up. He wanted to watch the man’s reaction. But the waiter was leaning against a far wall, his arms folded across his chest, a broad sardonic grin on his face. He had seen the scene at the table and had psychically positioned himself to emerge with a sense of moral superiority. He was a pro, and something like this happened to him several times a day. He knew when to cut his losses and how.

Martin and Julia walked out into the street. It was now nearly midnight. There were still rumbles of thunder and lightning flashes, but they were further, more feeble, like a receding toothache. The sidewalk was still filled with walkers, people who for one reason or another did not want to return to their apartments. Some eight million human beings were stuffed into a space that might nicely accommodate several hundred thousand, and the enforced proximity, the crowding, the constant abrasive contact, had made them permanently mad, so much so that they had come to accept the most bizarre and aberrant living conditions as a way of life, with only the vaguest glimmerings that existence on the planet might be a gracious, spacious thing, a dance with elegance and passion, with calm and time in which to appreciate the transience of sensation.

“I guess we have a problem,” Julia said as they turned east and strolled down the street.

“You mean ‘your place or mine?’ “

“Or neither your place nor mine.”

“It’s funny,” she added. “There have been hundreds of nights when we returned to the apartment without giving it a second thought, following the rote routine of our live together, and it got to be so casual, so unthinking, that it lost all its value, all its meaning. And now that we are outside the pattern, such a simple thing as deciding where to sleep becomes a kind of exhilarating challenge.”

“Any ideas?” he said.

“Let’s walk,” she told him.

It was the last quarter of the twentieth century as measured by Christian dogmatists. The world was beginning to concur in the judgement of a critic that “This is our worst century yet.” The globe had too many people on it, and they were organized into the most cumbersome and idiotic social structures imaginable, unwieldy, ugly states that imposed uniformity on larger and larger numbers of people. All the tribes had been wiped out, all the delicate and elegant lifestyles had been eradicated. And now the species was embarking on a systematic program to destroy all life on the planet. The very city in which Julia and Martin walked had produced so much garbage that it had poisoned the sea for scores of miles around, and swimming had been banned for seventy-five miles along the shore.

Those people who tried to make things better made things worse. The ancient traditions had lost all vitality and survived as grim shells of what had once been living truth. Protestants and Catholics planted bombs in one another’s homes. Whites and blacks still smoldered across genetic barbed wire. Communists and capitalists brandished nuclear weapons at one another in an attempt to prove which system could produce the higher level of human misery. And everywhere virulent morons made speeches and ran for president or led coups or piled more bodies to shore up the decaying walls of economic empire. Fascists appeared and swept up followers in the name of God. Everywhere the barbaric practices continued, the slaughterhouses boomed, the automobile factories continued cranking out unnecessary millions of poisonous machines, and square mile after square mile of earth was covered with concrete and asphalt to make room for these hideous toys of demented apes.

As they walked down Broadway, heading south, moving with no specific goal, no clear purpose, the neighborhoods changed. The folksy anarchy of West Seventy-second Street gave way to the lanky impersonal high-rises that had begun to close in on the old turf, great Orwellian nightmares without grace, charm, or concern for human scale, things built by huge machines, ordered by creatures who wore the human body but who possessed the souls of jackhammers, brutal, insistent, destructive animals for which a name has not yet been found.

At Fifty-ninth Street, yet another change. They passed Carnegie Hall, a building left over from a time when the inherent horror of Western culture had not yet hit its stride in the new land. After destroying the continent of Europe with incessant warfare, foul technology, strangling ideologies, and a greed so mammoth that even life forms in other solar systems must have wondered, they came to a land that was utterly unspoiled, inhabited by the highest form of human society ever seen on the face of the earth, a diverse people of different languages and civilizations who nevertheless managed to inhabit a land for ten thousand years without leaving a scar on the earth, without wiping out a species, without leaving vain and foolish monuments, without descending to the degeneracy of enforced uniformity.

The Europeans came, and with a viciousness made all the more ghastly because of the indifference within which it was couched, destroyed half a continent. Within four hundred years they had poisoned every body of water, polluted the very air, killed off entire species of animals and birds, and found justification on the lips of their priests to annihilate the red men, who, the sages and holy men of Christianity averred, had no souls anyway and thus could be slaughtered along with the bison, the beaver, and the trees. Where there was lawfulness they imposed laws and created lawlessness. Where there was the beauty of God’s creation, they erected testimonials to Man, and turned the land into a shit heap.

Past the culture corner of Fifty-seventh Street, with its book shop and delicatessen for celebrities, a short stretch of automobile showrooms followed, now all dark, the bodies of the cars gleaming dully behind plate glass. Here the street was empty, dark, almost sinister. But in the distance there was a bright glow, like the reflection of a fire seen against the clouds. They walked toward it, toward The Great White Way, toward Times Square.

As they approached, the nature of the street changed radically. Junk stores selling obscure plastic novelties that a retarded child would be embarrassed to play with. Souvlaki parlors with great hunks of meat dripping over a flame from which Greeks who had not shaved for days sliced long slivers to put on sandwiches. Movie theatres, massage parlors, the latter offering “Complete satisfaction, Yes, Complete! Only Eight Dollars!” After Forty-fifth Street, the slide into manifest decadence was swift and total. The space from there to Forty-Second Street was side-by-side sex shops. Peep shows, massage parlors with even more lurid promises, movie theatres showing XXX, and tiny stores which displayed knives, pocket calculators and dildoes indiscriminately in their windows, composing a set which would have taxed the ingenuity of an expert in Boolean algebra to define.

Along the sidewalks, the quality of people would have stretched the limits of a Buddhist’s capacity for compassion. Pimps, heroin addicts, muggers, killers, whores, young men who existed as nothing more than a twitch of nastiness, a festering scar, boys of no more than twelve or thirteen selling their bodies to middle-aged men with damp palms. And amidst all this, the police, stunned, stoned, overwhelmed, their eyes reflecting their inchoate stupefaction at how they could possibly be expected to halt the decline and death of a two-thousand-year-old civilization by standing on a street corner and brandishing their clubs.

Martin and Julia crossed over and went to stand underneath the Chemical Tower Building, a tall triangle of glass and brick which, when compared to the Flat-iron Building, speaks several volumes on the death of architecture in the nation. This was the spot where the crowds gathered on New Year’s Eve to watch the ball drop, to signal in the new year, which is the same as the old year, except for the digits written on billions of pieces of paper from coast to coast. There several hundred thousand people get drunk and gaze fuzzily into the air waiting for the signal when they can all jump up and down and make noise. Those viewing or listening at home are switched to Guy Lombardo who still makes an effort at waving his arm although the band can play Auld Lang Syne with the perfection of a phonograph record. Then there are several moments of sentimentality and a dim flare of primordial awareness around the edge of deep unconsciousness which is the waking condition of the modern world.

“Something is happening,” the collective mind says to itself. “There was something about . . . what was it? Time? Eternity? Wonder? Mystery? Awe? The Fact of Existence Itself? The Poignant Joy of Life? The Miracle of Love?”

But the shades go down very quickly, and before a quarter hour of “the new year” has passed everyone is stumbling about once more, ugly robots clanking about in the dirty grooves of their conditioning.

Martin and Julia stopped and turned to face one another. They held hands like two children about to swing round and round. They had not spoken a word for the entire thirty blocks they’d walked. There was nothing to say, and everything to say. The impact of the world they’d just passed through had both disheartened them and given them a wider perspective on their situation.

“Well, here we are,” Julia said at last.

“What do they call it” Martin asked. “The Crossroads of the World?”

She smiled. “Remember how excited we were when we decided to move to the big town? New York seemed like it would be the most sophisticated, hippest, richest place in the world. And it’s just a big garbage can. Nothing but unhappy people and poisoned air and noise and violence.”

“Do you think we would have been better off staying in Simpsonville? Me teaching gym and you raising babies in the back yard?”

“Who knows?” Julia replied. “We might have even become swingers and saved our marriage.”

“What are we now?” he mused.

“Statistics. Marriage statistics, divorce statistics, migration statistics, population statistics, income level statistics, rise-in-homosexuality statistics, people-who-have-begun-to-follow-gurus-statistics.”

“Is there a chance?” he asked.

She swept the area with her eyes. The din of traffic was so loud that it was difficult to hear or speak. Grotesques lurked in little psychic crannies up and down the street. The promised storm had absconded entirely and the earlier promise of fresh air in Central Park had become a false hope, replaced by an atomosphere that might make a gas chamber seem merciful by comparison.

“A chance for what?” she replied. “You see the way things are. We’re a suicidal race of creatures. What you and I are going through is nothing but the reflection of what’s happening everywhere, to everyone. The whole show is folding, falling apart.”

“Not all of it,” he said. “Babba is not part of this. My friendship with Robert is not part of this. Your love for Gail is not part of this.”

“And our marriage? Is our marriage part of this?”

“It was.”

“And so? We can’t go back to that?”

“We can go forward.”

“Where?” she asked. “Your place or mine? Or neither?”

“Or both.”

The little patterns of energy between them were beginning to dance once more. Front of body called to front of body. They hesitated, then shrugged, and gave themselves up to an embrace. It was peculiar. One might almost have expected the entire stage to collapse, for traffic to stop and the degenerates to straighten up and the air to clear, that two people could lovingly hold one another amidst the ruin of their civilization and the ashes of their dead marriage. They hugged each other tightly, her breasts murmuring against his chest, his cock whispering to her cunt.

They stepped back, still holding hands.

“I honestly don’t know which way to turn,” she said.

“What are the possibilities?”

She frowned at the question, taking it first as rhetorical, and then stopping to think about it.

“We could go back to Ohio and try to be normal.”

He shook his head at just about the same moment she did. The suggestion was definitely a possibility but not on the level of practical reality.

“We could just turn our backs on one another and walk away and not see one another again.”

“And then what?” he asked. “Each of us would find another mate of the opposite gender and begin again.”

She nodded.

“Maybe your guru could whisk us away to India and we could live happily ever after in Paradise.”

“Babba says he’s going back to the jungle for a year or so. He says he can’t stand the rat race any longer.”

Julia laughed. “Did he really say that? The rat race?”

Martin nodded. “Someone taught him the phrase and he uses it all the time. He’s like a child with a new toy.”

“Well, we don’t seem to be doing too well,” Julia went on. “It’s absurd to even mention your moving back into the apartment, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said, “As much as part of me wants to. We would just kill each other. And hate each other for what we had to give up.”

“Well,” Julia sighed, “the only other thing I can think of is going to the country and starting a commune.”

“Who?”

“You and me and Robert and Gail and Eliot.”

“Eliot?” Martin said. “I barely know him. I’m not sure I even like him.”

“But he’s Gail’s husband, and Gail’s my lover, and I’m your wife, so if you want me, you see, the line leads right up to Eliot.”

“And I suppose Eliot has a mistress he’d want to bring also.”

Martin put his arm around Julia’s shoulder and they began walking again, heading west, deep into the hooker territory, the subterranean atmosphere of Eighth Avenue.

“Martin?” Julia said after a few minutes.

“Yeah?”

“What are we going to do? I don’t mean just you and me, but all of us. All the statistics. The people getting divorced, the people deciding that they can’t live with anyone at all anymore?”

“I don’t know, darling,” he replied. “That’s a big question. I’m still trying to figure out what to do tonight.”