Free The Sensual Mirror by Marco Vassi Page A

sense, Robert and I are a couple, he thought. We came in together, we are focused on one another, we are excluding the rest of the room from this intimacy. And yet, I don’t feel that sense of oppression, of being tied to a stake. There is no anxiety, no clutching, no undertow of echoes.
    “This place all right?” Robert said.
    “It brings back a few memories.”
    “You came here with your wife?”
    Martin nodded.
    “Do you miss her?”
    “Only when I’m horny,” Martin said, then laughed. He was silent a few seconds and added, “I don’t mean that the way it sounds, and yet I do mean it in a way. There are times when I want to be with her, want to very badly. Sometimes it’s to fuck. My very cells cry out for her. At other times, I may remember a word or a gesture, and be almost crushed with the desire to be near her, to smell her, to bury myself in her, not to fuck, but to get lost, to find living oblivion. But the most poignant times are in movie theaters. There are certain films that I know she would love, and just how she would love them. And when the picture is over, I turn and find the seat next to me empty, and then I almost cry out her name.”
    He finished his narrative with a tonal flurish, turning the self-revelation into a sally instead of a cul de sac. He felt, on one level, that he was revealing too much too quickly, and yet something in Robert made it so easy for him to spill these things out. And aside from a long talk with his mother and a fairly brief conversation with a friend, he hadn’t talked about his feelings with anyone. The marriage, the breakup, and the two months since were all locked up inside him. To compensate for his trepidation, he put a lilt to his voice, keeping the mood light and conversational. He was afraid that if he entered the confessional too fully, he might begin to crack up.
    “Have you been in touch with her?” Robert’s questions were gentle, almost tender, but penetrating. It was not so much what he asked, but the quality of genuine curiosity which infused his words. He gave the impression that he really wanted to know, that the information was important, a means of getting to know a person better, something that seemed the most important concern in life.
    The waitress shuffled up. It was the sixth hour of her shift and she began to look like a soldier who was nearing the end of a thirty-mile hike. The image of soaking her feet in hot water and Epsom salt hung over her head like a balloon in a cartoon strip. She flipped two menus onto the table as though they were the first cards being dealt in a hand of blackjack. Knives, spoons, forks, napkins followed. And the reflex action of whipping out the pad, pencil to the ready, a posture she must have assumed several hundred times that day, a proletarian mudra which, manifesting in materialistic society, was not awarded any special significance by those who saw it, even to the point of not accepting it as a signal that she was ready to write down an order.
    “Something to drink before you order?” she rasped.
    “Milk,” Martin said.
    “Tea,” Robert told her.
    The men settled into their chairs and studied their menus. The beverages came. They drank and gave orders for food. Then they sat back again, and watched each other in silence for a while. Martin noticed that Robert had blue eyes, something that he must have registered as a fact of perception. But this was the first time he realized that Robert’s eyes were highly appealing, crisp, intelligent, alive with an inner light.
    It must be all that yoga, he thought.
    “Have you seen her since the breakup?” Robert repeated his question.
    “Oh! I’m sorry,” Martin replied. “I forgot you’d asked me that before. No, not really. A few letters. One phone call. But there is a strong tacit agreement that we leave one another alone.”
    “A cooling off period?”
    “In a sense. But I don’t have any notion that we’ll get back together. Aside from those