"They're scientists of ecstasy, scientists like us."
Justin stared at her, trying to take the measures of her face and voice so that he might judge to what degree to take her seriously.
'"Scientists of ecstasy,' Dana. How shall I understand that?"
"Perhaps by thinking very hard." She spoke it in her grandest tone of voice, her most superior, as if she really meant it, gave credence to possibilities so remote they barely qualified as possibilities at all, and he was amused, appalled and aroused, and all at once. "Mmm." She hummed it deep down in her throat. "It's a lovely word. I'm very taken with the word."
"Scientist?"
She turned her head around on the pillow to face him, and laughed with that thin sharp edge of triumph that sometimes poked through when she thought him a fool.
"Ecstasy, Justin. Ecstasy."
"I know." Justin ran a finger across her cheek. "I'm not that much of an idiot."
It was because she thought him such an unredeemable nerd—with some justification—that she was willing to believe in any degree of his obtuseness. Still, she allowed his finger to continue to trace small circles on her cheek and down her neck. She was wearing a soft black sweater that he loved on her, the way it set off the glowing pallor of her skin.
"Aren't you?" she murmured. "I don't know if I'm relieved or not to hear that." She took his finger in her hand and considered it. "Do you know the etymology of the word ecstasy?"
"It's from the Latin. It means: to stand beside."
"And what is it that the ecstatic stand beside, o promising youth?"
She had turned his hand over and was inscribing her web of triangles very lightly across his palm with the very tips of her fingers, which made it a formidable problem for him to think, although he was determined to try.
"Themselves, of course."
"Mmm, so you do know something about ecstasy after all, Justin Childs."
The edge had vanished from her voice. She had gone over to something closer to tenderness, it felt like tenderness to him. They were lying side by side in her little white bed, propped up on a pile of pretty little pillows, and had been studying one of Dotty's erotico-esoteric texts. Samuel Mallach had excused himself to take a nap before dinner, and there was still just enough wintry light to see by, though they had to hold the heavy tome quite near their eyes. Justin's weak eyes were straining through the lenses of his glasses at one of those voluptuously descriptive paintings that had initially shocked him, and that continued secretly to shock him still, and she would laugh at him if she knew.
When he had been a mournful nerd, too alone to have any sense of how lonely he was, wandering through the glare of Paradise grasping his moist dream of someday speaking to a girl, she had been Mrs. Nathan Martin, the wife of a physicist of the very first tier. There was a world of worldly experience that separated them still, an indivisible remainder inside her to torment him.
The book was open to a painting of "a prince and princess of Jodhpur," perched on luxurious cushions and gazing wide-eyed into each other's eyes, palm to palm, and maintaining a highly improbable position.
"They never seem to close their eyes, these Tantric people. Is that part of their religion?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact. The gaze is required. They see the divine in each other. She sees Shiva in him, and he sees Shakti in her. And when they move, it's the gods moving in their limbs."
"Frankly, Dana, it's hard to imagine how they move at all in that particular pose."
The royal lovers were dressed in nothing but elaborate jewelry, flimsy veils and those strange expressions over whose apt characterization Dana and he could come to no agreement. The smirking prince's legs were folded into the open lotus position and his smirking princess sat on his lap, her legs wrapped around him, the precise circumstances of their congress vividly executed.
"That's where you're wrong, Justin. That's where you're grievously in error. There are all sorts of hidden movements going on, movements physical and metaphysical."
"Metaphysical movements." Justin laughed and she smiled back at him with sweet serenity intact, not taking his jeering to her heart, perhaps because she took him altogether so little to her heart. "Now there's an expression to challenge the limits of the meaningful."
"And yet metaphysical movements nonetheless. That's a very advanced position, very conducive to meditation."
She persisted in her sententious tone of voice, and he laughed again, still not able to determine for certain how serious she was.
"And upon what, exactly, would they be meditating in their very advanced position?"
"The same things upon which we meditate in our very advanced science, Justin. The ultimate nature of reality. The shimmering veil between appearance and reality. The smug erroneousness of received opinion."
"Couldn't they meditate better at some further distance from each other?"
"Do you meditate better apart from other scientists?"
"Oh, come off it, Dana. Science is by nature collaborative. I always thought mystical enlightenment was a solitary sort of affair, not to speak of asexual. Some bony guy in a loincloth humming om on a desolate mountain."
She allowed herself to smile, the lights breaking out in her eyes.
"I think you're generally quite right. Even Shiva himself was said to fit that description, smeared with ash and arrogant as only a man in a loincloth can be, until his presumptions were blasted by the illuminating ecstasy of the goddess."
"So it was the goddess who enlightened the god."
"Of course. Kundalini is feminine erotic energy. I distinctly remember having explained that to you."
"Of course."
"Of course. This particular position, by the way," she pointed to the Jodhpur pair, "is supposed to be very effective in provoking the kundalini to ascend."
"Moving up through the seven chakras toward the great gnostic orgasm."
"Speaking of orgasms, Justin, Tantric experts are said to have been able to do the most amazing things. They could perform feats of eroticism that almost defy the imagination."
"I tremble to ask."
"As well you should. At the most advanced Tantric level, there are sexual yoga techniques called mudras, which means 'seals.' Everything is carried out with infinite slowness, at a rate conducive to meditation. The most advanced of all is called the amaroli, or immortal, mudra, and it requires the man drawing his released seed back into himself, now that it's been mingled with his lover's essence."
"Sounds revolting, not to speak of unhealthy."
"The idea behind all Tantric sex is to bind the two bodies together into one system of energy, the seven chakras becoming fourteen, with the long loops of released energy swirling through their joined bodies. If they can lose themselves entirely in this, like two ecstatic dancers only conscious of the dance, no longer knowing where one body ends and the other begins, then they have the experience of really being one. And this, Justin, is the instant in which they feel themselves absorbed into the divine."
"No doubt."
This time she allowed herself true laughter, unchecked and childlike.
Justin leaned over her and took her head between his hands. "You don't believe a word of it, do you, Dana? Chakras and kundalini. The gods moving in lovers' limbs or the mind of God lurking in the equations. You don't believe a single silly syllable of it. You're just playing around with all this high-minded hokum. But in the end you're a hardheaded little rationalist, Dana Mallach."
"A rationalist? Don't accuse me of that, Justin Childs. Anything but that." She said it with a great show of feigned horror, then grinned and moved herself closer, sliding herself halfway under him.
"I've seen through to you now. I've torn off the last of the shimmering veils. You're a thoroughgoing little skeptic. You believe in metaphysical motions just about as much as I do."
He was propped up on his elbows over her.
"Well, no, there's a difference between us. I do try and maintain an open mind. Still, the sense of the absurd does tend to invade. I think I do have a certain inherited susceptibility to the mystical..."
Justin snickered.
"I do, but the sense of the absurd may come out just a bit stronger in me."
"God bless you for your sense of the absurd, Dana. God bless you for it."
"Listen to you, summoning the Problematic Entity to bless me for my blasphemy."
She reached for her mother's book, pulling it nearer to them, and tapping a finger on the amorous center, the svadis-thana chakras, of the royal couple.
"We might give it a try, Justin, in the sacred spirit of science."
"You think?"
"I do."
"It would be worthy of us as scientists."
"Even though we're theoreticians, not experimentalists." She had slid out from under him and, kneeling before him and frowning slightly, was attempting to arrange his long stiff legs into a poor approximation of the lotus position. She herself could fold herself up into the pose with graceful ease. "Still, it would be an impressive application of the hypothetical-deductive method."
"I don't believe I'm familiar with the hypothetical-deductive method. Another Tantric sexual ritual?"
She leaned back on her heels and laughed again, with all her childlike unrestraint, taking her hands off his legs so that they came undone and he lost all pretense of lotushood.
"The hypothetical-deductive method, according to certain philosophers of science with whom Daddy qualifiedly concurs, is supposed to describe what scientists do. You assume a position, one with possibilities enough to deserve attention, and then see what follows." She smiled. "How very well I explained that. How very well that came out."
"What's so funny?"
"You're so absurdly proud of your own mind, Dana. You're such a mind-proud girl."
"I've a right to be. It's a good mind. Or can't you appreciate it?"
"I'm brimming over with appreciation: 'You assume a position' "—he pointed to the ecstatically smirking prince and princess of Jodhpur—" 'and then see what follows.' How could I fail to appreciate such a mind?"
How could I have failed?