Two

When the doorbell rang, Julia’s long evening of preparation fell apart. Gail’s arrival, interesting to deal with from the vantage point of silence and solitude in a warm bath, hit like a large rock in a shallow pool. The impact of what had happened the previous night, how it would be resolved now, caught her up breathless.

When she’d felt the impulse to fuck Eliot the night before, all the considerations which might have stopped her were quickly and easily swept away into the hollow tube of erotic tunnel vision. She dismissed the problem of Martin. They were separated, and anyway, he would never find out. Besides, she had already cheated on him with Eliot a year earlier.

Dealing with the question of her relationship to Gail was a bit more tricky. Eliot slept with many other women; Julia knew that. So it wasn’t as though she were taking a faithful husband away for a rare fuck. Also, Eliot wasn’t Gail’s husband and probably would never be. Gail hadn’t spoken too much about their affair, but Julia got the impression that her friend, while deeply involved, had not let herself fully fall in love. At least, Julia had never heard Gail say the word. All in all, she had been ready to have her brief fuck with Eliot and then drop the incident into the garbage bin of history, to pretend that it never happened.

Then the roof had come crashing in. First Gail’s call while Eliot was still there, naked and contented. His hurried dressing and leaving while she had to go through a universe of changes in order to talk to her friend. The idea that Eliot would have stood Gail up in order to be with her was fraught with almost too much madness. Eliot was ten kinds of bastard in his way, but he was not a careless or thoughtless man. Such a thing was practically inconceivable, not because of any tenderheartedness on his part, but because he was always such a meticulous planner. The long long conversation with Gail which had to go on until Eliot reached her place was pure hell, including the paranoiac undertones of wondering whether Gail suspected that Eliot had been there.

Julia began the next morning, this morning, ready to tear Eliot’s head off, but the only trace of him was a message left with his office secretary that he would be out of town for two days, whereabouts unknown. Her morning coffee, a cigarette, and the Times had been the next order of business. She was to see Gail in the evening and wanted to be totally together, the previous evening utterly erased. That small hope was shattered by the first phonecall of the day, Gail calling to tell her that Eliot had proposed, that she was going to accept, that she realized that perhaps she had loved him all along.

The day had been spent nursing a dull headache, and while it shied back somewhat when treated with aspirin, the way a vampire is supposed to flinch at the smell of garlic, the pain settled in for a long visit. The obviousness of its cause was not a factor in its cure. Julia had one of two very unpleasant roads to travel: telling the truth or telling a lie. And each time she swung from one to the other, her head hurt a bit more. She considered canceling the date for the evening, but she knew she would have no rest until she’d seen Gail, talked to her, and either found a new way to relate or else lose the friendship altogether.

Thus, after work, she plunged herself into hot water and grass, hoping to find some rest from the dilemma, so that when the moment of confrontation arrived, she might at least act spontaneously. The spell of relaxation had removed her headache, but had not indicated what her decision ought to be.

Julia sighed, walked to the door, and opened it. Gail rushed in, threw her arms around her, and hugged her, dancing up and down. Julia remained rigid in the embrace, her body unyielding.

“Isn’t it fantastic!” Gail almost shouted.

Julia looked at her through lidded eyes and didn’t say a word. She was so silent, so stem, so set in her posture of withdrawal that the mood cut through even Gail’s reckless mirth. Gail’s mouth went in and out of a smile half a dozen times. Her eyes were like birds on a beach just before a storm, electric, sharp.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Gail said at last in an exaggerated drawl which embraced the worst that a little child could possibly be experiencing and letting it know that whatever the problem was it could be fixed up in a minute. It was an attempt at humor, that quality which is born halfway between abandon and concern. Even her expression was like that of the schoolteacher she played to children each day.

Then she looked into Julia’s eyes. Then she knew that whatever it was, it was bad, very bad.

“Should we sit down?” Gail said. Her first thought was for her friend, guessing that something had happened to Julia, perhaps in relation to Martin. Or maybe it was the death of a relative or friend. Or grim news from a doctor. Gail was ready to drop all of her excitement and go to the aid of her friend.

Julia saw that, knew the depth of Gail’s friendship, knew that she herself would have acted the same in reverse positions. The brief bit of limited passion the night before now loomed as such a terrible mistake and Julia wondered how she could have rationalized it even for a second.

It didn’t seem like much at the time, she thought. I didn’t know he had a date with her. I didn’t know he was going to propose to her.

Gail took Julia’s hand and began to lead her to the couch.

“Should I put some coffee on?” she asked.

But Julia stopped. She knew it was then or never. The longer she stayed in Gail’s presence, the more difficult it would become to tell her. It would be impossible. And then she would have to live with it. She would be asked to be Maid of Honor at the wedding. And afterwards, how could she spend time in the same office with Eliot? She now swung as wildly into the direction of blame as she had gone in the direction of nonchalance the night before. She was taken with the worst symptom of panic—not knowing that one is in a panic. She turned halfway around to face Gail who was a step ahead of her on the way to the sofa. The room seemed carved out of flawed crystal. Everything stood out with stark precision, and yet nothing was whole.

“He was here,” Julia blurted out. “When you called last night. Eliot was here. When you called . . . he had just finished fucking me in the ass.”

Perhaps a society is possible in which the simple communication of mundane sexual activity might be noted and accepted with as much flurry as is given to, say, a listing of what one had for breakfast or dinner. Had Julia said, “When you called last night. Eliot was here. When you called . . . he had just finished eating an onion bagel with cream cheese and Nova Scotia salmon,” no one would have made much of it. The terrible contraction which the species had developed in relation to its erotic activity, however, propels people to rank melodramas of the most turgid variety, sometimes to physical violence and even murder. It is possible to envision a society in which an announcement such as Julia’s might be made with utter ease and received with some simple, offhanded remark? A “how droll” perhaps, or even “how icky.”

But the two women, intelligent, perceptive, experienced, and friendly to each other, could not, in light of all their conditioning, do anything but take the steps they did. Gail sucked her breath in sharply. Julia reached toward her. Gail drew back. Julia turned her head away. Gail looked out at Julia with eyes that signaled warmth through an iron grid of pain. In short, they did the dance of heavy news, taking an intrinsically neutral event and straining it, through the cheese cloth of social dilemma, into a cause célèbre, a scandal which eclipsed famine in Africa and earthquakes in Italy. It, in short, really gave them something to talk about.

“If you tell me you hate me and turn around and walk out and never speak to me again, I’ll understand,” Julia said.

Gail weighed the offer. Calculations ran through her mind like sand through an hourglass. But since all manifestations of everything which exists in the universe can be reduced to the result of three forces, even the seemingly complex rush of emotions that ransacked Gail’s wardrobe of rationalizations resolved itself into three factors: herself, Julia, and Eliot. Eliot was out of town for two days. He had left her apartment at eight in the morning and told her he wouldn’t be back until Thursday. Now she understood the real reason for his leaving. She wouldn’t be able to deal with him until he returned. His surprise would be a strong one for he couldn’t have imagined that Julia would tell.

“Don’t be absurd,” Gail replied. “I’m too much in shock right now to know whether I’m more angry or hurt. And in any case, it’s done. If I walked out now, in ten minutes I’d be crazy wanting to talk to you about it. So. Let’s talk.”

“I’d make some coffee?” Julia suggested.

“Wine would be more like it,” Gail said.

“Well,” Julia said, the word almost a sigh. “Why don’t you have a seat? Make yourself comfortable.”

The sudden stilted structure of the distance between them was as noticeable as an elephant in a rose garden. Each woman was filled with a score of tiny impulses to do something to break the tension. But there was no quick route to relaxation. A lot of words had to be spoken, many feelings had to be exchanged, certain understandings had to be reached. It would be a long evening.

Gail shrugged, indicating that she saw as well as Julia did how awkward the situation was and yet how thin the pane of glass that separated them. Julia nodded, and then turned to go to the kitchen. In a few seconds she could be heard in a dialogue with glasses, bottles, ice trays. Gail looked around the large space. Her glance fell on the bed at the far side of the room.

It must have been there, she thought.

Now that she had a brief moment to sort herself out, she realized at once that whatever she felt, it wasn’t jealousy. Relieved, she was able to toss that label out of the box of rubber stamps she used for cataloguing her experience. She knew that Eliot fucked other women, and even as she considered marrying him she was aware that fidelity was out of the question. She had never asked that of him; all she wanted was discretion, consideration, tact. The fact that one of the women he fucked was Julia, however, brought her up short. How long had they been making it? Should she consider herself betrayed? After all, until the night before, she had no special claim on Eliot. She was just one of his cunts. Probably his number one, but that carried no status which anyone, including Julia, had to respect. But as a friend, shouldn’t Julia have told her? On the other hand, how did they define friendship? And perhaps this was the only time, and if so, then Julia was honest because she did tell. And what of Eliot? Gail was forced to smile when she thought of his performance the night before. No wonder he was so flustered. If he had made it with just any other woman, he wouldn’t have been so completely thrown. Then what about the proposal? Was that just a panicked coverup? Yet he did have deep feelings for her. It was all very interesting, very subtle.

I’m the injured party, and with that insight her mood shifted. She could afford to wait, to let the others do the explaining and apologizing. But even as she felt that, she was ashamed. Eliot and Julia must be suffering quite a bit. And they weren’t villains.

She sat on the rug in front of the couch just as Julia came back into the room with a tray of wine and crackers and cheese.

“It was supposed to have been dinner,” Julia said. She sat down on the floor, putting the tray down next to her. “I was going to make veal, but . . . “ She couldn’t finish the sentence. Unaccountably, she began to cry. Her shoulders shook, tears wet her cheeks, she covered her face with her hands. She made no sound. She wept like an actress in a silent film.

Gail watched her for a few minutes, coldly at first, detached from the other’s sorrow. But then something stirred in her breast, a sympathetic warmth, a tiny flickering like that of a candle name. Julia’s feelings flooded the air, and Gail breathed them in with every breath. She saw that Julia was not weeping only for herself, but for all of them. For Eliot with his super-controlled life, in which each encounter ran on as strict a schedule as German trams. For her, for Gail, a nobody schoolteacher being kept by a wealthy man, finally having her bondage made respectable by a marriage license. And for all the poor people on the planet, trapped in their pitiful limitations, in their paltry possessiveness, in their rancid identities.

Not surprisingly, Gail felt her own eyes go moist, and without thinking she reached out and put her arms around Julia’s shoulders. Julia stiffened, then let go, and in a second the two women were embracing one another tightly, sobbing fully, letting themselves be overwhelmed by the cataract of rushing feeling, the sweet release that even pain provides when it is expressed, given the full range of fecundating power.

They cried for a long time, while a world spun on, unconcerned. In the same building, a score of other dramas unfolded. A man and wife entered the ninth hour of a fight. They had reached the point where they were dredging up little tender secrets they’d told each other a year earlier, things they’d whispered late at night after making love, and had now shaped the truths into sharp barbs, dipped in the venom of anger and meanness, and were hurling them into each other’s heart, purposely, viciously, wanting to hurt, to tear, to destroy, like outer-directed scorpions doing a dance of destruction. An eighty-five year old woman lay on her bed and felt her body protest each time she took a breath. “It wants to die,” she said out loud to the empty room, “but I don’t.” And for the hundredth time that day she dozed and strolled down the long lane of memory to see if she could remember who “I’ was, knowing that death would come that way, surreptitiously, as she bent over to smell a flower that had bloomed before the century was born. On the roof a young boy had attained the goal he’d worked on for almost a month. A thin, pouty girl had consented, after much attention, false promises, and concentrated mauling, to pull down her jeans and let the youth roam inside her sticky cunt with the middle finger of his right hand while she rubbed the bulge in his pants with the palm of her left hand.

Beyond that multi-leveled stage, the city throbbed its night song. Millions of bulbs burned with indifferent heat upon the full range of human behavior. A surgeon in the emergency room of a city hospital stitched up a split scalp; a mugger stepped out from behind a truck and waved a gun at an elderly man; a hundred thousand people lifted glasses to their mouths in an effort to get drunk; a scholar discovered a nuance in an ancient Hebrew text; a priest put on street clothes and walked up and down Eighth Avenue until a hooker caught his eye; a mother hummed a lullaby as her two-day-old infant sucked at her nipple.

The darkness spread, east and west, north and south, deepening over the face of the globe until it began to meet the light, and twilight and dawn, evening and morning, night and day, striped the earth with perfect symmetry. Green and blue and white and black, the earth spun slowly on its axis, sang its circle about the sun, which followed its prescribed course in the galaxy, joining a billion billion galaxies in a vast and seemingly endless expansion into realms so far beyond human comprehension that only our fantasies suffice to give any solace to our minds.

Gail and Julia wept until their tears were done, and then they pulled back from each other. For a while they busied themselves with handkerchiefs, dabbings, blowings, and sniffings. Then, that out of the way, they had no alternative but to look at one another. They both smiled shyly, a bit embarrassed.

“I must look a mess,” Julia said, her hand going to her hair in a reflex gesture.

“You’re so very beautiful,” Gail said. “I mean, not just your looks. I’ve always known that you were attractive in that way. But I feel that this is the first time I’m really seeing you. I mean, what’s inside.” She pressed her lips together. “Oh, am I making any sense at all? I feel like I’m talking inside a big paper bag.”

“How about some wine?” Julia asked. “That should clear both our heads.”

She poured, and they lifted their glasses, made a silent toast, and drank. The alcohol was a solvent cutting through the glue of self-consciousness. It bit the tongue, flushed the throat, warmed the chest, and hit the belly like a felt hammer on a bronze gong. It was a very good wine, and they finished the first round, poured a second, and were halfway into that before either spoke.

“It seems we have a lot to talk about, and yet, suddenly, I can’t remember what was so important,” Gail said. “I came over to tell you that Eliot had proposed. And then you told me that you made it with him last night. And I suppose I’m supposed to be outraged or vindictive, but right now I don’t feel anything but comfortable. Do you mind if I take my shoes off?”

“Take off whatever you like,” Julia said. The sentence echoed off the wall and bounced back on her, causing her to tilt her head slightly, but she dismissed the perception.

“How long have we known each other now?” Gail continued.

“I don’t know. Must be three years.”

“It’s funny. When I think of you, I always say to myself, ‘Julia my best friend,’ like that, all in one breath, ‘Julia-my-best-friend.’ And now that we’re sitting here, I realize I barely know you at all. That’s peculiar, isn’t it? After all this time, I realize I’ve never seen you cry, or cried with you. And there are some things we’ve never talked about.”

“I guess we’ve just enjoyed each other’s company and never felt the need . . . “ Julia began to say. Then she shook her head. “No, that’s bullshit. There have been a lot of things I suppressed. I guess I was trying to be polite.”

“You know I had a crush on Martin, don’t you?”

Julia kicked off her own shoes, and cut a piece of cheese. She popped it into her mouth. “No, I didn’t know.”

“I kind of fell for him when I used to go to the health club. It was a blow when I learned he was married But I tucked my pussy away and switched the vibration to one of pleasantness. Then he introduced us that night, remember? And I liked you so much all at once, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ve lost a stud but I may have found a friend,’ which is so much rarer.”

“I liked you a lot too,” Julia said. “Meeting you was so good for me. I was beginning to feel the first letdown after our Europe trip. And I had just begun working for Eliot and I got onto a kind of speed trip. So I was simultaneously depressed and strung out. And being with you was like the first breath I had taken in ages.”

At hearing Julia say “Eliot,” Gail gnawed at her lower lip, and her eyes threatened to fill again. Julia didn’t see the reaction until she’d gone on past his name, and when she noticed Gail’s unhappiness, she hung her head.

“Oh Gail, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world. I don’t know what got into me. I was just so horny. I haven’t fucked in almost two months. And I guess you don’t know this, but Eliot and I had had a very brief affair, just before you met him. We’re together all the time. You know? I mean, we’re very intimate.”

She looked up to see how Gail was taking all that she was saying. Her friend had an expression that seemed to hover between pain and hatred. There was nothing for Julia to do but accept it, to absorb the feeling and transform it within herself. This was part of her dues.

“Shall I go on?” she asked.

“Yes,” Gail said, her lips tight. “I want to hear. Please.”

“Well, I know things about Eliot that could send him to jail for ten years. He’s a lot of things to me. A father figure, a boss, a teacher, a confidant. When I began to go through really big trouble with Martin, Eliot listened to me for weeks and weeks.”

“But during all that time you hardly told me what was going on.”

“I suppose I have a natural instinct to go to a man when I need help.”

“I know what you mean,” Gail replied, her bitterness hanging out.

“Anyway, there was something in the air all day yesterday. Both Eliot and I felt it. And when quitting time came, it was just obvious that we both wanted to fuck. And I worried about Martin and I worried about you, but somehow it didn’t seem to involve anyone else. After all, we were consenting adults. We were both free. And it never occurred to me that Eliot had a date with you. You know his style. His appointment book is immaculate. He even schedules a precise amount of time between appointments, enough for transportation, enough to think about the next person he’s going to meet; he even leaves himself time to piss, for Christ’s sake.”

“I know,” Gail said, and a shadow of a smile fell across her lips.

The two women stole glances at one another. A subtle checkpoint had been passed.

“So I thought we’d just do it. You know. Get the panties off, get the pants down. Cock hard, hole all greased up. Huff and puff, move the old ass around, rub my fingers on my clit, and get my fucking rocks off.”

Gail’s eyes opened wide. She had never heard Julia speak like this before. In fact, she’d never heard any woman speak like this before. She had thoughts which used those words and those images, but they were fleeting, formless things which never got translated into sound, much less communicated.

“Are you shocked?” Julia said, seeing Gail’s expression. “Well, I’d choose more fancy language, but that’s exactly the way I was thinking. I knew there wouldn’t be any gooey stuff between Eliot and me, and no traces the following day. We could both do the thing and draw a curtain over it and act like it never happened. He’s a very attractive man in his brutal way, as you well know, and a certain charge builds up over time. So we discharged the charge. And nothing would have come of it if he hadn’t proposed to you. If he hadn’t stood you up to come over here.” She poured more wine into both their glasses. “I wonder why he did it?”

“Maybe he wanted something to happen. Maybe it was his way of blowing the lid off.” Gail picked up her glass and sipped at the wine.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, look at what’s happened. Eliot wound up proposing. And you and I are having probably the first real conversation of our entire friendship.”

“It seems a hell of a roundabout way to get at things.”

“Life is funny,” Gail said.

“Life is a soap opera,” Julia amended.

The two women looked at a spot on the floor between them. The pattern of their talk for the evening had been set. It would be a series of spirals ending in resolution at each level, with a pause before going to the next plateau. The movement was endless and could carry them for the rest of their lives, defining the meaning of relationship, A melting was taking place, a process they both felt, and the unexpected blow which had hurled them together so violently was indeed proving a form of caress.

“What about . . . Eliot?” Julia asked. “Are you going to tell him that you know?”

“I’d have to, if I was going to have anything more to do with him.”

“Are you?”

Gail looked up sharply. “Julia,” she said, “do you mind if I ask something personal?”

Julia smiled broadly. “Well, what could be personal now?”

“What was there between you and Martin? I mean, really. Without any bullshit.”

Julia stirred and changed her position. She unfolded her legs and sat with her back against the couch. The white terrycloth robe fell open and revealed her thighs far up past her knees. Gail found herself glimpsing the expanse of white skin. Julia’s hair hung loose about her shoulders. Her breasts were half exposed. Her face was open, easy, intelligent. Gail caught her breath. She was caught by a brief, intense desire to put her arms around Julia’s waist and bury her head in the other woman’s soft belly.

“I guess at first it was the challenge of getting married. You know. We’ve all been handed the story from the time we could understand English. That’s the big one, right? And then there was the physical part, of course. Martin is such a stud. Hung like a horse, and practically tireless. He used to screw me so long and so hard sometimes that I couldn’t close my legs for an hour afterward.” Julia looked about her almost absent-mindedly. “Do you have any cigarettes?” she asked.

“No,” Gail replied, “but I brought some grass. Would you like a joint?”

“I’m already a bit stoned, but why not?”

Gail reached into her bag and pulled out a tiny cigarette case from which she extracted a thin, hand-rolled marijuana cigarette. “This is a present from Eliot,” she said. “Just in from Thailand. A hundred and seventy-five dollars an ounce.”

Julia made a whistling gesture with her lips, which jolted Gail with its suggestion of kissing.

Gail lit up, inhaled, ballooned the smoke in her lungs, and passed the joint to Julia. The next few minutes were given up to the ritual of the grass high, letting the weed work its subtle alchemy, setting up temporary headquarters in the brain, rearranging the pattern and intensity of signals. It was an extraordinarily powerful strain, and by the time they were down to a roach, holding the ember with the tips of long fingernails, they both found it difficult to focus on anything but the waterfall of sensations exploding in their bodies.

“Whew,” Gail said. She leaned back against the sofa, her head on a pillow. She unbuttoned the waist of her skirt and pulled the bottom of her blouse out. She slid down until she was three-quarters reclining on the floor.

“Why don’t I put on some music?” Julia said.

She got up and went over to the stereo and stacked six records on the spindle. She listened only to slow music, and her collection reflected only the most mellow of whatever genre she choose. In popular, it was, for example, Donovan, not the Stones; in classical, it was Debussy and some of Satie, not Wagner; in Indian, it was Ali Akhbar Khan, not Ravi Shankar, So it didn’t matter which records she chose; they would all reflect the same mood.

When she returned, Gail was largely disheveled, her skirt hiked up past her knees, the top four buttons of her blouse undone. She was gazing at the ceiling, her eyes somewhat glazed.

“Where were we?” Julia said as she lay down.

“Martin was hung like a horse and you couldn’t close your legs after he fucked you,” Gail replied, her voice drowsy.

Julia sighed and sank back into her story. “Right. After that, there was the prospect of Europe. He wouldn’t have gone in a million years, but I was able to move him out of that dreary little town and that absurd job and for almost a year we lived like rich people. Moving all the time. Then there was domesticity, which lasted about three months before I got bored with living a twenty-four-hour schedule. It was like having two jobs: Eliot from nine to five and Martin from five until nine the next morning. And when I looked deep into my heart, I knew that if I had to make a choice, I’d prefer giving up the job with Martin. It wasn’t as exciting, and I didn’t get paid. After that, it was just a matter of time.”

“What about him?”

“Who knows? He’s not the world’s most articulate man. But I suppose if it takes two to make a marriage, it takes two to make a divorce. I assume he got as bored for his reasons as I did for mine. Anyway, the last few months before we split up were practically unbearable. We used to lie around all night and silently hate one another.”

“I didn’t realize,” Gail said. She rolled over on her side and looked at Julia who still lay on her back. The grass had imparted a softness to her aura, and Gail suffered a momentary loss of erotic indentity. For an instant she looked at Julia the way a man might, seeing the lush. unconscious invitation of the almost perfect body, the pose of utter lassitude. When she snapped back into herself, however, the feeling did not leave. And she found herself thinking. This is desire. What I’m feeling is desire.

“That was the worst part, getting caught up in that terrible trap of the closed pair. You know, the bond between a man and a woman is so strong, so total in a way, that it shuts everything else out. There were a hundred times I wanted to call you, to talk to you. But I had this idea that I owed Martin one hundred percent loyalty, that I couldn’t be really real with anybody else. You know, I was less upset over my sexual infidelity than over talking to somebody else about my marriage.”

Julia turned her head to look at Gail. Her eyes widened and then narrowed when she saw her friend looking at her. Gail’s face was a pool of such clear water that the bottom could be seen, magnified, clarified. And the feelings that lay at the core of Gail’s person at that instant were so sharply defined already that Julia couldn’t mistake them. Except that she did, for she had not made that leap across gender lines, and any erotic component to the mood of the moment could not be registered. What Julia perceived was concern.

“Gail, what’s the matter?” she said.

“I guess I’m mixed up,” Gail replied. “Suddenly it seems like there’s a lot of people in the room.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get so depressing.”

“No, it’s all right. I wanted to hear about it. I guess I want to know whether I should marry Eliot. Every marriage tale I’ve heard sounds pretty much the same, and I guess when anyone gets married they think, ‘Mine will be different,’ and then it never is. I’ve been consoling myself with the idea that money will make the difference. We can even afford to maintain separate apartments, and Eliot travels a lot so I won’t even be seeing him a lot of the time.” She reached over and put her hand on Julia’s arm. “Am I being too cold, calculating it all like this?”

Julia took her friend’s hand and held it. “No, baby, not at all. You’d be a fool if you didn’t. The only thing is, you never really know until you do it. Once that piece of paper is signed, it’s like living in a foreign country. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like hearing a door slam behind you.”

“Isn’t there anyway out? Does it have to be like that?”

They slowly disengaged. Gail’s hand was on fire where Julia had held it. Julia’s heart was beating rapidly. Both women were breathing hard. They fell back as though exhausted, the extremely powerful marijuana amplifying each nuance of feeling a hundred times. Julia’s reality crashed in upon her. Time telescoped and psychological space turned in upon itself. Telling the story of her relationship with Martin had impacted that experience so that she felt his presence very strongly in the room. Superimposed upon that was the hangover from the fucking she’d received from Eliot the night before. And now there was this abrupt and titanic breakthrough with Gail. And she had no resting place in the rapid flow of events within which to integrate, to allow it all to be absorbed into the wider stream of awareness that was her life. She felt flushed, undone. She slid forward even more and lay completely on the floor. She heard Gail do the same. The woman next to her had become a mixture of threat and consolation. Gail’s presence was filling her entirely, and at the same time crowding something in her, some wall of privacy that rarely got approached, much less climbed. Not even Martin had touched spots that were, madly, surrendering themselves to Gail’s vibrations. Julia had a wild impulse to tear her robe off. She sighed, arched her back, and tried to melt into the floor. The first record dropped and she realized she had not heard a note. With the second, the strains of Judy Collins filled the room. She was singing about clouds and life and somehow coming to understand that it is impossible to understand. She stretched. Her left hand touched something. It was Gail’s hand. She began to pull back with the unquestioned reflex of social nicety, but Gail’s fingers closed over her own. For an instant Julia panicked, not knowing why, but suddenly afraid. And then she took a deep breath, and relaxed. The contact was made, accepted.

Gail could barely contain herself. Insights galloped through her mind like steeplechase horses before the pack has thinned itself out. Thundering hooves pounded the turf of her consciousness, and then tons of muscle and bone lifted itself in the air to fly giddily over the hurdle of an ancient resistance, to come thudding down on the other side, pursuing the race. Every now and then, one didn’t make it, and horse and rider went sprawling crazily across the earth. The images in Gail’s mind were now too sharp, too vivid, to be denied. There was no hazy distance across which she needed to peer to discover what she wanted. She was hungry for Julia in a most direct, physical way. She wanted her friend in her arms, their breasts mingling, their thighs pressing tight. She wanted Julia’s kisses, her ripe mouth and tender tongue. She wanted to smell the pungent heat between Julia’s thighs, to savor the tart taste, the viscous musk of slow excitement.

This is insane, she thought. / have to get a grip on myself. But even as she forced herself down against the rug, biting the inside of her lip, Julia’s hand found her own. It was a moment of such electrifying intensity that Gail’s scalp crawled. It took superhuman effort to keep from rolling over violently and flinging herself on to Julia, raping her vulnerability. She felt Julia begin to pull away, and her heart dropped at the idea that she would lose even that little precious contact. So all her life’s conditioning to the contrary, she seized her friend’s hand.

And then, all at once, it was easy. They were lying side by side, relaxed, breathing fully, holding hands.

All that just to reach something so simple, Gail thought, and allowed herself an inner sigh of relief. I almost made a fool of myself. The actual, full, direct physical contact had skimmed the cream off the top of the tension that had built between them. And with that, they both subsided into a long, deep dreaminess, striking into the music, enjoying the soma that spiced their mundane physiology. They drifted along the edge of wakefulness, flirting with sleep, at the thin edge of hypnogogic ecstasy, the most exquisite jewel on the spectrum of consciousness. Around and between them, a subtle energy flowed. The full release of waking structures liberated the electricity of expression. And since they were totally inert on the gross level, the energy was free to dance like transparent flame over their bodies. Their fingers loosened and their palms became conductor plates through which flowed the essence of their selves. They entered a union so profound that it was attached to no experience whatsoever.

In time as measured by the clock, a half hour passed. In time as measured by the music, months passed. In time as measured by the depth of the women’s breathing, eternities had come and gone. When Julia finally stirred, moved a finger, opened her eyes, she experienced what she imagined an infant must feel, that chaotic sense of wonder at color and shape. When she went to move her left hand, she found that it was glued to Gail’s hand. Disengaging was not a mechanical process, but had become a radical alteration in the nature of her relationship to the world. As she began to pull away, Gail moaned softly and her eyelids fluttered.

“Wow, where were we?” Gail said at last.

“Another universe,” Julia replied.

“I’ve done that alone, but I never went there with anyone else before.”

“Me neither. In fact, I usually can’t space out that much. When I’m alone my thinking usually takes over. But with you—I don’t know. It’s like you took the place of my thoughts.”

“Did you feel my presence?” Gail asked.

Julia pulled herself up a bit, rested her shoulders against the couch. “Yes. There was a place when everything turned violet.”

Gail also sat up, excited. “Right. It was a kind of mist, with mountains barely showing through.”

“Right,” Julia chimed in, “and something that looked like a huge lake in the distance—it was a deeper purple.”

Gail opened her eyes wide in astonishment. “That’s exactly what I saw,” she exclaimed. “We were there together.”

“Telepathy!” Julia said, awestruck. “It’s real. And it’s not like reading somebody’s thoughts. It’s going to where thoughts go, only in your mind with someone. Oh, I’m not saying this right.”

Gail smiled, reached out and held Julia’s hand again. “You don’t have to. Don’t you see? We shared it together. We don’t need the words.”

“We . . . don’t . . . need . . . the . . . words . . . “ Julia repeated, the full impact of the words hitting her with methodical repetition, like the left jabs of a master boxer slamming into an already groggy opponent. Julia shivered, a chill shaking her so violently that her entire torso shuddered.

“Oh dear,” Gail said and spontaneously moved forward and put her arms around Julia, holding her tightly. Julia shook in her friend’s embrace for almost a minute, the energy exploding playfully up and down the nerve nodes of her spine. Not having any knowledge of the relationship between astral events and physical reactions, never having been introduced to the concepts of kundalini and chakras, both women experienced the phenomenon in ignorance, which meant that they tasted more fear than they might otherwise have, but at the same time appreciated the occurrence more nakedly, without a superstructure of rationalizations.

Finally, Julia calmed down and Gail’s embrace became looser, warmer. Soon, there was no need for Gail to be holding her at all, and yet neither woman made a move to pull back. Julia’s arms moved up slowly, tentatively, and made their way around Gail’s waist. When the contact was made, the moment and its implications accepted, they fell further into each other’s arms, holding on with all the ardor of lovers.

As sensitive to each other as they were, each minute aspect of the embrace hummed its separate song. The most immediate, the most obvious, was the pressure of their breasts as they brought their chests together. Neither of them had ever hugged another woman before in quite that way, so intimately, so long. The brief embraces of social convenience with relatives and acquaintances never reached the point at which they could feel the details of the other’s body. Julia’s robe was open and her breasts bare. Gail wore only a thin blouse, two-thirds unbuttoned. The heat where valley met valley climbed to troubling temperatures.

And yet, it was not quite erotic, for neither was prepared for such a reality. It seems like such a small step, to go from an embrace to a kiss, from a kiss to a caress, from a caress to a penetration. Yet there is a point at which quantitative change become qualitative, and then one is in another realm entirely. Such is the realm of eroticism. At a time when the casual fuck is the official insignia of the culture, when its only rival is the sanctified fuck of marriage, the notion of fucking as a branding of the soul, an alchemical transfusion from essence to essence, has fallen into disuse. Even the cross-cultural borrowing from tantric buddhism has not quite made the point, for those who study its methods and metaphysics tend to see merely technique or discipline or transcendence or union. And in relation to what fucking really is, these qualities are unspeakably petty, although from the point of view of the common person, they are held up as surpassing goals.

We all know this instinctively, and yet we forget, we have it trained out of us, along with all the other wisdom which is our birthright as children. And we go through all the dreary stages along the path of erotic development so-called, from shy romance to hard-edged debauchery, until we are caught in some mechanical routine, which may be garlanded with flowers of the most subtle sensuality, but remains essentially lacking in meaning.

Gail and Julia understood, inchoately, dumbly, that under no matter which rubric they might take their clothes off and plunge into the arms of Eros together, they would be transgressing the bounds of social safety, that they would become, on the spot, bound to one another. And even if they casually parted the following morning and treated the incident as a marijuana excess, the mark of erotic love would have been burned into their souls, and there would be no going back from that, for to be born again is as ineluctable in its implications as being born. For each time one is born again, one must die again.

They disengaged and pulled back slowly. When they were no longer touching, they looked into each other’s eyes.

“Gail,” Julia said. “I love you.”

Gail’s eyes were moist. “All this time. Three years. We’ve been in love for so long and never known it.”

“When we met, there was that sparkle, that joy, that sense of adventure. If you had been a man, I would have recognized it at once.”

Gail nodded. “What was it? The sex? Is it that we were afraid of sex and so we couldn’t accept love?”

“There’s no love without sex,” Julia said. “You know that. Not love the way I’m feeling it now.”

Gail closed her eyes in agreement, and when she opened them she looked out with the trembling ingenuousness of a teenage girl feeling herself turn into a woman for the first time.

“Do you want to have sex?” Gail asked.

“I feel it,” Julia replied. “You do too, don’t you? But actually doing it. I don’t know. What would it mean? Where would it lead?” She paused a moment and then her face broke open in a laugh.

Gail watched her and did not change expression. Julia subsided into a smile. “I just got a picture of Martin and Eliot as we called them in for a conference and then announced the news that you and I had become lovers.”

Julia grinned and looked at Gail, expecting a smile of corroboration. But Gail was stonefaced. “What is it?” Julia asked finally. “It’s not a cheap joke,” Gail said evenly. Julia’s eyes widened. “Oh Gail, I didn’t mean . . . Hey,don’t be so serious.”

“Why shouldn’t I be serious?” Gail snapped. Julia was silent for several seconds. “Now I do need a cigarette,” she said. “I think I may have some next to the bed.”

She got up and pulled her housedress about her, cinching the cord at the waist, then walked over to the far end of the large room She staggered slightly, a bit more affected by the wine and grass and heavy run of emotions than she had realized. She rummaged in a drawer of the night table, found a wrinkled Pall Mall, smoothed it out, lit it, and inhaled with intense concentration, then let the smoke out with an almost exaggerated sigh of relief. She ran her hand over her face, made several gestures which might, if she were an actress on stage, indicate to the audience that she was clearing her head, and turned to go back to the couch. She stopped halfway there. She couldn’t see Gail, but was able to sense her. Some strange and unsettling emanation came from the area behind the couch. A premonition of dread chilled her heart and she rushed forward suddenly, hair flying.

“Gail?” she called out. She couldn’t see Gail on the floor, and for a wild millisecond surmised that her friend had vanished, utterly disappeared. She turned the corner around the back of the couch, and found Gail lying on its pillows, stark naked.

Julia’s breath caught in her chest. In her confusion, in the low light, she thought she was looking down at herself. Her experience with nude female bodies was extremely limited. Several times, at the health club, a woman had come into the steam room without a towel around her, but that had been so formal, so public, so in keeping with the context, that Julia could view it the way she might look at photos in a nudist magazine. Before that, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen another woman without clothes on. The only naked female body she was familiar with was her own, and that was precisely the image which her mind hastily conjured to throw over Gail in the same way that a passerby might cover an accident victim with a coat.

Julia didn’t know what to do. To look or to look away; both were perplexing. Meanwhile, Gail’s figure pulsated almost imperceptibly, and Julia was drawn by its vibration. She lay with her right arm crooked up and over her, the forearm serving as a pillow for her head. Her left arm was by her side, relaxed. Gail’s right leg was raised, bent at the knee so that the angle between it and the left leg, stretched out flat and long at the edge of the couch, was enough to cause Gail’s cunt to appear as the merest hint of black and pink beneath the thatch of thick, curly pubic hair. Gail’s breasts fell, as large breasts do when a woman is lying down, to either side of her chest. Julia’s glance returned more often to Gail’s nipples than to anywhere else, for they were perfectly smooth purple discs, the tips long thin stems now drooping slightly. Gail was breathing deeply, her mouth was open and her eyes, hot mirrors, showed Julia the image of herself.

“Gail,” Julie said, her voice breaking.

“Why shouldn’t we be naked with one another?” Gail said.

“Gail . . . “ Julia repeated.

“Why shouldn’t we love each other, and fuck each other, and tell each other what’s in our hearts? Is that something that only a man and woman can do together? Who said that, Julia? Who made that law?” Gail smiled abruptly. “Have a seat, sweetheart. Make yourself at home.”

Julia’s eyes focused sharply and the lines of her face went straight. Something like anger flared. She brought the cigarette to her lips, sucked in the harsh smoke, and blew it out again almost at once. With her free hand she pulled the top lapels of her housecoat tightly together, all at once a prim matron putting a young man in his place.

“I don’t know that I want to continue this,” she snapped.

Gail leapt from the couch, her movement so quick, so unexpected, so seemingly opposed to the law of gravity, that Julia almost fell over backwards.

“Well, how shall I do it?” Gail shouted. “Do you want to be taken by force? Is that the way a man would do it for you?” Gail pulled the cigarette from Julia’s fingers and flung it into the fireplace.

“What’s so precious under here?” Gail grabbed the edges of the housedress and yanked so violently that Julia’s fingers were pulled loose from their grasp. Gail tugged and pushed, stripping the robe from Julia’s shoulders, and then, in a single sweeping gesture, peeled it off entirely, dropping to her knees to complete the movement.

Then Julia was also naked. Her eyes flashed fire but her lower lip trembled. She pressed her thighs together but her arms remained at her sides, the hands doubled into fists so that the pectoral muscles flexed and pulled her breasts taut. The two woman froze in those postures of defiance and revolt, of tender violence, stunned that they had come so far.

The presence of clothing is so fully conditioned an aspect of our lives that its simple removal is enough to be considered a major shift in identity. Whether it is done conventionally, as among nudists; or aggressively, as with stripteasers; or casually, as among people who have lived together for a long time; or radically, as with streakers; no matter what the mood or approach, the event is significant. Because it reveals what are called the private parts, the parts that shit and piss, the parts that fuck and fart, the parts that bleed and ejaculate. So deeply ingrained is our involvement with clothing that a multi-billion dollar business has sprung up based on nothing more extraordinary than photographs of women examining their vaginas as though they had suddenly chanced upon a totally unique discovery. A human being is not free to walk the face of the earth naked, and that is all the comment that need be made upon the entire human condition.

Julia relaxed by degrees, and in a few moments she was standing there with something approaching naturalness. Gail shook her head, amazed at her temerity. She rose slowly to her feet.

“All right,” Julia said, smiling suddenly, “‘we’re naked. Now what?”

“Now we can take it easy and enjoy the rest of the evening,” Gail replied. “We don’t have to do anything special. This is interesting enough, so far.”

“Well, if we’re going to actually hang around in our birthday suits, then I suppose I’d better make a fire,” Julia said.

“Fine,” Gail told her. “And I’ll make us some proper drinks and roll another joint.” She glanced at the stereo. “Jesus, I wish you had some music with a bit of beat to it. This is like having marshmallows poured in my ear.”

“You never criticized my taste in music before,” Julia said.

The two woman looked at one another wonderingly. Gail snorted, a huff of gruff merriment. “We haven’t even been to bed together yet.” She frowned. “Maybe sex does open the door to disrespect.”

“But there’s the radio,” Julia added quickly. “You might find a nighttime FM station with some rock.” Julia smiled. “Don’t worry about it,” she added. “Martin didn’t like my taste in music either, but he never had the balls to say so. I don’t mind if you lean on me a little bit. In fact, it feels good to have somebody really relating to me and reacting to me and not afraid to shake me up a little bit.”

“OK,” Gail said. She went over to the console, turned off the stereo and switched on the radio. She spun the dial to 102 .7 and at once a smooth, raucous guitar, backed by a throbbing base and sinuous drum, slid out of the speakers, changing the mood of the room. The place became darker, more vital, filled with nuances the way a wood is alive with sounds and sharp hidden eyes at night. Julia had turned to begin the makings of a fire, but when the music came on, she glanced over at Gail. Her friend was standing in front of the amplifier, her back to her. She was swaying slightly, doing a tiny dance to the sounds. Julia’s eyes were drawn to Gail’s ass, a tight, soft, vibrant organism that had sprung into life, and was signaling in a language of basic gesture and primitive meaning. Julia could feel the unmistakable urge to go across the room and put her hand on the dark inviting cleft that now shifted and spoke like the shadow of a stick on the sandy bottom of a shallow stream.

But Gail spun to one side and moved off into the kitchen, her voice trailing behind her. “Vodka tonic all right with you?” she called out.

“Fine,” Julia shouted, her own voice snapping her out of her reverie.

She bent down and built the basic structure of the fire carefully. Rolled up copies of the Times, strips of cardboard, thin splinters of wood. She lit it in four places and in seconds it was blazing easily. She put thicker pieces of wood on top, and when flames had begun to curl around their edges, laid on three thick logs. She scooted back, and sat with her shoulders against the couch, feeling the warmth of the fire begin to caress her skin. It was fairly obvious that she and Gail would make love. It had happened suddenly, without warning. Nothing in her life had prepared her for it. And yet there it was. She thought she could guess what it would be like, reasoning that one didn’t have to drink to have a notion of what drunkenness was. She was curious, a bit turned on. But this was already at a level once removed from Gail’s immediate presence. And some arcane voice inside her, one which rarely spoke because it had not been listened to since Julia was five or six years old, before she had had her sense of magic destroyed, now tried to whisper that what was about to happen was enough to rock the very foundations of civilization as it had been practiced for more than ten thousand years. Julia had no political consciousness as such, and women’s liberation was something she vaguely associated with articles in Cosmopolitan. In that sense, she was on a par with countless lesbians for whom the act of physical intimacy between women is a perfectly private affair. The radical middle, that group who understood that the issue is not having sex, but the freedom which having sex implies, would have smiled on Gail and Julia that night. Yet neither of the women had any inkling of the historical ramifications of what they were doing, that this night was both a product of and a movement in the growing awareness that the heterosexual bond, unqualified by homosexual love, and resulting in the rigid, terse, tense form known as the couple, was a relatively rare manifestation, and ought to occur only in those instances when it is consciously chosen by mature individuals who find it organically congenial to their needs, temperaments, and values. To have such a thing imposed ruthlessly upon an entire people is a kind of cultural fascism so profound that those who point it out are inevitably seen as some kind of crank. Among the Indian tribes on the continent, all forms of social erotic forms existed. The European wiped all that out and forced monogamy upon everyone, including such gentle rustics as the Mormons, thus crippling not only those whose inclinations might be toward other paths, but even the true monogamists themselves who had to bear the guilt born of association with the dictatorial decree.

For Julia, now, however, there was only the warmth of the flames, the insinuating insistence of the music that the pelvis must be moved, the mind must be shaken loose, the heart must expand. And in a few minutes there was Gail, beautiful, young, smiling with a universe of friendliness and warmth. Gail carrying a tray with two chilled glasses and their transparent bellyfuls of cheer, a tray with another marijuana cigarette with its ticket to realms of telepathy and sensual fulfillment.

Gail sat down. Julia watched her the way a cat looks at shadows. It was extraordinary to look at the hundred common gestures that a person makes, and to see them without the protective coloration of clothing. I really haven’t seen anyone in my whole life, Julia thought. I’ve just seen their clothing. She watched the slight jiggle of Gail’s breasts, the folds at the tops of her thighs as she bent over, and always, the hypnotic center, the living cunt.

They each picked up a glass. “Here’s to . . . what?” Gail said.

“To now,” Julia replied without thinking.

“And then,” Gail added.

Both women hovered around the edge of a smile and sipped at their drinks. The liquor did its job of instant loosening as the alcohol was absorbed into the bloodstream and made its way to the brain. Gail put her glass down, and lifted the joint up, her eyes questioning. Julia nodded, her expression that of a mischievous smile.

“Will we regret this in the morning?” Julia asked.

Gail lit the joint, inhaled, passed it to her friend. And once again the ritual was re-enacted, the formal decision to sail on a carpet of sensation into an other-wordly realm in which the concerns of chronological reality lost all substance. The solid world of the morning newspapers, of men in terrible machines killing other men, of a species run amok with its technological toys, of dreary routines in offices five days a week, of small pleasures, of absurd ambitions, of anxiety, of telephone calls from parents wondering why you haven’t been in touch. They would flee all that, even for a brief time, escape into their minds, find an infinitude of curlecues with which to distract themselves.

Gail took a lungful of smoke, leaned forward, put her lips on Julia’s open mouth, and exhaled, forcing the breath and grass into Julia’s body. It was done so deftly, so effortlessly, that the transfer had taken place before Julia realized that the movement was actually a kiss. Her chest exploded with heat, with the totally unfamiliar sensation of having someone else’s breath in her lungs. Her lips began to tingle almost at once. Gail’s eyes smiled into her own.

Julia took a toke, and then Gail, who repeated the mouth-to-mouth resusciation. But this time their mouths stayed together longer, their lips clung, and when they parted it was with deep sighs.

“I don’t know,” Gail said, replying to Julia’s question. “I won’t regret this. This is the most beautiful moment in my life. If I were a man I’d ask you to marry me.”

“I’m already married,” Julia said.

“And I’m engaged,” Gail added.

“I guess it’s hopeless, then,” Julia said.

The joint was finished.

“What about them?” Julia continued after Gail dropped the tiny roach into the ashtray. Her head was already beginning to swim. But it was with precisely that kind of disorientation that she wanted to talk about her situation, to know it from the point of view of unreasonable perspectives. “What about the men?”

“Martin’s your problem. As far as Eliot is concerned, I’m going to tell him that I know about you two. And I’m going to tell him about tonight. And I’m going to make him understand that my relationship with you won’t take second place to my relationship with him.”

“Will you marry him?”

“If we can keep out separate places,” Gail said with sudden conviction. “I like my apartment, I like my life. I don’t want to have to change who I am because I get married. And I want to be free to see you, to spend nights with you.” She glanced at Julia, a sudden flicker of fear in her eyes. “Unless I’m presuming too much. Unless this isn’t as important to you as it is to me. I can’t tell you what this means. But it’s like I’ve only been seeing out of one eye. And now I’ve taken one of my blinkers off. Do you understand? I’ve loved you for three years. And now you’re here, naked, lovely, and we’re free. Free! Do you think I would ever give that up? Would you?”

Julia shook her head slowly from side to side like a small child denying that it had done the naughty thing it was accused of. “No,” she drawled. “Anything or anyone that told me I wasn’t free to love you totally would have to be evil.”

“I’d like to marry Eliot,” Gail continued. “I would like his child. I would like to travel the world with him. I would like to pass the years knowing him. But not at the price of my liberty, my individuality.”

“Maybe we could do threesomes,” Julia said, and the minute she said it she put her hand over her mouth as though she had just belched. “Oh dear,” she said. “Did I say that? I usually don’t talk when I’m stoned. I can begin to see why. The words just bubbled up.”

“Well, maybe we could,” Gail replied. “Right now I feel like anything’s possible. What the hell. We’re free, aren’t we? The earth is our home, isn’t it? Nobody gets born a ruler over anybody else. Why the fuck shouldn’t we do whatever we want to? Who’s stopping us?” She had raised her voice, slipping into a kind of parlor oratory. She was voicing the question asked by every radical human being ever born, the question that cuts at the very heart of the senile dictator called civilization.

“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.

Julia slid her hands under Gail’s buttocks and pried the soft globes apart, slipping one finger into the already loosened and lubricated asshole. Gail let out a whimper and flexed her pelvis, impaling herself more deeply on the abrasive intruder. She spread her legs even more and let herself be had. Julia lost herself entirely. The only thought in her mind was, So this is what it’s like. This is why men are so hungry to lick us between the legs. The notion that she was eating a cunt left altogether after a while, drowned in the waves of taste and smell and constant motion. Gail’s cunt was capable of the most subtle and voluptuous expressions of her personality, and the organ was mute.

When Gail began to climax, Julia went mad. She had never been with or seen or heard another woman have an orgasm. In a way, what was happening seemed unreal, or hyper-real. She had the uncanny sense that it was she herself that was coming. The way Gail tensed her ass, the way her cunt hit a rhythm of thrusting which grew looser and faster. The sounds of abandonment, and the bringing up of her hands to caress her own nipples. The trembling in the thighs. The tautness in the belly.

Without being consciously aware of it, Julia began pumping her hips also, pushing her cunt into the fabric of the rug. From a third point in the room, it was clear that the two women were being drawn into one pulsation of excitement, Gail on her back grinding her wet pussy into Julia’s mouth, and Julia on her stomach thrusting her pubic bone into the floor. Julia held Gail’s ass and pushed her finger more and more deeply into the now clutching asshole. She licked and sucked and slobbered like a hungry animal.

Gail whipped her head from side to side, her cries of pleasure now loud and intense. She was very very close to climax. Julia dug into her cunt with her lips with even more fierce intensity and pushed Gail over the edge.

“Oh my God!” Gail yelled as she came, bucking, twisting, twitching, spurting secretions and urine into Julia’s wide sucking mouth. The tart taste of the lubrication that was oozing deep from Gail’s cunt and the sharp tang of piss that exploded uncontrollably from the burning hole right under the shrieking clitoris, sent Julia into a frenzy and she fucked the floor wildly until, seconds after Gail’s orgasm, she experienced her own, thrashing about on the rug with total abandon.

They lay still for a long time, waiting for their breath to return to normal, and when they had regained the borders of their egos, Gail pulled herself along the rug until she was turned a hundred and eighty degrees around.

“Now me,” she whispered, and slid her hands between Julia’s moist thighs, parting them, revealing the already dripping cunt. She brought her mouth up close to Julia’s juicy mound and licked the very edge of her cunt lips lightly. Julia stirred as though from a dream, feeling the warmth starting to spread between her legs. She opened her eyes and found that Gail’s cunt was still inches from her face.

“Oh,” she sighed, and the two women moved simultaneously, burying their faces in each other’s crotch, where they lost themselves for hours, driving one another to peak after peak of wild explosion, until they were exhausted, spent, fully satisfied, and reeking of the body’s most pungent smells. They finally crawled into bed where they wrapped their arms around one another and fell asleep kissing.

As Martin and Robert walked south on Chambers Street, they were met by a counterpoint of music styles that alternately blended and fought, producing a sine wave of cacophony and strange harmony. From a bar came the thudding intricacy of rock, while from wide windows of a loft directly across the street spilled the undulating cadences of an ancient chant. The contrast was so precise that Martin stopped to wonder at it.

“That’s the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club,” Robert said. “It’s owned by the guy who used to have Max’s Kansas City.”

“I’ve been there,” Martin said, as though he’d just learned that a man he used to play cards with was the Duke of Buckingham.

Robert arched one eyebrow. “Everybody’s been there,” he drawled. “Once it became a celebrity hangout, the slide downhill to long lines on the sidewalk with teenyboppers from New Jersey trying to get a glimpse of Mick Jagger was inevitable. So the owner sold out, lay low for a few years, and now opened this place. In the meantime he started two other places, two of the most popular restaurants and bars in the city. He’s a genius of bars. He makes bars the way Brancusi makes sculptures, trim, elegant, perfect.” He tilted his chin to the canopied entrance on the other side of the street. “It’s only been open three weeks and already the old crowd has started to hang out there. This used to be a deserted street after six o’clock at night, but now it’s buzzing with cabs, drunks, thrillseekers, and all the other scavengers that descend whenever the decadence gets thick.”

“You sound bitter,” Martin said.

“You might say that. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for three years. It was one of the finest places in the city. It’s a twenty minute walk to Wall Street, or to Chinatown, or to the Village. City Hall is just down the street, and the river is two blocks away. During the day there’s all the shopping and noise and marketplace liveliness you could want, and at night and on Sundays it was absolutely quiet, and safe. Then those goddamned towers opened up, the World Trade Center, Rockefeller’s pyramids. And that was the beginning of the end. The developers moved in and tore down lovely old buildings and built thirty-storey monstrosities. Bars began to flourish, and restaurants. Pretty soon we’ll begin to have robberies, and all the misery that goes with affluence and high profile. And for what? Just so a few scummy bastards can get rich.”

Martin had never seen the other man so agitated before, nor so angry. Robert spun around and continued to walk toward their destination, a building that looked as though it had seen its best days at the turn of the century. It looked abandoned, and had he been alone, Martin wouldn’t have even glanced at it, much less considered going inside. When they reached the front door, the war of the world was felt and heard most sharply. The sound of chanting fell from the windows above and cascaded down the stairway inside the front door. The rock music blasted directly from a large jukebox situated right behind the glass that separated bar from street. Martin could see the people inside. He got a fleeting impression of beards, glasses, cigarettes, women posturing and laughing, and a low swell of animal heat.

“I guess it’s a good place to go to pick up women,” Martin said as they entered the building.

For a moment, Robert didn’t know which place he was referring to, the bar or the loft. Then he spotted the confusion, stopped for a second, smiled, put his hand on Martin’s shoulder, and said, “Wherever you go, it’s the women who pick you up. Your only job is to keep from getting in the way.”

They climbed the stairs, David Bowie hooting at them as they went, his voice growing dimmer as the booming chant grew louder. Martin could now make out a drum, a stringed instrument of some kind, and snatches of the lyrics, which were not English.

“Hana hana mooloo jeebee, hana hana mooloo jeebee,” the song seemed to say.

To Martin, whose tastes in music were formed in the 1950’s, the foreign sounds made no less sense than the lyrics of most of the rock music that had erupted since the Beatles. He followed Robert up two flights of wooden stairs in the poorly lit hallway, halfway between curiosity and annoyance at himself. Like millions of Americans, he had read about gurus and meditation in newspapers and magazines, and he was excited to be finally seeing the thing firsthand. At the same time, part of him was still in the bar across the street. A cold beer in his hand and a hot woman on the hook seemed to offer all the enlightenment that any man might ever want.

Robert threw open the door of the loft. He stepped aside, put his arm around Martin’s shoulders, and eased him in.

For a moment, Martin couldn’t make out details. He was struck first by color. It seemed that orange predominated.

He didn’t know that there were so many shades of orange, from the screaming red end of the spectrum to the diffident yellow. He looked down on a carpet of orange shirts and robes. Everyone was sitting on the floor, all facing in one direction. The air was thick with incense. And the space was thick with the chant, the very atmosphere of the scene. People swayed, their eyes closed, clapped their hands, rocked their bodies gently from side to side, and sang the words over and over again. Martin glanced from one end of the loft to the other, a distance of nearly a hundred feet long by thirty feet wide. And nearly every square inch was filled.

There must be five hundred people here! Martin thought.

Robert took his arm by the elbow and led him inside toward what had to be the front of the loft, the place where everyone was facing. Martin balked inwardly at what he took to be a bit of impoliteness, but he trusted that Robert knew what he was doing. They went almost to the front wall and sat down no more than inches from a tiny wooden platform raised a few feet above the floor. It was covered with an orange rug, and held a cushion, vases with flowers, and a few artifacts and implements which were totally unfamiliar. The two men did not cause a ripple in the crowd; no one so much as glanced at them.

“He’ll be here shortly,” Robert whispered after they had settled themselves and merged into the mood of the place. Then he turned away, closed his eyes, and began to clap his hands and chant in unison with the others, his voice rising high and clear, adding a fresh input of energy to the common effort. His entrance stimulated a number of people around him and Martin could feel the chant growing in intensity and volume, spreading out from Robert’s chest. Martin felt the strategic embarrassment of not knowing how to behave. Joining in the song was clearly out of the question; he didn’t know the words nor the purpose in singing them; he couldn’t pretend to be in the spirit of the thing. On the other hand, he felt awkward and wondered whether he might be considered snobbish. He glanced around surreptitiously to see if anyone was watching him.

It was as though he were in an opium den. Everyone in the room, without exception, was wrapped in some private world, communicating to everyone else by means of a fixed ritual. It was a form of fascist anarchy whereby the individual could feel or think whatever he or she pleased so long as his or her behavior was absolutely uniform with everyone else’s. Martin couldn’t help but contrast it to the bar where there was a wider latitude of behavior but a more rigid focus in terms of interior life.

Unused to sitting cross-legged on the floor, Martin pushed back a foot or so until his back was against a wall. He now looked more openly around him, the fear of being the object of hostile curiosity having disappeared. The space was curiously bare. One corner held a kitchen, stove, refrigerator, sink, table and chairs, and shelves with dishes and foods. Nearby was a door which clearly led to the bathroom. At the very far opposite end, a sleeping loft had been built, with a staircase leading to it. Under it was a desk, chairs, small library. And that was all. Martin leaned his head against the wall, closed his eyes, and let himself be drawn into the monotonous rhythm of the chant. It was quite soothing, and his thoughts made little curlecues, like paper airplanes thrown off a cliff. He speculated on who lived there, and what all these people were looking for, and before he realized that he was falling asleep, he was asleep.

And then was awakened by a sound he had never in his life heard before. He was awakened by the thunder of silence.

Martin opened his eyes to find a different world from the one in which he had gone to sleep. The loft was still there, and the people were still there. But it seemed that someone had turned a great many lights on. The place was much brighter. And the people were absolutely still, sitting upright, spines erect, their hands in their laps. It was as though they had been a group of green recruits sloppily lurching across a field and then, by some miraculous transformation, instantaneously changed into crack troops, doing a precision march across an asphalt drill field.

Martin pushed himself away from the wall very slowly, almost afraid to stir. Robert was next to him, sitting cross-legged, his gaze distant. Martin followed the direction of his eyes to the small stage. It was no longer empty. Sitting there, wearing nothing but a tiny loincloth, waving a palm leaf fan in front of him, was a plump brown man of indeterminate age, smiling vaguely into space.

The first impression we receive always reveals the essence of the meaning a person is to have for us. We may have to work our way through the personality, the history, and all our projections, needs, and deeper perception to understand what it was we saw, but when we have reached through to the end of the entire string of egoic manifestations, the prize is nothing more than affirmation of what we’d known all along. When Martin first looked at Babba, the guru’s body was superimposed over a memory Martin had of watching Joe DiMaggio pivot and move toward left center field at precisely the instant he heard the crack of the bat against ball. Martin never forgot the spooky feeling of uncanny processes at work whereby a man could gauge exactly where a ball would land just from hearing how it sounded when it was hit with a piece of wood. That spontaneity, that accuracy, that power, that perfection of instinct, was the first thing that Martin saw in Babba, and it was that perception which rendered him acquiescent in what followed.

What he couldn’t know was that each person saw in Babba that quality which he or she most admired. Some saw a towering intellect, others a selfless saint, yet others a magician and healer. He was felt as father, leader, teacher. And when written about, he was called the very embodiment of God, the living consciousness of That from which everything arises, and which is indistinguishable from everything that exists. To all such appellations, Babba replied with a modest denial.

“I am the lowest of God’s creations,” was his favorite phrase. “I am no larger than an ant.” And would add, “If you wish to know God, you must become that small, so small that you go through the world unnoticed. Only then will you be free to see what is here, the splendor of God’s power.”

The silence was thick, alive, intelligent. Through it Martin could hear the faint strains of traffic from the street and the echoes of rock music from the bar. But even those familiar sounds were rendered exotic by the quality of silence in the room. It was as though the loft had been transported all at once to a mountaintop in India and the noise of the western world relegated to a quaint memory of a peculiar time.

All the attention was on Babba and it was impossible for Martin not to add his own curious gaze to that of the others. Babba sat, nonplussed and utterly at ease, as though he were alone by a river watching clouds turn crimson in the sunset. From a purely theatrical viewpoint alone, the performance was admirable and extraordinary. Martin had never seen anyone on a stage reflect such calm. People on stage either gave speeches or acted or sang or danced or projected a presence. But Babba did none of these. He merely sat, and the simple act was so powerful, so breathtaking in its simplicity, that it commanded attention.

Given that implacable stillness as a ground, the slightest hint of movement erupted with the violence of a lightning flash. So when Babba suddenly sharpened his glance and sent it sailing into the middle distance, it was as obvious as if he had hurled a bright red beachball into the crowd. The recipient of the glance stiffened as though stuck with a pin, flushed pink with embarrassment, and then smiled in confusion. It was a woman in her late thirties, with all the plainness of a dime-store saleslady on a Saturday night just before closing after a day of frenzied shoppers. She wore a white blouse and a black skirt, and carried her mousey hair behind her skull in a tight bun. She was totally unexceptional, and Martin would not have noticed her if a thousand like her had passed him marching in goosestep down Fifth Avenue. But now, for a few seconds, she was a radiant star, singled out. Her eyes shone with joy and a pixie spirit danced above her head. For a few seconds, she was beautiful.

Martin looked quickly back to Babba. The man had not so much as flexed a muscle. Whatever it was that had flowed out of him couldn’t be measured very easily in units of physical strength. Then, as Martin watched, Babba’s eyes shifted again and did some extraordinary dance, seeming to whirl around, each eyeball in an opposite direction, come together, vibrate like yoyos at the edge of their strings. The heads of the people in the audience turned from Babba to the woman and back again, and everyone laughed, as though an irresistibly funny story had just been told. The woman blushed even more, half-hid her face in her hands, and sank into the general laughter.

Martin was confused. He had understood the earlier bit of flattery, subtle as it was, but this escaped him. He turned to Robert for a clue, but his friend was caught up in the general mood of merriment. Martin waited for the hubbub to subside and then turned back to Babba to see what could happen next. But the guru had escaped to vapidity; his attention had turned inward, it seemed. A long time passed. Martin’s legs began to ache. As supple as he was, the unfamiliar posture was stretching muscles that were almost never used in this manner. He shifted his weight surreptitiously, and as he did Babba’s eyes turned and fixed him on the spot, catching him unaware and off balance. Worse, the eyes of everyone in the room followed the guru’s gaze to see what he was focusing on now. Martin suddenly found himself the object of attention of some five hundred people.

He half-turned to Robert for protection. He was experiencing the first wave of a very strong panic. He had never felt so exposed in his entire life. But Robert was only looking at him with a kind of rapt imbecilic smile, and in his newfound friend’s face he saw no recognition at all. It was a moment of madness.

Then, as quickly as it had come on, it stopped. Babba flicked his eyes elsewhere, and the concentrated energy of the room spun toward a different direction. Martin was seized by a spasm of intense relief, followed immediately by a dull throb of disappointment. For no matter how unpleasant the moment had been, it had also been fantastically explosive, a shock of impacted light, a shaft of iridescent vitality such as Martin only felt as the peak of his form atop the parallel bars when every system in his body was attuned to the complex adjustments necessary to maintain such a strenuous balance. Martin found himself straining forward slightly, as though by his posture he could lure Babba to turn back, to fix those magic eyes on him once more. Without any self-consciousness, without any word having been spoken, without a thought having crossed his mind, he had blended into the awareness of the hundreds who sat at Babba’s feet. If the Martin of a half hour earlier could have seen himself at that instant, he would have scoffed in disbelief; for this Martin had that same look of blind yearning which marked the follower of any charismatic figure. His eyes were a bit moist, his cheeks slightly pink, his mouth teasing the dawn of a smile.

Then, without warning, Babba turned his head again, like a searchlight sweeping a prison yard. He went past Martin, whose heart ducked a beat, and stopped with Robert, who took the attention with perfect ease by leaning his tall torso forward until he touched the floor with his forehead. He remained in that posture, prostrate, for several seconds, and then righted himself to smile at his guru.

“This is your friend?” Babba said in a voice that barely escaped the metallic twang which afflicts those wise men whose native language is one of the Dravidic dialects.

Robert nodded. “Yes,” he said.

Babba inclined his head and then glanced up at Martin. Once again Martin braced himself. The previous look had been humorous, gentle, but this time the guru’s eyes were hard, harsh, almost cruel.

“Why have you come?” he asked.

Martin’s first reaction was social outrage. After having done Robert the favor of accompanying him, he had not only been singled out for public notice but was now being asked a rude question in terribly blunt terms. Yet he could not escape answering; everyone was waiting for his reply. He simultaneously rationalized Babba’s crudity by ascribing to him a lack of knowledge of American customs and tried to formulate some answer that would be, somehow, satisfactory. But his brain had turned to porridge.

“Robert asked me,” he said finally, his voice almost cracking and not carrying very far.

Babba frowned and shook his head from side to side a dozen times, all the while keeping Martin’s eyes fixed with his.

Robert leaned over and whispered to Martin. “He wants to know the real reason. He wants to know what your problem is.”

“I have no problem,” Martin said in a low voice.

“What does he say?” Babba boomed.

“He says he has no problem,” Robert said in a loud voice.

“See here, you have no right . . . “ Martin started to say but his voice was drowned out by the laughter that erupted in the room. Babba was rocking from side to side, holding his ribs with his hands, his arms crossed in front of his chest, in perfect imitation of a chimpanzee that had caught its finger’s in a printing press.

“Old fart thinks he’s funny,” Martin said to himself, chagrined at being the object of ridicule. And yet, he reasoned, he deserved it. Stating that he had no problems was a colossal lie. It would be a lie for any human being to say such a thing. Even if one had no personal problems, which would be extremely rare, there are still the problems of pain and suffering and hunger in the world, the problem of death, the problem of ultimate meaning. And such planetary and cosmic concerns aside, Martin was neck deep in emotional difficulties. He didn’t give Babba any great credit for knowing that. From his position of power in the room and with his vast experience with people, it would be practically a reflex act to mock anyone who claimed he had no problems.

The laughter subsided, however, and Babba dropped his pantomime and resumed his posture of simple sitting. His eyes rested lightly on Martin. Martin’s gaze was caught. Not only by the guru’s glance but by the fact that everyone in the room was watching their confrontation.

“What does he want of me?” Martin said to himself.

Yet, even as he watched, he began to understand. Babba’s eyes ceased being two black dots in a white round pill set in a sculpture of flesh called a face. They underwent a series of astounding transformations which escalated so far beyond anything explainable by physiology or psychology that Martin was swept up into the changes and taken on the strangest ride of his life. As he sat and looked into Babba’s eyes he saw his father, then his mother. He saw himself as a child, riding his first tricycle in front of his house. He saw the expression of death on his grandmother’s features as she lay in her coffin. Then, the word seeing itself was no longer adequate, for he lost all sense of himself as a separate entity. It was not that he sat in a place and Babba in another place and some peculiar activity known as sight took place between them, but more as though they were the space itself, aware of itself, alive, pregnant with infinite possibility. Martin fell out of time and place altogether. There was only that awareness, that emptiness, that space, which began to glow, to vibrate. It was like climbing on a car in an amusement park funhouse and suddenly being plummeted into a world of dazzling surprises. But at the very point when it seemed that the experience would sprout its most bizarre leaves, everything was ripped away and Martin was back in the loft on Chambers Street, sitting on the floor, while Babba looked down at him from his platform, and a thousand eyes peeked in on the drama.

Now he was vulnerable, for the veneer of these dimensional illusion had been temporarily removed and Martin had accepted the alternate reality, presented so deftly and ingenuously by the guru. The weight of Babba’s question increased a hundredfold. Why had he come? Babba’s eyes had become drops of molten lava, rock subjected to such intense heat that it actually melted. The fierce fires of endless sorrow burned in Babba’s heart and turned the world to ashes. As Martin’s gaze was drawn more deeply into the guru’s mind, a lifetime of loneliness and sadness welled up inside him. Now he not only saw the facts of his past, his parents, his childhood, the death of loved ones, the disappointments, but he felt all the emotions that he had denied himself because little boys, when he was a little boy, were not supposed to cry.

Babba’s question swelled in scope until it encompassed the entire world. Martin knew he was being asked not only why he had come to the meeting, but why he had come into the world. From what mysterious source had he originated, and what was his purpose in being here. And the question was addressed not only to Martin, but to everyone in the room, everyone and everything in creation. Why was any of it here? And if there was a God to answer that question for everyone else, then how did God answer when He asked it of Himself?

All the people, all the trappings of the space, all that he had been up until the instant that Babba looked into his eyes, dropped away, and Martin was left with the sheer nakedness of the moment. And then, the most peculiar thing of all happened. Somehow, without his knowing how or when, it seemed that he was sitting on the platform looking down at himself. Only he had now become Babba. They had exchanged identities. And he saw that there was no difference between them, that one was the other, that the guarded and lauded thing called the self was just a momentary viewpoint. Martin began to laugh, only it was Babba laughing. He was caught in the confusion.

His ears popped, and he was back inside his ordinary awareness again. He was Martin Gordis, age thirty-one, a physical education instructor, recently separated from his wife, living in New York City. He was in a strange loft with several hundred people to see a man from India who Robert said had changed his life. This information was all very interesting to him, but whose body was that rocking back and forth on the floor?

He felt Robert’s hand on his arm. His friend’s eyes regarded him with warmth and gentle concern. He looked up at Babba. The guru had assumed yet a different mask, as though he had aged fifty years. He seemed to peer down from a mountain top. Martin wondered how he could ever have felt that the two of them were one thing, interchangeable parts of some unspeakable whole.

“There is sorrow,” Babba said.

Martin nodded, but already he was retreating inwardly. He felt he had exposed too much of his feelings, and wanted to cover himself up. Also, he was translating his withdrawal into a judgment on Babba.

Sure there’s sorrow, he thought, the hokiest gypsy fortune teller can tell you that.

“You are unhappy,” Babba went on. “Why have you come?”

There was a buzzing in the crowd. Robert was leaning close. “This is very unusual,” his friend was saying. “Babba almost never talks to people the first time they come. And even when he does, he never insists the way he’s doing now.”

Martin realized that he had dropped his head and was staring at the floor, refusing to look at the guru, and that Robert’s explanation was by way of telling him that he was being given an extraordinary and rare opportunity. How could he continue to behave like a sulky child? And yet he did not want to give anything to Babba. He did not trust the man. His feeling was so strong that it surprised him, for Babba had not really done anything, and on what basis could Martin form a judgment of trust or distrust?

Slowly, Martin raised his eyes. Babba had not removed his gaze. Now he looked like a standard picture of a wise man. The white robes, the white hair, the cross-legged posture, the piercing glance, the air of composure. Martin took a deep breath and straightened his back. He looked back at Babba, waiting for another round of hallucinatory pyrotechnics to be shot off. But Babba became very still, and his image did not flicker as much as a candle flame in a windless room.

Then, in a clear, full, distinct voice, he said, “Divorce is death.”

The words hit Martin like a fist across the temple. The calculating portion of the brain advanced and rejected a dozen hypotheses about what the words meant, all within a fraction of a second. The successful interpretation, the one that registered, manifested in the form of behavior, however, not thought. Martin turned to Robert and, without hesitation, said, “You told him about my marriage problems.”

But Robert was wide-eyed before Martin even spoke, and even as he spoke Martin knew that the other man was innocent of the charge. There was no way he could have reached Babba with information he’d only received that evening. The only alternative was that the guru had taken a wild shot, and scored a lucky hit. But the look in Babba’s eyes discounted that theory also. Somehow, Martin realized, Babba knew everything that was going on inside him.

Babba turned his head and looked out over the audience of devotees and the curious. And when he spoke, it was to everyone in the room. “Marriage is the most difficult yoga for a man and a woman in this age. Once, when it was clear what it is to be human, then marriage was very simple. Now we no longer know what it is to be human, so we cannot understand why we marry. Marriage does not seem necessary. Even to have children, we don’t need marriage. And we can have more fun if we are single.” The last sentence was delivered with that delicate intimation of a pause which the professional comedian uses to trip his listeners into laughter. It was successful. People laughed.

“Marriage now is like a prison. Husband and wife keep each other in their seats. They watch each other like thieves. Sometimes marriage is like a party. Husband and wife have sex with other husbands and wives. The best marriage now is like a school. It is a place to learn. It is a yoga. But this is still not the way it was.”

He paused and gazed out into space. His face began to glow, and his eyes shone, like a child watching a Disney film. Babba gazed into the Golden Age, the first period after the creation, and his heart was full with the joy of what he saw. The vision almost shimmered above the heads of those sitting in front of him. Martin saw it too. It wasn’t anything specific, not a picture. What he saw was more of a feeling, a time when he and Julia had lain in each other’s arms and faced the inevitability of each other’s death. Martin remembered the impact of the realization that one day he would exist in the world without her, or she without him. And it was as impossible to grasp as the fact of his own extinction. They had talked about it, and too overwhelmed with the brute reality of the truth that thundered in their souls, they had begun to joke about how they would end, and made a pact that if either of them were about to die, the two of them would jump off a cliff together, like lovers in the old Japanese romances.

“But they actually did that,” Julia had said. “I mean, it’s a historical fact. Lovers who weren’t allowed to marry sometimes committed suicide together to make their love eternal.”

“Would you really do that with me?” Martin had asked.

“Would you? With me?” she replied.

And for a while they had not spoken, staring into space, trying to imagine what it would be like to grasp one another in a final embrace and then leap from a cliff . . . the dizzying rapturous fall through space, the last kiss, the ultimate look into one another’s eyes, and then the plunge into the arms of death, the consummate union of their love.

Each person in the room looked into the space where Babba’s eyes were drawing a vision out of the ether, and each saw a different image, a different feeling, a different memory. And yet, all were united through him.

Babba suddenly withdrew his gaze from the air and whirled back to Martin who was caught totally unprepared for the lances of insight that shot into his mind. He was still tasting that moment with Julia when Babba leapt into his soul with both feet.

“Julia,” Babba said.

Martin gasped.

“It is dark,” Babba said. “You cannot see her. She cannot see you.”

Martin’s senses jammed. The floor tilted under him.

“There is sorrow,” Babba said, repeating his earlier judgment. “There is much sorrow. You cannot see her. She cannot see you.”

Martin heard the sound of sobbing. He felt tears on cheeks and hands. He was in touch with a deep ache going from throat to chest. And it took several minutes before he realized that all that was happening to him, and that it was all part of a single action.

I’m crying, he thought.

He had slid to the floor and was now curled up on his side, his face buried in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably. He wept from his belly to his brain. The tears of a lifetime were waiting to be shed, the sadness of a world waiting to be recognized. All the transiencies of his life swept before him, the lovely things doomed to perish. His parents, his friends, himself at all the stages of his growth. And finally, Julia. Julia, who had become a burr of anger, a wall of resistance, a symbol of continual discomfort. He understood how long it had been since he had even seen her, known the texture, the grain and smell and cut of her. She had become some grim thing on the periphery of his sensations, an annoyance whose name he knew. And through that sudden realization, there gushed the tenderness of the early days, the pure union of the first years. Memories like galaxies exploded in his mind. Words, fragments of glances, touches, silent subtle agreements, a shared destiny.

And it was lost, lost as fully as though she were dead. She had died to him, and he had not been there to leap off the cliff with her. Rather, he had helped push her from the precipice, as she had tried to push him. Babba’s words burned in his heart, and each time it seemed he would stop weeping, a new layer of sorrow was uncovered, and he started to sob again.

Martin cried for almost a quarter of an hour. After the first few minutes Babba looked away, as did all the others in the room. He began to chant, a low, liquid sound, and it was taken up by the crowd. Within seconds, Martin’s sounds were drowned in a great waterfall of voices, a mighty AUM which swelled and grew and lifted every thought and feeling and identity of all those under its sway, lifted them all to a space in which the eternal and infinite and ever-present source and beginning of all manifest creation flexed its unfathomable power to cause the countless universes to dance.

That single sound, the distillation of all sound, held by ancient sages to be the primal sound of creation, existing before light, before energy, before matter, before life, moved with the force of elemental consciousness to lift the people in the loft beyond all concerns of daily details, of earthly bother, of solar influence, and even of galactic programs. Sitting erect, eyes closed, Babba and his followers soared through the empyrean with all the ease and sweet grace of gulls skimming over water. The A began as a murmur in the belly and progressed to a rumble in the chest; the U opened the throat, the M vibrated through the skull, combing the tangled neuron patterns of the brain.

Martin knew none of this. All he could feel was the dam bursting in his heart. For the first time in his adult life he could wail and sob and cry his anguish to the skies, bury his tears in the earth. The wall of sound which towered over him allowed him to lose all self-consciousness, and absorbed even his most powerful cries.

Gradually, he wound down. His moans were interspersed with seconds of silence during which he coughed and tried to catch his breath. After a while, even the constriction in his diaphragm let go, and he gulped air down into his belly, that flat, muscled plane which had been tucked in and plastered over with exercise since he was fifteen years old and formed a military concept of posture. Finally, he was at rest, curled up on his side in the fetal position, both hands over his face, fingers in his mouth, his nose running, his eyes red, sighing.

Who am I? was the first formed thought in his mind.

As the swelling and sediment subside in a river which has been engorged by melting snow, returning to its prior contours and rates of flow, so Martin’s ego, shattered and blown out of all recognizable proportion, started to crystallize once more. Yet some other force was awake in him, that edge of panic, perhaps of greed or insecurity, that thing called evil or devil or ignorance, which cannot allow things to take their course; that curse of human beings who are aware of their own death and build civilizations as monuments to fear. It would not let him lie there, simply, like a child. Had that been possible, he would have emerged refreshed, reborn as it were, cleansed of tensions and alive to areas that had long been anesthetized. But the jagged rim of anxiety cut at him as a can improperly opened will snag the unwary finger, opening flesh and bringing blood.

What am I doing here? was Martin’s second coherent thought.

He opened his eyes.

Oh, my God. What will they think of me? completed the catalogue of his conditioned attitudes.

Babba was looking down at him. The guru had undergone yet another transformation, it seemed. Now he was like Martin’s grandmother as he remembered her. An old woman with a wrinkled face, lips that trembled slightly just before she began to speak, and fingers that knew how to grab him in just those spots which were ticklish or tender. His central memories of her were fat lemon gumdrops she gave him when she was pleased, and the brutally intimate pinches and squeezes she administered when she wasn’t.

Martin shifted his gaze. Every other person in the room that he could see was also looking at him. Robert was gazing at him too, his expression like that of a parent whose child has said its first word. Martin slowly pulled himself erect. He reached into his pocket and took out his handkerchief. Sheepishly, he blew his nose. The action produced a loud, wet honk, like a goose with a head cold nagging its mate. The sound made a number of people laugh, and Martin glanced out over the white pyramid formed by his fingers inside the cloth grasping his nose. At once he realized how silly he looked, and the apprehension in his chest loosened, and he found himself smiling inside the tiny tent.

He wiped his eyes, folded his legs under him, put his handkerchief away, and waited to see what would happen next. He was already piecing together the event as rapidly as his reforming sense of identity would allow. The pure experience, already and instantly a memory, began to fade in intensity and focus, and the machinery of analysis started to grind out interpretations. These proceeded along the lines of a reverse ontology, beginning with Martin’s highest level of comprehension and sliding down the scale from there. Having no education or inclination to allow a notion of the Absolute, or even the cosmic, Martin’s first awareness was psychological. He understood that he had suppressed a good deal of feeling in relation to his breakup with Julia, and that the guru’s extraordinary and unexpected line about divorce and death had unplugged a dam of emotion. He was even able to link that with the lifelong repression he had been suffering as a result of his childhood experience, given the culture he was raised in. But he did not, at that moment, grasp the wider implications, the notion that this was a lesson in the history of a people, or a process in group dynamics. He had no way of seeing just then that his tears had been everyone’s tears, that he had cried for all the people in the room. It would be a long long time before Martin would be able to disentangle himself from the notion that his limited self, his idiosyncratic viewpoint, was utterly transparent, transient and unimportant; that it was merely a reflection of the true Self from which all manifestations arise and to which all manifestations return.

Babba knew this about Martin. So did Robert. And yet, a man had to start somewhere. And Martin had at least felt something other than his habitual gesture, his unconscious awareness of the world as a vast theatre built for no other reason than to hold his personal drama. Paradoxically, however, as he returned from that liberating experience, his first reaction was to re-affirm his basic attitude, hyping it with the energy derived from his momentary and fragmentary liberation.

From Babba’s eyes, the incident was unremarkable, as were all phenomena in the created universe. Babba had attained a permanent state of consciousness, a state generally called “enlightenment” in America, but for which each culture has a name. God realization, being at-one with the Tao, bhava samadhi, satori, maturity, and so forth. He had been raised in a sanctimonious household, his father a minor priest in a local temple dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey god, his mother aggressively self-effacing in her effort to project a more abject humility than all the other wives of all the other minor priests in the area. At age eight, he suddenly saw through the stultifying hypocrisy of his parents, a feat shared by most children who are not absolute cretins. But with his insight he had felt a rare compassion. That is, he not only saw the stupidity of his parents, but he felt the sorrow against which their rigidity was a defense. He began to weep, and cried continuously for seventeen days. He lost thirty pounds and came close to dying. But in a land so riddled with religiosity, the event was not brought to the attention of a doctor, but to that of a holy man who had retired to a cave fifteen miles outside the village. The holy man, not stirring from his seat, had simply said, “Throw him into the river and then bring him here.”

When Babba, then known by his given name of Rammurti, was flung into the water of the river, he began to splutter, thrash about, and drown, and he had to be pulled out by two men who dove in from the shore. The act, however, did accomplish one thing: the boy was no longer crying. The hermit told the parents that the child was obviously marked for special spiritual development, and told them to leave him in the cave. They would not have dreamed of protesting.

Babba then underwent a fairly standard training, although bizarre by the standards of human convention. He once went five years without seeing another human being besides the hermit. For two years he had to pluck all the hair out of his beard one strand at a time to teach him disregard for pain. At one point he lived on nothing but water and sunlight for three months. The hermit eventually sent him on to another teacher, and this continued until he was thirty, at which point, sitting with his current master, the entire complex of tensions and attitudes and habits which define the human being dissolved all at once, and he became himself truly. There was no longer a platform or vantage point from which he observed himself or the world. He had lost all sense of identification with specific manifestations of pure, unformed consciousness, and so was able to watch the manifest universes rise and fall with as much concern as he watched the rising and falling of his own breath. He was no longer in the world, nor was he out of the world. He was the world itself.

He and his master exchanged a silent blink of understanding, and Rammurti walked out of the temple and into the forest. He wandered for five years, carrying nothing but the blanket on his back and an eating bowl. He walked more than thirty thousand miles barefoot, begging his way from village to village. When he arrived at the edge of a village, he would simply sit under a tree, and within hours his presence would be felt and by that night most of the people of the village would be sitting before him. He would speak, or sit silently; sometimes he healed or gave practical advice on the affairs of life. And then one night he would slip away, leaving a legend behind, and perhaps a small shrine that the villagers would build to mark the spot where he had been. Finally, he just drifted off into the woods and stayed there for more than twenty years, totally naked, simply one more animal on the face of the earth. He had attained ultimate simplicity.

One day he was found by a group of government engineers surveying that part of the jungle. He was sitting on a tree limb. Surrounding him were a group of monkeys. Some of the people in that party say that Babba was speaking in grunts and gestures to the monkeys and that they all seemed to be laughing and having a good time. The men were startled, but the power of four thousand years of tradition wiped out the thin veneer of westernized technological prejudice which had passed for education in the British universities they had attended, and they stopped to acknowledge that a rare being was sitting before them, naked, bearded to his belly, talking to monkeys.

As might be expected, word got out, and before long people were making pilgrimages to that spot in the forest, and shortly after that Rammurti was prevailed upon to return to the world of people to give suffering civilization the benefit of his wisdom. Only those so steeped in the darkness of their tunnel vision that they can’t see beyond the propaganda of progress will fail to understand what a sacrifice the man made in agreeing to leave the forest. Later on, when he had attained a following of tens of thousands in India, and twice as many in a dozen countries around the world, when he was accused of being on a large ego trip, only those who could see the man’s soul and knew his history realized what a petty prize this adulation was in relation to what he had to give up: that absolute liberty, that soaring solitude, that mute oneness with unstructured life, that approximation to God.

When he returned to the world of manufactured things, he was given the name Babba by his first devotees. For him, from the first, everything he saw once he left the forest was some kind of absurd drama. He was amused by airplanes and television sets. He became addicted to cigarettes. He read a newspaper once, then rubbed it against his buttocks, saying “Toilet paper.” He laughed a lot, and no one ever quite understood precisely why, although many rationalizations were given. The fact of the matter was that Babba had found vastly more intelligent, humorous, gentle and wise creatures amidst the bands of monkeys he had lived with than he ever found among the monkeys of the cities who wore clothing and spoke words and lived lives of such tortured tension and inflated self-importance that he could not believe they were of the same branch of animal life.

So when Martin appeared, his defenses bristling with the obviousness of porcupine quills, and then collapsed into racking sobs. Babba was unimpressed. At the same time, he felt empathy with the condition, enough so that he moved the roomful of people into the rather theatrical chanting, something which had value merely as a soothing device, but which overemotional devotees tended to mistake for some form of occult teaching. Reality, plain and unadorned, was the heart of Babba’s truth, and as all the scriptures have pointed out, there is no way to communicate it. Babba’s techniques, tricks, talks all served but one purpose: to keep people around him long enough for them to catch on for themselves, to use him as a fixed point against which to view all the changes of state they passed through in their lives until they learn that enlightenment is little more than a posture, an attitude, a direction.

“You feel better?” Babba asked.

Martin nodded, and settled himself more comfortably. He had almost regained his former composure, that is to say, the subliminal guardedness which constituted his moment-to-moment presence in the world. With his psychological clothes back on, he was now ready to become discursive, to talk about what had happened, to discuss his thoughts. The massive attention of all the people in the room, at first a threat, was now delight. Martin was beginning to feel the first rushes of what it is like to be a star.

Unfortunately, he was only the moon; Babba was the source of light. And upon receiving Martin’s nod indicating that he was all right, Babba smiled, then turned his head, paused a fraction of a second, and then cast his gaze on someone else in the room, a pretty woman who looked to be in her early twenties, with very large breasts unhampered by a brassiere, the nipples of which poked with soft insolence through the thin cloth of her blouse. Babba made some kind of facial expression Martin couldn’t see, but most of the others laughed, and the woman blushed and closed her eyes in seductive withdrawal.

Martin blinked several times, rapidly, as though clearing his head from a blow on the chin. All at once, he was a nonentity, just another body in the crowd. The emotions that coursed through him were shifting too rapidly for him to identify. Anger at being ditched like a high school girl on a blind date; shame at being exposed; jealousy that the guru’s attention was going elsewhere. These feelings mixed, boiled, and gave rise to judgments. Babba was a fickle fraud, a cheap showman taking cheap shots; the meeting had all the spiritual value of a nightclub in the Catskills; Babba cared only for his own aggrandizement, he had no true concern for individuals. He might have dug himself more deeply into a fit of chagrin, except that Robert, sitting next to him, put a hand on his shoulder.

“I know what you’re thinking and feeling,” Robert said. “But try not to let any of it scar you. We can talk about it later.”

Martin glanced up and was about to look away except that Robert held his gaze. The tall yoga instructor wouldn’t let Martin look away until he had acknowledged with a slight lowering of his eyelids that the message had been received at the depth at which it was sent.

The rest of the evening was a small torture for Martin. There was some more of Babba’s horsing around with people, and then a long shaggy soul story about a fish looking for water, and a disconnected ramble among reminiscences, references to Vedic texts, and homely homilies. When Babba finished talking, a bony woman in her late fifties stood up clutching a piece of paper and read off a number of announcements having to do with various functions concerning Babba’s organization, The Twilight Stallion Confirmation. And when she sat down, someone struck a gong and the group launched into a half hour of chanting, during which Babba sneaked away.

Martin was aghast. His legs were on fire. His eyes burned and he had trouble staying awake. But he was determined to stick it through to the end. But when everyone was singing the monotonous tune with its repetitious words, their eyes closed and their attention elsewhere, and Babba just sort of backed away from the edge of the platform and seemed to fade into the darkness behind the screen, Martin became furious. Still, he gritted his teeth, clenched his hands into fists, and suffered it through.

Finally, the chanting wound down, the room fell into a quaking silence, there was a moment’s pause, and then people began to gather themselves to leave. Martin almost sobbed out loud with relief. He tried to stand up but his right leg was completely asleep, so much so that it did not even tingle. It was like a dead fish, a piece of soft rubber. He rose up on his left leg, which did tingle, to the point of almost debilitating pain.

“My oh my,” he said to himself, “that’s going to hurt when it starts to wake up.” And slapped the right leg once, experimentally. No sensation at all.

He felt a hand slip under his right arm and grab his armpit. He turned. It was Robert. He was smiling, goofy, loose. But his arm was like a steel bar.

“I thought you were in shape,” Robert said.

“I am,” Martin huffed.

They made their way through the thinning crowd to the section of the loft that was used as a kitchen. Martin reached a chair just as his right leg began to twitch with the first rushes of painful sensation. He sat down heavily and began kneading the thigh of the afflicted leg. Robert stood nearby, talking to the woman whose place it was. The two of them walked over.

“I hope you’re all right,” the woman said.

“Oh, no damage,” Martin replied. His professional pride was stung.

The woman put a hand on his shoulder. “I do hope you’ll come to see Babba again. It was very unusual for him to single you out on your first visit. And what you went through was very beautiful, perhaps painful, but something which will begin to work in you and change your life. That’s the way it is with Babba. When he touches us, no matter how well we think we understand what’s happening, the truth of the experiences keeps unfolding.”

Martin’s leg was now a bottle of angry buzzing mosquitoes, each biting with silent fury. He wanted to give it his entire attention, to nurse the limb back to normality, but male vanity was stronger than organic pain. He stood up and smiled.

“I certainly never had anything like that happen to me in my life before,” he said. He tried to strike a note somewhere between honesty and graciousness. The woman was a plump, pleasant person in her early forties, attractive enough to sleep with but not so much so that one would automatically consider it. “I really don’t know what to make of all this. Perhaps I’ll be back, but the whole thing is very strange to me.”

“I don’t think there’s a person here who didn’t feel that at first.” She began to detail her own experiences, but caught a cautionary glance from Robert, and understood that it would be best to leave the newcomer to him. She waved a hand in front of her and gushed, “Well, you must excuse me. The one thing I don’t want to do is sound like a used consciousness salesman.” She smiled again, an expression so warm and pervasive that Martin was taken in completely. “I do hope well see you again,” she repeated, and turned to make her way to the far end of the loft where Babba was sitting on a rug, some eight or ten people around him.

“Ready?” Robert said. ttWhat’s going on back there?” Martin whispered.

“A business meeting. Making plans for Babba’s stay in the country this summer. He’s going up to a place near Grossinger’s.”

Martin’s eyes opened wide. Robert laughed. “I know,” he said. “On one level it’s just like a new wave in the Catskills. The old Jewish stand-up comedians are being replaced by Hindu sit-down cosmologists.”

The two men went out of the loft, down the stairs and into the street. The culture shock was like getting off a plane that had just arrived from Tibet. Cars thudded past. People slid by, angular, silent, guarded. The air was two-thirds exhaust and industrial waste. The bar across the street was even more crowded than it had been. Rock still crashed through the glass onto the sidewalks and shouted its raucous affirmation up to the rooftops of the converted factory buildings that were fast becoming a hive of busy artists.

“What’s your mood?” Robert asked.

“This may sound blasphemous, but I’d love a beer.”

“Nothing wrong with a beer. Want to try across the street?”

“Do you?”

“Sure. It’ll make an interesting contrast.”

They crossed the street and walked up to the double doors. Up close, the bar looked like a murky goldfish bowl, the cigarette smoke turning the air gray, the people, slightly drunk, moving with the spasmodic lassitude of underwater creatures.

They went inside. The bar stretched thirty feet down the left side of the narrow room. The opposite wall was bare except for a long counter, belly-button high. Not an inch of wood showed along either space. Men and women in about equal numbers occupied every available stool, stood in front of every available inch of counter and bar. Four bartenders moved incessantly, supplying customers directly, while a fifth filled orders for a stream of waitresses who serviced the back room, a barnlike space five times the size of the bar proper, with tables, booths, and a small space for dancing.

Robert and Martin walked several feet into the space and halted, letting it wash over them. A dozen women shifted their eyes and ranked the two men with erotically computerized glances, checking hair, clothing, mouth, crotch bulge, height, and general body attitude. Most of them, with uncanny instinct, dismissed Robert as a homosexual. For several of them, however, that offered more intriguing possibilities than were available with most of the men in the bar, swaggering types too inhibited to swagger, leering from their one-dimensional fantasy plots. A homosexual, at least, was more likely to produce amusing conversation, and those who were prone to fucking women usually did it very well indeed. Martin presented a more complex problem to those probing eyes. He was physically superb, a veritable bull, a classic stud. But the cut of his pants, the style of his hair, and the opacity of his stare indicated a certain lack of nuance or subtlety of understanding. He was the sort of man one would want to marry. He would work hard, sincerely do his best to please, and keep the old vagina properly pounded. The difficulty would be the absolute necessity for having an affair, almost certainly with some rotter, an artist with dirty dishes in his sink, brilliant canvases on his wall, crumbs in his sheets, women constantly ringing his phone, and a pound of grass in a cookie jar on his bookshelf. The women at the bar looked at Martin and by and large decided that they couldn’t stand the guilt.

The entire weigh-in took place in less than five seconds, during which time the two men tacitly agreed to move on to the back room.

“Dinner?” asked a short Oriental girl with a ponytail down past her waist. She was dressed in the waitresses’ uniform, a short black skirt and halter with a white blouse.

“How about coffee and dessert?” Robert asked.

The girl glanced professionally about the room, gauging the number of empty tables with her estimate of how crowded they would be that night, balancing the actuality of a small order against the probability of a full dinner, and decided that they could be seated. That art of judgment had been taught to her by the owner of the place. His legendary successes in the bars and restaurants he’d already opened were based in part on the fact that the help had to be smart as well as good-looking.

They sat at a small round table and ordered coffee and pie with ice cream. For a few minutes they didn’t speak, simply letting themselves become accustomed to the ambience, both more quiet and less intense than in the front room. The people here were mostly in groups of two or four, couples who had traded in the hungry excitement of the jungle for the well-fed regularity of the farm. It was not, however, that the current of erotic truth became nonexistent, but that it was insulated, not so naked. After all, when one is alone, the expressions one wears when assessing a strange piece of meat are of one’s own concern only; but if there is a mate or date nearby, it is necessary to become guarded, discreet, sophisticated.

“So. How do you feel?”

Martin pulled his attention back from its global reconnaissance and directed it toward Robert.

“I don’t know. I’d like to report some drastic change as a result of what happened. But I don’t really feel any different at all.”

“Don’t you find that a bit . . . unusual?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when people go through that sort of experience, they usually go on and on about their insights and how they understand it all now and so forth. You may not have been into any of the current crop of salvation therapies.”

“You mean like Primal Scream?”

“Primal Scream, Gestalt, Rolfing, bioenergetics, the whole neo-Esalen grab-bag of fundamentalist psychology. There you get to yell and scream, or to sound off, or to lie on a mattress and curse your parents, and afterwards you and the therapist congratulate one another on the breakthrough and chalk up your insights on the wall, like racking up points in a game of billiards. But they all miss the boat, because they still think that experience is worth something. They operate on the premise that if you have enough experiences, some kind of cumulative effect will take place and one day you’ll have somehow learned something. What’s worse, they begin to get competitive about their experiences, creating a kind of World Series of breakthroughs. And it becomes just another kind of drug.”

“I can see that,” Martin said. “I’ve never been involved in any of that, but I’ve always had the suspicion that it was a fancy kind of masturbation.”

“It is, and it is necessary for a lot of us because you do have to be able to masturbate without guilt before you can learn how to fuck or make love.”

“How is Babba different?”

“Because he is pure consciousness, he never discriminates among different types of experience. And so those who stay with him gradually learn how to approach life in the same way. He never says ‘do this’ or ‘don’t do that,’ but just by being in his presence, one learns how to live. It’s like sitting next to a stove on a cold day. The stove just gives off heat. You sit next to it and you get warm. It’s very simple. Well, Babba gives off consciousness. All the time. It isn’t something he does, it’s something he is. So when you go to him, no matter whether you’re in a good mood or bad, whether you think you’re king of the world or a worthless piece of shit, he looks at you in precisely the same way. Because he doesn’t get trapped in forms or different states. He remains in that one place, that pure consciousness, that eternal energy. So when you went through your heavy emotional changes, nobody there identified with you. Nobody said ‘oh poor you,’ or ‘what a marvelous breakthrough.’ We all understood that it was a very powerful, personal experience, but we also all understood that it was just another manifestation of God, nothing to get all wrought up over.”

The waitress came by with a round wooden plate. She put down the coffee, the pie and ice cream, forks, spoons, napkins. She took a breath and stepped back from the table, checked it out to see that everything was there and in place, waited until one of the men looked up and nodded his affirmation, and then turned to her next table. She had a twenty-minute break coming up in seven minutes and she was almost frantic to take her shoes off, have her own coffee, and smoke a cigarette. After that she had three more hours, and then home where her husband would be up late, studying. A thick black curtain closed over her heart momentarily and her mind lit up with a brilliant image in which she took her Friday paycheck and tips and got on a Greyhound Bus headed for Key West where she would get a room and a job and live a life in which she wasn’t responsible to someone else every minute of the day, where she could stay out all night or spend weekends at the beach and not have to report in or explain. But the image passed. She was two weeks late on her period. She would probably have a baby. And that took care of the next twenty years. Her parents would be pleased, his parents would be pleased, he would be pleased, and she would smile, forget that she had any identity outside of the net of family and friends, and she would be pleased. Table fourteen needed something. A man was sticking his hand in the air like a small child in class asking the teacher if he might leave the room.

“I must say that I surprised myself,” Martin replied after they had put sugar and milk into their coffee and had begun to eat and drink. “I would never have believed I could do something like that, much less do it in public. And then to be so blasé about it afterwards.” He paused, fork in the air. “It’s strange. I’m impressed, and yet I don’t feel impressed.”

“Babba says it’s the difference between drinking water and drinking soda when you’re thirsty. Both will quench your thirst, but the soda will leave a residue in your mouth, which will make you crave more. Truth is like water. It just does the job. And you hardly even notice it.”

“I was really angry with him afterwards,” Martin went on. “For just dropping me like that. I’m afraid I had a few unkind thoughts about him. And probably still do.”

“He’s been called more names than you can imagine. There are times when I’ve been so furious at him I could have hit him with a bat. Once a man tried to shoot him. But when these things happen, you just take a breath and look at what’s really happening. That man isn’t doing anything. He hasn’t asked you to sit with him. You go out of your own free will. And when there, he simply sits and talks. He doesn’t move around very much or do very much of anything. So when you get murderously angry, you ask yourself ‘where is this coming from?’ It’s not from him, so it must be from inside you. And then you realize once more what a guru is. He’s someone who lives continually in a state of consciousness that we can only glimpse. In relationship to him, we find out our own quirks and stupidities and distorted emotions.”

Robert leaned back in his chair, raised his arms over his head, and stretched voluptuously. His spine cracked in several places. He brought his arms back down, leaned forward, and looked into Martin’s eyes.

“So. It’s been quite a night, hasn’t it?”

Martin was made slightly uncomfortable by Robert’s gaze, but for the first time in his life he was aware of the discomfort, and he forced himself to look back, sharing a look of warmth and intimacy with a man.

This is a change, he thought.

“You know,” he said out loud, “when we left the loft I was sure I never wanted to see him again. But now I feel very much that I want to.”

“Your face and eyes are so much softer,” Robert said. For a second he had let himself speak freely, as he would to another gay man, letting his feelings inform his words, without the constant subliminal habitual defense that men assume in the world of daily combat. He was somewhat shocked that he could let himself be that loose with someone who practically personified male rigidity. Martin blinked. It was something that would have made him uncomfortable even if expressed by a woman. But to hear a man tell him that, with such gentleness of voice and ease of expression, ought to have sent him scrambling back inside his cage of reaction.

Instead, he simply smiled. “Thank you,” he heard himself say, and was surprised to feel his impulse to reach out and take Robert’s hand, not to shake it in some stiff, formal fashion, but just to hold it, to feel its warmth, its texture, its wondrous humanity.