“Of course,” I said. “Not now.”

We drank, we smoked, eventually we found ourselves fornicating again — it was my defense against her yearning to convert me — and this time she must have had her tenets less firmly to the fore of her consciousness, for our interchange was less of a copulation, more a making of love. Toward dawn Sundara and Friedman appeared, she looking sleek and glorious, he bony and drained and even a bit dazed. She kissed me across a gulf of twelve meters, a pucker of air: Hello, love, hello, I love you most of all. I went to her and she pressed tight against me and I nibbled her earlobe and said, “Have fun?” She nodded dreamily. Friedman must have his skills, too, not all of them financial. “Did he talk Transit to you?” I wanted to know. Sundara shook her head. Friedman wasn’t into Transit yet, she murmured, though Catalina had been working on him.

“She’s working on me, too,” I said.

Friedman was slumped on the couch, glassy-eyed, staring dully at the sunrise over Brooklyn. Sundara, steeped in classical Hindu erotology, was a heavy trip for any man.

—when a woman clasps her lover as closely as a serpent twines around a tree, and pulls his head towards her waiting lips, if she then kisses him making a light hissing sound “soutt soutt” and looks at him long and tenderly — her pupils dilated with desire — this posture is known as the Clasp of the Serpent—

“Anyone for breakfast?” I asked.

Catalina smiled obliquely. Sundara merely inclined her head. Friedman looked unenthusiastic. “Later,” he said, voice barely rising above a whisper. A burned-out husk of a man.

—when a woman places one foot on the foot of her lover, and the other around his thigh, when she puts one arm around his neck and the other around his loins, and softly croons her desire, as if she wished to climb the firm stem of his body and capture a kiss — it is known as the Tree Climber—

I left them sprawled in their various parts of the living room and went off to shower. I had had no sleep but my mind was alert and active. A strange night, a busy night: I felt more alive than in weeks, and I sensed a stochastic tickle, a tremor of clairvoyance, that warned me I was moving to the threshold of some new transformation. I took the shower full force, punching for maximum vibratory enhancement, waves of ultrasound keying into my throbbing outreaching nervous system, and emerged looking for new worlds to conquer.

No one was in the living room but Friedman, still naked, still glazed of eye, still supine on the couch.

“Where’d they go?” I asked.

Languidly he waved a finger toward the master bedroom. So Catalina had scored her goal after all.

Was I expected to extend similar hospitality to Friedman now? My bisexuality quotient is low and he inspired not a shred of gaiety in me just then. But no, Sundara had dismantled his libido; he flashed no signs except exhaustion. “You’re a lucky man,” he murmured after a while. “What a marvelous woman… What … a … marvelous …” I thought he had dozed. “… woman. Is she for sale?”

"Sale?"

He sounded almost serious.

“Your Oriental slave girl is who I’m talking about.”

“My wife?”

“You bought her in the market in Baghdad. Five hundred dinars for her, Nichols.”

“No deal.”

“A thousand.”

“Not for two empires,” I said.

He laughed. “Where’d you find her?”

“California.”

“Are there any more like that out there?”

“She’s unique,” I told him. “So am I, so are you, so is Catalina. People don’t come in standard models, Friedman. Are you interested in breakfast yet?”

He yawned. “If we want to be reborn on the proper level we must learn to purify ourselves of the needs of the meat. That’s Transit. I’ll mortify my meat by renouncing breakfast as a start.” His eyes closed and he went away.

I had breakfast alone and watched morning come rushing out of the Atlantic at us. I took the morning Times out of its door slot and was pleased to see that Quinn’s speech had made the front page, below the fold but with a two-column photo. MAYOR CALLS FOR FULL HUMAN POTENTIAL. That was the headline, a bit below the Times ’ usual standard of incisiveness. The story used his Ultimate Society tag as its lead and quoted half a dozen glittering phrases in the first twenty lines. The story then jumped to page 21, and the complete text was in a box accompanying the jump. I found myself reading it, and as I read I found myself wondering why I had been so stirred, for the printed speech seemed to lack any real content; it was purely a verbal object, a collection of catchy lines, offering no program, making no concrete suggestions. And to me last night it had sounded like a blueprint for Utopia. I shivered. Quinn had provided nothing more than an armature; I myself had hung the trimmings on, all my vague fantasies of social reform and millennial transformation. Quinn’s performance had been pure charisma in action, an elemental force working us over from the dais. So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.

The phone began ringing a little after eight. Mardikian wanted to distribute a thousand videotapes of the speech to New Democratic organizations all over the country; what did I think? Lombroso reported pledges of half a million to the as yet nonexistent Quinn-for-President campaign kitty in the aftermath of the speech. Missakian … Ephrikian … Sarkisian…

When I finally had a quiet moment, I came out and found Catalina Yarber, wearing her blouse and her thigh chain, prodding Lamont Friedman into wakefulness. She gave me a foxy grin. “We’ll be seeing more of each other, I know,” she said throatily.

They left. Sundara slept on. There were no more phone calls. Quinn’s speech was making waves everywhere. Eventually she emerged, naked, delicious, sleepy, but perfect in her beauty, not even puffy-eyed.

“I think I want to know more about Transit,” she said.

Three days later I came home and was startled to find Sundara and Catalina, both nude, kneeling side by side on the living-room carpet. How beautiful they looked, the pale body beside the chocolate one, the short yellow hair and the long black cascade, the dark nipples and the pink. It was not the prelude to a pasha’s orgy, though. The air was rich with incense and they were running through litanies. “Everything passes,” Yarber intoned, and Sundara repeated, “Everything passes.” A golden chain constricted the dusky satin of my wife’s left thigh and the Transit Creed medallion was mounted on it.

She and Catalina displayed a courteous don’t-mind-us attitude toward me and went on with what they were doing, which evidently was an extended catechism. I thought they would rise at some point and disappear into the bedroom, but no, the nudity was purely ritual, and when they were done with the teachings they donned their clothes and brewed tea and gossiped like old friends. That night, when I reached for Sundara, she said gently that she couldn’t make love just now. Not wouldn’t, not didn’t want to, but couldn’t. As if she had entered into a state of purity that must not at the moment be defiled by lust.

So it began, Sundara’s passage into Transit. At first there was only the morning meditation, ten minutes in silence; then there were the evening readings, out of mysterious paperbound books poorly printed on cheap paper; in the second week she announced there would be a meeting in the city every Tuesday night, and could I manage without her? Tuesdays became nights of sexual abstinence for us also; she was apologetic but firm about that. She seemed distant, preoccupied, engrossed with her conversion. Even her work, the art gallery she ran so shrewdly, seemed unimportant to her. I suspected she was seeing Catalina often in the city during the day, and I was right, though in my naпve Western materialist way I imagined they were merely having a love affair, meeting in hotel rooms for interludes of slippery grapplings and tonguings, when in fact it was Sundara’s soul far more than her body that had been seduced. Old friends had warned me long ago: marry a Hindu and you’ll be twirling prayer wheels with her from dusk to dawn, you’ll turn into a vegetarian, she’ll have you singing hymns to Krishna. I laughed at them. Sundara was American, Western, earthy. But now I saw her Sanskrit genes taking their revenge.