Mary jerked her arm away, whirling to face me, then calming slightly when she saw who I was.

“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to startle you. I was just going to say you can cut in line in front of me if you want to.”

“That’s all right,” she said. I couldn’t tell if that meant “No thanks, I don’t want to join you in line” or “No problem, I don’t mind that you touched me.”

As I watched her face for a clue, she looked up at the back of the house. Following her azure gaze, I saw Baba Raba looking down from one of his bedroom windows. The casement window was cranked open and he was visible from the middle of his thick hairy thighs on up, wearing his dhoti and a bent iron frown.

Mary lowered her eyes to mine, smiled, and then slid into line in front of me. There were additional impulses but I kept my hands to myself as we edged forward. When we had our food, she linked her arm though mine and led me to the bench in the rose garden, glancing up once at Baba, who still loomed like a dark demigod above the picnic. I wondered if he recognized me and regretted his invitation.

“You still want to take me to the beach?” Mary asked when we sat down.

“I sure do.”

I didn’t care if she was using me to make a point with the guru. It gave me an opportunity to sit close beside her, with our thighs touching. When we came to dessert, she let me feed her a piece of the coarse sweet cake, taking it from my fork delicately with her lips and tongue, chewing it slowly while looking me in the eye, occasionally blinking her fairy eyelashes. When I tried to feed her a second piece, she laughed and pushed my hand away.

“That’s enough of that,” she said. “Let’s get this place cleaned up, then we’ll go.”

Everyone pitched in to straighten up the yard and put the food away, with Ganesha and Mary supervising.

“You’re really having a good day, man,” Johnny said as we moved one of the picnic tables back where it belonged.

After lunch, some of the volunteers left and some returned to the jobs they had been doing, scraping paint or pulling weeds. I was waiting for Mary by the kitchen steps when Evermore walked up and handed me a card with her name and address written on it.

“When do you think you can come by and take a look?”

“I’m booked up next week,” I said. “But I could stop by tonight if you are going to be home.”

“Super!” she said. “Make it around six-thirty.”

“I’ll see you then.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Mary kept me waiting for fifteen minutes, either because she was tied up with Baba or to test her power over me. When she finally came back out, her subtle smile made up for the wait. I don’t know if she was truly beautiful or just very pretty, but I sure liked her looks. Her body was perfect from my point of view, occupying the midpoint between a too-skinny fashion model and a too-voluptuous Playboy bunny. She looked as wholesome as the girl who lives next door on Sycamore Street and sings in the church choir, raising a soprano hosanna to the heavens, and as experienced as the girl who sleeps with the prime minister when his wife is in the country.

“What are you grinning at?” she said, giving me a little shove.

“Take a guess,” I said.

As we walked down Broadway toward the ocean, I tried to sort out my mixed motives toward Baba’s delectable blonde. I was powerfully attracted to her, so much so that I was in danger of thinking more about how to get into her pink pants than how to find the pink diamonds. At the same time, when I reminded myself that the necklace was the true object of my tratakum, the thing I should be focused on as if it were a blip on a radar screen on the eve of Armageddon, she seemed like a good potential source of intelligence, someone who could fill me in on Baba’s operation, if I could gain her confidence.

“Did you know these streets used to be canals?” I asked her.

“What do you mean?”

“Where we are walking right now was water sixty years ago. All the streets in this area were canals until they filled them in during the nineteen thirties and forties.”

“Why did they fill them in?”

“Lack of imagination,” I said. “They were silting in and overgrown with weeds. It was simpler and cheaper for city hall to turn them into streets than to repair and maintain them.”

“Wow, that’s interesting. I never heard anyone mention that before. You know a lot of stuff, don’t you?”

“I pay attention,” I said.

“I bet you do.”

Whatever Baba had done to annoy her had shifted her attitude toward me to some degree. She was trying on a girlfriend persona, seeing what it would be like if I were her man, feeling for where my buttons were.

“Ganesha told me you fixed the roof,” she said after a little while. “He said it seemed like you knew what you were doing. It’s cool that you know how to do stuff like that. So, are you really in the construction business?”

“Kind of,” I said, not wanting to lie to her any more than I had to. She let the ambiguity pass.

The boardwalk was packed with a typical Sunday-afternoon crowd out to enjoy the atmosphere and entertainment. A “silver man,” wandered down from the Santa Monica Promenade, was doing his robot impression in exchange for dollar bills proffered by wide-eyed little kids pushed forward by their parents. A gang of hip-hop acrobats was bouncing and spinning and flipping in front of a suitcase-size boom box that made my chest reverberate as we strolled by. A man in a harlequin costume was swallowing swords.

The breeze had shifted quarters and was now blowing inland off the splashing water, carrying the exhilarating scent of the sea and seeming to impart the energy of the ocean to everything along the shore, putting a three-dimensional kaleidoscope into motion. Palm trees stirred, sparrows twittered and hopped, basketballs thumped and banged on the courts, boys and girls whizzed past on wheeled devices, pennants flapped, seagulls skimmed, and the homeless shook their silvery cups. Cappuccino machines hissed as sweet foam boiled up like the waves where they curled and creamed on the beach.

We stopped at a counter along the boardwalk to have Cokes.

“Oh, that is so good!” Mary said. “I know it’s not healthy, but I love soda. It is one of the things I miss living in the ashram.”

We were sitting on old-fashioned stools with metal bases and round vinyl-covered tops, sipping our Cokes through straws like two high school kids on a first date.

“So Baba allows prostitution at the ashram, but not soda?”

“Lighten up,” she said. “It’s not prostitution, not exactly.”

“What is it, exactly?”

“Have you ever heard of the Magdalene Order?”

“No.”

“You know what tantra is, though, right?”

“You bet.”

“Okay, what is it, then?” She used her taunting tone as if she didn’t believe me, but I think she just wanted to hear my definition before continuing her explanation.

“You tell me,” I said.

“It’s fucking for God,” she said.

I laughed out loud, and a Sikh drinking tea at the other end of the counter turned his turbaned head to look at us.

“What?” she said. “Isn’t that what it is?”

“Yes, that is a great definition. I kind of knew that’s what it was, but I couldn’t have put it so neat.”

She gave me a dazzling smile then, young and happy. I reached out to put my hand on hers, but she pulled her hands back into her lap before I could touch her.

“Let’s hear your definition,” she said.

“Tantra is when a man and a woman engage in sexual intercourse to achieve a sense or state of union,” I said, looking deep into her fairy eyes. “Instead of making love selfishly for physical pleasure and to gratify the ego the way people usually do, tantric lovers do it to transcend the ego. Becoming one with the other person is like practice for becoming one with God. Just what you said. It is a way of breaking out of the bounds of the little, socially constructed self and becoming part of something larger and better.”