“You really know this stuff, don’t you?” she said, trying out the admiring-girlfriend mode again.

I shrugged. “So, where does the Magdalene Order come in?”

“Mary Magdalene was the chick in the Bible that Jesus saved from being stoned to death for sleeping around,” she said. “Baba says she wasn’t a hooker because she was a bad person but because she was full of love and didn’t know what to do with it. He says everyone is like that underneath, but society suppresses it and makes it into something bad if people express it without permission. Jesus saw all the love that Mary had inside her and chose her for his companion. Then she found the right focus for her love and helped Jesus do his thing.” She spoke in an excited enthusiastic manner, proud of her esoteric knowledge and something more.

“How did she help him?”

“Through tantra.”

“You mean she slept with him?”

“Yeah. She helped him find God, like what you were saying.”

“This is what Baba teaches?”

“Sure. I know it’s not what they say in Sunday school, but it kind of makes sense, you know?”

“And that’s what the girls at the ashram do?”

“Kind of. Baba says most of the men that come to the ashram aren’t ready to find God, but that the girls are helping them by healing their hearts. He says everyone is wounded because they haven’t received the love they need and deserve and that that’s what’s wrong with the world. That’s why people are so angry and mean. He says the Magdalenes’ unconditional love helps the johns feel better about themselves and become better people.”

“But it’s not unconditional.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t the men have to pay to have sex with the girls?”

“Yeah, but they have plenty of money. They are all important people, big businessmen and politicians. I’ve seen some of them in the newspaper. And Baba uses the money for a good cause.”

“Where does he get the girls?”

“I don’t know. They were all there when I came.”

“What do they get out of it?”

“Baba says they grow spiritually by giving love.”

“Does he have sex with them?”

“Why are you asking so many questions about this? Are you trying to figure out how to get laid up there? Because it’s not hard if that’s what you want.”

“I’m not trying to figure out how to get laid. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on over there. Operating a string of call girls out of an ashram, no matter what you call them, doesn’t fit with what I know about Vedanta. I don’t want to start taking classes there if it is really just a whorehouse.”

“So what if they are whores?” She spit the word back at me angrily. “What’s so bad about that? Isn’t everyone a whore in one way or another?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You aren’t part of the order, are you?”

“No,” she said, calmer. “Baba wants me to join, but I won’t do it.”

“Why not, if it’s such a good thing?”

“Like I told you,” she said in a tough tone, “no one turns me out. And there is something strange about those girls. It’s like they are on something.”

“You think he is feeding them drugs?”

“No,” she laughed. “I don’t think he’d do that. He is really not as bad as you think. It is more like he is using tantra and psychic powers to control them. He has some kick-ass siddhis. I’ve seen him do some amazing things. Like with you at the beach yesterday. He really turned up the juice on you. I know you felt it.” She paused, giving me a curious look. “Why is he interested in you?”

“I’m an interesting person,” I said lightly, but her question made me uneasy. Why had he focused on me? I didn’t like the idea of his mental powers probing my subconscious when it contained a crystalline image he would be quick to recognize. “Did Baba start the Magdalene Order, or does it exist in other places?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Do men call and make dates or do they join a tantra yoga class or what?” I was counterprobing.

“There’s no class. It’s more like private lessons. I’m not sure how they set up the appointments. There are a couple of guys that run the girls for Baba, a creep named Jimmy, and some other muscle-bound jerk who goes by Namo. I can’t stand either one of them. Can we talk about something else now?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself?”

Instead of answering, she noisily sucked the last of the Coke from her vase-shaped glass, then rattled the ice and tilted the glass to her lips to get another drop or two. I could tell she came from a lower-middle-class background, same as me. Soda is one of our favorite things.

“Let’s keep walking,” she said, standing up. “I’ve never ridden on that Ferris wheel before. Might be fun.”

As we continued north on the boardwalk I looked back and caught the Sikh sneaking a peek at the pink shorts and shook my finger at him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

It was a bright, breezy three-quarters of a mile from the snack stand to the pier where the Ferris wheel was revolving slowly against the backdrop of the Santa Monica Mountains. I took the hint and didn’t ask Mary anything else about herself. As a reward, she gave me the Cliffs Notes version of her life story.

She was twenty-four, a Gemini born in May 1971, as I was stumbling through the second semester of my drug-blurred freshman year at Hazel-wood High School. She grew up in a two-bedroom, one-bath tract house in Anaheim half a mile from Disneyland. Her mother, like mine, was an alcoholic. Her father was a mindless Catholic churchgoer who beat her when she started getting interested in boys. She ran away from home in her early teens and had always been with older men, starting with a thirty-year-old pot dealer when she was fourteen. After that it was a little vague. She had traveled, worked at different things. She had quit drugs and alcohol two years earlier when she got interested in Eastern religion, gone back to school fifteen months before, in the fall of 1994, after passing the GED test.

Her personality, which she complimented me by displaying freely, was a blend of sunny optimism, fatalistic cynicism, and fierce self-determination. She was intellectually ambitious, though not terribly well informed. She was a bit of a snob about some things, little-girl curious about others.

As we walked down the sloping causeway onto the Santa Monica pier, she let me take her hand, which made me ridiculously happy. When we came to the amusement rides, I impressed not just her but myself and the concessionaire by slamming the big wooden mallet down hard enough to ring the bell atop the thirty-foot tower of the high striker. Mary clapped and laughed, and the concessionaire made a “Well, what do you know about that?” face.

I am six-two and weigh about 175 pounds, which makes me look skinny. But I am a lot stronger than I look, and years in construction taught me a thing or two about leverage and swinging hammers.

I don’t know if she was doing it to mess with me or not, but Mary said she wanted a popsicle. So I bought her a cylinder of cherry ice. She licked it contentedly as we waited in the line for the Ferris wheel. When she put it in her mouth the first time to suck on it, she looked up frankly into my eyes, saw some of what was going on there, and then burst out laughing, bending over and slapping her thigh with her free hand, leaving a red mark.

“Naughty boy,” she said.

“What do you expect after all that talk about tantra?” I said, my face the color of the popsicle.

“It’s okay,” she said, still laughing, reaching out to punch my arm. “I know how you guys are.”

When we made it to the front of the line, a five-foot-tall carnie with four-foot-long arms took our tickets and opened the gate on our seat.

“Here we go,” Mary said, excited.

We sat down side by side and I put my arm around her, cupping her bare shoulder with my right hand. We were facing northwest, toward Malibu. When the huge wheel lurched into motion, carrying us back and up, the sea-bright world expanded swiftly around us, getting vaster and grander as we came up to and over the exhilarating top, then shrinking again as we sailed downward, then expanding again, wider and brighter and bluer, the Channel Islands swimming into view, misty and green, as we were lifted skyward again. Round and round we went, half a dozen times, then stopped at the very top, 120 feet above the water, as the carnie began unloading and reloading the cars.