“Thank you,” he said solemnly.
“Are you enjoying your birthday?”
“Very much.”
“I’m amazed that they don’t bore you. I mean, having had so many of them.”
“I don’t bore easily.” He was awesomely calm, drawing on some bottomless reservoir of patience. He gave her a look that was at the same time warm and impersonal. “I find everything interesting,” he said.
“That’s curious. I said more or less the same thing to Steiner just a few minutes ago. You know, it’s my birthday too.”
“Really?”
“The seventh of January, 1975 for me.”
“Hello, 1975. I’m—” He laughed. “It sounds absolutely absurd, doesn’t it?”
“The seventh of January, 982.”
“You’ve been doing your homework.”
“I’ve read your book,” she said. “Can I make a silly remark? My God, you don’t look like you’re a thousand and seventeen years old.”
“How should I look?”
“More like him,” she said, indicating Francis Xavier Byrne. Nicholson chuckled. She wondered if he liked her. Maybe. Maybe. Nikki risked some eye contact. He was hardly a centimeter taller than she was, which made it a terrifyingly intimate experience. He regarded her steadily, centeredly; she imagined a throbbing mandala surrounding him, luminous turquoise spokes emanating from his heart, radiant red and green spiderweb rings connecting them. Reaching from her loins, she threw a loop of desire around him. Her eyes were explicit. His were veiled. She felt him calmly retreating. Take me inside, she pleaded, take me to one of the back rooms. Pour life into me. She said, “How will you choose the people you’re going to instruct in the secret?”
“Intuitively.”
“Refusing anybody who asks directly, of course.”
“Refusing anybody who asks.”
“Did you ask?”
“You said you read my book.”
“Oh. Yes. I remember—you didn’t know what was happening, you didn’t understand anything until it was over.”
“I was a simple lad,” he said. “That was a long time ago.” His eyes were alive again. He’s drawn to me. He sees that I’m his kind, that I deserve him. Capricorn, Capricorn, Capricorn, you and me, he-goat and she-goat. Play my game, Cap. “How are you named?” he asked.
“Nikki.”
“A beautiful name. A beautiful woman.”
The emptiness of the compliments devastated her. She realized she had arrived with mysterious suddenness at a necessary point of tactical withdrawal; retreat was obligatory, lest she push too hard and destroy the tenuous contact so tensely established. She thanked him with a glance and gracefully slipped away, pivoting toward Martin Bliss, slipping her arm through his. Bliss quivered at the gesture, glowed, leaped into a higher energy state. She resonated to his vibrations, going up and up. She was at the heart of the party, the center of the mandala: standing flat-footed, legs slightly apart, making her body a polar axis, with lines of force zooming up out of the earth, up through the basement levels of this building, up the eighty-eight stories of it, up through her sex, her heart, her head. This is how it must feel, she thought, when undyingness is conferred on you. A moment of spontaneous grace, the kindling of an inner light. She looked love at poor sappy Bliss. You dear heart, you dumb walking pun. The string quintet made molten sounds. “What is that?” she asked. “Brahms?” Bliss offered to find out. Alone, she was vulnerable to Francis Xavier Byrne, who brought her down with a single cadaverous glance.
“Have you guessed it yet?” he asked. “The sign.”
She stared through his ragged cancerous body, blazing with decomposition. “Scorpio,” she told him hoarsely.
“Right! Right!” He pulled a pendant from his breast and draped its golden chain over her head. “For you,” he rasped, and fled. She fondled it. A smooth green stone. Jade? Emerald? Lightly engraved on its domed face was the looped cross, the crux ansata. Beautiful. The gift of life, from the dying man. She waved fondly to him across a forest of heads and winked. Bliss returned.
“They’re playing something by Schoenberg,” he reported. “Verklarte Nacht.”
“How lovely.” She flipped the pendant and let it fall back against her breasts. “Do you like it?”
“I’m sure you didn’t have it a moment ago.”
“It sprouted,” she told him. She felt high, but not as high as she had been just after leaving Nicholson. That sense of herself as focal point had departed. The party seemed chaotic. Couples were forming, dissolving, reforming; shadowy figures were stealing away in twos and threes toward the bedrooms; the servants were more obsessively thrusting their trays of drinks and snacks at the remaining guests; the hall had reverted to snow, and feathery masses silently struck the windows, sticking there, revealing their glistening mandalic structures for painfully brief moments before they deliquesced. Nikki struggled to regain her centered position. She indulged in a cheering fantasy: Nicholson coming to her, formally touching her cheek, telling her, “You will be one of the elect.” In less than twelve months the time would come for him to gather with his seven still unnamed disciples to see in the new century, and he would take their hands into his hands, he would pump the vitality of the undying into their bodies, sharing with them the secret that had been shared with him a thousand years ago. Who? Who? Who? Me. Me. Me. But where had Nicholson gone? His aura, his glow, that cone of imaginary light that had appeared to surround him—nowhere.
A man in a lacquered orange wig began furiously to quarrel, almost under Nikki’s nose, with a much younger woman wearing festoons of bioluminescent pearls. Man and wife, evidently. They were both sharp-featured, with glossy, protuberant eyes, rigid faces, cheek muscles working intensely. Live together long enough, come to look alike. Their dispute had a stale, ritualistic flavor, as though they had staged it all too many times before. They were explaining to each other the events that had caused the quarrel, interpreting them, recapitulating them, shading them, justifying, attacking, defending—you said this because and that led me to respond that way because… no, on the contrary, I said this because you said that—all of it in a quiet screechy tone, sickening, agonizing, pure death.
“He’s her biological father,” a man next to Nikki said. “She was one of the first of the in vitro babies, and he was the donor, and five years ago he tracked her down and married her. A loophole in the law.” Five years? They sounded as if they had been married for fifty. Walls of pain and boredom encased them. Only their eyes were alive. Nikki found it impossible to imagine those two in bed, bodies entwined in the act of love. Act of love, she thought, and laughed. Where was Nicholson? Duke Alexius, flushed and sweat-beaded, bowed to her. “I will leave soon,” he announced, and she received the announcement gravely but without reacting, as though he had merely commented on the fluctuations of the storm, or had spoken in Greek. He bowed again and went away. Nicholson? Nicholson? She grew calm again, finding her center. He will come to me when he is ready. There was contact between us, and it was real and good.
Bliss, beside her, gestured and said, “A rabbi of Syrian birth, formerly Muslim, highly regarded among Jewish theologians.”
She nodded but didn’t look.