“What about the heavenly blue?” Fitz asked. He was propped on both elbows, his cigarette fuming in the ashtray, his drink—brandy, more brandy—squared up right beside it as if he were sitting in a bar someplace. “We need it for ourselves, isn’t that right? For our own sessions? Isn’t that what this is all about?” He was irritated, the lines in his brow compressing like waves crashing one atop the other. He looked directly at Dick. “Unless you’re planning on buzzing up to Canada in your Cessna every other week.”

“We’re going to do it without drugs,” Tim said.

“Without drugs?” Charlie could barely contain himself. “How can you have a session without drugs? That’s like, like”—he snatched up the first thing that came to hand, Fitz’s drink—“brandy without a glass. Or, or—”

“A pigeon without wings?” Tim said. “A Girl Scout without a uniform? An ocean without water?” He held up both palms for silence. “We are going to give them exactly what we promise: lectures, meditation, group mind. Just the way Gurdjieff’s people do it. Think of it as a retreat, a weekend in the country away from the madhouse of the city, leave your ego at the door, thank you very much. In fact, the first night, the way Dick and I see it, we dress everybody in robes so as to eliminate status symbols, and that goes for jewelry too, even watches—and we forbid them to talk, not a word, till the morning of the second day. Silence. A strict code of silence.”

“Right,” Dick said. “No ‘I’m a stockbroker’ or ‘We live in Scarsdale’ or any of that nonsense.”

“They’re going to want drugs,” Charlie said.

Fanchon, silent to this point, said, “But of course. This is what we all want, is it not?”

And Tim, serene, above it all, had every angle figured out: “They’re not going to get them. As Fitz points out, we’ve got our own supply to worry about—thanks, Dick, for all your efforts on our behalf, by the way, and don’t think we’re not supremely grateful—and the way the press is stirring things up, not to mention Lori’s dear old college prez, we don’t really need to attract any official attention here, do we?” He looked round the table. “We give them illusion, perfectly legal, non-controversial and totally habit forming.”

“Hocus-pocus,” Charlie said, and everybody laughed.

“Now you see it,” Tim said, pulling an imaginary card out of his sleeve, “now you don’t.”