What he wanted, what he fantasized about, was to get lucky in the Saturday night drawing and wind up paired off with her in the meditation house for a week of improvised activity. The only problem with that little fantasy was that she and Maynard—who was out touring with his band half the time in any case—declined to participate in the exercise, which only emphasized their difference from everybody else. They were part of the inner circle, but in the way of electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom, part of it and outside it at the same time. In the end, she was Flora Lu Ferguson, and for all her communion with the sacrament, she never forgot it or let anybody else forget it either.

Which went against the whole rationale of the drawing in the first place. The idea was to break through the sexual jealousy game as a way of deepening the communal bond and transitioning from the individual ego to the group mind—or that was how Tim explained it. And once he’d explained it—or actually just broached the subject—there was little debate or even hesitation because they were psychologists and this was the new frontier and they could all participate in a way that was strictly clinical and disinterested and might well have the added benefit of providing data for future papers, articles and even books. Or at least that was what they told themselves. The way it worked was that once a week Tim would draw a pair of names from the sombrero he’d brought back from Mexico, and whoever’s names came up would have to spend the next seven days in the meditation-house-cum-bowling-alley, relieved of all household duties and free to trip and engage in any activity they wanted, sexual or otherwise, without constraint. Two people, going deep.

The first drawing—Tim made a ceremony of it, as he did with everything—was held in front of the fireplace in the library at the beginning of one of their regular Saturday night sessions. There were no paying guests involved—that experiment, while profitable, had proved a nightmare, what with people’s cars mired in the snow and various fender benders that tested everybody’s equanimity and all but destroyed any meditative peace they might have found, and they’d decided to suspend the seminars till the weather improved. There were people up from the city, of course, friends, friends of friends, hangers-on and semi-regulars, but Tim had blessed them all with the sacrament they’d come for, then pulled the big doors shut on the library so that only the inner circle was gathered inside.