Maya Bohnhoff: As the Angels in Heaven

“I’m not sure I want to marry within my profession,” mused Roella. “Seems to me the proximity effect could be deadly.”

“It hasn’t been for Clay and me.” Cari patted her friend’s lace-covered shoulder. “Find the right man or woman and you’ll see it makes all the difference in the world. Besides, you create your own environment in a marriage. And your own distractions.” She shifted her shoulders suggestively and Roella smiled.

“Oh, you hot-blooded older women,” she said. “How about you, Meli? Are you going to create your own distractions?”

Meli, barely existing on the same plane, came to the sound of her name. “Huh?” she said.

“I think Roella wants to know if you’ve hired a handyman.”

Meli shoved a pair of camp-boots deep into her suitcase and shook her head. “No, 1 haven’t. And what would Roella know about handymen?”

Roella blushed to the pale roots of her hair. “Well, Cari has one. I’ve heard her talk about him. Hell, my mother has one. And I’m of a marriageable age, after all. I suppose I ought to start thinking about these things. It’s all right to think about it, you know.”

Cari laughed, apparently delighted by the younger woman’s defensiveness. “Of course it’s all right to think about it. As long as that’s all you do.”

“Good Lord, Cari. Of course that s all I do! But even a virgin has her fantasies.” She shrugged. “I’m curious, that’s all. Who wouldn’t be? It’s nothing to call church about. I’ve heard Mom and Sis comparing notes… Sis had a semi-regular guy for a while. Said she started feeling like she had to use him just because he was there. Then she realized she wasn’t getting anything out of it and fired him.”

“Well,” said Cari, “to each her own. So, Mel-Mel, you’re not going to hire a man. Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me. What about Birch?”

Meli flinched mentally. “What about Birch?”

“Has he got himself a squeeze, yet?”

Roella coughed. “Cari Munsi-Couric! Your language! That’s so-so derogatory, so sexist.”

“It’s just a colloquialism, Roella. You should hear what they call us—‘little men,’ ‘neuters,’ ‘bergs’—that’s short for ‘iceberg.’ Sonia calls me Eunice right to my face.”

“Sonia?”

“Clay’s cleaning lady. She’s not being disrespectful, really. It’s just a joke between the two of us.”

“A joke?” Roella shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

“Eunice—sounds like Eunuch?”

“Oh. Oh. I get it. But you’re not a Eunuch at all. I mean, you’ve got a guy.”

“Yeah, she calls him my ‘ice-pick.’ Cute, huh? Point is, I’m neuter as far as Clay’s concerned. Sonia just doesn’t ‘get it.’ I mean, her whole world is sex, right? Love isn’t something she relates to. Not the kind of love Clay and I have. I feel sorry for her.”

Meli paused in her packing and studied Cari’s pensive face. “You actually socialize with her? Doesn’t that feel… well, strange?”

Cari and Roella were both looking at her, brows knit. “That’s a weird question,” Cari said. “Why should it feel strange? Clay has a lusty sex drive. It has to go somewhere. Sonia’s clean—I insisted he have her checked, of course—and she’s exclusive to him. As a matter of fact, she’d just registered with the agency when he hired her. Straight out of high school. A virgin. Clean slate. And I like her. In fact, if we decide to have children, she’ll probably be the carrier.”

Meli frowned, pushing the flutter of unease back to the pit of her stomach, pushing another pair of shoes into her suitcase, pushing any further weird questions to the back of her mind.

Roella shook her head. “I don’t understand that. I mean, why would a girl not want to go to college? Why wouldn’t she want a career and marriage? Have you ever asked Sonia that?”

“Honey, Sonia has a career. She’s a Sexual Relief Specialist. And yes, I did ask her, just out of curiosity. She’s from a poor family—a dysfunctional family, as it happens—she did poorly in school, no head for academics or trades, and she liked sex. She said staying a virgin through high school was the hardest thing she ever did.”

“Geez,” breathed Roella. “I thought… with the Equilibrium and all…”

“Not everybody can live by the same code, Ro. For which we should be thankful. If there weren’t people like Sonia around to take care of a man’s needs, where would we be?”

“Back in the dark ages, I imagine,” said Roella. “I see your point.”

Cari shrugged. “So, Sonia’s in social service. She’s happy. Clay’s happy. I’m happy. She’s a gorgeous girl—healthy, nice disposition. She’ll be a great carrier for our kids.”

“But if she has a baby,” Meli asked. “How do you know it’s yours? I mean, how do you know the pregnancy is the result of the implantation of your egg and Clay’s sperm and not, well, the result of their having intercourse while she’s on the fertility program?”

“Meli, I trust Clay. After all, he’s my husband. He loves me.”

There was no doubt in Cari’s voice, no uncertainty in her face. She and Clay had that kind of relationship—a perfect relationship, Meli would have said. A relationship based on love, respect, trust, equality, intellectual compatibility and a passionate commitment to mutual growth and happiness. She and Birch had all that, she knew, if not the level of openness Clay and Cari enjoyed. The most she’d ever said to Birch about her sexual inclinations was that she wasn’t particularly concerned about them. Which was only partially true. Until she’d met Birch, her sexuality had been a non-issue. Now, it was an issue she studiously and ambivalently avoided. She envied Cari and Clay their frankness, their openness.

No. No, she didn’t. She wanted to envy them and did not. And that disturbed her.

Ajanta was an amazement. Sweeping along the rocky basalt face of a Deccan river gorge, the twenty-eight hand-hewn temple caves bore mute but eloquent testimony to the ingenuity and perseverance of humanity. Dating from India’s Golden Age in the tenth and eleventh centuries after the Advent of the Buddha, the religious shrines were begun during the reign of Emperor Harisena. They were unfinished when a sweeping return to Hinduism, followed by an advance to Islam, left them to lie forgotten until 1819, when a British army detachment stumbled over them in the colonial darkness.

After over a century of dithering and dickering, the disposition of the caves fell to the Global Tribunal which, in the interest of India’s heritage, hired Archaetech to restore the temples to their original glory.

Such was the Asbury-Bocamp’s happy duty—to bring Ajanta back to life. The work consumed them from the moment they arrived; the magnificance of the paintings, the incredible scope and detail of the statues and carvings, the majesty of the hand-hewn chambers. It was at once overwhelming and satisfying.

It was their special pleasure to rise before their colleagues and visit a favorite cave, sitting in shared and meditative silence before its major shrine.

It was a shrine of love, Meli thought, though disconcertingly medieval in its vision of that emotion. The central group of statues were made up of a woman (Queen Hariti) and a man (Hariti’s husband, Panchika) and their many children. They sat, looking out at the worshipful from their basalt thrones, serene, lovely, blissful, while overhead a painted medallion with all the rich color and pattern of a Persian carpet completed their pavilion. At each corner of the medallion’s square frame sat a Happy Couple. That’s what everyone called them, with varying degrees of sarcasm. Half-naked and entwined in modest intimacy, they gazed eternally at each other with dark, adoring eyes and smiles of secret bliss.