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smiled after the retreating figure. Unable and unwilling to probe the complexity of Freddie’s persona, he took the man totally at face value, which served perfectly as the adjustment which allowed them to work in the same place with a minimum of friction. The chubby man’s style was so consciously outrageous that it never would have occurred to Martin that it was a valid and viable way to speak the truth of one’s plain perceptions. Never having been in contact with any urge to fondle another man’s genitals, Martin could only view the suggestion of such a thing as a baroque form of humor.
    At that instant, Robert put his hand on Martin’s shoulder. Martin winced violently, his entire right side evincing a sharp, momentary spasm.
    “Oh, sorry,” Robert said, “I didn’t mean to startle you.” He pulled his hand back gently.
    “Oooohhh wheeeee!” Freddie trilled as he waddled down the tiled hallway into the locker room. He was by this time projecting his inner states to a vast audience far more sensitive and appreciative than anything one might ever expect at the Palace.
    Martin and Robert stepped into the walkway. “Well,” Martin said somewhat briskly. “Shower and then close the place down. The night crew will be here to clean up in a few minutes.”
    “I’ll meet you out front in fifteen minutes then?” Robert asked. “What sort of food do you like?”
    Martin shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s your show. Why don’t you choose?”
    Robert smiled, and the two men went into the shower room, taking a stalls at opposite ends. As Martin lathered his body, and sluiced the perspiration from his skin, he thought of a snake shedding, of that delightful process whereby the accumulations of a year are simply eased off one’s body. If it could only be that easy for people, he thought, and suddenly, unaccountably, a feeling of happiness bubbled from his solar plexus and up into his chest. The water cascaded over his head and down his face and he opened his eyes to find that the shower room seemed five times brighter than it ordinarily did, as though a brilliant new bulb had just gone on.
    All the while, Robert, who knew that there wasn’t anything existing which isn’t miraculous, had visions of the cosmic snake swallowing its own tail. He said the name “Babba” to himself, barely whispering, and then smiled.
    The conventional world had lost all reality for Gail Goddard. All that mattered was the shimmering aura of color that surrounded her perceptions. The dominant tone was blue, a bright mantle of light which blessed everything she saw the way a summer sky without clouds transforms the earth beneath it. She sat in the back seat of a taxi and felt as though she were being wafted aloft on a glider, skimming mountain peaks on cushiony thermals. Her nipples rubbed against the inside of her blouse and her thighs chafed pleasantly against each other. Her entire body sang with the vitality of youth and well-being.
    She was twenty-seven years old, as thin as a model, with just a touch of plumpness about the buttocks, a soft swelling that lifted men off balance when they looked at her but which caused her no little grief in trying somehow to remove it. Her yellow-green eyes sparkled in a face that would have driven Botticelli to his canvas to capture the high cheekbones and androgynous mouth, the upper lip firm and precise, the lower lip suggestive of a pout.
    She inhabited a mood of total euphoria, one which her day at school hadn’t been able to faze. She taught fourth grade in a public school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a Hassidic neighborhood lately inhabited by Puerto Ricans. The sidewalks resembled a divorce court, with the two ethnic groups arguing why they should be allowed to live separately even though they shared the same block. The ultra-orthodox Jews sent their children to their own schools, so among Gail’s charges, thirty-two eleven-year-olds, many barely spoke English. Her job often involved a good