The Stochastic Man

Perhaps I was being too harsh, though. Maybe there were patterns I failed to see. It was possible that Carvajal’s interest in me was real, that he had some genuine use for me in his lonely life. To be my guide, to be a father-surrogate to me, to pour into me, in the remaining months of his time, such knowledge as he was able to impart.

In any event I had real use for him. I was going to have him help me make Paul Qui

Knowing that Carvajal couldn’t see as far as next year’s election was a drawback, but not necessarily a major one. Events as big as the presidential succession have deep roots; decisions taken now would govern the political twists and turns of the years ahead. Carvajal might already be in possession of sufficient data about the coming year to enable Qui

18

It was a troublesome week. On the political front the news was all bad. New Democrats everywhere were falling all over themselves to pledge their support to Senator Kane, and Kane, instead of keeping his vice-presidential options open in the traditional ma

“How did it happen so fast, this Kane-Socorro tie-up?” he demanded. “One day I was the great white hope of the party, the next all the clubhouse doors were slamming in my face.” He gave us the famous intense Qui

Mardikian had no answers for him. Neither did Lombroso. What could I say? That I had had the clues and had fumbled them? I took refuge behind a shrug and a “that’s politics” alibi. I was being paid to come up with reasonable hunches, not to function as an all-out psychic. “Wait,” I promised him. “New patterns are shaping up. Give me a month and I’ll have all of next year mapped out for you.”

“I’ll settle for the next six weeks,” Qui

His a

It was a week of domestic problems, too. Sundara’s ever-deepening involvement with the Transit Creed was begi

Whim reigned. The day I went to see Carvajal, she quietly went over to the Municipal Building to apply for a prostitute’s license. It took her the better part of the afternoon, what with the medical exam, the union interview, the photography and fingerprinting, and all the rest of the bureaucratic intricacies. When I came home, my head full of Carvajal, she triumphantly flourished the little laminated card that made it legal for her to sell her body anywhere in the five boroughs.

“My God,” I said.

“Is something wrong?”

“You just stood there in line like any twenty-dollar hooker out of Vegas?”

“Should I have used political influence to get my card?”

“What if some reporter had seen you down there, though?”

“So?”

“The wife of Lew Nichols, special administrative assistant to Mayor Qui

“Do you think I’m the only married woman in that union?”

“I don’t mean that. I’m thinking in terms of potential scandal, Sundara.”

“Prostitution is a legal activity, and regulated prostitution is generally recognized as having social benefits which—”

“It’s legal in New York City,” I said. “Not in Kankakee. Not in Tallahassee. Not in Sioux City. One of these days Qui

“Am I supposed to govern my life by Qui

“Do you want to be a whore, Sundara?”

“ Prostitute is the term that the union leadership prefers to use.”

“ Prostitute isn’t any prettier than whore. Aren’t you satisfied with the arrangements we’ve been making? Why do you want to sell yourself?”

“What I want to be,” she said icily, “is a free human being, released from all constricting ego attachments.”

“And you’ll get there through prostitution?”

“Prostitutes learn to dismantle their egos. Prostitutes exist only to serve the needs of others. A week or two in a city brothel will teach me how to subordinate the demands of my ego to the needs of those who come to me.”

“You could become a nurse. You could become a masseuse. You could—”

“I chose what I chose.”

“And that’s what you’re going to do? Spend the next week or two in a city brothel?”

“Probably.”

“Did Catalina Yarber suggest this?”

“I thought of it myself,” said Sundara solemnly. Her eyes flashed fire. We were at the edge of the worst quarrel of our life together, a straight I-forbid-this/don’t-you-give-me-orders clash. I trembled. I pictured Sundara, sleek and elegant, Sundara whom all men and many women desired, punching the timeclock in one of those grim sterile municipal cubicles, Sundara standing at a sink swabbing her loins with antiseptic lotions, Sundara on her narrow cot with her knees pulled up to her breasts, servicing some stubble-faced sweat-stinking clod while an endless line waited, tickets in hand, at her door. No. I couldn’t swallow it. Four-group, six-group, ten-group, whatever kind of communal sex she liked, yes, but not n-group, not infinity-group, not offering her precious tender body to every hideous misfit in New York City who had the price of admission. For an instant I really was tempted to rise up in old-fashioned husbandly wrath and tell her to drop all this foolishness, or else. But of course that was impossible. So I said nothing, while chasms opened between us. We were on separate islands in a stormy sea, borne away from each other by mighty surging currents, and I was unable even to shout across the widening strait, unable even to reach toward her with futile hands. Where had it gone, the oneness that had been ours for a few years? Why was the strait growing wider?

“Go to your whorehouse, then,” I muttered, and left the apartment in a blind wild unstochastic frenzy of anger and fear.

Instead of registering at a brothel, though, Sundara podded to JFK airport and boarded a rocket bound for India. She bathed in the Ganges at one of the Benares ghats, spent an hour unsuccessfully searching for her family’s ancestral neighborhood in Bombay, had a curry di