“All right. In what sense do you want to use it?”
Teddy thought it over. “You know what the word `affinity’ means?” he asked, turning to Nicholson.
“I have a rough idea,” Nicholson said dryly.
“I have a very strong affinity for them. They’re my parents, I mean, and we’re all part of each other’s harmony and everything,” Teddy said. “I want them to have a nice time while they’re alive, because they like having a nice time … But they don’t love me and Booper—that’s my sister—that way. I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It’s not so good, that way.” He turned toward Nicholson again, sitting slightly forward. “Do you have the time, please?” he asked. “I have a swimming lesson at ten-thirty.”
“You have time,” Nicholson said without first looking at his wrist watch. He pushed back his cuff. “It’s just ten after ten,” he said.
“Thank you,” Teddy said, and sat back. “We can enjoy our conversation for about ten more minutes.” Nicholson let one leg drop over the side of the deck chair, leaned forward, and stepped on his cigarette end. “As I understand it,” he said, sitting back, “you hold pretty firmly to the Vedantic theory of reincarnation.”
“It isn’t a theory, it’s as much a part—”
“All right,” Nicholson said quickly. He smiled, and gently raised the flats of his hands, in a sort of ironic benediction. “We won’t argue that point, for the moment. Let me finish.” He crossed his heavy, outstretched legs again. “From what I gather, you’ve acquired certain information, through meditation, that’s given you some conviction that in your last incarnation you were a holy man in India, but more or less fell from Grace—”
“I wasn’t a holy man,” Teddy said. “I was just a person making very nice spiritual advancement.”
“All right—whatever it was,” Nicholson said. “But the point is you feel that in your last incarnation you more or less fell from Grace before final Illumination. Is that right, or am I—”