36 Arguments for the Existence of God (47 page)

It’s only when Cass is settling himself into his car that he realizes that he’s euphoric. He hasn’t had the time to observe the state of his mind, or maybe the euphoria has descended on him right at this moment. I’m drunk, he thinks, pushing the Start button of his Prius and silently steering onto Massachusetts Avenue.

William James, cataloguing the varieties of rapture that can seize hold of a person, hadn’t scorned to include intoxication: “Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the
Yes
function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth.”

Yes, Cass thinks, making a left onto Bow Street, driving past the Harvard river dorms. He feels as if he hardly has a need to breathe, as if he’s holding his breath as the
Yes
function is pumping, and that for as long as he can sustain this breathless
Yes
he is in perfect harmony with the world, no matter the wildness and pang of life. All the irreconcilabilities are melded sweetly together, the pulling-apartness that shreds the human heart is stilled in the yesness that’s resounding, and all manner of things shall be well.

My soul is blotto, he says, and laughs out loud, and William James himself would approve. Straight ahead of him, Weeks Bridge is spectrally glowing, the wide white steps leading into a self-enclosed space of solemn emotions, and he gazes lovingly at it as he makes a right onto Memorial Drive.

The traffic light on the corner of Memorial Drive and JFK, which is always red, is green for him, and as he turns left and glides over the river,
he glances left to get another glimpse of the mystical radiance of Weeks Bridge, and it induces a surge of love that would be more appropriate if directed toward a person than a brickwork structure. He turns left onto Storrow Drive and gets another loving look at the bridge and at the redbrick and pristine jewel-colored domes and spires of the Harvard skyline, the architecture that had impressed him twenty years ago with the insistence of its purity and American authenticity, and his love for it, too, is inappropriately tender.

As he makes the right that will take him to the turnpike, he realizes that the reason these loves feel as if they’re directed toward a person is that they are. All are expressions of his love for Lucinda. It’s Lucinda who has reset the vector of his life, giving a vigorous spin to the wheel of his fortune. No wonder his soul is intoxicated—shit-faced, as Mona might put it and he loves Mona again, now, too, mindful Mona, front and center—and he laughs as he exits for Logan Airport, and then parks the car in the short-term lot.

He’s twenty minutes late and his
Yes
function is still pumping at capacity, and the sound of it is laughter. He laughs when he checks the American Airlines monitor and learns that her plane is only now landing, and he laughs when he remembers that she had had to check her luggage, since she had taken her running and swimming clothes and the creams she has for every body part; and again he laughs when he sees that Carousel D is labeled “AA 211, Dallas,” which is the flight she was on, and then the carousel starts to spin and he recognizes the first suitcase to emerge and rushes to retrieve it, but another hand deftly lifts it before he makes contact, and it’s hers.

“Lucinda!”

She looks up at him, startled.

“Cass?”

“Lucinda!”

“Wow, you did come.”

“Of course! I said I would.”

She smiles, and again there’s that slight tremor in her vermilion bow that softens the hardness that sometimes settles over it.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she says simply, and she kisses him sweetly,
and it doesn’t surprise him, and he relieves her of the green leather bag with the monogram “LM,” and they walk together toward the terminal exit.

“I’m tired,” she says.

“Of course you are. If you want to wait here, I’ll get the car and bring it round.”

“No, I want to walk. It’s the staying still that’s wearying.”

They settle into the car, and she leans back and closes her eyes, and the solemn joy he feels is the solemn joy that William James describes.

“Anything happen while I was gone?” she asks.

A solemn joy, James had written, preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness. A solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent.

“Well, I’m coming straight from the debate at Harvard.”

“Debate?”

“With Fidley.”

“Ah yes, Felix. You know that he and I published a paper together?”

“‘Mandelbaum Equilibria in Hostile Takeovers.’”

“Right! You fang him good?”

“I don’t know whether it would be what you would call good fanging. I think it was a good debate.”

“Well, who won?”

“I kind of think I did.”

“Kind of?”

“Afterward, Luke Nanovitch said, ‘Score one for our side.’”

“Luke Nanovitch was there?”

“Yes. A lot of Auerbach’s cartel were there. He must have ordered them to attend. Arthur Silver and Nicholas Duffy and Eliza Wandel and Marty Huffer.”

“Sounds like quite the event. Those are brand names.”

“There was only one brand name I wanted there. Lucinda Mandelbaum.”

She opens her eyes and looks sideways at Cass and smiles and then closes her eyes again and leans back.

“The debate is going up on my agent’s Web site, if you want to watch it. There were over a thousand people there. If I had had any idea, I would have been too terrified to show up.”

“My talk for Pappa is posted on the Internet, too, if you want to watch it.”

“Of course I want to watch it! The question is, will I understand it?”

“Maybe not all the technical points, but the general ideas, sure.”

“Is it related to the Mandelbaum Equilibrium?”

“Only tangentially. It’s related to regret.”

“Regret, as in wishing you could change the past?”

“Exactly. Regret is a form of counterfactual thinking, and it can be modeled in game theory. People measure how well their strategy was not only by what they win, but by what they
could
have won. I developed some mathematics that puts regret into the equations.”

“The mathematics of regret. It sounds hopeful.”

“Yes,” she says and smiles again, “it’s very hopeful,” and the silence in the car is charged with their intimacy and the sweet naturalness they’ve easily found their way back into.

“Something else happened while you were away.”

She opens her eyes and looks at him.

“What?”

“I want to show you when we get home. I’ve been looking forward all week to showing you.”

She smiles and leans back again.

“Oh, then, it’s something good.”

“Yes, very good.”

“I’d thought for a moment it was something bad.”

“Bad? Why?”

“Your voice sounded ominous.”

“Ominous?”

“Well, solemn. I thought maybe some long-lost love of yours had shown up on our doorstep.”

“Well, that, too,” he says, and they both laugh.

They’ve exited onto Storrow Drive now, and there’s Weeks Bridge rising up before them, and Cass says, “The first night you were gone, I couldn’t sleep, and I finally just went for a walk at four a.m., and I found myself on Weeks Bridge,” and he points right and her eyes follow where he’s pointing. “The river was frozen except where it flowed through the three arches. It looked as if a cathedral had been carved into the ice.”

“Has it melted now?”

“Yes.”

“Too bad. It sounds sublime.”

“That’s exactly the right word. That’s the word I had thought at the time. Sublime.”

She smiles again, and they cross back over Larz Andersen Bridge and through Harvard Square, and Cass is contemplating how irresistible that drunken sense is that makes you feel that you and the world are in silent cahoots.

“Was Fidley fierce?”

“Pretty fierce.”

“Yes, I imagine he’d be a tough antagonist.”

“Before I even walked into the place, he was intimidating the poor Agnostic Chaplain of Harvard.”

She opens her eyes.

“Did you say the Agnostic Chaplain of Harvard?”

“I did. It was the Agnostic Chaplaincy that sponsored the debate.”

“How droll!”

“Yes,” he says, laughing, “it
is
droll!”

“I guess I’ll never understand the religious mind.”

“What about the agnostic mind?”

“No, not that one either.”

They drive down Massachusetts Avenue and turn onto Upland Road, and he pulls into the driveway, and the light from the streetlamp falls lavishly on them both.

“You look so tired I feel I should carry you in.”

She smiles. “I feel so tired I might let you.”

He gets her suitcase out of the backseat and shoulders her computer bag and her purse, and they go through their gate and up the porch stairs, and he unlocks the door, and they climb the narrow stairs to their first floor side by side.

“Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll make you some tea?”

“I ought to unpack first. I always unpack first thing when I get home.”

“I’ll help you unpack later. You just sit and have some tea. Are you hungry?”

“I ate dinner during the stopover in Dallas. What about you? Have you eaten?”

“I guess I haven’t. I didn’t have time after the debate.”

“Hungry?”

“Not at all. We can both have some tea and some McVities Original Digestive Biscuits. Heath and Heather Night Time or Rather Jolly Earl Grey?”

“I’ll have the Rather Jolly Passionfruit.” She smiles and angles her head coyly.

“My girl,” he says, his voice a little hoarse with emotion.

He puts the kettle on, and then gets her suitcase and trots it up to their bedroom. He knows how disciplined she is, so that the sight of it sitting there, unattended to, will spoil her fun. He comes back down, and she’s settled onto the couch, her shoes thrown off, and her long legs curled beneath her.

“I feel quite decadent not unpacking straightaway, but I guess I can be a bad girl sometimes.”

“Of course you can. Life’s a thrill!”

She’s wearing one of her short skirts, this one tight and black with pinstripes, and a pearl-gray sweater, and her languor is luscious, and he wonders whether he should put off telling her his news, but he can’t wait any longer.

He has the Harvard letter out on their dining-room table, and he walks over and picks it up and hands it to her without a word.

She places it on her lap and tilts slightly downward to read it, the fluffy halo of her pale hair falling away to reveal the lotus stem of the back of her neck, and Cass, standing there above her, gazes lovingly down on it. He would bend and softly kiss it, but she hates to be disturbed while she reads, even if it’s just the ingredient list on a food product, and he restrains himself from placing his lips on the tender exposure of her sweet neck. She straightens her back and stands and hands the letter back to Cass.

“How nice for you,” she says. Her voice sounds as if it has turned blue with cold, and the coldness has hardened her thin upper lip, and the sight of it, the transformation it casts over her face, brings an ungainly unreality into the room.

She turns away, and as soon as she does, and he doesn’t see her face, he’s sure that he hasn’t seen what he thought he had seen. She’s heading toward the stairs to their second floor, and there’s a howling sound, a long thin note as if of pain, and he realizes it’s the teakettle boiling.

“Wait a sec,” he says, and runs to the kitchen to take the kettle off and runs back to the living room, and she isn’t there. He starts heading up the stairs, but she hears his footsteps and calls down, “I’ll be down jolly soon,” so he turns around and heads back into the kitchen, and mechanically starts to make their tea.

He figures that her obsessional discipline has overpowered her, her sense of order asserting its tyranny. She’s unpacking, and then she’ll be down.

He arranges the biscuits on a plate and sets them out on the table with folded napkins, and he has strawberries, too, which he washes and hulls, and he scoops some of Lucinda’s Double Devon Cream into a bowl, and she still hasn’t come down from the bedroom.

She’s put out, he understands that. Her voice gets British when she’s annoyed, and that “jolly soon” was, to use her word, ominous. He had made a terrible mistake in not telling her immediately about Harvard’s offer. His wiser self has known it all week long and made him feel guilty. She read the date on the letter, and she can see that it was posted a week ago, and it’s jarring to learn that your lover is capable of such expert dissembling. If he can hide this particular thing so well, who knows what else he can hide? Of course she’s upset, she has every right to be. But he’ll make it clear to her that he’s not the kind to keep secrets from her, and that he never will again, never. And he shouldn’t have told anyone else either, certainly not Roz, and he’ll confess to Lucinda that he did, and he’ll hope that she will forgive him.

He wonders whether he ought to go up to her now. He knows that she’s hurt, and the longer she dwells on it without their talking, the more firmly the hurt will take hold. He knows this as a psychologist, and he knows this as a man. He moves toward the stairs and begins to climb them, heavily, so as to give her fair warning, and again she calls that she’ll be down soon and just to wait.

The tea has gone cold, and he empties out the two cups in the sink. Lucinda likes her tea just short of scalding, and he puts the kettle up again,
and steps out from the kitchen, and Lucinda is standing there in the living room. She’s holding the green leather suitcase in one hand, her briefcase and purse in another.

“I thought you were unpacking,” he says stupidly.

She takes a big breath and puts her things down and then says, “We have to talk,” and in those four words he knows it all.

“This isn’t going to work,” she says.

“Because of the way that I told you about the Harvard offer.”

“That’s part of it. The insensitivity with which you just flung the offer in my face, not even waiting for me to unpack, with that terrible gloating on your face—well, it’s hard to take. I hadn’t realized how competitive you are.”