36 Arguments for the Existence of God (7 page)

“It must be frustrating to deal with irrationality.”

“How can one be a psychologist and not deal with irrationality?”

“If I thought that were true, I’d never have gone near the field.”

“Well, I guess it’s a good thing for the field, then, that you don’t think it’s true.”

“But is it a good thing for the field that you do?”

Cass studied her face, which seemed both serious and friendly. He couldn’t tell from it, or from her serious and friendly voice, whether her question was ingenuous or sarcastic. Either way, he didn’t know how to respond. Lucinda held his gaze for several more ambiguous moments and then turned back to Held to resume their interrupted conversation.

He didn’t say more than ten words to Lucinda, nor she to him, for the rest of the semester.

Autumn and winter had gone by without his taking much notice. He must have shown up and taught his classes; he had his students’ class evaluations to prove it. And they were pretty good evaluations, too, considering he couldn’t remember a thing about the classes, neither preparing for them, nor giving them, nor reading the papers and grading the exams he had apparently assigned and administered. He had done it all sleepwalking with his eyes open, instructing the youth by day and writing, writing, writing by night.

Lucinda’s question to him, so direct and so undecipherable, had stunned him, and he needed to answer her. He needed to extract some answer out of the questions that had been roiling in him for the past two decades, the questions that he had lived out with Jonas Elijah Klapper and the questions he had lived out with Azarya. He had never cashed in that experience for hard insight.

Had he tried out any of his new thoughts on his students? He couldn’t remember, but a few of the more perceptive class evaluations had spoken of how it was cool to watch Professor Seltzer arguing with himself. “Sometimes it could get a little weird, like that dude at the end of
Psycho
. But in a good way.”

No doubt he had been distracted. It had been all he could do just to keep up with his classes and his fantasies. He never skimped on his fantasies, no matter how busy he was. He didn’t need to, since they blended with all he saw and thought and wrote and said. It was the love of the impossible that made everything possible. He was battered by the beating
wings of unlimited desire, but they lifted him, too. Battered, emboldened, and exalted, and all at once.

Mona was convinced, despite his disclaimers, that he had stopped attending the Psychology Outside Speaker lectures because he couldn’t stand the circus they had become—“what with that Mandelbaum creature performing in all three rings at once, juggler, lion-tamer, tightrope walker, bareback horseback rider, lady on the flying trapeze …”

“That’s five rings, Mona.”

“And counting. She’s such an insufferable showoff. She’s destroyed the whole atmosphere of our department. Do you know, that pig Pavel doesn’t even go through the motions of asking for questions anymore? He just turns to her with an obscene leer and squeals, ‘Lucinda?’ and the whole place cracks up, including the star—by which I don’t mean the outside speaker. It’s revolting. The whole display is revolting. Everybody bows down to that creature, and only because she’s a bully.”

“Surely there’s more to it than that.”

“You mean the fucking Mandelbaum Equilibrium? Cass, you think anybody here understands it better than you and me? They don’t know the Mandelbaum Equilibrium from e = fucking mc
²
. For all they know, it’s got as much to do with psychology as my grandmother’s blintzes. It’s not like mindfulness. Just because everybody can understand mindfulness, and can’t understand what the Mandelbaum Equilibrium is even
about
, they let her get away with carrying on as if the rest of us are just her movable props. Do you know, people have told me that they have to keep introducing themselves to her over and over again, because she’s just not mindful enough to remember who anyone here is? For some reason, she always seems to remember me, though. I’m one of the few whose names she actually knows, although for some reason she seems to think I’m Hungarian.”

Cass had been surprised by Mona’s severity toward Lucinda, especially since he had heard Mona complaining that people don’t let women academics get away with the kind of high-handedness that their male counterparts habitually employ. He would have thought Mona would be the first to applaud Lucinda for her ballsiness.

Cass had barely been on campus fall semester. He’d taken a leave of absence
because of the extensive book tour the publisher had set up for him: twenty-one cities in two months, and then another month spent in England, Scotland, and Ireland. He’d kept in touch through sporadic e-mail with Mona, who tried mindfully to keep the communications focused on him, “who, after all, is the only one of the two of us who’s suddenly leading the life of Cindefuckingrella.”

He had returned from London only a few days before. He was coming to campus now to gather any mail that might have accumulated. It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and it was already evening, and the campus was deserted except for a few foreign students forlornly clumping here and there, their footsteps echoing with melancholia on the abandoned Frankfurter concrete. The moodiness of an early evening in late November softened the hard outlines of the aggressive architecture. The bluing air was crisped and smoke-sweetened, and the leaves crunched gratifyingly under his feet as he walked up the dirt path from the faculty parking lot that was closest to the Katzenbaum Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center.

The Katzenbaum Center was built in the style that prevailed on Frankfurter’s campus, meaning that it was a rectilinear, flat-roofed building, made of red brick with an exposed steel structure, a large show of glass, and a generous helping of concrete, which was stained red to match the bricks. The campus went heavy on the concrete. This, Cass had been told, was the International Style of architecture, which had been considered boldly cutting-edge after the Second World War, when Frankfurter had been established, its Master Building Plan embarked upon. To Cass it looked like the style of architecture favored by the wealthy Reform temples and Jewish community centers of northern New Jersey, where he had grown up. He associated this architecture less with Le Corbusier than with Hadassah. The founders of the school, together with the money they had raised, had been Jewish, and the school, though non-denominational, still attracted a disproportionate number of Jewish students.

Cass was just opening the heavy glass door when Lucinda materialized on the other side of it. She had taken the stairs down from her sixth-floor office rather than using the elevator. He saw the dark figure swiftly descending, almost a blur of motion, though he hadn’t realized that it
was she. Why would he have realized, when a hundred times a day he had seen her superimposed on his surroundings?

The vision of Lucinda was always whisper-close, her phantom elbow ready to poke him playfully in the ribs. She had stood beside him on a sidewalk in Portland, Oregon, staring up at his illuminated name on the marquis of a big old opera house that he would be speaking in that night, both of them shaking their heads at the incongruity. She had walked the moonlit fog in London, floated by his side in fabled Oxford, teased him about his debate with Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, at London’s Jewish Book Festival, on reason and faith. So why wouldn’t he see her now, approaching him across the sterile vestibule of Katzenbaum, as he stood there holding the door wide open for whoever it really was?

She must have felt the cool, crisp air sweeping in. She looked up at the man standing there holding the door for her, his head tilted to one side and a loopy smile wobbling about on his pleasantly discomfited face.

He expected that she wouldn’t recognize him. He would simply smile at her without saying a word, as he held the door so that she could pass him by and disappear into the darkening world.

Lucinda looked up into his face, did a double take, and then burst out laughing.

“What?” he said. He could feel his embarrassingly responsive complexion beginning a slow burn. He had said nothing, and already she was laughing at him.

Without a word, she reached into her satchel and pulled out the familiar book, with its laminated foil jacket. It was a jolt of intimacy to see his progeny emerging from out of her bag.

“I’m not very good with faces, but I’d be willing to bet good money that you’re the author of this book. Wait a minute.” She opened the back flap and held the picture side by side against the original, the soft cuff of her winter coat slightly caressing his blazing cheek. “Yes. Don’t deny it. You penned this tome. You’re Cass Seltzer!”

“You’re reading it.”

“Not really. I’ve simply incorporated it into my weight-lifting regimen.”

“That’s why I added all those extra arguments for God’s existence. The
publisher was supposed to mention its physical-training possibilities on the back cover.”

“I find it makes a rather good stepladder, too. Easily transported from room to room. Had you intended that as well?”

“As a stepladder to enlightenment!”

Lucinda laughed, throwing back her head. She had a brave and sweeping peregrine of a laugh. And just like that it was back, reconstituted, the sense of blessed ease they had shared inside that dappled afternoon. Cass felt the way her whispering breath had warmed his ear.

“Aren’t you going to ask me whether I like your book? Or are all other opinions beside the point now that the
New York Times
has found it ‘invariably engaging and provocative,’ and
The New York Review of Books
has described you as ‘the William James for the twenty-first century’?”

He couldn’t believe it. She had actually memorized the choice bits from his reviews that were used in the ads for the book. Not even his mother had memorized the quotes.

“I’m afraid to ask you what you think of it. I’m afraid you’re going to fang me.”

“You don’t have to worry about that. The fanger of my fangee is my friend.”

“Funny, I don’t think of myself as a fanger.”

“Oh, but you are, my friend, a fanger of no mean talent. You fanged God!”

“Can I have them quote that on the cover of the paperback?
‘A fanger of no mean talent:
Lucinda Mandelbaum, author of the Mandelbaum Equilibrium.’”

She quickly cast her eyes downward, so that her long lashes rested on the ridge of her cheekbones for a few seconds, and when she raised her eyes again it was with a different expression altogether.

Lucinda’s lips were thin, and if there was any imperfection in her face, it was in her stiff upper lip. But now her upper lip quivered slightly, and the transformation was complete. It was a thing counter, original, spare, and strange, what had happened to her face. He could imagine no face more beautiful in all the world, no face more touching in its exposure. He could never go back and recover the face that had been there only moments before.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“For what?” he whispered back.

“For saying that that’s who I am. That that’s who I still am, even if I’m here.”

Cass could have taken offense, but he didn’t. With that strong sense of gazing directly into another, soul to soul, of seeing it all and all at once, as if it were an endless vista laid out before his eyes, he grasped the sorrows behind Lucinda.

Her move to Frankfurter had obviously cost her dearly, but she never let on. She could have just bided her time here instead of giving it— giving
them
—everything she had. There was nobody at Frankfurter she needed to impress. But she carried on as she always had, performing at peak, a prizefighting champ. And just for the sheer sport of the thing, for the reasons sustained in her own ardent heart. She wasn’t competing against anyone but herself. That’s what people like Mona didn’t get. He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.

Lucinda Mandelbaum, of the famous Mandelbaum Equilibrium, just kept playing the game with her heart and soul, making everybody here feel that by her very presence they had all been admitted into the insider game, when all the while she was aware that that insider game was transpiring elsewhere, away from Frankfurter and away from Lucinda Mandelbaum, and maybe she would never get herself back into it the way she had been, the way she had been born to be.

That transformed face of hers that she was holding out to him told him everything. It was astounding that she would trust him with the sight of it. What had he done to earn the trust of Lucinda Mandelbaum?

He saw the fragility within the fanger, the willed boldness and gumption of this brave and wonderful girl.

He saw the dappledness of her.

Glory be to God for dappled things, he silently quoted his second-favorite poet.

Despite the metaphysical exertions of his night, suspended over sublimity on Weeks Bridge, Cass remembers that he has a meeting with Shimmy Baumzer at eleven in the morning. So, before settling down again beneath the luxury of Lucinda’s comforter, he sets his alarm for 9 a.m., and then, just to be safe, he sets the second alarm clock, on Lucinda’s side. It’s already after six, the bedroom on the top floor of the duplex brightening, and he wonders whether he’ll be able to fall asleep at all, hugging the last tattered bits of epiphany and Lucinda’s fragrant pillow … and is awakened into terrifying confusion, the awful ringing setting his frantic heart to pounding, while he is desperately trying to make it stop, scuttling back and forth across the mattress, fumbling with the two alarm clocks—which one the hell
is
it?—until he finally realizes it isn’t an alarm clock at all.

It’s the telephone.

“Hello?”

“It’s me!”

“Lucinda?”

“Lu
cin
da? Who the hell is Lu
cin
da? It’s me! Roz!”

“Roz Margolis?”

“Is there another?”

“Roz. My God. Roz. My God.”