Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

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.