Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

That had been Roz’s laughter, not his own. He loved Roz, but that didn’t mean he had to adopt her cynical view of Professor Jonas Elijah Klapper. Gideon and the rest of the seminar would only have been awed by Jonas’s capacity for throwing himself so completely into another Weltanschauung, appropriating it so that he could understand it as those within could not hope to, reading it as he read the great poets, so that they yielded their innards to him far more torrentially than the poets themselves could have experienced, so that he might crisscross all the vast reaches of human conception and see its arteries coursing with the ichor of psychopoiesis.

And if he’d charged the car service and the leather boots and kaputa and Russian sable shtreimel to his discretionary funds, so what? This was research as legitimate as any, a measure of the creative limits to which a master like Jonas Elijah Klapper would travel, as daring an experimenter as any particle physicist with an accelerator-no, more daring, because it was his own soul that he offered up in the spirit of empiricism.

Jonas Elijah Klapper was like William James, who had experimented with nitrous oxide in order to determine whether it could induce something like mystical experiences. It could, he found. He wrote about it in The Varieties of Religious Experience . Cass pictured William James, sitting in his worsted-wool vest behind a closed door in his office in Emerson Hall and stoned out of his gourd, a high-pitched giggle emerging from the spread of his long Victorian beard, as he tried to write down the metaphysics floodlighting his mind: “What’s a mistake but a kind of take? What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea? Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment… Agreement-disagreement!! Emotion-motion!!!… Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same! Good and evil reconciled in a laugh! It escapes, it escapes! But- What escapes, WHAT escapes?”

You’d be laughing at William James, too, he chided himself, but William James would never have laughed at Jonas Elijah Klapper. The thought helped to sober Cass more effectively than picturing starving Ethiopian children, but it was a good thing that Professor Klapper, absorbed by the passing scenery, was disinclined to speak. The professor loved being driven in large fancy automobiles. Zackary Kreiser, who chauffeured him back and forth between Cambridge and Weedham, owned a cramped jalopy that rattled him to the limits of endurance. Might he prevail upon the university to procure a car of this model to be used soley to convey him between his place of work and domicile?

The professor was overtaken by a brief spasm of loquacity when he saw the forest-green sign announcing that they were on the Merritt Parkway, a scenic highway, he explained, landscaped with native plantings and shrubs, and the result of a Depression-era public-works project.

“To keep with the aesthetics, there were to be no intersections of local roads, in consequence of which sixty-eight bridges-no two of them alike, and with expert masonwork and ornamentation, some representative of the Art Deco movement, which was then in its heyday-were constructed to channel the local traffic aerially. I happen to remember the surname of the architect who designed all sixty-eight bridges, because it was so droll. The name was Dunkelberger.

“Imagine Dunkelberger as a man of letters, a man of the abstract instead of the concrete,” said Professor Klapper. “No one would have read him! But ‘designed by Dunkelberger’ has never stopped a motorist from traversing a bridge.”

And, succumbing to his wicked sense of humor, Jonas Elijah Klapper went into the contortions that were his laughter, and Cass, still harboring strange laughter within him, was happy to join in.

Cass comes up the back stairs of his apartment, which lead directly into the kitchen. He pauses at the stove to put some water up for tea and then goes into the living room.

Last night had been his second night of sleeplessness this week, and the deprivation is taking its toll. He had stayed alert during his early-morning taping of an interview for National Public Radio’s The Cutting Edge . The interviewer had introduced him in his famous plummy tones as “Cass Seltzer, the eminent philosopher and one of our deepest divers into the choppy waters churning between religion and science.” Cass has learned to take it all in stride, even the mislabeling of him as a philosopher, which used to embarrass him, making him feel as if he had illegitimately been awarded a few extra IQ points. He had rushed from the radio studio to Frankfurter’s campus, to teach his afternoon advanced seminar, “Psychology of Religion.” The topic today had been the Concept of the Quest in religious contexts.

But at four in the afternoon, he had slumped. He had begged off keeping his date with Mona for a drink, pleading exhaustion, which was true but also convenient.

On and off, all day long, he’s been thinking of Lucinda, wondering how her talk would go, is going, had gone. She had set the bar high. Anything less than spectacular success will be counted as failure, and Lucinda isn’t made for failure, in much the same way as he hadn’t been made for success, despite the strange happenings of the last year, which he has spent walking around in someone else’s coat.

He hasn’t turned on any of the lights, but a soft glow from the street-lamp drapes itself across various sections of the furniture and rug, a black-and-gold-and-orange adaptation of a Klimt painting that had been left behind, along with everything else, by Pascale when she took off with her plundering neurologist.

When he found this place, he couldn’t wait to show it to Pascale. It occupies the two top floors of a spacious Victorian house on gracious Upland Road. It has three bedrooms, high ceilings, and ample light; the rent was surprisingly reasonable, too. But Pascale had at first balked.

“It is for us too much space.”

She had scowled, her thin, dark brows drawing themselves into one elegant line of rejection. Too much space seemed an odd drawback. Perhaps what was in her mind was that her emphatic “No!” had not entirely vanquished the delusions of breeding to which Cass had several times confessed. What did her husband have in mind with all those bedrooms? But the dormered room that would be her study, with windows looking out at the park across the way, had made her relent. Sheltered in the closest corner of the park were a few playthings for children-a seesaw, a jungle gym. Perhaps she pictured herself hanging upside down there, for the vertigo and the images. Or perhaps she detected the spirits of the muses thick in the air around her. She had stood there a long time and had finally turned to Cass, her trademark red lips smiling, and said “Yes.”

There’s a little side yard with a blue spruce that reaches down to the ground in an invitingly cozy way. He often pictures it inhabited by little people playing hide-and-seek. “Please close the gate, remember our children.” The inscription provokes a feeling akin to nostalgia, only directed at the future.

The kettle is whistling, and he gets up and makes himself some strong tea and takes it back to the couch and picks up the phone and dials Lucinda’s cell and hears her voice on the recorded message and leaves one for her:

“It’s me. I’ve been thinking about you all day, wondering how your talk went. Call me when you can. I love you.”

Before he’s even replaced the receiver, he’s gagging on regret. What had he done? What had possessed him? He’s circling the living room in a blurry haze, and he’s bashing his forehead with his open palm to the down-down-down beat of his idiocy.