36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [18]

“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.

IV The Argument from the Irrepressible Past

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?”

“Lucinda? Who the hell is Lucinda? It’s me! Roz!”

“Roz Margolis?”

“Is there another?”

“Roz. My God. Roz. My God.”

“For a famous atheist, you sure call out to the deity often enough there, sweetie.”

Roz is laughing, girlish peals that contrast with her husky voice. It brings her home to him as nothing else could. Say what you will about Roz Margolis, she certainly knows how to laugh.