Pavel Yarnau, the smarmy chair of the Psychology Department, finally called a halt to the heated Q & A, thanking “our speaker for providing us all with such a lively time and much food for thought. And now let’s continue the discussion over more mundane fare, not to speak of drink. I ask you all to join me upstairs in the Leah and Marty Feingold Room for the reception in honor of Professor Lipkin.”
“Well, this has been fun,” Lucinda said to Cass as they were both standing, waiting for their row to clear out so that they could proceed. Did she mean merely Lipkin’s talk or the communion between them? Her eyes were scanning the crowd. “Are you going to that dinner for Lipkin?” she asked without really looking at him.
“No, I didn’t sign up.”
Cass rarely put his name on the sign-up sheets that had slots for ten faculty members and four graduate students to entertain the speaker at one of the local restaurants that had sprouted up along the formerly decrepit and now almost hip Maudlin Street. With the inflated property values of Cambridge and Boston driving chefs to outlying areas, Weedham, Massachusetts, was enjoying a restaurant renaissance, trendy little spots blossoming amid the blight.
“Well, then, I guess I’ll see you soon,” and she turned away, apologetically squeezing past the colleagues over whom she’d just recently stepped. Cass stood there watching her as she strode up to the podium. She and Lipkin shook hands cordially, even enthusiastically. Lucinda was smiling broadly as she spoke to him, and he was laughing as he answered her. There were obviously no hard feelings between these MVPs.
Cass watched for a while, his head cocked and his crooked smile in place, until everybody started heading out to the reception, lining up behind Lipkin and Lucinda like retinue behind royalty. Cass skipped the reception, and went home happy, chewing over it all. It wasn’t so much food for thought. It was ambrosia.
He saw Lucinda Mandelbaum two days later, at a university building where faculty meetings were held. She was standing next to Sebastian Held, both of them tanking up on caffeine in the few minutes before the meeting began.
Cass hated faculty meetings and skipped as many as he could get away with. Watching his colleagues’ intense engagement in the proceedings, the eloquence and pedantry slathered on points too minute for any but the best-trained minds to discern, he would be overtaken by his own failure to grasp human nature. But today he had looked forward to coming.
Lucinda, dressed in a pair of tailored black slacks and a pale-gray sweater matching the color of her eyes, seemed deep in conversation with Sebastian Held, but Cass strode right over and greeted them both enthusiastically.
“Hello,” Lucinda had said, smiling back at him with formally polite blankness, reaching out her hand to shake his with a briskly firm shake. “Lucinda Mandelbaum.”
“Yes, of course. I’m Cass. Cass Seltzer.”
“Nice to meet you, Cass.”
“Oh, we’ve already met,” he said, stopping himself before he could wail out his dismay: Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember how we laughed together like careless gods?
“Oh, sorry. I’m terrible with faces. Remind me of what you do?”
“Psychology of religion.”
“Psychology of religion?” Her thin upper lip curled slightly, not quite achieving a smile. “As a branch of abnormal psychology? Or are you one of those people who try to offer an evolutionary explanation for group madness?”
“Well, not exactly. What interests me more is the phenomenology of religion in all its varieties. What does it feel like from the inside? What sorts of terrors does it address, and what sorts of emotional growth does it both block and enhance? And how does the religious response manifest itself, even in ways that may not seem religious?”
Her lip curled a bit more, and it was a smile, and she lifted her chin so that her throat was exposed.
“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 mc2. 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.”