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.
“Roz,” he repeats. There’s still some small chance he’s dreaming.
Roslyn Margolis had been Cass’s girlfriend years ago, when he had first come to Frankfurter to study with Jonas Elijah Klapper. She had spent ten months at Harvard, and that’s how long she and Cass had been together. Still, those ten months had been something. They had been so packed with drama that they had left the impression of being ten years, ten decades, ten eternities.
They had never lost touch. Over the years, he had been wakened often enough in the middle of the night to answer the phone and hear Roz on the other end, always calling from some remote time zone, miscalculating the hour that it was for Cass, apologizing profusely in between her laughter and questions and unbelievable news. News from Roz always came filed under “Unbelievable.”
“Cass, I can’t believe how famous you’ve suddenly gotten yourself. It’s incredible! I’ve heard you on NPR at least a hundred times. And I read that feature in Time magazine. The atheist with a soul! Since when are you an atheist? I remember when you were contemplating the Kabbalistic meaning of potato kugel!”
“Where are you calling from, Roz? Are you still studying the fearsome people of the Amazon rain forest?”
“No. I’m here!”
“Where ‘here’?”
“Cambridge! I’m studying the fearsome people of Cambridge!”
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s a good thing I’m not the sensitive type, Cass. You’re supposed to be shouting out, ‘Yippee! Glory be! Hallelujah!’ Or whatever you atheists with souls call out in your ecstasy!”
Cass moves the phone receiver slightly away from his rattled ear. He’s becoming increasingly convinced that this is no dream.
“Well, contain your excitement, because I’m going to be in your Roz-starved arms in a few minutes! I’m calling from my car! I’m just passing Porter Square now. What do I do, make a right or a left?”
“Neither! Listen Roz, I can’t wait to see you, but I’m not even dressed and…”
“Not dressed? Okay, I just went through a red light!”
“And I’ve got an important meeting this morning.”
“I’ll drive you! I’m already in the car.”
“Roz, you can’t come now.”
“But I’m here, Cass! I’m literally here! You can’t stop me.”
How literally true Cass knows this to be.
The doorbell is ringing.
“Guess who-oo!” She’s laughing into the telephone. “You know, I thought of giving you some advance warning, but I know how much you love spontaneity and- Well, will you look at that? Here you are! Cass! Sweetie!”
Cass has opened the door in his blue terry-cloth bathrobe and slippers, and Roz has thrown her arms around him in a viselike grip, nuzzling him on the neck so that her last words come out muffled.
“Roz,” Cass is saying as he tries to loose himself from Roz’s amazing clutch. Or not so amazing. Roz has to be in tip-top shape for her field-work. Her sheer physical presence has certainly helped her to gain the respect of some serious hunter-gatherers, who had named her Suwäayaiwä, which translates, at least according to Roz, as “a whole lot of woman.”
“Roz.” Cass can’t help himself, he’s laughing along with her. “Come on, let go of me. You’re hurting. Let me get a good look at you.”
Those last are the magic words. Obediently, Roz drops her arms from around Cass’s neck and takes a giant step back on his front porch. She wafts her arms out into the air and executes a little pirouette, something you would think would make a woman of her height look silly, but Roz brings it off with panache. She’s always been quite the dancer. She had certainly led Cass a wild dance in their day.
“Roz, you look fantastic!”
“Don’t I?” She puts her two hands together in a fist and shakes them above her head from right to left, a champion’s gesture.
“No, really, Roz. No joke. You look… you look just amazing.”
Of course, there have been significant changes in her appearance since Cass has seen her last, but, remarkably, the changes seem to be all for the better.
Roz has to be forty-six, forty-seven,… no, Roz is nearing fifty. When they broke up, Cass had been twenty-two, stranded on the shoals of a graduate-school debacle, and Roz had just completed her Ph.D., had gotten herself a contract to turn the dissertation into a book, and had nabbed herself a plum tenure-track job in the Anthropology Department at Berkeley.
In the interim, she’s become a blonde of various artfully alternating and blended tones, and it suits her. Everything about her appearance suits her.
The Roz whom Cass had loved wore disintegrating jeans or long hippie skirts and preferred to go barefoot, as she had in the rain forest. She could never get the bottoms of her feet entirely clean.