My soul is blotto, he says, and laughs out loud, and William James himself would approve. Straight ahead of him, Weeks Bridge is spectrally glowing, the wide white steps leading into a self-enclosed space of solemn emotions, and he gazes lovingly at it as he makes a right onto Memorial Drive.
The traffic light on the corner of Memorial Drive and JFK, which is always red, is green for him, and as he turns left and glides over the river, he glances left to get another glimpse of the mystical radiance of Weeks Bridge, and it induces a surge of love that would be more appropriate if directed toward a person than a brickwork structure. He turns left onto Storrow Drive and gets another loving look at the bridge and at the redbrick and pristine jewel-colored domes and spires of the Harvard skyline, the architecture that had impressed him twenty years ago with the insistence of its purity and American authenticity, and his love for it, too, is inappropriately tender.
As he makes the right that will take him to the turnpike, he realizes that the reason these loves feel as if they’re directed toward a person is that they are. All are expressions of his love for Lucinda. It’s Lucinda who has reset the vector of his life, giving a vigorous spin to the wheel of his fortune. No wonder his soul is intoxicated-shit-faced, as Mona might put it and he loves Mona again, now, too, mindful Mona, front and center-and he laughs as he exits for Logan Airport, and then parks the car in the short-term lot.
He’s twenty minutes late and his Yes function is still pumping at capacity, and the sound of it is laughter. He laughs when he checks the American Airlines monitor and learns that her plane is only now landing, and he laughs when he remembers that she had had to check her luggage, since she had taken her running and swimming clothes and the creams she has for every body part; and again he laughs when he sees that Carousel D is labeled “AA 211, Dallas,” which is the flight she was on, and then the carousel starts to spin and he recognizes the first suitcase to emerge and rushes to retrieve it, but another hand deftly lifts it before he makes contact, and it’s hers.
“Lucinda!”
She looks up at him, startled.
“Cass?”
“Lucinda!”
“Wow, you did come.”
“Of course! I said I would.”
She smiles, and again there’s that slight tremor in her vermilion bow that softens the hardness that sometimes settles over it.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she says simply, and she kisses him sweetly, and it doesn’t surprise him, and he relieves her of the green leather bag with the monogram “LM,” and they walk together toward the terminal exit.
“I’m tired,” she says.
“Of course you are. If you want to wait here, I’ll get the car and bring it round.”
“No, I want to walk. It’s the staying still that’s wearying.”
They settle into the car, and she leans back and closes her eyes, and the solemn joy he feels is the solemn joy that William James describes.
“Anything happen while I was gone?” she asks.
A solemn joy, James had written, preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness. A solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent.
“Well, I’m coming straight from the debate at Harvard.”
“Debate?”
“With Fidley.”
“Ah yes, Felix. You know that he and I published a paper together?”
“‘Mandelbaum Equilibria in Hostile Takeovers.’”
“Right! You fang him good?”
“I don’t know whether it would be what you would call good fanging. I think it was a good debate.”
“Well, who won?”
“I kind of think I did.”
“Kind of?”
“Afterward, Luke Nanovitch said, ‘Score one for our side.’”
“Luke Nanovitch was there?”
“Yes. A lot of Auerbach’s cartel were there. He must have ordered them to attend. Arthur Silver and Nicholas Duffy and Eliza Wandel and Marty Huffer.”
“Sounds like quite the event. Those are brand names.”
“There was only one brand name I wanted there. Lucinda Mandelbaum.”
She opens her eyes and looks sideways at Cass and smiles and then closes her eyes again and leans back.
“The debate is going up on my agent’s Web site, if you want to watch it. There were over a thousand people there. If I had had any idea, I would have been too terrified to show up.”
“My talk for Pappa is posted on the Internet, too, if you want to watch it.”
“Of course I want to watch it! The question is, will I understand it?”
“Maybe not all the technical points, but the general ideas, sure.”
“Is it related to the Mandelbaum Equilibrium?”
“Only tangentially. It’s related to regret.”
“Regret, as in wishing you could change the past?”
“Exactly. Regret is a form of counterfactual thinking, and it can be modeled in game theory. People measure how well their strategy was not only by what they win, but by what they could have won. I developed some mathematics that puts regret into the equations.”
“The mathematics of regret. It sounds hopeful.”
“Yes,” she says and smiles again, “it’s very hopeful,” and the silence in the car is charged with their intimacy and the sweet naturalness they’ve easily found their way back into.
“Something else happened while you were away.”
She opens her eyes and looks at him.
“What?”
“I want to show you when we get home. I’ve been looking forward all week to showing you.”
She smiles and leans back again.
“Oh, then, it’s something good.”
“Yes, very good.”
“I’d thought for a moment it was something bad.”
“Bad? Why?”
“Your voice sounded ominous.”
“Ominous?”
“Well, solemn. I thought maybe some long-lost love of yours had shown up on our doorstep.”
“Well, that, too,” he says, and they both laugh.
They’ve exited onto Storrow Drive now, and there’s Weeks Bridge rising up before them, and Cass says, “The first night you were gone, I couldn’t sleep, and I finally just went for a walk at four a.m., and I found myself on Weeks Bridge,” and he points right and her eyes follow where he’s pointing. “The river was frozen except where it flowed through the three arches. It looked as if a cathedral had been carved into the ice.”
“Has it melted now?”
“Yes.”
“Too bad. It sounds sublime.”
“That’s exactly the right word. That’s the word I had thought at the time. Sublime.”
She smiles again, and they cross back over Larz Andersen Bridge and through Harvard Square, and Cass is contemplating how irresistible that drunken sense is that makes you feel that you and the world are in silent cahoots.
“Was Fidley fierce?”
“Pretty fierce.”
“Yes, I imagine he’d be a tough antagonist.”
“Before I even walked into the place, he was intimidating the poor Agnostic Chaplain of Harvard.”
She opens her eyes.
“Did you say the Agnostic Chaplain of Harvard?”
“I did. It was the Agnostic Chaplaincy that sponsored the debate.”
“How droll!”
“Yes,” he says, laughing, “it is droll!”
“I guess I’ll never understand the religious mind.”