36 Arguments for the Existence of God (4 page)

When Lucinda Mandelbaum entered the crowded auditorium of the Katzenbaum Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center at Frankfurter University for the inaugural Friday-afternoon Psychology Outside Speaker lecture of the new semester and rejected an aisle seat, instead clambering lithely over the legs, laps, and laptops of the assorted faculty members and graduate students, all of whom had been impatiently awaiting her maiden entrance, even though it was not she but, rather, Harold Lipkin of Rutgers University who was the invited speaker; and when she then slipped into the empty seat next to Cass Seltzer, bestowing on him a sweet little shrug of coy chagrin at coming in late and making a bit of a commotion in getting to him; and when she then proceeded, all through Lipkin’s lecture, entitled “The Myth of Moral Reason,” to address her running commentary on Lipkin’s efforts exclusively to Cass, so that Cass, who had in fact been looking forward to Lipkin’s lecture, seeing how the psychology of morality dovetailed with his own research on the psychology of religion, ended up missing a good part of it, instead chuckling appreciatively at Lucinda’s zingers and even managing to launch one himself that had made Lucinda snigger so enthusiastically that his good friend and colleague Mona Ganz, sitting several rows in front of them, her well-groomed girth just able to settle itself into the seat she always claimed for herself, front and center, swiveled her head around and then, determining the identity of the sniggerer, reversed the motion just as sharply—“like that kid in
The Exorcist,”
Lucinda observed, making Cass give vent to a chortle so disloyal that it certainly ought to have been swiftly followed by a stab of guilt, considering Mona’s devoted mindfulness toward him, especially during the ravaged weeks and months that had followed the post-aphasic Pascale’s first words to him from her hospital
bed, which, in their percussive rhythm and impeccable precision, “I must of necessity break your heart,” were as reflective of the poet that Pascale was
(La Sauvagerie et la certitude
, Prix Femina, 1987) as they were effective in dampening the desire of her husband to live out any and all possible forms of his future—it had been entirely by mistake.

Lucinda had thought that Cass Seltzer was someone else entirely. To be precise, she had thought that Cass Seltzer was their mutual colleague Sebastian Held, to whom she had been introduced last week at the welcome party that she thought the university had thrown for her. (Actually, she had been wrong. The party had been in honor of all the newly arrived faculty.)

Lipkin, a small man with a booming, pedantic, overenunciating style, was an excitable lecturer, who rose onto his well-shod tiny tiptoes as he hammered home his points. He was already launched at full steam in his oratorical trajectory, irrigating the first row with his spittle, speed-clicking his way through the PowerPoint presentation that swerved abruptly from brain scans of sophomores, neuroimaged in the throes of moral deliberation over whether they should, in theory, toss a hapless fat man onto the tracks in order to use his bulk to save five other men from an oncoming trolley, to sweeping conclusions that claimed to deliver final justice to John Rawls, not to speak of categorically laying to rest the imperative-rattling ghost of Immanuel Kant.

“He Kant possibly mean that” had been the quip of Cass’s that had been anointed by Lucinda’s titter.

Cass had never been good at this sort of thing, making fun and making light, but Lucinda’s proximity, or, more to the point, her having so deliberately chosen proximity to him, had revved up his wit. The Katzenbaum auditorium was subterranean and windowless, but it seemed to have become ungloomed ever since Lucinda claimed her seat, as if some of the dazzle from outdoors had been tracked in on the bottom of her shoes.

It was one of those September days, the sky looking like an inverted swimming pool, and the white-gold liquor of afternoon light drizzling through the leaf-heavy trees and pooling on lawns and walkways and the gleaming crowns of Frankfurter’s youth. Cass had quoted the line “Glory be to God for dappled things” to himself, which was from a favorite poem
by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as he made his way across the stippled campus. “Glory be to God for dappled things— / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; / Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings.” And then that stunning second stanza, beginning, “All things counter, original, spare, strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) …”

How was Cass to know that Lucinda Mandelbaum was slightly prosopagnosic, “prosopagnosia” being the technical term for an inability to recognize faces? Arguably, Lucinda’s prosopagnosia had nothing to do with any malfunctioning in her fusiform gyrus. Arguably, prosopagnosia, in the case of Lucinda, was more a matter of mental efficiency than deficiency. Lucinda tended, largely unconsciously, to group faces into kinds, and then was likely to exchange one of a kind for another of the same kind. She could often, when her mistake was discovered, reconstruct the logic of her unconscious taxonomy. Her confusions sometimes led to awkwardnesses, but Lucinda generally knew how to cover herself, and her errors more often amused than alarmed her.

“Did he say brain scans or brain scams?” Lucinda whispered now into Cass’s tingling pinna.

“Do Lipkins recognize the difference?” Cass had returned with breathtaking celerity.

Cass had never been quick on the verbal draw, and the years he had lived with Pascale had buried him deeper beneath his reticence. Pascale went after statements with ferocity, ripping them into phonetic shreds. It was her poetic technique. At least several of her poems had been the result of her free-verse attack on some phrase he had uttered, including the prize-winning
“Je ne peux pas te nier ça”:
“I can’t deny you that.”

There had been something lupine about Pascale Puissant, and, as much as he had loved her, it had turned him cautious. Her beauty—her pointed features, hollowed cheeks, burning black eyes—had always reminded him of a starved wolf. Even the gash across her mouth of her deep-red lipstick, often a bit smeared, suggested bloodstains from a wild meal of still-quivering flesh that had left her just as starved.

Narrow as a boy of twelve, her tiny derrière able to fit into Cass’s large palm, her voice, heavily accented, dissolving like smoke into thin air, Pascale was nonetheless a force with which to be reckoned. Her father, a
mathematician at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, in Bures–sur–Yvette, twenty kilometers outside of Paris, had chosen her name in honor of Blaise Pascal, who had founded mathematical probability theory when a gambler asked him for some rules to govern rational game-tabling.

After her parents divorced, when she was nine, Pascale had chosen to live with her father. It was pleasant for her at Bures-sur-Yvette, all the distracted mathematicians living together in housing owned by the Institut on parklike grounds, a playground in the middle with a jungle gym from which she had liked to hang upside down, “for the images and the vertigo.” All the children she played with were the offspring of mathematicians, which made them less annoying, in general, than typical children. Also, her father left her alone far more than her mother would have. So she chose to live with her father, therefore not with her mother, and therefore refused to see her mother anymore.

“Refused to see her? That seems extreme. Had she mistreated you?”

“No, not at all. What do you mean? I just told you that I had to
make
the decision. I had to fabricate it out of my will. If she had been a bad mother, then I wouldn’t have had to make the decision. The
situation”
— she pronounced it as a French word—“would have decided.”

“But why wouldn’t you see her anymore, just to visit, now and then?”

“Now and then.”
She paused for a few moments, and Cass wondered whether she was going to go to work on that expression, but she let it go. “No, there could be no
now and then
. If I had chosen to live with Marie-France, then it would have been exactly the same, then I would have refused to see Papa.”

“Marie-France? That’s your mother?”

“But
of course!
Who else?”

She glared. He wasn’t paying attention. She often glared, thinking that he was lacking in attention. She was wrong. When it came to Pascale, whatever it was Cass was lacking, it wasn’t attention.

“So it was more or less random, whether to live with your mother or father. It was more or less symmetrical. But then, once you decided, it was completely asymmetrical. He got all of you, and she got none.”

“It was still symmetrical, absolutely, but in the abstract. The symmetry was preserved,
absolument
, but in the abstract.”

She was annoyed with him. Her infinite eyes were darkening with impatience. Her scowl brought her brows together in one continuous line over her delicate but imperious nose. He was being slow, deliberately obtuse. He was very sweet, her Cass, and tried very hard to make her life easier. He believed that in doing all the household chores, the paying of the bills and the shopping and the cooking, and the dealing with the computer, and even doing her research in the Edna and Edgar Lipschitz Library at the Frankfurter University, where he taught, he could put himself, in his own small way, in sacred service to her muses. But occasionally, for reasons that eluded her, he was determined not to understand the simplest of things. It was a mystery to her. Also extremely annoying.

Sometimes, in order to show her that he really was following her, or to test his own comprehension, he would try to finish her sentences as she groped for the right English words, and if she smiled her red-toothed smile and said
“Exactement!”
his day was made. But there were times, too, when he chose the coward’s way and only pretended to know what she was going on about.

For example, her views on probability. Though she was named after the founder of probability theory, she thought the entire concept a perversion of reason. An event that happens happens. Its non-occurrence, therefore, cannot happen. Never, when something happens, can its not happening also happen. It is happening 100 percent, and it is 0 percent that it is not happening. And since a thing either happens or not, there is only 100 percent or 0 percent of the probability.
C’est logique!
Therefore, what is the probable but the confused? And what is the confused but the cowardly? And what is the cowardly but the immoral? And what is the immoral but the probable? It is full circle! Therefore—she always said this word with a special emphasis, equal accent on both syllables, and blowing a bit of air into
the f
, so that the aspirated phoneme seemed to ascend on the smoky fragrance of her voice—there is only the absolutely impossible, what they rightly call the thing with 0 probability, and the absolutely necessary, which they say has probability 1, Papa had informed her, but she had vehemently countered that, no, it must be measured as 100, or, better yet, as infinite, since certitude is infinite. There
fore
—maybe she had inherited the love of the adverb of consequence from mathematical Papa, or maybe, as Cass enjoyed picturing, all the children of
Bures-sur-Yvette, hanging upside down on the jungle gym, solemnly sprinkled their sentences with
donc
—there is only, in the calculus of probability, the numbers zero and infinity.

“And do you know, Cass—Papa, he did not argue with me.”

Cass could well believe that Papa, he did not argue with her. What Pascale believed, she knew, and what she knew, she knew with savage certitude.
La Sauvagerie et la certitude
.

“Basically, she’s full of shit” was the way that Mona had put it, which Cass thought hardly did the situation justice. Mona, with her high-school-level French, couldn’t even read Pascale’s poetry in the original. Cass had translated as best he could, but clearly it wasn’t good enough.

“Her poetry is a crock, too. That relentless keening. It hurts my ears just reading it. She’s the Yoko Fucking Ono of poetry. She’s
anti
-art.”

“How is she anti-art, Mona?” Cass felt compelled to ask, even as he acknowledged to himself that Mona’s Yoko Ono comparison had something to it. “Say what you will about her, Pascale is a brilliant poet. How can her poetry be anti-art?”