36 Arguments for the Existence of God (18 page)

“It sounds like a dangerous place to be a woman.”

“It’s a dangerous place to be a human.”

“And what do they make of you?”

Roslyn Margolis, if that was indeed her name, was a tall, slender girl, only a few inches shorter than Cass, but she looked, despite her slenderness, as if she would never have to ask a man to remove any twist-off top for her. Her face looked strong, too. There was something bold and
arresting. Once you really looked at her, it was hard to look away. She had a high-bridged nose and clear blue eyes, and her upper lip looked sweetened by all the laughter it had laughed, it looked generous to share that laughter with others, and it looked, despite all its fun, noble. Her whole bearing had something noble about it. But, even with the height and obvious physical strength and the suggestion of nobility, she was feminine.

She was certainly dressed feminine, in a long peacock-blue skirt of crinkly velvet and a silky blouse in the same color that was shot through with gold embroidery. She was one of those women that could qualify as beautiful without being pretty. It was something about the sheer quantity of life that seemed compressed into her.

“Well, first they thought I was a dead person who had come back from the sky country. They kept asking me how I had died, what it was like to be dead. They have a pretty complicated mythology, mostly derived from their heavy use of hallucinogens. The men get high every day, and believe me, that stuff is powerful. It also makes them drip long grotesque strands of green snot, which would be enough to get Jean-Jacques to rethink that noble-savage shtick. They finally accepted that I’d never died when I came down with a head cold. Dead people don’t sneeze. But they were never completely convinced that I was a woman. Their name for me is Suwäayaiwä, which roughly translates as ‘a whole lot of woman.’”

She laughed again. The words she had pronounced—her name, the word “Onuma” itself—were heavily nasalized, almost a snort. If she was making this all up, she was really good, better even than Gideon, who also had a way with extended put-ons, and whom Cass spotted just as Jonas Elijah Klapper was entering the room.

“Frankly, I like it a lot better than ‘Roz.’” She’d nasalized “Roz,” too.

Jonas Elijah Klapper was flanked by the three men who had introduced him at Sanders Theatre, and the crowd immediately shifted to swarm around them like worker bees around the queen. Gideon was there in the attending circle, and, almost instantaneously, all five of the other Klapper students materialized. Now Cass seriously wanted the girl in dreadlocks to go away. It was enough that she had made him miss the thrust of the Prufrock Lecture. He didn’t want to miss hearing what was going on now around Jonas Elijah Klapper.

“Well, Suwäayaiwä,” he said, putting out his hand to shake hers, “it’s been a pleasure meeting you. Good luck here in Cambridge-teri.”

She laughed, and again he couldn’t resist her laughter’s invitation to come along for the ride and laugh along with her. She shook Cass’s hand, and he gracefully abandoned her, hurrying to be in Klapper’s proximity.

But Roz found him again before the reception was over. Cass and Gideon and Miriam and Nathan and Ezra and Zack and Joel were standing in a huddle. The group of seven had supped on canapés and spreads and sipped from Harvard’s excellent sherry. None had felt this good since transplanting from New York.

“Are you going to the dinner?” Roz asked Cass. He had forgotten all about the girl in dreadlocks who might or might not have been christened “a whole lot of woman” by a tribe that might or might not exist.

“What dinner?”

“The dinner for Klapper at Robert Harris Chapman’s house.”

“Are we?” Cass asked Gideon.

“Un-uh.” He shook his head no. “That’s not for us.”

“I just got invited,” said Roz.

“By whom?” Gideon asked.

“By Robert Harris Chapman. He’s a perfectly wonderful man, funny as hell in an urbane kind of way. You’ll love him. He teaches drama and English here, and he’s the head of the Loeb Drama Center. I heard from Doris Turner over there”—Roz motioned with her head toward a woman of formidable amplitude and mien, who was a Shakespearean scholar at Harvard and had indeed been cited by Professor Klapper as “the premier authority on the Sonnets 101 to 116”—“that his home is decorated like a Moroccan sultan’s and that he mixes the meanest drinks in town. Do you want to come?” she asked Cass. “It seems only fair. After all, I got myself into this shindig by pretending I was with you!”

Cass laughed along with her. Suwäayaiwä was a force of nature not to be withstood.

“No thanks,” he said, withstanding nevertheless.

“Why not? When are you going to get an opportunity like this again? You can see how your adviser comports himself with his peers. You can peer behind the seven veils at the heavenly hosts and see what goes on when you aren’t looking.”

“It’s not my style to finagle my way into a place I don’t belong.”

“Okay, I can understand that. No, on second thought, I can’t. I’ll just go tell Robert that I’m not going to be able to make it after all, and then you and I can go off and you can explain to me what exactly
is
your style.”

They went to the 1369 Jazz Club. Roz had been in Cambridge for a couple of months. She was here to pick up some evolutionary biology, she said, attending what everyone called the Simian Seminar, which was given in the living room of a biological anthropologist. Cass and Roz walked the several blocks to the jazz club—Roz had been here once before but had been driven, so she wasn’t exactly sure how to find her way, but she did—and she had talked a lot about Absalom and about the Onuma and about how strange it was for her to be in “Cambridge-teri.” She loved that Cass had called it that. “It puts it into perspective for me.”

Roz was a self-described jazz-junkie. She asked the man at the door, “Who’s on?” and when she heard that Raphé Malik was putting in an appearance, she let out a war cry she must have picked up in Onumaland. Cass was surprised to discover he wasn’t embarrassed. Roz’s resistance to the emotion communicated something of itself to those she was with. This was the first sign of what Cass would come to think of as the Margolis magic, waffling on the question of whether it was black or not.

It was Malik on trumpet, and Frank Wright on the tenor sax and vocals, and William Parker on bass, and Syd Smart, who was a Cambridge native, on the drums. Cass didn’t know much about jazz, but apparently, judging from the reaction of the audience and Roz, this was a night of miracles.

And it was, too. It was all new to Cass: Cambridge and jazz and a woman like Roz. He was swept off his feet. Even though she was older than he and far more experienced, having lived at the ends of the world for months on end, she made him feel as comfortable with himself as he had ever felt. He had the sense that whatever it was that he most liked about himself was what she liked, too.

He had gallantly walked her back to her place, a little apartment that was reached by way of a creaky outside flight of stairs and was attached to the second floor of a grand house on Francis Avenue, owned by what she called an “embalmed” couple.

“He used to be a Harvard English professor, and she was a Harvard
professor’s wife, if you know what I mean. They’re straight from Central Casting. It was the wife who interviewed me. She’s so frail that I just wanted to pick her up and carry her up these stairs. She said her husband would have to meet me to approve me as a tenant. He greeted me with ‘I’m a Wilde man,’ and it took me a few beats to figure out he was talking about Oscar. I don’t know why he thought my knowing this about him was relevant to my renting the place. Maybe he got confused and thought I was a prospective graduate student. I’ve never seen him since, though she comes around to check on things once in a while. They built this addition to keep their daughter from running away from home during her stormy adolescence. Sometimes I get the creepy feeling that they’d had monitors installed, like in the spy movies, and that the old couple still tune in now and then, hoping for some kinky action. What do you say we make them happy?”

The brazen act came off with her clothes. Cass was startled by the tenderness of Roz. She was able to be tender, sexy, and hilarious all at once. They stayed up all night. Roz declared herself famished—“Orgasms burn calories!”—and jumped up and came back with a pint of Cherry Garcia and two spoons, which they ate facing one another cross-legged in bed. Any questions Cass might still have had about how women are anatomically put together were conclusively answered. Living among the Onuma, she’d told him, had cured her of the cult of female modesty. By morning, he had stopped being alarmed by her. She was more Roz Margolis, a Jewish girl who had grown up on the Upper West Side and been sent to the Ethical Culture school before going off to Frankfurter, than she was Suwäayaiwä, warrior anthropologist. By noon, he still didn’t know exactly how much of her to believe, but he did believe himself in love. The strange thing was, so did Roz.

“I’m crazy about you,” she announced as they drank coffee in her kitchen. She’d made them some toast, too, and scrambled up a mess of eggs with butter and cumin.

“You sure you’re not just crazy?”

“Me? No, I’m the sanest person I’ve ever met. You’ll see when you get to know me better, Cass. I’m the sanest person you’ve ever met, too. We’re both sane. That’s what’s so crazy about us.”

“So I’m sane, too. How do you know?”

“Our type can always recognize each other. We’re like werewolves able to sniff each other out.”

They fell into couplehood with relative ease. The only topic, and it was hardly an insignificant one, on which Cass and Roz agreed to disagree was Jonas Elijah Klapper. Roz didn’t view the Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values in quite the same way as Cass did:

“What?”
Roz bolted up in bed so abruptly that her womanly breasts bounced with a soft little plop.

Cass immediately regretted the words out of his mouth even as he heard them.

“What did you say he said to you?”

It was too late. He had told her the story of how he had gone, with an undergraduate’s fear and trembling, to the posted office hour of Columbia’s pre-eminent professor, the one who stood before his crowded undergraduate course without any notes, leaping from personal reminiscences to quoted stanzas to revelations of the ontological scaffolding that underlies genius, and that at the end of the two-hour private session the great man had murmured, “I sense the aura of election upon you.”

Cass had let the fire of Roz mix with the fire of Jonas Elijah Klapper, and, mixing his fires, he had transgressed.

“What did you say he said to you?” she repeated.

He closed his eyes and pronounced the words with which Jonas Elijah Klapper had anointed him.

Roz had burst into laughter, collapsing backward on the bed and writhing. When she finally found her voice, she rasped out, “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! But I thought you had said that he sensed the odor of luckshen on you—and, frankly, I don’t know which line is funnier!”

“Luckshen” is the Yiddish word for noodles, and it was the first time Cass didn’t find Roz’s laughter irresistible.

Cass can’t believe his eyes as he makes the right onto the drive leading up onto Frankfurter’s hilltop campus. The overnight thaw has brought out the protesters, many of them pushing their luck in baggy shorts and flip-flops. If the fragrance in the air intoxicates Cass, the students are even more susceptible. The atmosphere of exulting giddiness is all over campus.

There are tables with flyers, and kids with armbands holding up hand-lettered signs. It looks like the era of be-ins and walkouts, which Cass had been a bit too young to experience firsthand. In those days, too, springlike weather always enhanced the chances for student activism. Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February?

Cass drives up the hill and passes the Ida and Howard Lowenstern Dorm, which, he notices, has paint-splattered banners hanging from some of the windows. One, in Hebrew, reads
“
!
, Go Maccabees!”

Cass flashes back to Roz’s hand-held sign yesterday, “Maccabees = Taliban.” Talk about taking on a sacred historical mythology! The Maccabees are the heroes of the Hanukkah story, the stirring tale told to Diaspora Jewish kids so they don’t feel so deprived missing out on Christmas. “Maccabiah” is the name given to countless color wars in Jewish summer camps and day schools, not to speak of the Olympic-type international sporting event held every four years in the state of Israel. “Maccabees = Taliban” are fighting words!

The Maccabees were the Jewish liberation army that had fought
against the Hellenistic Seleucid Dynasty of Antiochus IV in the second century B.C., a dynasty that had brought a Hellenized lifestyle to Palestine, including Greek philosophy, art, worship of the body, and a pantheon of raunchy gods.