“Well, maybe. But Shimmy really did seem shaken.”
“I can imagine. It’s Gamma Gamma Gamma, or he can just forget about his yes indeedee.” As an alum, Roz has kept abreast. She even knows the name of the expert doctor that Deedee and her sorority sister Bunny share.
“His weak spot is that woman.”
“Isn’t it always?”
“I could feel his pain. He kept talking about being squeezed.”
“That Southern belle of his can probably squeeze them like they were limes for mint juleps.”
“Ouch.”
“Oh, Cass! I’m sorry, but this is one beautiful hoot!” She breaks off a spell to demonstrate just how beautiful a hoot she thinks it is. She’s a bit breathless when she returns. “I guess I might have contributed some to this kankedort.”
“Don’t start getting a swelled head.”
“Did any of the kids use my motto?”
“At least a dozen. I have to say, though, that the banner I liked the best was one that had “Toga Party!” written out in Greek letters. Tau, omicron, gamma, alpha, pi, alpha, rho, tau, iota!”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, give me a moment to think.” He gives her a moment to think. “Okay, here’s what we do to end Shimmy’s Hanukkah Wars. Tell him to Hebraicize the Greeks! So, instead of some fraternity named Alpha Delta Kappa, make it Aleph Daleth Qooph!”
He can’t help joining in her laughter. “Deedee’s Gamma Gamma Gamma could be Gimel Gimel Gimel.”
“Instead of sororities and fraternities, they can call them sisterhoods and brotherhoods-like in a synagogue! It’s so ridiculous, it just might work!”
“As Shimmy likes to say, ‘Stranger things have gone down the tubes.’”
“But whether it works or not, you’re out of there! Stop letting the Shim-mys of the world work you over. Get it through your head, you’re a star. Speaking of which, I can’t wait for your big God debate tomorrow.”
“What big God debate?”
“The debate with Felix Fidley! I was over at Harvard today, and there are posters plastered all over the place! ‘Resolved: God Exists.’ You can’t have forgotten!”
“But I did! Fuck! I totally forgot. Fuck!”
“It’s upsetting when you curse, Cass. You’re the only person I know who only curses in extremis.”
“Fuck, Roz. Fuck.”
“Really upsetting.”
It’s all coming back to him. Felix Fidley, a Nobel-laureate economist who has been taking his stand on a wide range of issues by publishing in the neoconservative magazine Provocation, has been challenging the so-called new atheists to debate him on the existence of God. He’d written to Cass with a mixture of arrogance and flattery:
I’m having too easy a time with these debates. The reason is that some of the “new atheists” know something about one thing but very little about other things. Twickenham, for instance, admits he knows nothing about science. Fitzroy seems to know little about anything else. You, on the other hand, with your extensive knowledge of religion, psychology, philosophy, science, and history, would present a more than worthy adversary. A Fidley-Seltzer debate would be a real highlight, entertaining but intellectually provocative.
“What do you think of Felix Fidley?” he had asked Lucinda. They were in bed, Lucinda tucked neatly into the pockets of the comforter, reading.
“Felix Fidley?” Lucinda looked up from A Proper English Murder. She’s addicted to mysteries. “He’s got a Nobel.”
“Yes, but what do you think of him?”
“He’s one of the most brilliant economists of the last twenty years. In fact, I co-authored a paper with him, ‘Mandelbaum Equilibria in Hostile Takeovers.’ Why?”
“He wants to debate me.”
“Really?” Lucinda marked her page with her bookmark and set A Proper English Murder down on her night table. “About what?”
“The existence of God.”
“I should have guessed!” She laughed. “Are you telling me Felix Fidley believes?”
“Belligerently.”
“How odd. He’s such a rationalist-University of Chicago and all. Are you sure?”
It was touching how sincerely Lucinda believed in reason. It was difficult for her to get her mind around the fact that believers weren’t all high-school dropouts who used their fingers and toes to add and subtract.
“For lots of people it’s become a matter of political coalitions more than anything having to do with theology. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If liberals are going in one direction in the religion-versus-reason debates, defending the theory of evolution and secular humanism, neocons feel they have to head off in the opposite direction. Or they think that it’s okay for people like them, who are thoroughly civilized, to question God’s existence, but that it would be moral anarchy if the teeming masses started to doubt God. I suspect that that’s what Fidley believes.”
Provocation is a good example of what Cass was describing. It was founded by left-wing intellectuals in the 1940s, but its editors had been profoundly insulted by the new leftism of the sixties and reacted by lurching to the right. By now Provocation’s policy of opposing anything advocated by the liberals-a word it had helped besmirch-has carried it into open warfare against the entire project of the Enlightenment. Darwin has come in for multiple attacks, and religious scientists have shown off their creativity. There was an article by an Orthodox Jewish linguist who used Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar to vindicate the Bible’s story of the Tower of Babel. There was an article authored by a fundamentalist geologist on the movement of the tectonic plates of the earth as consistent with a worldwide flood on the order of Noah’s. There was an article by a Catholic anthropologist arguing against the liberal denial of distinct races and backing it up with Genesis 10, where the begettings of Noah’s three sons are explained. Provocation’s review of The Varieties of Religious Illusion had been so negative as to border on the actionable.
“Are you going to debate him?” Lucinda had asked him, turning over on her side so that she was facing Cass, her head propped up on her palm.
“Do you think I should?”
“What day did you say this thing is?” he’s asking Roz now on the phone.
“February 29. I think that’s tomorrow.”
“It is tomorrow! I’m fucked. And that’s when Lucinda is getting back from Santa Barbara. What was I thinking?”
“Well, if anyone is worth debating on this issue, then Felix Fidley is,” Lucinda had said. “It would certainly be a major win for you, and I don’t see how you could fail to win.” She’d smiled, and her delicate nostrils flared ever so slightly. “I’d like to see that.”
She’d reached out her hand and laid it on Cass’s stomach and then had slid it slowly up his chest. She reached up for Cass’s glasses and gently removed them, leaning over him to place them on his night table, her brandy-glass-shaped breasts just grazing his uplifted face.
That minute adjustment had come over her face, unstiffening her upper lip and unloosing the full extravagance of her beauty, flooding all of Cass’s modules, seizing him up with the one and wordless premise that composes the Argument from Lucinda.
“I’m fucked for real,” he says now to Roz.
XXI The Argument from the Remains
Jonas Elijah Klapper had intimate knowledge of all the prominent thinkers across the ages. There was not a novelist, poet, essayist, critic, historian, metaphysician, ethicist, theologian, or belletrist worth the reading (an emphatically necessary qualification) of whom he had not taken the reckoning. He had expended himself in exhaustively computing the ranking of anyone meriting mention in the great chain of genius. His project had been demanding. It had demanded neither more nor less than omniscience. The (all but) universal ovation was not disproportionate to the accomplishment. He had organized the vast reaches of human thought in a way that could be compared, mutatis mutandis, to the commendable efforts of Miss Ching in helping him to settle into his Frankfurter suite of offices, her admirable zeal in conceiving categories for the color-coded files, craftily alphabetized.