“Who are the Onuma?”
“They live in the rain forest, and they’re often described as the last of the hunter-gatherers, although, technically speaking, that’s not exactly right, since they garden. They’re one of the last cultures to come in contact with modern civilization.”
“But now they’ve come in contact with you.”
“And they’ll never be the same!”
“Isn’t that a problem?”
“You mean like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, but with bigger particles?”
“Yeah, like that.”
“Well, actually, Absalom has thought about that quite a lot.”
“Absalom?”
“Absalom Garibaldi. I work under him. He started studying the Onuma in 1964. He walks a fine line between a hands-off policy and humanitarian intervention. Just think about sickness. Their view is that disease is caused by the curses of their enemies and the only way to combat the curses is to blow ebene up their nostrils, which is one hell of a hallucinogenic drug, and go into a trance where you can undo the curse, and that view is not anything that we’re going to try and talk them out of. But if Absalom sees a child dying of a bacterial infection, he’s going to slip the kid some antibiotic to go along with the ebene and the witch doctor’s charms. Obviously, our being there leaves a footprint, but that isn’t really an argument against our studying them, especially since it can shed so much light on our evolutionary past.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. I was just being facile.”
“It’s nice that you can admit that. I assume you haven’t been an academic for long.”
“No. I’m a first-year grad student.”
“What made you decide to go to Frankfurter?”
“Jonas Elijah Klapper.”
“Yeah, like me. I just went where Absalom was.”
“To the Amazon.”
“Yes, but I meant my institutional affiliation.”
“Which is here?”
“Harvard? No. I’m at Berkeley. When I first started working with Absalom he was at Tulane, but I just switched when he did.”
“Yeah, some of Professor Klapper’s grad students did the same when he came from Columbia to Frankfurter.”
“Were you a Frankfurter undergrad?”
“No, Columbia.”
“So basically neither of us knows where the hell we’re going right now.”
They had walked determinedly across Harvard Yard, each following the other, and now exited onto a street, which they crossed.
“That looks like the right place,” the girl announced, pointing to a redbrick building not noticeably different from any of the others around it. “Excuse me, is that the Faculty Club?” the girl asked a woman passing by.
“Yes, it is.”
“I always find my way,” she said, turning back to Cass, “even when I have no idea where I’m going. It’s inexplicable.”
“It must come in handy in the rain forest. What country do the Onuma live in?”
“The borderlands between Brazil and Venezuela. I’m mostly in Venezuela. I lived in a village called Meesa-teri. Teri just means ‘village.’”
“Do you speak … what’s the language they speak?”
“They speak Onuma. That’s what we call it. They don’t have a name for themselves. ‘Onuma’ is a name from the Kentubas, another tribe, and it means ‘dirty feet.’ Is this the reception for Klapper?” she asked a woman inside the Faculty Club who was sitting behind a table.
“Yes, it is.” She smiled in a transparently perfunctory way. “Your name, please?”
The girl turned to Cass with a flourish, gesturing for him to go first.
“Um, yes, I’m Cass Seltzer.”
“I have it, Cass,” the woman said, her traveling finger stopping at a name on her list. She handed him a name tag. “And your name, miss?”
“I’m with him,” the girl said.
“I still need your name.” The perfunctory smile was growing rigid round the corners. The woman had an upper lip so stiff it looked as if it could make puncture wounds.
“Roslyn Margolis.”
“I don’t seem to have you on the list, Ms. Margolis.”
“Are you sure? Didn’t you inform them I was coming, Cass?”
“I don’t know.”
Roslyn Margolis smiled at the gatekeeper.
“Absentminded professors!”
“Oh, are you a professor, Professor Cass, I mean, Professor Seltzer? Excuse me. I hadn’t realized. You look so young.”
“He is young! He’s a prodigy! That’s why he’s so absentminded! Cass, how could you have forgotten to let the club know I was coming with you?”
“Oh well, not to worry. This can be remedied lickety-split,” said the gatekeeper, producing a magic marker and the fixings for a name tag. “You know,” she said to Roslyn in a confidential tone, “we have quite a few professors who forget to mention their significant others.”
“Oh, thanks. I appreciate it. We could have used your help the last time this happened. I was almost kept out of seeing him inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,” said Roslyn Margolis, pinning on her name tag.
“Oh my! The Academy! And so young! Well, wonderful to have met you both!”
Cass stared at Roslyn Margolis. He had begun to doubt everything she had said up until this moment, not excluding that her name was Roslyn Margolis.
“Anyway,” the girl continued, as they headed into the reception area, “so far as my speaking Onuma, I do speak some. There are lots of dialects. Sometimes people from one village can’t understand the people from another village. They can be pretty isolated from each other. There are still lots of villages that haven’t had any contact with outsiders.”
“Are they noble savages?”
“Noble savages?”
“You know, uncorrupted by society’s venality.”
“Frolicking like bunnies in Rousseau’s Never-Never Land? Funny you should ask. When I first applied to be Absalom’s student—he was wary of me, since I was coming from studying the kind of anthropology he doesn’t have much use for, but, then, I didn’t either, so it worked out great—but when I first met him, I asked him what they were really like, the Onuma, and he said, ‘They’re assholes.’”
She laughed. She had a wonderfully lusty laugh. Cass couldn’t hear it without grinning himself.
“And are they?”
“Assholes? It’s against the anthropologist religion to say anything judgmental, so if it strikes you as judgmental then don’t repeat it, or Absalom or I will have to kill you, which we’re capable of, but, yeah, basically they’re assholes. They’re not noble-savage pretty. The Onuma are about as good a counterexample as you’re going to find for a universal moral instinct. They don’t seem to have any compunctions about lying or stealing, the men can beat their wives whenever they feel the need to, they’re constantly raiding each other’s women, which is how their wars start, it’s always about kidnapping women, and then the raided go raiding to get them back, preferably taking a few extra women with them as long as they’re going to the trouble, and they have an unquenchable thirst for revenge.”
“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 nobili
ty, 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 anthropolo
gist. 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!”
36 Arguments for the Existence of God Page 14