“I’ll tell you exactly how. Art is supposed to increase our mindfulness. Pascale wouldn’t know mindfulness if it bit her on her skinny French ass.”
This last phrase, which might easily be perceived as not only anti-Gallic but, even more egregiously, intolerant of a woman’s right to choose the shape of her own body, was a testament to just how angry Mona felt, on Cass’s behalf, or how hard she was trying to get Cass to feel some anger on his own behalf. (She never succeeded.) But her assertion about the mindfulness function of art was straight out of her textbook. Mona had done her doctoral work with Arlene Unger, who makes the concept of mindfulness central to her existentialist psychology. The concept was central to Mona as well. She worked it in whenever she reasonably- or even unreasonably-could. Mona, who was quick to ask the first question at lectures, always began her query with the phrase “As an Ungerian, I’m wondering.” You could tease Mona about almost everything-her bisexually frustrating love life, her Omaha, Nebraska, upbringing, even her weight-but mindfulness was off limits. Mindfulness was Mona’s religion.
And Mona had indeed been mindfully present to Cass during the long ordeal with, and without, Pascale; mindfully eager for every blood-smeared detail, which she had picked clean with raptor-zeal; mindfully condemnatory of the mindlessness that had left Cass so battle-of-the-sexes-scarred-“I hate to say it, Cass, but you’ve been pussy-whipped. So have I, if it’s any consolation”-that she, Mona, repeatedly wondered whether he’d ever be able to love a woman again.
Mona was facing stoically forward now, but Cass knew her well enough to read the silent reproach in her back. He knew what it must be costing Mona not to give way to temptation and swivel around backward to see what was going on now, and he felt remorse in a highly theoretical sort of way, which is to say that he supposed that somewhere, in whatever part of the brain was supposed to be involved in moral reactions-did Lipkin say it was the right orbitofrontal cortex or the left?-his neurons must be making desultory guilty gestures, and perhaps eventually he would register the muted activity.
Lipkin was now affirming the unthinkability of the unsayable, which prompted Lucinda to tickle Cass’s ear with a whispered “Ah, the all-too-common Wittgenstein Fallacy.”
It was as if she were prescient. The next words out of Lipkin’s mouth were “as we have learned from Wittgenstein.”
