Mona was convinced, despite his disclaimers, that he had stopped attending the Psychology Outside Speaker lectures because he couldn’t stand the circus they had become-“what with that Mandelbaum creature performing in all three rings at once, juggler, lion-tamer, tightrope walker, bareback horseback rider, lady on the flying trapeze…”
“That’s five rings, Mona.”
“And counting. She’s such an insufferable showoff. She’s destroyed the whole atmosphere of our department. Do you know, that pig Pavel doesn’t even go through the motions of asking for questions anymore? He just turns to her with an obscene leer and squeals, ‘Lucinda?’ and the whole place cracks up, including the star-by which I don’t mean the outside speaker. It’s revolting. The whole display is revolting. Everybody bows down to that creature, and only because she’s a bully.”
“Surely there’s more to it than that.”
“You mean the fucking Mandelbaum Equilibrium? Cass, you think anybody here understands it better than you and me? They don’t know the Mandelbaum Equilibrium from e = fucking mc>2. For all they know, it’s got as much to do with psychology as my grandmother’s blintzes. It’s not like mindfulness. Just because everybody can understand mindfulness, and can’t understand what the Mandelbaum Equilibrium is even about, they let her get away with carrying on as if the rest of us are just her movable props. Do you know, people have told me that they have to keep introducing themselves to her over and over again, because she’s just not mindful enough to remember who anyone here is? For some reason, she always seems to remember me, though. I’m one of the few whose names she actually knows, although for some reason she seems to think I’m Hungarian.”
Cass had been surprised by Mona’s severity toward Lucinda, especially since he had heard Mona complaining that people don’t let women academics get away with the kind of high-handedness that their male counterparts habitually employ. He would have thought Mona would be the first to applaud Lucinda for her ballsiness.
Cass had barely been on campus fall semester. He’d taken a leave of absence because of the extensive book tour the publisher had set up for him: twenty-one cities in two months, and then another month spent in England, Scotland, and Ireland. He’d kept in touch through sporadic e-mail with Mona, who tried mindfully to keep the communications focused on him, “who, after all, is the only one of the two of us who’s suddenly leading the life of Cindefuckingrella.”
