“Funny, I don’t think of myself as a fanger.”
“Oh, but you are, my friend, a fanger of no mean talent. You fanged God!”
“Can I have them quote that on the cover of the paperback? ‘A fanger of no mean talent: Lucinda Mandelbaum, author of the Mandelbaum Equilibrium.’”
She quickly cast her eyes downward, so that her long lashes rested on the ridge of her cheekbones for a few seconds, and when she raised her eyes again it was with a different expression altogether.
Lucinda’s lips were thin, and if there was any imperfection in her face, it was in her stiff upper lip. But now her upper lip quivered slightly, and the transformation was complete. It was a thing counter, original, spare, and strange, what had happened to her face. He could imagine no face more beautiful in all the world, no face more touching in its exposure. He could never go back and recover the face that had been there only moments before.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“For what?” he whispered back.
“For saying that that’s who I am. That that’s who I still am, even if I’m here.”
Cass could have taken offense, but he didn’t. With that strong sense of gazing directly into another, soul to soul, of seeing it all and all at once, as if it were an endless vista laid out before his eyes, he grasped the sorrows behind Lucinda.
Her move to Frankfurter had obviously cost her dearly, but she never let on. She could have just bided her time here instead of giving it- giving them-everything she had. There was nobody at Frankfurter she needed to impress. But she carried on as she always had, performing at peak, a prizefighting champ. And just for the sheer sport of the thing, for the reasons sustained in her own ardent heart. She wasn’t competing against anyone but herself. That’s what people like Mona didn’t get. He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.
Lucinda Mandelbaum, of the famous Mandelbaum Equilibrium, just kept playing the game with her heart and soul, making everybody here feel that by her very presence they had all been admitted into the insider game, when all the while she was aware that that insider game was transpiring elsewhere, away from Frankfurter and away from Lucinda Mandelbaum, and maybe she would never get herself back into it the way she had been, the way she had been born to be.
That transformed face of hers that she was holding out to him told him everything. It was astounding that she would trust him with the sight of it. What had he done to earn the trust of Lucinda Mandelbaum?
