No wonder, then, that Cass undergoes moments when he feels he’s lost the feel of his own life, its narrative continuity, the very essence of which was insignificance and an obscure yearning in many directions. The loss hardly matters, since he likes this new narrative so much better, likes it too much to own it fully as his own.
For the most part, fame is agreeable to Cass. For one thing, people treat him more nicely. It’s a revelation to learn what a nice bunch of upright mammals we’re capable of being. Everybody happily, gratefully, applies the Golden Rule when it comes to interacting with the famous. Thou must treat the famous as thou wouldst wish to be treated thyself. Easy! If only everybody could be famous, we would all be effortlessly altruistic.
Of course, notoriety presents its own challenges. Last week, a girl had shown up after one of his lectures with a copy of his book and asked him if he “signed body parts.” Before he could find his voice or gain control over the blush spreading beyond his high hairline, she rolled up her sweater and offered him the heartbreaking baby innocence of her tender inner arm. Not knowing what else to do, wishing the present moment to become the past as quickly as possible, he had mutilated the butterfly softness in the tiniest spider scrawl he could manage.
“It must be that Seltzer boyishness I keep reading about,” Auerbach had said, laughing, when Cass had told him about it, wanting his reassurance that this sort of thing was within the bounds of the normal, that it didn’t transgress an academic’s sacred trust to the impressionable young. “Stop worrying and start enjoying. Anyway, why isn’t it a good thing if a guy like Cass Seltzer becomes a cult figure? Why not you rather than a Scientologist moron like Tom Cruise? Think about it, Seltzer.”
Seltzer is still thinking.
This boyishness of his: before this year, that quality listed awkwardly in the direction of a handicap, socially and professionally, not to speak of romantically. Not that there had been any romances to speak of during that long cold February of the soul that had arced from the day six years ago when Pascale regained her speech and announced the end of their marriage until that day two and a half years ago, when Lucinda Mandelbaum had sat down next to him at the first Friday-afternoon Psychology Outside Speaker lecture of the new fall semester. But now, under the transfiguration of his fame, even his boyishness has become charmed. He’s no boy (forty-two), but he has got boyish looks and boyish ways, of which he used to be boyishly unaware, until he read himself described as “boyish” in several newspapers, magazines, and blogs too many. So now when he goes bounding across some stage, his hair flapping a bit round his ears in time with his eager strides, somewhere in the recesses of his mind he knows that this is boyish, and that this is good.
