Standing dead center on Weeks Bridge, in the dead of winter in the dead of night, staring down at the sublime formation, Cass is contemplating the strange thing that his life has become.
To him. His life has become strange to him. He feels as if he’s wearing somebody else’s coat, grabbed in a hurry from the bed in the spare bedroom after a boozy party. He’s walking around in someone else’s bespoke cashmere while that guy’s got Cass’s hooded parka, and only Cass seems to have noticed the switch.
What has happened is that Cass Seltzer has become an intellectual celebrity. He’s become famous for his abstract ideas. And not just any old abstract ideas, but atheist abstract ideas, which makes him, according to some of the latest polls, a spokesperson for the most distrusted minority in America, the one that most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.
This is a fact. Studies have found that a large proportion of Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays, and communists, in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists, the researchers reported, seem to be playing the pariah role once assigned to Catholics, Jews, and communists, seen as harboring alien and subversive values, or, more likely, as having no inner values at all, and therefore likely to be criminals, rapists, and wild-eyed drug addicts.
“As if,” as Cass often finds himself saying into microphones, “the only reason to live morally is fear of getting caught and being spanked by the heavenly father.”
Cass Seltzer has become the unlikely poster boy for this misunderstood group. His is a good face for counteracting the fallacy of equating godlessness with vice. Handsome, but not in a way to make the squeamish consider indeterminate sexual orientation, Cass has a fundamental niceness written all over him. He’s got a strong jaw, a high ovoid forehead from which his floppy auburn hair is only just slightly receding, and the sweetest, most earnest smile this side of Oral Roberts University. Is this a man who could possibly go out and commit murder and mayhem, rape our virgin daughters, and shoot controlled substances into his veins?
His life has been largely commandeered not only by Sy Auerbach, the literary agent-cum-cultural impresario who represents him, but by a speakers’ agent, publicists, media escorts, and other attendants who two years ago were as alien to him as atheists remain (despite Cass’s best efforts) to the majority of Americans.
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.”
