Decatur Read Online Free Page B

money and trotted towards the register, gave the required sum to Scott and put the rest in the slash side pocket in her black waitress uniform. Sitting back down, she whispered, “Don’t mind him. Eat your dinner.” Max ate never taking his eyes off of Marilyn, watching her pink tongue dab little droplets of hamburger goulash (why did they call this chop suey?) from her red-lipsticked lips.
    “So it’s a scientific study,” Marilyn finally said, her black eyes with the heavy lids and long lashes narrowing slightly, “I’m only talking to you because Father Weston asked me to. You’re Jewish, what are you doing hanging out with a priest anyhow?”
    “You’re a woman, and I could ask you the same,” Max answered, a little more sharply then he meant as he watched Marilyn pull away from the table, leaving her fork in the slaw, scooting to the edge of the booth as if she might just get up and run. “Sorry,” he quickly apologized, “I don’t primarily identify as Jewish. The Father and I like some of the same books.”
    “Books, huh, and you don’t ‘primarily identify’… now you do sound like a professor.” But she relaxed and moved back into the booth, picking up her fork again. “Father W said you were in Chicago at some big research institute.”
    “Priest or no priest, Frank Weston runs his mouth a lot. University of Chicago has - had ,” he corrected himself, “ the beginnings of a pretty advanced think tank putting together collaborations between psychology, ancient religions, and pharmacology that no-one had ever thought of. The old fogeys hated it but the students, oh, man.” Max hunched his shoulders, the familiar pain creeping up the back of his neck as he tried to push down flashbacks of the last meeting in the dean’s office.
    “What are you doing here then?” Marilyn asked simply.
    Something happened to Max then. The booth seemed to both darken and lighten. The dark was at the edge and high sides but the light was where they were sitting and the front door and the man clicking on the adding machine might have been on the moon for as far away as they seemed. The words tumbled out of him as the images played across his mind. He felt as if something was drawing the most intimate truths out of him. He could see himself ten years younger in the early sixties with Carnaby Street striped pants on standing at a podium-- the paper he gave in London at King’s College to thunderous applause where he asserted that modern life had veiled the connections between the mind and soul. How he had experimented with mushrooms that night and wandered Kensington Garden feeling all the cells in his body and how they connected to all the cells in the plants, wandering in a full revel through a glowing moon garden planted in the middle of the city. That had been the turning point. He began to gradually move away from more traditional studies and plot his own course, taking advantage of his full professorship and tenure to protect him from his more conservative critics. He had some fans at the University as well, like Dr. Wendell, an archeologist who was a brilliant researcher, but the students, they were his biggest fans. The course at University of Chicago he taught on the mystic texts of the Kabala was always full to overflow as students flocked to his lectures. The earnest insistence of a brilliant baby-faced graduate student, Lawrence with the mop of curls, to let him be Max’s academic chronicler. Lawrence followed him breathlessly as he charted Max Rosenbaum’s meteoric rise as the boldest, most brilliant professor in the entire University, connecting the mysteries of the Kabala, where man is put into the world to repair the flaw that God made, and contemporary psychology, while gently advocating for careful experimentation of mind-altering substances as ancient priests and shamans would to reconnect with the Divine. His wife’s withdrawal to the ladies circle at the Temple and finally her sudden move