Philosophy Made Simple (12 page)

The manager also produced a scrapbook with photos of a number of Indian weddings he’d catered, one of which included, in addition to the photographs of the different dishes, several photos of an elephant that was all dolled up with costume jewelry and velvet trappings. In the background was a citrus grove.

“This is Norma Jean, right?” Rudy asked.

“Precisely.” The manager shook his head up and down vigorously “She is a very fine animal, very fine, very beautifully shaped,
very well behaved. She did not cause one bit of concern. There were two hundred guests at this particular wedding, and we took care of everything. You won’t need to be concerned at all.”

Rudy spent most of the afternoon with the manager, drinking sweet tea and planning a menu that included tangy lentil soups,
spicy vegetable curries, baked spiced fish, cucumbers in yogurt, hot bitter mango and sour lime chutneys, and platters of aromatic rice tinged with saffron. And the chicken vindaloo that Rudy had eaten for lunch.

It was almost five o’clock when Rudy left the restaurant. He drove straight to the Russians to have a shot of vodka and chew the fat, and to buy three more paintings, one for each of the girls, and to see if Norma Jean would like to be in another wedding. The Russian was giving Norma Jean a bath outside her little barn when Rudy pulled into the drive. A portable radio was blasting the Beatles’ new album,
Sgt. Pepper,
and Norma Jean was dipping her trunk into a big horse trough, sucking up water and then spraying herself so thoroughly that sheets of water covered her shoulders and flowed down her sides and onto the Russian, who was on his knees, scrubbing her stomach with a large brush. She had her eyes closed, and the Russian was doubled up underneath her, so they didn’t see Rudy.
Norma Jean struck Rudy as a being from the beginning of time, or maybe outside of time, like a Platonic idea, but at the same time he had the impression that he had intruded upon an especially intimate scene, as if he had intruded on a husband and wife in the privacy of their own bathroom.
This is happiness,
he thought as he watched the Russian scrub the big brush back and forth on Norma Jean’s stomach.

He was about to clear his throat to announce his presence when a sharp pain in his chest took his breath away, as if he’d taken a bullet, or as if Norma Jean had sat on him. He opened the door and staggered out of the truck. He tried to hold himself up by putting his right arm through the open window, but he fell, belching loudly as he hit the ground. And then he was trying to tell the Russian, who was kneeling over him, that he just needed to lie still for a while, right there on the ground. He got his breath back for a minute; the clenched fist opened up. That’s when he realized something else: that he didn’t mind dying, didn’t care, didn’t give a hoot, as his dad used to say. He’d been a little frightened at first, but once the pain let up he didn’t care one way or the other. He wondered if that was how Creaky’d felt. Or Helen. He just didn’t want to die in Texas, that was all. He just wanted to go home.

He passed out again, and when he woke up in the Rio Grande Regional Hospital in McAllen, what he thought he remembered was the Russian lifting up his shoulders so that Norma Jean could slip her trunk underneath him and pick him up and lay him down gently in the bed of the pickup.

He tried to explain to the doctor the next morning: about trying to swim against the current in the Rio Grande, about straining to turn the valve that opened clockwise instead of counterclockwise, about the chicken vindaloo he’d eaten for lunch at the Taj Mahal, about the sensation of being shot in the chest, about the importance of the wedding … But the doctor wasn’t listening.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” he said. “You’re lucky we’ve got one of the first CCUs in Texas.”

“What’s a CCU?”

“Coronary care unit.”

“What’s the diagnosis?” Rudy asked.

“Myocardial infarction.”

“Why can’t you just say ‘heart attack?”

“Because your heart didn’t ‘attack’ you,” the doctor said. “I’m going to give you a prescription for an oral arrhythmic and nitroglycerin tablets.”

“What’s ‘infarction’?”

“It’s a blockage. Your hearts not getting enough blood. If you exert yourself too much, or get too worked up, especially after a heavy meal, then boom, you’ll find yourself lying on the ground again. Your blood pressure will shoot way, way up and you’ll develop diastolic hypertension.”

“Avocados are supposed to reduce the risk of heart attacks,” Rudy said. “Cancer too, and diabetes.”

The doctor looked at him over the top of his glasses. “You need to watch your diet,” he said. “No smoking. No alcohol. No rich foods — and that includes avocados. You don’t want to clog up those arteries: no bacon, no sausage, no eggs, no butter,
no cream, no driving for at least a month. The main thing is to keep calm. No emotional excitement. No conjugal relations.”

“No conjugal relations?” Rudy said. “I’m not married.”

“You’re wearing a ring.”

“I
was
married.”

“You know what I mean,” he said.

“What about the nitrogen fertilizer?” Rudy asked. “Could that have something to do with it? We got a couple of sacks of nitrogen fertilizer in the barn left over from last winter.”

The doctor shook his head while he wrote something on his clipboard. “You’re barking up the wrong tree,” he said.

Rudy didn’t say anything. He didn’t
like
hospitals — who does? — but he’d never really
minded
them. He’d had his tonsils out, and he’d been hospitalized once for pneumonia. He’d never
particularly minded the dentist either. You went with your mother; you looked at a magazine. And whatever was wrong was taken care of. He hadn’t even minded the shots, not the way his daughters had. In his arm or in his butt, it didn’t matter. The doctor’s office in St. Joe had been right in the doctors house, and on their way home Rudy and his mother would stop at the drugstore in Stevensville to pick up a prescription and Rudy would order a cherry phosphate. His mother would have something too. It was hard to remember. He did remember spinning round on a stool. But then when Helen got sick … it was different.
In and out of the Passavant Pavilion at Northwestern Memorial Hospital on Huron Street, right on the Gold Coast. Dr. Arnold in his office saying there was nothing more they could do. Helen had smoked for years, but it wasn’t lung cancer that killed her. It was leukemia — attacking her lymph nodes, liver, spleen. She took a kind of perverse pleasure in that. At least they
— Rudy and the girls — couldn’t say “we told you so.”

“And if I don’t?” Rudy asked the doctor — back in Texas now. What did he care? He hadn’t had a cigarette in ten years; he drank a glass of wine or two with dinner, it’s true, but whom was he going to have conjugal relations with — he hadn’t been with a woman since Helen died — unless he went with Medardo to Reynosa? Actually, he’d started to consider it. Rudy and Medardo:
a couple of cockhounds, a couple of whoremasters. Better to die across the border in a whorehouse than in Texas.

“Don’t what?” the doctor asked.

“Don’t follow your advice.”

“Your next one will be a lot worse,” the doctor said.

“I’ll think about it.”

“You have to realize, Mr. Harrington, that dying is not like going to sleep. Very few people die with dignity Five percent at most. For most people it’s a painful struggle.”

Rudy’s father had died of a heart attack at the Benton Harbor market, keeled over while he was bidding on a load of strawberries,
but his mother had died at home. There’d been a lot of coming and going, a lot of eating and drinking, even a bottle of whiskey,
though his mother had been a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. But it was Helen he was thinking about now,
how her body had shut down so that she no longer needed the morphine, how her breathing had slowed, how her lower jaw had jutted forward, how she’d slept with her eyes open because there wasn’t enough strength in her muscles to hold her eyelids shut. There hadn’t been much left of her at the end, and what was left had turned white. She’d lost her hair and looked like a marble statue or pillar in a museum. Rudy remembered the phone next to the bed ringing and ringing, though it was the middle of the night, and Margot coming into the room. She was working for a bookbinder in Hyde Park, on the South Side, just before she got a job at the Newberry Library A boatload of black-market avocados — enough avocados to supply the entire Midwest —
had left the Cayman Islands without the bill of lading, something that didn’t seem important at the time, though it caused him a lot of grief when it docked in Hammond, Indiana, and he was almost arrested.

Rudy was inclined to argue with the doctor, calling him Doc: “A heart attack, Doc. A massive coronary. Bingo. That’s it.
Lights out. Doesn’t sound too bad to me.”

“If the lights don’t go all the way out,” the doctor said, “then you may run into some problems.”

“What’s the worst that could happen?” Rudy asked.

“The worst? You could wind up on a respirator, or paralyzed.”

“I’d rather be dead.”

“Suit yourself,” the doctor said.

“That’s what I used to say to my daughters,” Rudy said.

Rudy didn’t mind dying; he just didn’t want to die all alone. In Texas. He wanted to die in Chicago, in his own bed, with the dogs snoozing on the floor and the sound of his daughters moving around downstairs, or climbing the stairs to bring him a cup of tea or bouillon. The certainty that he’d made a mistake returned, washing over him, like a big wave, suffocating him. He didn’t see how he could go on. The prospect of arranging an Indian wedding … The thing was impossible. All the talk of curries and chutneys and the elephant had been an illusion, a harmless fantasy. Better to let Molly arrange things with the hotel in Detroit. He lay back in the hospital bed and recited a litany of all the ancestors and relatives whose names he could remember and of the names of all the men he’d known on the market, and he tried to remember the street addresses and phone numbers of all the places he’d ever lived and of all the places his children had ever lived and of all the places he and Helen had made love.

O
n Sunday morning — Rudy’s second morning in the hospital — he woke up with a hard-on, not just a morning erection but the kind of pulsating ache that had visited him on Christmas Eve. When the nurse came in to give him a shot of li-docaine his prick was sticking out so straight he could hardly turn over on the bed. When he did manage to turn over he saw that Medardo’d brought a pair of pajamas and his dopp kit and his copy of
Philosophy Made Simple,
which he’d asked for on Saturday. Rudy was going to be in the hospital for a week and wanted something to read.

The nurse lifted his hospital gown and swabbed his left buttock with a bit of alcohol and put a bandage on it. “I’ll be back this afternoon,” she said.

What did it mean? What was his prick trying to tell him? What Rudy thought it was trying to tell him was this: he thought that his prick was mocking his condition; he thought that his prick was telling him that he’d never hold a woman in his arms again. He’d known that this might be the case ever since Helen
died, but suddenly he knew it in a new way, and his chest tightened up and he thought he might be having another heart attack.

He closed his eyes, and when he did, he pictured the nurse coming back to give him another shot, only she was younger, and she was beautiful, and instead of a hypodermic needle, she had a glass of wine in her hand, and as she leaned over, one of her perky breasts poked out of her blouse and a nipple dangled above his lips, and his hand reached around behind her to caress a firm buttock.

He kept his eyes closed till he heard someone at the door: the nurse coming back into the room, naked, holding a glass of wine. Two glasses. But it wasn’t the nurse, it was a priest. Rudy could smell tobacco on him and was overwhelmed with desire,
a real knock-down, drag-out craving, for a cigarette.

“The doctor said you were pretty down, might want to talk,” the priest said. “Father Russell, OMI, last of the Oblate Fathers of Mary Immaculate.” He held out a hand. Rudy didn’t feel like shaking it. The priest looked vaguely familiar.