Philosophy Made Simple (27 page)

The pandit sighed. “You mean inconvenient, not impossible.”

“All right, then, inconvenient.”

“Exactly. You understand then that fundamental reality is not always convenient. I want to make sure there is no misunderstanding on this point.”

“I understand,” Rudy said.

“Very well, then,” the pandit said, “as long as you understand. I will perform the ceremony, a ceremony, but I cannot take responsibility for an inauspicious outcome. You can only hope that Lord Ganesh will take that responsibility upon himself.”

Nandini, Siva, and the pandit began to discuss the details of the ceremony, first in English, then in Hindi. Rudy drank his tea. He didn’t understand everything, but what he did understand
was this: for the pandit, everything meant something; for Siva, nothing meant anything. He and Nandini, he thought, were somewhere in between. He said as much on the way home.

Siva was driving; Rudy was riding shotgun; Nandini was sitting between them and Rudy was very conscious of the points at which their bodies touched.

Siva laughed. “But don’t you see, Rudy?” he said. “At the end of the day it all comes down to the same thing.”

On Thursday morning, Siva and Nandini flew to Detroit. Rudy drove them to the airport in McAllen.

“You may have a rival in Detroit,” Siva told Rudy, lighting a cigar despite the
NO SMOKING
signs. He held the cigar out at arm’s length and looked at it. Nandini was in the restroom.

“Why are you telling me this?” Rudy asked. “Its none of my business anyway.”

“No, of course not, but I thought you ought to know.”

“It’s none of my business,” Rudy said, repeating himself.

“Yes, I understand, but you should not give up hope. I thought you ought to know that too.”

“Please,” Rudy said. “What you’re saying doesn’t concern me in the least. There’s no need to talk about it.”

But by the time he sat down to dinner that night with Molly and TJ, he knew he was in love. He knew it the way he knew when he was coming down with the flu. He hoped that maybe if he just kept moving and drank plenty of liquids, the symptoms, which weren’t really bad yet, would disappear. But at the same time he knew they wouldn’t. He knew that he’d known her for less than a week, but now that she was gone he was continually probing his feelings for her, the way he might probe a sore tooth with his tongue, engaging her in imaginary conversations, imag
ining her saying such delightful things. He was perfectly aware of the difference between these fantasies and an encounter with a real person, whose words would be dictated by her own interests, not by his—perfectly well aware that the woman in his imagination probably bore only the slightest relationship to the real woman, who had landed in Detroit at 1:24 that afternoon and was now no doubt sitting down to an Indian dinner at her aunt’s house in Royal Oak. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was full of life and high spirits, and in her presence he too felt this way: full of life and high spirits. She had taken him by surprise, ambushed him from inside the walls, and he found himself replaying in his mind Uncle Siva’s remarks about her position: a widow whose life in a remote part of India was troubled by dacoits and by unrest among the native tribes. He was powerless to resist the fantasies that came crowding in, fantasies in which he saved her from being carried away by the current,
in which he carried her in his arms up through the little cove to firm ground, even though she was a strong swimmer.

What was Rudy to do? How was he to understand this inner turmoil? Was he like the old house next door to them in Chicago after the crazy contractor’d gotten through with it? Had too many load-bearing walls been knocked down? Or was the damage only superficial,
a necessary prelude to reconstruction? Was Rudy as crazy as the contractor? Or was he an architect with a dream? Should he call in the wrecking crew or the carpenters? He wanted to ask TJ about what exactly Detroit Auntie was arranging for his mother,
but he didn’t because he didn’t want to reveal his feelings. But out in the barn, after supper, he opened his heart to Norma Jean, who took his wrist in the tip of her trunk and put his hand in her mouth so that he could massage her tongue.

When Rudy went back up to the house, Molly and TJ were sitting on the veranda. TJ, who’d caught several mice out in the
barn, was practicing making them disappear with a vanishing tube from Rudy’s dad’s collection of magic tricks. There was a hinged door in the front of the tube, which resembled the cardboard tube in a roll of toilet paper, only smaller. The back of the tube was attached to an elastic cord that TJ had pinned to the inside of his coat. He’d stuff a mouse into his right hand, which concealed the tube, and then release the tube, which would disappear under the flap of his coat. Rudy understood this part of the trick, but he didn’t understand how TJ got the mice to reappear in his coat pocket or in his sleeve. “Look,”
TJ’d say, and Rudy and Molly would look at his outstretched hand, and a mouse would run out of his sleeve, and TJ would catch it and put it back in a cardboard box and repeat the trick, with variations, with another mouse. Molly made him keep the box of mice out on the veranda that night.

Rudy and Molly opened the late responses that had been accumulating and went over the guest list one last time. One of the responses was from Rudy’s cousin, or grandniece, or great-niece—Gary and Vivian’s daughter, Christine. Rudy hadn’t heard from Gary since the letter from Africa that he’d read on the plane, the one suggesting that the Second Coming was at hand. He tried to remember Gary’s dad, his own older brother, Alfred, but he could barely picture his face. What he remembered was that Al’s widow, Francine, had been living with them, and that after Al was killed at Verdun she always insisted on setting an extra place for him at the table. She did that for the three years that she lived with them on the farm, and as far as he knew,
she kept on doing it. He couldn’t remember his brother, but he could remember the extra place at the table—the empty chair,
the clean plate with the fork on the left and the knife and spoon on the right.

The total came to eighty-seven out-of-town guests, mostly Indian relatives and TJ and Molly’s friends from Ann Arbor.

When he was satisfied with his ability to make the mice disappear and reappear smoothly, TJ set out to solve the geometry problem that Rudy had set him—Rudy’s old favorite: if the bisectors of two angles of a triangle are equal in length, prove the triangle is isosceles. “It’s not so simple,” Rudy said, standing behind TJ and peering over his shoulder. “You can
see
its true, but you can’t
prove
it’s true. My math teacher gave this problem to me when I was in seventh grade, and I worked on it for a year because I loved geometry. She couldn’t figure it out either.”

“I’m not a geometer,” TJ said, “but this doesn’t look too difficult. If you’ll give me a few minutes…”

The thing that bothered Rudy about TJ was this: he, Rudy, knew that he could explain everything he knew about avocados to TJ. After a couple of hours, TJ would be able to grasp it all—the physiology of the plant, the different varieties, the growing cycle, the advantages and disadvantages of different grafting methods and different cultivars, grove maintenance, marketing strategies. But TJ might spend weeks or months or even years explaining what he knew about parallel universes to Rudy, and Rudy would never understand it, because to understand parallel universes he’d have to understand abstract mathematics and quantum mechanics, and he couldn’t even prove that if the bisectors of two angles of a triangle are equal in length, the triangle is isosceles.

Rudy tried not to bother TJ, but he couldn’t stop himself from watching his son-in-law-to-be try first this and then that.
“You can
see
it’s true,” Rudy kept saying, “but you can’t
prove
that it’s true. I’ve never gotten over it. Maybe all the important truths are like that,” he said. TJ just shook his head and drew another triangle.

M
eg had just argued her first case before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and had won. She walked up and down the veranda replaying some of her arguments, as if she were addressing a black-robed judge, but Rudy—the judge—wasn’t listening to her words. He was listening to the sound of her voice, and he knew that her
aventura
was over and that she hadn’t told Dan, who’d taken the boys to the grocery store.
Well,
he thought,
the story wont he over till he finds out, and then we’ll see.

And Margot. Margot had been arrested at the airport in Rome for trying to take an antiquity out of the country, an Etruscan statue that she’d bought in London. She’d had all the necessary papers, but she was detained anyway and had to take a later flight.

“Italy’s been good for you,” Rudy told her on the way home from the airport. “Maybe I should send your sisters!”

She laughed. “Maybe you should come yourself, Papa.”

“I’ve got an avocado harvest to deal with,” he said.

“After the harvest,” she said., so he knew she wasn’t planning to come home soon.

“Maybe I’ll do that,” he said. “Maybe in April?”

Rudy slowed down as they drove by Medardo’s trailer park so that Margot could admire the yard ornaments. “So,” he said, “you’re not mad anymore? About the house?”

She looked at him and smiled. “Florence is beautiful in April,” she said. “A little crowded, but that’s okay. And no, I’m not mad. But you have to admit it was a bit of a shock.”

“And the man you fell in love with?”

“Back to his wife. In Rome.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You seemed so happy…”

“I
was
happy,” she said, “and I’m happy now,” but she told him the story of how they’d fallen in love. It was a long story, and she told it they way she used to tell him about a movie she’d seen, taking almost as long to relate the plot as it would take to see the film, because she didn’t want to leave anything out.

She hadn’t finished by the time they got back to the grove, so Rudy kept on driving down the farm-to-market road till he came to the mission chapel, La Lomita. He parked the car in the parking lot while she finished her story.

It was a sad story, but it was a. wonderful story too. He thought he was a lucky man to hear such a story from his youngest daughter.

The Russian had left almost eight hundred of Norma Jean’s paintings behind, two hundred already framed. On Monday morning,
Rudy and his three daughters and two sons-in-law turned the barn into a museum while the boys climbed on the walls of Norma Jean’s stall. Dan had his hands full trying to keep
them from falling in. Rudy gave them each bananas and carrots to feed her, and promised them that they could sleep out in the barn with him one night.

TJ got up on a ladder to pound in the nails and Rudy and Dan and the girls labeled the framed paintings and handed them up to him. The girls used the names of recipes from the Chinese cookbook that Rudy found in the Russians barn, and when they ran out of recipes they got more names from TJ, starting with the four fundamental constants that hold the universe together:
Strong Nuclear Force, Weak Nuclear Force, Electromagnetic Force, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation.

It took them three hours to hang a hundred and fifty paintings. When they were done everyone except Rudy went up to the house to fix sandwiches for lunch. Rudy stayed behind to admire their work. The wall of paintings was so beautiful, even in the dim light of the barn, that he put aside his hope of ecstasy and his fear of loneliness, his anxiety about keeping Norma Jean,
his worries about the wedding, put aside everything he knew about the certainty of death and the untrustworthiness of the senses, put aside his failure to validate his earlier visions, and let the bright colors wash over him, let himself be ravished by the bright beauty.