Philosophy Made Simple (5 page)

The sign had worked its way loose — he hadn’t hammered the nails all the way in when he put it up — and he could have pulled it off with his hands. He didn’t need the hammer. But instead of taking it down, he walked down the driveway to the
street, to pick up the empty garbage cans that had been sitting there since that morning, and to have a look.

It was windy and the snow blew upward in spiraling flurries. The ornamental streetlights glowed like beacons marking a broad channel. Most of the big old houses on the street had long ago been broken up into five or six apartments — sometimes even more. Their owners didn’t live there anymore, and the lawns didn’t get cut as often as they should, and the houses got painted every ten or twelve years instead of every six or seven. Helen used to say that when she looked down the street at night from their master bedroom, she could imagine — if she squinted a little — that she was living in Paris, St. Germain or St. Rémy.
To Rudy, who’d lived there longer than he’d ever lived anywhere else, it just looked like home.

The living room window, which was curved at the top, was divided into three panels, like one of Helen’s Renaissance paintings,
a triptych. The window was filled with little white lights that were doubled by the beveled edges of the glass; in the large center panel stood the Christmas tree, full of light and promise. The light under the porte cochere was on too, and the
FOR SALE
sign was clearly visible from the street. Rudy loved this house. “
Come on in, this old house,”
he used to sing to Helen; “
ain’t nobody here but
me.” But now it was time to move on, time to let go. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he knew it. He knew it as surely as migratory birds know when it’s time to leave everything behind them and head out who knows where, and no one has ever figured out how they find their way, but they do. It was as if he were sprouting wings, big golden wings, like those on the angel on Margot’s postcard, wings that would carry him out of the past and into the future, wherever he needed to go.

R
udy didn’t say anything to the girls about his vision, because he was trying to understand it himself. After Christmas, after everyone had gone, he sat down in Helens study and reread the first chapter of
Philosophy Made Simple.
He was trying to figure out what had happened to him on Christmas Eve. He was looking for a passage in which Uncle Siva —
TJ’s uncle Siva — quotes Socrates’ comparison of the soul to a bird, and when he found it, he underlined it:
for a man who beholds the beauty of this world will sometimes be reminded of true beauty, and his wings will begin to grow and he will desire to spread his wings and fly upward, and because he gazes upward, like a bird, and cares nothing for the world below, he will be considered mad.

Maybe that was it. He couldn’t be sure, but in the second week of the new year he took some time off and flew down to Texas to look at Creaky Wilson’s avocado grove. Avocados had been a luxury fruit when Rudy started working on South Water Street.
They were high in calories and they had a reputation as an aphrodisiac, so middle-class housewives were afraid of them.
But they’d become popular in California, and the rest of the country had followed. Texas seemed to him an ideal place to raise avocados. Although Texas
consumed
a lot of avocados, it didn’t
produce
many — probably fewer than a thousand acres were under cultivation in the Rio Grande Valley — but there was no reason that couldn’t change. Creaky Wilson had always sent good fruit, the finest, and the only thing to worry about in Texas was frost.
Besides, raising avocados is easy — relatively speaking, of course.

The dogs were banging at the door of the side porch when he left the house, but they’d have to wait for the neighbor’s kid,
who’d be staying with them, to get home from school. He grabbed the mail and shoved it in the outside pocket of Helen’s old leather briefcase, along with his copy of
Philosophy Made Simple.
He left the car at Midway Airport and boarded a flight to Dallas and then a connecting flight to McAllen. On the flight to Dallas he kept
Philosophy Made Simple
on his lap while he read through the emergency landing card and the in-flight magazine and the catalog of stuff you could buy, and then he remembered the mail. There was nothing from Margot, but there was a letter from Edgar Lee Masters College,
asking for money, which he stuffed in the flap on the back of the seat in front of him, and there was a large, formidable envelope bearing a stern warning:

This Cash Winner Notification may not be delivered by anyone except US Government employees.

A partial list of sweepstakes winners was enclosed. Rudy could see his own name displayed through a little window, but he stuffed the envelope, unopened, into the pocket of the seat in front of him, next to the letter from Edgar Lee Masters. The mail also included a trial issue of a senior citizens’ magazine called
The Golden Age Digest,
and finally, there was a letter from East Africa, from his nephew, one of the few remaining Harringtons, who had sold his house in Wheaton, Illinois, and become a missionary.

Rudy set the letter aside and glanced through
The Golden Age Digest
to see what his cohort was doing. They were, mostly, playing golf. Happy foursomes in fruity two-toned shoes with fringe on them, like the hair that hangs down over a sheep dog’s face, waved from pea green links. The men wore cardigans and blue or white oxford shirts, the women bright-colored skirts and pale blouses with wide collars. The same folks were buying condominiums with little work islands in the kitchens, which were tiled for easy maintenance. The idea was that old age wasn’t a downhill slide but the culmination of life, the peak.

Rudy stuffed the magazine into the seat flap, drank some airline coffee, and then opened
Philosophy Made Simple
and started to read the chapter on Aristotle. Happiness. Not Plato’s Goodness or Beauty or Truth, but Happiness: something final and self-sufficient, the Supreme Good, the end at which all actions aim. But to achieve Happiness, one had to bring Reason to bear on one’s Passions and Desires.

Rudy had to admit that Aristotle had a point. Would he be happy, he started to wonder, if he won the sweepstakes? He closed
Philosophy Made Simple
and retrieved the sweepstakes envelope from the flap and learned that he was in fact a “verified sweepstakes winner,” though it wasn’t clear just what he had won. He read through a lot of fine print. There were prizes in his category that ranged from two hundred fifty thousand dollars to one thousand dollars to “many thousands of substantially lesser cash prizes (as stated in the official sweepstakes rules).” He started to shove the brochure back into the seat pocket, but then
his eye was caught by another stern notice: “Failure to claim prize will result in loss of your cash award. Company is not responsible for unclaimed cash awards.” There was no entry fee or purchase necessary for Rudy to claim his award, but in fact they wanted him to buy some perfume — real perfume, not cologne or toilet water. Perfume that might cost a hundred dollars in fine stores in New York and Paris, but which he could buy for only five dollars: Chanel No. 5, Climat, Rapture, Miss Balmain.
The perfumes came in different-shaped bottles, but it was hard to tell how big they were. One resembled a tomb or cut-glass mausoleum; another was squat and round and dark, like a sea creature that had been flattened out. One had a stopper shaped like a bird. One was hard to figure out: it looked like a fried egg that had been folded in half, with a yolk that was much darker and yolkier-looking than the pale yellows of the other perfumes. The name Alexandra Dali was written in script on the white part of the egg. Was Alexandra Dali Salvador Dali’s wife? His daughter? His granddaughter? Rudy had no idea. But the egg looked like the sort of egg you might see in a Dali painting.

You didn’t have to order any perfume to enter the sweepstakes or claim your prize, but they made it very difficult for you if you didn’t. You’d have to cut out your randomly generated number from one place and paste it on a three-by-five card, and then you’d have to cut out other bits of information from other parts of the official form and paste them on different parts of the card. And you’d have to cut out the “NO” paragraph from the lower left-hand corner of the Grand Prize Claim Document and affix it to the card too. There wasn’t enough room, and if you failed to arrange them in a certain way, you would be disqualified.
You would also be disqualified if you used staples or cellophane tape. What the hell! Rudy stuck the ad in Helens briefcase.
He’d deal
with it later. But two hundred fifty thousand dollars. A quarter of a million dollars. What would he do with it? He wasn’t sure. He closed his eyes, tried to imagine. He could get close to the feeling he’d have right after he’d opened the letter telling him he’d won, how he’d hold himself together, not tell anyone but the dogs for a few days, just riding high, till he’d gotten used to the idea.

When he was a boy he used to have daydreams like the one he was having on the plane — waking fantasies, about success, about love, about how women would want to be possessed by him, how everyone would be forced to acknowledge how extraordinary he was. But he’d thought that when he got older, when he’d grown up, he wouldn’t do that anymore. Now here he was, no better than a kid. It wouldn’t have occurred to him in a million years that his dad or his mom might have had thoughts like that.
He could see his dad, standing in the door of the empty packing shed, looking out at the empty trees. Three years in a row they lost the entire peach crop, before the Depression, before Rudy’d gone up to Chicago to work for Becker. What had his dad been thinking?

“Well,” he’d say, “looks like you and me can eat the whole crop.” And they’d wander up and down the rows, looking, and find maybe three or four peaches. But what was he thinking, imagining, dreaming? And his mom, her hands up to her elbows in soapy water, looking out the kitchen window. What was she looking at? The pump? The packing shed? Or something beyond? What was
her
heart’s desire?

He put
Philosophy Made Simple
back in his briefcase and opened the letter from his nephew, Gary, in East Africa. Gary was the son of Rudy’s older brother,
Alfred, who’d been killed in action in World War I when Rudy was only ten. It was a belated Christmas card. “Dear Uncle Rudy”
Gary wrote,

I meant to get this off in time for Christmas but didn’t get around to it. Everything is chaotic, and in fact I’ve been down with a parasite called giardia, found in the water here, so now 1 drink bottled water only, which is a nuisance.

The country here is beautiful, the natives are friendly and speak French. Vivian and I spent six months learning Kikuyu at the Institute training school in Zurich, Switzerland, but its a difficult language and we’re still having trouble, and it’s very expensive here.

The way things are going it seems to me the Lord Jesus Christ is coming very soon, in fact any minute. I fervently hope so.
This is a very wicked world these days and I wonder at God’s patience with humanity.

I hope you had a nice Christmas and will have a good year.

Lovingly,

Gary and Vivian

There was some literature from Gary and Vivian’s employer, the Christian Bible Institute, an international organization dedicated to the task of translating the Bible into every single language in the world, including Kikuyu, and a request for support.
He crumpled it up and then smoothed it out again so he could slip it in the flap with the airline magazine and the letter from Edgar Lee Masters.

What kind of Christmas message was that? “The Lord Jesus Christ is coming very soon, in fact any minute”? What got into people?
People will believe anything. But these beliefs weren’t like ordinary empirical knowledge. They couldn’t be treated in the same way, because they weren’t based on anything that could be examined or evaluated. But what about Plato? What about Aristotle?
What about me?

He didn’t give another thought to Gary’s letter till the next morning, when he woke up at three o’clock in the Starlight Motel on the border between Mission and McAllen. He had a hangover and couldn’t get back to sleep. He’d drunk too much Lone Star beer and eaten too much chili at a diner on Highway 83. His head and his stomach were both churning, like electric motors that were running at different speeds, pulling against each other, and there was a neon sign that made a loud buzzing noise as it blinked on and off, on and off, outside his window It made you realize why a lot of people preferred Howard Johnsons and Holiday Inns, where there were no surprises, no crumbling tiles in the bathrooms, no little boxes of roach powder in the closets. He lay there in the dark thinking,
What am I doing here? What on earth am I doing here?
It had seemed like a good idea back in Chicago, but it didn’t seem so hot right now. A man his age ought to be thinking about retiring, not raising avocados.

He reached over and turned on the clock radio on the stand next to the bed. He turned the dial but didn’t get anything except a lot of static. There was lots of space between stations down in Texas. He finally picked up a talk show way down one end of the dial, on the right. He started back the other way and then reversed. There was an urgency in the slow Texas voice on the talk show that spoke to his condition. Something was wrong, really wrong: